I swirled soju down my throat as he neared the end of another speech. The ease with which he shared the details of his life made me want to confide in him. He was Haemi’s brother, after all. Maybe he would understand if I told him—that I had once loved her, that I thought she had loved me, too.
“Will you come, Hyung?” With his hand on his elbow and his face averted, he refilled my glass. “One demo and you’ll see.”
“I don’t want to talk about our government anymore.” I straightened. “I was actually thinking about Haemi. Are you two still close?”
He set down the bottle and I willed him to speak. To tell me some secret that would make me understand her.
“We fought right before I left. She didn’t write for two years. She made Mother and Jisoo communicate with me instead.” He grimaced. “Then I missed Mother’s funeral on Nuna’s orders, to take the college entrance exams. But when I went to the tumulus the next day, Nuna refused to see me. I hated her.”
Disappointment swept through me. “So you don’t talk anymore?”
“We made up, actually. I’m trying to convince her to visit.” He sipped, forgetting to turn his head.
“She hasn’t yet?”
“I think she’s afraid.” Hyunki gazed out at the street. It was too dark to see beyond the streetlamp’s circled limits. “She’s more fearful now than she was before. Don’t you think?”
My face rippled with heat. I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’m not good at staying in touch.”
“I feel guilty.” The soju smeared his words together. “Working, studying, searching for a job. And then all of a sudden, it’s been four years. I’m going back as soon as I finish, though, for the whole winter.”
“She’d like that.” I nodded so he’d continue, but he seemed caught in his own guilt. His mouth rimmed with worry. I prodded his glass. “What do you two write about?”
He shrugged. “She’s written about you before, if that’s what you’re asking. Wanted to know if I ever saw you around. I tried to explain how big it is here, but she doesn’t understand.”
“I visited her last year. Saw Jisoo and the girls.” I tried to steady myself. My voice sounded tight. “Did she tell you?”
“Yeah, I heard.” Hyunki glanced at me. “Did something happen?”
I stared at the table. The oily sparrows, speared through the core with a stick, had soaked through the napkins. I nudged a withered, burned skeleton. “What do you mean?”
“Nuna’s been vague these past few months whenever I ask about home. Hyung hasn’t written much, either. Maybe they know I’m protesting, but it seems like something else.” He crumpled a stale napkin. “Do you know if things are all right between them?”
“Jisoo and I don’t talk much anymore.” I lined our empty bottles into a tidy row. “Haemi and I were close when we were young.”
Hyunki nodded. “Sure, Hyung. You were friends.”
“Not just friends.” I popped a sparrow off a stick and broke the head and ribs with my thumbs, as if I were a god over its tiny, delicate bones. I rushed on, before I could lose my nerve. “I loved her. Did she tell you that?”
Hyunki’s mouth gaped. He scanned the air between us, clicking the story into place. “Haemi-nuna? Does she know?”
I looked down at my hands and wished I could laugh at his question. The undersides of my nails were thick with meat. “She almost ran away with me last year.”
He scooted his chair closer. “Who else knows?”
I leaned against the table. My temples throbbed. I couldn’t sift through my feelings. There was no point explaining now. “I haven’t heard from her since I left.”
Hyunki picked up the half-full soju bottle and stared at the liquid inside, the dull, refracted light. “I guess I’ve been gone a long time.”
The pojangmacha owner rang a bell. “One hour till curfew. Get your last orders in while you can.”
Hyunki watched me pour soju to the rim. “Hyung, I have the demo tomorrow.”
“Drink,” I ordered. “And forget I said anything.”
He covered the top of his glass when I tried to pour him another. I closed my eyes. “I’m a jealous bastard.” I shrugged my shoulders to exaggerate my drunkenness and the movement turned me around. I leaned over, woozy.
The table seemed to swing toward me. Hyunki caught my arm, steadying me as if I were truly old. “Maybe you should go home. Do you live far from here?”
“Don’t worry about me.” I waved away his concern.
Hyunki hesitated. “Does Jisoo-hyung know? Is that why he hasn’t been writing?”
I pulled out my wallet and rubbed the bills in my hand, these thin slips of paper that held such weight in our world. The pojangmacha owner shouted another warning.
“Go back to your boardinghouse before I buy another bottle,” I said.
“If it weren’t for the demo, I’d stay. I’m sorry, Hyung.” Hyunki bowed and hurried out.
My limbs felt heavy. One hour until national curfew, and Haemi had never mentioned me to her precious brother. I ordered another bottle of soju. Fearful. A trait I never would have tied to Haemi in the past, when she used to speak of a life beyond our hometown. She had changed into a fearful woman. I had changed, too.
The next morning, I didn’t go to the protest. I decided to move out of my rented room instead. Haemi had scoffed at my living arrangements last year and I knew she was right. Another family’s hanok wasn’t enough for a grown man.
In the days afterward, when Park’s warning signals burned the air and he imposed martial law, I saw Hyunki. Not in person or on the emptied streets and not in the newspapers scrubbed clean of the protest’s violence. I saw him in the absence of demonstrations, crowds, speeches, pamphlets. The late-night gatherings were gone, the schools closed.
I found an apartment building for respectable young men and beginning families. I’d sold the motorcycle, but still my savings weren’t enough. A public telephone stood two streets away. I picked up the receiver and asked the operator to connect me to Jisoo’s town council. I left a message and waited for the return call. It was pitiful, and I knew there would be pleasure in it for him.
“I need your help,” I said.
“Why should I help you?”
“If you do, I won’t come back.” I held her letters in my hand. The ones from our childhood and the one she’d written two years ago, asking me to visit.
“You think I care if you come back or not?”
I raked a hand over my face. My body felt whittled away, corroded. “I don’t know, Jisoo.”
He exhaled, measured and slow. “What do you want?”
“I need a cosignature. To rent my own apartment.”
“Still too poor to afford a home?”
“I did what you asked me to do.”
“How is he?”
I pulled a small jar of cream, our newest product, from my pocket. We claimed it would bring back your youth. Deeper in, a pack of cigarettes. I lit one. I was all smoke and haze now. “Hyunki’s fine. Safe. I told him to write you.”
* * *
“If you leave me, I won’t forgive you.”
She had warned me.
We were sixteen and it was 1951. We were twenty-eight and it was 1963.
I thought we had offered ourselves up to each other. For years, I had no one to claim, and then, finally, I had her. We were all orphans in this country—I understood this—but I was the orphan who deserved Haemi.
The morning after she said those words, I left her with a final letter. She loved me, and I was sure she would make her way to me, with or without the girls. I was ready. I waited with the dog. She never came. Eventually, I left her again.
Hyunki
1964
I woke with a headache, with Kyunghwan’s words roping my mind. “I loved her. Did she tell you that?” I tried to recall the rest, but the night’s edges were smudged with drink. A table covered with sparrow bones, soju bottles. As he spoke, he’d pressed his f
inger to a scar on his cheek, pushing against the raised white line as if everything he held inside would spill out.
I rose to my knees and fumbled for the glass on my tray table. The wet lash of water slid through me. In a few hours, Gwanghwamun would be filled with students protesting. Whatever Kyunghwan wanted me to do with this confession would have to wait.
A truck outside clattered down our street. I watched it pass by my open window. Piles of lettuce covered the cargo bed, the green heads packed tight. Not a military truck, then. I breathed in, relishing how clean the outside world seemed in comparison to my body. The air was woven with anticipation, textured, as if I could reach my hand across the sky and feel all the hours of preparation that had led to this morning. I imagined Park and the capital officials fleeing, running for their private cars with papers shielding their shamed faces.
I pulled on black slacks, a black shirt. The cotton tee stuck to my back, my skin clammy. At my desk, I shuffled through the love notes Myungsook had slipped between my demo flyers and rolled up the Taegeukgi flag we’d used at the other demos. Kyunghwan still crowded my thoughts, the vague shape of him in our lives. He was Jisoo’s cousin, and I’d thought he’d introduced Hyung to Haemi. I wondered if what he’d said was true.
I pulled out Haemi’s most recent letter and studied the photograph she’d included. Jisoo stood in the middle of the frame wearing a dark suit. The three girls sat in front, smiling in their matching dresses and frilly headbands. Haemi sat to the right, cradling the new baby. Eunhee had a round, wide face and a tuft of wavy hair. Jisoo wanted to take a formal photograph for once. What do you think? Eunhee looks just like me, everyone says. I felt a deep kick of pity. Kyunghwan seemed like the type of man who might imagine a love that wasn’t there.
The landlady’s cuckoo clock started downstairs, the bird’s incessant call like a woodpecker against my temples. Damn Hyung and his drinks. I had an hour before I was supposed to meet Sungsoo, Jinho, and Byungchul. Just enough time to see Myungsook. I pocketed my wallet and identification papers, the flyers and flag, and a handkerchief, and scrambled outside.
As I headed to Myungsook’s boardinghouse, I noticed the stains on the rolled-up Taegeukgi. I had coughed up a glob of mucus in the middle of the night and groped for a napkin in the dark. Now a yellow blot marred the corner of the flag. It was almost shaped like a dog, the yolky tail dragging to the frayed edge. I rubbed at it and willed myself to ignore the tight grip around my head. “She almost ran away with me last year.” His words were like a burr on a sweater, catching at the thread of my thoughts. Was he lying or dreaming or telling a truth I didn’t want to hear? He had visited her last summer. Maybe she loved him back.
I passed a telephone booth with a line of people curled around the corner. Inside the cubicle, a man yelled into the receiver. He banged a long umbrella against the glass and the people in line tensed, looked away.
I felt a wash of guilt at having avoided Haemi’s calls, her letters. You better not be joining the protests, Hyunki. You aren’t strong enough. I need you too much. I imagined her clutching the receiver, her lips pressed tight as she left each message with my landlady. I would call her after the demo. I would tell her about Kyunghwan’s strange, drunken declaration, and she would laugh or confide or explain his meaning.
Myungsook snuck out of her boardinghouse with two containers of orange juice and long white strips of yeot. “I dreamed that a horde of crows attacked us.” She shuddered, hugging herself with her full hands. “They pecked until we bled all over and one of your eyeballs rolled between their crusty little legs.”
“You watch too many movies.” I took the juice boxes from her. “Why all the treats?”
She stretched off a piece of taffy, looping it as wide as she could before it broke. “Eat this for good luck.”
I groaned. “I can’t put anything in my stomach right now. An old uncle made me drink with him for hours last night.”
“No wonder you look so tired.” She sucked her teeth. “I went out early this morning to buy this for you. Please?”
“I’ll have one piece.” The sugary yeot inflated my headache, but I chewed until the crease between her eyebrows had smoothed. “I’m all protected now.”
We wandered the streets of her neighborhood, our arms brushing in a steady rhythm. Female conductors stepped from packed buses to collect fares, men lined up along a bulletin board pasted with fresh newspapers, and a few aunties lugged metal jugs to the water tank truck. Dense gray clouds, blown in from the north, threatened the skies, and the air was moist, almost brackish. In her short-sleeved dress, Myungsook’s skin slid along mine, soft and slick. I caught her pinkie for a moment and she smiled.
“I wish I could go with you,” she said, a sudden gust in her throat. She and the others from the women’s college had helped distribute information through the activist student groups all week. “Why should the dean get a say in what we do?”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind,” I offered.
“Maybe we won’t listen to him next time.” Myungsook slid closer. “Anyway, I don’t want to go today. My dream scared me. Please be careful.”
I smiled and the bruise on my right cheek throbbed. “I’ll be fine.”
She sucked her straw, her eyes focused on me. “You don’t have to go if you’re not feeling well.”
I gestured at my face. “This is all superficial. It looks worse because it’s healing.”
“I mean the coughing.” She nodded at my chest, as if she could see through my shirt and skin and bones down to my lungs. “The last few weeks.”
It annoyed me, how the women in my life treated me like I was an invalid. I gulped juice and bit off more yeot, as if thirst and hunger equaled health. “Don’t worry about me.”
We looped back, past a schoolyard full of children and a store selling radios. We stopped at Myungsook’s gate. Her landlady’s window opened onto the street. We could hear her daughter inside, the high pitch of a young girl around Solee’s age.
Haemi had written about Kyunghwan’s visit only after Solee had already told me. Yes, he’s here. Do you remember him, Hyunki? I’ve known him always, since before you were ever sick. I had thought Haemi and I were knitting in the holes that had formed throughout the years, but she hadn’t told me anything.
“Is something wrong?” Myungsook cocked her head. I realized she was waiting for a response. Haemi would like her. Myungsook was smart, confident, a college student. We’d been dating a few months now and I hadn’t told Nuna about her. I’d kept the information to myself, just like the river stones I used to shine and hoard.
“I was thinking about my nuna,” I said. “She would be like you, if she were here. Helping us get ready.”
Myungsook gazed at the third floor, where she shared a room with another classmate. “Maybe I should put on some black pants and one of your shirts. Hide my hair under a cap.” She fluttered her hands and presented herself like a magic act. “Jja-jjan! And no one would know the difference.”
I laughed and leaned toward her. She cupped my elbow as if even that part of me was hers. “I wasn’t joking about the dream,” she added. “Promise me, no violence.”
I held out my pinkie, even though we both knew yubikiri was Japanese. “Wait, this is what Haemi-nuna and I used to do.” I kissed my palm and Myungsook did the same. We slapped our hands together. “Sealed tight.”
“Don’t be reckless,” she said.
“Me? Reckless?”
She smiled. “Go kick Park’s ass, all the way to Japan.” She blushed even as the curse left her mouth.
I kissed her cheek, quick, before anyone could see. “You’re learning my bad habits. I’ll come see you after.”
Sungsoo, Jinho, Byungchul, and I met at the American restaurant near our college as the rain began to splatter. Sungsoo came in shaking his head, drops falling on his shoulders. He chuckled when he saw me. “You look awful. Sit down. I’ll order.”
I found a table big enough for
the four of us. As Sungsoo spoke to the cashier, Byungchul jumped to Jinho’s side, as chatty as Jinho was quiet, and they read through the morning specials together.
Sungsoo joined me first with a tray of cornbread and eggs, two soda bottles. The unnamed leader of our second-year student group, he was squarely built with muscled shoulders and flat feet. He had a flat nose to match and a commanding voice. Grinning, he jerked his head at the counter. Byungchul was speaking in English, as if the cashier weren’t Korean. “Our translator’s working his charms again,” Sungsoo said.
It was Jinho, though, with his glasses and discreet allure, who attracted the most girls. We laughed as the cashier craned her neck to catch his gaze while Byungchul blustered on. Jinho, as usual, didn’t notice. A few minutes later, Byungchul sauntered over with three pancakes soaked with syrup. Jinho followed with sliced peaches and watermelon.
“Maybe we should have gone to a place with hangover soup.” Byungchul smirked.
“Do I really look that bad?” I pulled at the skin under my eyes. “Better?”
“You shouldn’t be hungover for the demo.” Sungsoo straightened. Now that we were all seated, he twisted off the soda bottle caps. “Your mind has to be clear.”
“Leave him alone,” Byungchul said. “We can’t all be perfect like you.”
I cut into the cornbread with my chopsticks, my stomach roiling at its sweet scent. The dense yellow crumbled and I dabbed at the flecks with my fingers. “An older relative wanted to know if I was protesting. We met at a pojangmacha last night.”
“You let an uncle get you drunk?” Byungchul laughed. “Invite me next time.”
Jinho’s cheek dimpled, the only evidence of his amusement. He pricked his toothpick into a peach slice. “Did you tell him about the fight?”
I shook my head. A week ago, on our way to a demo at Seoul National, Byungchul had insulted a passerby when he cut in front of us. The man threw a punch and I got into my first fight. My classmates thought I’d been beaten at the demo, and none of us corrected their assumption.
If You Leave Me Page 25