Bridges Of =

The house I was born in was near the Hangang Bridge. On June 28, 1950, the bridge was blasted by the South Korean Army to deter the advancing North Korean troops. Many refugees fleeing the city fell to their death as the bridge collapsed. Our house is no longer there, but it persists in my memory. It speaks to me in a language only the homesick understand. My mother tells me that, as soon as I could walk, I reveled, walking on the bridge. I grew up listening to the rippling laments of the bridge. As children, my sister and I believed that angels flew down from the sky to bathe inside the hollow legs of the bridge. The angels sang as they bathed. That’s how we knew they were inside the legs. Sometimes, we waited till dusk on the sandbank, where we played, to catch a glimpse of the departing angels.

= Taedong Bridge = Glienicker Brücke = Hangang Bridge =

Before I was born, when my mother was pregnant with my older brother, she dipped into Han River and floated about. She was not exactly a swan, but she might as well have been because she looked so happy then, her eyebrows drawn so far apart. I must repeat that swans have nothing to do with S or T, for that matter. I think of Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang, North Korea, as my father’s bridge. He stood on it sometime in the late fall of 1950, during the Korean War. When my father was dispatched to Pyongyang to photograph the city, he walked up to the old Angel’s pagoda, which gave him an angel’s eye view of the city. Angel’s panorama O beautiful! The gate the river the bridge O marvelous! Angels are waving to us. My father couldn’t help being overwhelmed by the beauty of the panorama of Pyongyang despite the fact that the whole city had been bombed to the ground. Craters are formed, and the impression of traveling on the moon is born. An aerial view reveals that the angels are, in fact, gooks in white pajamas, normal for the daytime.

= Swan = Eiserner Steg = Langenscheidtbrücke =

Langenscheidtbrücke is above the rail tracks, legless, yet the angels still bathed in evening dew, singing and crying, perched on nearby trees as if they had been waiting for me. Sparrow, what took you so long? How was it that they could speak the rippling language of my childhood? How did they know to wave? That I would return? Spree O beautiful! The gate the library the TV tower O marvelous! The overwhelming beauty of Berlin’s panorama. I owe it entirely to wings of utopia.



 

= Damiel = Homer = Albert Camus =