If You Leave Me

by Crystal Hana Kim

  Kyungho reddened. Namil shook his head.

  “Let’s return to this,” Kyungho said after a pause, pointing to their written problems.

  I stood as soon as I finished. “Thanks for the meal. I have to go.”

  Kyungho wrote his address on the back of his notes. “The study group is meeting at my house the morning of the results. You should join.”

  It was Namil who stood when I tried to make an excuse. “Don’t let an asshole like me stop you from coming. We might be classmates in a year.”

  I took the address in order to get away from them. They watched me leave, and at the end of the street, I entered the secondhand bookstore to escape their gaze. Inside, a man leaned against a shelf with a cigarette between his fingers.

  “Can I have one?” I asked.

  “If you buy a book.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  He gave me one anyway. “Look around, at least.”

  Towering stacks covered the tables. There didn’t seem to be any order to them. I wanted clean, new books like the ones in the library. I laughed.

  “What is it?” the man asked.

  “This is the first time I’ve felt spoiled in a long time,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  Lewd comics, foreign paperbacks, novels, clan registers, slim slips of poetry, almanacs, literary magazines, short stories, a few translations. I wanted to rummage through them all, to indulge in their words, to keep moving, to avoid the hut where I lived alone. Haemi had needled herself into my mind, and it made me restless. As I’d read question after question during the test, she’d floated through my head—the swift motion of her arms when we used to strip pine trees as children to get to their edible inner bark, her figure on my handlebars, the pressure of her shoulder against my collar as I cycled through shantytowns. Her face, apologetic and defiant, the last time I truly saw her, when she had let Jisoo lead her away.

  Maybe she would have preferred the boy with the glasses, his arrogance. Maybe she was here in Seoul, a wife and mother of a higher class who had forgotten about me. Maybe it was because of her that I wanted to take the test at all. She was the one who’d whispered the dream of college into both our minds. But her presence, now, annoyed me.

  She and Jisoo had abandoned me. After the war, Jisoo hadn’t gone beyond asking Father if I’d survived, and Haemi hadn’t sought me out, either. As I lived in a hovel, they continued on—comfortable and without any thought for me. I had meant nothing to them in the end.

  “So are you buying or not? I need to close soon.” The man walked to a shelf. “These comics are cheap.”

  “I’m still looking.” I held a short story pamphlet in my hand. Cranes. I walked to the back of the store. As the man smoked, I slipped the slim volume into my pocket. It was easy; it had always been easy for me to lift.

  “Nothing?”

  “I don’t have enough money,” I said.

  He blew smoke circles toward the ceiling. “This is my brother-in-law’s store, and he’s a jerk. Here.” He extended another cigarette. “Enjoy.”

  I smoked with him, but the cigarette reminded me of Haemi, too. She wetted the tip too much and had scowled when I tried to teach her the right way. “I know what I’m doing,” she’d said, walking ahead of me on the narrow footpath. We’d been in the woods looking for something to do. With the cigarette between her fingers, her sharp elbow angled to the ground, she’d swung toward me, her mouth billowing. “See?”

  A week later, I hesitated at the entrance to the doctor’s office with a shirt held up to my face. The bleeding had stopped, and the idea of asking for help embarrassed me. Since the day of the test I had felt as if Haemi was following me, watching me at work, in my hut, and now here with a shredded cheek, ready to beg for care. I imagined her pity at the unraveling of my life.

  A nurse stood by the front door, careful to avoid direct sunlight. “Do you need help?”

  I lifted the shirt off my face. “Should I go in?”

  She squinted. “Come closer.” I waited for her to flinch. She only nodded. “Yes, definitely.”

  “I can’t pay.”

  “The doctor might help anyway. Better to get it checked out than lose your handsome face.” She smiled at my surprise. “Come in.”

  She led me to a small waiting room with a few chairs and a desk. “He’s with a woman who lost her baby,” she whispered. “Sit. Let me see the damage.”

  A strand of her hair had caught on her earring, and I concentrated on that tangle as she leaned over me. Even so, I felt her. She touched my forehead with the tips of her fingers, walked the length of my brow down to my right cheek, where I’d bled the most. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched me. It felt strange, like I was underneath someone else’s skin. I wanted her to continue.

  She found some gauze and held it against my face. “These are bite marks. From what?”

  “Rats,” I said, almost laughing at the pathetic story. My throat tightened, and I closed my eyes as her fingers pressed against me. Ever since that raft, with its death mound stink that still made my nostrils flare, I saw rats everywhere—around street corners, in my dreams. They taunted me. “I woke up to them. Gnawing on my cheek like I’m nothing.”

  “That sounds awful. Here, use your fingers to apply pressure.” She tucked the tangled strand of hair behind her ear. “I could fix you up myself, but the doctor won’t let me.”

  “I don’t mind waiting.”

  She crossed her arms and held up one hand, as if weighing an invisible object. “He wasn’t here during the war, so he doesn’t think women can do anything.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He’s rich. His family probably shipped him off somewhere.”

  A low wail floated through one of the screened doors behind us. “She’s all alone. Her husband’s away and the mother-in-law’s watching the other kids.”

  I imagined the faceless woman, a dead infant in her arms. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not the one who lost the baby.” The nurse pushed herself up. “I’ll tell Dr. Kim you’re waiting.”

  A few minutes later, the nurse, doctor, and woman emerged. The woman’s dress was stained, and I tried not to look. She moaned and yelled when she saw me. “Who are you?”

  “Me?” I asked.

  She looked ruined as she pointed at me. “People like you.”

  “Mrs. Jo, please.” The doctor shifted her to the nurse, and as they walked out, he shook my hand. “I’m sorry about that. She’s a little hysterical. Let me examine your wound.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “Could you just give me some bandages?”

  “Come with me.”

  The treatment room was small but clean. So was Dr. Kim. “I can stitch these up in a few minutes,” he said.

  “I can’t pay.”

  “It’s all right. Lie down.” He gave me a circular board covered in cushiony fabric to hold against my chest. “In case the cream anesthetic isn’t enough. I need to ration it, unfortunately. How did this happen to you?”

  His smooth face didn’t flinch as I described waking up to rats with my blood on their dirty mouths. He hummed and continued with his almost painless stitches. I saw myself from his perspective—unwashed, nearly homeless, a vagrant. I closed my eyes and tried to swallow my resentment.

  Afterward, he guided me to the waiting room and suggested ointments. He showed me a few examples on his table. “I’ll write down the names for you. Your wound will look bad for a while but it should heal well. A small scar, at most.”

  “What did you do during the war?” I asked.

  He stopped writing. “I was studying for my medical degree abroad.”

  “Why didn’t you do it here?”

  “There are less than ten, maybe five, real medical schools here. And in a war? That wouldn’t have been the right way.”

  “I listened to the Chinese attacking in the night, bang
ing their gongs and playing their flutes to disorient us. I thought I was going to die as I waited with a rifle in my hands. That’s what I was doing,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  The nurse sat behind the desk, watching us.

  I touched my face. “I’m curious. I wanted to know how you become a doctor.”

  “It’s hard here. I’d suggest going overseas.”

  “With what money? Were you listening to how I got these bites?”

  The doctor finished writing with a sheepish, annoyed look on his face. The nurse frowned. “Here,” he said. “Come back if you get an infection.”

  When I exited the doctor’s office, there was some sort of parade celebrating Seoul’s continued recovery. Women and men hoisted neat, round children on their shoulders for better views. I watched through a gap in the crowd. A man in a suit yelled the city’s accomplishments from a moving truck. Kids in colorful matching outfits cheered in formation. Boys cartwheeled. A done-up woman wearing an elaborate hanbok rode in a flatbed and waved.

  The lady beside me didn’t hide her stare as I raised my bandaged face for a better view. She turned away when I held her gaze. The test had peeled back a layer of the world for me. I noticed more. The way the richer folk moved around and away from people like me. When we were children, Jisoo had described Seoul, and I’d been jealous. I was still jealous.

  Hours before, I woke to rodent teeth digging into my face, their damp, mushroomy smell all over me. Their flicking tails. The tent I’d once shared with Father ridden with rats. The pot of rice I’d so carefully saved overturned. I chased them out, waving Father’s long pipe. The one indulgence I had allowed him to bring. When I retrieved him from our hometown in the middle of the night, refusing to live near Jisoo and Haemi, Father had wrapped his pipe in Mother’s red bojagi cloth and slipped it into my pack. He apologized for enlisting me, for being foolish enough to think a stalemate meant the end of war. I used his guilt as leverage and pushed him out of our home, only to watch him shrivel to death a month later.

  In my pocket, I found the doctor’s note and the tube of ointment I’d taken from his desk. “It’s a stupid habit,” Haemi had once said about my stealing, with a cluck and a twelve-year-old girl’s sincerity. “You don’t think it’s stupid when I get you food or schoolbooks,” I’d replied. That smile. It was her. She was the reason I had taken the test. Haemi, who had left me for someone sturdy and predictable, who hadn’t waited long enough for sixteen-year-old me to shed my pride, to understand the circumstances of our upturned lives. I would defeat Haemi and Jisoo both. I would go to college. Then I would find them and show them what I had become.

  The days were the same. I dredged. I picked up shit. I kept track of Results Day and loathed myself for caring. I rubbed Cranes and the ointment tube between my fingers as I wheeled my cart through different neighborhoods. These lifted items made picking up garbage seem like a choice. When I pulled the bell on my wagon, the aunties waved at me with their pails.

  I dumped their buckets into the cart as the women blushed or looked away or tried to hide their embarrassment with chatter. When I reached the last woman in line, she tapped my shoulder. “Is he calling you?”

  Someone across the street yelled my name. It was too dark, but as the shape came closer, I recognized the mouth. “I thought it was you,” Namil said. “Yun Kyunghwan, right?”

  “What do you want?” I sounded angrier than I’d intended and realized I hadn’t spoken all day.

  Namil shrugged, as if suddenly aware of the wagon, the garbage uniform, the garbage boy. I wondered if he could see my face. “We haven’t seen you since the test. We still go to the library on Sundays.”

  “The test is over,” I said.

  “That’s probably why I was thinking of you. The results will post tomorrow.”

  “I know.” I handed the last woman her emptied bucket. There wasn’t anyone else. I didn’t know if I was relieved or embarrassed. “I have to go.”

  “Will you meet us in the morning? At Kyungho’s?”

  I shrugged, picked up the handlebars, and pulled the two-wheeled wagon along.

  Namil walked beside me. “His parents are having a little party—whether it’s a celebration or mourning, we’ll have to see. You should come.”

  I felt better with the weight of the wagon steadying me. We passed a streetlamp, and from Namil’s face, I could tell he saw my marks. He looked around, as if I were dangerous.

  “It was a rat,” I said. “Rats, plural. A whole family of them.”

  He smiled, uncertain.

  “Tell the others I said congratulations.”

  “How do you know we’ll get in?” he asked.

  “You said it yourself. I’m not the competition.” I started down the road, yelling “Garbage day!” for Namil and all the aunties to hear.

  The next morning, I smoked Father’s pipe. I put on his shirt. It was thick, wheat-colored. He hadn’t ever graduated from middle school, and he had always regretted it.

  Crowds of parents and boys surged against the bulletin boards. Their rumblings stitched together into a mass of deep-throated waves. I walked past with my face averted. I didn’t want to see Namil or Kyungho or the bragger with the girlfriend. I wanted to feel ready. A few streets down, the girls with dreams of getting into a women’s university gathered together with just as much ferocity as the boys. When I could no longer hear either group’s shouts or stand the wait, I turned back around.

  From across the street, at the top of the amphitheater where I’d sat a month before, the names on the boards looked like little rivers, like the wormy parasites that squirmed out of our asses when we were young. Boys hugged their mothers. Some rested their hands on their knees. A few turned away with shocked, unreadable expressions.

  I waited until everyone left. I missed work. I didn’t care.

  I walked up to the bulletin board. At the top, the word PASS stood in bright, black strokes. I started at Ga. Family names. I read one after another. Student identification numbers, exam scores. I read it all again.

  Still, it was true.

  There was nothing that resembled my name.

  Part 3

  Haemi

  1956

  On the day Solee was born, a sticky summer morning in 1954, Jisoo gazed at his first child and said she was a wonder. That she was worth more than any son. Despite the pain in his arm, he hefted Solee into a cradle so he could smell the sweet-rice scent of her newborn skin. He kneeled beside me. “We’re a family now,” he said.

  As he held me in his arms and whispered to our child, I made myself a promise—I would love my husband.

  So I fell in love with Jisoo. I didn’t run away. When his nightmares turned him around, I didn’t imagine covering his face with a heavy buckwheat pillow. I stopped all that and loved him.

  * * *

  Jisoo entered the kitchen, smelling of spring and grain, and dipped me into a half swing. He’d won the fight against his tenants just in time for this year’s planting season, and this victory buoyed him still, a month later. This man, I thought. His broad, square face and those evenly spaced eyes that almost disappeared when he smiled. I smiled with him.

  “I’ll come with you to the market,” he said when he saw my water jug. “I want to parade my pretty wife around.”

  Hyunki, seated at my side, groaned into his meal. He was twelve and didn’t want to see me that way. “Does that mean I don’t have to go with you, Nuna?”

  “You get to stay and help Mother with Solee and Jieun.” Jisoo snatched Hyunki’s spoon and scooped a mound of rice into his mouth. To me, he said, “Let me change my clothes.” He wore a suit when he spoke to the tenants, but for the market he favored light cotton. He sauntered away, hooting with happiness.

  The walk to the market was my daily exercise. With Solee, returning to the tasks of regular life had been easy. But since Jieun’s birth a few months ago, I tired quickly. Jieun’s mulish character had revealed itself with
the earliest birth pangs, and I still felt an aching in my bones.

  I touched Hyunki’s hair, shorn close to the scalp like his friends’. “There’s more rice in the back.”

  “Chickens and beef and pork. That’s what I want for every meal,” he said.

  “Soon.” I tugged the round curl of his ear and left.

  * * *

  When Jisoo returned to us after the war, he found me in my hometown. As soon as the armistice was signed, Mother, Hyunki, and I had left Busan. Prisoner uprisings had swept Geoje Island, and when the American general was taken hostage, the field hospital turned oppressive. It dismantled as soon as it was allowed, and everyone dispersed. Without saying goodbye to Major Kim or Minhee or the other nurses, we were gone.

  Jisoo had considered taking us all to Seoul. I’d refused. I wanted to live in the house where Hyunki and I had been born. I wanted to relish the seclusion of rural life. We compromised and settled in the closest town. We were ready to move on from the war, to start anew with each other. As we packed our belongings, I was grateful for Jisoo’s parents—for their disappearance or death or capture. It was merciless, but true. It meant Hyunki and Mother could live with us. With our country broken, we clung to any type of blood, even if it came from the wife’s side.

  Our new hanok, a long structure that cornered into a right angle like a scythe, was unlike our squat makeshift house in Busan or the square hanoks with inner courtyards to which Jisoo had been accustomed in Seoul. We had the traditional planked porch, though, which led to five rooms. In the back, a lone tree, an additional outdoor kitchen, and a large yard completed the property. A stone wall bordered us in, leaving a breath of field between us and the neighbors. Once we were settled, Jisoo guided me to the farmland he’d purchased a few kilometers away—more space than I’d ever thought we could own. “A person can get used to anything. Even you,” he’d said.

  It was true. Habit cloaked us now in an easy rhythm. Jisoo charmed the tenants as if he’d been born here. I knew how to clutch Jieun to my chest while carrying Solee on my back. Even gangly Hyunki fell into the routine of home as if we’d never left.