“Where are you going, Auntie? Need tickets?” A young boy with a brimmed hat waved his papers. “Sungnyemun Gate? Changgyeonggung Palace?” He spoke rigidly, carving the space between his syllables. He spoke like Seoul, like Jisoo when he’d first arrived in my life. The boy glanced at my rucksack. “Do you need a place to stay?”
“I’m a little lost. Can you help me with these directions?” I tried to find the slip with the addresses of Hyunki’s boardinghouse and the hospital, but the boy had turned to the next traveler, his papers already flapping.
Passing women and men talked intently at one another. Everyone looked hurried, walking in half bows for easier greetings and goodbyes.
As I tried to locate a street crossing, a voice filled with country drawl filtered through the chatter. I searched for its owner. A girl in a buttoned coat discussed the best way to preserve radishes, the inflections pitching her words high and low.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
The girl and a college-aged boy stopped. “Yes, Auntie?”
I showed her the addresses. “I’m looking for my brother. Can you help me find this place?”
She pointed to buildings and shot her hand down imaginary streets. The boy touched the girl’s shoulder, where her coat was patterned with purple flowers. He fingered the rounded sleeve, caught my glance, and sheepishly bowed.
“Once you get off the tram, the boardinghouse should be around the southern corner,” she finished.
“Could you walk me to the right line?” I gestured to the cars. “I’m not used to this traffic.”
“They’re over there,” the girl said.
In an alcove across the street, trams crowded together. Instead of wheels or steam, floating wires and grooved tracks guided them through the city’s streets.
“Where do I cross? How do I know which one to take?”
The boy looped his arm with the girl’s. From the way he looked at me, at the wraps and folds of my plain-colored hanbok, I knew he was native to the city. “We’re sorry, Auntie,” he said, bowing again, “but we’re late. If you follow the signs, it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out.”
I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t help me. As they walked away, already returning to their own concerns, I wanted to yell at them. That I was only thirty, that my name was Lee Haemi, and that the way they spoke here—in one timbre through and through—was bloodless.
I held on to a hanging strap on a yellow-and-green tram driven by a kinder man. When we approached a neighborhood of apartment buildings, he whistled. “Jump off here, miss!” I did as he said, hitting the ground hard, and found the boardinghouse around the corner.
The landlady opened the entrance gate before I could even knock. “You must be Mr. Lee’s sister. Come in.” She wore a tight plaid dress. Her face revealed her middle age, as if her features mocked her attempts at youth. She caught my arm and hurried us across the yard. “I’m so sorry.”
She blustered up the stairs to the apartment, almost carrying me by the elbow, wringing her belt with her other hand. “I’ve prepared a room for you. Of course, it’ll be free of charge. Mr. Lee was a sweet boy.”
“Did you know him well?” I brushed the bare stairway walls with my fingertips as we reached the second floor, where a single painting decorated the hallway. The Angelus. Two figures praying in a field. Hyunki had lived in this simple, clean apartment. “The doctor said he’d been sick for some time. Hyunki never told me. He acted like he was fine.”
The landlady hesitated. She opened a door into a dark room. I saw the outlines of blankets and a chest, a desk. A cloying perfume scented the air. “I hope this is enough.”
“When did you first notice his illness?” I asked.
She gazed down the hall without speaking, her weight against the doorframe. “After he came back from the demo last year,” she finally said. “He didn’t recover as quickly as he should have.”
The demo. So he’d lied to me. Despite my pleas, he had joined in the protests. On the phone, with his voice distorted by the distance, I had thought he sounded cheerful. “I’d like to see his room,” I said.
“Of course.” She led me down the narrow hallway, shifting her feet as she described Hyunki’s injuries, the coughing she’d heard from his room in the late hours of the night. “I was the one who insisted he see a doctor.”
I raised my hand. “I’ll stay in here with his belongings. I don’t want the extra room. Excuse me.”
“Do you need—?”
“Thank you. I’d like to be alone, please.”
I shut the door and listened to her hard, clipped footsteps recede. Alone, finally, I felt the tears come.
Hyunki’s room was immaculate. I touched the leveled corners of his sleeping mat, the cleared desk, and the folded clothes in the wardrobe. I had tidied for him all those years, and he’d finally taken up the habit.
The air felt dank and clammy. I wondered if my jealous presence was poisoning the space. I should have been the one to tend Hyunki through his sickness these past months. Not these strangers with their undeserving hands, while I sat dumb at home.
I started with the clothes. He was taller than I’d expected. His pants came up to my stomach. I folded each pair at the knee. The shirts were flamboyant—reds, greens, blues, and one with a checkered pattern. I packed everything, even his undergarments.
I found his round white pills in the back of his wardrobe. The medicine was supposed to sturdy his lungs, and yet his illness had curled in on itself and killed him anyway. I packed the useless medicine, too.
Inside his desk, I found his childhood messiness. The hoarding I’d loved and hated. The dregs of his life—movie tickets, a soccer game stub, a photograph of a trio of boys, sketches on exam schedules, a finished bag of puffed rice, crackers wrapped in paper. Underneath all these nothings, I found notes from a girlfriend he’d never mentioned in his letters. Myungsook.
I read each of her notes and tried to picture Hyunki in Seoul. He watched movies with his friends. He met Myungsook at the library to study. There he leaned her against bookshelves and kissed her. Perhaps he had even brought her to his room, laid out his mat, and loved her. At least he had these happinesses.
When there was nothing else to be done, I unfurled his bedding and burrowed in. He had always smelled like Mother. I’d once accused her of washing their clothes in a different river. She’d laughed at my suspicion and worried about my mind. These sheets had that same milky sweetness. I smelled him in, my little brother. I imagined him alive. I would wake and he would walk into this room and laugh at my unannounced visit. He would hurry me out to meet his girlfriend. As I tried to sleep, I worried Mother was right. There was something rotten inside me that turned my mind around.
Jisoo, too, was right. I was selfish. On the corner of a magazine advertisement, I’d written another address and hidden it in my coat pocket. I’d found the address a year ago, scribbled in the margins of a notebook. Beside it, a name.
I recalled the hurt on Jisoo’s face when I’d left this morning, his impotence and fear. I hated my callousness. It would have been easy to assure him, to kiss him and say, No, I won’t see Kyunghwan. I will find Hyunki and bring his body home.
I woke with Hyunki’s photo sweat-slicked to my chest. I hid it in my skirtband and left for the hospital. It was early in the morning, but the city was already full. Workingmen hung from wires attached to half-constructed buildings. Down below, vendors claimed their corners. Women hurried along to church, covering their heads with lace. They reminded me of Mother, her religious burial. How the church had refused to change the date of her funeral. Hyunki’s insistence on coming home and missing the college entrance exams. My refusal. Mother had been dying for years, and she’d wanted only one thing for her son. Jisoo’s accusation: “You are withholding this experience from him. He has a right to mourn. You cannot do this. You don’t have the power to do this.” But Hyunki was always so good. He listened to his Haemi-nuna.
I didn
’t know where I was going—too many streets, people, cars, noise, ringing church bells with their hollow echoes. I touched a wall, an elderly vendor’s shoulder. “Can you help me?”
“Tea?” The grandfather held up a tray of refreshments. “I have many. What kind would you like?”
His tray was lined with an intricate drawing of children playing with frogs, moles, even tigers. A girl with a long plait of hair rode the back of a boar. “Did you draw this?” I asked.
“It’s what I used to do. Would you like some tea?” He lifted a cup.
“Angelica root,” I said. “Can you help me find this place?”
As I drank, he drew me a map. A box for the hospital, a curlicued arch for the bridge I should cross, and two small caricatures to represent us. At the top, he sketched a fox’s head. “For good luck.” He held it in front of his face and yipped.
During the first winter of the war, Mother and I had thought Hyunki was going to die. He’d survived the journey south, but we were convinced he was going to leave us in Busan. We wiped bloodstained phlegm from his lips and told him he would be fine. One night, as I cared for him alone, he tried to sit up.
“I’m the fox you eat,” he whispered, and swished his sheets.
I saw the whites of his eyes, his rolling pupils. “You’re dreaming.” I swaddled him in blankets. “Shush and go to sleep.”
Hyunki yelped and wouldn’t stop. He was six, the age when boys want to live wild. “I’m the fox!”
I tried to calm him and worried his mind wouldn’t come back around. He yowled until his lungs couldn’t take it. When he quieted, I held his hand. I kissed his flushed face, his shallow chest, his dirty, quivering fingertips. “You can be the fox tomorrow,” I said. “Sleep now.”
“I’m the fox,” he whispered, his lids already closing.
At the hospital, I stared at Hyunki’s face. I wanted him to sit up for me again. If he came back to me, I would even take his hallucinations. On the gurney, only his head and neck were uncovered. The mortician, surprised to find a woman, said this was all I needed to see.
“I did an autopsy,” he’d said when I arrived. “There are incisions, stitches. It won’t help to look at his body.”
But I had seen bodies before. I’d carried Mother’s airless, bone-light frame. As the chief mourner, I had pounded my chest and wailed as I watched her disappear into the earth. Just as, years ago, Mother had moaned for Father. Since childhood I had seen so much of the dead. I’d carried an infant Hyunki along a road that teemed with trucks. We had watched as soldiers unloaded bodies from the Second World War. A few were alive, held together by the parts of themselves they were able to keep. When a man emerged whole, everyone had cheered through their jealousy. Hyunki and I had waited. Like the others along the roadside, I was convinced there’d been a mistake. Father would come home to us. He would return for his son.
This body, though, was my only brother. I looked at his pale, petaled eyes and the strange bloat of his cheeks, and convinced myself. This wasn’t Hyunki. This was merely a dead thing, someone else’s kin.
I almost laughed. I was the only one left alive—cruel, heartless Haemi, a bad mother, sister, daughter, wife.
I walked out of the room. The mortician stopped me in the hallway. He was a short man with a scar ruining his cheek. I’d recoiled when he first greeted me, but he seemed kind.
“I’m done,” I said.
“You should sit with him awhile.”
“I sat with him for years.” I turned to the mortician’s office. There were papers I had to sign and a casket to order for the journey home. “He was always sick.”
“I was angry, too, when my wife died. It goes away.”
There was no blame in his words. I stopped. I couldn’t feel my legs or face or hands. Only my thoughts, as if they had a weight and a taste. Like the mist from that smoke grenade I’d unleashed years ago in Busan—metallic, dangerous. Hyunki wasn’t alive, in hiding. He was in there, splayed out, dead.
“This will be your last chance,” the mortician said.
I let him guide me back to the room. He brought me a chair and sat me down.
I stayed with Hyunki, my little brother, my own.
I no longer knew him, this man before me. I held my hands above his throat, over the knob that declared him an adult. His strange, long face with the high forehead and large eyes that no one could link to Mother or me. He was only twenty-one and he looked like someone else.
I imagined what else had changed. His voice. What I’d heard through the town’s one telephone, fuzzy and warped, hadn’t been enough. I’d taken care of him since he was born, and I would never know the simple, true sound of his adult voice. Was it dark and low, tinged with a gravelly husk, or higher and delicate, softened at the edges? How did he sound when he laughed? When he spoke in class and whispered to Myungsook late in the night? Did he speak of me, ever?
“Hyunki? Talk to me. Tell me you’re a fox.”
I dropped the sheet that covered him and looked at his mutilated body. A single cut from the base of his neck to his pelvis, stitched closed with thick thread. A moan, low and vibrating, spilled out of me. My Hyunki, who’d been so carefully protected by Mother, who’d not even been allowed to run outside, now lay here broken.
I touched his shallow chest, his bloated stomach. Imagined it tinged red from a soldier’s fists. I hovered above the birthmark that spread across his ribs, and his long, muscleless legs. In between, his penis, like a snail curled in on itself.
The mortician opened the door. “That’s enough now.”
“Not yet.”
This was my only brother. I had been cruel. For two years, I’d refused him a home, a response to his letters. He had forgiven me anyway. He had written cheerful stories and never mentioned his hurt, and I hadn’t known enough to ask about his lungs. I hadn’t visited or pushed him to come home. I’d lived my life as if he weren’t my responsibility. This was my punishment.
I wanted to tattoo the image of his body into my memory, to hurt as he had. I wanted to kiss him, leach death from his lips and store it in my own limbs and lungs.
The mortician gripped my shoulders and tried to pull me away. I wouldn’t move. I cupped Hyunki’s soft heels, traced the fingers accustomed to pencils and inks. Intelligent and giving, the doctor had said on the telephone. My little brother was intelligent and giving, and he’d died before me. I touched his chest, the space above his heart. I couldn’t breathe. I had given him nothing in the end.
Outside the hospital, I dug in my coat pocket. I unfolded a glossy slip of paper and held on to someone else’s name. When I arrived at the three-story apartment, I called for Kyunghwan. He would come and we would drink. I would forget Hyunki for a few hours. Kyunghwan would help me pretend. He was good at that, smearing emotions numb with alcohol. I peered through the first-floor windows into other people’s lives. “Kyunghwan!”
He wasn’t home.
I wandered to the side of the building, where a row of bushes and streetlamps bordered a construction site. A half-built apartment frame stood in the middle of an undone space. I wedged my way through the bushes, past the plastic netting, into a lot full of dirt. One complete wall had been erected. The other three sides were a skeleton of metal beams. I peeled off my shoes and socks and rubbed my soles along the cold concrete floor. In the darkening light, I watched my ghostly imprints fade. I would wait. I would ask all the residents.
And when I finally found him, I would tell him what he didn’t know. Hyunki was dead. Jisoo was a drunk. We were losing land. Something was wrong with me. I couldn’t rein in my moods, and sometimes I was unkind to my children without reason. I feared they would resent me, the way I’d resented Mother. I had a new, beautiful daughter. Kyunghwan’s. Jisoo’s. No. She was only mine. Her name was Eunhee—hope and grace. It was true. Of all the girls, she gave me the most pleasure. In moments of frenzy, when Solee wanted to be left alone with her books and Jieun whined for attention and Mila wander
ed off and I didn’t know how to manage, I would squeeze Eunhee’s body and feel calm.
I spotted a shadowed figure walking toward the apartment next door. I climbed over the netting, stopped at the bushes, and called out. “Excuse me? I’m looking for someone.”
“Haemi?”
Kyunghwan.
Tall and unexpected and handsome. I’d imagined a heavier man, but he was still slender with narrow cheeks, the same thin-lipped mouth and high forehead. He rested one hand against the bushes. In the other he held a dinner pail.
“Haemi, is it you?”
He stood beneath a streetlamp and I laughed. Our nights in Busan returned to me, when he’d waited by the fields with his homemade cigarettes, the lamppost’s glow haloing his young, beautiful face—an image from our childhood in this new, unknown space.
“It’s me, Kyunghwan.”
“What are you doing here? How long have you—?” His anger cut his stride into quick steps. “Why are you here?”
I walked backward, deeper into the construction site. The ragged burr of his voice frightened me. He rushed toward me, quickly bridging the space until he stood close enough to touch. Kyunghwan. Not only of my imagination. Real and alive. I pressed my back into the metal corner. “It’s me, Kyunghwan.”
He palmed the beam, his arm stretched overhead. Beneath his open coat he wore a gray suit. He pressed his lips together. Silent. I’d seen this before, how he had to pool enough words before he spoke.
I closed my eyes and waited.
“I was going to eat this,” he finally said, holding up his pail. I smelled Chinese noodles, black bean sauce.
“That’s it?” I pushed him. “You leave, and that’s it?” I pushed again. I towed him back to the lamp. “Look at me.”
If You Leave Me Page 27