GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA
to rest on the liquor bottle. Only then I understood what she meant when she said that she couldn’t come here often because it was expensive. She hadn’t been talking about the side dishes but about the drinks. Next to the soup bowls and side dishes were two bottles of beer and a long-necked ceramic bottle of the high-quality Andong soju. So she had been talking about mixing beer and Andong soju. This was also very odd.
She told me that her friend, the one who had first brought her here, had taken pains to emphasize that the side dishes here were not prepared elsewhere and delivered, but that the owner went to the market every day for the ingredients and made them herself. At this, her friend poured her a beer and then mixed in Andong soju without even asking. Pain will win forgiveness for an offence. Her friend tossed back her drink first while my friend sipped her soup. Like a creditor who barges in, downs a glass of cold water, and cuts straight to the chase, her friend put down her glass and asked urgently: “What was it like for you then?What are you supposed to do to keep breathing and living at times like this?”
Seeing my bewildered expression, she took a slow sip of her drink and said: “I went through something similar the year before.”
It was the first I had heard of it. My head was a jumble of confused thoughts. If someone had seen me then, they would have seen a tortured expression similar to the one on the face of the waitress trying to understand what a combination dish was. If her friend had her heart broken two years ago and she had her heart broken a year before that, then that meant that she’d had her heart broken three years ago.Three years ago we were twenty-nine years old, and we got together every now and then, though not frequently. An absurd suspicion began to well up inside me as it suddenly occurred to me that I might know the man who had broken her heart.
Yet once again I merely said: “Oh, really?” One year ago, how had she kept on breathing? Did she also cling to a hope to keep on living? Of course she would have. It only took her some time to realize it since it wasn’t really hope in any recognizable form.
“The moment that you feel you’ve lost it all . . .” Her friend had lifted her head sadly upon hearing these words. “You will realize, when you take the time to look back, that something is still left.”
198 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
