Highway with Green Apples (Kindle Single) (A Short Story)

by Bae Suah

  HIGHWAY WITH GREEN APPLES

  Bae Suah

  Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Bae Suah

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Sora Kim-Russell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Highway with Green Apples was previously published in Korean in Fiction and Thought (Soseolgwa sasang), summer 1994, as . Translated by Sora Kim-Russell.

  Published by StoryFront, Seattle

  Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and StoryFront are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781477872604

  Cover design by Inkd

  Illustrated by Michael Hirshon

  CONTENTS

  HIGHWAY WITH GREEN APPLES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  HIGHWAY WITH GREEN APPLES

  We take a drive one day down a secluded highway through the countryside. As he’s sitting behind the wheel, I ask him, “Did you see a cat pass in front of the car just now?”

  “Of course.”

  He responds nonchalantly while fumbling with one hand for a cigarette. The late-autumn sky is heavy with clouds and looks as if it has been draped in dark and light curtains. A line of larch trees stretches all the way down to the end of the gray highway. The road ends at a rundown street that leads to a small, unfamiliar town, where women selling green apples will be sitting along the side of the street.

  I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years. I never know what the next day will bring, so I am always uneasy.

  “They say it’s bad luck when a cat crosses your path,” I tell him.

  “Do they?”

  “They say something bad will happen. Especially if it’s a black cat, like that one.”

  “Black cat?”

  He takes his hands off the steering wheel for a moment and considers this. The road is quiet and monotonous. All there is to see on either side are low, unchanging hills and fields planted with corn and pumpkin. With a week left to go before turning twenty-five, I tell myself that there must be a river nearby. Longing for that blue-green water, I lean out the car window into the wind.

  “That cat wasn’t black,” he says. “You saw it wrong. It was gray with black spots. I’m sure of it.”

  I think, It was black, I know it was. But then I think, Who cares? What difference does it make? And I keep my mouth shut. Outside, where the tall grass lies flat in the wind, there are no people—only road, and more road. I will never forget just how beautiful the late autumn is.

  “Want an apple?” he asks.

  When I don’t respond, he points to the paper bag of green apples, the ones we have just bought on the side of the road in the small, dust-covered town. Ah, right, we have apples. Green apples.

  The woman who came to the car to sell us the apples was wearing a thickly woven scarf. He had pulled over near the highway and was busy studying the map. He made it sound spontaneous, but he’d had a destination in mind. A fishing village on the west coast—not too small but not so big that you would notice it right away. He tells me it’s a tourist resort during the summer, but by that time of the year, it will practically be in hibernation.

  “How do you know about this place?” I ask him. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  I had stared at the woman’s chapped, reddened cheeks and wound up buying apples from her. They came in a paper bag that crinkled and gave off an old, musty smell. There must have been an orchard nearby. Her faded, hand-knit scarf covered half of her face. The piano music playing at full volume inside the car echoes far down the deserted road. Was it Rachmaninov? Tchaikovsky? Maybe a Schubert arpeggio? He keeps so many tapes in the car that I never know what we are listening to. The music reaches a shrill, intense part that contrasts with the surreal calm of the street. Then it subsides and turns dark as death, and the pianist lets out a deep breath. The woman had put the apples in a crinkly paper bag. The tall larch trees that line the highway stand against the backdrop of the gray evening sky like an old watercolor. Women selling green apples on a dusty road. He had pulled the cash from his wallet without taking his eyes off of the map. A dark-blue bus swept past the car with a dull clatter. Nearly invisible dust settled onto the woman’s eyes and dry lips. The buildings are short, and the signs are old and flaking. The inside of one building, where the door stands open, is dark and low-ceilinged. A dry late-autumn breeze carries the scent of boiled beans and dried fish. I want to get out of the car and walk slowly down the street. Yes, it would be nice to live here and sell green apples in paper bags. I see myself from behind, walking back to a home next to a river out past the low hills, dragging my heavy feet as the night grows dark. On that autumn day of my twenty-fifth year, I have a lump in my throat.

  “I went there once a long time ago,” he says. “I think one of my high school friends was living there at the time. You can go fishing, and they have summer rentals. I don’t know if he still lives there. But we used to be close.”

  I gaze at the side of his face and bite into an apple. I am a twenty-five year-old who goes to bed every night wondering what I will do the next day. By now, all the other women I know who went to the same all-girls high school as me are at their most self-assured, having married or living as career women in the big city, but I am as unsure of myself as I was at fifteen. He starts the car. Fallen leaves swirl up as if in a typhoon. He says, “From here we head straight west,” and adds, “The last stretch is unpaved.” He keeps checking the map. We get lost along the way, so it’s pitch-black by the time we reach our destination. A dog won’t stop barking, and the waves are loud. His high school friend is still living there.

  “Long time no see,” the friend tells him. “We don’t get many visitors this time of year. The fishing isn’t that good here. Truth is, I’ve been thinking more and more about leaving this place.”

  His friend says he wants to move back to the big city to get a job and enjoy the unsentimental nature of organized society for a change. The three of us walk along the beach in the dark, the sand coarse and the waves high. Beer and Coca-Cola cans and disposable chopsticks lie scattered among the rocks; lights from fishing boats sparkle on the dark sea. We occasionally stop to sit on the rocks, where they smoke cigarettes and talk about the old days. I sit quietly, as I don’t know any of the people they are talking about, including the many women whose names come up. When the waves dampen our shoes, we get up and walk back the way we came. I trail soberly after them, unable to keep up with the conversation. His friend occasionally turns to say, “Watch your step,” as if he has just remembered that I am there. Dawn approaches.

  After the trip, I do not see him again for two years. I never learn whether his old high school friend left the village to return to the big city. We arrive in the dead of night and leave at dawn when the fog is thick, so all I remember are sounds—the barking dog, the crashing waves. He sips coffee while driving carefully through the early morning fog. The air is filled with the scent of the inv
isible sea.

  “Feels like we’re floating in a dream,” I say.

  I dip my palms into the damp fog. He keeps humming along to the song coming from the tape deck and doesn’t say anything.

  You don’t know, do you? How much I love you.

  My love for you will never change,

  even after an ocean of time has passed.

  How long is an ocean of time? Feelings as countless as grains of sand. Distances as far-flung as the sky. How much is that, I wonder. The song keeps playing.

  No matter how far you go,

  like the wind, I’ll be with you.

  I take a bite out of the last of the green apples rolling around in the backseat. The sour, astringent taste fills me like fog. I look over at the side of his face and think, Even if we break up, you won’t be forgotten.

  Later, over the phone, he tells me, “I met someone. I think I’m in love. She’s tiny and cute. You would like her. I told her all about you. She’s…”

  Here, he lights a cigarette. I hear the all-too-familiar sound of his lighter over the phone. The blue-green flame.

  “She really puts me at ease. It’s different than when I’m with you. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I had a problem with you. Not at all. It’s just that, with her, I never feel anxious about what I’m supposed to do next. I could never cheat on someone like her.”

  He exhales a long puff of smoke. I can picture the blue cloud spreading thinly through a darkened room. I hear the sound of dinner being made downstairs in the house where I am renting a spare room. A cat meows, and the scent of roasting fish is in the air. A week has passed since we ate green apples together in a village on the west coast. It is the evening of my twenty-fifth birthday.

  “I wish you were a different type of girl,” he continues. “The type who cries and refuses to let go when a guy breaks up with her. The type who says, ‘How dare you see another woman, I won’t stand for it.’ If you were that type, you would never have gotten this call from me. But, we were good in the beginning! You said so yourself.”

  Those words—You said so yourself—sound so oddly like begging that I find myself saying yes despite myself. He forgot it was my birthday. I don’t feel like reminding him, either. And that is how I end up turning twenty-five. During the two years that we dated, he gave me a gift to celebrate every occasion—my birthday, the anniversary of the day he bought a dress shirt from me at the department store where I worked, the anniversary of our first date. If I told him it’s my birthday, he would buy me a gaudy printed scarf or an African-style necklace. That’s the kind of girl he likes.

  “Remember our first date?” he asks. “I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep the night before. We saw a movie together. It was a French movie, and I thought about trying to kiss you in the dark.”

  It wasn’t a French movie but a 1960s Italian film that was playing at a small revival house. And I had left for our date thinking that I wouldn’t mind having sex with him that night. It was late by the time the film ended, and we missed the last subway train while drinking cold beer at a pub afterward. We held hands and walked for hours in the dark past shuttered shops along city streets littered with black plastic garbage bags. Old newspapers fluttered in the wind. What did I wear that night? A blue dress with a white sash. Black high heels to make my legs look longer. Clear polish on my nails. When I let down my hair, which I’d tied into a high ponytail, at a corner of a darkened building, he thought I was trying to seduce him.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say. “I wish you wouldn’t worry about me. I’m not that upset about it.”

  I think back to elementary school. My handwriting was always neat and perfect, and during class, I kept my eyes on the swaying hem of my teacher’s dress. She would hand back my pristine homework that never had any eraser marks on it and praise me by patting me on the head with a hand that smelled like soap. “You’re such a good girl,” she would say. “Keep it up.”

  “You told me from the start,” he says. “That you were only seeing me because you were depressed. That we would break up eventually. Once I met a girl I really liked.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You said you would turn into a good girl, a virtuous one, and leave me for good.”

  “Yeah, so don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “You have nothing to worry about. I’m not going to run off and become a nun or start drinking or anything.”

  The house fills with the scent of dwenjang soup, which the landlady always serves at dinnertime. The landlord’s chickens cluck in the back garden, and the rose vines growing on the gray outer wall where the paint is peeling away sway in the November breeze. Salarymen returning home to their families pause to buy cardboard boxes of grapes at the store and to smoke outside the subway station, which is surrounded by buildings that rent out small studio apartments. It’s a typical evening, unchanged and seemingly never to change. When I first found this house, my friend So-yeong said, “I don’t like it. It’s everything I can’t stand.”

  “So?” I said. “You’re not the one who’s going to live here. And it’s what I can afford.”

  “What I can’t stand is the petit bourgeois air that fills these places. I get this ominous feeling that hiding somewhere in these alleys is a neighborhood bully who never quite grew up. Do you want to live like a character in that TV show, Three Families Under One Roof, crammed into a tiny spare room next to all these poor families?”

  I hate those things, too. Until recently, I was living with So-yeong in her apartment, which was old, dark, and dirty, like an abandoned ship on the verge of sinking. The fire escape with its rusted, broken railing was barely hanging on, and the building housed a poker den where salarymen who worked in a nearby office park would gather, their eyes bloodshot and ties loosened, and a piano school on the second floor where primary school students carrying little keyboards in their bags would show up like a relentless swarm of bugs once the deathly silence of midday had passed. The monotonous Czerny étude that would start to drone in the early evenings was probably overheard by a typist in the bathroom of a small office nearby, where she was touching up her lipstick and anxiously checking the clock. With the dark sunset reflecting in the bathroom mirror, she would turn and check how she looked from the back and then gather up her makeup and run back to her seat. She would still have fifteen minutes left to go before she could leave for the day.

  I keep going.

  “Do you remember those green apples, from the last time we took a trip?”

  Why am I suddenly thinking about those green apples?

  “Green apples? Oh, those horrible sour apples. They made my mouth pucker.”

  “I remember the women who were selling those apples. It was a shabby little street. The women were covered in dust and just watching the cars race down the highway. And they were all bundled up in thick scarves.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re always trying to shut me up by saying something ridiculous. Why can’t you take anything seriously?”

  “You know what I thought about back then? I thought about going back to that street someday and becoming one of those women who sell green apples.”

  “Instead of selling shirts in a department store?”

  He sounds a little hurt.

  “I don’t know why I thought that either. I just got this premonition that someday I would be old and poor like those women and wind up selling apples on a dusty highway. And terrible green apples at that. I would stand there until evening, until I was sure that no one was coming to buy my apples. Until it was completely dark, my face covered in a thick, hand-knit scarf, staring down a road that leads to some far-off place I’ll never reach.”

  Because life has not turned out the way I wanted it to. Because that’s how it always is—as a child, you get no love from your parents, and at school, you get bad grades and never catch anyone’s eye. And after you’re all grown up, you keep peeking in the door of the gynecology clinic, and then wait for an hour, an
d another hour, at the café where a man has promised to meet you, gulping down several cups of weak coffee before leaving alone in the dark. Then, to top it off, the cat that crosses your path one day on a highway with green apples turns out to be a black cat.

  The following afternoon, I bump into one of my cousins. She is eagerly picking out a necktie when she spots me and comes over to say hello.

  “I didn’t know you work here,” she says.

  “I didn’t tell anyone at home.”

  “Want to get some coffee?”

  She looks like she has a lot to tell me. I dread, and hate, this. Home, family, dropping out of college, runaway daughter—the words waver before my eyes. Everyone always wants to know why. They bring it up lightly, the way you would ask a child why she didn’t do her homework, then they light a cigarette, pull the ashtray closer, lean way back in the chair, stretch their legs out, and wait for me to answer. I hate it.

  “Do you have something to ask me?” I say.

  “No, I won’t ask any questions. I just wanted to know if you want to get coffee with me.”

  True to her word, we go for coffee. She tells me that since I left home, she’s married the medical student she was dating. Come to think of it, there is something about her that suggests a housewife.

  “Did you get married?” She raises her coffee cup to her lips.

  “No.”

  She slowly lowers the cup.

  “How’ve you been getting by?” she asks.

  “I’m managing okay. But don’t ask me where I’m living, and don’t tell me to call my parents.”

  “I thought you got married. I thought you ran away to be with a man your parents didn’t approve of. That’s what we all imagined. I heard you wrote it in a letter. This is a surprise.”

  I feel sorry to have disappointed them. I can’t tell her that I ran away simply because I felt like it.

  “Eun-gyeong told me she saw you in a car with a guy.”

  Eun-gyeong is my younger sister by two years.