by Han Kang
These days she goes every Wednesday to see how her sister is getting on, but before that rainy day when Yeong-hye went missing, once a month had seemed sufficient. She had walked this road carrying all manner of snacks—fruit, rice cakes, fried tofu stuffed with vinegared rice. It was desolate, with no sign of either vehicles or pedestrians. When she spread out the food on the table in the visiting room, Yeong-hye would silently go through the motions of chewing and swallowing, like a child diligently tackling homework. If she tucked Yeong-hye’s hair behind her ears, her sister would look up at her and smile quietly. These were the moments when there might have been nothing at all the matter, the moments that never failed to lighten her heart. Might it be okay, after all, for Yeong-hye to live like this indefinitely? Here, where she didn’t have to speak if she didn’t want to, didn’t have to eat meat if the thought repulsed her? Couldn’t the two of them get along just fine with these occasional visits?
Yeong-hye was four years younger than her, enough of an age gap for them not to have been in competition with each other growing up. As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father, and Yeong-hye had provoked in In-hye a sense of responsibility that resembled maternal affection, a need to expend all her energy in looking out for this younger sister. She had watched, marveling, as this same sister, once up to her elbows in the dirt and suffering from a recurring heat rash on the backs of her knees, grew up and got married. The one thing that caused her distress was that, as she got older, Yeong-hye became more and more taciturn. She’d always had this side to her, of course, but she had also been perfectly cheerful and sociable when the occasion called for it. Somehow—not suddenly, but over a period of time—she became difficult to read. So difficult that there were times when she seemed like a total stranger.
A day or two after Ji-woo was born, when Yeong-hye came to the hospital to say hello to her first nephew, rather than congratulating her sister she had simply muttered to herself, “I’ve never seen such a tiny child…so this is what they’re like when they’ve just been born?”
There’d been something faintly unsettling about the quiet smile playing around Yeong-hye’s mouth. What seemed to be happening was that Yeong-hye was retreating from herself, becoming as distant to herself as she was to her sister. A forlorn face, behind a mask of composure. This was clearly nothing like the melancholy that sometimes afflicted her husband, and yet in certain respects they were both baffling to her in exactly the same way. They were both descending further into silence.
—
She enters the tunnel. It’s darker inside than usual, on account of the weather. She closes her umbrella and walks. She listens to the ringing echoes of her footsteps. A large speckled moth, a type she’s never seen before, flutters up off the surface of the wall, into a darkness saturated with damp. She pauses for a while, looks up at its beating wings. But on the pitch-black tunnel ceiling, the moth stays put, as though conscious of being observed.
Her husband liked to film flying things. Birds, butterflies, airplanes, moths, flies. These scenes of flight, which he always seemed to have inserted into a piece despite an apparent lack of connection to the overall subject, had confused her. She was a layperson when it came to art. Once, she’d asked him why he’d included a particular scene, a two-second clip of the black shadow of a bird soaring slowly up into the air, which he’d put after a scene of a ruined bridge and people crying at a funeral.
“Just because” had been his answer. “I just ended up putting it in. I put it in and I thought it looked good.”
And then that familiar silence.
Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work, in his video art. In fact, before she met him, she hadn’t even been aware that such a field of art existed. Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.
She remembers the late afternoon when they first met. He’d come into her shop, skinny as a sorghum stalk and with several days’ worth of stubble on his face, a camcorder bag slung over one shoulder that was clearly weighing him down. He searched out some shaving lotion, brought it to the counter and rested both arms on the glass, looking utterly worn out. He looked like he might collapse, and take the counter with him. It was faintly miraculous the way she, having had practically no romantic experiences up until then, came out with a friendly “Have you had lunch?” As if surprised, but lacking the energy required to express that surprise, he had merely fixed her face with his exhausted gaze. Something in his defenseless state had drawn her to him.
What she’d wanted, from that afternoon, had been to use her own strength to allow him to rest. But despite devoting herself wholeheartedly to this goal, even after they were married he still looked perpetually worn out. He was always busy with his own things, and during what little time he did spend at home he looked more like a traveler putting up there for a night than a man in his own home. His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber, particularly when his art wasn’t going well.
It wasn’t long before she realized something: perhaps the one she’d so earnestly wanted to help was not him but herself. Was it not perhaps her own image—she who had left home at nineteen and gone on to make a life for herself in Seoul, always entirely under her own steam—that she had seen mirrored in this man’s exhaustion?
Just as she could not be certain of the source of her affection for him, or if he was really its true object, she had never been entirely sure of his feelings for her. He often seemed to rely on her, being the type for whom daily life was a constant struggle, full of potential pitfalls. He was honest to the point of seeming naive; exaggeration or flattery was entirely beyond him. But to her he was always kind, never once raised his voice in anger, and indeed would sometimes give her a look of great respect.
“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are—the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…”
Respect—that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was nothing even remotely resembling love?
Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images—those he’d filmed, or then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film. The first time she went to one of his exhibitions, after they were married, she was taken aback; she couldn’t believe that this man, who had looked as though he might be about to collapse, had carted his camcorder around all these various places, with all the difficulties that must have involved. Indeed, it was hard for her even to imagine how he’d managed to negotiate to be allowed to film in sensitive places, the courage and sheer nerve he must at times have had to display, the patient perseverance that seemed so at odds with everything she knew about him. What it all came down to was that she just couldn’t believe he’d been sufficiently passionate about the project to put himself through all that.
There was one time that stuck in her memory. It had been a little after Ji-woo’s first birthday, when the boy was just beginning to walk. Her husband had used his camcorder to film Ji-woo tottering around the sunny living room. He’d filmed Ji-woo suddenly being scooped up into her arms, her lips pressed to the crown of the boy’s head.
“Every time Ji-woo takes another step,” he said, his eyes sparkling with life yet somehow inscrutable, “how about I make an animation so flowers spring up from his footsteps, like in that Hayao Miyazaki film? No, not flowers, butterflies would be better. Ah, in that case we should film it again, on a lawn.”
He showed her how to operate the camcorder, played back the scenes he’d just filmed, all while rattling on excitedly about his ideas for the piece.
“You and he’ll have to wear white clothes. No, wait, how about if the clothes were re
ally shabby, old and worn? Yes, yes, of course, that’s it. A poor mother and child on an outing, the multicolored butterflies that fly up like a miracle every time the baby takes an unsteady step…”
But they didn’t have a lawn, plus Ji-woo soon grew out of the unsteady tottering phase. The video of butterflies flying up from the child’s footsteps never became a reality.
From a certain point onward he began to work himself even harder than before. He shut himself up in the studio, not even coming home in the evenings or at weekends, and yet he never seemed to have anything to show for it. He wandered the streets until his sneakers turned black. Sometimes, when she woke in the early hours and went into the bathroom, she was startled to find him there, curled up in the empty bathtub, still in his clothes, and sound asleep.
After her husband left them, Ji-woo would often ask her, “Is there a dad in our family?” It was the question he’d asked her every morning even when her husband was still around, so infrequently did the boy actually see him.
“No,” she would answer shortly. And then, soundlessly: “No one at all. There’s only you and me. That will have to be enough, now.”
—
In the rain, the hospital buildings stand dreary and forlorn. Their gray concrete walls appear darker and more solid than usual. The wards on the first and third floors have iron bars over the windows. Many of the patients liked to stick their faces between the bars; on bright days it was difficult to make them out, but with the weather like this several gray faces could be seen staring out at the rain. She glances up briefly, to the windows of Yeong-hye’s third-floor ward annex, then walks inside and heads toward reception.
“I’ve got an appointment to see Dr. Park In-ho.”
The receptionist greets her, recognizing her from previous visits. She closes her dripping umbrella and secures the tie around it, then sits down on a long wooden bench. While she waits for the doctor to come down from the consultation room, she turns to look at the zelkova tree that stands in the hospital’s front garden. The tree is clearly very old, easily four hundred years. On bright days it would spread its countless branches and let the sunlight scintillate its leaves, seemingly communicating something to her. Today, a day sodden and stupefied with rain, it is reticent, and keeps its thoughts unspoken. The old bark on its lower part is dark as a drenched evening, and the leaves tremble silently on the twigs as the raindrops batter down on them. And she sees her sister’s face, flickering like a ghostly afterimage overlaid on the silent scene.
She closes her bloodshot eyes for a long time before opening them again. The tree fills her field of vision, still silent, keeping its own counsel. Still she cannot sleep. It’s been three months straight now, three months of getting by snatching pockets of sleep here and there, never more than an hour at any one time. Yeong-hye’s voice, the forest with the black rain falling, and her own face with the blood trickling from her eye, shiver the long night into fragments like potsherds.
Usually, when she has given up on trying to wring any more sleep out of the night, it is around three in the morning. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, prepares some side dishes, cleans and tidies every corner of the house, and still the clock goes as slow as ever, the shifting of the hands like the almost comically suspended movements of some ponderous dance. In the end she goes into his room and listens to some of the records he left behind, or puts her hand on her back and spins herself around the room as he once had, or curls up in the bathtub with her clothes on and even feels, for the first time, as though he mightn’t have been so incomprehensible after all. He probably just hadn’t had the energy to take his clothes off, simple as that. He simply can’t have had the energy to adjust the water temperature and take a shower. It struck her that this narrow, concave space was, oddly enough, cozier than anywhere else in the entire apartment.
“When did all of this begin?” she sometimes asked herself in such moments. “No—when did it all begin to fall apart?”
Yeong-hye’s increasingly odd behavior had become noticeable around three years ago, when she’d suddenly decided to turn vegetarian. She lost so much weight it was quite shocking to look at her, and she practically stopped sleeping altogether. Yes, she’d always been quiet, but at that time she would say so little that any kind of meaningful communication was impossible. The whole family had been extremely concerned, their parents in particular. All this had happened shortly after In-hye and her husband had moved with Ji-woo to a new apartment. At the housewarming, when the whole family had got together, their father had struck Yeong-hye in the face, held her mouth open and forced a lump of meat inside. In-hye’s body had jerked violently, as though she herself were the one receiving the blow. She’d stood and watched, stiff as a ramrod, while Yeong-hye howled like an animal and spat out the meat, then picked up the fruit knife and slit her own wrist.
Wasn’t there something she could have done to prevent it? Again and again, doubts raced through her mind. Was there really nothing she could have done to stop their father’s hand that day? Or to get the knife out of Yeong-hye’s hand before she had time to hurt herself? Couldn’t she have prevented her husband from being the one to pick up the bleeding Yeong-hye and rush her to hospital? And then, once Yeong-hye had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital, surely she could have dissuaded her husband, Mr. Cheong, from coldly casting her aside? Above all, that terrible thing that her own husband had done to Yeong-hye, that thing she wanted to put as far from her mind as possible, couldn’t she have talked him out of it, found a way to make him change his mind before the whole thing descended into a cheap, tawdry scandal? The lives of all the people around her had tumbled down like a house of cards—was there really nothing else she could have done?
Of course, there’d been no way for her to guess what ideas her casual mention of that small, blue Mongolian mark would spark in her husband. But shouldn’t she have been able to at least make a guess as to the way things were heading—hadn’t his recent behavior given her sufficient clues? Could she have found a way to impress on him that Yeong-hye was still on medication, was still ill? The only thing clear to her was that what her husband had done was unforgivable.
It wasn’t until past noon that first her husband and then Yeong-hye had awakened, followed quickly by the three paramedics rushing into the flat, concealing straitjackets and protective equipment. Two of them had immediately gone over to Yeong-hye, who had been leaning precariously out over the veranda railing. She resisted violently as they tried to slip the straitjacket on over her naked, paint-mottled body, biting their arms savagely and letting out an incomprehensible roar. Despite her struggles, they managed to insert an IV needle into her forearm. While all this was going on, her husband had tried to get around the other paramedic, who was standing by the front door, but the man easily caught hold of him. Using all his strength to tear himself free, he whipped around and, without a moment’s pause, ran out onto the veranda. He tried to throw himself over the railing. The quick-footed paramedic got hold of him around the waist just in time, and after that he didn’t struggle anymore.
She had stood there, trembling from head to foot, as she watched all this unfold. Eventually, when her husband was being dragged away and their eyes met, she stared at him as hard as she could. But what she saw in his eyes was neither lust nor insanity, regret nor resentment. There was nothing there except the same terror she herself was feeling.
And that was how it all ended. That afternoon, which marked the point after which their lives could never go back to the way they’d been before.
Her husband had been held in a police cell after the hospital confirmed that he wasn’t mentally ill. It took several months of tedious lawsuits and official inquiries before he was released, after which he went immediately into hiding—she never saw him again. But Yeong-hye’s condition was such that she had to remain in the closed ward. After her initial bout of mental illness she’d returned to the stage where she was able to speak to others, only to now withdraw into
silence once more. But it wasn’t simply that she didn’t engage in conversation; back in the closed ward, she’d taken to squatting down in a sunny spot where she wouldn’t be disturbed and muttering incessantly to herself. As before, she refused to eat meat, and if she so much as set eyes on a side dish containing meat she would scream and try to run away. On sunny days she would press herself up against the window, unbutton her hospital gown and bare her breasts to the sun. Their parents, whom the whole sorry saga seemed to have greatly aged, didn’t make any further effort to visit Yeong-hye, and even severed contact with their elder daughter, In-hye, who reminded them of the despicable way they’d treated Yeong-hye. The two sisters’ younger brother, Yeong-ho, and his wife were no different. But she, In-hye, could not bring herself to abandon Yeong-hye. Someone had to pay the hospital fees, someone had to act as her carer.
And she got by, as she always had done. Despite the scandal hanging over her, steadfastly refusing to disappear, she made sure that the shop kept running. Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart. Ji-woo, who had been five that autumn, was now six, and Yeong-hye, who had been transferred to a hospital where the environment was good and the fees were reasonable, looked to have greatly improved.
Even as a child, In-hye had possessed the innate strength of character necessary to make one’s own way in life. As a daughter, as an older sister, as a wife and as a mother, as the owner of a shop, even as an underground passenger on the briefest of journeys, she had always done her best. Through the sheer inertia of a life lived in this way, she would have been able to conquer everything, even time. If only Yeong-hye hadn’t suddenly disappeared last March. If only she hadn’t been discovered in the forest that rainy night. If only all of her symptoms hadn’t suddenly got worse.