I achieved only ten minutes of conversation with an old lady with flawless English who’d learned it, she informed me, from her time as secretary to an American general who’d stayed in Korea after the civil war.
“Then all we wanted was unity,” she sighed, “now people don’t think we are the same species as our Northern sisters, let alone the same country. We all say we hope the regime will collapse, but when it does, who will tell the people of the North not to rise up and kill us all? Perhaps things are best left as they are.”
“Do you believe that?”
She twisted her lips, tilted her tiny, bird-like neck forward and up, considering the matter. “I think it’s complicated. I don’t know anyone who tries to work out problems for people by numbers, except generals and prime ministers. I don’t think there’s good mathematics for what war does to people.”
I wanted to ask her more, but the bell rang and the interval ended, and at the end of the opera, the prince kissed the princess and I looked away, unable to stomach it.
In the morning, I woke to find Byron gone. The hotel hadn’t called her a cab, they had no idea where she was going, but there were only so many places she could be. I caught a taxi to the station, looked for her desperately, did not find her, cursed my arrogance in thinking I could track her, went to the nearest internet café, turned on my laptop and sat down to wait.
Four and a half hours of waiting, and when at last Byron came online I laughed with relief. The tracker I’d lodged into the internal hardware of her machine took a little while to pinpoint her, zooming steadily in on the map, but at last put her in a hotel in Gyeonju. By the time I reached the hotel, she was out I knew not where, but I stole the master door key from reception and slipped into her room, and all was at it should be, socks folded, a shirt drying by the sink, TV off, a single mattress rolled out across the wooden floor, sleeping bag open and ready for use. I couldn’t find her laptop, but checking my own I registered her in a café a few streets away, and went to watch her eating dumplings with one hand, attention all on the screen and her work. My USB stick was lodged in the laptop’s side, data being copied, transferred, digested. It was enough — for now, enough.
The next morning I was up at 5 a.m., and at 6 a.m. I heard her alarm go off. I sat a few tables away at breakfast, followed her into the streets, caught the train to Bulguk-Dong, watched as she surveyed the empty roads and quiet white hotels leading up to the temple on its hill. A town for tourists, hotels offering services in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, English, French, German, Spanish. A single supermarket for the few residents who remained, a tourist office, round with a sloping roof, a woman inside who handed Byron a leaflet and said, “It’s very long way for you to come.”
A car park, half full, a yellow dirt path heading uphill through the trees. I followed Byron fifteen paces behind, climbing towards the temple hidden on its hill, Bulgaska, ministry-designated Korea Historic and Scenic Site No. 1, do not forget to see visitor centre (newly opened) and grotto (sacred, hidden amongst the hills). Buddhist swastika carved into ancient timbers; autumnal red-leaved trees hanging over still ponds where ancient orange carp swim, watched by a curious grey kitten that senses supper.
There were no other humans on the winding climb to the grotto, just she and I, walking. A stone bench on the left, after a mile or so; a symbol of a boddhisattva carved into the cliff, a river running swiftly, trees loose in the breeze.
A pair of Korean tourists, descending the other way, all backpack and big camera, smiled at Byron as they passed, nodding their greeting. They smiled again at me, eyes bright, watchful, and continued on their way. I listened to their footsteps in the leaf and gravel behind me, a regular pattering of stones running downhill from their passage, and had walked another three or four yards before it occurred to me that their footsteps had stopped. I looked back over my shoulder, and there they were, staring up at me, still smiling their polite, interested smiles. I moved away, saw Byron ahead, her back to me, still, eyes down. I kept walking, then stopped. She turned, phone in her hand. My picture was on the screen.
“Oh,” I said, as she examined the photo, my face, comparing it to me, me to it. “Hello again,” I added, glancing over my shoulder — the tourists perhaps not tourists at all now, a definite something in the way they moved, the way they watched.
“Hello, Why,” said Byron.
A flicker of doubt, a moment where my stomach caught, but my voice was steady. “Hello, Byron.”
“Can I ask how many times we’ve met?”
“Only once, properly.”
“In Dadohaehaesang?”
“Yes. We had dinner.”
“I thought we must have. The bill seemed more than one person could eat, though I remembered eating alone.”
The two tourists, definitely not tourists, close now, an arm’s reach behind me, not exactly aggressive, neither about to go away.
“Any other times?” she enquired.
“We spoke on the phone in Mokpo.”
“Did we? I received a text message telling me to get on a ferry, but you weren’t there.”
“I was.”
“And on the ferry back?”
“Yes.”
“And on the train?”
“Yes — all the way.”
“You’re following me?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Not very successfully, at this moment, but that’ll probably pass.”
“As in… how do I not remember you?”
“I have a condition.”
“What manner of condition?”
“Wherever I go, people forget me.”
“You mean…”
“I mean,” I explained simply, “people forget me.”
A slow nodding, a time to think. Then, without looking away from my face, she reached into her pocket, and pulled out another mobile phone. Softly, “I recorded our dinner conversation. I have every word. I’m recording this now.”
Wind through the trees, the swastika carved into the path, symbol for lucky or auspicious object in Hinduism and Buddhism, symbol of death in Europe and the West.
I looked from Byron to the not-tourists, and back again. I said, “Close your eyes. Count to sixty.”
She hesitated, then closed her eyes. I closed mine too, felt the wind on the back of my neck, the slope of the path beneath my feet, time running by, and I didn’t need numbers, didn’t need to think, the time came and I was still.
Heard a little intake of breath, hard and scared, opened my eyes, saw Byron looking at me, her phone held knuckle-tight in her hand, hair ruffled by the breeze, mouth open, eyes tight.
Silence a while. Byron nodded with her chin, and one of the tourists took my rucksack from my back, and I didn’t fight her. She riffled through its contents, checked my phone, found nothing, patted me down, thorough, hands down my arms, my chest, my legs, feeling round my ankles, nothing of interest, looked through my wallet, passport, ticket stub from the train. No weapons were produced, but we were four strangers on a path through the woods, and I didn’t know what the tourists carried beneath their bright blue anoraks.