by Seong-nan Ha
When Jason stopped for a moment to catch his breath, I mustered every last ounce of energy and sat up, swinging the razor. Jason clutched his chin and backed away. I got up and ran blindly out the front door. My legs moved on their own accord, independently, like a squirming octopus that had been chopped to pieces. The only thought in my head was to live. I swung the razor at Chang, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. He scrambled out. I got behind the wheel and locked the doors. I gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the accelerator. Jason’s car sprang forward and headed straight for the fence. It upset me to run over the flowers I had tended so carefully.
I rammed into the fence and burst onto the road. For about ten minutes, I zigzagged along at top speed. I wasn’t used to driving with the steering wheel on the right side. Cars sounded their horns and kept their distance.
In the end, the yellow sports car leapt onto the sidewalk, hit a fire hydrant, and came to a stop. Water sprayed from the hydrant like a fountain. I heard the approaching sirens.
I was kept in the hospital for three days because of dehydration. Jason came to see me. He had a big scar on his chin. He said the whole thing had been a big misunderstanding, that they had been planning to take me to the hospital. I didn’t divulge to the police what had actually happened. I had played my last hand. Jason knew it, too. I was able to return to Korea.
Shortly after my return, Jason’s parents came to see me. They had known all along. Jason’s mother wept. “So he hasn’t changed …”
Jason’s father, who seethed with anger, didn’t say a single word. Until Jason would marry a woman once more, he would receive no financial support from his parents. He had never made a living on his own.
•
A year has passed since then.
Every morning at seven-thirty, I get on the subway in Seoul, famous for its crowds, and go to work. There aren’t many pharmacies willing to take on new female pharmacists well past thirty. My friend owns the small pharmacy where I work now, but I’m just filling in for her while she’s on maternity leave.
Whenever I find myself rocking back and forth on the packed subway car, I wonder: If I hadn’t opened the door that night, would our marriage have carried on?
In the end, I couldn’t tell my parents the truth. I couldn’t tell my friends either. Our marriage had lasted nineteen months. They would have said, “You were so close—why didn’t you just hang on for another five months?” Just as I had before marriage, I went back home once a month to visit my parents. On the hill behind their house, a new sapling was beginning to grow from the princess tree stump.
The divorce was finalized during that time, and I talked to Jason only once on the phone. He asked for my address in order to send me the wardrobe. He mentioned he’d grown a beard, that he’d needed to cover up the nasty scar on his chin. Eventually, Jason will marry another woman in order to receive his parents’ help. His parents, too, will refuse to give up. These things will repeat themselves.
Exactly a month and a half later, the wardrobe arrived. The five movers struggled in the narrow entrance and steep staircase, and demanded that I pay extra. An older mover was eager to share his expertise. “There’s no way princess tree wood is this heavy. I don’t know where you got this made, but I guarantee they pulled a switch-eroo on you.”
I had no energy to go to the factory to confirm whether what the mover said was true.
This time, I didn’t bother to tell them to be careful. There were already ugly gashes on the wardrobe, especially right above the keyhole where the knife had gone in, and inside were scratches from my fingernails and deep gouges from the belt buckle. There was also a dark, discolored spot. Probably from when I’d wet myself. The drawers still didn’t slide out smoothly. In the top drawer were my journals and graduation album, just as I’d left them.
When the wardrobe was placed inside my bedroom, there wasn’t enough space for even a twin bed, so it had to be moved to another room. I thought then the wardrobe would have been better at eight feet.
By noon, the sun streams in through the pharmacy window. I doze off, my arms folded on the glass counter filled with antibiotic ointments, mouthwashes, and birth control pills. Then the living room of a white wooden house brimming with light spreads before my eyes.
The trolleybus. Parnell Village lined with its quaint, Victorian-style restaurants and boutiques. The bumpy hills of Auckland. The Waitemata Harbour and the Hauraki Gulf, teeming with yachts. When these scenes sparkle outside the window of the pharmacy, I think long and hard, and wonder where my life went wrong.
Flies
There was an unusual amount of gravel. He could feel every rock through the thin soles of his tennis shoes. He slipped and stumbled repeatedly. He stopped to light his cigarette, as well as to rest his legs. Everywhere he looked was gravel.
The bathroom at the bus terminal didn’t even have urinals. He stepped onto the cement ledge and finally relieved himself on the cement wall, which was encrusted with yellow and white stains. When he looked out the small window and saw his bus pulling away from the terminal, he rushed out without even zipping himself up, but the bus was already beyond reach.
He paid for a bottle of soju and a pack of cigarettes at a nearby corner store, and waited at a table under an umbrella set out along the gravel path. His plastic chair rocked on the uneven surface. An elderly woman in baggy nylon pants brought over a bottle of the local soju and some coarsely chopped cubes of radish kimchi. The soju wasn’t the brand he liked. He drank straight from the bottle. He’d better get used to the taste anyway.
In one corner of the backroom sat a pile of cotton work gloves. As the owner mended a hole in a fingertip, she asked listlessly if there was anything else he needed. Bits of loose thread clung to her tired, frizzy hair.
“When’s the next bus to Ungok-ri?”
She bit off the thread and motioned with her chin in the direction the bus had gone. He couldn’t make out her words whenever she bit off some thread, but the gist was that he’d just missed the last bus, and the next one wasn’t coming until early morning, so he should get a room, and if he was interested, she knew a decent place.
He swung his backpack over his shoulder and set out blindly down the road the bus had taken. The woman came outside to wipe the table.
“You plan to walk?” she shot toward his back. “The sun’s gonna set soon. Like I said, there’s no other place to spend the night except here.”
The rice paddies were brimming with water, and the bean and sesame fields were green. After walking on the gravel road for half an hour, he wished he’d listened to the woman. He’d come across only one boy herding a pair of black goats. Even from afar, the boy had been able to tell he was a stranger and had kept his distance.
He sat down by the side of the road to have a smoke. He wasn’t in a hurry. And nothing was waiting for him in Seoul. He peered at the furrows, dried up from the recent drought. It grew dark quickly in the mountains.
Just as he was settling into a furrow for the night, he glimpsed a set of headlights bobbing through the dark. He jumped up and ran toward them. He forced his cramped legs to move. He stood in the middle of the road, blocking the pickup truck’s path.
“You headed to Ungok-ri by any chance?” he asked.
From out of the glare came a man’s voice. “No, we’re going to Maehyang-ri.”
He slowly moved out of the way. The truck pulled up next to him. The window rolled down to reveal the driver’s face. He smelled faintly of alcohol.
“We’ve got to pass through Ungok-ri, though,” the driver added. “But there’s no room up here in the front, as you can see.”
A woman and her two boys were squeezed in the passenger seat. She had her arm around the smaller one, his limbs splayed limply as if he were in a deep sleep. Judging by the boys’ age, the woman was probably in her early thirties at most, but without a trace of makeup she looked over forty. Her eyelids were puffy, as if she’d been sleeping as well. Her small,
suspicious eyes flicked over him. He was no stranger to those kinds of looks. When she found him staring back, she hurriedly repositioned the child on her lap.
The back of the truck was loaded with all kinds of odds and ends. He sat squeezed in between pesticide containers and some plastic plates. The truck had to go slowly because of the gravel. Rocks flew out from under the tires like oil splattering from a hot pan, while some popped out unpredictably, scattering in all directions. When the truck rolled over big rocks, the man bounced into the air. His tailbone grew sore.
If the driver were to lose his grip on the steering wheel for even a second, the truck would dash straight into the paddies. He kept a firm grasp on the wheel and glanced into the rearview mirror at the 14-inch window between the front seat and the back of the truck. The man was sitting with his back toward the driver, his shoulders filling the rearview mirror.
He wasn’t very tall, but he was stocky with a short, thick neck. He had grabbed onto the side of the truck bed and swung himself into the back in one motion. He was now smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the paddies and bean fields buried in darkness. The driver rolled down his window halfway and shouted at the top of his lungs, “So what’s your business in Ungok-ri?”
The man twisted around and just laughed toward the window.
“I’m a farmer in Maehyang-ri,” the driver said. “We used to live in Seoul. It’s been four years since we left.”
The wife glared at her husband. “Why’d you pick up a complete stranger? Who knows what kind of person he is?”
“Well, did you expect me to just leave him back there in the middle of nowhere?” the driver hissed in a whisper, in case the man should hear. “How could I pull something dirty like that?”
Ungok-ri was submerged in fog—fog so thick it was impossible to see more than a meter ahead. The driver switched off the headlights and turned on his hazards. He put the truck in low gear, crawling to a stop in front of some flickering lights.
“We’re here.”
From the back came a soft thud as the man’s feet hit the ground. In an instant, he was standing by the driver’s window. He raised his hand in a salute and disappeared into the fog. The words Building a Just Society on the back of his jacket were barely visible in the faint light.
The woman looked at her husband and muttered, “‘Building a Just Society’? See? I knew something wasn’t right.”
“Keep your mouth shut—you don’t know anything,” he snapped, as he turned the truck toward Maehyang-ri. “You ever see a thief walk into a police station to turn himself in? Jeez, you’re slow. Can’t you tell? He’s obviously the new police officer—the police, woman.”
He turned his head and spat. His saliva dropped onto the window instead. “Why is this place always so goddamned foggy? I wonder why he had to leave Seoul to come to this hole.”
“So you think he was pushed out of Seoul?”
“Did you forget we were pushed out, too?” he berated her, checking both side mirrors. “If you can’t stop talking, tell me if there’s anything on that side.”
Their son started to whimper, startled awake by his father’s voice.
•
In the police station, an officer on night duty was boiling some instant noodles for a late-night snack. The man pushed open the door, letting in the fog. The officer seemed to have been expecting him. He stuck out his hand in greeting, still gripping the chopsticks he’d stirred the noodles with; then he burst into laughter and hurriedly transferred the chopsticks to the other hand.
“The name’s Lim,” the officer said. His hand was moist, but he had a solid grip. The police chief had already gone home.
Three metal desks and two filing cabinets lined two walls of the station. On a third wall was a map. Maehyang-ri, where the truck driver lived, was located northwest of Ungok-ri. Surrounded by mountains, Ungok-ri was made up of a number of villages, each a cluster of about a dozen houses. There was a bridge over a stream that flowed southeast. The farmer’s truck was probably crossing the bridge at that very moment. The rest of the map was marked here and there with the “” sign—most likely all fields.
“What’s there to see?” Officer Lim said, slurping his noodles. “It’s just paddies and fields. This town’s just like this pot. We’re basically buried in between the mountains, and when the fog rolls in, we’re stuck inside as it boils. Still, this place has everything a man needs, if you know what I mean. You can’t tell from the map, of course, but you’ll see when the fog clears.” Lim snickered, and then choked on his laughter.
The man unpacked in the night-duty room attached to the station. There was just enough space for an average-sized man to lie down. There was no furniture, and instead of hooks there were some nails hammered into the slate wall. He took off his jacket and hung it on a nail, but it was loose, and both nail and jacket fell to the floor. A grimy pillow and quilt sat folded in the corner. The pillow smelled of cheap hair product. Once he lay down, he saw through the small window a naked bulb dangling from a ginkgo tree.
At a little past nine, all was quiet outside. He heard a clatter through the wall; it seemed Officer Lim was rinsing out the pot. The small town was a far cry from Seoul, where he’d been until that morning; he felt as if he’d crossed over into a different dimension. He imagined walking down a Seoul street flashing with neon signs. There, he couldn’t stop walking for even a second to light a cigarette, for example, because people would bump into him from behind. Seoul was filled with noise, and drunk men were dragged into the police station all night long. Dozens of incidents were reported every day. But at the Ungok-ri station, the phone didn’t ring at all; he hadn’t heard it once in the past half hour. The place was graveyard-quiet. He closed his eyes, but the quiet kept him awake. He pulled out a notebook from his backpack. The pages, covered with writing, curled up at the edges. Lying on his stomach with the pillow under his chest, he wrote by the light of the bulb that came in through the window. He scrawled down a few words and then erased the whole thing. He heard the first bus as it rolled into town. Only then was he able to fall asleep.
•
The night-duty room was only a temporary lodging place; he couldn’t expect to stay there forever. There were thirteen houses in the village of Cheongbong. The houses were simple, not all that different from the way they looked on the map, like something kindergarten children might draw using squares and trapezoids. People lived under tile roofs, and cows and pigs lived under tin roofs. They arrived at the house Officer Lim had recommended. Nailed to one of the gnarled wooden posts was a nameplate engraved with Chinese characters.
“Doesn’t matter how many times I look, they all look the same to me,” Lim muttered, peering at the Chinese characters. He then glanced at the man and laughed. “Everyone in this village is from the same clan, so they all have the same family name. On top of that, their first names are so similar it gets really confusing.”
The gate was wide open, but no one was home. Officer Lim strode into the courtyard. Pollack were hung out to dry on the clothesline that cut across the yard, their mouths strung together with a nylon cord. Officer Lim pushed open a door as though it were his own house.
“These people can’t sit still for a minute. They must’ve gotten tired of waiting for us and headed out to the back fields.”
While Officer Lim went to find the owners, the man peered around the house. Every piece of furniture was old and shabby. He walked back out to the yard where the pollack hung. He caught a whiff of something foul. Although the fish were split down the middle to dry, and held apart with a bamboo skewer, the parts deep inside where the sunlight couldn’t reach were rotting. Something writhed and squirmed within the crevices. Maggots. The bellies of all twelve pollack were teeming with fat little maggots that bulged and shrank ceaselessly as they ate through the fish. Some had squirmed out and clung to the scales.
The husband and wife were holding hoes, the blades covered in dirt. They wore towels over their wide-brimmed viso
rs, so that everything above the nose was buried in shadow. The man felt their eyes move over him from within the shadows. Officer Lim must have filled them in already. The woman finally spoke, pushing open the bedroom door closest to the front gate.
“I hear you’re from Seoul. I’m not too sure the food will be to your liking. Don’t know when you plan on heading back, but make yourself at home while you’re here.”
She said the room had belonged to their eldest son, who had left for the big city. All that remained was a low desk and a few books.
The couple was rarely home during the day. Their bedroom light came on briefly in the evening and went out shortly after.
When the man returned from night duty, he would stay up for a little while and then go to bed late, waking up past noon. Set out on the wooden floor of the living room was his meal tray, consisting of rice—the ceramic bowl painted with the Chinese character signifying long life—kimchi, marinated greens, and pickled pollack. The clothesline was bare except for two pairs of coveralls. Recalling the pollack that had been writhing with maggots, he stayed well away from the fish. The maggots had probably matured into flies by now, soiling the walls of some house with dung. When the pollack went untouched for a few days, it ended up going to the pigs.
The streets remained empty during the day. Once in a while, teahouse girls sauntered along, carrying flasks and teacups wrapped in cloth. On his way to work and back, he saw people squatting in the fields, pulling out weeds. If their eyes happened to meet, they awkwardly got to their feet and nodded to him.
Even the path from his rented room to the station was entirely of gravel. Who had brought and laid it all? With each passing day, he grew used to walking on the rocks and his calves grew stronger.