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.