Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo
Tongue (12 page)
Paulie is still baring his teeth, revealing his beastly side. I turn off the water and slide down to the floor. We sit in a puddle, our bottom halves wet, staring at each other.
You can’t do
this, Paulie
. I grab the scruff of his neck and raise him up, glaring into his eyes. A bite to the neck is a challenge to hierarchy. I sharply slap his skinny nose. If he continues to misbehave, the only thing left to do is stop feeding him. No. I lose my resolve and drop my hand. I shake my head. I have to think about what’s best for this old dog. What would be the best for Paulie? As if waiting for a new challenge, Paulie breathes hard, looking seriously into my eyes. I turn away from him in a firm and exaggerated gesture so that he will understand it, even with his failing eyesight. I want to say, Now we’re over.
I need to be firm. I don’t have the right to keep a dog when all I do is just look at him. I have no right to keep Paulie. Paulie is here not because he wants to stay with me but because he doesn’t have a choice. A dog doesn’t stay by his owner’s side in the face of danger out of love or loyalty. He’s merely waiting for what happens next. Humans think it’s because the dog loves his owner, but a dog is only a dog. I grab Paulie in an embrace. Paulie is only a dog. He’s merely his dog. Okay, I’ll bring you back to him, I whisper into Paulie’s ear.
So you can stop being like this, Paulie
. The perfect place for this dog is the house he, Paulie’s first owner, is living in. This is the last thing I can do for Paulie.
Before I send Paulie to him, to them, I realize something: Even the most well-trained dog will not move the way we want him to, and a dog feels terror, desire, curiosity, anger, satisfaction, hesitation, and loss just like us. A human instinctively wants to cuddle and protect a smaller and weaker being, furry and soft, with big eyes and a round head. And when Paulie is not acting up, he is so beautiful and gentle and loyal. Even though I know she can’t stand dogs, I dial her number, which I still know by heart, in the hopes that she will feel maternal toward him.
The fourth rule is, to have all ingredients and materials necessary for the preparation of your dishes ready and handy before you commence cooking, so that nothing need be hurriedly done
…
—Henriette Davidis’ Practical Cook Book
IN THE SUBWAY CAR on line three, I see a woman holding a large globe. I am going to work two hours earlier than usual, to meet the delivery of a big, twenty-five-kilogram perch and ten kilograms of blue crab from Wando Island. The woman looks straight ahead, her overstuffed duffel bag leaning on the seat next to her and the colorful globe on her lap, perhaps on her way to somewhere far. It’s unexpected to see a globe in an uncrowded subway car, and I stare at it as if I’ve never seen such a thing. When you spin a globe it feels like you can go anywhere in the world—the world is as small as your kitchen. But just as you can never see the Southern Cross from the North Pole, you can never see the other side of the world. You can leave whenever you want, but a time may come when staying here is beyond your willpower. The plastic globe sways on its axis with every shake of the subway car.
I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. My stop is announced. I open my eyes. The woman is no longer across from me. Neither is the globe, which looked heavy for its size. I
manage to slip out just before the doors close. I pause momentarily while climbing the stairs. I can’t recall whether the woman was holding a globe, or a newborn baby swaddled in a colorful blanket, or a lapdog. Was I dozing in the early-morning subway? I keep walking, thinking it would have been better to see someone holding a big, slightly cracked melon instead. At least you can eat a melon. I haven’t been able to fall into deep slumber all spring. When reading a book or drinking herbal tea doesn’t help, I go into the yard and pace, barefoot, watching the sunrise. Now even Paulie isn’t there, Paulie, whose warm tongue used to lick my face.
The gigantic fish is splayed across the butcher block, dripping water. It’s so fresh that I think its eyes will fly open, tail flopping. A century ago the perch wouldn’t have arrived in an ice-filled Styrofoam box but in a clay jar of honey. Tension flits in the air among the six cooks who gather around the fish with their knives. Last month, I decided not to handle fish for a while. I feel warmer than usual and my palms sweat—the worst hands with which to touch fish. I’ve never been this hot before. I don’t know why this is happening. I gaze down at my palms. Is it because I’m completely alone? I shake my head. These thoughts only make my palms warmer. It’ll get better when the seasons change.
It feels like warm—and cold—liquid is seeping out of my body, like juice from cutting a ripe peach. I can’t do anything but wait for time to pass. If you want to pursue something, it means you have desire. There’s something I want to grab firmly with these two hands. I stand in front of the large oven that reflects my face and whisper:
The hours I wait with desire will certainly be mysterious
.
It’s disappointing that I can’t handle the perch—the tiger of the sea—but I step back. A fish this size has a lot of flesh and
allows you to bring out all kinds of flavors. One hand supporting my chin, I glance at Chef, wondering how this one will be prepared. I think of Chef every time I look at a perch, just as I’m reminded of a cow or yellow paprika whenever I see Munju. What do people think when they look at me? Do they associate me with a vegetable or a fish? Chef picks up a knife, slides it along the dorsal fin, and slits the body open. Everyone, even Manager Park, gathers around the fish, curiosity gleaming in their eyes. Chef will carefully divide the body, cheeks, collar, stomach, liver, small intestines, and gills and distribute them to the staff. Then he will tell them to make a dish out of it—homework. This is how Chef uses a perch, as expensive as a whole calf. Another reason you don’t leave Nove once you start cooking here. A few years ago I parboiled the liver of a perch in salted water before stewing it in garlic sauce. Chef’s opinion was that my concoction was fine, but that it didn’t show enough imagination and tasted one-dimensional.
The kitchen becomes busy all of a sudden. While the others work on the perch, I take charge of marinated blue crab for the staff meal. Shellfish live underwater and breathe through their gills, periodically shedding their shells as they grow. The time to get the plumpest and sweetest shellfish is right before they shed. Blue crabs in May are packed with eggs—they don’t taste as good after they lay eggs. Chef makes the soy sauce used for the marinade. Soy sauce is the one condiment I’m not very comfortable using. If Grandmother were still alive, I could learn from her. Grandmother used a pear reduction to satisfy all the need for sweetness in her cooking, and when she made marinated crabs she used pear juice instead of sugar for the soy sauce. Worm-mottled pears, old pears, frozen pears—they all turned into sweet, clear pear reduction when they passed through Grandmother’s hands. Chef believes that a young person can’t
handle soy sauce. By the time I learn how to make and handle it, I may no longer be young. My wish is that I will still be in this kitchen.
The darkest soy sauce, like the darkest caviar and olives, is the best. Soy sauce has to be black and have a tongue-seducing aroma, but it can’t be overly viscous and you should take care to use only the appropriate amount. The squirming crabs are piled into a nickel bowl. One even lurches and claws its way to the top. If they were lobsters, we would immediately snip the muscles in their claws. Lobsters, the most belligerent of shellfish, eat each other when they are kept in a confined space. We don’t do anything to the crabs yet, though, because the flavor suffers when a knife touches living crabs. Now I should pour the soy sauce over the crabs. After boiling and cooling the sauce, I dip a finger into the liquid and stick it in my mouth, rolling it around on my tongue. Sour and salty and sweet and profoundly weighty, like when I take a sip of good wine. I pour the sauce over the live crabs. They writhe as if in protest. Now all I have to do is wait until they die, then trim the claws.
ASTRANGE THING HAPPENS on Thursday afternoon. I take a walk down the hill near the Shilla Hotel before dinner service. Suddenly a black flock of pigeons rises up in front of me. Dust and pollen fly into my face, and as I pull my hands out of my pockets to shield my eyes, I see through my fingers a pigeon flying swiftly toward my foot. My foot pauses in midair as the pigeon rushes forward and swoops onto it, swallowing it whole. With no time to regain my balance, I take a tumble in the middle of the street. Rolling on the downward slope, I realize it wasn’t a pigeon but a black plastic bag. But that’s after I’ve already fallen. For a while I lie there on my stomach without moving. I must have broken something, I think. My cheek, which scraped along the sidewalk, starts to burn. Two pedestrians try to help me up. I’m okay, I say, pushing their hands away, thinking, I hope I hurt my ankle, not my wrists. I sit up slowly and flex my wrists. If I hurt my hands, I won’t be able to cook anymore, or even go into the kitchen. I won’t be able to do anything, either at home or at Nove. This
has to be more horrific than being alone. My wrists seem fine. I don’t feel any pain. I get up and rotate each of my ankles. They’re fine, too. It’s odd. It was as if someone yanked on my ankles, yet not a single part of me was hurt. I fell only a few seconds ago but it seems like a hallucination. But the black plastic bag that enveloped my left foot and my sore cheek are proof that it wasn’t. It happened in a split second. My foot was held up to take a step, and the black plastic bag, tossed by the wind, fell to the ground as if carefully planned, heading toward my shoe with its opening facing me. The scene remains in my head as if I pressed the pause button. It happened in the blink of an eye but I couldn’t avoid it.
I’m glad I didn’t get hurt, but I’m dogged by an ominous feeling that I’m the butt of an unpleasant joke. That night I receive two complaints about my food. Once it’s too salty and the other time the food isn’t seasoned at all. What’s wrong with you today? Manager Park says unpleasantly. I don’t go with the group to eat truffle dishes at the InterContinental. Recently the hotel has become the center of talk among gourmets because it imported twenty kilograms of fresh truffles from France for the first time ever. It’s a large amount, worth around forty million won. I asked the head manager of the hotel, who is close to Chef, to get me a truffle, even if it’s as small as a clove of garlic. Not believing that I tripped over a black plastic bag, I cluck as if someone is watching. It was stupid to think that the bag was a pigeon. If there were two of me, I would pat the shoulder of the other me in sympathy.
It’s probably because you haven’t been sleeping well
. When you’re alone for a long time, you learn how to think of yourself as separate from even yourself.
I’m tired of hoping he will come by and waiting for the phone to ring. With even Paulie gone, there’s nothing left that connects me to him. I lie on the living room couch and look up
at the spiral staircase leading to the second floor, giving in to my imagination. I imagine receiving his phone call; I imagine him coming to see me, sitting with him at the table to eat, and making love with him after we’ve slowly peeled off our clothing. But here I am lying in the dark listlessly, my ribs sticking out.
I get up and open the fridge. I take out a head of cabbage, thick, big, heavy. I rip off some leaves and wash and drop them into boiling water to make broth. I’ve heard the story of a blind person recovering his sight after washing his eyes with cabbage broth—possible only in legend. But we did exactly that three years ago. I placed at his bedside a bundle of tetterwort I’d collected from the hospital grounds and waited every night, fervently, for him to produce tears. It was the hardest time, he said once in a quiet voice, remembering. And he gripped my hand, which he was holding, even harder. Where did those times go?
I place the lid on the pot and balance over it the ladle I had been holding. The broth of a boiled cabbage is effective in treating alcoholism as well as insomnia. If I can’t fall asleep I’ll be unable to tell bean sprouts from mung-bean sprouts, confuse flounder with stingray, and continue to trip over plastic bags and fall. A sour smell wafts up, the smell of cabbage.
Cabbage is born from tears. When Dionysus arrived in Trachia, Likourgos led his army to capture the god. Gaia, the goddess of the earth, cast a spell on Likourgos, who went crazy and, confusing his son Drias for a grapevine, took his sword and cut him in two. Adonis then captured and tortured him, ripping his body apart. Cabbage sprouted from the sand where Likourgos’ tears dropped. Even now, farmers don’t plant cabbage near grapevines because bees might transfer the smell of cabbage onto the grapes. Cabbage contains sulfur, so it stinks when you boil it. People are most sensitive to bitterness. I down the hot cabbage broth and get into bed and pull the covers over my head.
What would grow from this place where my tears have dropped? It would be better to think about something else. Something more interesting and sensual and specific. Something I can fall asleep to with a smile on my face.
Coffee and bread
Butter and jam
Ham and Emmentaler
Truffles and foie gras
Mayonnaise and cooled roast chicken
Melon and Parma ham
Caviar and vodka
Pea porridge and honey
Fried cod and garlic
Spinach and roast duck
Shrimp and curry
Scallops and pasta
Mussels and white wine
Calf brains and butter sauce
I feel myself loosening up, as if a spoonful of something delicious has just entered my mouth. I understand how appetite and hunger and thirst and deprivation expand one’s palate. I smack my lips and sink one step further into sleep. If I were a fish, I would be a small, flat, fresh, sparkling, silver-gray turbot. One that has firm flesh and delivers a good bite, best when you crunch down on it whole including the bones—one you can eat in small pieces. If I had to be a shellfish, I’d like to be a scallop, floating deep in the ocean. I don’t want to be an oyster even though it’s snow white and brimming with sweet brine. An oyster lives its life changing from male to female and back again. I like the oyster’s spiraling, intricate shell, which is harder to shuck than you might think. I don’t want to be a starfish, either.
A starfish slinks past shellfish, leaving behind only an empty shell—a chilling sight. Even though sea urchin and sea cucumbers are fragrant and expensive, I don’t want to be a spineless organism like them. I’ll stick with being a scallop.