Chapter 92: The Last Tree

Saturday came with the specific quality of a day that held two performances and the knowledge that the second would be the last.

He woke at seven—earlier than the Saturday body wanted, the rehearsal schedule’s weekday rhythm still governing the internal clock. The apartment was quiet. His father’s shoes were by the door—the late night, the post-show subway home, the father who had seen the tree and had slept with the seeing.

His mother was in the kitchen. The Saturday morning quality: slower than the weekdays, the rice cooking at the unhurried pace of a morning that did not need to catch a train.

“몇 시에 가?” (What time do we go?)

“낮 공연 1시니까—11시에요.” (Matinee is at one, so eleven.) Two hours before. The same buffer.

“저녁 공연은?”

“7시요. 사이에 쉬는 시간 있어요.” (Seven. There’s a break between.)

His mother calculated. The day’s schedule: leave at eleven, matinee at one, break from approximately two-thirty to five, evening performance at seven, home by nine. Ten hours of the day belonging to the production.

“도시락 싸줄게.” (I’ll pack a lunch box.) She said it. The practical love—the food that would sustain the body through the ten-hour day, the rice and the banchan and the fruit packed in the container that his mother had been using since he was in elementary school.

His father appeared at eight-thirty. The late riser of the Saturday morning—the practitioner’s body recovering from the previous day’s emotional expenditure. He looked different in the Saturday morning than in the weekday evenings: softer, the professional posture relaxed, the house clothes replacing the theater clothes.

“오늘 두 번이지?” (Two today, right?)

“네.”

“저녁에 또 갈게.” (I’ll come again for the evening.) He said it. Not the matinee—the evening. The father choosing the last performance. The closing night.

“감사해요.”

His father looked at him.

“감사할 거 없어.” (Nothing to thank.) He said it. “아빠가 보고 싶어서 가는 거야.” (I’m going because I want to see it.) The distinction: not the parent’s obligation to attend, the practitioner’s desire to watch. He wanted to see the production again. The first seeing had placed the tree in him and he wanted to see the tree again.

The matinee.

The one o’clock audience was different from the Friday evening audience. The afternoon light in the room—the rehearsal-time light rather than the performance-time light, the production returning to the light it had been built in. The audience: younger. More children. The Saturday afternoon audience was the family audience—parents who had brought their children to a children’s theater production on a Saturday.

The children in the audience changed the room’s quality.

Woojin felt it from the wings. The adult audience’s attention was focused and vertical—the concentrated watching that pressed downward. The children’s attention was scattered and horizontal—the looking that moved around the room, the curiosity that touched everything rather than settling on one thing. The mixed audience—adults and children—created an air that was both focused and scattered, the two qualities coexisting.

The children in the audience will see differently, he thought. The adults watch the production. The children watch the room. The children see the tree because the room has a tree in it, not because the production tells them the tree is there.

The matinee run.

Minjae’s entrance: 나무야, 나 왔어. The personally small voice landing in the afternoon light. A child in the front row—a boy of perhaps five—looked at Minjae and then looked at the space where Minjae was looking. The five-year-old followed Minjae’s gaze to the tree. The tree was there for the five-year-old because Minjae was looking at it.

The children follow the looking, Woojin thought. They see what the actors see. The actors’ seeing directs the children’s seeing. The production teaches the audience how to see.

His entrance. The third child’s question.

“왜 여기 있어요?”

He said it and a girl in the second row—eight or nine years old—tilted her head. The specific gesture of a child who had heard a question and was considering it. The question had arrived in the child’s attention and the child was thinking about it. Not analyzing—thinking. The way children think about questions: directly, without the adult’s intermediary of context and interpretation.

She is thinking about my question, he thought. An eight-year-old in the audience is genuinely wondering why this boy is here. The question works on two levels: the character’s question and the audience’s question. The audience wonders why any of these children are here, talking to a tree.

The seamless overlap. Seoyeon’s entrance. The 아.

The children in the audience responded to Seoyeon’s syllable with the specific quality of children hearing a sound of recognition—several of them made small sounds of their own, the involuntary response of young bodies to the arriving vowel. The 아 triggered 아 in the audience’s children. The mirror response.

Seoyeon’s six pages. The grandmother’s zelkova tree appearing in the room.

The five-year-old boy in the front row was no longer looking at Seoyeon. He was looking at the tree. The tree that the two understudy children’s bodies formed and that Seoyeon’s seeing made real—the five-year-old was looking at the tree with the complete absorption of a child who believed the tree was there. Not the suspension of disbelief that the adult audience practiced—the full belief that the child’s age permitted.

He sees the tree without effort, Woojin thought. The way Seoyeon sees without effort. The child in the audience and the child on the stage share the same quality: the seeing that does not need to overcome the barrier of knowing it is not real. For both of them, it is real.

The convergence. The overlapping voices.

The children in the audience were moving—the small movements of young bodies responding to the convergence’s density, the shifting and leaning and the specific physical response of children in the presence of something they could feel but could not name. The adults were still. The children were moving. The two responses coexisted in the horseshoe.

The silence.

The silence was different in the matinee. The children’s attention did not hold the same concentrated stillness as the adult attention—the silence was populated by the small sounds of children’s bodies: a shift in a chair, a breath slightly louder than the adult’s breath, the rustle of a jacket. The populated silence was not lesser than the concentrated silence—it was a different kind of holding. The children held the silence with their bodies’ small movements the way the adults held it with their bodies’ stillness.

The silence ended. The applause.

The children’s applause was faster and louder than the adults’—the immediate response of bodies that did not wait for the social cue to begin clapping. The five-year-old in the front row clapped with his hands above his head, the enthusiastic applause of a child who had enjoyed something and was expressing the enjoyment without restraint.

The matinee ended.

The break. Two-thirty to five—the gap between the two Saturday performances.

The cast stayed in the rehearsal building. Park Yongcheol had arranged the break: the children could rest in the rehearsal room, the chairs pushed aside to create a space for sitting and eating. The dosirak boxes came out—each family’s packed lunch, the practical preparations of mothers who had calculated the ten-hour day.

Woojin ate his mother’s dosirak on the floor of the rehearsal room—the performance space temporarily returned to the eating space, the tape on the floor visible between the banchan containers. The rice was still warm in the insulated container. The kkakdugi had the specific crunch of his mother’s recipe—the cubed radish kimchi that she made every two weeks, the current batch three days into its fermentation.

Seoyeon sat next to him. Her dosirak was different—the specific quality of a different mother’s cooking, a different family’s banchan selection. She had japchae. He did not.

“바꿀래?” (Want to trade?) She held out a chopstick-full of japchae toward his container.

He looked at the japchae. The glass noodles glistening with the sesame oil, the vegetables cut in the julienne that varied by household—Seoyeon’s mother’s julienne was thinner than his mother’s.

“응.” He took the japchae and placed a piece of his mother’s kkakdugi in the offered space.

They ate. The trading—the first sharing of food between them, the specific intimacy of eating from the same container that Korean culture loaded with meaning. The trading was casual in their eleven-year-old execution and loaded in the cultural context that neither of them was old enough to fully register.

Jiwon sat across from them. She watched the trading with the twelve-year-old’s awareness—the older child’s perception of the social gesture that the younger children performed without self-consciousness.

“나도.” (Me too.) Jiwon said. She offered her own banchan—the seasoned spinach that was her family’s version. The trading expanded to three—the circle of food-sharing that was the post-performance’s decompression, the bodies refueling from the families’ separate kitchens.

Minjae sat apart—the thirteen-year-old’s slight distance from the younger children, the age gap maintained even in the eating. He had his own dosirak and ate it with the focused quality of someone refueling rather than socializing.

Seongjun ate with the eight-year-old’s enthusiasm—the dosirak opened and consumed in twelve minutes, the speed of a child who ate to eat rather than to share. Doyun and Chaeyoung ate together, the nine and ten-year-olds’ companionship continuing from the rehearsal into the break.

The break’s quality: the specific atmosphere of a company between performances. The first performance’s energy expended, the second performance’s energy not yet summoned. The gap between—the resting, the eating, the talking that was not about the production.

Seoyeon, finishing her japchae: “아까—앞에 앉은 남자 아이 봤어?” (Earlier—did you see the boy sitting in the front?)

“다섯 살쯤?” (About five?)

“응. 나무 쳐다봤어.” (Yeah. He was looking at the tree.) She said it with the specific quality of someone who had noticed something during the performance—the peripheral awareness that the seeing enabled. She had been seeing the tree and had also seen the child seeing the tree.

“봤어.” (I saw.)

“진짜 봤더라.” (He really saw it.) She said it. The emphasis: the five-year-old had really seen the tree. Not pretended to see, not followed the convention of seeing—really seen. The child’s full belief.

“애들은—그래.” (Kids are like that.) He said it. “믿으니까.” (Because they believe.) The child’s belief was the thing the adult audience had to work toward—the suspension of disbelief that the adult needed and the child did not.

“어른들은—안 믿어?” (Adults don’t believe?)

“다르게 믿어.” (They believe differently.) He said it. The adult’s belief was conditional—the agreement to pretend, the theater’s contract. The child’s belief was unconditional—the tree was there because the tree was there. The two kinds of belief produced different kinds of seeing, and the production received both.

She considered this.

“나는—어른처럼 믿어? 아이처럼?” (Do I believe like an adult? Or like a child?)

He looked at her. The question was genuine—the eleven-year-old asking where her seeing belonged in the spectrum between the child’s unconditional belief and the adult’s conditional belief.

“아이처럼.” (Like a child.) He said it. Her seeing was the unconditional kind—the tree was there because her seeing made it there, without the intermediary of the theatrical contract. This was her power and the thing he had been observing since the first day.

“너는?” (What about you?)

He thought about the honest answer.

“어른처럼.” (Like an adult.) He said it. His belief was conditional—the hundred years’ experience had placed him in the adult’s position. He could not believe unconditionally because he knew the tree was not there. His giving to the tree was the adult’s giving—the choice to treat the absence as presence, the technique of the trained actor.

“그래도—잘해.” (You’re still good at it.) She said it. The casual assessment.

“고마워.” He said it. The thank-you that held the recognition of what she had named—the difference between their qualities. Her seeing was natural. His asking was constructed. Both worked. Both were different.

The break ended. Five o’clock. The cast reassembled. The dosirak containers packed away. The white shirts smoothed. The hair re-fixed—Seoyeon’s mother appearing at the building at four-thirty to redo the pulled-back hair that had loosened during the break.

The evening audience arrived at six-thirty.

This audience was different again—the Saturday evening audience, the specific quality of people who had chosen the evening performance. The demographic was older than the matinee: fewer children, more couples, more single adults. The professional circle’s presence was heavier—word from the invited run and the Friday performance had moved through the theater community, the specific velocity of the small-theater world’s information.

His father was in the audience. Second row, same seat as Friday. The father who had seen the tree once and had come to see it again.

The evening run.

He knew from the wings that this was the last time. The last of the three performances. After tonight, the production would not run again—Park Yongcheol’s children’s theater company was a one-production entity, the summer’s work concluded in the summer’s showing. The four weeks of building would end tonight.

The last tree, he thought. After tonight, the tree will not appear again. Seoyeon’s seeing will make the tree real one more time and then the tree will exist only in the audience’s memory and in our bodies’ memory.

Minjae entered.

나무야, 나 왔어.

The personally small voice. The last time the first child would announce his arrival. The voice carried the knowledge of the last time—not performed, present. The body knew this was the last run and the knowing was in the voice.

The production accumulated through the scenes. Each scene heavier than the matinee’s version—the evening audience’s concentrated attention adding weight, the Saturday evening’s specific quality pressing into the room. The production had run twenty-seven times. This was the twenty-eighth. The accumulation of twenty-seven runs was in the production’s body.

His entrance. The last time.

“왜 여기 있어요?”

The question carried everything. The hundred years. The eleven years. The twenty-seven runs. The matinee’s children’s seeing. The Friday night’s father’s seeing. The three weeks of building. The question was the heaviest it had ever been because it was the last time the question would be asked in this production.

He felt the lastness in the body. Not sadness—the specific quality of the final iteration. The awareness that the thing being done was being done for the last time and the awareness made the doing more present. The last time was the most present time because the last time had no next time to defer to.

The seamless overlap. The last time his 모르겠어요 would travel through the space and transform into Seoyeon’s 아. The last seamless transition.

It was the most seamless of all the transitions.

The lastness had sharpened everything. The departure and the arrival flowed into each other with the precision of two things that had been practicing this joining for twenty-seven times and were now performing it for the twenty-eighth and final time. The accumulated practice arriving at its peak in the last iteration.

Seoyeon’s scene. The six pages. The grandmother’s zelkova tree appearing in the room for the last time.

He watched from the wings.

Seoyeon’s seeing on the last night had a quality he had not seen before. The seeing was not different in kind—it was the same direct, unmediated seeing that had been her quality since the first day. But the seeing was deeper. The tree she saw on the last night was the tree that held twenty-seven runs of children’s questions and six overlaps of transitions and three audiences’ worth of watching and the matinee’s five-year-old’s unconditional belief and the rain of the first run-through and the silence that had grown from twelve seconds to twenty-three to the uncounted and all of it—all of it—held in the tree that she was seeing.

The tree was more real than it had ever been.

The room felt it. The evening audience—the adults, the practitioners, the father in the second row—received the tree’s fullness. The tree that held everything. The tree that Seoyeon’s seeing made present one last time.

The convergence. The overlapping voices. The seven children around the tree for the last time.

He spoke his line: 왜 여기 있어요?

And for the first time in twenty-eight runs, the question was not a question.

It was an answer.

I am here because I am here. The question had been asking for twenty-eight runs and the twenty-eighth run’s asking had arrived at the answering. The question contained its own answer. The asking was the being. The being was the reason.

The silence.

He did not count. He stood in the silence and let the silence hold everything.

The silence held. The audience held. The tree held. The seven children held. The room held.

Park Yongcheol: “끝.”

The last word of the last performance.

The applause. Longer than the previous performances—the evening audience’s sustained response, the specific quality of an audience that knew this was the last showing and gave more because the giving had no next time.

The seven children stood in the applause.

Seoyeon was looking at him. Not at the audience, not at the tree—at him. The direct quality aimed at him across the convergence’s two meters. She had heard the last question—the question that had become the answer—and she was looking at him with the recognition of someone who had felt what had happened in his voice.

He received her looking.

The looking held something new. Not the casual directness of the rehearsal room. Not the professional seeing of the performance. Something between them—the personal recognition of one eleven-year-old by another, the acknowledgment that they had built something together and the something was now ending and the ending was the completion.

He looked back.

The applause faded. Park Yongcheol stood. The brief closing—the director’s gratitude, the cast’s bow, the audience’s dispersal.

After.

The rehearsal room emptied. The audience gone. The chairs empty. The tape on the floor visible again—the production’s geography, the marks that four weeks of rehearsal and three performances had worn into the room.

The cast stood in the empty room. Seven children and two tree-children and the director and the assistant, the company that had been built in four weeks and had lived for three performances and was now ending.

Park Yongcheol looked at them.

“수고했어요.” (Good work.) He said it. The two words that Korean theater used to close a production—the acknowledgment of the effort, the gratitude for the work. “다 잘했어요.” (Everyone did well.)

He looked at each child. The clockwise scan—the same scan he had done on the first day, the director’s reading of the bodies. But this time the reading was not assessment—it was farewell.

“이 경험—갖고 가세요.” (Take this experience with you.) He said it. “여기서 배운 거—다음에 쓰세요.” (What you learned here—use it next time.) The production’s end was not the learning’s end. The learning would continue in the next production, the next performance, the next encounter with a partner and a tree and a silence.

The children dispersed. The families collected them—the mothers from the hallway, the fathers from the audience. The building emptied.

Woojin stood in the empty rehearsal room for a moment. The lights were still on. The tape was on the floor. The forty chairs were empty.

He looked at the center of the room—the tree’s position. The tree was gone. The two children who had been the tree had left with their parents. The tree existed now only in the room’s memory and in the bodies of everyone who had seen it.

The tree is in the memory, he thought. Twenty-seven runs and three performances of the tree. The tree that was a grandmother’s zelkova, made real by a girl’s seeing, held by the silence, received by the audience. The tree is gone and the tree is everywhere it was received.

He picked up his bag.

He went down the stairs.

In the hallway: his father and his mother, together. The family waiting. His father’s face held the post-show quality—the settled look of someone who had seen the last performance and was holding the seeing.

“끝났어.” (It’s over.) He said it.

His father: “끝난 게 아니야.” (It’s not over.) He said it. The practitioner’s correction—the production’s performances were over. The production’s effect was not over. The tree was in the memory. The learning was in the body. The ending was the beginning of the carrying.

They walked out into the Hongdae Saturday night. The summer heat had not broken—the July evening was warm, the streets full of the weekend’s energy, the neighborhood alive around the building where the tree had appeared three times and would not appear again.

His mother walked on his left. His father walked on his right. The family configuration of the walking home—the child between the parents, the specific geometry of protection and belonging.

“아이스크림 먹을래?” (Want ice cream?) His mother.

“네.”

They stopped at the convenience store on the corner. He chose the melon bar—the summer’s specific ice cream, the green wrapper and the melon-flavored ice that had been the marker of every July since he could remember.

He ate the ice cream on the Hongdae street. The melon flavor on his tongue, the July heat on his skin, the parents on either side, the production behind him, the tree in his body.

His father ate a red bean bar. His mother did not eat—she watched them eat with the specific satisfaction of a mother watching her family enjoy something simple after something significant.

“잘했어.” His father said it again. The repetition of the two words from Friday night. The same words, heavier now. The Saturday evening’s 잘했어 held two performances and the lastness and the tree that was more real than ever and the question that had become the answer.

“감사해요.” He said it. Not the automatic gratitude—the specific gratitude of a child thanking a parent for watching, for coming back, for seeing the tree, for saying 잘했어 twice.

They took the subway home. The late train—the Saturday night’s mixed ridership of returning families and going-out students and the specific quality of a city that was both ending and beginning at ten o’clock on a summer Saturday.

He sat between his parents. The ice cream’s stick was in his pocket—the thin wooden stick that he would throw away at home, the last physical artifact of the evening.

He thought about the production. Four weeks. Twenty-eight runs. Three audiences. One tree. Seven children. Six overlaps. One silence that grew from nothing to everything.

This is the beginning, he thought. Not the ending. The first production is the beginning of the productions. The tree that appeared in this room will appear in other rooms, in other forms, with other partners. The tree is in the body now. The body will carry it.

At home. The late evening. Notebook eighteen.

July 9, 2011. Last performances. Matinee and closing night.

He wrote: The last tree was the most real tree. The lastness sharpened everything. The question became the answer: I am here because I am here.

He wrote: Seoyeon’s looking after the last convergence. Not the seeing of the performance—the seeing of me. The personal recognition. We built something and it ended and the ending was the completion.

He wrote: My father: “It’s not over.” The production ends. The carrying begins. The tree is in the memory. The learning is in the body.

He wrote: The melon bar on the Hongdae street. The parents walking on either side. The ice cream after the tree. The ordinary after the extraordinary. This is the life that holds both.

He closed notebook eighteen.

He turned off the desk light.

He went to sleep on the first night after the production’s end—the body holding the absence of the daily rehearsal that would not resume on Monday, the body holding the presence of twenty-eight trees and one seamless overlap and one girl’s seeing and one father’s recognition and one silence that had grown until it held everything.

The body held it all and the holding was enough and the sleep came and the sleep was the first sleep of the after.