The Red Queen (28 page)

A sign outside the courtyard reads ‘Solemnity’, in large English lettering, but they hardly need its injunction. This space is silent and solemn, like an outdoor cathedral. There are long, low buildings with carved and winged eaves, where dragons march along the rooftops. There are doors in walls leading to mysteries. There is a well, and a purification chamber. In the distance, they hear a strange chanting, to which both listen, intently. It seems to come from another era. Can the voices of the dead reach the living?

Dr Babs Halliwell is beginning to feel exhausted by the strangeness of everything that she sees. She knows nothing of this kind of architecture. The bright, painted colours and patterns of the woodwork are strange to her. She does not know what any of it means. She cannot understand any of its symbols or principles. It seems at once utterly foreign and yet somehow deeply familiar. Can it be that the Crown Princess, who so forcefully took possession of her astral body on the Air France flight, is now forcing and urging her onwards, towards some other denouement in real time? Has the Crown Princess invaded some of her memory, and is she forcing upon her some new agenda?

These thoughts occur to her, but she knows that of course they are complete nonsense. Babs Halliwell scorns the supernatural. She has never liked ghost stories. She does not believe in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls or reincarnation. She does not think that we may be punitively reborn as worms or dogs or rats or microbes. She does not even believe in the more plausible Buddhist concept of enlightenment along the eightfold path of meditation. She does not believe that the ghost of Marie Antoinette appeared to two respectable English Oxford women academics in the grounds of Versailles in the year 1901. She is not superstitious. She knows that we cannot speak to the dead, nor they to us. Never. They can never speak to us. So why is she feeling so light-headed, so confused, so besieged, so transported?

Jet lag and culture shock and hunger, suggests the wise Dr Oo, as he sits her down at a little table in a spruce and spotless small café on the busy sidewalk just outside the palace gates, and encourages her to order a little light lunch. She has no idea what any of the dishes are, and cannot read a word of the menu, so he orders for her: this will be as useful a tip as the lesson of the Maxwell House machine, he assures her. She must learn the word ‘
bibimpap
’. Bi-Bim-Bap. He makes her say it several times. Bi-Bim-Bap. She will feel much better when she has had some of it, he says. And it arrives, accompanied by various delicious little sushi-style side dishes and pickles, and it is delicious.
Bibimpap
, or Bi-Bim-Bap, is a heated iron bowl of rice, topped with various vegetables and sauces, and a charming poached egg. A light and innocent dish, a fortifying dish. She can stir it all up together, or pick bits out, as she chooses. She can do whatever she likes with her
bibimpap
. It is a free and easy dish, and she can get it everywhere, in varying formats. This, he agrees, as he delves into his own, is a fine example. They have been lucky here. He has not been to this café for some years, and he is pleased to find it as good as ever. Seoul is changing rapidly: it is good when the good things do not change.

Over the rice, he responds to her questions. He is willing to tell her more about himself, and his sister and his mother in New York, and his wife in Amsterdam, and his sons at school in Amsterdam. He is working at a research hospital, where he is studying the effect of certain recently developed drugs on those who have suffered from severe strokes. ‘Stroke patients,’ he tells her, as he moves into didactic professorial mode, ‘are much neglected by the medical profession, although the stroke is so common an event and kills and disables so many. It is the commonest cause of death, after heart failure. Mostly they are old people who have strokes, and we do not care for the old. It is not considered exciting work by many. In South Korea, we talk much about longevity. In principle we care for the old, we talk much about respecting the old, but I am afraid we care for them only when they are old and well. We do not like people who are old and ill, people with mobility and communication problems. Like you in Europe, we ignore them somewhat. Sick children, sick young people, people with unpredictable rare diseases in middle age – these are interesting stories, for everyone, everywhere. These are newspaper cases, cases where we have to make dramatic decisions, perhaps dangerous decisions. You tell me that you speak about these decisions in your paper on medical risk. It is an interesting subject.

‘But an elderly person with a stroke – this is just what happens to us, we accept it. We do not pay much attention, we do not even try to understand what happens in the brain, we do not bother with re-education programmes or even with much stimulation. In my hospital in Amsterdam, where I work, there is an excellent volunteer service, which brings professional readers of short stories to entertain and interest these stroke patients. Sometimes poems even. We can test the attention span, and the memory span, and the effect of stimulus, the effect of a new face, the impact of a new person in the hospital ward. There is much that can be done. It is not a waste of resources. There are few high risks in my area. There is more to be found of simple neglect.’

Babs chopsticks up a morsel of sea greenery, and asks him why he first became involved in this field? Why did he specialize in stroke patients? She already knows he will have an answer. And he has.

‘It is because of my mother,’ he says. ‘My mother, she suffered a serious stroke while quite a young woman. I was still at medical school, here, at Seoul National University Hospital, just across the road from where we are now. For a while she lost her speech, and she lost permanently use of one arm and one leg. She was wheelchair-bound for some years, but slowly she has recovered. She has been my experiment, my inspiration. She is a fine woman, my mother. She is OK now, in New York. America is good for old people. It has every contrivance. Here, we have been slow with improvements. The World Cup 2002 brought more help for wheelchair users to travel in this city. It is better than it was. You have not been on the underground yet, I think? You must try the underground before you leave. It is easier to use now, after the World Cup. The maps are excellent. Very clear maps. Very good and helpful English-language notices.’

The thought of plunging down into the underground makes Babs Halliwell feel faint with fatigue. This immersion in Korea past and present is challenging. It would have been more restful to have stayed in the Sejong Auditorium to listen passively to the Japanese professor. On the other hand, Dr Oo represents something unique. He is a multicultural opportunity that is not to be passed over. The Crown Princess has sent him to her as a messenger, and she must follow him.

Dr Oo suggests that, while they are in the neighbourhood, they should pay a short visit to the Munmyo shrines at Sung-Kyun-Kwan University. Then he will let her go back to her hotel for afternoon rest and the evening programme. She will never find these shrines without him, and they are worth the visit. This was the university where his brother studied. His brother is now in software, working on Chinese-character transliteration programs. She will like the Munmyo shrines. They are more private, less visited than the royal Jongmyo shrines. Is she up to it?

Babs, who had thought the Jongmyo shrines fairly quiet, is sufficiently intrigued by the thought of the yet more deserted and yet more secret shrines to agree to stagger on. Her feet are painful, but if he can do it so can she, for she is younger than he. (If she agrees to go to Hwaseong with him, she will abandon vanity and wear her trainers.) Mercifully, he hails a taxi, and they take a short ride uphill, and disembark at the beginning of a broad and populous road leading up towards a large, modern campus. The shrines, he says, are to the right: the main royal gateway to them is under restoration, so they will have to go round through the back entrance.

As they approach, on foot, they hear the sound of chanting, perhaps the very same sound that had been airborne towards them over the high wall of the queen’s gardens. And when they enter the courtyard, by a side door, they find that they are not alone. There is a faint air of desertion and dereliction, but the far end of the courtyard is filled with rows of people in colourful costume, performing some kind of ancient ritual. These people chant, and a stout man from time to time strikes a vast hanging drum. Nobody could possibly mistake these substantial figures for ghosts, for they are very twenty-first century in figure and deportment, and some of them have false beards and moustaches. Is this a film set, or is it a religious ceremony?

It is neither. It is, says Dr Oo, a rehearsal. It is a preparation for an enactment of ancestral rites by a Confucian Society. He had forgotten it was the season for these events: he should have remembered when he heard the chanting floating over the garden wall. These are not actors, and they may not be true Confucians. They are re-enactors, not actors. Every year they dress up and go through these rituals, to honour Confucius and his ten philosophers and his six sages. So it is religious, she pursues? Not really, he says. Look, there are several women lined up in the ranks in dark green silk dresses. That is quite irreligious and anachronistic. In true Confucian ceremonies no women could ever take part. Your Crown Princess, she would never have been admitted to these observances in this temple. It is true that on her sixtieth birthday she went to Suwon-Hwaseong in royal procession and great pomp, but she had to remain hidden in her palanquin. And here, she would not have been admitted. These green-robed women, they would not have been here. Perhaps the Confucian Society is short of members and now has to accept these women to make up numbers. Anyway, says Dr Oo, Confucianism is not a religion, in the Western sense of the word. It is not supernatural; it does not recognize the soul.

The re-enactors of this pageant do not seem to mind that she and Dr Oo are wandering round their sacred courtyard, gazing at the Hall of Great Accomplishments and the Hall of Illuminating Ethics. Modest paper lanterns of red and blue hang along the wooden eaves of the cloisters, and small children play in the dust. A very large granite turtle with a smoothly rubbed nose rests beneath a mulberry tree. A woman appears carrying a great raw leg of pale meat in a metal basin. It is an offering to the ancestors. Babs and Dr Oo peer into the gloomy interior of the shrine, and see rows of little, dark brown boxes on tables, arranged to receive more food offerings. It is all very odd. It is neither real nor unreal. The scene belongs neither to the past nor to the present. It belongs to no time.

Babs follows Dr Oo in his exploration of the hinterland of the compound, where young people who seem to be students are living in rooms that line one of the courtyard walls. They, unlike the re-enactors, are not at all keen to be seen. They wave away these intruders, and try to repel them, as the rulers of the Hermit Kingdom had for centuries tried to repel earlier visitors from the outside world. Dr Oo mumbles what she takes to be apologies, but the young people understandably continue to look displeased. They do not want this gross and grotesque Western woman to see their washing pegged up to dry and their shoes lined up on the floor and their unscholarly magazines lying on their reed mats. This lack of welcome does not deter the inquisitive and tireless Dr Oo from penetrating yet farther into a homely little labyrinth of cottages and gardens that strays and tumbles off to one side of the main structure. Here golden melon flowers bloom, and pale pink roses clamber, and large gourds lie unharvested and unwanted upon the paths. A glimmer of red gold and pale blue autumn light strikes the turning leaves in the afternoon sun. Familiar-looking weeds flourish in neglected borders: she thinks she identifies the modest meadow yellows and pinks of cow-wheat, mallow, bistort, tormentil. For some reason, this garden reminds her overwhelmingly of her paternal grandparents’ garden in Orpington. The sense of mingled recognition and bewilderment is simultaneously both shocking and comforting. She feels on the verge of some immense discovery about human nature and culture. But maybe she is merely tired, and her feet do sadly ache.

‘I can’t tell you how interesting all that was,’ she tells Dr Oo, as they taxi back together towards the Pagoda Hotel. ‘I can’t thank you enough. I would never have seen such things without your help.’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ he tells her, ‘your conference has a group coach tour round the city and to Cultural Expo 2002. I read of this on the hotel notice board. Your group coach tour will not show you the things that we have seen. I wonder what Professor van Jost will make of Expo 2002.’

‘I don’t suppose Professor van Jost will bother to come on the group coach tour,’ says Babs Halliwell. She cannot quite keep a tone of disappointed pique out of her voice, although she knows it is wholly inappropriate. She hopes that Dr Oo will not notice it because she is ashamed of it. And she wishes to make a good impression on Dr Oo because she stole his suitcase.

When Dr Halliwell reaches Room 1517, she finds that her message light is blinking. She would have been surprised and annoyed had it not been. She needs to be needed. She had expected the oblique reprimand from her boy-minder, who wonders where she is and why she hadn’t been there to hear the Japanese professor, though he puts it more courteously than that. There is also an invitation from her Australian friend Bob Bryant, suggesting they meet that evening for a drink in the bar, and another, more important message from the National Women’s Hospital wanting to set up an appointment to show her its work on gene therapy and cancers of the bone marrow. This is a subject near to what was once her heart, and close to her professional concerns, so she responds at once, rings back, and sets up an early morning meeting for later in the week.