‘Child, say something!’ Her mother’s voice was laden with sympathy.
Young-sil took a step away from her. ‘Go back inside, Mother.’
Her words did not reach her mother. Young-sil took a deep breath and tried to say it again, louder, but she erupted into tears. She flung her hands over her mouth. Angrily wiping her face, she looked up to see her mother in white, standing before the gate, just out of reach.
‘Mother! What are we to do!’ she shouted.
Abruptly, Young-sil forced herself to walk away. When she had gone a distance, she turned around to see her mother still standing there. What would become of her mother? Would she come after her to the hospital again? Would she go back to the old village where she grew up?
Young-sil changed her mind. She determinedly walked back to her mother’s house. But her mother no longer stood at the gate. This comforted her somehow, and she walked away again.
Then, when she turned to look once more, she saw something white standing by the gate. She rubbed her eyes and ran back to the gate. Her shoes were giving her trouble, so she took them off and held them in her hands as she ran.
Looking through the gate again, she saw the lights were on in the house. Her mother must be inside… But she could not face her! Young-sil could offer no comfort in this state. Her tears threatened again, so she turned around and walked away for the third time.
She passed by the local school and a wave of nostalgia hit her. The darkness of the central building that rose into the night seeped into her soul. She remembered the countless mornings she had climbed the hill to this school, holding her brother’s hand.
They wore patched-up clothes and had no backpacks. Her brother carried their books in a book bag full of holes that their mother had obtained from the Japanese house she worked for.
Their mother disappeared for work early every morning, so it was her brother who raised her. He changed her diapers and taught her to count. When she began school, he held her hand all the way to her classroom. She sought him when she was sick and when she fought with her classmates. If she hurt her hand during a game, he was the one who blew on it to make it better. Her brother! Her dear brother! She stomped her feet like a little girl.
There was a day when it snowed so much they had to almost swim through it when leaving school. Her brother had carried her on his back and told her to close her eyes.
He had made a path through the glittering particles of ice piled up as high as their heads. The packed snow grazed Young-sil’s face and slipped into her scarf, prickling her neck. She had begun to cry. When they finally arrived home, their mother was not there. Seen through the torn paper screen of the door, the inside of their house looked colder than the outside. Her brother had brushed the snow off her and wiped her face with his sleeve.
‘Mother is coming with sweets. Don’t cry.’ But he was crying as well. Inside, they stared at the door, and every time it rattled in the wind, they called out, ‘Mother!’ and rushed to open it, but it was not her. Young-sil would cry in disappointment, and her brother would carry her on his back again, both of them in tears as they waited for their mother to come home …
Young-sil walked, frantic. The memories tore at her heart. She fell on the pavement and thought her brother’s footsteps might still linger on that very street.
Someone approached; a woman who looked like her mother!
‘Mother!’ She ran towards the woman, crying, but it was only a perplexed stranger who quickly moved away from her. Young-sil stared at her as she disappeared into the night. Was her mother sleeping? She wanted to go back to her again but felt she would never leave the house if she did. She put her shoes back on. She could see the hospital in the distance, and she needed to be ready to work again.
Her father died in the March First Movement of 1919, and now her brother might have met his fate in a terrible way as well. Was their family cursed?
The hospital was busy with activity. Oh no, was there an emergency patient on the operating table? She glanced at the operating theatre and saw the light was on, and through the windows saw the doctor and various assistants bent over the table. She hesitated but went up the stairs to the office.
Hyosook jumped up from her seat. ‘Unni! You must go down. There’s an appendicitis patient. The doctor keeps calling for you. He shouted at us. We had to tell him the truth, and he was furious. Hurry!’
The young nurse helped her change, the scent of her lotion seeming to hit her in the face. Young-sil had no strength left in her at this point, and allowed Hyosook to dress her as if she were a lifeless doll.
Hyosook dragged her down to the operating theatre and pushed her through the door. It was hot and humid inside, and she had to grip the wall to keep from fainting.
The patient was already on the operating table, the doctor standing over him. Nakagawa stood by with a tray full of tools. Three other nurses wiped the doctor’s forehead, chased the moths that occasionally flew in, or poured cold water on the cement floor to cool their feet. In the corner sat a woman in her forties, presumably the wife of the patient, her eyes and mouth wide open in shock.
The doctor sneered as soon as he saw Young-sil, and his expression replaced her feelings of guilt with that of violent hate. She went to the basin and scrubbed her hands.
The rhythm of her scrubbing prepared her mind to work, encasing it in cool ice.
‘Ah! Ah!’
The patient kept shouting and kicking his legs. The nurses held him down, making him scream even louder. Young-sil saw that the doctor had just cut him open. The white layer of fat became visible underneath the epidermis, and the clamps on his aorta seemed to be clamping her own eyes. Nakagawa handed the doctor a snowy puff of gauze, which was handed back to her as a clotted mess of blood.
Young-sil finished scrubbing and came up to Nakagawa. ‘I’m sorry. Thank you for filling in.’
‘Lee-san!’ Nakagawa sounded relieved to see her and nodded a greeting, sweat dripping from her head as she did so. She stepped back and let Young-sil take her place.
Young-sil took up the pincers. The feeling of this tool in her hand! Strength rushed back into her body through the solid sureness of the pincers. She felt ready to flip over a large machine with them if necessary.
‘Suture!’ The doctor held out his hand and looked up. He was taken aback by Young-sil and gave Nakagawa a hostile look. ‘Who told you to switch?’
He pushed Young-sil’s hand aside and picked up the tool himself from the tray. Nakagawa made a face and grabbed Young-sil’s pincers from her and pushed her out of the way.
Young-sil felt as if the pincers had been taken from her forever. The shock was so great she could not move from where she stood.
Everyone in the operating theatre gave her hateful looks, the nurses who had once been so respectful of her and her position.
She bit her lip and stared at the doctor as he concentrated on the operation, holding a scalpel in one hand and pincers in the other. Had he once not trusted her more than anyone else in both work and life? Had he once not wanted to entrust the rest of his life to her?
‘Aigo! Aigo!’ The patient’s screams seemed to scratch at her very bones.
Her brother! She suddenly thought the man’s screaming sounded like her brother’s voice. She quickly realized the patient was not her brother, but her heart beat fast and she started to tremble again. She tried to run but felt like she was about to vomit. In the next moment, as she bit down on her bottom lip, it felt as though her throat was being ripped from her body and it was as if someone had punched her right in the nose. The room went dim around her.
She saw the glint of the scalpel in the doctor’s hand. It looked like a knife headed for her brother’s neck.
‘Mother, Mother! That man is trying to kill Oppa!’
Young-sil ran at the doctor, who stumbled backwards before he righted himself an
d kicked her. Young-sil fell on the cement floor but got up and ran at him again. Her nose and mouth were bleeding, her face smeared with crimson.
‘That bastard! That bastard is killing Oppa! Oppa, wake up, that bastard, that …’
The others finally realized Young-sil had gone insane. The other nurses rushed to restrain her.
‘Mr Kim! Take that crazy bitch out of my operating theatre!’
Mr Kim, who had been readying a gurney outside and had run into the room when he heard the shouting, froze as he saw the nurses dragging Young-sil out by her arms.
One of the nurses yelled at him, ‘She’s crazy, she’s gone crazy!’
They handed her over to Mr Kim and pushed the two of them out of the operating theatre, slamming the door. The walls rang from the impact.
Not knowing how to restrain her, Mr Kim slung her over his shoulder.
Young-sil struggled in his grasp and beat against him. ‘You bastard! Oh Oppa, oh Mother, stop darning socks and come out now. Ha ha ha! That bastard!’
Mr Kim ran down towards the quarantine ward, but in the chaos of the screams he forgot what the room number was. He ran up a floor but none of the room numbers jogged his memory. He carried her back to the door of the operating theatre, but then in a strange fit of frustration, ran with her out of the hospital.
The night was dark.
January–February 1937
The Man on the Mountain
I wonder if that man is still throwing rocks at us, with that rope tied around his waist?
It’s become a habit of mine to think this whenever I worry about my mother back home, or read one of her letters. It all comes back to me, the rope soaked in blood, the crimson of it almost piercing my eyes. I shake my head to get rid of the image, but oddly enough, two years after the events of that day, the memory is clearer than ever.
His eyes were like dark spheres and his nose, which bulged at the tip, was shaped like a tadpole. It dampened the effect of his brow, making him seem solid and steadfast rather than intimidating and fearful. I always thought I might run into him again as he hurled his stones, the rope still tied around his waist and draped about his torso. The thought makes me shudder. Perhaps I’ve become oversensitive these past few years.
Rumour has it that he was the illegitimate son of a certain local official named Kim, who was the richest and most powerful man in our village. The man with the rope belt was the result of an affair Kim had with a married woman. Kim hid them away in a mountain hut and never had anything to do with them again, until the son appeared before him one day, brandishing a knife.
I was once extremely curious about this man and tried to find out as much as I could about him, but everything had happened so long ago that details were thin on the ground. From time to time I thought back to that desperate moment where he almost lost his life. Doing my needlework, on nights the rains came down, or when I’d look up at the cliffs of my home village and see the sky above moving like a turbulent blue ocean … If it hadn’t been for him that day, what would’ve become of us …?
It all happened two years ago, around 20 July. I received a telegram saying that my mother was ill, urging me to come home immediately.
I was already worried about her, as she was over seventy and often sick, and I felt my world go dark in that moment. I just about pulled myself together and looked at the clock: 3 p.m. There was an express train at 3.05 p.m., so I grabbed a bag and rushed out in my house clothes with my husband.
The station platform was almost empty as most of the passengers had already boarded. I ran through the turnstiles, stumbled several times, and jumped on to the train as my husband hurriedly bought a ticket. He thrust it at me through the train window and said, ‘Your slip, your slip!’ Only then did I realize that I’d been stumbling because I had stepped on my slip, which had come down below my hem. I was too out of breath to even hike it up. My head pounded as if it had taken a serious blow.
I looked back to catch my husband’s face when the train began to move, but it was too shadowed to make out anyone on the platform. Even the cool July breeze blowing through the window felt sad to me, and the plains, spread like swathes of indigo light, made me dizzy. The telegraph poles which once whipped past the train windows seemed to crawl now, and I was annoyed by the persistent sight of the low mountains that indicated we were still far from our destination. I kept telling myself that I might as well have taken the all-stop train.
I finally caught my breath, but for some reason I thought then of my mother’s fragile, wriggling chin, and gradually the rest of her face. How could I have not seen her for five years? What had I been doing all that time that was so important? I admonished myself as I buried my face in my hands. I wanted to cry like a baby. What if I went but it was too late, and I was never to hear my mother’s voice again? My anxiety ran ahead of the clanking rhythm of the train.
My mother, who had no sons, whose daughters had scattered east and west as they married. My mother, who had no one to lay a cool rag on her head or make her a bowl of rice gruel if she fell sick. I couldn’t stand the fact of my circumstances, or to be exact, the very social system that prevented me from having my mother live with me. I closed my eyes and leaned against the window frame. The wind blew through my hair and my memories, reviving scenes that I thought I had long forgotten. The time when we lost Father and had to climb a twisted mountain path to go live with my aunt. The time when we were gathering pine straw and I cried because I was hungry, and my mother stripped a pine sapling and gave it to me to suck on. The murmur of the people on the train and the cigarette smoke seemed further away from me than these memories. I wiped my tears and looked around me. The car was filled with the yellow faces of the other passengers, which so repulsed me that I stuck my head out of the window instead and felt the misty rain wrap itself around my neck.
The sky was bereft of the sun, and the birds seemed to be refusing to sing. I thought I saw the face of my mother on a faraway hill crying out, ‘Child! My child!’ I saw her running towards me, jumping over mountain after mountain. The smell of the leather seating in the carriage was almost enough to choke me.
Only when it started to rain in earnest did I finally close the train window. The sound of the rain pounding against the glass helped maintain an ominous mood in my heart. We arrived at Jangseong Station at 2 p.m. the next day, whereupon I transferred to the Gyeongeui Line in the midst of a horrendous downpour. I could barely sit still for the anxiousness I kept feeling about my mother.
The windows of the next train were all shut, trapping all manner of little sounds that set my teeth on edge: a woman constantly whispering, a man droning on and on about something inconsequential, a child buzzing his lips on a willow leaf for an instrument, the clomping of footsteps, the slam of the door. I was also sat next to the lavatory, and the acidic stink turned my stomach.
The winds and rain seeped through the edges of the shut window, and raindrops trailed down the pane like tears. The rising and falling of the telegraph wires alongside the train was like the flight of a baby bird searching for its mother. The low mountains were huddled in the wet, red light as I pressed my face to the window until my nose almost froze. I begged the rain to stop.
Finally, I was let off at Sariwon Station and I rushed through the rain and boarded the light railway. I gathered my wet skirt around myself and looked outside, and what I saw was not reassuring.
The scene near Sariwon Station looked as if everything was covered in red. The sky, chaotic with falling raindrops, was empty of birds, and only the faraway hint of the mountains could be seen. One of them barely seemed to keep its peak out of the water, and it was almost as if the thatched-roofed farmer’s houses were cowering in fear of the deluge.
There was no toilet on this train, so at least the stink was gone. The interior of the carriage was thick with worry. The passengers seemed to have forgotten about smoking as they sma
cked their lips from time to time, staring silently out the window.
The closer we got to a familiar elevation of mountains, the more my heart raced and limbs trembled. What if I was rushing all this way only to be too late? I was so nervous that I kept opening my window, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the carriage. The train was practically ploughing through a flood. I kept thinking it was going to sink, which made my body scrunch up to a fraction of its size. Finally, we arrived at my station. The few of us who disembarked were met by some of the station staff in a waiting area that was otherwise empty, save the sound of the pounding rain and a sour smell. The concrete walls were gaudy with posters, and there were only a couple of chairs in the corner for resting.
‘The bus may not come today, so please find a room at the inn,’ shouted a staff member over the din of the rain.
I couldn’t believe it. To be trapped here, only a few li away from home! I stared down the road, wondering if I should walk the remaining distance. The new road, sprinkled with white sand, stretched into the grey of the rain. There were no pedestrians. I looked back at the other passengers to see if any were about to brave it, but they were all looking at the red body of water approaching the road. A staff member said that once the water flooded the road, the station and the town it served would be swept away.
Suddenly, one of the station staff announced, ‘We’ve called the next station, and they say the bus has left. Buy your tickets!’
We passengers rushed to comply, buoyed by a sudden surge of energy and chatter. I stared up the road as I shivered and willed the bus to pull in.
The bus really did arrive, a big one at that. We boarded, and soon the vehicle was running along the road at a great speed. The driver said the road before the hot springs was about to be flooded so we had to rush. He concentrated hard on the road ahead, moving only to turn the steering wheel. We were as nervous as he was and could barely stay calm in our seats.
The Underground Village Page 9