One spring, when her husband was away travelling, she told the juniper tree of her fears and doubts, of the rigours of her marital bed and of a husband who loved her sometimes too much and sometimes not enough. She leaned against the trunk of the tree, its rough bark smooth under her soft skin, its lower branches seeming to stretch and enfold her. She sank to the base of the tree, curled between the roots and slept for some time. In her sleep she dreamt of love without pain, of gentle caresses, of a lover who took time enough to ensure she was wanting and ready.
When she woke, there were small tears in her skirt and she was wet as she had never been with her husband. Confused, she retreated into the house, throwing uncertain glances at the tree.
She did not mention anything to her husband. When he was next inside, her she thought of spreading branches and the touch of bark, and clung to him, rising up to meet him as she never had before. He was surprised but pleased.
The wife began to glow and grow, and it became obvious that her husband had at last sewn fertile seed. They were happy—he would have his longed-for heir and she a respite from his attentions.
The wife grew still.
Her husband was travelling, increasing his fortune so that he would leave a comfortable legacy for his coming child. One night when they lay beside each other the wife said:
"If I should die, bury me beneath the juniper tree."
Her husband, startled by her turn of thought, but certain he would not have to fulfil his vow in the near future, agreed.
The child killed her. The daughter, pale skinned, streaked with her mother's blood, was handed to her father, who held the child tightly and named her Simah. The juniper tree flourished, new blossoms bursting forth, fed by the wife's fertilising form.
* * * *
The man was rich, and loved his little daughter, but he was lonely. A warm bed and an obliging, soft body were the only things on his mind. When Simah was five, he took a new wife.
Second Wife had a child of her own, a daughter not much older than the widower's little girl. Second Wife loved her daughter with all her heart and vowed she would love her stepdaughter just as well. She did try (in her heart she knew she had tried) but every time her husband slighted her daughter in favour of his, it grew a little harder. Each snub was a prick and her heart soon became a pincushion of jealousy. She began to take her hurt out on his child, in tiny ways at first, then in larger, more bruising ones.
Simah understood only that her presence angered her stepmother. She grew quieter, tried to shrink so as not to attract the woman's ire. Without conscious thought she began to dim, to fade, until she was a tiny voice that seldom spoke. She would light up only when her father came home or when she played with her stepsister. On the worst days, she fled to the back garden and hid in the branches of the juniper tree, eating its berries, her face turned to the sun and the wind, taking in for a short while the breath of a place where she was welcome.
Second Wife's girl, Marlechina, was fond of her stepsister, and tried her best to protect Simah from the worst of Second Wife's temper. She watched as her mother grew into someone she did not fully recognise. When Simah entered the room it was as if Second Wife darkened. Marlechina did what she could but, ultimately, she was a little girl, no match for the dark worm that curled inside her mother.
When her father was away, Simah was fed less than Marlechina; her clothes became old and worn in spite of her father's wealth; no new toys became Simah's while Marlechina's collection spilled from her room like a flood.
Simah's father loved her in the casual way men love their daughters, affection without attention. And her father, as fathers are apt to be, was blind when it came to his wife. The domestic sphere troubled him not at all—as long as his belly was sated with tasty foods and his bed was filled with an agreeable softness, he did not worry about what happened in his own house.
On one of his trips, the husband sent gifts home ahead of his arrival. A large box arrived. Inside it, Second Wife found a beautiful necklace for herself, a pretty ring for Marlechina, and for Simah, ribbons and the biggest doll any of them had ever seen. It was almost as big as the little girl and looked enough like her to be a sister, with dark curls and huge blue eyes.
The children held their gifts happily and Second Wife looked, the one to the other. All she saw was the size of Simah's gift compared to that of Marlechina's—she did not weigh up the value or even consider that her husband had thought carefully in order to give his stepdaughter a gift she would treasure. She saw it as yet another snub. As she seethed, her own daughter spoke: “Mother, may I have an apple?"
"Yes, in the trunk over there,” she answered. Simah, glancing shyly over the top of her enormous doll, risked a tentative request.
"Mother, may I also have an apple?"
Second Wife turned on the little girl, a refusal at her lips, then paused and nodded. Simah followed her stepsister to the trunk. The woman shadowed her.
Marlechina drew an apple from the trunk and skipped outside to watch the sun shimmer across the red stones of her ring. Simah leaned into the great trunk to reach one of the rosy red apples lying at its bottom. Second Wife grasped the lid of the trunk with both hands and slammed it closed.
The child's body dropped slowly to the floor outside the trunk, now as still as the giant doll. The woman opened the lid and stared at the child's severed head. Blue eyes reproached her.
Shaking, Second Wife picked up the body and sat it at the table, then plucked the head from the trunk by its dark curls. Using a long purple scarf, she wrapped the neck tightly so the head appeared to be connected. Only a little blood escaped from beneath the silk. Second Wife hid in the parlour to watch what might happen.
Marlechina skipped inside. She looked at Simah so still and pale at the table, her doll lying on the floor beside her.
"Sister, may I play with your doll?” Receiving no reply, Marlechina gently shook her sister, which provoked nothing but a head wobble.
"Sister, I would play with your doll.” Once again, she received no reply and she frowned at her sister's unusual perversity.
"Simah, answer me! I wish to play with your doll!” She reached out and violently shook the little girl's shoulder. This produced a more startling reaction—Simah's head rolled from her shoulders like a pumpkin dislodged from a windowsill.
Marlechina screamed, and her mother, watching from the parlour, charged into the room, demanding to know what had happened. Marlechina wept as she blurted out the story. The mother looked at the sad little body and its severed head and began to weep. Second Wife steeled herself—she was, after all, a woman who had decapitated a child.
"No one must know what you did, Marlechina,” she said. Marlechina shrank, fear and guilt frosting her veins. “Get me the biggest pot in the pantry. I will put this to rights."
Second Wife cooked her stepdaughter; she made a lovely stew, with plenty of vegetables and a thick brown sauce. Some of the meat she kept aside, to hang later in the smokehouse to dry. Marlechina stood beside her mother, weeping. Her tears fell into the pot; the salt of her grief seasoning the dish.
* * * *
When the meat had boiled from Simah's tiny frame, Marlechina took the bones and wrapped them in a cloth. She carried the sad little bundle and the doll to the back garden. She hid them under a thick pile of leaves at the base of the juniper tree, and ran back inside. She did not see the earth move and shift, the doll and the bones sliding into the dirt as if swallowed, taken to a place of safety.
The husband returned, his belly growling as the odour of cooked meat filled his nostrils. Second Wife piled the plate high with tender flesh and he ate ravenously, not noticing that his wife and stepdaughter did not touch the dish, nor that his own child was nowhere in sight. He ate and ate; the more he had the more he wanted and soon the large pot was empty.
When he finally pushed back his plate he looked for Simah.
"Where's my daughter?” he asked, picking slivers of meat from his teeth.
Second Wife looked meaningfully at her own child, and he shook his head. “My own daughter."
"She has gone,” said Second Wife, her voice rough. “Gone to visit her mother's sister; she wanted to see her aunt."
The father grunted, disappointed and disapproving that his daughter had left without his permission, though a stronger imperative had begun to take hold. His belly filled with forbidden meat, he now eyed his wife's sweetly curved flesh.
He sent Marlechina to her bed and, almost before she disappeared from the dining room, he was on his wife as if he would eat her, too. Plates and pot were thrown aside as he lodged himself firmly within her. Second Wife thought her happiness complete.
* * * *
The woman grew round.
When her husband was home from his travels, she would draw his hand to her swelling belly and run it over the taut skin. She was kinder to her own daughter, gentle as she watched guilt swim in the child's eyes and dark shadows grow beneath them.
But she did not say, It was me.
She found herself thinking of the dead child as she rubbed her belly, blinking away tears and wishing things had been different.
Marlechina thought of her stepsister often. One morning as she played beneath the juniper tree, she heard the most marvellous song. Looking up, she spied a magnificent bird, plumed red and blue and gold. The bird sang and its notes began to sound like words:
My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister she hid me,
Now my bones lie beneath the juniper tree.
A shower of colour fell toward Marlechina. She reached out, grasped the rainbow, and found coloured ribbons in her hand. The silk shone, glowing like gems in the sunlight. She looked up again but the bird was gone, only the ribbons in her fingers and the memory of its words remained.
She knew now that she hadn't killed her sister. She knew now that her mother had done it. And she didn't know what to do. She could only watch.
* * * *
The father, returning from an evening at the tavern, staggered into the yard. From behind the house he heard a song, beautiful and gloriously lonely. He made his way to the back garden and saw a wondrous bird in the juniper tree. It sang him a song like none he'd ever heard:
My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister she hid me,
Now my bones lie beneath the juniper tree.
Alas, he didn't understand a single word. When she had finished her serenade, she shook her beautiful head and dropped him something that flashed in the moonlight.
It was a golden chain and it held, banded in wrought gold, a small bone, like that of a child's finger. The man took it to be a religious piece, the finger bone of a saint, a piece of jewelry picked up by the bird in its travels, stolen because it was shiny. He believed in religion, not magic. He hung the gift around his neck and looked up.
She was gone; she had seen his lack of understanding and disappeared.
* * * *
Second Wife, hanging out washing, heard the song. She did not understand the words but it sounded to her like the sonorous ring of funeral bells, and it struck at her heart with its pain and beauty. She thought of her little stepdaughter, of the way her head had rolled from her shoulders, and she felt pierced. Tears came unbidden.
The bird, glorious fair, swooped down and hovered in front of the woman. It drank in her pain and her regret, her loss, and saw the empty place where Simah could have resided had jealousy not taken hold. In the bird's beak appeared a juniper berry. Second Wife held out her hand and caught the berry as it dropped. With a flurry of feathers the bird was gone. The woman put the berry to her lips and swallowed, the bitter-sweet flesh and juice leaving their taste in her mouth long after the morsel was gone and she had returned to the house.
She began to crave the berries daily; they hung on the tree's branches, tantalisingly just out of reach, purple and lush. Second Wife stood, heavy and fecund, at the base of the tree and stared upward. The tree shivered and shook, and a hail of fruit fell upon her. She dropped to her knees and began to devour the berries.
When they were gone and her mouth was rimmed purple with their juice, Second Wife raised her eyes and the tree, sensing she still hungered, shuddered until she was once again showered with berries. This second feast sated her and she curled into the roots at the base of the tree.
The feasting became a ritual; no matter what she had eaten or how much, she craved the berries. In her final months they were all she ate, greedily sucking them into her mouth like a child at the breast, juice dripping from her chin. Gradually her hair began to darken and her eyes lost their blueness, hazing into green. Her skin, once golden, lost its colour even though she sat in the glare of the sun for hours at a time, consuming juniper berries. Her nature, once prone to blazing up, settled to a contented hum.
Marlechina watched her mother from a distance, from the windows of her attic room, fingering the ribbons in her hair, singing quietly.
* * * *
She gave birth beneath the juniper tree. She'd woken in the middle of the night, pains familiar and strangely comforting, rippling across her abdomen. From the garden she could hear—ever so faintly—the song of the bird. She slid from the bed, away from her husband's snoring bulk, and wrapped a shawl about her shoulders. Her feet took her where her mind did not think to go, a movement without thought but necessary none-the-less.
There was no sign of the bird, but the tree welcomed her. She sank to the ground between its roots, and felt the pressure of a child anxious to enter the world. The smell of juniper berries was strong as her waters broke. The child came swiftly.
Marlechina, in her attic room, woke to the sound of bird song. She looked from the window. The white of her mother's nightgown caught her attention and she left her room, swiftly and silently.
Second Wife looked up at her daughter and wept. She lifted the child.
It was the doll. Simah's doll, streaked with blood and birth fluids, still, hard, soulless. Second Wife sobbed.
The bird perched at the top of the tree. In its beak, a juniper berry once again. It dropped the berry into Marlechina's waiting hands. She knelt and gently squeezed the berry between the doll's ever-so-slightly parted lips.
There was a catch of breath; the doll gasped and moved in her mother's arms. Her flesh became malleable, soft and warm as she squirmed, growing rapidly before their eyes.
Marlechina lifted the child, and found her eyes open wide, deep and knowing. Simah's eyes. The child became heavier. Marlechina had to put her down and within minutes the baby was no more. Simah stood before them, naked, and exactly as she had been on the day of her death. Except for the little finger of her left hand, which was missing. The sisters looked at their mother, now almost bloodless, but smiling.
"Take care of your sister, Marlechina.” As the little girls watched, the earth beneath their mother's body opened and drew her down, to rest beneath the juniper tree.
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The Film Column
William Smith
Asako in Ruby Shoes
Dir: E J-young (Je-yong Lee)
Deltamac DVD, Hong Kong, All Region
Note: The Film Column often contains spoilers.
I found this Korean/Japanese co-production by chance in a DVD bin in NYC's Chinatown. This was exactly the right way to discover Asako ... a movie full of playful and quirky synchronicities. The film follows two young, single characters in the parallel cities of Seoul and Tokyo. U-In in Seoul is a low-level worker in a generic city office. He delivers tax forms, tells people—through their mail slots—about new city garbage policies and gets his pinky finger (which has gone mysteriously numb) stapled to walls and shut in doors. Aya, in Tokyo, is practicing breath control as a method of suicide and thinks the international dateline will be a good place to kill herself, since no one will know if she did it “yesterday or today."
These characters walk a
delicate line between eccentricity and perversity. Aya drops out of school and—when she doesn't receive enough of a refund to finance her suicide attempt—accepts a job as a webcam fetish model. U-In, stuck in the women's rest room when the men's room is out of order, ends up spending much of his workday there, listening to women pee while they speculate about his life. He also has a lively interest in internet porn (but no credit card!) and we see him awaken surrounded by wadded-up Kleenex, underwear around his ankles. U-in and Aya rise above these indignities, but only through total detachment from their lives.
The one bit of “color” in U-In's day is a punky-looking girl, who works in a baking class at the city center. Her hair—in just about the only example of deliberate individuality shown in the film—is dyed bright red. U-In is obsessed. He takes the girl's photo to renew her town ID, then keeps it for himself. When he finds “WanderWonderland.com"—a remarkably tame webcam site—he selects this red-haired girl as his ideal type and thus discovers Asako in Ruby Shoes.
The two stories in the film are slightly out of time sync (it is only after U-In finds the webcam site that Aya's story leads her to the “modeling agency") but the characters’ fantasy lives are exactly aligned. Posing on a sparsely furnished bluescreen set, wearing a red wig and rhinestone shoes (bought with her suicide fund), Aya becomes Asako. The mundane objects that have helped the characters temporarily escape—a picture postcard of Alaska, a pair of red shoes—combine and create a mythical persona who is strong enough to get them both to act and eventually (and very sweetly) to meet.
When I checked this film on IMDB.com I discovered that the male lead, Jung-Jae Lee has done several of these unlikely romances where the characters are separated by time (Il Mare), memory loss (Over the Rainbow), or other non-traditional obstacles. I don't know if these other films are as charming and sensitive as Asako ... but it definitely seems like a fruitful subgenre of Korean film for fans of quirky western romances like Better off Dead and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 Page 9