On the crowded walkway toward immigration in an unfamiliar airport, I stopped and glanced around. I heard the notes of a melody that had once cradled a clear and round world covered in snow. A sudden storm had delayed several landings, and travelers running behind schedule pushed me out of their way. Outside the airport’s glass wall, snow fell on the dark runway and lights glimmered in aircraft windows. “It’s snowing.” I spoke softly as if I’d noticed just then. The melody that only I could hear seemed to chime louder. Ever since I met Kwon Eun again, or ever since I restored the memory of what lay beyond a certain rusty, dented front door, the melody would traverse long stretches of time to reach me wherever I stood. In those moments, all I could do was peer into that world where the melody chimed. At times, the world was a freezing cold room, tiny without a kitchen or bathroom; sometimes a school field blanketed in snow on a Sunday; occasionally a sickroom with disinfectant hanging in the air. There was only ever one inhabitant—Kwon Eun.

    Last year, when Kwon Eun and I met at a book café in Ilsan after twenty years apart, I failed to recognize her. She was based in nearby Paju, and I’d arranged that meeting in Ilsan for an interview. As a news magazine writer, I had a running feature on emerging cultural voices, which was set to spotlight Kwon Eun, a young conflict zone photographer. The stories she recounted that day made a memorable and even moving impact. I was intrigued that a friend’s gift of a film camera had led her to photography, and I detected impassioned urgency in her accounts of life-and-death conflict zones.

    As the interview neared its end, heavy snowflakes drifted down outside the café window. “That won’t be stopping anytime soon,” I muttered to myself while saving the interview notes on my laptop. Kwon Eun murmured back, “The spring winds down, the melody breaks off, and the snow stops falling.” Amused by the solemn statement, I asked if it was some sort of riddle, but she smiled and said no more. We wrapped up and stepped outside, exchanged a loose handshake, and parted at a crosswalk. A few steps on my way, I glanced back and caught a side view of Kwon Eun standing still in the snowfall with her head bowed. The snow fell harder, but she showed no intent of moving. I had a fleeting urge to share my umbrella with her, but the thought of us huddling in awkward silence held me back. I turned and walked toward the subway without glancing back at her again.

    In hindsight, the things she mentioned that day—how she got into photography, the windup spring, the melody—were meant as clues. Even the way she stood stock-still in the snowfall was, to me at least, a sign. Little did I know that she was slipping me a key to a bygone time I’d forgotten.

    Sensations vanished in the order they had arrived. The melody waned, our conversation faded, and the image of her standing by the street dimmed into the distance. All that remained were white snowflakes landing on the asphalt, on her coat collar, and on her shoes. Once I gathered myself and lifted my head, snowflakes from the past dissolved into the swirling snow outside the airport’s glass wall.

    By the time I took the airport bus to midtown Manhattan, it was an hour before midnight. Blinding neon lights and digital billboards lined the streets, yet I kept losing direction as if thrown into a maze with no exit. As I wandered in search of my hotel, I had a gnawing thought that this gleaming city might be someone else’s dream. The dream of a lonely girl alone in a tiny, cold room, winding up a musical snow globe, losing herself in that wintry world, and falling asleep before tears could fall. Why was her dream so icy cold?

*

After the interview in Ilsan, I met Kwon Eun again probably on account of a snow globe. Right before she called to thank me for the magazine article, I’d been Christmas shopping for my nephew at a large retail store. Browsing through the toy aisle, I happened to see a snow globe that held all the clues to Kwon Eun’s riddle. Sidetracked from shopping, I gazed into that clear, round, windup world where a melody chimed and snowflakes flurried. Kwon Eun stood in that world, helpless in the heavy snow as if she had nowhere to go. I realized then that the image of her by the street had lingered in a corner of my mind. I can only point to the snow globe as to why, upon receiving her courtesy thank-you call, I suggested we meet for drinks. Never had I socialized after hours with an interviewee, nor had I ever felt the need. Had I not met her again and heard about Helge Hansen’s documentary Person, People, I would’ve lived my life not knowing who Kwon Eun really was.

    Now I regret nothing.

    It must have been a few days after Christmas. Year-end festivities had taken over, and there were crowds everywhere in Seoul. We met near my office at a subway station on Euljiro and headed to a local bar. Once we had beer and snacks on the table, Kwon Eun broached the unexpected news. She was leaving next week for a refugee camp in Syria, joining a volunteer group of pastors and missionaries. At a time when foreigners risked being abducted or injured amid the Syrian civil war, it could only be worrying news. But I had no right to tell her she shouldn’t go or should at least rethink it. It was up to her, and I couldn’t interfere in the career of an up-and-coming photographer I barely knew. Nor could I dash her innocent belief that a camera was all the defense she needed against danger. Besides, as a professional photographer, she’d already visited her share of conflict zones.

    “What will you photograph while you’re there?” I asked absently while downing my beer. “Why, people,” she replied. “You don’t find the tragedy of war in weapons or shattered buildings. You find it in the tears of a young widow as she applies makeup, remembering her late husband. War is about ordinary people who, if not for war, would have cried no more than you or me.” The elaborate explanation, delivered as if from a script, took me by surprise. My solemn stare cracked her up. As it turned out, those were someone else’s words. “I’m quoting Helge Hansen.” “Helge Hansen? Who’s that?” “My favorite photographer. He’s the one who inspired me to visit conflict zones.” When she heard that Hansen had filmed his first documentary, she was desperate to watch it. She combed through arthouse cinema showtimes and scoured film sites to inquire about purchasing a DVD. But the documentary never screened in Korea and wasn’t available on disc. It was a friend studying film in Japan who managed to send her a copy, letting her watch the documentary Person, People. Her interest in Hansen led her to the work, which, in turn, introduced her to a woman named Alma Meyer. “It’s strange,” said Kwon Eun. The way she put it, she and Alma Meyer were as unrelated as passengers on distinct ships in different eras, yet they somehow shared similar experiences. As if their ships had been stranded on the same island, weathering the same storm. Kwon Eun told me with a shy smile that she had written letters to Alma Meyer whenever time allowed. Something about her smile felt familiar, and as I glanced for a better look, our eyes tangled. “So you heard back from her?” I blurted, my eyes darting away as I filled her empty glass. “I post the letters on my blog, like diary entries. All in Korean, too. Since she’ll never get to read them. She died in 2009.” Stopping mid-pour, I gave her another solemn look. What was she hoping for, writing to a total stranger who was already dead? I wondered what their shared experience might have been but preferred not to pry into personal matters. The conversation moved on. It ambled along the housing crisis, the tight spot of being thirtysomethings in Korea, and other predictable topics. Instead of fading from my mind, however, Kwon Eun’s story crystallized.

    When we stepped out of the bar around 10 p.m., I told her before parting ways, “You know, I solved your riddle. About that place where the spring winds down, the melody breaks off, and the snow stops falling.” Instead of asking for the answer, she hung back as if waiting for me to go on. I joked, “Isn’t it time to outgrow toys?” but it fell flat. A cab pulled up. She climbed in while I offered a standard “Have a safe trip.” “Thank you. The camera—” “What?” The cab drove off, and I never heard the next clue. The tiny, cold room, the snow globe that stopped chiming as the light switched on, the sallow-lamped alleys that filled my eyes outside, the late autumn day I ran there with a camera clutched to my chest—these clues came to me later, one step at a time, like footprints on a snowy field.

*

The next morning, a thick fog shrouded New York. My hotel room on the ninth floor gave me a surreal view of the streets resembling an ancient city underwater, as otherworldly as an illusion suspended at the far end of eternity. Not unlike the dreamscape of Kwon Eun’s childhood nightmares, where she wandered, tearfully lost, and where her secrets lay buried, yet to be uncovered.

    I left the hotel and arrived at the Anthology Film Archives, where I saw their special screening marquee for Person, People. I’d come to the right place. On a lobby table were brochures on the documentary and photographs of the Israeli attack on Palestine in late 2008. I took a brochure and found a corner seat. According to the director’s bio, Helge Hansen had survived an airstrike on a humanitarian aid truck traveling from Egypt to Palestine in January 2009. Hansen spoke of his motivation for the documentary: “Norman Meyer’s death in the airstrike, and Alma Meyer’s loss of her only son, bears witness to individual courage battling historical violence. As a survivor, I’m duty bound to honor their sacrifices.”

    I smoothed out the brochure and slipped it into my bag, trying not to get it crumpled. I entered the screening hall. It was an early weekday, but the hall was more than half full. As I lowered my bag to settle into a seat, the lights dimmed, and I was hit by a wave of anxiety. Even as the screen lit up and the title rolled, the anxiety hardly waned. My fingers shook.

    The documentary began without any on-screen text or narration, showing countless photographs on a mosque wall in Ramallah, the Palestinian capital. As a monumental photo album, the wall displayed tattered portraits of men, women, elders, and children gazing, each in their own ways, upon the world they left behind. A young woman in a hijab staggered up to press a devout kiss on a man’s portrait. The camera lingered as if urging viewers to imagine the tears that flowed from her eyes as she prepared to pay homage to her late husband.

    The short, stirring sequence was followed by Interior footage of the aid truck. The driver and five other passengers, all in good spirits, chatted now and then; at truck stops, they held discussions hunched over a map. The footage was cut to focus mostly on Norman.

    According to the articles I’d read, Norman’s death had caught headlines in the US, leading to widespread media coverage. The violation of humanitarian law prohibiting wartime attacks on aid convoys, the death of a retired Jewish-American doctor in the attack, the revelation that he had used his own savings to purchase the aid supplies—these poignant facts seized upon the public mind and fueled speculation over their potential impact. The media glare intensified, spilling over to Norman’s mother, Alma Meyer. News outlets hounded her for interviews, and condolences poured in from all quarters except the Jewish community. Alma Meyer turned down all interviews and ignored the flood of sympathy. She refused to go out, invite guests, or take phone calls—except for Helge Hansen, the one person she met after Norman’s death. It happened after Hansen sent her the footage of Norman’s final fifteen hours, which later became Person, People.

*

Three months after my second encounter with Kwon Eun, when newspapers and broadcasters reported on her misfortune, I didn’t let it get to me. The news was startling but not a complete shock, unsettling but not enough to upset my daily life. Even if I’d tried talking her out of that trip, she would’ve left all the same. Who was I to change her mind? So went my rationale. Being newly hired at a film magazine back then, I had little time to dwell on Kwon Eun. The new job came with new workplace dynamics and new forms of writing, and it was either sink or swim. I forgot about Kwon Eun without even trying. No, maybe I did try unconsciously. I nearly succeeded.

    Kwon Eun’s name, a faint afterimage in the recesses of my memory, returned to the fore when a senior reporter quit on short notice, leaving me to take over his work. This included reporting on a New York documentary festival, and while sifting through my predecessor’s notes, I came across Helge Hansen’s Person, People. The documentary had released to much acclaim in 2010 and screened at several international film festivals that year. The New York documentary festival was now planning a special screening to mark the fifth anniversary of that unprecedented airstrike on the aid truck.

    From that day on, I kept thinking about the things Kwon Eun had told me at the Ilsan book café and Euljiro bar. I stayed at the office late into the night, digging around the internet to find everything I could about her. Memories resurfaced, not in flashes, but in sensory fragments that, one by one, flowed back from afar. The first clue was her confession that a camera gifted by a friend had led her to photography. Her second mention of the camera while climbing into the cab—that was the confirmation I needed. Whenever I revisited her world in my memory, I always saw snow. It was a clear, round world where a familiar melody chimed while snowflakes flurried. Then there was the snowy school field where we’d exchanged those dreamlike words. “A light flashes through the camera when you press the shutter.” “A light? Where does it come from?” “It’s usually hidden away, I think.” “Where?” “Well, maybe behind the wardrobe or in a desk drawer. Or an empty bottle, even.”

    Before heading on a business trip to New York, I tracked down the hospital where Kwon Eun was being treated and went to see her. It understandably took her by surprise. Despite the three surgeries to remove shrapnel from her legs, she was in danger of losing her ability to walk, but even as she broke the dismal news, her dark eyes stirred with curiosity. After a long silence, I asked, “That Fuji film camera. Do you still have it?” She fixed her eyes on me until we both broke into knowing smiles. I couldn’t bring myself to say I’d return. Before I left, she wrote her blog address on a slip of paper and handed it to me. There was a letter for me on the blog, she added, without any mention of meeting again.

    Back home, I opened my laptop and visited her blog. Under the “Letters” tab, I found twelve letters addressed to Alma Meyer and one addressed to me. I read through them all in one sitting and went for a long shower. As I toweled off before the fogged bathroom mirror, I seemed to be peering out a window into a morally nebulous world—one without clear-cut choices of right or wrong. As far as illusions went, it wasn’t half bad. But the fogging cleared. The mirror gradually revealed my reflection, and I whispered, “So tell me, are you happy now?” The nebulous world gave no reply, but from behind me came the creaking of a door handle. Without turning back, I knew. It was a rusty, dented front door. Startled to find it open, a thirteen-year-old boy blinked to adjust his eyes to the dark, his timid voice asking, “Does . . . K . . . Kwon Eun live here?”

*

On screen, Alma Meyer explains her long spell of seclusion. “I couldn’t stand the people who hailed Norman as a ‘beacon of conscience’ or ‘the last hope for Jews.’ They brandished lofty labels, thinking this would hide their inaction and make them advocates for justice—self-delusional posturing in my eyes. No different from ignoring the things you could’ve known and using that willing ignorance to wash yourself of blame. I remember all the non-Jews who were morally incensed by the Holocaust only after the war. It didn’t anger me. Then, as now, it deadened me instead. A deadening disillusionment, that’s what it was.”

    The scene cuts to her past. Born In 1916 In Belgium, Alma Meyer trains to become a violinist and overcomes the double discrimination of sexism and anti-Semitism to join the Brussels Philharmonic in 1938. Dismissed from the orchestra in 1940 following the Jewish registration law, she is in danger of being deported to a ghetto or death camp. Her lover Jean, a fellow member of the orchestra who plays the horn, arranges a hideout for Alma in the cellar of his cousin’s grocery shop, located just outside Brussels.

    Morning or midday, the windowless cellar stays pitch dark unless a lamp is lit. At times, even with her eyes open, mirages unfold as if in a dream. She blinks hard. Her eyes are always met with an unfamiliar street. Only one shop has its lights on—the instrument shop. Slowly, she pushes the door open, and fellow musicians from the past welcome her back. They each sit before their instruments and strike up lively waltzes and marches, beaming as their eyes meet. “No more pain—so long as we live, all pain is meant to be soothed and healed,” they seem to whisper. She basks in the music until another blink of the eye chases away all traces of melody, musicians, and smiles. Every time the sweet vision fades, she is lonelier and more desolate. Her lips move in her sleep as she dreams of feasting on her mother’s warm food. Once awake, she is chilled by the unbearable sense of standing alone on a windswept wasteland. Jean comes by every two weeks with water and a basket of bread, but there is never enough to last a fortnight since he is as destitute as everyone else during wartime. The basket is sparsely filled, but Jean never forgets to line the bottom with a page of his original sheet music. On days when she sees the instrument shop bathed in light, she takes out her violin and holds the bow a safe distance away from the strings. She performs the sheet music without a sound. On a stage unlit, unapplauded, and silent.

    “To me, spending every day as I did in that cellar with only death on my mind, Jean’s sheet music was the light that sustained my dreams of a future. I can say that the sheet music saved my life.”

    After telling the long story, Alma Meyer gently lifts her head with the flicker of a smile—the one and only smile of the interview. In the dark screening hall, I smile with her.

*

“Does . . . K . . . Kwon Eun live here?”

    The door opened, but reluctant to step inside, I kept repeating the question. The rusty, dented front door led directly into a dark room, where the only light came from a clear, round snow globe. My visit to the tiny, cold room without sunlight had nothing to do with my own will. I’d been class representative at the time, and when Kwon Eun missed four days of school without notice, the homeroom teacher asked me, along with the vice rep, to check on her at home. Once we left the teacher’s office, the vice rep said she couldn’t go because of a piano lesson. Setting out alone, I followed the street address written on a slip of paper and came upon that front door. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I finally saw Kwon Eun wrapped in a worn-out overcoat and blanket. She stood up to reach a switch, and just as the fluorescent bulb flickered on, the snow globe’s melody wound down and stopped.

    The room had no kitchen or bathroom. The single hot plate, kettle, and plastic basin holding toiletries revealed the room’s many functions. I couldn’t begin to fathom how she, a thirteen-year-old, kept herself fed and alive in that cold, impoverished room. She told me that her dad, the only family she had, would disappear for anywhere between a month and half a year at a time. “Keep it a secret,” she added, offering me a glass of water. “I’m not an orphan. I won’t let anyone put me in a home.” Not knowing what to say, I swallowed the tap water that tasted of chlorine. I grimaced and set the glass down. “Okay.” With that, I scurried out of the room. The next day, I reported that Kwon Eun was sick. It wasn’t a complete lie. The young, newly appointed teacher didn’t bat an eye. As for me, I was haunted by the idea of Kwon Eun dying in that room. It smothered me. On some days, I heard voices—classmates murmuring that she died because of me.

    Without being told, I went back to revisit Kwon Eun a few times. Not that I had any real plan. I simply hated the stifling anxiety and whispers. I had nothing to bring her except odds and ends—half-read comic books and batteries for the snow globe. “You should go. I’m okay.” Despite the awkwardness of being with a girl, I’d hesitate to leave until she’d reassure me with those words.

    Once I emerged from her room and took the narrow path sloping down toward the road, the surroundings would blur as if they didn’t belong to this world—sallow streetlights, kids scuttling into alleys, communal toilets with broken doors, dirty toilet bowls peeking through the cracks, and a beastly bulldozer crouching in an empty lot. The plywood and concrete shanties teetering on that hillside were half torn down. I, like Kwon Eun, was only thirteen. I had no answer to the cold and hunger she endured in that derelict shanty town. When I discovered the Fuji film camera in my parents’ closet, I clutched it to my chest and ran to see Kwon Eun—it seemed like the perfect item to pawn for a wad of cash. To my surprise, she never sold the camera. But of course. The camera was more than a mechanical device. It was her gateway to another world. She would have loved the magic of pressing the shutter and watching light pour out from every corner to embrace a photographic subject. Once the shutter closed and all the light vanished, would she have mirrored Alma Meyer in feeling lonelier and more desolate? Like scenes beyond a picture frame, those details lie out of my reach.

    Perhaps forever.

    Kwon Eun used the Fuji camera to photograph objects in her room. She ventured outside in search of more scenes to capture and then eventually returned to school. Once she came back to class, I never reached out or even spoke to her. I didn’t want others to think we were close since she was that girl who always wore the same clothes. She mostly ignored me as well. We never became friends, but we each kept each other’s secret. I didn’t tell a soul that Kwon Eun was practically an orphan, and she pretended not to know I’d stolen my dad’s camera. Weeks before winter break, I heard she was moving away to live with a relative. Rumor had it that her dad had been found dead in a junkyard near a gambling den, but no one knew for sure.

    A long time passes, and Kwon Eun writes a letter to Alma Meyer, who no longer has a worldly address. She recounts that nearly every night in that room where her dad rarely returns, she has the same nightmare. Wary of seeing it again, she winds up the snow globe until her eyelids droop, then gazes into the snowy world for one last minute and thirty seconds. During the final notes of the melody, she pulls the blanket over her head and squeezes her eyes shut. In the nightmare, I wander a strange, unfamiliar city, calling for Mom as I jolt awake. It never changes. After writing this much, Kwon Eun falls silent. I keep silent with her. Only after a few days does she reenter the blog and slowly continue. One day, I bowed against the cold wall in desperate prayer. I prayed that the clockwork running this tiny room would stop, so I could stop breathing. That was my only prayer until I received a camera. So . . . The sentence following “so” is repeated in the only letter written to me. In it, she calls me “Rep.” Though twenty-odd years have passed, she admits to being hurt that I don’t recognize her, but she is also somewhat relieved. She asks, Rep, what is the greatest thing a person can do? I shrug. Someone once said, “To save a life is the greatest thing, an honor given to few.” So . . . whatever happens to me, remember that your gift of a camera once saved my life. Yours, Eun. The letter was saved on the day we met for drinks. She thanked me in parting, and as her cab weaved through the festive streets of Seoul, she decided to write a useful letter for once—one to be read someday by a person still alive.

*

It wasn’t until 1943 that Alma Meyer left the cellar. Warned that she’d been reported to the German police, Jean assisted her again in another escape. She followed him to Switzerland, where they parted at a border town. Her heart was beating with Norman’s by then, but being unaware, she couldn’t tell Jean. She embarked on a US-bound steamship, at which point severe seasickness in steerage alerted her of Norman’s presence. Upon arriving at Ellis Island in November 1943, she immediately sold her rare violin, an erstwhile extension of her body. With that money, she secured lodgings and provided for herself during the pregnancy. Five whole years after the war, she heard news that Jean was alive. He had married and started a family, which held her back from sending word of her survival and Norman’s birth. The way she saw it, Jean had outdone himself for her sake and at great risk. She chose not to upend his life again. More out of human courtesy than an ex-lover’s pride.

    Until she recieved Helge Hansen’s video, she had no clue that Norman had followed Jean’s life from afar. For nearly three decades, Norman had been hiring the services of a private detective agency in outer New York that secretly gathered information. Norman visited the agency once every month or so for updates on Jean’s latest news, and he occasionally received photographs. He drew the line there, never revealing his existence to Jean and never making contact by letter or phone. While he didn’t agree with his mother’s sense of human courtesy, he honored her decision. He also believed that some things were truer than actual truth. In 2007, he received his last report on Jean—photos of his funeral and a funeral company’s booklet with the address of his grave. “I’m sorry, Norman.” The detective, who had aged with him over the years, offered Norman a cigarette. After the smoke, Norman left the office and walked aimlessly past his car in the lot. Jean Verne, a Belgian of French descent, a man who dreamed of being a composer yet never published his work, an unknown horn player who never performed solo and lost his provincial orchestra job in his forties . . . Recalling thirty years’ worth of these facts, Norman made a vow.

    “I vowed to repeat the greatest thing he ever did—saving a woman from wretched death in war. To save a life is the greatest thing, an honor given to few. You see, I’m an old man now. Before I get any older, I’d like to celebrate his legacy by doing as he did.”

    Those words are followed by solemn silence in the aid truck. The camera zooms in on each face, one by one, then slowly pulls back. The screen fades to black. Before complete darkness sets in, an ear-splitting blast strikes the viewers, thundering through the theater. The house lights switch on and the end credits roll—but my ears ring as if still absorbing the explosion and its grim aftermath. The last two names, Norman Meyer and Alma Meyer, appear next to their exact dates of birth and death. The latter died at home two months after the director’s interview. The clockwork running their worlds stopped in 2009.

    The credits run their course, but I stay with my eyes fixed on the screen until someone taps me on the back. I turn around to find a middle-aged woman with cleaning tools. Only then do I notice the empty screening hall. I grab my bag and hurry out of the building. Fog had given way to the dazzling winter sun, bathing the street in light.

*

I slowly enter the shimmering streets of Manhattan. After passing a few blocks and turning a corner, I see it. My jaw drops. There it is, absorbing all the sunlight—an instrument shop window. I draw closer. Inside the shop, there are instruments of all kinds on display, including a violin and a horn. Had Kwon Eun been with me, she would have pictured Alma Meyer and Jean Verne playing music on those instruments. Rapt in imaginings, blinking hard yet guarded by light . . . Of course. Now I know. The spring winds down and the snow stops, but some melodies still chime in that world and even cross into new worlds, breathing life into lost memories.

    I look down at my feet.

    As the snow starts melting, the carved footprints fade. Several steps ahead, I see Kwon Eun’s small back hunched over the ground. We’re the only ones on that snowy school field one Sunday afternoon. I step closer and see that she’s holding the Fuji camera up to a set of footprints left behind. “What are you doing?” Those are my first words to Kwon Eun since her return to school. Startled, she looks up away from the camera, then huffs, “What are you doing here?” I explain, “My parents have guests over, and there’s nowhere else to go. But really, what are you doing?” Instead of answering, she motions for me to come next to her. I hesitate but then huddle up. She points to the faint outline of a footprint. “There’s light in there. They’re like small boats of light, don’t you think?” “Huh . . . I guess.” “Hidden here, too.” “What is?” “A light flashes through the camera when you press the shutter.” “A light? Where does it come from?” Once I show interest, she faces me with a glow I’ve never seen before.

    She doesn’t reply yet, but I already know. I remember it all—the fleeting moment when flashes of light, usually tucked away behind the wardrobe, in a desk drawer or even an empty bottle, burst forth to embrace a photographic subject when the shutter is pressed, the thrilling sense of being briefly transported to another world when taking a photo. Kwon Eun tells the story I already know. Sunbeams reflect from the shop window and shine all their light on her. 

Translated by Sunnie Chae