The Impossible Fairy Tale Read online

  The Impossible Fairy Tale

  The Impossible Fairy Tale

  A Novel

  HAN YUJOO

  Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong

  Graywolf Press

  Originally published in Korean by

  Copyright © 2013 by Han Yujoo

  English translation © 2017 by Janet Hong

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Quotations from Maurice Blanchot are taken from Lydia Davis’s translation of Death Sentence (Station Hill Press, 1998).

  A portion of chapter 3 first appeared in Two Lines.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  The Impossible Fairy Tale is published under the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). The translation was undertaken with the support of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and a PEN Samples grant.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-766-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-960-7

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938176

  Cover design: Kapo Ng

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  Each of us carries the mark of all that has ever been written.

  — Botho Strauss, “Scribbles”

  Contents

  I

  II

  Afterword

  The Impossible Fairy Tale

  I

  1

  Dog.

  See the dog.

  See the dog drifting by.

  2

  See the dog, swimming, following the current of the river.

  Perhaps the dog is doing nothing more than being swept down the river, but it looks as though it’s swimming, as though it’s following the current, heading toward the dam where two rivers meet. No, it looks as though it’s being swept down the river. Since the dog cannot speak, no one knows how it ended up drifting in the current, and even if it were able to speak, bark, or cry, the noise would get swallowed up by the water, and silently, it would be washed away with the dog. The dog is black and large, but because its soaking wet hair is as black as black can be and its large body is mostly submerged, its blackness and largeness aren’t immediately apparent. The dog is submerged in water, the water is moving, the dog is moving, and so the river is moving. The dog’s name, the dog’s age, the dog’s sex, the dog’s breed, and even the dog’s language are unknown. The dog that is far, right now so far away, even if it had a language, even if it were a dog’s language, there is no truth that can be known about the dog. It’s a dog, just a dog. A dog that happens to be swimming.

  The dog is swimming wordlessly.

  All of a sudden shouts ring out from the riverbank where frost has yet to form. Three or four people are gathered there, shouting at the dog. Video cameras. Microphones. Reeds. Wind. Summer. Four in the afternoon. And a point just past that. No one knows why the cameras are there. A small, run-down boat moored across the river looks as though it’s adrift. Before the dog is carried to the dam, before it’s cast away, before the water meets the barrier, it must be scooped out. If it were winter right now, if there were a cold snap and the harsh days continued until the air froze, until the whole river froze, then the dog could simply slide across the top of the thick ice. No, if it were a dry season instead, if the dry days continued until the sand became dust, until the river dried up, until the bottom of the river creased and cracked like wrinkled lips, then the dog could simply walk across the bottom of the river, on its four legs, without leaving any paw prints behind.

  The dog moves on.

  The dog isn’t interested in crossing the river, or it looks as though it’s not, since it’s not fighting the current and just continues downriver. On and on it goes, front paws, back paws side by side, paws crisscrossing, on and onward. Someone shouts its name, but it seems unreasonable to the dog to call its name in a language not its own, and so it doesn’t respond, it doesn’t look back, but stares straight ahead—no, somewhere a bit higher than that—and keeps swimming, with its head pointing above the surface of the water at a thirty-degree angle. The dog is swimming calmly, but who can know how calm it really is? The people standing on the riverbank begin to walk in the direction the dog is heading. Quickly or slowly. Only if the dog could walk on water, only if it could run on water … While someone shouts again, while someone anxiously calls its name again, while its name is on everyone’s lips, it acts as though it can’t hear anything, or it pretends it can’t, and with the bottom half of its drooping ears submerged in water, it moves on and on, westward and westward. The dog that is just a dog will sink before it sinks. It’s a strange way to put it, but there’s no other suitable expression. When its blackness and largeness are no longer in anyone’s sight, it will disappear. The dog and the river, the river and the dog.

  The dog must cross the river. There are cameras waiting to record that moment—the moment it crosses from that side of the river to this side—and there are people standing safely among the reeds, not entrusting their bodies to the current, who are hoping, no, who had hoped it would cross the river. The reason someone was able to become the dog’s owner was because he or she had given it a name, and as a result, he or she had told it to cross the river, or perhaps had commanded it to cross the river, and after fastening a metal collar around its neck, had pushed it into the water. Perhaps the weight of the collar will cause the dog to sink to the bottom of the river. Therefore the cameras standing by across the river will also have to sink. Therefore the dog’s name and the dog’s language will also sink. The spot where the dog should have landed has already disappeared from the dog’s sight and is disappearing from everyone’s sight. No one knows why the dog doesn’t cross the river, why it doesn’t cut across or sail across, or how it has come to drift with the current. The dog isn’t crossing the river and the dog isn’t swimming. The dog is drifting by.

  See the dog drifting by.

  The dog is there.

  The dog is not there.

  3

  The child is lucky.

  Before we talk about her good luck, because several other children will soon be entering the scene, we need to address the matter of her name. The child’s name is Mia. It could be Min-a, Mi-na, or Min-ha, or it could be A-mi, Yu-mi, or Yun-mi, but since she thinks of herself as Mia, let’s just call her Mia.

  Mia is lucky. One day, she receives a set of seventy-two German watercolor pencils from one of the two men who consider her to be their daughter. Mia has two fathers. One is not yet aware of the other’s existence, or pretends not to be, and the other is aware of the one’s existence, but chooses to turn a blind eye for some unknown reason. When a person discovers a truth that no one else knows,
every surrounding relationship will change drastically. Nevertheless, even though they both function as fathers to Mia, only one of the two had given her a set of seventy-two German watercolor pencils. Because these pencils were manufactured in Germany and were not cheap ones made in China, they satisfied her taste and interest, enabling the father who gave the gift to gain leverage over the other father. Red, fuchsia, crimson, blood red, rose, yellow, orange yellow, citron, tangerine, flesh color. And light green, emerald, forest green, grass green. With such an overwhelming array of colors spread before her, lucky Mia gains the innocent and childish confidence that she’ll be able to draw every object around her with seventy-two colors. When Mia traces the outline of an object with a gray pencil, when she is coloring the skin of an object with a blue pencil, Mia’s mother realizes that her daughter has become larger than her own shadow. Mia’s mother loves Mia, and Mia was sick often, and each time she got sick, five shades of color would appear on her face—red, yellow, violet, green, and black—and Mia’s mother made herself absent during her husband’s absence. There would be a square of chocolate and a glass of orange juice by Mia’s pillow, but not Mia’s mother. Wet with sweat, in bed with a cold, Mia would rouse herself briefly to drink the orange juice and fall asleep again under the damp blanket. When her mother would return late at night and gaze down at her sleeping daughter, because Mia is lucky, she would stir awake and ask her mother for a glass of cold water. After this sequence was repeated several times, Mia’s face would once again turn white as milk and smooth as a baby’s bottom, but when Mia’s face turned dark as water and red as fire, when she recognized vaguely that the scene she was witnessing was losing some unknowable thing, the colors of objects became unfixed and began to waver. Therefore the early morning would become dark-blue rage, the afternoon would become crimson resignation, the evening would become gray silence, and the colors would, all at once, turn dark as night. These things happen whenever Mia is sleeping, whenever she is opening her journal, whenever she is engrossed in watching television, whenever she is climbing a jungle gym, whenever she is being warned that she is too young to drink coffee, whenever she is passing a note to the student sitting in front of her. And whenever she distractedly looks away, the objects return to their original color in perfect order.

  When I grow up, I’m going to buy a fountain pen, says Mia. Do you know you can kill someone with a fountain pen? she asks. I got that from a book. If you drop the pen from high up at the right angle, the pointy tip will pierce right into the person’s head. It’s because of acceleration. It was in a detective story.

  But of course, Mia has no desire to kill anyone; in fact, she doesn’t understand the words death or kill. She is a lucky child, and she lacks the passion, let alone the opportunity, to kill someone; she doesn’t yet know that people kill even in the absence of emotions such as hatred. She doesn’t yet know that rather than trying to aim the tip of a fountain pen at someone’s skull from a tall building, it is far more effective to drive the pointed metal tip into someone’s throat, a fact she would have learned if she had read more books. But she is interested only in detective novels, and because there are more things she doesn’t know than she does know, her world is simple; and for that reason, she is lucky. Anyhow, I’m going to buy a fountain pen when I grow up, she says. I like the way it sounds. Fountain pen.

  Mia, who more or less has everything, who was always told she could have anything she wanted, thinks she could construct her world exactly the way it is with seventy-two colors, that she could fill in the shadows of already existing objects, each with its own shade, that she could erase even the shadows, that she could perhaps kill a person. If she has the power to kill, she equally has the power to save. Therefore, nothing is impossible. Mia, who has everything, or could have everything, thinks she is able to do anything. Of the two of Mia’s fathers Mia’s mother alternates between, one father is unaware of the other’s existence while the other father is aware of everyone’s existence. Mia moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. Because she doesn’t yet have a clear understanding of acceleration, she has no concept of the speed at which an incident breaks down once it takes place, no concept of the velocity at which emotions expand once they begin to swell and, ultimately, explode. She remembers seeing on television a reenactment of how space came to be; the Big Bang, that beautiful, round thing like a wreath. She tried to draw the scene with seventy-two color pencils, but no matter how many lines she drew, there were always two colors missing and she, who had no concept of the colors she lacked, proudly showed her drawing to her fathers, and perhaps even to her mother, and one father thought Mia had drawn a flower bouquet and the other thought she had drawn the entrails of a beast. While she moistens the tip of her forefinger with saliva and erases the light’s outline, the smear of colors and their shadows become submerged in darkness. Naturally.

  It’s not yet known if Mia will receive a set of 120 German-made color pencils next year, or a pair of leather shoes adorned with exquisite ribbons instead of a pair of running shoes illustrated with a cartoon character. She has two fathers, enough people to give her presents, and so the piano, silver bracelet, doll, fountain pen, wool coat, her bright, sunny room, and the large window with mold growing in its every crevice will remain hidden, overtaken by the shadows of all that she will receive. Not even the speed at which the white-blue-and-black mold is infiltrating the room will be seen, not yet. She can have everything, and because she is merely twelve years old, there is indeed time yet to have everything. She must always prepare for the future. Just like they say, she must become the main character of the next century. Because she is important to everyone, Mia’s mother may take her as a hostage in court, one of the two fathers may use Mia to gain leverage over everyone else, and the other father may want to use her as an excuse to turn an affair into a nonaffair, but, apart from these, Mia is involved in an infinite number of scenarios, and until the number of all these scenarios becomes null, she must not die or disappear.

  Soon the emotions that are being launched in Mia’s blood vessels, eyes, mouth, joints, and bones will rise and fall simultaneously, but when? How? A thirteen-year-old Mia may want, as the other girls do, to cut her hair in a bob like that of a middle school student, or to go to school in Adidas running shoes. Bobbed hair, Adidas shoes, and things like this will be given to her easily enough. While her mother pulls back Mia’s long hair in a ponytail, Mia grimaces, despite herself, and doesn’t forget to mention that she wants a new sweater—the one hanging in a store window that had caught her eye the previous afternoon; the one she saw as she passed the shopping arcade on her way home from her after-school academy; the one with five different shades of green and five different shades of blue; the one with a small deer knitted on the chest. White psoriasis blooms around Mia’s mouth while Mia’s mother, who has now pulled Mia’s hair in a tight knot, turns Mia around to place a kiss on her cheek. Mia’s mother tells Mia that it will soon be spring, that there will be no need for sweaters; and because she’s a growing girl, she won’t be able to wear it for long anyway. She pleads with her mother. Her mother says no. Mia writes in her journal: Mother tied my hair too tightly. So my head hurt. Mia says, I’m going to ask Ageosshi to buy it for me, because it might be gone ten days from now, by the time Dad comes home. The sweater that is still hanging in the window, the sweater that is much too large to be a child’s sweater, the sweater that Mia will get or will not get, will be blacked out from her memory in several weeks in any case, blacked out even if it’s not black or red or yellow. Since there is no lack of substitutes and there is more than enough to substitute for even the substitutes, Mia could have anything, as long as there is time.

  Mia pulls her left arm out of her sleeve and hides it under her pajama top. She sits at the breakfast table with the empty sleeve dangling from her still-flat chest when her mother asks, Now what are you supposed to be? Mia responds by saying, My arm disappeared. It ran away, because there’s no deer sweater.


  Toast, milk, and apples are on the table, but Mia’s fathers are not there at the head of the table. My right arm says it’s going to run away tomorrow, too, and my chest might run away the day after that, says Mia, who uses her right hand to spread jam on her toast.

  Her mother stares blankly at her daughter. Though no one had ever taught her, Mia always knew how to wheedle and whine in a reasonable manner, to a reasonable extent. While nibbling on her toast Mia says, My friend—and as she begins to plead again, Mia’s mother throws away the empty plastic bread bag and recalls the phrase phantom limb pain, forgotten until now. Her chest sometimes hurts when she thinks of Mia. And yet, there is no lack of substitutes. There are even substitutes for substitutes. Mia’s mother could have another child—it was still possible—and even if she didn’t want another child, she could have a substitute thing instead of a child, but if a substitute wasn’t possible, she could have something else, and if she could have something else, she could also lose something; and so Mia must not be allowed to want anything. The more we want, the more we lose. But she is still young, so she is more interested in the things she can have than the things she can lose.

  My friend wanted a doll so bad that she didn’t eat for two days, says Mia. You don’t see me doing something like that.

  In the end Mia gets the green-and-blue sweater with the deer, but it is unclear who buys it for her. What is certain is that she could not buy it for herself. Dad bought it for me, she says. Dad bought the sweater for me, she writes in her journal. I like it so much that I wore it to bed last night. Tuesday, March 3, 1998, the second day of school. Weather: Clear. On her desk is a neat stack of new textbooks and notebooks. Her mother wraps plastic over the cover of each textbook, still fresh with the smell of ink. Mia has two journals: one she’s been using for a year and one that’s new; one that conceals secrets and one where secrets are revealed. But she can’t conceal, reveal, cover up, or even expose her secrets. Her writing is too immature. Mia, who is wearing an adult sweater, looks even smaller and more childish than usual, and since the sweater has no pockets, she can’t hide anything—not a single hairpin, not a morsel of a secret, not a container of pencil lead. Because she hasn’t yet menstruated, grown-ups say that there is enough time for her to grow taller.