by Mi-ae Seo
The mountain was 125 meters above sea level. It was a little mountain that people in the neighborhood could climb with ease, morning and evening; it had a small mineral spring, and a pavilion and some plyometric exercise equipment at the top. People who lived at the foot of the mountain planted seeds in the tiny spot of land where the mountain began, to grow lettuce, peppers, spinach, and other vegetables to eat in summer.
Trash had begun to pile up where people had been. At first, it was things like support fixtures and wooden sticks that had been used for farming; later, food waste began to accumulate. In summer, watermelon rinds and kimchi that had gone bad were dumped there, causing a stench and swarms of flies to gather.
Stray cats that lived in the wild without a home flocked to the foot of the mountain for food. A few came at first, and then more and more began to appear, and even make their way down to nearby alleys and tear up trash bags, which created a problem for the people in the neighborhood.
Kang and Sihyeon thought that these stray cats had trespassed on the nature study area at school, making a mess of the birdcage.
Cats are nimble. And strays crouch down, getting ready to run, as soon as someone approaches. The kids knew that they had no chance of catching these quick and nimble cats, the way they themselves ran.
“How will you catch them?” someone asked Kang.
Kang grinned and took out a black plastic bag from his backpack. The bag held a net.
“What is that?” Kaeun asked. “How will you catch a cat with that?” she continued, doubting that this card from up his sleeve would work. The others nodded, though they didn’t say anything, feeling the same way.
“Haven’t you guys seen Animal Farm on TV? How the animal rescuer throws a net to catch a cat?” Kang asked.
“Well, that worked because people blocked up the alley and trapped the cat first. This is open space,” one of the other kids said.
Kang sulked, put out by their reaction.
“How would you do it, then?” he asked, throwing out his chest.
The kids just looked at each other, unable to come up with any other ideas; it seemed that Kang was the only one who had thought of catching the cat.
“Don’t you have any ideas, Sihyeon?” Kaeun asked, and Sihyeon, who had been tilting his head, opened his backpack, looking unsure.
“How about this?” he said, pulling out a slingshot—a Y-shaped branch with a yellow rubber band tied to it. Between the strands of the rubber band was a strip of leather that could hold a bullet. Sihyeon looked around on the ground, and picked up a pea-sized rock to demonstrate. The bullet flew so fast, and so far, that the kids couldn’t run after it.
“Wow! That’s awesome!” the kids exclaimed, and Kang looked even more sullen. Sihyeon, who hadn’t been sure that his treasured slingshot would work, shrugged his shoulders, looking proud.
“How do you know the bullet will hit the mark, when you can’t even see the bullet when it’s flying?” Kang, who had been sulking, pointed out a problem, which called for another demonstration. Sihyeon picked up an empty can from the ground, set it down at a distance, and came back to where the rest of the kids were. Their eyes sparkled with curiosity. Sihyeon aimed carefully at the can, and pulled the rubber band. Again, the bullet couldn’t be seen very well, but the can fell with a clang.
Sihyeon looked proudly over at Kang, and Kang had to acknowledge that it worked.
In the end, Sihyeon was put in charge of the important mission of catching the cat, and the kids hid where they could see the heap of trash, and waited for the cat to appear. It turned out that waiting for the cat, without budging in the sizzling heat, was not as fun as they’d expected. After ten minutes or so, beads of sweat began to form on their foreheads, and they began to complain. Swarms of flies infested the place, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. They began to wonder if it would show up at all.
Wiping the sweat off her forehead, Kaeun got to her feet.
“I’m leaving. This is no fun,” she said.
“Wait a little longer, it’ll be here soon,” Kang said, placating her, keeping his eyes forward.
“Hayeong, let’s go,” Kaeun said, not wanting to leave by herself.
Hayeong stayed sitting in her spot, looking at the mountain without a word, and Kaeun began to press her, taking her arm and saying, “Come on, please? I’ll buy you ice cream.”
Hayeong pulled her by the arm and sat her down, and said in a low voice, “They’re here.”
At those words, the kids looked at her. Tension filled the air.
“Where?” Sihyeon asked, lowering his voice as well.
Hayeong raised a hand and pointed to the path that led up to the mineral spring. The path was empty, but there were two cats roaming among the trees that lined the path.
“Can you hit them from here?” Kang turned around and asked Sihyeon, who shook his head.
“Let’s wait till they come closer,” he said.
The kids kept their eyes fixed on the cats, not even daring to breathe. Even Kaeun, who had wanted to go home, was looking at the cats, her face full of curiosity.
One of the cats came slowly down to where the kids were. The kids gestured for Sihyeon to hurry, and he quickly raised the slingshot and aimed at the cat. But the cat must’ve heard the clamor of the kids, for it instantly disappeared down an alley under the mountain. Disappointed, the kids sighed.
At that moment, Kang nudged Sihyeon on the arm again.
Reflexively, Sihyeon turned his eyes to the other cat. It was a black cat, approaching the pile of food waste with caution. Anxiously, the kids looked from the cat to Sihyeon’s slingshot, hoping that this time, Sihyeon would succeed.
“A little closer, just a little closer,” Sihyeon mumbled quietly.
Zing! The taut rubber band was released at last. It hit something with a dull, thick sound. The cat looked up in surprise. Whooping, the kids ran over at once. The cat, dazed from the shock of the slingshot attack, sensed danger and began to run. But the shock must’ve been quite big—in trying to run from the kids, it ran right up to Kang.
Not missing his chance as the cat slowed down, Kang changed direction, and quickly released the net in his hand. As soon as the net was over the cat, he stepped down on it. The cat couldn’t budge.
“Wow, you really did it!” said the kids, and flocked around him. Sihyeon and Kang gave each other a high five. Their joint operation had succeeded. The kids gathered around the cat, and looking at it through the net, they all had something to say.
“Is this the one that killed our birds?”
“Who cares? They won’t be coming back to the school after this.”
Kaeun reached out a hand to touch the cat, looking fascinated. Someone scared her from behind, and she let out a yelp.
“A lot of people pass through this way, so let’s go up to the mountain,” someone said, and everyone started up at once. Kang and Sihyeon carried the net together, walking side by side. The cat resisted, its feet flailing in the air; but finding it was no use, it huddled up and meowed quietly.
The kids gathered next to the pavilion at the top of the mountain, where a tree had fallen and created a little space.
“What should we do with it?” Kang asked.
“Yeah, how should we punish it?”
The kids considered the question, watching the cat in the net, looking around and trembling in fear. Before catching the cat, they’d declared that they would punish it severely once they caught it. But now that they’d caught the cat, they didn’t know how they should punish it.
“Should we beat it?” Kaeun asked. The kids looked at her, aghast, and she shut her mouth, looking glum.
“You guys, take the cat out of the net,” Hayeong, who had been following the kids in silence, said to Kang and Sihyeon.
“Have you come up with something?” Kang asked.
Hayeong nodded, grinning, and said, “Yeah. So take the cat out, and take one leg each.”
Hayeong put her bac
kpack down and took out her pencil case. Excited, the kids took the cat out of the net, and reached out their hands to grab its legs. But the cat wouldn’t give in so easily. It resisted violently, scratching their hands.
Hayeong quickly grabbed the cat by the nape of its neck and picked it up. Unable to resist any longer, the cat waited for its fate, legs dangling in the air. Amazed, the kids stared at Hayeong and the cat.
“When you pick up a cat or a dog, grab it by the neck like this, and they can’t do anything,” Hayeong said, and everyone looked at her with wonder and admiration.
As Hayeong instructed, Sihyeon held the cat by the nape of its neck, and Kang and the others took hold of the legs.
The cat was hanging in front of Hayeong, with the belly—its most vulnerable part—completely exposed.
Hayeong was holding a paper knife in her hand. Looking at the cat, she slowly pushed the blade up.
Seeing the knife, the kids opened their eyes wide.
“What . . . what are you trying to do?” Sihyeon asked, his voice trembling. He knew, without hearing the answer, what she was about to do. Kaeun and Kang looked at her in horror as well.
“You’re not really going to . . .”
“You said you wanted to punish the cat, didn’t you?” Hayeong said.
“Yeah, but, hey. . . ,” Kang began, but Hayeong’s hand flew up into the air, along with the knife, then went straight for the cat’s belly.
Kaeun covered her eyes with her hands. The others looked away, grimacing.
“Ow!” Kang sank to the ground, clasping his own hand. The cat had freed itself of Sihyeon’s and Kang’s hands, and was running away in the distance.
“Hey, what happened?” the kids asked, but Kang and Sihyeon just stood glaring at Hayeong, panting. She glared back, without blinking her eyes.
“Kang hurt his hand because of you!” Sihyeon said.
“It’s not because of me. He would’ve been all right if he just held on to the cat,” Hayeong said.
Kang had cut his hand, it seemed, as he let go of the cat and tried to get away from Hayeong’s knife. Kaeun pulled out a handkerchief, and hunkered down by Kang and took his hand. She lifted his hand to see the wound, and saw blood seeping out. Fortunately, though, the wound wasn’t deep; it was a light scratch.
“What are we going to do? His hand is bleeding,” Kaeun said.
All eyes turned to Hayeong. But she just pulled the blade back down, and said casually, “Scaredy-cats, you should’ve just held on to it.”
“Does it hurt, Kang?” Kaeun asked, dabbing at the blood on the back of his hand.
Hayeong started back down the mountain slope, as if to say that she was finished there.
No one called out after her. They all seemed to be thinking about the way she had so calmly wielded a knife at the cat. One of the kids, who had been staring at her, gave a sudden shiver. No one said anything, but they were all thinking the same thing.
The afternoon’s play, in which they’d wanted to punish a cat, thus came to an end.
22.
AFTER HAYEONG WENT TO SCHOOL, SEONKYEONG WAS busy taking care of household chores; when she was finished, she filled a mug with coffee and headed to the study.
She began the task of transcribing Yi Byeongdo’s interview, recorded the day before. Transcription was something that took longer than people generally thought, because the intonation of the interviewee, as well as the speed and the choice of the words, had to be recorded in detail.
“There was a baby monkey who lost its mother the moment it was born. The people who raised the monkey made two mothers for it: one made of wire . . .” The words flowed out.
Seonkyeong pressed the pause button. A wire mother, and a fur mother.
The mother who had brought Yi Byeongdo into this world was made of cold wire, and had poked him all over his body. A mother who was beautiful, but cold and cruel.
But Yi Byeongdo had another mother. Seonkyeong didn’t know who she was, but she was someone who comforted his wounded heart and held him in a warm embrace. The day before, he had reached out a hand to this mother, invisible, beyond Seonkyeong’s shoulders. He had cried, asking this mother whose name was unknown, not the mother who had died at his hands, to hug him once again. Seonkyeong wanted to know who his fur mother was.
Seonkyeong, who had guessed that he was seeing his own mother in her, thought she had been half right. She wrote “fur mother?” in her notebook, and thought she should ask him more about her during the next interview.
She was about to press the play button on the recorder, when the phone rang. It was Hayeong’s homeroom teacher.
The teacher asked Seonkyeong to come see her at the school. Worried, Seonkyeong asked if Hayeong was hurt, but the answer was no. The teacher’s voice was cold, saying that it wasn’t something that could be discussed easily over the phone. Seonkyeong sensed that something awful was waiting for her.
Trying to push the anxiety out of her mind, Seonkyeong got ready and left the house in a hurry.
When she arrived, less than an hour had passed since the phone call.
She walked into the teachers’ room and saw the teacher, whom she had met during the transfer process, sitting in her seat. The teacher led her outside to the nature study area behind the school building, saying they should talk there. The vegetable patch, which the kids tended to, seemed to have grown thick in just a few weeks.
Hayeong’s teacher stood there, looking at her class’s section of the garden. She didn’t know where to start, it seemed, now that they were face-to-face.
“What’s going on?” Seonkyeong asked, and the teacher began to speak at last, with difficulty.
“I’m not sure how you’ll take this. I myself can’t believe that Hayeong’s done something like this, but all the kids that were with her say the same thing, so I don’t know what to think.”
It seemed no small matter, the way she was stalling. Seonkyeong guessed that there had been some kind of problem among the kids.
“You need to tell me what happened,” Seonkyeong said.
“They say that Hayeong . . . wielded a knife at the other kids,” the teacher finally said.
“What?” was all Seonkyeong could say at the unexpected words.
“Do you see the farm there? The birds there have been disappearing again and again lately, and the kids thought it was some stray cat in the neighborhood that made them disappear. So some of the kids went to catch the cat, to punish it, and Hayeong took a knife and was about to stab the cat with it,” the teacher continued.
“Wait a minute, didn’t you say just now that she wielded the knife at the kids?”
“Yes, but the cat ran away, and a boy was wounded by the knife.”
“I think I understand the situation, but are you sure you’re not exaggerating? I don’t think she carries around a knife in her backpack.”
“Oh, I think it was a paper knife, for sharpening pencils and stuff.”
Seonkyeong felt angry. The teacher was making too much of the situation.
“So you said she wielded a knife at the kids, when in reality, she hurt someone accidentally, while trying to punish a cat with a paper knife for sharpening pencils?” Seonkyeong said.
“Huh? Oh, I guess I wasn’t very precise. I was just trying to relate the kids’ story, the way they told it.”
“You heard about what happened in detail, so why are you exaggerating? Hayeong was going to punish a cat, not harm the children. Aren’t they two different things?”
“Well, the thing is . . .” The teacher was at a loss for words for a moment, thrown off by Seonkyeong’s question. She continued, however, with some difficulty, saying, “I wouldn’t have called you if that’s all that happened. Things felt weird in class today so I asked the kids, and . . . they told me that this wasn’t the first time that Hayeong has done something violent. If someone so much as touches her desk, she’ll prick their hand with a mechanical pencil, and . . .”
Hayeong had
even pushed a kid at the top of a staircase. Luckily, other kids took the girl’s hands and kept her from falling down the stairs, but she could’ve been greatly harmed, the teacher said, shaking her head.
A lot seemed to have happened. Seonkyeong was shocked by what Hayeong had done, but she was angry with herself for not noticing anything until things had gone so far. To show interest, she’d been asking Hayeong how the day had been, and if she’d made any new friends, when she came home from school. But Hayeong never really said anything. Seonkyeong had simply assumed that it must not be easy for her to make friends yet. She felt stupid for not paying real attention to the child. Then she thought of the friendly girl who said she sat next to Hayeong.
“She seemed to be good friends with the girl who sits next to her, though,” she said to the teacher.
“Kaeun . . . is a very easygoing girl. It seems that she thought she should make friends with Hayeong since she was new, and since they sat together. But after what happened yesterday, her mother called and asked for a change in the seating arrangements,” the teacher replied.
Seonkyeong couldn’t say anything.
“She must not tell you anything at home. From what I’ve seen and heard, I think it might be wise for Hayeong to receive some counseling,” the teacher said.
Seonkyeong thought for a moment, then told her briefly about Hayeong’s situation: her parents’ divorce, her mother’s death, and the fire at her grandparents’. Saying that her behavior was a result of those painful experiences, Seonkyeong asked for the teacher’s help, as it would take some time for Hayeong’s wounds to heal.
Hearing the story, the teacher was sympathetic at once.
“I didn’t know. I did guess that there was something going on, because whenever I saw her face, I felt that she didn’t seem quite like a child. . . . I can see how difficult it must be for her, with the fire being so recent,” she said.
“We’re trying as much as we can at home to help her regain stability, but I think it’ll take some time for her to recover from the shock. I’d appreciate it if you could keep a close eye on her.”