suddenly leapt into the water at their owner’s urging, panting heavily, and the startled ducks made for the hill on the opposite side of the lake. With no movement other than to open her eyes, the woman observed this brief disturbance. Though she must have felt Yang’s watching her and her partner, her glance did not stray in his direction.
Just then it started to seem to Yang that he had met them both somewhere before. At first, the thought was like something in a dream, imagination and expectation tangled up and dim as the ground seen from a great height, but it gradually became invaded by echoing doubts, which might very well be facts. If Yang was not mistaken, they were that tall, odd couple who had been at the birthday party of the person living in the attic room that winter, who had stood there quietly side by side, practically glued to the wall, joined hands and did a little polka once the music started up, then gone home at the stroke of midnight, without at any point having spoken a single word to anyone else there. Since it was uncommon to encounter people as tall as they, Yang slowly became convinced that he was correct. At the party they had both been wearing sweaters; the woman with a sleeveless jacket on over hers, plus black stockings and a gray, pleated knee-length skirt. None of the other guests had seemed to know who they were, and were presumably none the wiser once the party had ended, but as Yang had been standing close by when they’d exchanged greetings with the host he knew that the woman worked as an assistant librarian and the man was a college student. Just then it had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow of the year. The flat where the party was being held was on the top floor; the door to the veranda had been left open for the smokers, and the night was peering in through it, a night formed from keen rays of darkness, and within that only a chiaroscuro of what was dark and still more so; the lofty cityscape, comprised of the silhouettes of chimneys and rooftops, which were completely different entities at night than they were during the day, was casting a sharp eye over the room’s interior. The rooftops, sloping at somber and beautiful angles, recalled iron warships floating mute in the sea of night, made with great toil but that were, having weathered a hundred years, desperately old. Yang loved the shadows of such rooftops on winter nights, and since whenever he encountered something he really liked there would stir in him a vague terror proportionate to the delight, intangible yet burdened with physical sensation, though in fact any experience of unbearable beauty will bring with it a measure of terror—in this case, the experience being the room full of people and the veranda that looked out over the rooftop nightscape—he had to be careful to make his body as inconspicuous as possible and not shock others with the pallor of his fear. That winter, the man had said he had to leave the party because he was working part-time clearing the snow from around the university office. Yes, that was it. Yang’s memory began to revive from the dust of tangled unconsciousness, curling into animation gradual as a snail. Before the couple left, the woman got a book out of her bag. Yang could see it without moving from his place in the shadows, pressed up against the wall in the corner of the room. Not that he had stationed himself there in order to observe them; the two of them had simply happened to position themselves right between Yang and the open veranda door. Just then, Yang shuddered at the caustic sound of a hard, pointed talon scraping the metal handle of the apartment’s front door. The sound grew louder as the music did, and disappeared when it died down. Though Yang surreptitiously opened the door several times to investigate whether some kind of wild beast was struggling to get inside, each time he opened the door to nothing but the stale smell of the old corridor, the saturated air raising goose bumps on Yang’s face like being licked by a huge tongue.
The woman’s book was from the library where she worked and had a classification code stuck to its spine. The blue stamp of the library’s name was visible on the first page as she flicked through the yellowish pages. At the time, Yang couldn’t see the book’s title. It was clear that the couple were both extremely shy, unable to enjoy parties. They wore passive smiles that melted inconspicuously into those around them, and made an effort not to exclude anyone from their gaze, without actually staring at them. Yang furtively rubbed his finger, sticky from the sugary drink, against the wall. The scraping sound startled him, loud as a scream. Equally loud was the rumble then produced by his stomach, sloshing with drink; fearing stares, Yang tried not to attract attention as he rummaged through the host’s son’s toy box, hoping to find something that would muffle the sound yet seem like merely an amusing distraction, a pair of castanets maybe, but all he found was a yellow rubber duck that made a squeaking sound when squeezed, and a toy arrow. As time passed and the night deepened, Yang grew gradually more uneasy, seized by an ever-more inexplicable terror; whirled about by such emotions, oppressed by the scenery that lay before him, of the veranda and the snow-covered rooftops, their existence seemingly visible only to himself, and in order to slip still further into the antinomic pleasure of his heart smarting and melting as though pierced by the toy arrow, Yang did not stop deliberately pushing himself further into the center of the unease. Even as he did so, he worried that his secret enjoyment would be unwittingly brought to an end by someone closing the veranda door, cutting him off from the sight of the rooftops, but luckily no one did. The woman gave the book to the host, who thanked her. The couple put on their hats and coats. They kissed the host on the cheek and said their goodbyes. They left, closing the door behind them as quietly as possible. Yang was shaking, but kept his gaze fixed on the veranda. After he’d calmed down a little he stepped out onto it, under the pretext of smoking a cigarette. The snow was piling up in the streets, and the shadows of the couple, seen from Yang’s vantage point, were startlingly tall.
Later, the person who had invited Yang to the party asked him to return a library book for him, which he’d borrowed a short while before unexpectedly having to move house. He added that, though the initial due date had already passed, it wouldn’t be a problem since he’d renewed the book twice for one-month extensions, but if there was some miscommunication and Yang did in fact end up having to pay a late fee, he would of course be reimbursed. The friend’s need to move in a hurry made it difficult to find time for such errands, so Yang decided to do him this favor. There was no reason to refuse; the library was on his way to work, and returning the book wouldn’t take much time. He went there a few days later. He’d been on night duty at the hotel, working at the front desk until the early hours and the gradual arrival of morning. When he got to the library he discovered that it wouldn’t be open for another half hour. Coming back the next day would be easy, but he might forget, or the library’s opening hours might be different, and if they didn’t coincide with the time that he left work—since, for the hotel’s temporary employees, these weren’t fixed but depended on the circumstances—he might end up returning home only to have to head out again later, so he decided that it would be best just to wait, and get something to eat at a cafe nearby. There was no cafe serving breakfast in the immediate vicinity, but he was hungry, and in any case it was far too cold to wait out in front of the library. But the sparsely populated cafe he did find was barely any warmer than it was outside; the stingy owner must not have the heat on. After ordering toast and coffee, Yang got out the book and looked inside—the first time he’d opened it—finding there the blue stamp with the library’s name, but neither this nor its title stirred any memories in him, as by then he had entirely forgotten the couple at the party. Yang read the first few pages while buttering his toast, drank his coffee, then opened the book again around the middle and read some passage or other, rummaged in his bag for his pen and notebook and continued reading, jotting down a few passages as he did. It wasn’t that these had made any especial impression on him, simply that he liked to collect sentences this way, and tended to note down whatever caught his attention, as long as he had the tools on hand. Lacking a similar fondness for organized filing, however, meant that the quotes thus amassed were stored in a slapdash manner. Since the notebooks and loose paper where he wrote down random sentences were not kept specially for this purpose, and since, moreover, they were themselves not collected in one place but rather scattered here and there, he almost never looked at them twice, and in the majority of cases just discarded them for no reason whatsoever. Now and then he would stumble across them among his belongings, sentences he himself had written down, but which by this time he had entirely forgotten ever having read, never mind what they meant or which book they’d come from. Rather than lodging in his mind or being engraved upon it, these sentences were fated to be forgotten from the very moment he recorded them, and though the business of collecting them, being purely habitual, did not go beyond simple,
