WITH MY BACK TO THE POET
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung; translated by Anton HurHonford StarJuly 2021Selected by Anthony Bird and Taylor Bradley
The stories in Cursed Bunny – about a toilet-based golem of human refuse that grows larger the more a woman “feeds” it; a cursed bunny-shaped lamp that ruins an alcohol magnate; a child ghost who befriends a woman who dreams of being a landlord – are populated with the monsters we feed and are all surreal, miniature masterpieces about human life. In the last story of the collection, set in Chung’s beloved Warsaw (she has a PhD in Slavic literature), a young woman sits at a cafe watching an elderly ghost wander by, leading to an encounter with a man haunted by trauma. Translator Anton Hur skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous; this translation is one of his two nominations for the International Booker Prize 2022. – Anthony Bird and Taylor Bradley
A long time ago, I met him in the plaza for the first time. Poland’s summers are hot and dry – I was holding a cold drink in one hand and sitting in the shade. My life was making me anxious. I wanted to escape from it, for just a little while at least.
The plaza was full of people but the voices that drifted toward me were mostly speaking English or German rather than Polish. The city was a tourist town. Nine out of ten people sitting under the statue in the centre of the city plaza were from abroad. I was one of these foreigners, and like other foreigners, I was sitting by the plaza’s statue at an outdoor café, staring at the sunlight heating up the paving stones.
Then I saw the old man.
I didn’t spot anything different about him at first. Again, there were many people in the plaza, and the countless foreigners were taking pictures, drinking beer, talking on phones, talking to each other. Living in the moment, so to speak. There were people moving slowly, people just standing around, and people moving about in a hurry. There were people with dogs and people with children. It wouldn’t have been easy spotting someone doing something strange in that crowd.
But the main reason I was paying attention to the old man was because of one thing, he was walking with a very pronounced limp. Another reason was that despite his limp, he moved with surprising agility.
The third reason I kept watching the old man was because he was only walking on one side. I need to explain this a little more.
The plaza was roughly the shape of a square, with a statue of a 19th-century Romantic poet † who was considered a treasure of the nation placed in the middle. The reason it was “roughly” a square shape was because while the plaza had roads on all sides, there were also little alleys radiating from the centre. A typical European city plaza, with the northern side – the side the poet’s statue faced – lined with souvenir shops, and to the west, a little away from the poet statue, a clock tower, and to the east and south of the plaza, outdoor cafés, pubs, and restaurants. I was sitting with my back to the poet statue, looking south.
The old man appeared on my left and walked toward my right. Limping at a surprisingly rapid speed, he crossed the main road and disappeared into an alley. Then just five minutes later, he reappeared to my left at exactly where he had first come from and walked to the right. Swiftly limping all the way, he moved in a straight line to cross the main street on the right and disappeared once more into an alley. And again, he reappeared to my left not five minutes after. With his mouth firmly shut, slightly biting down on his bottom lip, and his eyes opened wide, his face frozen into a desperate expression, he diligently moved his uncomfortable leg to walk, right before my eyes, from the plaza’s east to west in a straight line.
The plaza was wide. It took about 15 to 20 minutes for the old man to traverse the southern side of the plaza on his bad leg with his wobbling walk. Even if he had taken a shortcut that I didn’t know about, it should’ve taken him at least 20 minutes to circle back to the square if it had taken him 20 minutes to get to the alley. But the old man would disappear and reappear barely five minutes later in the exact same spot. And limp the same distance at a fearsome speed. In a single direction, over and over again.
“Czy ty też go widzisz?” You can see him, too?
Startled, I turned my head. The man, who stood with the sun to his back, looked like a giant from where I sat.
“Mogę?” May I? ◉
† Born in Zavosse, Belarus, formerly in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) is considered a national poet in Poland, Belarus and Lithuainia. He was a member of the Three Bards – alongside Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859) – a group of leading poets in the Polish Romantic movement.