by Paul Yoon
Bey had waited until the patrol boat was no longer visible in all directions before entering the cabin. He found Soni, however, already standing in the room. They faced each other, in silence, as the trawler swayed, brushing water.
“You told me to wait,” she said. “Until I heard nothing. That’s what I did. And then I opened the door.”
“Like we had planned,” he said.
She reached to touch his arm and they stayed that way for some time. She said, “It is good to hear your voice.” She gripped his hand and he led her to the deck where she returned to sitting close to the bow, watching the albatross hover over them.
Before long the birds faded up beyond the clouds and the island appeared along the horizon, flat and dark. It seemed at first to remain in a fixed distance from them. Soon, though, as if they had somehow unlocked what held it, the land approached at a steady pace and they were able to distinguish the forest canopy. Rising above it, like great balloons, was smoke. Soon they smelled it, too, the scent of burning as the winds pushed against them. By Bey’s guess, they were perhaps three kilometers away.
He gripped the rails and held his breath. It was far worse than his imagination had allowed. The sea, all at once, was speckled with debris. They surrounded the trawler, like cracked and splitting glaciers. He listened for his heart. He concentrated on its rhythm and told himself to slow.
Later, he would attempt to recall what it was exactly that caused his wife to jump overboard. He remembered she stepped onto the rails and he rushed to her. He held her arm, said, “Soni,” and she looked at him with an expression that was unrecognizable, one he had never seen. It was hatred, he thought, and she swung at him and he felt her knuckles against the side of his face and he let go and she was no longer there.
What was it? He wasn’t sure. It could have been the island growing larger, the sensation of rushing they both felt. It could have been the evidence of destruction around them: the pieces of wood, the amount increasing the closer they approached the coast, some as long as the trawler. It could have been the clothes, a shirt, a straw sandal. Or perhaps it was the limbs they saw, a severed leg bent at the knee, two arms with their hands clenched together, the muscles still straining. The sea shining copper.
And Soni now in it. He saw her for an instant. Her white shirt spread across the water’s surface as she swam away from him. He heard her breathing and then cough and he shouted but she did not listen.
Dense clouds of smoke surrounded the trawler. The air grew thick and warm, the sun fading within it. Bey’s vision dimmed. She was gone. He cut the engine. He called for her. He heard the colliding of floating debris. He called again: “Soni.” He stood there waiting and it was as though the inside of his body were escaping. He saw the world as gray and vast and impenetrable and he clawed at his chest and looked for the color blue. He thought of painting and stars and distances and what lay buried and he envisioned them on a map, positioned as continents he would never visit.
The winds grew stronger. And the smoke, for a moment, dissipated. It revealed the island, its blackened trees. On the beach lay the remains of masts and keels like the spines of ancient creatures.
And below him there was his wife. She was kneeling atop a piece of wood the size of a door, its edges shredded. She grasped the trawler’s ladder for balance. She was drenched, her clothes revealing a body loosened by age, all her years contained in the folds and the pigment of her skin, like the inside of a tree. She knelt there and the water licked her knees. In her eyes he saw clarity. She motioned for him.
Slowly, Bey descended the ladder. His toes touched the damp wood and he felt Soni’s hand press against his back to guide him. When he was settled, she pushed away. The wood tilted and then gained control of their weight and the waves and they were soon adrift among the wreckage. They kneeled and paddled with their hands, and their fingers turned cold and numb. They worked in silence. They kept low and remained under the haze of smoke. When a body passed them, they reached for the man. Some they held by the feet, others by the arms, neck, or hair. Whatever was closest. They picked them as if for harvest. The tide took them out to sea. Their breathing grew heavy. And, with all their effort, they pulled the floating men closer and lifted their still faces out of the water.
FACES TO THE FIRE
SOJIN KNEW HIM ONCE though that was a different life and then he left and she grew older. Now he had returned. She heard that. This morning, from her neighbor. “Sojin,” the woman said, pulling weeds from her front lawn. “Sojin, did you know? Kori is here.” And the news, like a premonition, brought on the certainty that her days were about to change, alter from their accustomed rhythms, as though the entire island had tilted against the tides and shifted in its geography so that for a brief moment the landscape was unrecognizable. She smoothed a crease in her cotton skirt and then, as she did every day, walked along the road that led to the town.
At the store she waited for him, assuming he would come, although it was presumptuous to think he knew she worked in the town now. Perhaps he was at the house, with her father. Perhaps he was looking for her. Perhaps she would look for him. Her thoughts revolved, afloat, never landing. The hours went quickly. She sold a T-shirt, camera film, water, candy, postcards, a map of the hiking trails around Tamra Mountain and the nearby waterfalls.
She had done well for herself. She could say this much. She owned the shop, one of the largest on the western part of the island. This would be the fifth spring her store kept business. A good month remained before the monsoons came and the wet heat lingered along the slopes of the hills. Last winter she turned thirty. It had been fifteen years since Kori left on a seaplane flown by a postman. She remembered the engine noises, the water spraying, then the quiet and the plane ascending. He would have been eighteen then.
The early evening arrived. Because of her father she had recently begun to close the shop before dark. But today she stayed on the sidewalk a moment longer, leaning against the metal shutters she had pulled down over the storefront window. The sun disappeared behind the distant forest. The headlight of a moped swung past her. Two boys fed pigeons and then chased them, the birds fleeing to rooftops. An old woman led a tour across the street, lifting a red parasol into the air.
It was a different island now. Mainlanders came for weddings. Foreigners visited the beaches. In the town, streetlamps had been installed, brightening the houses and the signs of the new restaurants that remained open until the late hours. There was a store where visitors could rent snorkels and then board a bus to the coast. A hotel and country club had been built beside the town and on some nights, after her father was asleep, she sat on the fence to watch the golfers on the driving range, the arcs of their swings gleaming under floodlights. She did not know what he would think of all this. Whether it made a difference.
She herself lived on an unpaved road at the edge of town, across from a field where the cows grazed. The houses there were single-story and painted white. Hers stood at the end. By the time she returned it was dark and she glanced through the windows before heading inside. From her father’s bedroom came the sound of a television. He was sitting on the couch she had moved in there. He wore a cardigan and his hands were clasped over his lap. In the past year a faint scent of staleness had appeared in his room. She was unable to get rid of it and no longer bothered to try.
“Papa,” she said. “Did anyone visit today?” His face was lit blue from the screen and she thought she saw him shake his head. She looked about the house—nothing to suggest a visitor. Perhaps her neighbor had been mistaken, she considered, and then apologized to her father for her tardiness.
In the kitchen she cooked noodles, cracking eggs into the broth. She brought him to the table and tucked a napkin into his shirt collar. She told him about her day, as she always did. He sat hunched over the bowl, his cane hooked to the back of the chair. Thin lines of dried blood were on his cheeks from where he had cut himself shaving. His gray hair had grown past his ears and she
reminded herself to trim it.
He had been in Seoul at the start of the war when the bridge was blown. In her bedroom there were photographs of him as a young man in uniform. Beside those were ones of herself as a child with her mother, one under the shade of a tree and another on the coast. The room was sparsely decorated; there wasn’t much else. There was a hook where she hung her shop keys, which were tied to a string she wore around her neck throughout the day. On a bureau was her mother’s jewelry box. After dinner, while undressing, she tried on the necklaces and the rings, the chains cold against her chest. They didn’t look as lustrous on her as they did in the box, she thought. Gold, she assumed, but had never bothered to verify it.
The bathroom was in the old style, with the drain in the middle of the tiled floor. She filled a washbasin with cold water and used a plastic ladle to pour the water down her shoulders and back, scrubbing with soap and a cloth. She felt the day ending and shut her eyes and hummed folk songs. As a child she would wash herself by moonlight, with the window open, and watch her neighbors, the cows, the moths, the world passing. It seemed like something only a child would do, she thought, now that she was older, though sometimes she was tempted to do it again. Once, she looked up to find Kori there, by the window, and she had flung the bucket of water at him and he had run back into the forest, drenched and laughing.
She was washing her hair when she heard a tapping on the door. “One minute,” she called.
“Are you in here?” her father said, pushing the door open with his cane.
Sojin rushed to her towel and covered herself. He wouldn’t have noticed anyway, but all the same her shoulders tightened and her face flushed, she couldn’t help it. Cold air followed him from the hall, the scent of their dinner. He placed both hands on the cane and leaned forward, forming words with his dry lips, though none came forth.
“What is it, Papa?”
“Someone came by for you today,” he said.
“Yes, Papa,” she said. “Who was it?”
His eyes were gentle, apologetic. “No, no, I am sorry,” her father said. “They came by for Sojin. Not you, my dearest.”
And then he shut the door behind him and she listened to the beat of his cane and his heavy feet as he returned to his room to watch television. She stood there clutching her towel. She heard the flicker of the streetlamps beginning to burn, the hollow sound of water draining. Quickly she dried her hair. There was still shampoo in it, spots she missed, though she wouldn’t notice until later as she lay on her mattress, unable to sleep, sliding her fingers through its length and smelling chamomile.
Born without a father, Kori, as a boy, lived with his mother in a village in the forest, close to the hills. Where the other whores live, the neighbors said. Rumors spread. His mother had entertained American soldiers during the war. Still did, the students used to say, as if from experience. Kori neither denied nor confirmed the accusations. The mute, they called him. His mother, when she was seen on the street, wore short skirts and sunglasses like the Hollywood movie stars. Presents, it was assumed, from her customers.
He and Sojin attended the same elementary school. She spoke to him because he was alone. She was seven. He was two or three years older. It wasn’t out of sympathy that she approached him. It was because in her shyness she was unsure of how to join the groups of boys and girls scattered about the playground every afternoon. So she picked the single boy and circled him, widely at first, then narrowing, while he kept a ball of tape in the air with his foot. His legs were thin and tan. And it was only when he missed and the ball thudded into the red dirt that she took a piece of sesame candy from her pocket to give as an offering. She watched him chew, his mouth revealing crooked teeth. She picked up the ball and attempted to keep it aloft. She failed and she looked at him and he did not laugh. He said, “Try again,” and she did.
When he was older, boys began to approach him, other times men. They called him names. He fought them no matter how many there were. Sojin did as well. They used their fists, their nails, their feet. They compared bruises. Once there were six, older and drunk. He and Sojin were walking down the main street. He was twelve years old then. The men took him by his arms and legs and carried him to the center of the town. He thrashed. She saw his muscles strain, his wild eyes. She chased them and hit a man against the side of his head. He turned and slapped her and from the ground she watched them take Kori’s pants off and beat him. They were quick. They picked him up and put him in a car.
Sojin ran to her parents but before she could speak her mother saw her dirtied clothes and the redness along the side of her face. “Was it Kori?” her mother kept on insisting. When Sojin didn’t answer they sent her to bed. “Enough,” her father said, and forbade her to ever see the boy again. In the middle of the night she snuck out of her house to search for him.
At dawn she found him asleep at the edge of the forest, the bruises on his thighs the color of persimmons. He opened his eyes. She lay beside him and they looked up at a clear sky and spoke of the sea.
From then on, ignoring her parents, Sojin left the house while they slept. Her nights became days. Kori bought a motorbike and they rode to the waterfalls and the caves. They dipped an old T-shirt in gasoline, wrapped it around a stick, and lit it. They moved through the narrow space of a cave, guided by the torch, following their shadows against the curving walls. They went in as far as they could, the cave enclosing them, and they waited for the torch to burn out and then they raised their voices and listened to their echoes and imagined they were in the belly of a whale. In the darkness they felt themselves slipping, as though they were being swallowed, growing smaller, moving backward through time.
He never talked about his mother. She never asked. Not once did she visit his house or meet the woman. She grew used to this. They lived in fantasy and that was another life and they were young.
It changed with the fire. An entire neighborhood, in a matter of hours, gone. No more whores, one of her neighbors said, more concerned about the trees. They never found the body of Kori’s mother.
After that Sojin saw less of him. She spent afternoons in the grass, looking into the destroyed forest. Often she found herself pausing with her house chores, listening to footsteps approach the road. Sometimes, during the nights, she spotted him at the edge of the field and went to him. They met in the high grass and stood there together as if they were travelers who had recognized each other. They spoke politely. He did not stay long and she watched as he continued across the field to wherever he was headed.
Kori, eighteen years old, left the island that winter. He was going to find work on the mainland. He was going to be rich. She couldn’t convince him otherwise. Then write to me, she said. He promised he would. He never did.
She used to dream of him walking across the peninsula like Johnny Appleseed. In the early months it was like this for some time—her imagination with him, across the strait and not where she was, her body moving without her, it seemed, without permission. A year turned into another, the seasons repeating. She turned twenty, then twenty-five. She opened the store. Her mother grew ill. She thought less of him and of the fire until it was only an occasional memory. She took care of her mother instead. She spent the evenings at home.
Her mother passed away while Sojin was at work. She was found lying on the rush mat that she had preferred over a mattress. Her ear was pressed against a portable radio. It had awoken her husband in the morning and before he left to gather eggs, he had told her to shut it off. When he returned it was still on, tuned to a station that played swing music. She died grinning. With saxophones and trumpets.
It wasn’t until the late afternoon of the following day that she saw him. She had come to the store early and propped the door open, listening to the radio at a low volume—news about a port construction, a US Army base, a sailboat accident, a series of thefts in a northern village. A small group of teenagers browsed the aisles. A man dressed in a tuxedo drove down the main street in a
golf cart, holding a megaphone and announcing discounts at the driving range, “Two buckets for the price of one!”
She was arranging pinwheels beside the counter when he appeared at the window, leaning forward to view the displays. She held her breath. She recognized his narrow shoulders and his arms, their slimness, like the necks of swans. She knew his walk, the way he moved carefully past the window and into the store, as if worried of intruding. He was taller than she remembered him being. He had aged, of course. The boyish skin had become taut, darker, his jawline more defined. His hair was longer, falling past his eyes, which were alert and bright. He rested his elbows against the counter. He smelled of the ocean.
“You’re here,” she said. “You’ve come.”
He had arrived the day before last. Had he been back before? she wondered. The question seemed silly once she thought it and so she asked him instead whether he was just visiting. What she wanted to know was whether he had come to stay but she didn’t say that either. She was shifting her weight from one leg to another, she realized, and stopped.
“I’ll stay for a bit,” Kori said, and smiled in that shy way of his while looking at the gifts she sold.
He motioned for her to follow him outside. The street was crowded, people stopping to read restaurant menus, a line forming for the bus to the coast. He pointed to the left, over the country club, far beyond Sojin’s neighborhood. The man in the tuxedo drove by again, honking the horn and waving.
“Look higher,” Kori said.
Scattered across the hills were a few shacks, efficiency homes, and a narrow road that wound around the slope. The houses there were fairly new, built fast and cheaply in the late sixties, after the fire, when housing was needed. She hadn’t realized anyone still lived there.