![]() ![]() ![]() The psychiatrist to whom her alarmed mother had taken her gave her tablets that she hid under her tongue and later buried in the flower bed at home. Silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloped her body both outside and in. She moved without language and understood without language, as she had before she learned to speak-no, before she had obtained life. Wrapped in that foggy silence, her memories of the tongue and lips that had been used to pronounce, of the hand that had firmly gripped the pencil, grew remote. Words still reached her ears, but now a dense layer of air buffered the space between her cochleas and her brain. The language that had pricked and confined her like clothing made from a thousand needles abruptly disappeared. It first happened the winter after she turned sixteen. Trembling lips pressed firmly together, she muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat, It’s come back. The moment she stepped into the corridor, the hushed whispers became clamorous, as though amplified through a loudspeaker, swallowing the sound her shoes made against the stone floor. The only thing she was able to do was walk calmly out of the classroom. Glaring fiercely, she saw neither students nor ceiling nor window, only the empty air in front of her. When a minute or so had passed and she was still unable to produce the next word, her students had started to shift in their seats and mutter among themselves. Late spring of the previous year, the woman herself had been standing at a blackboard, one chalk-dusted hand pressed against it. Before he has time to add the diacritical marks, the chalk snaps and both halves fall to the floor. He turns to the blackboard and dashes off a short sentence in ancient Greek. When she’d seen it in their first lesson, she’d thought of it as marking where tears had once flowed.īehind pale-green lenses, the man’s eyes are fixed on the woman’s tightly shut mouth. The woman gazes up at the scar that runs in a slender pale curve from the edge of his left eyelid to the edge of his mouth. The sleeves are a bit short, exposing his wrists. His dark-brown corduroy jacket has fawn-colored leather elbow patches. A faint smile of restrained emotion plays around his mouth. He is slight, with eyebrows like bold accents over his eyes and a deep groove at the base of his nose. The man standing by the blackboard looks to be in his mid- to late thirties. ‘My,’ ‘our.’ ” The three students read, their voices low and shy. He moves his gaze over the baby-faced university student who sits in the same row as the woman, the middle-aged man half hidden behind a pillar, and the young postgraduate student sitting by the window, slouching in his chair. “Let’s all read it together.” The man cannot wait for the woman any longer. Han Kang on how language misses its mark. ![]()
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