From time to time, I ask my quite old mother to recall some more details about that place where they took me immediately after birth. I know that it was a two-room apartment on the fifth floor of a recently constructed building. In the very center of Pyongyang. On the shore of Taedong River, to which I was taken out in a carriage on walks for fresh air. I ask her…but all of my requests remain futile—either mother doesn’t want to or can’t remember—and nothing remains for me. How to present, conjure, visualize through the turbid thickness of years, curves, bends, and lines that are native to me? A landscape that it would turn out, I, in principle, could not remember.
And none the less, closing my eyes, I see the Taedong River, in all of its in-depth perspectives. Its smooth level current and even seagulls rushing about over the silver surface of the water. Still, then with the turn of the head—father along the shorefront, in a gray tunic, three steps from me, squatting down, he’s stretching to me his hand, toward which I direct my first steps.
The happy images break off, like an old, lost, and tattered film reel. And opening my eyes, I once more remember that all of this landscape, this plot, I merely contrived to myself. That my inner perspective holds nothing but deception, subterfuge, the momentary luxury of pseudo-clairvoyance. Perhaps as an eternal protest against all that is tangible, visible, immutable. All to which—by my will or not—I should abide.
Yet as long as this bright vision, again and again, returns to me, I, a faster visionary and mystic, in the end, conclude: this reflection, flash, fragment, is my paradise. Absolutely not lost for me, but always found, residing in me and with me. Now I am here, and the linear flow of external life only demonstrates its immutability or my ability to summon this paradise.
But of course, I learned this ability not immediately. In the beginning, there were no words or visions. I speak now only about my sense of life—but just one silent emptiness, about which I wrote several times in my essays, stories, and plays. About when they carried me as a one-year-old to Alma-Ata, a void which lasted probably a few years at least. My memory doesn’t know anything about those silent and invisible years.
Only afterward, before I had reached five years, on an early winter morning, a brilliant light suddenly blinded me, as if someone had opened a thick curtain. I saw a room, and the bright lamp under the ceiling: mother prepares me for kindergarten for the first time, putting on my boots last, and we walk to the exit. Wind in the face, we long journey through dirty hardened snow to a two-story building, gray in the gloaming. We head inside, and mother gives me over from her hand to the hands of a rude, loud-voiced nanny, who roughly plucks from me all that my mother had diligently clothed me in.
Then the expansive room with noises, slovenly unsightly children, and I, instead of joining with them, walk stubbornly, despite the nanny’s cries, to the window. To see, glance through the gloaming—to seize by my eyes, my mother. She, as it seemed then, had betrayed me, leaving me here in this rude, horrible, institutional place… I knowingly and in full detail depict now this shrill. Neophyte! Feeling of injustice, known, perhaps, to each Soviet person, namely because from this precipice, fracture, fright, even shock, began that otherworldly life. Suddenly declaring to you that your paradise or image of paradise is traitorous destruction.
And so, all the still memorable Soviet institutions: kindergarten, school, university, work by assignment—you walk bitterly and rigidly by the canvas of what public society determines. Through some kind of moments stolen from this society, you instantly understand that Words in your life as you knew them before are no more. But there is just one absolutely uncomplicated introspection. Mechanical motion and memorized wording. Actions that you present to the world, only so that it, useless and indifferent, will leave you in peace next time. And you, of course, suffer, but then what can you do but move again—you learn, work, socialize, seeing what is around you and nothing within…
In the end, you arrive at despair called forth by precisely that shrill, screaming discrepancy. You even see how others also begin to rebel—let this life slip through, run from its classes, be a hooligan, live off of others, behave disgracefully—understanding that nevertheless, you are not alone. So rough, nervous, and inarticulate. If you long for that which does not exist, maybe it will be worthwhile for you to track down that very nothingness, moving along those earthly circles which are sometimes worse than hell.
That is: deceive, sin, live in dissolution, like others, and in the end and through the most unexpected figure, these circles push you out not to someplace, but for some reason just to the writing-table. You begin to write on clean pieces of paper. Some kind of secret characters. Perhaps denunciations—for now, unclear to whom. To another world on another planet? Filled with furious indignation again at those wintertime situations in which you once found yourself.
The Author
Alexander Kan is a Russian writer of scripts and fiction of Korean origin. He was born in Pyongyang (North Korea) in 1960. In 1961 after political repressions his incomplete family removed to the Soviet Union: to St. Petersburg, and then to Almaty, Kazakhstan. In 1988 he enrolled at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, majoring in prose, which graduated from 1993. In 1994 he became a winner of a Russian competition "New Names" among young writers under the literary magazine "Novy Mir" in Moscow. From 1992 to 1994 he worked on the TV program, covering the life of the post-Soviet Korean Diaspora "Koryo Saram" as a TV editor in Moscow and Almaty. From 1995 to 1998, he worked in the British-Russian TV drama "Crossroads" in Kazakhstan as a scriptwriter. From January to June 1999, he obtained a literary residency with the NIPKOW PROGRAMM Film Academy to write a full-length feature film script "The Other Sky", based on his own novel, revolving around the life of Russian settlers in Germany. In 2003, he became the winner of a worldwide script competition in Seoul, organized by the Korea Foundation. His novels, poems, essays were published in the Russian and international newspapers and literary magazines and in literary collections. Some of his novels and essays were translated into English, German, Swedish and Korean. So far, he has published nine collections of fiction, and he is an author of many TV drama episodes. Kan’s writing is characterized by its lyrical style and existentialist intricacy, evocative of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Most recently Alexander has written a script for Katya Kan’s short feature film “Na Zare”, which will be submitted to international independent film festivals: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm9462440/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
Alexander Kan
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