The Hole

by Hye-young Pyun

  Oghi blinked hard. It did feel good. The past three months had been one miserable and depressing day after another. There would be many more of those days to come, but for now, he felt at ease. It didn’t matter that his body was broken and he couldn’t move and his wife was dead, he was simply relieved to the point of astonishment that he could feel this way.

  “Of course it’s good. It must feel good,” she said with a sigh, and then suddenly sobbed.

  He guessed she wasn’t crying out of joy at his partial recovery. He figured she was crying because of her daughter. Crying with pity for the child who would never come home, whom she would’ve preferred to have home even if it meant she was in the same shape as Oghi. And because she missed the daughter she would never see again.

  Oghi stared at his mother-in-law and blinked to comfort her. She wept loudly, louder than before, as if demanding that he agree with everything she said and praise her for her decisions. He was tired, but he wanted to do as she wished.

  But as her weeping grew even louder and more ragged, Oghi turned his gaze to the ceiling. There were times when he liked the fact that he didn’t have to talk, that all he had to do to communicate was blink and that, if need be, he didn’t even have to do that. Now was one of those times. Oghi was exhausted. He was in no shape to comfort anyone. No one was worse off than he was. His mother-in-law should have known that. He’d been more than understanding so far each time she had looked at him and cried, but he sensed that it was going to make him angry in the future.

  His mother-in-law’s tears died down to a quiet sob. If she had let it all out at once, it would have tapered off soon enough, but now there was no telling how much longer her whimpering and sobbing would go on for. Oghi wasn’t too happy about that. But then again, maybe happiness and comfort were now luxuries. His mother-in-law had been doing her best to bring that to his attention. Awakening him to the fact, as it were, that he had survived where his wife had not. Given the state he was in, Oghi should have envied his dead wife, but everyone around him kept saying how lucky he was to be alive.

  Oghi wanted to be alone. He’d been away from the familiarity of home for so long. Even in the hospital, he was able to get some alone time. It was a two-person room, but he’d had it to himself whenever the patient in the other bed was in the examination room. It never lasted long. The nurse, the nursing assistant, occasionally his mother-in-law, or the family and friends of the patient in the other bed were always dropping by.

  It felt more like being at a country market than a hospital. It was loud, and people were constantly barging in. Even when Oghi was emptying his bladder through his catheter, they would come in and try to talk to him, the door sitting open the whole time. He knew that since he would be relying on a caregiver for the time being, his desire to be left in silence was an impossible dream. But even so, as he looked around at his familiar home and smelled its familiar smells and ran his hand over his blanket and stared up at the pattern on the ceiling, all he wanted was to be alone.

  His mother-in-law showed no intention of leaving. She sobbed quietly, and when the tears eventually stopped coming, she sat on a folding chair at the foot of the bed. She sat and stared at him. She did not take her eyes off him for one second, as if ready to jump up and fetch anything he might ask for. Now and then her mouth twitched and she mumbled something, but the words weren’t directed at him. There was nothing he wanted to ask of her. In the future there would be plenty, but not yet.

  He’d been away for eight whole months. He wondered if others had any idea what it meant to leave on a trip with your wife only to return home alone. He felt angry about the state he was in, and at the same time lonely at the thought that no one could possibly understand him.

  Perhaps his mother-in-law would leave once he fell asleep. He closed his eyes. She didn’t move. She kept her breathing quiet, as if for fear that even the tiniest sound would disturb him. He breathed louder. If she were watching closely enough, she might have noticed that his eyelids were trembling in an unnatural way, but he kept pretending to sleep. Just to be alone, however briefly.

  It was the first time he’d been alone with his mother-in-law for this long. He’d been married for fifteen years, but they rarely had long conversations. There was never anything that he needed to discuss with her and nothing really to talk about. His mother-in-law was shy and not very talkative, while he was admittedly not the warmest person. Nor had there been any need for him to try to get closer to her. His wife had always been there as a go-between. His mother-in-law had sought her out and consulted with her in all matters, and in turn his wife was always the one to talk to her and only occasionally chose to involve him. When his wife wasn’t around, there was his father-in-law, who was never at a loss for words. No matter the topic, his father-in-law always started out with name-calling and blaming others, but that didn’t make what he had to say any shorter.

  He remembered vividly the first time he’d met his mother-in-law. Oghi was nervous and had memorized his wife’s two pieces of advice. The first was that her father was talkative and her mother was not. His plan was to be a good listener and applaud anything and everything his father-in-law said and to try to engage his mother-in-law in conversation. The second was, “My father has a lot, but I’m all my mother has.” He took this to mean that her father was distant while her mother was clingy. His plan for that was to flatter her father for his accomplishments while praising his wife to her mother.

  Oghi wanted to do his best and impress his wife’s parents. He loved his wife, and he wanted them to be happy with the wedding. He was making a concerted effort because he knew he couldn’t afford a fancy ceremony. Oghi was in the middle of a PhD program in the humanities with no clear future ahead of him, his parents were deceased, and he had inherited nothing from them. He was all too aware of his circumstances the day he went to meet his future in-laws.

  His mother-in-law looked young for her age. She was elegant and aging gracefully. She had none of the dowdiness or pushiness that he normally associated with women her age. In contrast to his wife, who had sharp features and big eyes, his mother-in-law was plump and had a round face with half-moon-shaped eyes. But despite those differences, there was something very similar about the two of them. He hoped his wife would age as well as her mother had.

  At the same time, there was nothing frivolous or casual about her at all, and that made him uncomfortable. If she’d been a little more down-to-earth, a little bit easier to get along with, Oghi wouldn’t have had to sweat so hard all through dinner.

  At first, the problem was his wife’s father, who picked on every little thing. He seemed to know that Oghi was trying to get on his good side. But gradually, his mother-in-law with her unchangingly soft expression grew trickier. His wife was indifferent. She sat there as if she didn’t even know them. It was strange. Of course it was only natural to feel awkward around future parents-in-law he was meeting for the first time, but even his future wife felt like a stranger to him. When he thought about it later, he figured she must have felt ill at ease too. It had to have felt strange to be sitting amicably between a father who was never home and a mother who had poured her whole life into her daughter rather than her husband or herself.

  His mother-in-law chewed her food silently and stared back and forth at Oghi and his wife. The look on her face shifted very subtly from one of pride as she gazed at her daughter to one of doubt as she gazed at Oghi. But on the whole her polite, refined, and cultured smile never wavered. In a word, her expression conveyed distance.

  Only his wife’s father kept throwing questions at Oghi. They were mostly about Oghi’s parents. No matter how he answered, his father-in-law punctuated his responses by lamenting over what a shame it was that Oghi’s parents had died so early.

  People were always careful when asking Oghi about his parents. That was how he knew that he had experienced something he shouldn’t have at such a young age. They avoided talking about his parents as much as possible, and w
hen the subject did come up, they made sincere-sounding apologies for poking at old wounds. This offended Oghi. It felt no different than when he’d been ostracized as a child. The message he received from everyone was that not having parents was a shortcoming. Everyone knew it, and they demanded that he feel inadequate for it.

  His father-in-law asked him how his mother had died. What was wrong with her, how long was she sick, which specialist at which hospital treated her—he wanted all the gory details.

  So Oghi lied. Since he’d been lying about his mother his whole life, it wasn’t difficult. He’d been telling people that his mother died of liver failure, and in fact at times he thought maybe it wasn’t far from the truth. His mother had suffered from depression and insomnia for a long time, and was doubly fatigued as a result. You didn’t have to abuse alcohol or do hard labor for life to take its toll on your liver.

  Oghi was flummoxed by his father-in-law’s barrage of questions. He was acting like a specialist who blames the first doctor’s initial diagnosis. The questions kept coming: How high was her liver index? How long did it take to reach that number? Wasn’t the initial treatment mishandled? Didn’t Oghi think to ask the doctor any of this?

  It was worse when he asked about Oghi’s father. Oghi’s mistake was in mentioning the doctor who had diagnosed it as a bowel obstruction. His father-in-law called Oghi incompetent for not knowing any decent specialists and continued the interrogation.

  He had no proper response to his father-in-law’s criticism. He tried to keep up at first, but belatedly he realized it was only natural to not know the answers. As a result, he prattled on pointlessly about how they’d wandered from hospital to hospital, sounding like an idiot because of how little he knew, got picked on for that, and in the end found himself being asked, his father-in-law’s voice laced with suspicion, whether cancer and liver disease ran in his family.

  Even after they’d changed the subject, his father-in-law kept abruptly bringing up Oghi’s parents. It didn’t seem to be out of any concern that their deaths were caused by particular diseases or that those diseases might be passed down, thus inviting disaster into Oghi’s future family. He simply seemed displeased with Oghi. As if it were his goal to remind Oghi that he had nothing. His father-in-law seemed intent on awakening him to his inferior position by telling him that he had nothing now and would never have anything in the future. Oghi’s wife stared at the opposite wall, her face a blank. She made no move to help him. For all he knew, she might have heard it all from her parents already before they’d sat down together.

  Finally his father-in-law jokingly asked Oghi, “Since you’re an orphan, I guess that means you can skip the pyebaek?”

  This was the traditional wedding custom in which the newly married couple bowed to the groom’s parents. Oghi squirmed. His mother-in-law stepped in.

  “Mr. Principal, I’m an orphan too. As are you. We all lose our parents eventually, so why are you giving him such a hard time about it?”

  Looking embarrassed, his father-in-law reached for his water glass. He downed it in one shot and bellowed for a refill. Oghi scrambled up out of his chair, poked his head out of the door of the restaurant’s private dining room, and asked the waitress to bring them more water.

  His mother-in-law continued her quiet admonishment of his father-in-law. Oghi’s wife seemed accustomed to her father’s behavior and to her mother’s way of nagging him and calling him Mr. Principal. A frown crossed her face but she didn’t say a word.

  His mother-in-law’s words seemed to take effect, because his father-in-law did not say the word orphan again for the rest of the meal and stopped asking about his parents altogether. His talkative father-in-law swiftly changed the subject—right to Oghi’s hopeless choice of academic discipline and his prospect-less future. Oghi was okay with that line of questioning. It had been an ongoing subject of conversation with his wife and cohorts and even with his PhD advisor. He and his cohorts joked about the amount of time and money they were investing in such pointless work. It helped them to shake off a little of the anxiety they felt about their uncertain futures.

  Besides, looking like a deadbeat to parents was nothing new to him. Oghi’s own father had considered him a constant disappointment. Every time he saw Oghi, he’d asked him, When are you going to start acting like a man, and, What kind of man sits on his ass all day fiddling with books? When his father said “acting like a man,” what he’d really meant was “making his own money.”

  His mother-in-law laid into his father-in-law again.

  “But Mr. Principal, you yourself taught ethics. You spent your whole life learning and teaching a useless subject. Who are you to criticize?”

  She laughed as she said it, as if she were telling a hilarious joke. Oghi hesitated, unsure of how he ought to react. His father-in-law laughed. His wife, who had been silent and unresponsive, laughed a little. Oghi was the only one who didn’t. The in-jokes they shared reminded him that he would always be an outsider among them.

  From the appetizers to the final dessert course, his mother-in-law made flawless use of every bit of cutlery. Even the way she dabbed the corners of her lips with her napkin and lined her fork and knife up neatly to the right at the end of each course impressed him.

  Oghi felt caught between his father-in-law, who used whichever fork and knife he pleased; his wife, who seemed to think she was above caring about such things; and his mother-in-law, who practiced perfect table etiquette. He kept stealing sidelong glances at his wife and mother-in-law before choosing a fork and trying to match the pace of his eating to hers. More than his father-in-law, who openly lambasted him, he wished to impress his mother-in-law, who elegantly concealed her true colors.

  When the third course came out, she stared at Oghi. His father-in-law dug right in, followed by his wife.

  As Oghi squirmed, his mother-in-law said, “Go ahead.”

  Her tone was kind and her expression friendly, but he felt he was being tested. She must have known that he’d been watching her the whole time. Or maybe he was imagining things. Maybe she just wasn’t that hungry. Oghi was so nervous that he was seeing everything as a test.

  Everything about that evening had weighed on him, from choosing the restaurant at Hotel Shilla for their first meeting and being told it was booked when he called to make a reservation, to then having his wife’s parents call instead and immediately get one of the small private rooms, not to mention the smooth way his mother-in-law had ordered the restaurant’s prix fixe meal for them in advance.

  When they had finished eating and were leaving the room, his mother-in-law hung back. His father-in-law walked ahead, coughing and sniffing as he went. His mother-in-law looked back and forth at Oghi and his wife. Then she gestured at her retreating husband and whispered to Oghi, “You really hung in there.” She added, “Mr. Principal likes to mess with people.” Oghi waved off her concern and said he was fine.

  “You’re so well-behaved. If your parents could see you right now, they would be proud of you, I know it. I was a little worried you might have an inferiority complex because of being an orphan, but I see I had nothing to worry about.”

  She patted his hand twice as if to encourage him, said good night to her daughter, and walked away.

  Oghi and his wife watched her parents’ retreating figures as they quietly made their way out of the restaurant. After seeing her parents off in their black sedan, shiny from a recent wash and wax, Oghi waited for his wife to take his hand, but instead she raised hers to hail a cab that pulled up at just that moment.

  It wasn’t until much later that Oghi wondered if he should have been the one to take her hand first instead of waiting. He’d wanted her to comfort him, but maybe she was trying to figure out how to apologize. Then again, she hadn’t offered him any apology at all. Not that he knew exactly what she was supposed to apologize for.

  His mother-in-law’s parting words kept echoing in his mind. “Well-behaved.” “Inferiority complex.” Those words
dug at him more than the open criticism his father-in-law had unleashed on him all through dinner. He felt like she saw right through him. She knew that because Oghi had nothing, he had every reason to have an inferiority complex, and that he wasn’t all that well-behaved either. His father-in-law had called him on it, and his mother-in-law in her own refined way made sure he didn’t forget it.

  His wife made no mention of what her parents had thought of him or what they’d said after the dinner. It made him uncomfortable to bring it up. He’d wanted to impress them but it didn’t seem to go the way he’d hoped. For all he knew, she might have argued with them about marrying him.

  After mulling it over for a few days, he finally asked. She shrugged. He’d been mistaken. He thought that she’d been avoiding the subject because they’d said bad things about him, but that wasn’t the case. She simply had nothing to report. She told him that she hadn’t had a chance to talk to her parents about Oghi at all. He was confused, so she reluctantly explained.

  “They got in a fight.”

  “Because of me?”

  “No, because Mom kept calling him Mr. Principal,” she said with an embarrassed grin. “She calls him that whenever she’s in a bad mood. She’s making fun of him. He was never actually a principal. He never even reached retirement, let alone became principal. He had to resign early.”

  “Why?”

  “There was an incident, and he took the blame.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “How would I know?”

  “They’re your parents, how do you not know?”

  “Do you know everything about your parents?” she shot back.

  Oghi tried to defuse the situation by laughing.

  Only after they’d set the date for their wedding did Oghi learn why his father-in-law resigned. He’d been caught having an affair with a fellow teacher and was fired. His wife told him about it the second time he met her parents, about a year after their official introduction at the hotel restaurant. In trying to explain why her parents were so chilly toward each other, the subject had naturally come up.