1
“Why do I not commit suicide?”
An unusual question appeared on the final exam for Logic. Professor An Ju-hee, who had tormented the philosophy freshmen all semester with truth functions, inductive reasoning, singular quantifiers and universal quantifiers, wrote only that one question on the blackboard and put down the chalk. The students’ empty sighs and sighs of relief mixed together. Someone might have raised a hand and asked what logic had to do with suicide, but no one did. After glancing at one another, the students lowered their heads one by one and began writing their answers. A little while later, the professor quietly left the classroom.
When Professor An Ju-hee returned an hour later, I was the only one left in the room. She began reading the answer sheets the students had turned in. A smile spread across her lips. Outside the classroom, the history students were making a bit of noise. A few even opened the door, thinking the room was empty. The professor gathered the answer sheets and the attendance book from the lectern and said,
“Kim Shin. Time is up.”
I got up and handed in my answer sheet. The professor took it and looked at me gently.
“Philosophy is your minor, isn’t it? You said you were in French literature?”
Students who chose philosophy as a minor were rare. Perhaps because of that, the philosophy professors knew most of their faces. They also seemed to like the seriousness of minor students who had started philosophy late, more than that of students who had entered the department only because their scores had pushed them there.
“Yes.”
“Logic is a required course for majors, so turning in a blank answer sheet could become a problem.”
“Time will take care of it.”
The professor looked surprised.
“If you were going to turn in a blank sheet, why did you stay in the classroom by yourself?”
“I thought the answer sheets the other students had submitted shouldn’t get lost. If even I left, the history students in the hallway might come into the room and read them.”
“Do you have any exams left?”
“No. Logic is my last one.”
The classroom door opened, and a student who looked like the class representative politely asked us to vacate the room.
“Shall we go to my office for a moment?”
I glanced at my wristwatch.
“I don’t have much time.”
“Would enough time for a cup of tea be all right?”
“Yes. That much would be…”
We left the classroom and headed toward the faculty building. I walked slowly, a couple of steps behind Professor An Ju-hee. She stopped and waited for me to come up beside her. For a little while we walked side by side, but soon the distance opened again. I regretted not having made up an excuse about another appointment, and shortened my stride.
“Do you have any special plans for winter break?”
The professor said this as she handed me a mug.
“Shouldn’t I study logic again? If I fail again next year, my minor won’t be recognized.”
“You don’t have to worry about failing. It wasn’t a question with a right answer anyway. But why didn’t you write anything?”
“I thought no one had the right to know why I do not commit suicide. That is private.”
“I suppose I should apologize. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to.”
The professor rummaged through a drawer, looking for something.
“Would you like a cigarette?”
I held out my pack.
“Thank you. You may smoke if you want.”
I did not smoke. The professor opened the window a little. After finishing her cigarette, she took a book from the shelves and handed it to me.
“Would you like to read it?”
It was Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.
As I took the book, I unconsciously stole a glance at my wristwatch.
“Did you say you had an appointment?”
“No. It’s not that I have an appointment… Earlier, I only said I didn’t have much time because I thought you might give me an oral exam.”
When the professor smiled, I found myself smiling too.
“You have the kind of personality that doesn’t lie.”
She put a CD into the stereo. Perhaps because of the music, the awkwardness eased.
“Why did you put that kind of question on a logic exam?”
“It’s a question philosophy freshmen should think about at least once. Wittgenstein is a representative logician who lived an illogical life. He was the heir to a wealthy family, but gave up his inheritance and taught children in a rural school. Can his life be explained with logical symbols? Whether some proposition is true or false is wordplay. The world isn’t the sort of place that can be determined by truth and falsity, is it?”
“I prefer Monk to Miles.”
I pointed at the cover of Miles’s Prestige album with the traffic light on it.
“Maybe because I’m a logician, I prefer something clear like Miles to music that is mysterious and foggy like Monk.”
The professor smoked another cigarette. The world around us was slowly getting dark.
“By the way, why did you choose philosophy as a minor when it doesn’t help you get a job?”
“Wouldn’t it help, rather? Philosophy is like music or painting. You can live without it, but once you come to know it, a different kind of world opens up.”
The professor looked at me with a warm smile. There was a knock, and a graduate assistant came into the room. I told the professor I should be going.
“I’ll be in my office every day during the break. If you come to campus, will you stop by from time to time?”
The assistant was staring at me. I hesitated for a moment.
“Yes. If I come to campus, I’ll come say hello.”
2
Winter. It rained more than it snowed. Blurred, blackish days continued. I studied at the university library every day, but I did not stop by Professor An Ju-hee’s office.
“I like you because you seem like an orphan.”
When Yeon-su said this in the classical music club room, I did not understand what she meant. I think I simply took it to mean that I looked lonely and desolate. Yeon-su was a philosophy student. Because of the stigma of having taken the entrance exam three times and because of her introverted personality, she had very few close people around her. She told me, a returning French literature student, small notices from the philosophy department. And sometimes, when I was eating alone in the humanities cafeteria, she would quietly put a glass of water beside me and disappear. She enjoyed listening to Mozart and Chopin, and when I was alone in the club room I listened to Mahler’s songs.
“An orphan? Everyone becomes an orphan someday. A person who never becomes an orphan commits the greatest unfilial act. Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies, grandson dies. That is the basis of filial order.”
At my words, Yeon-su gave a small laugh. When Mozart’s piano concerto ended, she said she had to go to her part-time job and left the club room. A little while later, some freshmen opened the club room door, each holding a CD in one hand. They hesitated, unsure whether to come in or not. I left the room.
The rain that had fallen steadily since morning turned to snow toward evening, and the bitter wind froze the road. What was I thinking? I turned my steps toward the faculty building. Before I knew it, I was knocking on the door of Professor An Ju-hee’s office. There was no sign of anyone inside. After pulling hard once on my own ear, I walked toward the elevator. Just then the office door opened, and I heard Professor An Ju-hee’s voice.
“Kim Shin?”
When I turned my head, she said, “Who knocks only once? That isn’t polite.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I might be bothering you for no reason.”
That mock-prim look of hers soon brightened.
“It’s all right. Come in. Have a warm cup of tea before you go.”
The office was thick with cigarette smoke.
“I really have to quit these damned cigarettes.”
The professor opened the window a little.
“Coffee? Or…”
“Coffee would be good.”
I took a CD from my bag and handed it to her. She looked a little surprised.
“I thought this was the clearest of Monk’s albums.”
“All right. Thank you. Shall we listen to it now?”
“No. It will be better when you’re alone. Maybe because it’s a story about Monk himself, it doesn’t taste right when several people listen to it together. When I listen to Monk, the world becomes quiet.”
“Is that so? Then I’ll listen to it when I’m alone. But you seem to know a lot about jazz.”
“It just happened that way. When I was in the army, my mother and older brother died in a car accident, and my brother loved jazz. I decided to keep the LPs and CDs among his things. So naturally I came to listen to them.”
“I brought up something unnecessary. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all in the past. Maybe time eats up emotions too. Now I feel numb about it.”
The professor took out her cigarette pack. We smoked together.
“There was another philosophy freshman who turned in a blank answer sheet.”
“Lee Yeon-su?”
“Oh. How did you know?”
“I didn’t think there was any other freshman who would do that.”
“Your girlfriend, perhaps? I should have failed Lee Yeon-su.”
The professor laughed with a playful look.
“It isn’t anything serious. Maybe because I’m in French literature, she takes care of this and that for me.”
“I imagine you’re popular with the female juniors.”
I glanced at my wristwatch.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I picked up the habit of checking my watch in the army, and it doesn’t go away. A few days ago I read one of Wittgenstein’s books.”
“Which one?”
“The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.”
“A troublesome book.”
“I was drawn to the parts about limits. The limits of language, the limits of the world, the limits of cognition. And the limits of life. I thought suicide, in the end, was also a problem of limits.”
A smile spread across the professor’s lips. Then she took up her desk calendar, checked her schedule, and said,
“Shall we have dinner together tonight? If you don’t have any special plans.”
Instead of having dinner, we drank beer and had light snacks, with philosophers as our side dishes. It began with Wittgenstein. When she talked about the Dictionary for Elementary School Students he had written based on his experience as a teacher, Professor An Ju-hee looked a little excited. She said the dictionary was not arranged alphabetically, but organized around words of the same kind, adding their derivatives, and that the structure was very Wittgenstein-like. But when she spoke of how he had eventually been forced to leave teaching because of an incident in which he struck a student’s palm, she let out a long sigh. The conversation then naturally moved on to Klimt. By the time we were talking about Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, I was a little drunk. After that, I do not remember very well what we talked about. I only vaguely remember that the professor was speaking of the husband she had married during her studies abroad in the past tense.
The road, covered with a thin skin of ice, was very slippery.
“Where do you live?”
“Five minutes on foot.”
“I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s all right. Shin, you should go home too.”
Because of the ice, the professor briefly lost her balance. I took her hand as she was about to fall.
“It’s all right. I’ll go by myself.”
The professor closed the right hand I was holding. Then she gently slipped her fist out of my hand.
“You’ll come to my office again, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
I kept watching until she had completely disappeared from view, worried that she might fall.
After drinking beer with Professor An Ju-hee, I began visiting her office once or twice a week. Sometimes she bought me lunch at the faculty cafeteria, and sometimes we talked about books she had lent me.
“I think I should have majored in metaphysics. When I was a student, I thought ontology was just talk in the clouds, so it didn’t interest me. But the more I study, the more I think I understand why Aristotle called it first philosophy.”
I smiled.
“Oh? Why?”
My face flushed, and I could not answer.
3
“Do you want to go see the sea tomorrow? The winter sea.”
Yeon-su said this cautiously in the club room on the day she finished her part-time job.
“The sea?”
“You don’t want to?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then it’s settled. I already bought two tickets yesterday. Gangneung is closer, but I still want to go to Sokcho. Sokcho has mountains, and a lake, and the sea.”
Recently Yeon-su had begun putting on clumsy makeup. Perhaps because of that, she looked more alive than when her face was bare.
“It will take five hours by express bus.”
“I already told my family I’m going on a club retreat.”
Yeon-su’s pink cheeks flushed red.
After Yeon-su left the club room for her last part-time shift, I went to Professor An Ju-hee’s office. The door was locked. I was about to leave a note in her mailbox on the first floor, saying I did not think I could keep our appointment tomorrow, when the professor entered the lobby of the faculty building.
“Shin is here. What are you doing down here? Let’s go up to my office.”
The professor took off her coat and hung it on the rack. Then she made coffee and emptied the ashtray.
“I wanted to ask if we could move tomorrow’s movie to next week.”
“Something urgent came up?”
“A friend suddenly asked me to go to Sokcho tomorrow. She even reserved the tickets without asking me, so I don’t think it’ll be easy to change the date. I’m sorry.”
“Yeon-su?”
The professor said this with a bright smile.
“You said it wasn’t serious, but now it looks like it might become serious.”
“It’s not that. I also wanted to see the winter sea.”
After returning from the trip to Sokcho with Yeon-su, I went to see the movie I had promised to see with Professor An Ju-hee. As we left the theater after the film ended, neither of us said anything. It was a film that made one side of my chest ache with cold sadness. For some reason, I felt uncomfortable looking straight at Professor An Ju-hee’s face. She must have felt awkward too, because she did not bring up the movie until we had coffee at a café and parted. That night Yeon-su called my house. She was not usually talkative, but that night she went on about small, trivial things in a strangely detailed way. Then, for a while, only her breathing came through the receiver.
“You went to see Damage today, didn’t you? Was it good?”
Yeon-su’s voice was trembling.
“It was a sad movie.”
“I’m going to see it with friends tomorrow.”
Only Yeon-su’s small breathing could be heard through the receiver. Suddenly, I felt boundless affection for her. It was as if an uncontrollable feeling of love were being tattooed deep inside my chest.
“Wait. I’ll come now.”
We made love that night. Yeon-su never once brought up Professor An Ju-hee. Even now, I do not know whether that was because she trusted me, or because of her pride. No useless rumor caused by Damage went around.
Along with the tuition bill for the new semester, a notice arrived at my house saying that I had been selected for a merit scholarship. Because of Logic, I had not expected a scholarship, but my grades in my major courses were unexpectedly good. Around that time, my visits to Professor An Ju-hee’s office also grew less frequent. We were both busy, and once the new semester began, her office was always crowded with philosophy students. So naturally we came to keep some distance. Besides, I gave up my philosophy minor. Instead, I took courses in physics and biology, and learned elementary Latin. In the evenings, I took conversation classes at the French Cultural Center. Time flowed indifferently.
When final exams ended and summer break began, I heard from Professor An Ju-hee. She said she had resigned from the university at the end of the semester. She was leaving for Boston at the end of July, and wanted to see me once before then.
“I’m sorry. The house is a mess because of the moving boxes.”
When twenty minutes had passed after our appointment time and she had still not come out, I called her. She said she could not leave because she was waiting for an important phone call. Instead, she asked me to come to her place for a little while. We were exchanging news about each other when the phone rang. The professor began speaking in English. Then she made a gesture asking my pardon and went into a room. The call continued for quite a long time. I looked around the living room. The only appliance was a small stereo. There were many CDs. Thelonious Himself, the album I had given her the previous winter, was sitting on top of the stereo. There were no decorations on the walls. No family photograph, no ordinary painting. Judging by the absence of nail marks in the wall, it did not seem to be because of the move. The books were inside thick cardboard boxes, but the boxes had not yet been sealed with tape. There were more than thirty of them.
This time too, we drank beer instead of having a meal. Wittgenstein did not appear. I told her I had given up the philosophy minor. I also told her I had taken physics and Latin courses for a semester. We talked about the scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where the students are scolded for not knowing the Latin declension of mare. Beyond the pub window, a fine rain began to fall. I did not ask why she was resigning and leaving for America. I only realized that the paperwork with the husband from whom she had long been separated had been settled. The man who had existed only in the past tense seemed to have briefly leapt into the present, then been buried again in the past tense, becoming someone who would no longer exist in the future. The professor looked solitary. Not lonely, not merely desolate, but solitary. I felt that an old solitude, sunk deep into her bones, was lodged throughout her body. The raindrops grew heavier. The wind also began to blow hard. While we waited for the rain to thin out, we drank a few more glasses of beer, and the alcohol rose in us. As the time approached when the subway would stop running, we had no choice but to get up. The professor had no umbrella. She was wearing jeans and sandals and said she would run home, but the rain was falling too hard for that. I opened my folding umbrella and walked her home. It was only a five-minute walk, but we were soaked through. Every time we took a step, I felt the small curve of her rain-soaked breast against my right arm. The subway and buses had stopped running. Because of the downpour, I could not catch a taxi either. Hiding myself under the small folding umbrella, I walked and walked endlessly, thinking of that small curve of her breast against my right arm. It was a quiet night.
4
After graduation, I got a job at an affiliate of a large corporation. I was promoted a little faster than the other people who had joined the company with me, and the stress was just as great. When I felt I had settled into my position at work, I naturally married Yeon-su. Yeon-su wanted a child. I refused. I secretly marked her menstrual cycle in my diary, and during her ovulation period I even avoided drinking gatherings. If I had no choice but to attend a company dinner, I slept alone in the small room. My father-in-law said we should stop loving only each other like a pair of doves and now make a real family, but he did not force us. Yeon-su’s family found me, a man of few words, difficult, and I was comfortable with that. My father never remarried and died in the end. His old age, after losing his beloved wife and eldest son in a single car accident, was lonely.
“I like you because you seem like an orphan.”
I now understand the meaning of what Yeon-su said in the classical music club room. Nothing surrounding me bound her. Even before I met Yeon-su, I had been emotionally orphaned. We did not bind each other. As long as we did not cross the line, we lived our own lives independently. Sometimes Yeon-su’s hair smelled of men’s aftershave, but I pretended not to know. I did not want to disturb our comfort and peace with useless fantasies. Yeon-su must have thought the same way, because she paid no attention to lipstick marks on the collar of my dress shirts. She worked as an editor at a publishing house and made several bestsellers. When a marketing book she had edited was designated required reading at my company, I congratulated her, but I did not read the book. She too seemed to regard the bestsellers she had handled as nothing much. Yeon-su received job offers from several major publishers, but turned them down each time. She became the youngest team leader at the publishing house, and not long afterward was promoted to editor-in-chief. One day, when Yeon-su said she was going to have a sterilization procedure, I did not try to stop her. I no longer needed to mark her menstrual cycle in my diary. An apartment not too small for two people, two cars, and an audio system that did not discriminate between classical music and jazz. Yeon-su and I walked along the road set out for us in that way. Wittgenstein and Camus slowly faded from my memory as people whose names had not been spoken once in over ten years. I could read the name of the French cosmetics Yeon-su used, BEAU-TEMPS, as beau temps, but what it meant did not readily come to mind. At the company, French was a dead language, like Latin. Questions such as “Why do I not commit suicide?” had no room to enter our lives. As Professor An Ju-hee had said, there was a time for such philosophical anguish. The world had settled into a murky dark gray, and nothing could be explained by logic.
My friendship with Professor An Ju-hee continued by email. She said she was teaching logic and philosophy of language at a university in Boston. Not long afterward, I heard that she had been appointed full professor. A few years ago, when I went to New York on a business trip, I tried to meet her. From New York to Boston was a stone’s throw. But at that time she was in Seattle. I tried everything I could to extend my business trip by a few days, but it was no use. On the flight back to Seoul, I tossed and turned without rest. When I arrived at Incheon Airport, I did not go straight home. I called Yeon-su into the city, had a fine dinner with her at a hotel, and made fierce love to her. For a while, contact with Professor An Ju-hee was cut off. I sent emails, but she did not reply; she did not even open them. I tried calling, but she did not answer. I thought she must be absorbed in some other important work, or perhaps had fallen in love with a wonderful man, and I waited until she contacted me first.
“I’m here in Busan.”
The voice on the other end of the phone trembled a little, but it was clearly Professor An Ju-hee.
“Yes.”
“Shin is still a man of few words.”
“Professor, are you well?”
I picked up my desk calendar and checked my schedule first. Yeon-su had left for New York on a business trip the day before and was not in Seoul.
“Of course. I’ve been teaching here since this fall semester. I’m late in getting in touch, aren’t I? I’m sorry.”
My throat closed with longing, and I could not say anything.
“I’d like to see Shin once…”
“Professor, I can see you this Saturday. I’ll call you when I arrive in Busan.”
We asked after each other once more and hung up. I left the office, abandoning the work that had piled up. And I walked and walked through the darkening streets until the streetlights came on.
5
“You haven’t changed at all, Shin.”
On Saturday morning, after taking half the clothes from my closet and putting them on and taking them off, I finally wore jeans, a slightly pink shirt, and a light jacket. When she saw me, the professor said this in surprise.
“You don’t have any belly at all. I’d believe it if someone said you were a college student. Now I’m jealous.”
For a moment she made that mock-prim expression of hers, then smiled brightly.
“You haven’t changed either, Professor.”
Professor An Ju-hee was beautiful, just as she had been long ago. Her open eyes, her warm smile, and her moderately thin body. And perhaps because of her gray-streaked hair, she gave off an even more intellectual charm. My chest swelled. Whether because the longing I could not bear had exploded, or because I was relieved to confirm that she was all right, I wrapped both arms tightly around her. She did not refuse, and held me too.
“I didn’t know Shin had this side to him.”
The professor said this as we left Busan Station. I answered by scratching my head.
Sitting by a window that looked out on the sea, we breathed life back into faded memories. Then the events of the past unfolded as clearly as if they had happened yesterday.
“Why did you give me a B back then? Do you know I nearly missed my scholarship?”
“Wasn’t it a C? A B was more than enough for a bad student who turned in a blank answer sheet. There were a few students who wrote serious answers. I probably gave those students A’s and the rest B’s.”
“I guess it wasn’t graded on a curve then.”
“Was it? I don’t remember that very well. But one parent protested fiercely, saying I was encouraging students to commit suicide. I had a hard time because of that. Since it was just before the new semester started, I don’t think it was about grades.”
“I wasn’t in the philosophy department, so I didn’t know that had happened. I’d given up the philosophy minor too, so I had no chance to meet philosophy students.”
“I think it was good that it happened then. At the time, I wasn’t ready to teach anyone. I thought maybe it was for the best.”
“Did you resign because of that?”
“No, not because of that. I wanted to study more. And luckily, a university in Boston was looking for someone like me. Family matters had been settled by then too. You know, don’t you?”
The professor spoke calmly, as if she were talking about someone else’s affairs.
“I noticed because you always spoke of him in the past tense.”
“Really? You have a good eye. To think you noticed all that.”
We talked on and on, losing track of time. She was pleased that I had become more talkative. I joked that perhaps it was because my male hormones had decreased. She made that mock-prim look of hers, then let a smile settle around her lips. For dinner, we moved to a raw fish restaurant with a view of the sea. Beyond the wide window, autumn rain began to fall steadily.
We spoke openly about the paths our lives had taken, fitting our times together. She was still single, and still studying in order to broaden her horizon as a philosopher. She said that although she taught philosophy to students at the university, she no longer asked questions such as “Why do I not commit suicide?” And she said that the year before, that is, during the period when we had lost touch for a while, she had undergone surgery for breast cancer. Looking back now, food that did not suit her, an irregular life, and a solitude worse than either had slowly eaten away at her health.
“Will you come up to Seoul?”
“I don’t know. It’s my first time in Busan, and I like that it has the sea.”
“There is still something of a girl in you.”
“A girl?”
The corners of her mouth lifted gently toward her ears, and a red glow rose in her cheeks. No longer drinking alcohol, the professor filled her glass with water and toasted me every time I raised my drink. It felt like making a new old friend. I was comfortable, but my heart stirred.
“I’ll walk you home.”
She quietly nodded.
“You live close to the sea.”
I said this when the taxi stopped at the entrance to her apartment complex. If it had not been raining, we would not have needed to take a taxi. I opened my folding umbrella.
“Could you hold the umbrella with your left hand?”
I moved the umbrella to my left hand. Then she stood on my left. Sharing the umbrella, we slowly walked into the complex toward her apartment. Every time we took a step, I felt the small curve of her breast brush against my left arm.
“May I contact you again?”
“Of course. Anytime.”
She did not invite me inside. Thinking of the small curve of her breast brushing against my left arm, I walked toward Haeundae Beach. The waves were calm.
Sometimes I created business trips to Busan. I exercised my authority within the bounds of not abusing my position. The employees at the Busan branch were tense each time the head of the audit department from headquarters came down. On Saturdays, I spent time with Professor An Ju-hee. We often walked along the beach together, and each time I usually had to listen to one of her philosophy lectures. She said she preferred the late Wittgenstein, who had simply told us to leave things to nature, to the young Wittgenstein who had said we must remain silent about what cannot be spoken of. When she said this, she looked at ease. She was curious about my daily life too, but I avoided talking as much as possible about my dull and tedious company life. And when Yeon-su came up, I quietly turned the conversation elsewhere. Since I had not crossed the line I had to keep, I did not tell Yeon-su about my friendship with the professor. But our friendship did not last long. Less than two years after settling in Busan, Professor An Ju-hee’s cancer returned, and she came to the end of her short life.
When death was near, I held the professor’s hand for the first time. When I wrapped her right hand in both of mine, she smiled gently and interlaced her fingers with my left hand.
— End —