The Last Lover

12. JOE RESOLVES TO LEAVE

Joe finally emerged from the intricate crisscrossing alleys. He told Maria that he had been in a heavy-headed state, but light-footed. He remembered only that he saw parrots everywhere — on the balcony, on the walls, on the trashcans. Everywhere, and moreover, the birds weren’t afraid of people. When they saw Joe, they approached and spoke to him. The birds’ voices scared him, sounding too much like Vincent’s voice. Even the import of what they said was similar.

“Joe, have you made up your mind?” the old parrot swayed side to side toward him.

Joe looked up at a sky covered in haze, and answered dejectedly, “I want to find an exit.”

The bird stood its ground, dissatisfied. But wild laughter erupted behind Joe from another bird.

Maria heard him attentively to the end, and at last responded: “Vincent truly is your kindred spirit. When you pushed that small door open, didn’t you hesitate, even a little? It sounds so strange.”

“I thought of it too late.” He felt his will sinking.

The next day Joe took off from work. He began reading a book with only one page. The book was clothbound, with a drawing of a tall pine tree on the cover. Inside there was a single thick sheet of paper. This sheet could be unfolded to the length of the desk. The picture on the cover appeared to be of an anthill. The periphery of the anthill was densely written over with a miniature text, visible only under a magnifying glass. And once Joe looked with the glass, he discovered that he didn’t recognize a single word. This book had sat on the lowest shelf of the last rack in a small bookshop on a noisy street in the city. When Joe went to pay for it, the elderly bookstore owner came over and told him the book was not for sale.

“It was on the shelf, but it’s not for sale?” Joe was furious. He grasped the book tightly, almost afraid the shopkeeper would take it back by force.

“Fine, take it away, take it away! But don’t regret it!” He walked away resentfully.

The book’s price was unusually high, but Joe paid without hesitation.

Now he attempted to locate his own square in this anthill. Accompanying the slow movements of the magnifying glass in his hand, the floor under his feet began to rise and fall.

“Father, what are you doing in there?” Daniel shouted from outside the study.

“Be a good boy. Don’t come in, it’s a mess in here. .”

Daniel evidently didn’t dare enter. Joe sighed in relief and continued to wrestle with the book, which was flying around madly. At one point, he flopped down to the ground, his ear to the floor, and heard Maria’s voice underneath the floorboards. She sounded irritable. Joe didn’t care to listen to more, so he stood up, leaning against the wall. But he hadn’t been on his feet two minutes before he fell down onto the sofa. He looked around from the sofa and saw that the anthill had disappeared from that remarkable book and turned into a blank white space. He felt as if the sofa were a small boat on the rippling water. Daniel pushed the door slightly open and stuck his head in. His neck and face looked fresh and healthy.

“The study is finally mad, too,” Daniel said, looking pleased.

“Daniel, son, what are you planning to do?”

“Me? Don’t blame me, this is because of you, you bought that book. And there’s Mother. .”

He closed the door, apparently to go downstairs. Joe was astounded: “Does Daniel really know everything?”

In the chaos of the study, Joe started to think calmly. A dove was cooing. There was an actual dove inside the heap of books on the floor. Had it flown in through the window or had Maria put it there? Many of the books were damaged, their pages strewn all over. Joe leaned against the wall and slowly moved out onto the balcony. Before his eyes a familiar scene reappeared.

Maria and Daniel sat among the bushes drinking tea. The two cats walked, stately, back and forth. The balcony was directly in the line of sight of mother and son. Joe waved to them, but they did not respond. Did they even see him? The room shook again with violent tremors. Joe feared he would fall from the balcony, and quickly went inside, crawling aboard the sofa, holding on with a death grip. “And so there are things as strange as this,” he said to himself irritably.

Afterward the earthquake gradually subsided, although there were still aftershocks. The aftershocks continued until Maria called him to come downstairs and eat, when they finally disappeared. He went downstairs, disoriented, and sat at the dining table. Daniel wasn’t there.

“Did Daniel go to work?”

“So you know everything after all.”

“Of course. Doesn’t he know everything about me, too? He’s an ambitious young man. I just lived through an earthquake, damn it.”

“Daniel and I saw. You were shaking with fear. But we couldn’t have helped you, could we?”

A turkey was arranged on the table. Maria’s face appeared almost bewitching in the rising steam, her cheekbones almost like two red halos. Joe couldn’t make out her expression. It was as if she were covered by a membrane.

He had just finished eating and put down his chopsticks when an uninvited guest entered his yard. The man’s head was wrapped in a turban. He seemed travel-weary. Maria told Joe that the man was his driver. Joe recognized the familiar face. It brought to mind the time he’d stayed for a night and day in the north at Mr. Kim’s home. But when had Maria come to know the driver?

“I arrived a number of days ago, and I’ve been staying in the basement of the restaurant. You’ve seen me, you haven’t recognized me, and you’ve walked away from me. At the time I was drunk, down on the ground, but one of my eyes was always open.”

Maria called to him to put down the canvas bag he carried on his back, but he didn’t, standing in the doorway instead.

“Mr. Kim wants you to come and relive old dreams with him,” the driver said to Joe.

A vast pastureland floated up in Joe’s mind, the mountain peaks piled with snow and the eccentric owner of the house halfway up a mountain. The driver stood in front of him without moving. His face under his turban was extremely handsome in the evening glow. Joe was drawn in by him, thinking that in the city one very seldom met a good-looking man like this one. Was he the descendant of a warrior from ancient times? But when Joe had first met him on the pasture-land, he hadn’t been handsome. Maria’s eyes were fixed on the man. Joe remembered that she and this fellow had already been in contact, and jealousy unbidden leapt up in his heart. She, and him, and also Kim, what sort of connection did they share?

“How would I relive old dreams?” he asked.

“You’re already reliving old dreams.” His eyes were smiling.

“But I don’t understand.” Joe felt his whole body go hot and dry.

“I’ll go now.”

He walked from the yard, through the main gate, and disappeared into the golden sunset. Maria’s face glowed.

Joe couldn’t stay sitting at home. He went outside. He walked aimlessly and unconsciously reached the small bookstore, where he saw the fearsome shopkeeper. People came and went in the shop. With the dim lamplight, the people coming in all appeared furtive, but the bookstore owner sat haughtily on a high stool at the entrance. Over many years, Joe had bought many fine books here. Yet before it had been an ordinary little bookstore, doing a lackluster business. Who would have thought such a bookshop could survive in the city for so many years? Joe suspected that the bookstore owner might rely on an occasional shady transaction to support his livelihood. Joe had never spoken with the bookstore owner, who wouldn’t cater to people, as if he really were someone important. Nevertheless, his shop contained some truly interesting books.

Today was a little strange. After Joe entered the shop, the electricity suddenly shut off. He was shoved back and forth, and a bookcase was knocked over. All the books fell out. The bookstore owner cursed in the dark. Fortunately the lights were soon restored.

“Wherever you go, there are earthquakes,” the bookstore owner said, gathering the books.

Joe helped, thinking to himself, How did he know? After the books were gathered up, he was too embarrassed to stay and left the shop. But the bookstore owner called him back. From under his buttocks he drew out the book he was sitting on and handed it to Joe, saying it was especially for him. Joe’s heart pounded. He hid behind a bookcase, opened the book, and saw a portrait of Kim. But it wasn’t Kim. Another man’s name was written underneath the portrait. He read from the introduction. The introduction said that in the book the author described the minutiae of his entire life. It also contained an extensive daily record. “Because someone is willing to publish it, I wrote everything without scruple,” the author wrote derisively. Reading up to that point, Joe resolved to buy the book. The bookstore owner wasn’t willing to accept money for it. He said the book was left by the author with instructions to give it to Joe as a gift.

“The author came?” Joe was disturbed.

“He didn’t come himself, he sent his underling. Look, he’s sitting over there.”

In the obscure light, Joe saw the driver’s handsome face. He was browsing through a book in a corner. Joe’s heart palpitated. He thought, “It really is still him.”

“Sometimes the people one meets by chance were already by one’s side.” The owner finished this sentence after he returned to his high stool, recovering his haughty look.

Joe thought the driver was smiling at him, but evidently he didn’t want Joe to disturb him. He seemed to be looking for a book. Joe left the shop. In the light of the streetlamp, he couldn’t help opening the book again, and so he saw the photograph of Kim a second time. When he’d calmed down, he discovered that the man wasn’t Kim after all. It was only someone whose face had a similar shape. The man’s expression was cold and stern, even a little cruel. Joe didn’t like cruel men. But wasn’t Kim a bit cruel? Joe thought this strange: he rather liked Kim. A fellow who could write down his personal secrets in a book this thick, and who moreover wanted to give the book to him. Joe shivered, although he wasn’t cold. So this driver, was he the driver he’d met at Kim’s? Perhaps this book was what he called “reliving old dreams.” But the man in the picture didn’t really look like Kim. Even the color of his hair was different: Kim had black hair, black like a crow’s wings, and this man’s hair was a lighter color.

Then Joe thought: Could he write a book like this himself? If someone would publish it, would he write all the trivial things that happened in his life into a book? This way of thinking stemmed from a kind of avarice. Joe wasn’t sure whether he would be able to do it. He honestly disliked the countenance of the man in the picture. Pondering this question, he carelessly ran into someone’s back. It was a black woman, the beautiful street cleaner.

“Good evening! Why are you reading in the street, sir?” she asked cheerfully.

“Excuse me.” Joe’s face and ears suddenly reddened.

“This time of day is so beautiful, especially in the bookshops where the light is dim. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, yes, you are so beautiful, that’s how it is.” He spoke at random.

The woman walked away, smiling. Joe saw his own awkward, distracted look in the shop window. He clamped the book under his arm and hurriedly walked toward home. Without intending to watch him, he saw the driver leave the bookshop and go in a different direction.

“But in the evening the world outside is glorious. Why do you always stay in your study?”

Maria reproached him. What for? He carried this question back to the study. He was eager to know what sort of thing this author’s “reliving old dreams” was, and whether it had anything to do with the web of stories he’d been constructing over the years. Because a man with a face like this one couldn’t have given him the book without a motive. The opening of the book was the man’s self-introduction. It seemed affected:

I was born in a mountain village of a small country in the East. The impression of this country in the mind of the average person is of an extremely cold place, where the long winters are insufferably dull. The reality of the matter is not like this at all. People there have extremely warm dispositions. The ivory snow of the mountain range is our paradise. There are numerous ice caves in the mountains, dug out by generations of tenacious labor. In fact, I was born in one of these ice caves.

Joe, reading this far, felt duped. Nor could he produce a corresponding image in his mind. Hadn’t the author said he would write exclusively about the personal details of his life? This generalized background was like an old teacher’s worn-out saws. He put down the book, growing distracted. There was a man in this book who wanted to say something to the people of the world, and so he had written the book. The man was much like Kim, the owner of the grasslands in the north whom Joe had met; but he was also entirely different. Yet Kim, his own situation hidden, had indirect exchanges with Joe through all kinds of connections. The result of these exchanges was that Joe sank into oblivion. Joe sighed and picked up the book again. This time he began to read in the middle.

The landscape of swirling snowflakes is a symbol of happiness. One only has to see the atmosphere of ardent collective labor in the ice caves to understand this. What is happiness? Sweating in the freezing winter, at 30 degrees below zero Celsius, is happiness. Each person holds an iron pick in hand, digging stroke on stroke into the walls of a thousand-year-old ice cave. We are extending our own space.

Joe shut his eyes and felt incredibly tired. Someone came into the hallway. Was it Daniel? Did Daniel know his father’s spirit had fallen into a difficult place? Such a sensitive boy! When the web of the story in Joe’s mind was about to reach a state of perfection, someone was sabotaging him, pulling the firewood out from under the pot. In recent days, the space Joe had constructed over a long period of time had been shrinking. His eyesight was also getting weaker. He held in his hand a book that fascinated him, but he simply couldn’t read it; he only had a sense of being excluded from it. Was he already so old?

“Father, I love you.” Daniel stuck his head into the room and then drew back.

Joe heard a cat meowing in the hallway. “A woman who builds up a home like this is admirable.” Joe felt deeply Maria’s intrinsic perfection and beauty. “I love you, too, Daniel,” he said to himself. The loom sounded downstairs. Hadn’t Maria stopped weaving a long time ago?

Daniel finally came in. He stood quite still against the wall, a long thin twig.

“Is something bothering you?”

“I’m happy.”

His response startled Joe. When Daniel was little Joe took him fishing, and when a fish was hooked Joe had asked him what he felt. He said it hurt him. Now he’d become a gardener with a happy life.

“Daniel, why are you still standing there?”

“There are things in this room that I’m afraid of. Father, do you see the bone you hung on the wall, it’s moving. . What kind of bone is it? Is it human?”

Daniel stuck close to the wall. To Joe he looked like he was trying to bore into it.

“Don’t take this to heart, child. Your thoughts are so serious.”

Joe stood up and went to another bookshelf. From this angle he couldn’t see Daniel. The boy made him restless. He sat down, still wanting to reason through his own train of thought. But he couldn’t with Daniel on the opposite side, interfering with him like a magnetic field. Joe heard the sound of pages turning. Was Daniel looking at the book out on the table? Abruptly the study rang with the sound of Daniel reading aloud:

The garden in the air has no flowers, only wild grass. Who would garden in a place like this? No one. But when a gust of wind thins the dense fog, a straw hat appears.

Joe walked out of his hiding place. He saw Daniel holding the book. Joe moved in front of him and took the book from his hands. But somehow he couldn’t find the sentence his son had just read aloud. He asked Daniel where the sentence was. Daniel said it wasn’t in the book, he had just seen it. He’d strained to look and the sentence appeared. This was the kind of book you could see things in, but usually he didn’t read because it was too hard on his eyes. He wished his father would read less of this kind of book.

“Father, you should just be a gardener, too.” His look as he spoke was both simple and experienced.

Joe thought of the days and nights when he was immersed in the world of his books. There was also the story he had woven, a great undertaking soon to be completed. In comparison to Daniel, all of this was insignificant. He sank back into gloom.

“I don’t want to be a happy gardener, son. My destiny is to work at the Rose Clothing Company. My life is under a spell. Maybe someday I will be able to leave. It’s what my boss expects of me. Daniel, are you still afraid of that bone?”

“No, Father. It isn’t moving now, so I can see it’s a cow bone. I have to go. I’m even happier now, because you aren’t opposed to my being a gardener. I haven’t touched any books for years. Are you disappointed?”

“No, Daniel, I admire you.” Joe spoke in sincerity.

The door shut. Joe heard Maria and Daniel talk in the hallway, then go downstairs together. Joe reflected that he had an admirable wife and an admirable son. He paced onto the balcony and saw the figures of mother and son floating out through the garden gate like ghosts. A cat squatted guard on a boulder, watching them go.

Someone was in his study. When Joe returned to his desk and sat down, the man walked out from behind the bookshelf. He walked up behind Joe with slow steps, then returned back behind the bookshelf. Joe heard him, but did not want to turn around to see him.

“Daniel, your father wants to come out of his cocoon. Will you move back in, darling child?”

“No, Mother. This way is better.”

Maria looked at her son as he walked beside her. His long, thin body seemed to be near her side, yet also at a far distance. She thought of the young women who wore kimonos in Joe’s story. It was possible that in Joe’s eyes those girls were embodiments of Daniel. Joe was such a strange man. At the present moment her son was by her side, and yet wasn’t by her side, and surely he was pondering some remote thing. When he came outside, Daniel had said he would bring her to see the garden he’d designed in the air, but they were already outside the city, where there weren’t any gardens. They followed an embankment down into a dry riverbed. Daniel squatted, scooping the river’s silt with his long, thin fingers, letting it run through them. Maria heard a groan from his throat. The fog gradually grew thicker, and after a bit they couldn’t see each other’s faces. Maria’s mind grew confused.

“Daniel, I can’t remember what I did yesterday.”

Daniel’s answer was scattered in the air with a buzzing weng weng. Maria had no means of understanding the disordered words. She breathed with effort. Surely she smelled the fragrance of a rose of Sharon. The blooms were invisible; probably they were running through her son’s fingers. A vision of Daniel wearing a straw hat, sweating under the sun, appeared in Maria’s imagination. She heard him saying two syllables, Fa-ther. But Daniel wasn’t calling his father. It was like a preschooler practicing his letters.

Steps could be heard on the river embankment. Maria stood and the steps stopped.

“Is that Joe?” she shouted.

“Is that Joe. .” The air vibrated, Daniel’s voice echoing hers.

A magpie flew in front of them, toward the embankment.

“Mother, let’s go back to where Father is.”

Daniel stretched out his hands to restrain her. Maria saw that the arms he reached toward her were the branches of a Chinese redbud, with small flowers swaying cheerfully. They climbed together up onto the embankment, but Joe wasn’t there. Maria’s heart flowed with warm currents of happiness, because she heard again the voice of Joe in his youth. She was moved to tears.

“Joe, Joe. .” she said.

Many years ago, she and Joe had climbed up from the dry riverbed. Over so many years, she had never thought she might return like this, in person, to old dreams. Maybe now she and her son truly were walking into Joe’s all-encompassing story. He wasn’t on the riverbank; he was inside her body. On such a day redbud flowers grew from her son’s body. The year she became pregnant, she’d often seen Chinese redbuds.

Joe was on the embankment. He saw the mother and son in the riverbed, one standing, one squatting. Then they started to walk, groping like blind men, as if neither could see the other. Joe took two breaths of the limpid air. Then he saw a white-haired Eastern woman appear on the opposite shore. The woman’s clothing was also white and looked a bit like a kimono, a bit like the short dresses of ancient China. She leaned on a willow tree, observing mother and son in the riverbed. Joe stared without shifting his eyes from the aged, beautiful woman, in a daze because he had never seen such a fine older woman. He felt his soul spirited away from his body. Someone clapped his shoulder. To his surprise, it was the shopkeeper from the bookstore.

“The person over on that side isn’t real.” The bookstore owner knit his brow, spitting out the sentence as if it hurt him.

“I had also sensed this. What a pity. Where is she from?”

“She is my former wife.”

Joe looked in surprise at the ugly bookstore owner, and had nothing to say. He couldn’t bear Joe’s gaze. He hunched his back, broken down. Joe recollected an image of him sitting proudly at the bookshop entrance on a high stool, and suddenly understood the pain in his heart. In the riverbed mother and son, one before and one behind, climbed up to the bank. They hadn’t seen Joe. Maria’s legs were slightly lame. Seen from behind, her posture was still like a young girl’s.

“Why isn’t she a real person?” Joe asked the bookstore owner, his voice revealing his tender thoughts.

“Because whichever way you go, you still can’t reach her. If you don’t believe me, you can try it.”

“I would like to make an attempt.”

After Maria and Daniel climbed onto the bank, the woman opposite turned around, her back to Joe and the bookstore owner. Joe thought the woman’s figure resembled the immortals in an Eastern myth. Was the East the place he should go? The shopkeeper walked down the riverbank, hunched over. He said he couldn’t bear it any longer. He seemed to cry as he walked.

Joe went down to the riverbed, wanting to cross over to the other bank. As he walked he distrusted his progress, because the bookstore keeper had just spoken of how no one would be able to reach “her” face. Joe climbed the bank anxiously. He saw the woman slowly turning around. Her clothing was a dazzling white. The woman wore glasses. Joe had not imagined that she might wear glasses.

“Are you off work today?” she asked amiably.

“I never expected. . I thought how much. . Today I didn’t want to go to work. Do you live near here? It’s so nice here!”

“Yes, I live here. I’ve observed you, too. Someone is urging you to leave this city, isn’t that right?”

Joe did not answer. He understood why the bookstore owner was crying. Above them, the heavens became like crystal. He wanted to ask the woman whether she knew Kim.

“Do you mean the man who has a pastureland, who lives halfway up a mountain? Of course I know him, there aren’t many people who don’t know him. He is not a real person. Have you sensed that?”

Her dazzling glance watched Joe. His blood bubbled.

“Your former husband said that you weren’t a real person either. Why?” He drummed up his courage to ask.

“Some people are an unsolvable mystery to other people. If he lives with that sort of person, he will gradually disappear. Have I answered your question? If you go to Ito’s bookstore late at night, you will hear him wrestling inside and the books falling from the shelves.”

“Who is he wrestling with?”

“Who? I think it’s a ghost. He has exceptional eyesight.”

The owner of the bookshop was named Ito. Joe had never noticed this before. So he was Japanese? His wife, this woman before him, was Japanese? They came here from the distant East to start a business, then they separated? Human hearts are frightful. There was something he wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t think of it. She seemed already to know what he wanted to ask, and moreover to be weary of answering it. She said someone was calling her, she must go at once, then she hurriedly left. “We won’t meet again.” This was the last thing she said.

Joe made up his mind to go to Ito’s bookshop in the depths of the night. What relation did this strange divorced couple have to those young Japanese women wearing kimonos in his story? The woman he’d just seen, wearing white. . it seemed that he had seen her somewhere before.

Joe looked up and down the pattern of a new tapestry Maria had woven. His head felt dizzy. There seemed to be no design at all, only changing layers of faint color. Perhaps even the changing of the colors was only in his imagination, and there was no pattern on the surface of the tapestry. His eyes began to hurt looking at it; even his temples hurt. He thought of turning aside his gaze but a magnetic force seemed to draw him into the tapestry. “Let me go, Maria,” he begged in his heart.

“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”

Maria appeared in the doorway. A few wasps wheeled around her head, looking dangerous. The wasps made Joe’s memory vivid and bright.

“You’ve come from seeing Kim, Maria?”

“As good as seeing him. I met the driver. Ah, that grassland! Did I weave it well? This time I began anew. It’s a new beginning. Listen, Joe. It’s so quiet. I mean the walls are quiet. After you leave, Daniel and I will miss you.”

And so Maria expected him to leave, too? Joe thought of the bookstore owner’s former wife, how years ago she and her husband had undertaken the journey here. The bookstore in the evening dusk and the riverbank during the bright day formed a contrast, so that Joe spontaneously felt the longing between the separated couple. But what kind of longing did Joe have for that woman? Maria was disappearing. Now she wove tapestries that gave him headaches, that left Joe’s line of thought suspended in midair. Joe circled the room, discovering the walls hung with quite a few similar tapestries, only with colors that were even more shadowy, in layers even more difficult to tell apart. When he fixed his eyes on a tapestry with deep gray tones, Maria spoke again, from behind him:

“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”

Joe uneasily turned to face her, saying to Maria that he grew more and more stupid. He heard the household’s two cats howling from the tops of the walls, and unexpectedly he glimpsed the pattern revealed in the tapestry. It was a hatchet. What hatred did Maria hold in the depths of her heart?

He heard Maria talking to someone, but there was no one in the room. She stood with her back to him, behind the loom, her voice low and hoarse. She was using a language that Joe didn’t understand.

Joe quietly left the workroom and went into the garden. There were a large number of wasps flying around it. Where had they come from? Was a wasps’ nest nearby? Daniel had also come out to the garden. A large group of wasps wound around him. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, but he didn’t mind the poisonous wasps. Joe thought of Daniel’s girlfriend, the Vietnamese girl with a body as light as a swallow’s, and felt that these two were truly a match made in heaven. Perhaps one day Daniel would go back with her to live in Vietnam. In that green country full of rainwater, Daniel would feel like he was returning home.

“Father, do you know who led the wasps here?” In the sun, the freckles on his nose were conspicuous.

“Who?”

“It was that driver. The moment he stood in the rose garden the wasps swarmed in, in a black mass. Such beautiful little things! The driver is admirable. Maybe he’s in love with Mother. Will you be jealous, Father?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will be.” Joe spoke without confidence. “Do you think your mother hopes I will leave?”

“Mother loves you,” Daniel said earnestly. “Although that has nothing to do with your leaving.”

Joe saw the wasps sting Daniel’s head and face over and over. His face swelled rapidly, so that even his eyes were swollen into a single seam. Joe was afraid, but the wasps didn’t sting him. Only one kept at his ear, menacing, making its weng weng buzzing. Daniel sat calmly on the stone bench, as if he had not felt the wasps attack him, and was indifferent to the red swelling.

“Daniel, where should I go?”

His manner was helpless. He knew Daniel couldn’t answer questions like this, Daniel, who was bending down to investigate the roses, half his face swollen. He told Joe that the roses gave him evil thoughts.

Joe heard the loom start up again in the house. At the same instant, raindrops fell on his cheeks. How strange, when the sun was shining brightly!

“Daniel, did you notice it was raining?”

“I was just thinking about the problem of the soil quality, and I had a few thoughts about a tropical rainforest. What luck, Father, you seem to be able to feel my thoughts. Mother said there is a square inside of you, and a broad road shaded with trees extending all the way to the foot of snowy mountains. But why can’t I feel it there?”

Surrounded by such an atmosphere, Joe felt suffocated.

Daniel pulled up a rosebush and said something to its roots that Joe couldn’t hear. His hands were shaking. This boy, who as a child had shed tears at seeing a fish on a hook, had grown so violent. When Daniel was a year and a half old he fussed at night, and Joe held him in his arms, swinging in a circle outdoors, Daniel’s cries reverberating through the whole street. But once he learned to speak he became a silent, prissy child. Maria wasn’t willing to have Daniel grow up at her side and she sent him to a boarding school on her own initiative. For this, Joe had resented her. But now he felt grateful to her.

Joe needed to break something, to struggle. This boy, his face swollen, speaking to rosebush roots, and the headache-inducing tapestries in the workroom. . he couldn’t breathe. Also, there were the electricity-carrying cats. He must find a pure land to hide away in. Who could tell him where such a place was? Maybe the former wife of the bookshop owner could tell him?

A large clump of wasps circled Daniel. His face was swollen out of shape. He hadn’t realized it. He pulled up another rosebush and studied it in his hand. He seemed to have forgotten Joe still at his side. The sun burned the sweat from his youthful body, its odor filling the air. Joe heard an ominous implication in the loom’s shuttling sound. He had borne all he could.

He went inside and picked up his briefcase, telling Maria he was going to the office.

From her loom Maria fixed her eyes on him for several minutes, nodding her head. Joe sensed that her eyes were filled with expectation. Joe quickly walked into the yard before hearing Maria stick her head out and yell, “Joe, dear, walk to the corner and don’t look back.”

Joe, moving as if a generation had passed on, proceeded through the narrow streets. His own face reflected in the glass doors and windows was a stranger’s, a long face, a somber man, with a head of white curling hair. If the change in himself was so great, what had Maria, and Daniel, and other people, too, known him by? The street cleaner stood at the corner. Even this beautiful black woman seemed a little weary. She leaned toward Joe to greet him, with an imploring look. Joe stopped in his steps, and at the same time remembered Maria’s words.

“Can I help you?”

“The night is vast, I will fall into the tiger’s mouth. No one can help me.” The beautiful woman showed her teeth savagely.

“Oh! Oh!” Joe groaned as he walked, cold sweat running down his back.

“Don’t come back again!” the beautiful woman screamed.

When Joe entered his office he saw the wasps. An enormous wasps’ nest was tied to the air conditioner, where they massed into squeezed, black piles. But these little insects didn’t make any sound at all, which was unusual. Joe opened a drawer, took out a Tibetan travel book, which he hadn’t seen for ages, and turned to the middle. He couldn’t read a single one of the Tibetan words, nor did the book have any pictures, but over a long period of time he had turned its pages one by one. What was inside this book? He didn’t know. He only knew that perhaps inside there was a world, an unfathomed place. As he fixed his eyes on the Tibetan script, a wasp dropped onto the surface of the page. The Tibetan words suddenly leapt up like flames burning the little insect. It struggled for a few minutes and then didn’t move.

“Joe, are you making an experiment?”

Lisa entered. She was still dressed gaudily. Her skirt even showed a stretch of thigh.

Even though Joe turned his face to the wasps’ nest in embarrassment, Lisa walked over indifferently, lifting Joe’s book, spreading its pages with a few shakes. Joe saw a layer of dead wasps lying on the floor.

“My old home was called the village of wasps. Every person’s blood is permeated with their toxin. Vincent doesn’t believe this, and so he suffered enormous hurt.”

“Then what is inside my book? Do you know?”

“It’s a place where you haven’t been.”

Lisa stepped underneath the air conditioner and put a hand in among the wasps. Joe saw her slender hand rapidly swelling. She laughed naughtily. Then she pulled back her hand, her fingers swollen like carrots. Walking away from Joe with a smile, she left.

He had just put the book back into the drawer when a customer entered. He was unannounced. Joe, furious, glared at him without saying a word. He was a skinny fellow with scars on his face. He said that when he came into the room he felt like he was returning home. Who still raised wasps in their offices today? Such a lovely idea. He praised this idea with his teeth bared while pulling a glass bottle from his pocket. It was full of dead wasps.

“Joe, I am a worker from Reagan’s farm.” As he spoke he wiped away tears with the back of his hand, because his left eye always ran. “The work clothes your company manufactures brought about the deaths of two more people yesterday.”

“That has nothing to do with our company.” Joe spoke coldly.

“Really?” He stepped closer, staring at Joe. “Really?” He also swung the bottle in his hand.

Joe discovered that the wasps inside the bottle were moving.

“I will make a business trip to your farm, to investigate the deaths of these workers.”

The thin man looked at Joe curiously, rubbing his eye, and asked him whether he sincerely wanted to understand this matter. Would he be paralyzed with fear by the reality of the situation? He also said that if Joe wanted to go, he didn’t need to go to the farm. He should go to Country C instead. Why should he go to Country C? Joe asked. The thin man became immediately active, walking back and forth across the office and jumping to pluck at the nest so that the wasps flew around, filling the room.

“Country C is the place where you should go. The boys we lost came from there. Two beautiful boys. Your clothing wrapped around them like snakes. But I must leave. Go there yourself, but don’t go to the wrong place. If you see grapevines, you should stop and wait.”

After he’d left, Joe spread out the Tibetan book on his desk again. He thought that the book should have a topographic map and an itinerary inside. Could those two boys have come from the snow-peaked mountains of the plateaus? Joe had one reverie after another, he couldn’t help himself.

Two drenched black birds stopped on the windowsill. They were crows. Joe sensed the air of death. How could he get to Country C? He would take a plane, of course. But how would he tell Vincent? Say he was going to realize his aspirations? Say he would never turn back? Joe felt that web appear again at last. The broad road into his square led all the way to the horizon, and a woman wearing a kimono walked slowly ahead. Was he struggling out of chaos? Or would he jump into an even larger web of chaos? It seemed everyone was inciting him, forcing him to leave. Yet at the very beginning this plan had come from the boss who couldn’t do without him. It seemed that Vincent, too, was forcing him.

Vincent hadn’t shown his face. Joe searched for him in all corners of the office. He hadn’t come, no one had seen him. Joe’s co-workers stared at him in reproach, thinking he shouldn’t search for his boss so anxiously. Someone even hinted he might pay attention to his own business. Unbelievably, everyone knew what was on his mind. Joe didn’t dare keep on asking. He returned to his office like a stray dog, put his things into his briefcase, then sat down to make a phone call to the airport. He had just finished the call when Lisa slipped back into the room like a ghost.

“You’re just going to leave without giving notice?”

“I couldn’t find Vincent.”

“He wouldn’t be here, especially on a day like this. Look at those two crows, so black. That year I came from the gambling city all alone in the world. . You have such good fortune, Joe, you possess everything!” She spread her arms in exaggeration, as if she would dance.

“Actually I have no place to even set my foot. .” Joe grumbled and placed the Tibetan travel book in his bag. He remembered that he still needed to go home and pick up his clothes. What was he doing, was he possessed, that he’d obey a complete stranger’s suggestion? Just because the atmosphere around him incited him to this crazy idea? Who was that thin man, and what made him say Joe should go to Country C, that faraway place not even described in books? Yes, he read many books, but he still had never read a book that described this faraway nation. In books he’d read of red palace walls and amber tiles, but he hadn’t thought about Country C. Joe often traveled on business, for the most part to domestic locations, and sometimes also to Europe and to Mediterranean countries, but Country C, an ancient Eastern country, remained only a hazy recollection in a recess of his mind. He had a groundless intuition: perhaps what Maria had woven was that place? Perhaps he was also on a road with her, depicting those patterns that couldn’t be seen? “Maria, Maria, you are so callous, you won’t release me,” he said to himself. The sun shone on him through the glass. A wasp flew faltering by, stopped on the back of his hand, and began to sting him. Joe’s mind became a stretch of blank space.

He returned home as if moving in his sleep. Maria wasn’t at home. Daniel had not returned either. Once Joe entered the house voices spoke from inside the walls, a sound both urgent and agitated, as if they were quarreling. He put his ear to the living room wall, but couldn’t tell what the argument was about. He went upstairs to his bedroom and packed his suitcase. When he opened the bedroom curtains, two drenched crows sat on the windowsill! The crows did not turn to look at him. They sat unmoving, like statues. Their bodies were much larger than normal. They appeared to be a special breed of crow. Other than his clothing, what else should he bring? He couldn’t make up his mind because he didn’t know a single thing about that country. He had heard before, unwittingly, some familiar person, whose face he couldn’t even recall now, say that poppies grew everywhere there, and that the men and woman all loved to smoke opium, floating like sleepwalkers in blue smoke. In that place, time could reverse, people could return to their childhoods, collecting a few pieces of testimony from their former lives to bring back. Since he had been inattentive at the time, he couldn’t remember who had said this. He discovered that Maria had left a note on the desk. She said she was going to deliver a tapestry that had been ordered by that driver. He felt no need to leave a few sentences for Maria because she’d wished for him to leave all along. Of course, Joe was slightly jealous — he wasn’t sure of the nature of the relationship between Maria and the handsome driver. But now wasn’t the time to consider the matter.

He tidied his suitcase and went out the door. A tall woman wearing a black skirt stood at the front doorway of his house. Joe had seen her before. She had an Eastern woman’s face, her expression detached. Joe greeted her; she merely nodded her head. Perhaps she stood there by chance. The two crows suddenly cawed. The sound reverberated through a vast sky.

At the intersection he ran into the beautiful black woman. She smiled at him with spirit, showing glistening teeth. Joe answered her with a smile, confusedly trying to avoid her, but she willfully moved to the side of the road.

He was troubled by the thought of the sordid action he’d just taken, because he was carrying away the better part of the family’s savings. If he didn’t return, Maria would have to sell her jewelry to live on. Yet it didn’t matter, she always had ways to get through trouble.