Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah

Author:Bae Suah [Suah, Bae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473565814
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Buha enjoyed deviating from his fixed route to watch the poet woman. Many women liked taking classes, and the poet woman was no exception: she was learning German. After work she went to a house in a poor hilltop neighbourhood. Sitting with his back against an unusually low wall, Buha was able to hear her hushed voice coming from inside the dark rooms of the house, where she would read aloud from a book. In that house there were two women. The customer to whom Buha periodically delivered medicine, and the poet woman. Buha could not tell what sort of relationship they had. Since the customer woman always remained in the shadowed interior that was like a frosted mirror, only wordlessly reaching out a white hand to take the medicine bottle from him, her face remained unknown. It was as if one woman was the shadow of the other. When they read from the book at the same time their voices could not be distinguished.

The book the poet woman read from every evening was The Blind Owl.

She worked in a place called an audio theatre. It had very few visitors, and only one performance a day; it was a small theatre, whose audience never numbered more than ten. Buha was born and raised in Seoul, but had never known that such a theatre existed in this city. The audience was made up of blind people, or of students, mainly, who would be assigned to write school reports on the performance. The poet woman worked alone all day, selling tickets to visitors alone, arranging the library’s documents alone and, once the performance was over, locking up alone. She seemed to enjoy this work. Now and then, while she worked, an inscrutable smile would appear on her face. But that only happened when she was alone. The poet woman stayed inside the theatre all day. Listening to the weather forecast on the radio was almost a hobby of hers, though not the ordinary forecast but the shipping forecast, for the weather out at sea.

At times Buha had trailed her – though the criminal connotations of such a word meant he hesitated to use it to describe his own actions. He didn’t expect anything from her. The present situation, in which he simply looked at her, could not have suited him better. All he wanted was to watch her, for as long as possible, even if only from behind, with no other aim or ulterior motive.

One day the poet woman took the subway for some distance, all the way to the end of the line. There, she switched to a bus. The bus pierced the barren residential areas where the city’s outskirts had been erected on haggard earth, passed through a vast suburban district dotted here and there with low apartment buildings and lonely petrol stations. The poet woman alighted at a secluded bus stop. The darkness lacked even a single point of light. No houses or other buildings could be seen, but that would have been due to the darkness only, not because they did not exist.

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