The Vegetarian

  He had felt suddenly sick. Even though those images had undeniably caused him agony, even though he’d hated them, the individual moments contained in the work, which he’d stayed up all night wrestling with, struggling to face up to the true nature of the emotions they provoked in him, had now come to feel like a form of violence. At that moment his thoughts crossed a boundary, and he wanted to fling open the door of the speeding taxi and tumble out onto the tarmac. He could no longer bear the thought of those images, of the reality they portrayed. Back then, when he had been able to deal with them, it must have been because his hatred of them was somehow underdeveloped—or else because he hadn’t been sufficiently threatened by them. But just then, shut up inside the taxi that sweltering summer afternoon with the smell of his sister-in-law’s blood assailing his nostrils, those images and that reality were suddenly threatening, making the bile rise in his throat and the breath catch in his lungs. It occurred to him that it might be a long time before he was capable of making another work. He was worn out, and life revolted him. He couldn’t cope with all these things it contaminated.

  The past ten or so years’ worth of work was quietly turning its back on him. It wasn’t his anymore. It belonged to a person he used to know, or thought he’d known—once upon a time.

  —

  His sister-in-law was silent on the other end of the phone. He knew she was there, though; he could hear a faint sighing sound, like breathing, overlaid with a kind of rattling that he guessed was coming from the line.

  “Hello?” He was finding it difficult to force the words out. “Sister-in-law, it’s me. Ji-woo’s mum is…” He despised himself, all his hypocrisy and trickery, but fought this down and continued speaking. “Well, she’s worried, you know.”

  Still no answer. He sighed into the receiver. She would be standing there barefoot, he knew, like always. When her time at the psychiatric hospital, where she’d spent several months, had come to a close, she’d come to stay with them while his wife and the rest of the family all went to try to persuade her husband to take her back. The month she’d spent with them, before moving out into a rented studio apartment, had caused none of them even the slightest strain. Partly this was because he had yet to hear about the Mongolian mark, and thus regarded her as nothing more than an object of pity, albeit a faintly inscrutable one.

  She’d never been much of a talker, and had spent the majority of her time out on their veranda, sunning herself in the late-autumn sunshine. She would occupy herself in picking up the dried leaves that had fallen from the flowerpots and crumbling them into a fine powder, or in stretching out the palm of her hand to cast shadows over the floor. When his wife was busy with something she would lend a hand with Ji-woo, taking him to the bathroom and helping him wash, her bare feet kissing the cold tiles.

  It was difficult to believe that such a woman had once tried to kill herself, or that she’d sat topless in front of a crowd of strangers, perfectly composed, which had apparently been a symptom of some kind of post-suicide-attempt dementia. That he had run to the hospital with her bleeding on his back, and that the experience had had such a profound effect on him, seemed like something that had happened with a different woman, or perhaps in a different time.

  The only thing that was especially unusual about her was that she didn’t eat meat. This had been a source of friction with her family from the start, and since her behavior after this initial change had grown increasingly strange—culminating in her wandering around topless—her husband had decided that her vegetarianism was proof that she would never be “normal” again.

  “She was always so submissive—outwardly, at any rate. And for a woman who wasn’t quite all there to start with to be taking medication every day, well, she’s bound to get worse, and that’s all there is to it.”

  What threw him was the way that his brother-in-law seemed to consider it perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or household appliance.

  “Now don’t go making me out to be some kind of villain. Anyone can see that I’m the real victim here.”

  Unable to deny that there was at least a measure of truth in this, he, unlike his wife, kept a neutral position on the matter. She, on the other hand, begged Mr. Cheong to hold off on the formal divorce proceedings and wait to see how things would pan out, but he remained unmoved.

  He made an effort to push Mr. Cheong’s face out of his mind, that narrow forehead, pointed jaw and general look of stubbornness which he’d always found unpleasant. He tried speaking Yeong-hye’s name again.

  “Answer me, sister-in-law. Whatever you say, just answer.” Just as he thought there was nothing else for it but to hang up, she spoke.

  “The water’s boiling.” Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absentminded, as might be expected of someone who was ill. But it wasn’t bright or light-hearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being.

  “I’ll have to go and turn it off.”

  “Sister-in-law, I…” He spoke hurriedly, panicking that she might put the phone down and cut him off. “Is it okay if I come over now? You aren’t going out anywhere today?”

  After a brief silence, he heard a click and the tone which signaled that the call had been ended. He put down the phone, his hand slick with sweat.

  —

  It was clearly only after hearing about her Mongolian mark from his wife that he’d started to see his sister-in-law in a new light. Before that, he’d never had any kind of ulterior motive when it came to his dealings with her. When he recalled how she’d looked and acted during the time she’d spent living with them, the sexual desire that flooded through him was a product of his mental re-enactment of these past experiences, not something he’d actually felt at the time. He felt his skin grow heated every time he called to mind her absentminded expression as she sat on the veranda throwing out shadows with her hand, the flash of white ankle that her baggy tracksuit bottoms had revealed while she was helping his son to wash, the nonchalant line of her body as she’d sat sprawled in front of the television, her half-naked legs, her disheveled hair. And stamped over all these memories was the blue Mongolian mark—that mark which appeared on the buttocks or backs of children, usually fading away long before adulthood.

  Now, the fact that she didn’t eat meat, only vegetables and cereal grains, seemed to fit with the image of that blue petal-like mark, so much so that the one could not be disentangled from the other, and the fact that the blood that had gushed out of her artery had soaked his white shirt, drying into the dark, matte burgundy of red bean soup, felt like a shocking, indecipherable premonition of his own eventual fate.

  Her room was in a fairly quiet alley near to a women’s university. He stood in front of the multistory building, laden down with two big bags of fruit that his wife had insisted he bring with him—tangerines, pears and apples from Jeju Island, and even some out-of-season strawberries. The knotted muscles in his hands and arms ached, but still he stood there wavering, realizing as he did that the thought of going up to her apartment, of encountering her in person, was making him afraid.

  At last he set the fruit down, flipped open his mobile and dialed her number. When she still hadn’t answered after the tenth ring, he picked the fruit up again and began to climb the stairs. When he reached the third floor he went over to the corner apartment and pressed the doorbell, which had a picture of a semiquaver. Just as he’d thought: no answer. He tried turning the handle. To his surprise, the door opened. He readjusted his baseball cap, only then realizing that his hair was soaked with sweat, tidied himself up a bit, took a deep breath, and pushed the door.

  —

  The south-facing studio apartment was bathed in the early-October sunlight as far in as the kitchen area, and felt still. Some of his wife’s clothes, which she’d passed on to her sister, were lying scattered across the floor, and there were ti
ny dust balls rolling about, but somehow the place managed not to seem untidy. Perhaps that was because of the almost complete lack of furniture.

  After putting the fruit down next to the door, he took off his shoes and went in. There was no sign of her anywhere. Perhaps she’d gone out. Perhaps she’d gone out deliberately because he’d told her he was coming. There was no television, and there was something unseemly about the way the two wall sockets, next to the hole for an antenna, lay exposed in the middle of the wall. At the far end of the living room–cum–bedroom, where his wife had installed a solitary telephone, there was a mattress, on top of which the quilt was rumpled up into a cave-like mound, as though someone had just slid out from under it.

  The air felt stale, and he was on the point of opening the door to the veranda when he heard a noise and whipped around. The breath caught in his throat.

  She was coming out of the bathroom. The real shock, though, was that she was naked. She stood there blankly for a moment, as though she, too, were somewhat startled, and without the slightest trace of moisture visible on her naked body. But then she began to pick up the scattered clothes one by one and slip them on. She did this quite calmly, not in the least flustered or embarrassed, as though getting dressed were merely something demanded by the situation, rather than something she herself felt to be necessary.

  While she stood there getting dressed, calmly and methodically and without turning her back to him, he was of course aware that he should either avert his gaze or hurry outside. And yet he remained standing there, as if rooted to the spot. She wasn’t as gaunt as when she’d initially turned vegetarian. She’d gradually put on weight after being admitted to the hospital, and she’d eaten well when she’d been staying with him and his wife, thanks to which her breasts had now rounded out into softness. Her waist narrowed sharply, her body hair was fairly sparse, and the overall effect, aside from the line of her thigh, which he felt could have done with being a little rounder, was one of an enticing lack of superfluity. Rather than provoking lust, it was a body that made one want to rest one’s gaze quietly upon it. Once she’d finished sorting through the clothes and putting them on she came up to him, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t managed to get a look at her Mongolian mark.

  “I’m sorry.” Belatedly he stammered his excuse. “What with the door being open, I thought you’d just popped out for something or other.”

  “It’s okay.” Now, too, she spoke as though answering like this was the expected, necessary thing. “It’s just that I enjoy being like this when I’m on my own.”

  So. He tried to collect his thoughts; his mind had gone blank. She’s saying that she always walks around with her clothes off in the house. He’d been fine just a moment ago when confronted with her naked body, but as soon as he grasped what she was saying he became flustered and felt his penis becoming engorged. He took off his baseball cap and squatted down awkwardly, trying to conceal his erection.

  “I’ve nothing to offer you to eat…”

  She walked over to the kitchen area and he took in the fact that her light gray tracksuit bottoms were grazing her bare skin, knowing from what he’d just seen that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her buttocks were neither large nor particularly voluptuous. Nothing to account for why his mouth was suddenly so dry.

  “I’m not really hungry,” he said, stalling for time in the hope he’d be able to suppress his arousal. “How about we just eat some of this fruit?”

  “If you like.” She went over to the front door, picked up the pears and apples and carried them to the sink. Listening to the sound of running water and the clinking of dishes, he tried to concentrate on the ugly electrical sockets and the angular telephone buttons, but the memory of her pubic region only intensified in his mind. His head throbbed with the image of her buttocks crowded with colored petals, overlying that of the man and woman having sex, with which he’d covered page after page of his sketchbook.

  When she came and sat down next to him, carrying plates of the peeled, sliced fruit, he had to bow his head so that she wouldn’t see the look in his eyes.

  “I don’t know if the apples will be any good…” He trailed off.

  After a while, she broke the silence. “You know, you don’t have to come and visit me.”

  “Oh?”

  “The doctor said I wasn’t to do any kind of job where I would be left alone with my own thoughts,” she continued in a low voice, “so I’m thinking of trying somewhere like a department store. I even had an interview last week.”

  “Really?”

  This was surprising. “Would you be able to put up with a wife who was always like that, zoned out on psychiatric medication every day, completely dependent on you for her livelihood?” This was something Mr. Cheong had said to him during one of their phone calls, slurring as if he were drunk. Now it turned out that prediction had been off; she wasn’t as far gone as all that. Turning his upper body toward her, though with his eyes still fixed on the ground, he finally got to the point.

  “How about working at your sister’s store instead?” As he carried on talking he felt his arousal subside a little. “Ji-woo’s mum pays a decent wage—you know what a good person she is—and she’d much rather see it go to you than to a stranger. She’s your sister, which means you can trust each other, and she’d like for the two of you to spend more time together. Besides, the work wouldn’t be as tough as at a department store.”

  Slowly she turned to face him, and he saw that her expression was as serene as that of a Buddhist monk. Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment. He reproached himself for having used her as a kind of mental pornography, when she simply had an innocent wish to be naked. All the same, he was unable to deny that the image of her naked was now stamped indelibly on his brain, burned into him like a brand.

  “Have some pear.” She held the plate out to him.

  “You have some too.”

  Using her fingers instead of a fork, she picked up a piece of pear and put it in her mouth. He averted his head, frightened by the sudden urge he had to throw his arms around her still form—so still in fact she appeared to be lost in thought—to suck on her index finger, sticky with sweet pear juice, and lick the last of the juice from her lips and tongue, and to pull her baggy tracksuit bottoms down right then and there.

  —

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he said, slipping his feet into his shoes. “You’ll come with me?”

  “Where to?”

  “We could just walk around, talk for a bit.”

  “I’ll try and think of something that might interest you.”

  “No, no, there’s no need…the thing is, I have a favor to ask.”

  She looked unsure, but he’d already made up his mind. If he was to escape from this agonizing situation, the inexplicable compulsions that were gradually taking him over, he needed to get outside, out of this room. It was too dangerous for him to stay there a moment longer.

  “We can talk here.”

  “No, I want to walk for a bit. Besides, isn’t it stifling for you to be cooped up inside all day?”

  Eventually, as though resigned to having lost this argument, she put on her slippers and followed him out. They walked down the alley without speaking to each other, and continued along the main road. When he spotted a sign for a chain café he asked her, “Do you like shaved ice?” She gave a half smile, looking for all the world like a girl on a date who doesn’t want to seem too easily pleased.

  The two of them took a seat by the window. He looked across at her in silence as she mixed red bean into the shaved ice slush and licked it from the tip of her wooden spoon. As if there were a wire linking her tongue with his body, every time that little pink tip darted out he found himself flinching as though from an electric shock.

  And h
e thought to himself that perhaps there was only one way out. That perhaps the only way out of this hell of desire would be to make those images into a reality.

  “So, the favor…”

  She fixed him with her glance, a dot of red bean on the tip of her tongue. In her single-lidded eyes, the simple line of which made her look almost Mongolian, her pupils, which were neither large nor small, shone with a faint light.

  “I’d like you to model for me.”

  She neither laughed nor became flustered. She kept her calm gaze fixed on him, as if intending to bore inside.

  “You’ve been to some of my exhibitions, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be a video work, similar to my other ones. And it won’t take long. You just have to…take your clothes off.” Now that he’d finally come out and said it he felt suddenly bold, and was sure that his hands, which had already stopped sweating, would also become steadier. His forehead felt cooler too. “You’ll take your clothes off, and I’ll paint your body.” Her eyes, calm as ever, still gazed across at his.

  “You’ll paint on me?”

  “That’s right. You’ll keep the paint on until the filming is over.”

  “Paint…on my body?”

  “I’m going to paint flowers.” Her eyes seemed to flicker. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. “It won’t be difficult. An hour, maybe two—that’s all I’ll need. Whenever’s convenient for you.”

  Having said all that there was to say, he lowered his head with an air of resignation and examined his ice cream. Topped with crushed peanuts and flaked almonds, it was slowly melting, the liquid pooling around the sides.

  “Where?”

  His mind was on the melting ice cream, which was beginning to turn to froth, when this question finally came. He looked up to find her spooning the last of her shaved ice into her mouth, its redness smeared over her bloodless lips.