by Cho Se-hui
“So, did someone say he’d take you to the moon?”
“Chi-sŏp wrote a letter to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He’ll get an answer from Mr. Ross, who’s in charge there. It can probably be arranged in the future—I’ll go with the astronauts.”
“Would you please give that book back to Chi-sŏp?” I asked. “And don’t believe what he says—he’s crazy.”
“Look at these pictures. That’s Francis Bacon, and that’s Robert Goddard. The people of their time called them lunatics too. And do you know what achievements these lunatics left us with?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Dead learning—that’s what you got at school.”
“Anyway, would you please give him back the book?”
“All of you are hoping I’ll have troubles on this earth till the end and die all withered up, aren’t you? Hoping I’ll be beaten down by hard work, struggle to the end, and breathe my last. No?”
“Think whatever you like.”
“Don’t any of you want to learn something from Chi-sŏp?”
“What the hell are we supposed to learn from him?”
“I’ll show you. I’m going to talk to Chi-sŏp, and by the time Mr. Ross’ letter arrives, I’ll show you how to launch an iron ball.”
“Couldn’t find her?”
“No.”
“Then where have you been all night?”
I picked up another pebble and lobbed it toward the sewer creek. Mother was exhausted too and could speak of nothing else. Big Brother ushered Mother inside the gate of our house. It was a quiet morning. Over a hundred houses had been torn down and only a few were left. If Yŏng-hŭi hadn’t gone off, we too would have left the previous day. There was no other reason for us to miss the demolition deadline.
Our last days in Felicity Precinct were a nightmare. We wandered in search of Yŏng-hŭi. No one had seen her. Yŏng-hŭi had left home without a bag. All she had taken were the guitar with the broken string and the two pansies. I lobbed a slightly larger pebble. No sound this time either. The ripples pushed out among the waterweeds. Chi-sŏp was walking straight toward me; he’d just passed the lot where the barbershop had stood. In his hand was beef. Father met him at the gate, took his hand, and led him into the yard. Father handed the beef to Mother in the kitchen. The kitchen grew smoky. My brother was hunkered down in front of the fuel box fanning the fire. He stood up, wiped away tears, and fed wood into the fuel box. Mother emerged from the kitchen and wiped her tears. For several days now we had been splitting the wood from Myŏng-hŭi’s house and using it for fuel. Brother split the doorjamb from Myŏng-hŭi’s house, fed the fuel box, and came outside. He smelled of smoke. Father had a hacking cough. Father and Chi-sŏp said nothing. Chi-sŏp read the book he had lent Father. Father had said Chi-sŏp was in prison. According to Father, he had gone to prison without doing anything wrong. Chi-sŏp sat on the edge of the veranda reading the book. My brother and I stood beside the cement wall looking out. All the houses had been torn down and we had a direct view of the precinct office. Beyond it we could see bright, clean houses. To the right of those houses was a main street with a supermarket. The bakeshop where Yŏng-hŭi had worked was visible. From where we had stood outside the bakeshop window she looked truly pretty. No one would have believed she was the daughter of a dwarf. We had looked for Yŏng-hŭi as long as we could but hadn’t found her.
I could smell beef soup boiling on the stove. And grilled beef. Mother set down the meal table and wiped it with a dishcloth. People were standing in front of the precinct office. People with sledgehammers. They crossed the empty lots where the houses had been torn down and came toward us. I locked the front gate. Mother set the table. My brother then took it out to the veranda. He worried about me. Needless worries. I would have remained calm even if they were to bring their sledgehammers down on my head. Father began eating first. Then Chi-sŏp beside him. Mother, sitting at the end of the veranda, drank soup. My brother and I soaked our cooked rice in our soup. There was knocking at the gate. We remained where we were and ate. Where was Yŏng-hŭi at this moment? What kind of meal was she eating? We didn’t know. Resting on our meal table was all the time that had passed in our family, ever since the days of our first ancestors. If you took that time and cut it with a knifeblade, from every opening there would flow blood and tears, hollow laughter, and a hacking cough. The people who had been knocking at the gate surrounded the house. They smashed our cement walls. Holes appeared and then the walls came down. Dust rose. Mother turned toward us. In silence we continued to eat. Father placed slices of grilled beef on top of the rice in our bowls. They stood examining us through the haze of the cement dust. They didn’t enter, waiting until we had finished our meal. Mother went into the kitchen and returned with scorched-rice broth. Father and Chi-sŏp drank. When the broth was gone Mother picked up the meal table. I stepped down into the yard and opened the front gate. Mother brought the meal table out to the yard. Brother followed with the cloth bundles containing our quilts and clothing. The people with the sledgehammers inspected us silently from across the ruins of the walls. One by one we hauled out the things Mother had packed. Mother went into the kitchen and came out with the bamboo rice strainer, kitchen knives, and cutting board. Father emerged with his bag of tools over his shoulder. Standing before the people with sledgehammers was a man holding not a sledgehammer but paper and pen. His eyes met Father’s. Father indicated the house with his free hand, then turned away. The people with sledgehammers began pounding at the house. They swarmed at the house and knocked it down. Mother sat with her back to the house, hearing but not seeing it collapse. They struck at the north-facing wall and the roof came down. The roof came down and dust rose. The men retreated, then swarmed at the remaining walls. It seemed so easy and then it was over. They put down their sledgehammers and cleaned their sweaty faces. The man with the paper wrote something down. Chi-sŏp handed the book to Father. He approached the man.
“What have you done just now?” he asked respectfully.
It took the man a few seconds to understand. “You had until the thirtieth to demolish the house, correct? The deadline passed. We carried out the demolition according to the law. So there.”
As the man was about to turn away Chi-sŏp hastened to speak. “Sir, do you understand what you have ordered to be done? It could be a thousand years, but for convenience’ sake we’ll say five hundred. What you have just done, sir, is tear down a house that stood for five hundred years. Not five years—five hundred years.”
“Five hundred years? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?” Chi-sŏp countered.
“Move!”
“You trapped them. You or your superiors. You must have known that over a hundred families settled here? And you trapped those people, didn’t you? Go on, tell them—tell them I hit you.”
Unbelieving, the man neglected to turn away. Chi-sŏp’s fist landed flush in the man’s face. The man crouched, burying his face in his hands. Blood flowed between his fingers. As he crouched, Chi-sŏp hit him once more. The man sprawled forward limply. We had had no time to intervene. Nor had the people with the sledgehammers. Too late, they surged forward and fell upon Chi-sŏp. Together several of them hit, butted, stomped him. It was time for my brother and me to step forward. But Father took us by the arm and drew us aside.
“Stay out of it,” he said. “You two need to find someone who can speak up for us.”
My brother and I watched, Father detaining us. The end came quickly and simply. The man rose and Chi-sŏp lay sprawled on the ground as if dead. The people stood Chi-sŏp up. Mother broke into sobs. Chi-sŏp’s face was covered with blood. It streamed from his head down his face. They led Chi-sŏp away. They went the way they had come, straight across the empty lots. They could be seen passing the precinct office, heading toward the main street. Father turned to us and gave the book to my brother. Father walked off toward them. His small shadow followed him. I could no
longer bear up. Sleep overcame me. I retrieved a section of our front gate and lay down on it. Feeling the sun on my back, I slowly drifted off to sleep. Except for Chi-sŏp and the people in our family, the whole world was strange. I take that back. Even Father and Chi-sŏp were a bit strange. As I lay in the sunshine I had a dream. Yŏng-hŭi was throwing the two pansies into wastewater from a factory.
3
The owl in the clock on the living room wall hooted four times. I’d never been up this late. Compared with this one night, the seventeen years I’d lived till then seemed so long. But seventeen years was nothing compared with the time lived by our ancestors, a period once calculated by Eldest Brother. And the time lived by our ancestors was nothing compared with …? Well, Father had said he would go to the moon and work at an observatory. From the moon even Coma Berenices is distinctly visible. According to Chi-sŏp’s book, that nebular constellation is five billion light-years away. I can’t even compare my seventeen years to five billion years. Even a thousand years might be just a few grains of sand in comparison. To me, five billion years is an eternity. I have no idea what eternity feels like. If it has some connection with death, though, then maybe through death I can begin to understand it.
When I think of death a scene comes to mind: a desert horizon. Around nightfall the wind gets sandy. At the end of the line described by the horizon I stand naked. My legs are slightly spread, my arms drawn close to me. My head is lowered halfway and my hair covers my chest. If I close my eyes and count to ten my outline fades and disappears. All that remains is the windy gray horizon. This is death as I know it. Isn’t such a death something like eternity? Our life is grayness. Not until I left our house could I observe it from the outside. Our gray-coated house and our gray-coated family were revealed to me in miniature. The people in our family ate with their foreheads touching, talked with their foreheads touching. They spoke softly and I couldn’t understand them. Mother, reduced to a size even smaller than Father’s, stopped on her way into the kitchen and looked up at the sky. Even the sky was gray. I hadn’t run away from home dreaming of my own independence. Leaving home didn’t mean I was free. From the outside I could look at our house. It was horrible. Like my two older brothers, I had dropped out of school. Just before that, I had read these words in our supplementary reader: “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.” The Ancient Mariner had lost his boat and was afloat on the sea. With water all around him he was thirsty. From the outside I watched our miniature house and the miniature people of my family, all enveloped in gray, and I thought of the Ancient Mariner. I was the same as he.
I got out of bed. The bed trembled but no matter. He was fast asleep. Just to be sure, I opened the bottle again and shook some of the drug onto the handkerchief. I gently covered his mouth and nose with the handkerchief and silently counted to ten. I thought back to the beginning. He had stood next to me while the older man wrote out the sales contract. And he had stood next to me while Father signed the contract and stamped it with his seal. He had noticed me running up to the precinct office the day the condemnation notice arrived. He had left my side when Mother handed over the items she had wrapped so carefully. As he turned away his right hand brushed against my chest. Mother received the money with both hands. Nobody saw me leave. I choked back my rising tears. I sneaked out to the alley beside the sewer creek and went to the precinct office. Not a soul remained from the mass of people there during the day. His car was parked in front of the bulletin board. I stood in front of the car and waited for him. He appeared, surrounded by his men, and was speaking to them in a loud voice. He stiffened when he saw me. The older man handed him the black briefcase. He sent his men away and approached me.
“Waiting for me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“How come?”
“Is ours in there too?” I asked, indicating the black briefcase.
“It better be.”
“I came to get it.”
“And then what?”
I had no answer.
“What’s on your mind? I have to go.”
“That’s our house,” I managed to say.
He looked down at me.
“Not any more,” he said. “I bought it—paid money for it.”
He produced a key and unlocked the car. After setting the black briefcase inside, he got in. I knocked on the window with the palm of my hand. He opened the door on the other side. Not until I climbed in did I realize I’d left home with the guitar. He took the guitar and placed it in the back seat for me. He turned the car around in front of the precinct office and we left. I sank down, burying myself in the seat.
“Sit up,” he said. We had left Felicity Precinct and were on the way out of Eden District. As he drove he took a look at my face. We arrived at a red light and he took the flower from my hair and sniffed it. Then he stuck the small blossom in his upper-left jacket pocket.
“We live in Yŏngdong,” he said. “I’ll let you off a little farther along, and you can go back home.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I don’t have a home to go back to anymore.”
“What are you going to do, then? Steal the briefcase?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Fine,” he said. “In the meantime I’ll give you a job. But you’ll have to listen to me. If you don’t, then out you go. Fact is, you’re pretty—thought so the first time I saw you. But there’s one thing you have to remember: Never say no to me, no matter what. If you can do that, I’m willing to give you more money than anyone else I’ve hired. Think it over and decide.”
There was nothing to think over. Eldest Brother said it had taken a thousand years to build our house. I hadn’t really understood what he meant by that. Exaggeration, of course, entered into what Eldest Brother said. But he wasn’t lying. When I turned seventeen Mother quietly tried to teach me a woman’s traditional duties toward kin and family. Chastity she emphasized till she was blue in the face. She couldn’t forgive me if I so much as thought about a man at night. She would have strangled herself if she’d known the kind of life I’d led since leaving home. He treated me kindly. The very first thing he did was have some clothes tailored for me. Several outfits, all at once. I felt obligated to pretty myself up for him. His office, like his apartment, was in Yŏngdong. In the office I cut clippings on residential housing from the newspaper and pasted them in an album. I did the same thing every day. If there weren’t any articles on residential housing I killed time reading other articles. His advertisements appeared in the paper every day: “Everyone’s interested in Chamshil. Call now for free consultation on Chamshil apartments. Ŭna, a real estate agent you can depend on—Ŭna Realty.” Advertisements for residential complexes also appeared: “New Ch’ŏnho Bridge, Chamshil area, fast-growing location along First Kangnam Way. Bargain-priced units for your dream home. Don’t miss this opportunity—Ŭna Home Realty.” He was a ruthless man. Twenty-nine years of age, he was capable of anything. The number of apartment occupancy rights he’d bought in our neighborhood seemed like a lot to me—but for him it wasn’t. He had practically cornered the market on occupancy rights in the redevelopment zones. He had also tucked away a fair amount of land in the Yŏngdong area.
His family was wealthy. What he was doing now, he had told me, was only a warmup. He was destined for greater things in his father’s company. After returning to the apartment at night he would call home. At the other end of the line sat his father. He reported to his father what he had done and asked his advice. He practically stood at attention when he telephoned him. After the call he examined item by item the ledgers kept by his employees. For four hundred fifty thousand wŏn each he sold the apartment rights he had bought in our neighborhood—and not a penny less. It was unthinkable. I had assumed he would get ten or twenty thousand wŏn more than what he had paid. While he sat in the living room working, the housekeeper set out his meal and waited for him to come to the table. The housekeeper had been sent by his mother. He paid
her extra not to inform his family about his arrangement with me. After I moved in, the housekeeper would leave for the night. Per our agreement, I never said no to him. No one could say no to him. I was living with a person who occupied a world completely different from mine. He and I were different from the day we were born. Mother said that my first cry was a scream. Perhaps my first breath was hot as hellfire. I was undernourished in my mother’s womb; his birth was a thing of warmth. My first breath was the pain of acid flowing over a wound; his was comfortable and sweet. We grew up differently as well. Many choices were open to him. I remember nothing but what was given to my two brothers and me. Mother had dressed us in clothes without pockets. He got stronger as he grew, but we were the opposite—we got weaker. He wanted me. Wanted me, then wanted me again. I slept in the nude every night. I dreamed every night. In the dream my brothers had found jobs at a different factory and had left for work. Father made several trips a day to the moon and back. Half asleep, I would hear Mother’s words: “Yŏng-hŭi, what are you doing now that you’ve left home?”
And then I would answer: “Our apartment occupancy rights are in his strongbox. I put them at the very bottom. They haven’t been sold yet. I’ll get them back before he sells them. I learned the combination.”
“Who told you to do something like that? Get up and get your clothes on—right now.”
“I can’t, Mom.”
“We’ve decided to go to Sŏngnam. Get up—quick.”
“I can’t.”
“The naked body of one of your great-grandmother’s younger sisters plugged up the local reservoir. Do you know why? Because she shared her master’s bed. Her mistress had her beaten to death.”
“Mom, I’m different.”
“You’re the same.”
“Different.”