by Ha Seong-nan
3
She is about to climb the stairs to Ocean Palace Day Care, but goes back outside and heads to the pharmacy across the street. She pays for a health tonic, and as she sips it, looks up at the windows on the second floor. The colored letters have already faded. She and Miss Hong, her classmate from college, had spent all night sticking them on the windows when they had opened a year ago. Someone forgot to close the window yesterday, making the letters on the panes overlap, so that the sign reads day are. She slings her bag over her shoulder and climbs up the steps. Colorful footprints lead all the way to the door.
From the moment the van brings the children to the center, chaos breaks out. She stumbles on the toy blocks, now strewn across the floor. Two of the older boys pretend to be Superman, dashing about the room with one fist at their hip and the other stretched out in front, hopping over crawling babies like they’re hurdles. One boy’s outstretched fist hits a girl in the chest and she begins to cry. When an older child cries, the little ones who had been content until then start to cry as well. She changes the newborns’ diapers and is giving them their milk when Miss Hong opens the refrigerator and laughs. The water bottle cap has disappeared again. Bottle caps are always going missing.
Two children playing on the slide vomit everything they ate for lunch. She puts shoes on the little one and is pulling out the other child’s shoes from the shelf when a plastic bottle cap rolls out. She finds a fistful of caps stuffed deep inside the shelf. The child, with his eyes shining, hides his hands behind his back, and says, “Whoa, look at all those caps! I wonder who put them there?”
Gazing at the lying child, she recalls that human nature is fundamentally evil. She loads the sick children into the van and drives to the pediatric clinic. She parks in the lot and even before she can set foot in the clinic, her ears are assaulted by screaming and wailing. There isn’t a single empty seat in the waiting room. Her feet mash the crackers children have dropped on the floor and candy sticks to the bottom of her shoes. The two children scamper off to the play area. Her hair, which had been neatly pulled back this morning, has come loose, and stray strands cling to her sweaty face. All through the night in her sleep, she had heard children’s songs and their bawling. Looking after more than thirty children was a difficult task for just her and Miss Hong.
She sees an empty corner seat with a jacket tossed on it. She pushes it aside and sits. She feels something soft and hard under her bottom, like a purse. She closes her eyes. She hears endless whining, intermittent howls from the injection room, and soda cans falling in the vending machine. The younger child, who is coming down the slide, crashes into the older one, who has climbed up the wrong way. “Teacher!” the smaller child screams, bursting into tears.
She awkwardly gets to her feet, and glimpses something like a reddish lump out of the corner of her eye. What she had been sitting on wasn’t a purse at all, but a newborn baby. Smothered by her rear end, the area around the baby’s eyes and nose has already turned blue. She makes eye contact with a young woman coming back from the pharmacy counter with a prescription in hand. The woman walks in her direction, her body still showing signs of postpartum swelling.
She pulls the children off the slide and drags them toward the clinic entrance. Another baby, who is cruising along the front edge of the sofa, trips over her feet and falls, but she can’t afford to help. The younger child cannot keep up and trips on the outside steps. She hears a woman’s animal cry ring out from within the closed doors. She picks up a child in each arm and runs all the way to the parking lot.
A black sedan is blocking the lot exit. All the windows are tinted dark, so she can’t see the driver’s face. She starts the van and waits for the car to pull into a stall. She is sweating, and her blouse is glued to her back. An ambulance, with its siren blaring, pulls up before the clinic entrance. People rush down the steps. The ambulance turns its siren back on and speeds away. The black car is still blocking the exit. She finally leans on her horn.
Even after she sends the children up to the day care center, she remains inside the van. The nurses and the other mothers who had brought their children to the clinic will remember her strange behavior. One of them will be sure to recall the child who had called her teacher, and the police would begin a search of all the childcare facilities in the vicinity. The apartment she is renting is located two bus stops away. She wonders if she has enough time to fetch some personal items and clothes before the police descend, but she knows it’s too late. They would already be staked out at her apartment, waiting for her. She clutches her hair and lowers her head onto the steering wheel. She sounds the horn by accident. She jumps out of the van and heads for the main road. She steps off the sidewalk, waving her arms to hail a taxi.
She calls the day care from the station. When the phone has rung more than ten times, the distraught voice of Miss Hong comes on the line. She hears the same children’s songs and their crying in the background.
“Miss Kim?” Miss Hong shouts. “What happened? Where are you?”
She hangs up. It seems the police have already been there. She puts her hand in her pocket and crumples up the bus ticket. Even her parents’ home is no longer safe. She boards a subway train and rides a line that loops around Seoul. The people sitting next to her change many times. She buys a newspaper and holds it close to her face, but nothing registers. Because she’s staring at a single spot for too long, the middle-aged man sitting next to her starts to read from her paper. She gets off at Jamsil Station. She doesn’t realize she has gone through Jamsil three times already. She crosses over to the opposite platform and lines up with the crowds heading home from work. A man in his late twenties smiles at her. He’s wearing snug-fitting black jeans. Wasn’t this the same person who’d been climbing the steps in front of her on the other side? Why was he following her? Right then the train arrives and she quickly boards, standing close to the door. When everyone has gotten on and the doors are closing, she leaps back onto the platform.
Her heels are so worn she keeps stumbling. She hasn’t eaten all day. The streets are turning dark, and the streetlights begin to come on. Only a few frizzy locks are still caught up in her yellow hair tie. There is a run in her stockings, stretching like a spider’s web from a hole in the heel, all the way up to her thigh. She leans against an embankment wall of an apartment complex. Under the end of the gutter pipe is a rust stain. Her back grows damp from the trickling water. A drunk man stumbles along and whistles at her. She starts walking again, but her legs are like the limbs of a chopped-up octopus, moving on their own accord. She sees a lighted store sign up ahead. Midori Japanese Restaurant. Along the entire front window is a large water tank, where fish swim leisurely in the dim lighting. She puts her face up to the glass and peers between the fish. Inside the empty restaurant, a man is mopping the floor. He’s wearing neon pink sandals and his pant-legs are rolled up. She pushes open the bamboo door. Since all the chairs are turned over on the tables, there is no place to sit. She walks toward the bar and pulls herself onto a bar stool.
4
He puts the chairs on the tables and starts mopping from the back of the restaurant. Because of the cast on his left leg, the cleaning takes twice as long. Every time the mop bangs against the table, water splatters. He wedges the mop into his armpit and smokes a cigarette. The feeling still hasn’t returned to his left cheek. The sashimi knife had cut his cheek in the shape of a boomerang, and then penetrated his foot, leaving a three-centimeter crack in his bone. The orthopedic surgeon, paged out of her sleep, kept yawning while performing surgery.
“It almost hit your eye. You need to thank your glasses.”
She stitched up his cheek as if she were hemming a skirt. When they had finished applying a plaster cast on his foot up to his ankle, it was past two in the morning. He checked the waiting room, but the woman who had followed him to the hospital door was gone.
The heat is oppressive. Inside the cast, his foot is getting itchy. The itch keeps moving
, from his foot to his thigh, and then to the inside of his ear, until he can’t find it anymore. He feels as if he’s being electrocuted. He flings down his mop and scratches at his whole body. Welts and scrapes emerge on his skin, and scars, hidden until now, begin to stand out.
At Myeongdong Sushi, the last place he worked before coming here, he had gotten the ellipsis-like scar that dotted around the knuckle of his left thumb. It had gotten wet before it was fully healed, and so he’d ended up with an infection. He touches the scar like a wounded soldier feeling his chest for a bullet wound. That time, too, he had been filleting fish while two young men drank at the bar. As they got drunk, they started to argue. One started to talk about the deplorable state of the world, how everything was heading to ruin, while the other blamed it on the failures of their generation. They grew angry over their different opinions, but the real provocation was when one man whacked the other in the head, which caused him to fall head-first into his soy sauce dish. Soy sauce spilled all over his white shirt. He brushed off his shirt, and then shoved the other man in the chest. The chair was knocked over and the man tumbled to the floor. He jumped to his feet right away. His gaze landed on the man’s sashimi knife. He snatched it up and slashed at the air. The man had been using the same knife since he first started filleting fish. The silicone handle was slip proof and the blade, stamped with the Zwilling J. A. Henckels mark, had a non-reflective matte finish. He rushed toward the two men and grabbed the knife by the blade. The blade went around his thumb.
He had almost lost his thumb then. His thumb needed to be bandaged until the stitches were removed. Though it was his right hand that did the filleting, he wasn’t able to work quickly. To avoid getting water on his thumb, he had to constantly keep his thumb upright, like a hitchhiker. Having an extra finger was just as uncomfortable as missing one altogether. The man turns over his hand and peers at his scars. He’d gained scars both big and small every time he moved to a new place, starting from twelve years ago when he’d been snagged by a hook at the Noryangjin Fish Market, where he’d worked as a handyman. Busan and Company, Island Seafood, Sushi, One Sea, Midang, Myeongdong Sushi, Midori … His scars are his resume.
He empties the bucket in the bathroom. He steps into the restaurant and stumbles. It’s her again, sitting at the bar. This time, she’s the first to speak.
“Sorry, I don’t know what to say,” she mumbles. “I didn’t mean to get so startled …”
“You know, fish don’t have pain receptors.” Every time he moves his mouth, the ends of his boomerang-shaped scar nearly meet. “They don’t feel pain.”
The woman is wearing the same clothes from the other night. “I was just surprised at the tongue … Never thought fish would have them …” she says, as if she’s sighing.
Her heels are so worn that the metal edges are showing. Her heels ring out on the deserted sidewalk. She follows him at a fixed distance. If he starts to take big strides, she follows quickly with small steps. If he stops and glances back, she stops, too. Every time her heel gets stuck in the crack of the pavement, her foot comes out of the shoe and lands on the bare ground. She then goes back, flops down on the ground, and yanks out her shoe, as if pulling out a nail. She puts it back on her foot and practically runs after him. The clacking of her heels sounds like tap dancing.
5
They are driving to the port on the east coast. Inside the glove box is his sashimi knife, which has gone everywhere with him for the past five years. The owner, who was concerned about restaurant sales not improving even after fifteen days, didn’t try to stop him from leaving. His knife and neon shower sandals were all he took from Midori, where he had been working for the past twenty months. The sandal was the only thing that fit his foot cast. At the port, he plans to meet Mr. Kim, who had been a supplier for Midori. Mr. Kim had driven through the night from the East Sea to Seoul, and filled the restaurant tank with live squid, fish, and water from the ocean. The man planned to buy a truck with a water tank like Mr. Kim’s. If he could get leftover squid from Mr. Kim at a discounted price and sell them to the sushi restaurants in Seoul, he could double his profits. He was going to open up a small sushi restaurant where the East Sea lay outside his window, instead of only in his imagination.
“That’s him. He’s been following us from back there,” she says. Her protruding eyes shift anxiously.
He glances at the side mirror on her side, but the driver of the red sports car in the next lane is only doing neck circles to relieve stress.
The freeway leading to the East Sea is packed with countless cars. His car begins to heat up like an oven. A news helicopter hovers in the sky, taking footage of the summer holiday traffic. Whenever it comes into view, he glimpses through the open door a camera operator with a video camera on his shoulder. The helicopter roars above, its shadow wavering over the cars. He leans halfway out the window to look up, his toes resting on the edge of the brakes. In the end he opens the car door and sticks out his foot, but he can’t feel any air on it because of the cast. His right foot chafes against the shower sandal and the skin starts to peel. His car model was discontinued a while back, so there aren’t many left in Seoul. Every time he switches gears, he hears the cogs mesh. Rust is showing where the paint has chipped.
The woman is chewing on her thumbnail, with her bare feet on the dashboard. Every fingernail is bitten down, and her shoes have left red marks that look like shackles on the tops of her swollen feet. Every fingernail is bitten down. On top of her crossed knees is a department store catalogue. Tiny writing fills all the white space that’s not taken up by advertisements.
The woman is on the run. But he doesn’t ask why she’s running. Right now, her eyes, like those of a rockfish, are as shiny as marbles. As he looks at her, he recalls a word he hasn’t thought about for a long time. Family. It triggers many other words for him. Soybean paste stew. Light bulb. Cutlery set. Children. Tricycle …
Right then the car behind him honks. He sees the tank truck, which had been stalled in front of him, speeding away. The man hurriedly pulls his leg back in the car, closes the door, and steps on the accelerator. He realizes only later that he has left the shower sandal that had been on his foot on the road. The red sports car in the next lane cuts in front of him with a roar. The woman stops chewing her fingernails and flips through the catalogue again. In the blank space above pictures of a stone bed and a running machine, she writes down the numbers in a license plate. Because so many plate numbers crowd the blank space, it’s hard to read them. They start to see more and more Gangwon plates as they cross into Gangwon Province.
At the gas station, while the man fills up and buys some kimbap for their lunch, she looks for a payphone. She fishes out a slip of paper from her pocket and dials. The phone rings. A tired voice answers.
“About July 12 …” she says.
The receptionist raises her voice. “Pardon me?”
“July 12 …” she says.
“Ma’am, you’ll have to speak up. Hold on.” The voice moves away from the receiver. “Excuse me, could you tell your children to keep it down? I can’t hear a thing with all the noise.”
The receptionist comes back on the line. “Could you repeat your child’s birthday?”
“July 12 was a Wednesday … Was a newborn smothered to death that day?” she asks, her voice trembling.
There’s silence on the other end of the line. The receptionist says coldly, “You think you’re being funny? If you’ve got nothing to do, just go to sleep.”
The line goes dead.
6
The pitted field looks like a hammer-throw field. Under the scorching sun, the humpbacked woman pulls out weeds by their roots, thrusting her rear end in the air. She tosses them out of the field without a backward glance. Not one falls inside the field. She leaves crooked holes in her wake. All summer she pulls weeds, but after a rain shower, the weeds are thick again. Then she has no choice but to pull them again.
From the highway, it’s ea
sy to miss the old house in the woods. There isn’t even a shabby sign for those passing on the highway. The house is hidden behind a chestnut tree. The woman barely catches sight of its red roof tiles between the branches. When they drive across a bridge and up a hill, along a road just wide enough for a single car to pass, the backfield of the house appears. The humpbacked woman, who had been sitting on the ground pulling weeds, gets to her feet. They glimpse a mongrel behind her thin, bowed legs. It rubs its chin on the ground and growls at the two strangers.
Their room is at the end of the hall. The front window looks out to the backfield, and the side window looks out to a kitchen built from a shipping container. The motor of the old refrigerator makes loud noises all day. A corner of the kitchen has been refloored and turned into a small store. On the dusty wooden shelf are a box of Mon Amie pens, envelopes, toothpaste and disposable toothbrushes, soap, candy, chips, and instant noodle bowls. The woman is grumbling as she returns to the room, holding a bag of candy covered with a thick film of dust. There are four rooms along the narrow hallway, two rooms on each side. If the man stood in the middle of the hall and stretched his arms out, his fingers would touch the walls. They sometimes run into the other guests. Then they have to turn their bodies and flatten themselves against the wall so that the other person can pass.