by Hwang Sunwon
The girl would tire of toying with the flies and ants before the fish would. Then she would entertain herself by dredging scales from the bottom of the fishbowl with a long, pointed stick. She would press one of the scales against the glass and pull it up little by little. But the scale would slip away before it reached the mouth of the bowl. When this happened, the girl would quickly reach into the water and pincer the sinking scale. She would glance at Hyŏn, and when he pretended not to see, she would swirl the water with her stick to set the other scales astir. Then she would pick them out in the same way. Having recovered all the scales, she would hurry outside to dry them in the sun.
Whenever Hyŏn went out to the well to change the murky water in the fishbowl, the girl would run to him and pick up the goldfish as it flopped in the empty bowl. As the fish struggled in her hand, she looked down with satisfaction at its shiny scales. After filling the bowl, Hyŏn would hold it close to the girl’s hand. Only then would she put the fish back in.
There had once been a second goldfish. It had slipped from the girl’s hand and fallen into the sewer drain as she was about to put it in the bowl. Just before Hyŏn could grab the fish, it disappeared down the sewer pipe, leaving a trail in the muddy water. The girl looked down at the scales remaining in her palm. Hyŏn was afraid she would burst into tears if he stood there any longer, so he hurried upstairs, all the while looking at the remaining goldfish, which was moving its fins and swimming spiritedly in the fresh clean water, as if unaware its mate had disappeared.
Once Hyŏn was out of sight upstairs, the girl became cheerful. She added the old scales she had collected to the new ones in her palm and arranged them all on the back of her hand. Next, she turned her hand toward the sun to make the scales sparkle. She repeated this movement again and again. Finally she stuck the scales to her cheeks, forehead, and nose and pretended to dart and swim like a goldfish, rounding her lips over and over and working her arms like fins. But the girl lost interest in this game too. So she found the cat and began scratching its face with her fingernails.
The young lady had a different way of playing with the cat. After returning from one of her sojourns she would take the cat in her arms, hold one forepaw, and caress her own cheek with it. The paw, claws retracted, would brush gently across her cheek. Closing her eyes, the young lady would stroke more forcefully. Red marks would gradually appear on her face, and a faint smile would rise on her lips, forming a dimple on her left cheek. The round outline of her face looked quite smooth from the front, but her profile was a different story altogether, revealing her sharp nose, mouth, and chin. The slight upward slant of her long eyelashes was charming when seen from the side, but from the front, the first thing Hyŏn noticed in her eyes was the fatigue that had settled there.
One day, after the owner of an unfamiliar pair of shoes had left, Hyŏn, on his way downstairs, made the chilling discovery that the dimple on the young lady’s cheek was actually a deep scar. The young lady was standing outside her room, smiling, her arms extended toward the girl. Hyŏn was curious. This was the first time he had seen the young lady open her arms to the child. Perplexed, the girl stared up at the young lady’s face. Then she looked back just in time to see the cat run out from behind her and jump into the young lady’s arms. “Oh, my daughter,” the young lady might have been murmuring to herself as she held the cat to her breast.
This black cat was the only one allowed to enter the young lady’s room when a pair of men’s shoes sat outside her door. The cat would nestle in her arms, crawl around her bosom, climb to her shoulders. And after attaching itself to the young lady, it would often lick the rims of her ears and her rouged cheeks. The young lady would then go into the kitchen, slice several pieces of raw meat, and place them on her palm in front of the cat. The cat would eat them, the blood staining the edges of its mouth like lipstick. Finally, it would stretch, yawn, and withdraw, leaving a couple of slices of meat uneaten. The young lady would then take the cat to the sunny part of the yard and give it a bath. The cat was used to this and merely blinked when the young lady lathered its fur with soap; it was more docile than the girl was when the landlady washed her hair. The cat was then carried to the young lady’s room, where it played with the flowers.
The flowers were as various as the shoes of the men who visited. Only when a man left and the young lady went out could the little girl have the flowers of her choice. The girl would plant sprigs of these flowers around the sewer drain. There she left them until they all had withered.
Hyŏn then gave the girl a vase so she would have a place to put her flowers. At first she didn’t know what to do with it, but finally she set it down and raced downstairs. She came back a little later with the sprigs she had planted near the drain and put them in the vase. All the flower petals were either torn or wilted. The torn petals must have been the work of the cat’s claws and teeth. The girl changed the water in the vase as often as possible. If the cat tried to bat at the flowers, the girl grabbed it and threw it to the floor. But the sturdy cat would land on its feet and stand its ground, as if to prove it was a match for the girl. Then it would stretch and yawn, extending its middle and hunching its back.
The young lady’s sojourns got longer and longer and the cat grew thin. When the girl threw the cat away from the flowers, it could barely land on its feet. Then it would climb onto the windowsill. One day the girl crept up behind the cat and tried to push it out the window to the ground below. But the cat managed to flatten itself against the sill and escape back inside, tipping over the vase. The vase broke at the neck, and the flowers, which were already withered away, fell out, their petals scattering. As Hyŏn gathered the petals floating in the water on the floor, the young lady’s dimple-like scar kept appearing in his mind. He placed the petals and sprigs in the broken vase, then took it to a vacant lot at the corner of a nearby alley, where he threw it onto a pile of dung, dead rats, and broken dishes under a sign on the back wall of a house that read DON’T ANYBODY URINATE HERE.
As the cat wasted away, it sometimes came home from the vacant lot with a dead rat in its mouth. When that happened, the landlady cursed it and chased it with the stick she’d used to poke the mother rabbit. But not for its life would the cat part with the rat—it would climb up the outside of the chimney and hide on the roof. The landlady would rap the chimney with her stick and yell at the cat to let go of the rat and come down. Finally she would throw the stick aside and go into the kitchen. The cat would come down from the roof licking blood from its mouth and sun itself under the veranda.
Seeing this, the girl stole up to the cat and poked at its half-closed eyes with a stick, but the cat just batted the stick away. The girl then started clawing the cat’s face, but the cat clawed the backs of her hands. The girl clawed more forcefully; then, when the cat was about to run away, she grabbed it around the middle and rolled it over on the ground. The cat got covered with dirt. The girl then tied a piece of colored fabric to the cat’s tail. The cat chased its tail, trying to catch the fabric in its mouth. The girl went around in circles too. Soon, after tottering several times, she keeled over. The cat kept going. Exasperated, the girl got up and started turning in circles again, trying to outlast the cat. And again she plopped down, but this time she remained on the ground, dizzy, her upper body seeming to sway round and round. The cat kept turning in circles, trying to catch the colored fabric. The girl was clearly the loser in this game. A few minutes later she rose, picked up the landlady’s stick, and hit the cat’s belly as hard as she could. The cat rolled over with a howl and scurried away.
When the girl had nothing else to do, she could play with the mute boy who lived next door. The landlady called him an opium addict. The boy had come to live with some distant relatives after his opium-addicted parents died. Though mute, the boy could hear, and he would look down with shame when the landlady declared that the little bastard had turned his parents into addicts and destroyed them; it was rotten luck, but that’s what happened when you h
ad a boy whose nose turned up toward the sky. When the boy played with the girl, he undertook all the drudgery—kneading mud into the shape of food when they played house, putting the food in one of the larger, prettier-colored potsherds, and serving it to the girl and her doll. The girl never shared this food. Even so, the boy watched in satisfaction, with no sign of displeasure, as she kept touching the mud to the lips of the doll and saying, “Eat, Mother.” But this sight had him drooling before he noticed it. When the boy’s father had started taking opium, the mother nagged him, trying to get him to stop. The hounding ended when the father got her addicted as well. The two then had to compete for opium, and finally the father sold the mother away. But the mother secretly visited the boy and had him steal his father’s opium. The boy was caught by his father and beaten again and again. In the end the father ripped out the boy’s tongue to prevent him from communicating with his mother. Since then the boy had been unable to talk, and he drooled helplessly without realizing it. Whenever the girl saw him drool, she scowled and jumped up. “Dirty!” The boy understood, and sucked in the spittle. But the girl would disappear inside without looking back. At such times the boy also went home, never waiting for the girl to come back out.
After one such incident, the boy came to play with the girl, offering her a broken piece of porcelain he had smoothed. She accepted it as if it were her due. The boy then took a shiny blue potsherd from his shabby vest, placed it on a rock, and began smoothing its edges. It was a piece of the vase Hyŏn had thrown away in the empty lot. Whenever the boy struck one of the sharp edges with a stone, bits of porcelain flew up. The girl stood far enough away to avoid them. The boy kept smoothing, and didn’t seem to mind when the chips flew in his face or down his neck and inside his sleeves. Suddenly he lifted his left hand, the one holding the potsherd. He had struck his thumb by mistake, and immediately blood had begun to well up from the cut. In no time it stained the piece of porcelain. The girl retreated a step and wrinkled her nose at this awful sight. But the boy flicked his hand back and forth a couple of times and went back to smoothing the potsherd. The bits of porcelain flew faster than before. Finally he was done. He polished the smoothed potsherd on his threadbare pants and handed it to the girl. The girl received it as if this were only proper, and added it to her other potsherds.
Sensing that the girl was getting bored, the boy took two clamshells from his vest. After fitting the shells together, he began rubbing the hinged side against a crock of soy sauce to make holes to blow through. The rubbing produced a ringing screech. The girl covered her ears, withdrew farther than before, and watched the boy. The landlady came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her skirt, and yelled that the damned addict ought to be grateful he was allowed to play with the girl, but instead he had the nerve to make that terrible racket. But before the landlady could make the boy stop, the girl snapped at her to go away. The boy kept rubbing the shells. The landlady went back to the kitchen, mumbling to herself that the handicapped didn’t have an ounce of kindness. Finally the boy stopped rubbing, his hands worn out. But he had made holes in the shells. He started to bring the place with the holes to his mouth, but then he noticed that he was drooling again. His face crinkling in alarm, he offered the girl the shells. “Dirty!” The girl spat, then took them. Showing no desire to blow into them, she threw the shells under the soy-crock terrace, breaking them to pieces.
After a few moments the boy ran out through the gate. The girl picked up some of the prettier and more shapely pieces of shell as if nothing had happened, and added them to her pieces of porcelain. She had started playing house with her doll when the boy returned, panting. He took a handful of sawdust from his vest pocket and held it in front of the girl. He had gotten it from where the sawyers worked at the corner of the empty lot. Squatting and emptying his vest pockets on the ground, he buried one of his hands in the sawdust and began patting it with the other firmly and evenly. Then he carefully withdrew his hand from the sawdust. Instead of forming a cave, however, the sawdust crumbled. Again the boy buried his hand in the sawdust and patted it, and again the sawdust crumbled. Impatient, the girl scattered the sawdust with a sweep of her hand. The sawdust flew into the boy’s face. A smile of enjoyment rose at the corners of the girl’s lips, and she sprinkled the boy’s face with a handful of the sawdust. The boy didn’t move, merely closed his eyes. The girl sprinkled his face with another handful of sawdust. This time the boy recoiled as if surprised. Her interest heightened, the girl now sprinkled the sawdust with both hands. The boy flinched again. The girl raked the sawdust together again and again with both hands and showered the boy with it; by now she was giggling. The louder she giggled, the more forcefully the boy ducked. Eventually the girl lost interest in this game and her laughter died out. The boy got up with a sudden look of satisfaction and dashed out the gate without looking at the girl. That was the last time he came to play with her.
On his way home from the laboratory Hyŏn sometimes saw the boy playing near the two elderly sawyers in the empty lot. A sign reading IF YOU’RE NOT A DOG, DON’T URINATE HERE was now posted beside the sign reading DON’T ANYBODY URINATE HERE. The two men worked their saw lengthwise down a large log that was propped up at one end, dusting the hair of the boy and the lower man. The boy heaped sawdust into a mound. A keen scent of wood rose from it. The log, the bent back of the elderly man standing on it, and the saw being pulled and pushed—all were in dull silhouette against the glow gathering in the evening sky. The sawdust was like falling snow. Whenever he saw them Hyŏn thought that real snow whiter than the sawdust would surely begin to fall before the men finished sawing all the dark logs piled in the corner of the lot.
Hyŏn returned from the laboratory and sprawled in exhaustion across the floor of his room. The late-summer evenings were darkening more and more quickly. Suddenly he could smell the rats he had been handling at the lab. Surely the smell was coming from his hands. Hyŏn raised his head and looked at his hands, but it was already too dark to distinguish them. The walls and ceiling seemed to press in on him. The corners of the walls and ceiling were not square but round. He could not sense which way he was lying. Sometimes he had awakened, his heart quickening, to find he wasn’t lying where he thought: the window that should have been above his head was at his feet, things that should have been on his right were to his left. But today he hadn’t even fallen asleep before he sprang up in alarm, thinking that the blur of the window was in the wrong place.
“Damned cat! That damned cat!”
The thumping of the landlady’s feet on the stairway followed her voice into Hyŏn’s room. Hyŏn turned on the light. The stairs he had thought to be at his feet were at his head. He opened the door. The cat came in with something in its mouth, the landlady in pursuit with the stick she had used to poke the mother rabbit that morning. It was a dead baby rabbit. The landlady’s wrinkled face twitched, and she tried to grab the cat, saying she hadn’t realized the damned thing was eating all the little rabbits. The cat easily eluded her.
The girl ran into the room and grabbed the cat by the middle; the animal tried to squirm free. When she yanked at the dead rabbit, the cat arched its back, hissing spitefully through clenched jaws, hate filling its eyes. Hyŏn grabbed at the rabbit, and part of it tore free. The girl went down the stairs clutching the cat in her arms. “I’d better kill that damned cat,” muttered the landlady. “All it’s good for is bringing dead rats into the house and eating up baby rabbits.” Hyŏn went down the stairs holding what was left of the rabbit. In the darkness outside he could barely see the girl hurl the cat to the ground. The cat howled and disappeared beside the rabbit hutch. Hyŏn went to the hutch and showed the remains of the baby rabbit to the mother. The hutch was quiet, as if the mother rabbit, like the goldfish that had lost its mate, was unaware. Hyŏn had to kick the hutch to make his point, and only then was he able to startle the rabbit. He decided to take it to the lab the next day.
Hyŏn took the rabbit remains to the open sewer besi
de the street leading to the park. The farther his eyes traveled down the ditch, the darker it appeared. The smell was repulsive. Hyŏn dropped the remains into the ditch. There was a soft plop and the ditch became still again, filling the air with its stench. The goldfish the girl had dropped down the drain at his boardinghouse would’ve been dead and rotten before coming this far, he told himself. While gazing into the dark sewer, he had a recurring illusion that it was flowing upstream. He walked on toward the park.
At the park Hyŏn went to a broadleaf tree and stretched out his hand. The dewy leaves infused him with their damp coolness. Hyŏn withdrew his hand, but then stretched out both hands and rubbed them with the leaves. He went to a bench and sat. The clouds had not parted for even an instant. With the moon cloaked, the sky was as black as the ditch. The shadows in this part of the park were darker because the few lights along the paths were screened by trees.
Hyŏn left the park and went to a well-lit market. In one of the stalls near the entrance sat an elderly woman surrounded by brightly colored toys. She sent a toy tank wheeling about, knocking down other toys. Then she sent a self-righting doll rolling down a slide. When the doll reached the bottom the tank knocked it over. The doll rolled away and then righted itself.
Hyŏn returned to the park. A boy and a girl were sitting on the bench he had occupied. They were laughing in a shrill, affected manner. Hyŏn turned away. His hands still felt sticky, as if bloody and exuding a smell. He returned to the broadleaf tree. This time he picked some leaves, rubbed them between his palms, and wiped the backs of his hands and each of his fingers. Their grassy smell was stronger than the bloody stink. Then he noticed a different smell, not blood or grass—the scent of cheap face powder. He lit a cigarette. No one was there. He was about to reach up to the leaves again when something whitish appeared right in front of him. He stepped back in surprise. A woman was next to him. She laughed nervously and asked for a light. But her outstretched hand snatched the cigarette from his mouth before he could hand it to her. The area around her nose, which looked reddish in the glow from the cigarette, was discolored with a mark that her thick facial powder could not conceal. The tips of their cigarettes fell away from each other, and the woman’s face disappered in a cloud of smoke. The woman held Hyŏn’s cigarette out to him in the darkness. Hyŏn reached for it. She brushed his hand aside. Her hand that held his cigarette probed for his mouth. Hyŏn stuck out his lips, only to find that the woman was trying to pass him the lighted end of the cigarette. He slapped the cigarette from her hand and strode away. Behind him, the woman giggled.