26
Another year passed. With the attempted coup of August 1991, the Soviet Union was completely dismantled, showing the whole world the birth and death of a constitutionally socialist state.
The death of Mr. Yi Hee Soo passed with an unexpected quickness. It is not that I felt the time I spent with him was wasted, it just felt like it was not real. I did not remember it as the recent past but as a fleeting moment from a long time ago, like a spring day when I was a little girl playing by the levee, making necklaces and bracelets out of clover flowers and violets and lying on the ground chewing foxtails. Certain parts are vivid, but some things are vague, no matter how hard I try to remember. The tiny unimportant details remained with me for a long time, and now everything is just an unimportant detail. Only the little brass sculpture I took from his place, that now rests on my desk, remains the same.
Now it was time to say goodbye to Song Young Tae.
He called me from time to time, sometimes acting serious, sometimes explaining that he was doing something very important, sometimes angry. Still, he was one of the few close friends I had in Germany. I once went to see him in Göttingen. We went out to the countryside with his friends to drink and barbecue, and we sang throughout the night to release ourselves and made the neighbors angry.
From the outside, I did not appear depressed at all. Since I had been working hard for a while, I had more than forty paintings to show, including eight large canvases. I had a solo exhibition at a gallery near Tiergarten. I think it helped me complete the Meisterschiller.
The exhibition began with drawings, continued with large and small canvases mixed together, and ended with the most recent work, which was somewhat different from my past work. To be honest, I was greatly influenced by Mari’s childlike graffiti with simplified lines and expression. But I tried to be more specific and also to appropriate the simplicity and abbreviated forms of folk art. I did not want traces of the past to be the starting point; I wanted to start within my own style. The subject was hidden inside the form, and the objects were shown as certain symbols that were highly stylized. The audience looking at them would reinterpret and translate according to their own views. The figures were distorted and overlapped and clumped together, but they were still bound by certain rules of geometry. My bigger canvases followed this set of rules even more strictly, depicting simplified figures bubbling up, as if they were about to burst.
The exhibition was pretty successful. Several media outlets covered and reported on it, and offers for exhibitions in other cities followed. I spent every single day surrounded by strangers. The last day, I stayed late at the gallery after it was closed to take down the paintings with Mr. and Mrs. Shin. Well, maybe it was not so late, perhaps half past seven, around dinnertime on a summer evening. A man with glasses wearing an unbuttoned white shirt and a loose cardigan walked in. He was pulling a large suitcase with wheels behind him. I took a hurried glance at him but turned back to take a painting off the wall, and then the familiar voice came from behind. “Can’t you take them down after I’ve looked at them?”
Turning around, I realized it was him, Song Young Tae.
“You can’t complain. You’re too late!”
But I was happy to see him. Somehow he always managed to reappear when I was just about to forget him, and of course he always presented a new set of problems every time he did, which was taxing. I stepped back and waited until he had walked around the gallery. I introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. Shin, and he helped us clean up and pack everything. Temporarily, the paintings were to be kept in the gallery’s storage room. We went to a Greek restaurant nearby to eat dinner. We talked about the absurd failure of the coup in the Soviet Union and about the depressing prospect of worldwide capitalism. There was nothing new or radical about our conversation; we were saying things students were saying in cafeterias everywhere. After we bid farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Shin, Young Tae and I took a taxi back to my studio because of his cumbersome suitcase.
“What on earth is this? Where are you going now?” I grumbled, as he put the suitcase into the trunk of the taxicab.
“I’m going back,” he replied casually.
“And you’ll give up your studies?”
“Miss Han, why don’t I buy you a drink to celebrate the successful end of your exhibition? We can go out again after we drop off my suitcase.”
“There’s no need to go out. I have plenty to drink at home. There’s a case of beer and a few bottles of Mosel wine. Let’s just drink at home. I don’t want to go out.”
“But I want to buy you a drink!”
“Next time.”
I dragged him back to my studio. I knocked on Mari’s door and invited her, too, and we had a little party. Sometimes we talked in German, but mostly in our language. Mari lifted her glass and said, “Congratulations on your solo exhibition.”
Young Tae also raised his glass, so I had to as well, a little embarrassed.
“Yuni, there was one painting that I really liked,” Mari said.
“Which one?”
“The one with cream sprouting from a long rectangle and touching the numerous triangles above. That one. The large canvas on the first wall of the last room.”
It was a painting of a human figure, transformed into a soft, melting shape, reaching out one hand from the confines of walls and trying to catch a butterfly, which was in the form of two overlapping triangles. Outside of the rectangular frame were numerous butterflies with triangular wings. The only nongeometric form was that of the human being, melting and caked within the walls. Mari had read it as a lump of cream. Unlike her, I did not translate my own painting for her.
“Your paintings were incredibly depressing,” Song Young Tae muttered in his usual peremptory manner.
“Really? In what way . . . ?”
“They refuse to communicate, they are egocentric, and they seemed to be saying that the world is determined not to change anymore.”
“That’s how I feel these days.”
“Let’s go on a trip together.”
Since he was so unpredictable, I had to reply, guarded, “Where, back to Seoul?”
He rustled around and took something out of his back pocket.
“Tickets for the Trans-Siberia train. I heard about it from my grandfather many times. How about we commemorate the end of the Cold War with this trip? Let’s go.”
“Where did you get that?”
“Several travel agencies are going crazy now. I got them from a Japanese one. We’ll be part of a tour group.”
What I still cannot understand now is that there was not one thing suggested by Song Young Tae that I ever turned down. Maybe he was trying to leave me an imprint of himself and our time together. I studied the ticket and the travel brochure with pictures of the Siberian landscape. When we told Mari about the trip she said, “When we were young the continent was blocked and divided into several pieces. Even the sky was divided into two.”
I had no choice but to accept.
“Looks splendid,” I said.
Song Young Tae and I left Berlin in early September. We had to arrive in Moscow on the date the travel agency had specified. We made preparations based on our own research. Did you know, for example, that there are only two months of summer in Siberia, and that the first snow arrives by late August? We made sure we had enough instant noodle packages. From the last U-Bahn stop at Berliner Straße we took a bus to the airport. The Schönefeld Airport was once an international airport in East Germany, with flights to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and other socialist states in Asia. Of course, there was a flight to North Korea, too.
When we arrived at the Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow via Aeroflot, it was raining insistently. The airport was enormous but almost empty, with only a handful of passengers, maybe because the high season was over. We took a bus to our hotel, which was near the Red Square and the Moscow River. It got dark early, and the streetlamps were misty in the rain.
That night, we went out in the rain and wandered around, then had dinner and stayed at a café until late drinking beer. On our table were two brass candleholders, a red candle in each one, and because it was dark I did not realize how drunk Young Tae was. Both of us had been pretty quiet from the moment we began that trip. I had followed him without too many questions because I had fantasized for a long time of traveling through a continent without barriers. The city was not as scary or disquieting as I’d imagined it would be, but even our modern hotel was gloomy. It felt like a gigantic but deteriorating government building. The faucet leaked rusty water and drunk people staggered along the alleyways outside. The airport was full of austere officials with overbearing manners and female volunteers who were fat and brusque. At least I could understand the bare stores, and the expressionless faces with tightly closed mouths in the long lines outside every store, no matter how little or insignificant the merchandise was. The locals, who did not care for the tourists, probably felt less discomfort than we did. They could at least retreat to their own tiny apartments. Song Young Tae poured more beer into his glass with a trembling hand.
“This is really ridiculous. How can a country with one-sixth of the landmass of the whole world be so poor? The whole place is like a crumbling wall. The building has been abandoned for too long without maintenance, and the concrete parts are falling down. How can they take such poor care of people?”
“Are you talking about buildings or people, Mr. Song?” I asked. “Everything is made by people, and in the end people are the problem,” I said, without too much of emotion. “It’s like dreaming of an ideal woman and then discovering her dirty underwear.”
“Is there any place not like this? An island or a mountain or a village, still untouched and undiscovered at the end of the world?”
Suddenly, the few months you and I had together went through my mind, followed by the beautiful open school Mr. Yi Hee Soo talked about. I saw how the candles dimly lit the space above the small table.
“From now on, the material world will dominate. The market will demand uniform production from everyone on Earth, and it will say that this is civilization, that people will have to accept it if they don’t want to collapse. Everyone will turn into a pair of brilliant crystal eyes, a product with no imagination, only responding to money.”
I remembered the helpless sneer that spread around my mouth when I heard the news of Mr. Yi Hee Soo’s death. I felt the same way now.
“Whether you like it or not,” I spat, “this is the world we live in. There is not much I wish for anymore.”
“I don’t think you really loved Mr. Yi.”
“I guess you can say whatever you want now, since we are in a foreign place. It’s not like I can leave you here.”
“You just wanted to escape to someplace else, like I do now.”
“Is that so . . . ?”
I replied with fatigue in my voice.
Another day was beginning on a continent where only a hollow shell remained. In the morning, our tour group gathered in the hotel lobby. The tour guide did roll call and lectured us on how to behave and what to expect. Most of the tourists in our group were Japanese. Most of them were young, but there was an elderly couple, too. At two o’clock in the afternoon, we went to the Yaroslavl train station in front of Komsomol Square. The Trans-Siberian train headed to Vladivostok was departing at three o’clock. Before the departure, Young Tae and I went to a berioska on the other side of the square to buy food, as we were advised by the tour guide. We got three bags filled with everything from cigarettes and vodka to salami and ham and instant coffee. At that time, no solo foreign tourist was allowed to change route or get off the train and stay at a city during the transcontinental trip, but tourist groups were. It took one week for the Trans-Siberian train named Russia to complete its tour. Our schedule included a night’s stay at a hotel in Irkutsk and another at Khabarovsk, and then the group was to disband in Vladivostok. The train was an electric locomotive painted green with a red star, and there were only two passenger classes, first and second. All foreigners were to use first class only. A female attendant dressed in a light blue shirt and a navy blue skirt and tie greeted us at the entrance. Like in Europe, a passenger train had compartments furnished with a pair of seats on each side that could be used as beds. The window was draped with curtains, a table suspended underneath it, and the floor was carpeted. The attendant distributed blankets, pillows, sheets, and towels to each compartment.
The train began moving, and as soon as it left the city we saw white birch trees everywhere. Even in the darkness, pale trees were visible as they passed. It would be the beginning of autumn in other places, but here it was already deep into the season, the leaves darkened to the deepest shade of brown. The train crossed over the Moscow River headed toward Kirov. Until you cross the Ural Mountains, you’re not in Siberia yet. In darkness, the black wall of forest sprouted up like irregular teeth beside the endless fields.
I began to realize how beautiful this enormous land was when I saw the sunrise on the great plain dusted with frost. The train moved without stopping, and the low sun would be revealed then hidden again by tree branches. Little villages, rooftops, and fences were scattered on the endless field. They looked like tiny blemishes on Mother Earth.
The sunshine turned the yellow and brown leaves of the birch trees into golden fragments, and the larch leaves had started to turn yellow. Beyond the grassy fields and wetlands, the evergreen forest of fir and spruce and pine trees stretched on. The forest touched the distant horizon, which we never seemed to reach even though we were moving all day long. We spent the first couple of days just watching the overwhelming land, both of us looking out the window without saying much.
We saw the morning sun reflected on the surface of a river or a pool of water in the wetlands, creating a pattern like a silver net on it, or a group of ducks and birds flying over the fields of reeds. Among the weeds, the fertile black soil of Russian land exposed itself and coursed down along the tracks. No one was working on the unharvested wheat fields. Only a rusted tractor stood in the middle of them. The train passed several small stations in the middle of wilderness, never stopping. They were old wooden structures whose color had faded to gray, and the staff, wearing black uniforms and hats with a red stripe, would stare at us while holding a flag. Or there were robust railroad workers wearing orange vests waddling away while carrying a railroad tie.
We used the first-class bathrooms at each end of the car to wash our faces and sometimes our bodies with hot water. Then we ate breakfast. This usually consisted of dark bread and ham, and we bought warm milk from the cart pushed around by a train employee. Lunch was served in the restaurant car, the only meal served during the day. We started with borscht, a vegetable soup made with beets, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage and topped with sour cream, accompanied by tough and sour rye bread. Then came a stew with pasta and meat and peas, and we laughed as we ate it, calling it a different version of our beloved noodles with black bean sauce. It was actually quite good. The beer bottle had a Russian label, and its slightly sweet taste and fermented smell were so lively that we called it a version of our rice wine. When the train took a break at a crossroads, which happened rarely, we went out to find women selling food. The passenger car was warm, but when we stepped out it felt like the cold air was cutting through our backs. The sunlight was so bright and the sky was so blue, but the cold air made it feel like early wintertime. Women wearing scarves on their heads and sweaters or vests were calling and beckoning to us. They offered homemade bread and cookies, hardboiled eggs, still steaming boiled potatoes in a pot, fries, toasted sunflower seeds, ugly little apples, and scallions. Young Tae and I bought the hot potatoes for snacks. The woman wrapped them in newspapers and gave us a bunch of scallions. It was only later that we found out you were supposed to dip the scallions in a sauce as you ate the potatoes. Our train car attendant was a plump young woman named Tania, and we communicated through hand gestures most of the time. She did not speak a word of English or German, but if Young Tae looked through the Russian dictionary and tried to speak a word of Russian, she quickly understood what we were trying to say and even corrected his pronunciation. Thanks to her bringing us hot water in a samovar, we were able to eat ramen noodles for dinner. Of course we offered some to her, and Tania ate them, almost crying because it was too spicy for her, but still exclaiming, “Karacho!”
Dusk on the plain was magnificent. Birds flew over tall birch trees, and the mist rose from the earth and filled the air as the temperature dropped. The sunlight faded into muted shade, and the sun turned red and appeared misshapen, like a watercolor whose colors have spread. The earth and the forest, the sky and our train, even our faces looking out the window and our clothes were colored red. Hills and mountainous regions began to appear, and far away we saw tall mountaintops covered in white snow, protruding like sharp teeth. As she passed by, Tania pointed out the window and yelled, “Ural! Ural!” That night, with the Ural Mountains as the border, we said goodbye to Europe and crossed over to Asia. Siberia was a wholly different world, another mighty land.
Moving through three nights and days, the train crossed the Ob River and arrived at Novosibirsk. It was around eight at night. The train stopped for about an hour at the station, and I woke up Young Tae, who had fallen asleep earlier, and went out to get fresh air. Since we had been sitting down for so long, the passengers tried to get out and walk on firm ground, no matter how much the attendants tried to stop us. We saw a small crowd gathered outside, near the exit where the cargo was transported. There was a big street market there, larger than any we had seen, and men approached us to exchange US dollars. Others were selling hot bread filled with smoked salmon and chicken soup with noodles as thick as my finger. I chose chicken soup, because it reminded me of the bowl of noodles I used to eat at Daejun Station.
We arrived in Irkutsk the following afternoon, and had to leave the train with all our belongings. We were to stay there one night, tour around the city and Lake Baikal, and then switch to a different train. From our hotel I could see the Angara River, and I remember the moment I opened my window to let in the sky, the river, and the forest colored by the red sunset. The following day, we were transported in a tour bus all over the city and up to Lake Baikal. I can barely remember the walkway along the river in front of our hotel and the Museum of Decembrists, but Lake Baikal looked like an ocean, and all around it looked like a village in the Alps. I did not want to leave the warm bus to be swept up by the freezing wind coming off the lake.
“They were the heroes and heroines of War and Peace,” said Song Young Tae as we passed by a row of wooden houses. I knew the Decembrists were actually aristocrats who led the first revolt against the czar and the system into which they were born. As Napoleon stirred things up across Europe, the idea of a republic spread like dandelion seeds blown in the wind. The five leaders were executed, and more than one hundred aristocrats were sentenced to life and exiled to the lumberyards and mines near this city. The wives and fiancées of these men came through the snowstorms to be with their loved ones. Some of them were reunited, but sometimes the man died or the woman didn’t survive the journey. The women worked as laundresses or maids while they waited for the men to finish their sentences, suffering the insults and scorn of the guards and judges. Tournetshaya, a duchess, did not stay in Irkutsk, but went into the mountains to the village of Nerchinsk to be with her husband. Madame Borkonkaya found her husband among the mine gang, and instead of embracing him, she kissed the chain around his feet. It took more than thirty years for them to be pardoned and released from hard labor, and those who managed to survive never returned to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Many revolutionaries went through here afterward, Lenin and Chernyshevsky among them.
I remember the two of us walking along the Angara River talking about them, stepping on the yellow leaves carpeting the ground. I was wearing a windbreaker, and Young Tae was in a thin winter coat and a wool hat. On the riverside road were mothers pushing strollers and young lovers taking walks.
“After all that sacrifice and effort, the modern age was barely able to hold the barricade of the antiestablishment for seventy years. The bourgeoisie has taken over again. The whole world is in the process of being colonized.”
As in Berlin, Young Tae constantly wanted to return to talking about current events, but I did not want to be disturbed on this very personal and lyrical journey. I think I was very tired. At the Museum of the Decembrists, before the humble objects and other traces of those exiled to a lonely life here, I thought of the dark windows I had seen when I tried to visit you in prison. For an instant, my eyes felt warm. Looking up the tall, straight body of the white birch in front of the museum, I shook off that memory. And what I regret most now is that I did not try to understand Song Young Tae at that moment.
“You should call it a change. Everyone and everything under the sun changes.”
“Look at how those whities got together to bash everything in the Persian Gulf! The only place that’s left is the North or Cuba. Maybe I should go to the Caribbean and try to get along there? But it’s too far.”
“Look at that baby!”
I approached a baby who must have been two years old, sitting in a stroller and laughing out loud at her mother’s hand gestures. The mother had taken a ribbon from her hair and was shaking it in front of the baby, and as it fluttered in the wind the baby laughed. Young Tae remained in front of the concrete barrier on top of the high bank facing the river. The mother did not seem to mind that I held the baby’s fingers and gently shook them. I kissed the baby’s cheek and returned to Young Tae.
“Look, there’s one, and there’s another. There are lots of moms and babies here.”
“Didn’t you see a lot of them in Berlin, too? What are you fussing about?”
“Nothing. You don’t like family, do you?”
“I hate my father.”
“Then how can you survive anywhere? The two places you talked about are only persisting because of a central father figure.”
“I hate the fascists and the bourgeoisie.”
“Your father was one of those?”
“He was in parliament and a member of the ruling party, someone who served the dictatorship for a long time. You know that.”
“I think I‘ve finally begun to understand my father,” I said, but I was thinking of something else. I was not sure which was correct, his hatred or my understanding. And each of our beginnings was so different, like heaven and earth. I mumbled as if I was still talking to myself, “There are so many people like them, just ordinary people all over the world. Who’s going to protect them now?”
“Aren’t they the ones who resisted their protection, who wanted to go back to the old days? The market will swallow them.”
“Competition is bad, of course. But government control is just as bad.”
“It’s futile to go on about things that don’t exist.”
We returned to the journey that had consumed our lives over the previous few days. But how irresponsible it was, the traveling. Like the wind, we passed fields and villages and houses of people. But this road was a path across the continent that brought me closer to my own dividing lines. To my country, which was divided in the middle, where so many people had sacrificed their lives for their dreams and now were exposing the wounds all over their bodies before the onslaught of change.
As we passed Lake Baikal and traveled into East Siberia, a range of mountains appeared at the far end of the great plain, and we began to notice long winding rivers and hills. The coniferous forest of taiga continued, with spruce trees and cedars and larch trees with elegant brown leaves, and what seemed like every birch tree in the whole wide world, unendingly following the railroad. The Trans-Siberia train followed the course of the Amur River, the life source of this continent that greets the rising sun and guides it until it sets. Riding nonstop for two nights and days, Young Tae and I could no longer bear being on the train. We usually had a little bit of vodka as a nightcap, but the night before we arrived in Khabarovsk we were drinking more. At first we were just a little bit tipsy, but things accelerated, thanks to Tania, when she brought us a hunk of pork and Russian sauerkraut, so similar to our own kimchi. The day before, I had given her some pairs of pantyhose as a present. We began drinking in earnest. The nighttime air was cold, but we kept the window open. The refreshing fragrance of trees and the river drifted in. Each of us talked and sang and chattered, not necessarily to each other, and Tania left after a few glasses since she was still on duty. Song Young Tae and I had not lost consciousness, but we were slurring. At one point we started to calm down, and soon both of us were quiet in his or her own thoughts, as we normally were.
“Why are you weeping?”
Only when Young Tae pointed at me with his finger and asked did I realize that I was crying while staring into the darkness outside the window. I was thinking that I wished Mr. Yi was with me right here, right now. This was completely different from the absence of you, still alive.
“I was thinking of Mr. Yi.”
“A selfish individualist . . .”
“Hey, I am no ‘ist’ of any kind.”
“All you care about is yourself. And your paintings are awful.”
“You think you’re better than me? All you do is talk, talk, talk. Why don’t you just do something instead of talking about it? Or do one thing well and forget about the rest.”
Song Young Tae’s mouth was twisted, he seemed to be sneering.
“You’re hopeless. You never loved anyone, not even yourself.”
Tears were gushing down my cheeks. About half of it was the effect of the vodka. I was crying, but I didn’t feel despondent and I wasn’t screaming. It was my turn to attack.
“You bastard, you knew what was happening! And what did you do to Mi Kyung?”
“It was that kind of time,” he murmured.
“Don’t you dare blame the times,” I shouted. “Admit that you made a mistake!”
Suddenly, his face became curiously contorted, and he began to weep as I was. “I can . . . disappear . . . if that’s what you want.”
That made me loathe him even more, so I climbed into my bed and closed the curtains. The rhythmic sound of the train wheels on the track continued. Was it true that we did not love anyone? Or is it just that we did not know how to love? I think I fell asleep. The curtain was opened stealthily. The light was out, but I was able to make out the upper torso of Young Tae standing right above my head. He bent down and kissed my cheek. I did not know what to do. My head was a jumble of thoughts. He got up quickly and left, closing the curtain again. I turned toward the wall. As always, the rhythmic sound of the train wheels continued, and the restless train moved into the night.
When we arrived in Khabarovsk, the first snow of the season was falling on the Amur River. The strange thing was that the snow was coming down while the sun was dimly shining on, like rainfall on a sunny summer’s day. We unpacked at a hotel near Lenin Square. This was to be the last city we would stay in. The next day, we would go to Vladivostok, and the group tour was to end there. In the hotel lobby, there was a ticket office for a cruise on the Amur River. In our itinerary, a cruise at sunset was already included. Young Tae’s face was puffy, and he had not said much all day. The hotel looked out over the square and the grand avenue named after Karl Marx. We got into a tour bus in front of the hotel and went north on the grand avenue to the harbor. The sun had set, but it was still a little early for the white sunlight to turn red. The first floor on board was the cafeteria and the second floor the deck, and everyone tended to stay on the deck. We stood among other tourists on the right side of the deck and looked down at the river, leaning on the railing. Far away were the dark mountains and forests of China. There they call the Amur River the Black Dragon River, the name we are more familiar with. This magnificent river flows through most of Eastern Siberia and into the Sea of Okhotsk at the northern part of Sakhalin. The cruise ship was to travel slowly down the river to the iron bridge of Khabarovsk and then turn back, which would take about an hour and a half. The sun was going down on the other side of the river, and bands of yellow and red appeared in the sky. Like an ignited tree, the bands widened into a wide swath that colored the surrounding area, the sun falling fast as it burned into a red flame. The river was also turning red. The water closer to us was a darker shade of blue, and the color faded as it moved away from us. When it finally met with the red sky there seemed to be no boundary between the two.
“The sun is going down again,” I thought I heard Young Tae mumble.
I watched his face as he stared down at the river.
“Are you feeling better?”
“What . . . ?”
“You said your stomach hurt before.”
“Hmm, I’m really hungry now. Thanks for asking, though.”
I regarded him in silence.
“I really appreciate that . . .” Song Young Tae said to me in the voice that I was so familiar with. “I really appreciate that you came on this trip with me, Miss Han.”
“I’ve enjoyed it.”
I hoped a few words like these might clear the air. When the cruise was over and the tourist group dispersed at the harbor, the two of us went to a Chinese restaurant we had seen from the bus. We ordered four dishes and ate rice for the first time in a while. Then we went to a café, and that is where he disappeared. After he ordered coffee, he got up and left as if he was going to the restroom. He still had not come back long after I’d finished mine, and I simply assumed that he had become sulky again and had gone back to the hotel by himself. I ordered a cocktail and stayed longer, listening to a chamber music group playing there. Alone, I felt rather free and unencumbered after being obliged to accompany someone for more than a week. I was alone again, thank God. And even if I’d still been with him, would I have been able to stop him from what he was about to do? After spending about two hours there, I slowly walked down the grand avenue back to the hotel. The moment I walked into our room I saw that his bag and clothes were gone. Somehow, I remained calm at that moment. I looked around and found a piece of notepaper leaning against the vanity mirror. Hastily scrawled onto the paper were his words:
I was going to leave as soon as we arrived here, but I decided to stay and have at least one more dinner with you. My dear Miss Han, I am going to the most secluded village in this world, and I won’t be coming back from there. The north of the peninsula is perhaps the most isolated and difficult place in the world right now, but I can’t stand idly by . . . or kill me! I’ll never forget this trip. Dasvidanya!
At first, I had no idea what this extraordinary action of his really meant. The next morning, I simply told our tour guide that we would be ending our trip here, and I stayed at the hotel for one more night. Of course, he did not come back. After spending a whole day in an unfamiliar city all by myself, it finally dawned on me. He had had a different destination in his mind since the beginning of this trip.