45th Translation Awards Grand Prize: 'On Slowness'
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Kim Soom’s “On Slowness” is included in her collection of short stories “The Fighting Dog”
Written by Kim Soom
The following is an excerpt from the translation by Kim Jin-ah and Seth Chandler.
Every night I managed to find an excuse to go into my older brother’s room. I said that I had come for a radio that I would not listen to or a novel that he had already read as I knocked on his closed door. He was lying down in the dark room with the fluorescent light turned off. Sometimes he cried out sharply, 'What?' as if he felt that his peace of mind, the serenity in which he lay pondering something, was interrupted by my sudden appearance. As I looked for the radio or the book and, having found it, finally left the room, he stayed just as he had been, still and silent. But each night I knocked at his door, and sometimes I would even just sneak up and open the door to look in.
Translator Kim Jin-ah
Translator Seth Chandler
What could he have been doing in that dark room?
That was what I had started wondering by the time I reached the sixth grade of elementary school. Once in a while, fiddling around with the books on his shelf―One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Castle, The Stranger―I asked, ‘Oppa, guess what I’m looking for.’ On every occasion he responded bluntly, as if irritated, ‘I don’t know,’ and then said, ‘Get what you came for and go.’
The thing that I was in his room looking for, it was his eyes. The eyes through which he stared at the hole punched in the ceiling as he lay in his dim room with the light off, those eyes, and every night, unable to hold back my curiosity toward his eyes, I wound up in his room.
“Oppa, Father’s home.”
Only once our father had returned home did Brother open his door quietly and, phantom-like, drag his sluggish feet out, a scene that Father disapproved of.
“Why does such a young boy…”
At home Brother shut himself in his room. Mother said he did it because he was preoccupied with looking up at the night sky through the opening he had created in the ceiling. At night Mother also used to go into his room, like I did. Dragging her lame leg behind her, she brought him a cup of milk or a plate of fruit she had peeled and left it behind on the dim floor. Brother was never interested in eating anything at all. On many occasions he didn't even unpack his lunch box and brought it back home untouched. But he always ate the snacks that Mother brought without a word to his room. I often saw the look of relief on her face early the next morning as she carried the empty plates out of his room after he had left for school.
Author Kim Soom
MOTHER’S limp.
While my steps toward Brother’s room were hurried, Mother’s were slow and calm. But inside that calmness dwelled a far-off sense of doom, like a crumbling tomb of sand. Her disabled leg was not the only reason that her steps were slow and calm. The year she turned twenty she got hit by a yellow taxi. After that she was afraid of anything that moved fast. Unlike the other kids' mothers, she did not hope that Brother and I would finish first in the races on sports day in elementary school. Even when Brother, who had quick feet, was chosen to run for his first-grade class and then came in first place, she made just one remark to him, in a careful tone: ‘I don’t like fast things.’ Her young son was compassionate enough to understand the words of the mother who walked with a limp in one leg. One day he left his quick feet on the playground. From then on he avoided first place in any of the races at school.
Mother did things like chopping vegetables, setting the table, and doing laundry at a much slower pace than other women. She could have gotten these things out of the way quicker after having repeated them all those years, but she never did the work in a hurry. This meant that she had less break time than other mothers. Some of them said that her slow pace probably came from her physical disability, but I was sure that wasn't the case.
With each move that Mother made there followed unfamiliarity and a carefulness that arose from it. It was as if one of the spirits that falls upon a shaman had possessed her body.
But despite that Mother worked slowly, our home was always much tidier than other homes.
When Mother passed slowly through the vendors at the market to buy groceries, dragging her lame leg behind her, people there turned to glance at her leg and talk in whispers. One day a person was wheeling a bicycle loaded up with five full boxes of groceries through the narrow market alley, and he cried out at her ‘Keep yourself in the house, you freak! Don’t get in the way!’ and honked his horn violently. In a market packed with people coming to pick up groceries for dinner, Mother got flustered like she thought her limp had caused the congestion of the entire market. I felt as if people’s disapproving gazes were turned not toward her, but me. From then on I was afraid to go there with Mother. But then, for all that happened that day, she would still go to the market as if it meant nothing to her.
Father married Mother because he was taken with her slow gait. Once, when she was twenty-two years old, Mother was about to cross the road at a crosswalk, but a taxi ― the same color as the yellow taxi which had run over twenty-year-old Mother ― was coming toward the crosswalk. Anyone with a normal pair of legs would have crossed the road, as the taxi was approaching from a safe distance, but she stood in place, waiting for it to pass. The yellow taxi, instead of passing, came to a slow stop before the crosswalk. When Mother looked in the driver’s seat, a young man motioned with the palm of his hand for her to cross. So twenty-two-year-old Mother gave him a grateful smile. But even after she had crossed over to the other side, the yellow taxi stood still in its place. Only after it was sure that she had stepped up onto the sidewalk did the taxi pass through the crosswalk. It was not until later that twenty-two-year-old Mother found out the driver was the man living next door.