by Hwang Sunwon
He takes a sheet of paper and begins folding it like Chohun’s doing.
“What gave you this idea? It’s amazing you still remember how to do it.”
“Strange, isn’t it? I don’t know what gave me the idea, but I do know I started after Myŏngae went to work at the bar.”
“Isn’t it too early for her to be at work?”
“These days she always goes in early.”
“Business must be good. Just don’t let this one slip through your fingers. Even Yongjae says you’re the luckiest guy of any of us.”
“Luckiest, huh?” Chohun lights a fresh cigarette from the one still burning and produces a bitter smile. “Luckiest, my ass!” With a flick of his wrist Chohun launches the paper crane he’s made and watches it turn upside down and fall to the floor.
“Sure you’re lucky—look what you’re smoking,” he says, taking the pack of Kaida cigarettes.
“Not so fast. Look inside,” says Chohun.
Instead of Kaidas the pack contains Hŭng’a and Midori cigarettes. He selects a Midori.
“Myŏngae brought those back from the bar. Isn’t she sweet?”
He takes the paper boat that Chohun has just finished and sends it sliding.
“Can you guess what I do with those?” Chohun asks.
“You do something with them?”
With his pointed chin Chohun indicates a vase in the corner. The flowers in it are wilting. “It has something to do with flowers.”
“I don’t know—you got nothing better to do and you use the flowers to dye the paper or something?”
“Uh-uh. I float those little paper boats down the river.”
“You do?”
“Actually, Myŏngae does it with flowers. In the rain. I guess I got the idea from her.”
Enveloped in smoke, Chohun starts another paper boat.
He rises, approaches the vase, and sticks his nose close.
“The next time you have a lucky-guy moment, how about floating my crane down the river too?”
And with that he leaves.
The most direct way to the street from Chohun’s place is a narrow lane that’s a quagmire rain or shine. The open space that borders it is just as muddy. From that space comes the sound of a gong and drum. He approaches.
A family—are they Manchurian? An aging couple; a boy, must be their firstborn son; a girl, their daughter; another son, can’t be older than ten. Only a few onlookers, and among them moves the older son, juggling balls he produces from a worn bag. The balls are blue. The father bangs the gong, the mother beats the drum, the daughter beats a smaller drum, and the younger son plays a single-string fiddle. The older son produces more balls from his bag, along with an incongruous shriek for each.
He tries to anticipate the next shriek, but it always startles him. Is it because his stomach is empty?
On to the department store, which has a clean restaurant.
Up goes the elevator. The effect is of the first floor going down to the basement, and then the second floor to the first. The third floor arrives. A woman is sucked inside. She looks familiar. She smiles. A snaggletooth comes into sight.
“I know you,” she says.
It’s Taeung’s former wife, Chŏmnan. She didn’t used to have a beauty spot on her other cheek; maybe that’s why he didn’t recognize her at first.
The restaurant is on the fifth floor. They sit across from each other. Chŏmnan produces a block of chocolate from her handbag. He breaks off a piece and tries to guess what else is in the handbag. Compact, lipstick, eyeliner, beauty-spot brush, and a mirror barely large enough to see one eye in. The mirror actually comes out and Chŏmnan proceeds to touch up her lipstick, keeping one eye on the mirror and observing him with the other eye as she speaks.
“So, Taeung’s in the hospital with a dislocated leg. It must be difficult for him. I tell myself I’ll go see him, but I just don’t know where the time goes.”
The next item in her handbag, he tells himself, will be the screenplay for that movie she’s in.
“Did you finish the movie?”
“We finished shooting on location—that was ages ago. Now we’re on set and we’re behind schedule. What a bore. I’m thinking about going back to theater.”
Their order arrives and Chŏmnan proves adept with knife and fork. When the apple is brought she halves it, halves again one of the halves, then peels and delicately eats these two quarters; she then eats the remaining half, skin and all. When the coffee arrives she nonchalantly chews a sugar cube, then drinks the coffee.
She certainly has a way with food. Where are the beauty spots going to show up next? On to the elevator, the beauty spot on her right cheek in view.
The effect now is of the fifth floor rising to the top level, and then the fourth floor rising to the fifth, the third to the fourth, and the second to the third. The first floor arrives.
“Are you going to the hospital?” Chŏmnan asks at the place where the street forks.
“Yes—part of the daily routine.”
Chŏmnan marches into a flower shop. She emerges with a bouquet.
“I’d appreciate it if you could give these to Taeung. Please tell him I’m too busy to see him now.”
Off to the hospital.
He doesn’t like the twisting, noisy, disorderly street to the hospital, but he dislikes even more the hospital’s long, dark corridor.
At the end of the corridor is Taeung’s room. He enters to the usual greeting:
“Well, I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to see you again. Have a seat.”
With a grimace Taeung hoists himself to a sitting position, his injured leg stretched out.
“Aren’t you going to hurt yourself moving around like that?”
“It’s better than just lying here bored out of my mind. And it doesn’t really hurt. But the bending and stretching exercises, that’s a different story—they practically kill me. And I had another blackout today.”
“That would have been something to see.”
Until yesterday the next bed was occupied by a youth recovering from a tonsillectomy that was supposed to improve his vocal cords. Now a swarthy-faced boy lies there.
“Pop,” the boy says, trembling all over.
An aging man sitting at the foot of the bed draws near.
“What is it, son?”
Both father and son speak with thick P’yŏngan accents.
“Don’t go anywhere, huh?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Where would I go?”
The boy looks up at the gray ceiling.
“Let’s go home.”
“Good heavens, son.” The man takes his walking stick in hand and rises. “Just relax, you’re going to be all right.”
“Look at him shake,” he says to Taeung.
“His left side’s paralyzed,” Taeung says in an undertone.
The aging man looks in Taeung’s direction, as if he knows what Taeung is saying. His eyes are set in a welter of wrinkled flesh.
“It’s worse than yesterday,” the aging man tells them.
“Is there any swelling?”
“No. All this time, been well over a year now, and never any swelling. One day, summer of last year, he went out to cut fodder, and that’s when we noticed it, something wasn’t right with him. He couldn’t hold on to a bunch of grass to cut it, fingers just wouldn’t work. . . . A few days later his fingers went back to normal. Then winter arrived, and guess what—his left hand got gimpy, the same hand. He was trying to braid a rope, couldn’t even keep the straw in the palm of his hand. Whatever it was started at his fingertips, and by and by it got to his wrist. And then somehow or other it worked its way up to his elbow, and now it’s down to his ankle—all on the left side.”
At this point the man holds out the walking stick to the boy.
“Son, grab on, hard as you can.”
The boy flexes a trembling elbow and reaches out, but now his fingers tremble all the more, and before he can
touch the walking stick his arm falls limp.
“See? The boy used to be strong—worked like an ox. And to see him like this now. . . . We wondered if it was something in the grass, something poisonlike, or maybe a snake bite, so we tried a poison remedy and a snakebite cure, didn’t work. We did the needles and the burning, no improvement. So finally we brought him here. And now he’s shaking worse than yesterday.”
As he says this the man rubs his nose with the back of his free hand, then rubs his eyes.
He can’t find words to comfort the man, can only say, “He’s listening, you know, so try not to worry so much—that just makes it worse for him.”
After a brief pause Taeung speaks so that only he can hear: “That’s the third time. The boy was admitted after you left yesterday, and the old man told me then, and this morning he told Mr. Throat over there.”
Mr. Throat is a young man who entered into a suicide pact with a woman. They both drank lye, and when he came to, he had a tube coming out of his neck. The woman died, but even after learning this the man has never missed a feeding through his tube. At the moment he’s pouring a bottle of milk into it.
“Imagine two of them kissing tube to tube—now that would be hygienic,” he says, and then he gets up.
“You’re not going already,” Taeung fusses, as he always does.
“I’ve got something for you.” He opens the paper wrapping of the bouquet.
“You got that for me?” Taeung exclaims.
“Easy now. It’s from Chŏmnan.”
“You saw Chŏmnan?” Taeung extends a large hand and takes the bouquet. “I’ll bet she’s prettier than ever. Probably too busy to come here so she sent the bouquet instead, right? Ladies-and-gentlemen etiquette, you know? I did the same thing a while back—sent her a wreath for the premiere of a movie her husband’s the male lead in.”
Taeung’s laughter, so much like him before his injury, fills the sickroom and follows him down the corridor.
Off to the next stop on his daily routine—the movie theater.
He arrives at the theater—it’s one that shows a lot of newsreels—just in time to see a film of a sumo match from Tsushima Island. Flesh collides with flesh. Pulling and pushing, the two opponents are evenly matched. Neither shows any sign of urgency; both look calm and composed. When the two bodies come together as one and he notices the referee circling quickly around the space they occupy, his tense anticipation changes to excitement as his interest shifts from the outcome of the match to the movements of the referee. But then unexpectedly one of the bodies sprawls to the mat, and the scene changes.
The screen is filled with the movement of antlike insects. But on closer inspection, isn’t it a flock of raptors settling down on an island shore? The camera gradually brings the scene close up, until the raptorlike creatures become distinguishable as people. Disaster victims? No, refugees from northern China. Dishes or sacks in hand, they throng toward a place where food is being distributed. People pushing. Falling. Rolling. A melee.
In and out of the close-up pass the faces of the elderly, cross-hatched with wrinkles like the detail of a complicated map, and the twisted faces of children. He realizes that he is seeing over and over faces that resemble those of the Manchurian family in the muddy lane, playing the gong and drum. He looks for the faces of the aging man and the hemiplegic boy from the hospital, and when he finds himself looking for his own face on the screen, he scurries from the theater.
He’s thirsty. On to a teahouse.
His first priority is a drink of water. He sprinkles the leftover liquid at the base of a potted palm.
Across the tearoom Chohun picks out a record. “Are you by yourself?” he says as he approaches.
“Yeah. When did you get here?”
“It’s my first time out in a long while, but you know, it’s even worse here. Let’s go someplace else.”
Out they go. The evenings are still a bit chilly. After making their way through several alleys, the last one long and gloomy, they enter a small bar.
Chohun finds a table, heaves a great shudder, and calls out to the barmaid: “Vodka!”
The vodka warms them from the inside.
Chohun downs three shots in quick succession; his face remains pale.
“Easy does it.”
“Pleasy does it—we’ll drink as much as we please. Myŏngae earns at a place like this, I spend at a place like this. Good plan, huh? Hey, Hanako! Hanako, right? We want good service, hear? You give us good service, we give you good business.”
Hanako’s smile creates fine wrinkles on the bridge of her prominent nose.
“What kind of service?”
“You know better than me, a little kiss here, a little . . .”
Chohun takes Hanako’s extended hand in his, which has started to tremble, pulling her down close so that her full bosom bumps their table.
“All right,” says Hanako, extricating her hand, and after another smile that wrinkles the bridge of her nose she gives Chohun a coquettish scowl. “People are watching; maybe later.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” he says.
This draws a cursory wink from Hanako, who then proceeds to the end of the bar where a man in Japanese clothing is licking a shot glass.
Chohun turns back to him. His eyes are bloodshot. “Better keep an eye on her. One of these days she’ll be lying on her side, posing for Yongjae.” He tosses down the rest of his drink. “I can see Myŏngae doing the same thing with some bum before long. That’s how I met her, and I have a hunch it’s only a matter of time before she hooks up with some other guy. It’s not a problem as long as she brings home the cigarettes those bums leave behind. But the day will come when she gets all her cigarettes from one guy and doesn’t want to bring them home. Next she’ll be going out to the river and floating flowers with that guy, just like she and I used to do. I’m sure of it. It’s not that I haven’t thought about trying to salvage our relationship. It’s just that I know things would work out if I could get her to quit working at the bar. But what do you think our living situation would be like if she stopped working at the bar? It would be over. So in order to save myself, my best bet is to dump Myŏngae before she dumps me and moves on to some other guy. If she left me I don’t think I could bear it sober. I really envy you and Taeung. I envy you two to the point of resentment, the way you both took it in stride when the little woman left you. Every afternoon she goes to the bar, and every afternoon I decide to dump her. I decide to dump her as long as she’s at the bar. When she comes home at night, I decide not to dump her; as long as she’s with me I’m happy. The very next afternoon she goes to the bar and I decide to dump her all over again. And then I started paper folding. And when she comes home at night I tell myself once again that I’ll offer to break up, but instead I smoke the cigarettes she’s brought. The days are so long. I’ve started wondering which one of the guys with the cigarettes will end up marrying her instead of me. When she’s at the bar and I’m at home I take her silk stockings and flatten out the wrinkles and I think of her body. And I imagine her pulling those stockings up higher than she has to, in front of some man. I couldn’t stand it today; I had to get out. I had to see for myself Myŏngae pulling up her stockings higher than she has to, in front of some man. But before I knew it I was outside the city, away from where the bar is. I realized my legs were shaking, and then I saw where I was—I was standing at the edge of a cliff. And I had an illusion—I was a little pebble at the base of a large boulder. I made up my mind I was going to roll like a rock right off that cliff, but guess what—a rock near the tip of my foot went over first. I decided I’d roll myself over the edge after that rock came to rest. Well, it bounced off another rock and fetched up against another rock about halfway down. And then I sent a second rock over the edge. This one shattered against another rock before it got to the bottom. That’s when I realized I could shatter against a rock and never reach the bottom—that scared me. So I came back into town. And once I was back I
came up with a swell idea: use a place like this to blow what Myŏngae earns. I could kick myself—I should have thought of this sooner.”
With a peculiar sparkle in his dreamy eyes, Chohun gulps down his new drink.
He can’t offer any words of consolation to Chohun and doesn’t feel like scolding him.
“So, a new routine for the man Yongjae calls Happy Guy,” says Chohun.
“Well, I guess I need a new routine too. I’m looking for a missing person, and she comes with a reward. She must be pretty, judging from the description: a snaggletooth when she smiles, a wart to the left of her upper lip, double eyelids, long eyelashes. . . .”
“Sounds like your wife.”
“Pretty sharp, aren’t you? And the bridge of her nose sticks out like that one . . .”
Hanako approaches.
“You two look like you’re having a grand old time. Bottoms up.”
“Give us a smile, would you?” he says.
The same cursory smile as before, wrinkling the bridge of her nose.
“Okay, okay, I got it now. Dimple when she smiles, nineteen years old, and . . . Hanako—Hanako, where are you from?”
Hanako tries out several replies, each in a different accent. “Can you guess?”
“Wait a minute. You were in that newsreel, in Chinese clothes. You were in that crowd of refugees yelling and carrying on, trying to get a handful of rice.”
“Listen to you!”
“When it comes to a fight, winning is the only thing.”
Hanako turns away, and just then a huge man appears at the door. Hanako goes to greet him, the bridge of her nose crinkling.
“Where have you been hiding?” she says. “Did you find someone better?”
“Hanako, you’re prettier than ever. Prettier by the day. What am I going to do with you?”
“There you go again. So, what can I bring you? Absinthe?”
The man flips back the tip of his felt hat. Taking the drink Hanako serves him, he finishes it in a few sips.
The man continues to proffer the empty glass and Hanako continues to fill it. Then, while the man is smoking, she approaches the two of them and pours more vodka.