The Kinship of Secrets

by Eugenia Kim

  “Yes, he is. Sadly, I cannot come for his funeral, but please write and tell me about it, will you?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Pray for your harabeoji, and I pray for the day when we can be together.”

  “I will, Mother. Thank you.”

  “Here is your father. Goodbye, my daughter. Be good and help Grandmother.” The connection got very messy then, or Inja’s mother needed to blow her nose.

  “Inja, how are you my child?” said her father. He sounded commanding but gentle.

  “I am well.” Again she couldn’t think of what to say, so she repeated, “A little sad.”

  “We are all praying for Harabeoji, and you and the family. Are you studying hard?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I know you are. We miss you. We miss you very much.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “God bless you and the family.”

  Uncle gave her the signal to hang up. “Thank you, Father. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.” She heard her mother chime “goodbye,” too.

  Uncle hung up and they looked at each other. “You did very well. I’m proud of you.” He gave her a hug, which brought her back to this world, the world she belonged in, though it was a sad world without Grandfather. Uncle paid and signed a receipt. On their walk home, dawn broke and spread a violet hue over the buildings. A swallow swooped from its nest in the eaves. Uncle took her hand. “What did you think of the call?”

  “It was strange.”

  “I know. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  That wasn’t the kind of strange she meant, but she couldn’t define her feeling until much later—after Grandfather’s funeral and the next quiet weeks in the house without him. Returning to school gave Inja time to think about her first telephone call. Hearing her parents talk despite the static had made them more real than their letters, photographs, or packages ever had. The physical presence of their voices was like a shadow echo that followed her for days, and it made the concept of a reunion real, too. By now, since she was old enough, they all knew she’d be the one going to America once they figured out the red tape. If a telephone call cost that much, what impossible cost would get her to America? This gave her a sense of guilty assurance. The few times her father wrote, he explained the different things they were trying, including something special with the government, and her mother had also tried to explain it. Because of that telephone call, what had always been a benign idea now felt like a threat. She knew that sentiment was bad and wrong of her, and she would never mention it, but there it was.

  20

  * * *

  Grandfather’s Burial

  The night after Easter Sunday, April 6, 1958, Miran woke to terrifying moans from her parents’ bedroom. She’d heard her mother’s dreaming screams before, but this time they seemed to escalate until her father said, “Yeobo, wake up, you’re dreaming.”

  “A terrible nightmare,” Najin said.

  Every night from that night forward, Najin’s dreams made her shout out loud, a sound more like groans, her mouth sluggish with sleep. Fortunately, Miran had Easter vacation from school and spent the remainder of the week at Sarah’s house, but when her father picked her up, he said Mom hadn’t been sleeping well and to be quiet when they went in as she was napping on the sofa.

  Miran and her father tiptoed around the house the following week, for as soon as Najin came home from work, she’d lie down and be asleep in seconds. But the nightmares kept her awake after dark; then she would get out of bed as if running from her dreams and stay up sewing, planning lessons, correcting papers, writing in her diary.

  On the third Monday in April, when Miran came home from school, she went into her mother’s sewing cabinet drawer to resew a loose button on her blouse. She found an opened thick envelope from Korea tossed atop the notions. Usually letters from Seoul came in thin blue mailers, so she examined the many stamps and compared the Korean writing to the pile of letters from Seoul stashed in the buffet table drawer. The envelope contained photographs from Uncle.

  She took the envelope out of the house to a little secret alcove beneath a pokeberry bush in the woods. She sat on a cinder block beneath the umbrella of vines, and a wad of black-and-white photographs fell to her feet. To avoid the stain of the poisonous berries scattered on the ground, she grasped each crinkle-edged photo by the edges. They were grainy pictures of a funeral in Korea—her grandfather’s burial. She’d been told he’d died on the evening before Good Friday earlier that month. Many images were of lines of people—men in black suits, women in white Korean dress—threading up a mountain path. One man, seen from the back near the robed minister, stood at the head of the line carrying a woman piggyback. Having heard before how her uncle carried her grandmother everywhere after her stroke, she deduced this was them. She didn’t remember her grandfather at all but knew his elderly face from a photographic portrait hung in an oval frame in her parents’ bedroom. He had a stern demeanor, his mouth mostly hidden by a white mustache and goatee, but Miran had noted the smile lines around his eyes.

  She shuffled through images that showed the coffin—its rectangle wrapped in cloth—being lowered by men’s dusty hands straining against ropes into the open grave. She fanned the photos in her hands like a flip book, and the staccato movement sent shafts of feeling into her gut that both excited and made her afraid, as if she were looking at the LIFE magazine photographs of survivors in concentration camps or the shocking burns on the bodies of victims from Hiroshima.

  She’d never known someone who died, and now she thought about her own father in that box and felt something singular for her mother, a sensation beyond the usual distance and alienation. She also felt bad that she had no sadness. People were supposed to be sad and cry when a grandparent died. Janet, the patrol girl, had taken a week off when her grandmother had died, and all the teachers had been super nice to her for the rest of the year. Miran’s mother had gone back to work the following day.

  She tried to reorder the photographs in sequence, glanced at the letter written in dense Korean with brush and ink on tissue, and slid it all back into the envelope. At home she slipped it back into the drawer and hoped her mother wouldn’t notice it had been disturbed.

  In a cavernous hall, dank, cold, Najin shivers. Far ahead are dim outlines of a long wooden box, ropes coiled beneath, the smell of decay. She approaches, fearful. The light grows as she nears the coffin’s open top, its surface murky and gleaming. Out of that blackness her father sits up slowly. Water drips from his hair, streams from his plaintive eyes, and pours down his beard to his soaked hemp gown. He raises both arms, and water pours from his sleeves. She screams.

  22 May 1958, Thursday. I cannot sleep for the nightmare. It comes every night no matter how hard I pray or how tired I am. Last weekend I dropped a gallon of kimchi, and yesterday I was short-tempered in class. It’s the same dream of Harabeoji every night, but it still frightens me with the intensity of the first time. C says I moan and thrash. For his sake I tried sleeping on the couch, in Miran’s room, a cot in the basement, but still it comes. Tonight I will make ginseng tea and go back to our bed.

  2 June 1958, Monday. I looked in the mirror this morning and did not recognize my eyes. They are like an old woman’s eyes and circled in shadows.

  14 June 1958, Saturday. I slept the whole night through with nothing! Thank you, Lord. The letter to Dongsaeng must have helped. I told him about the dream, so he can go up and check on Harabeoji’s grave. Miran is on school vacation, and yesterday we went to the post office together to mail my letter to Dongsaeng. I was happy to spend a little time with her, and we stopped at the library on the way home. I dozed while she looked for books.

  14 June 1958, Friday

  Noona,

  Older Sister, I do not want to worry you but something strange has been occurring for some time now. We are all fine and Inja is fine, so do not worry about that. She is a treasure to me, and I honor my noona for trusting her to my
care. This is a testament of your love, and I weep with the joy it gives me, with the joy she brings to me and to this family. Halmeoni is also fine, the same, and not getting worse. She is quieter now with Harabeoji gone, but she still wields her flyswatter like she is attacking the communists.

  I am writing because of Harabeoji. I am having a terrible nightmare. It is the same dream every night for the past 7–8 weeks. I am afraid to sleep. I get up and copy the Bible all night so I will not have this dream again, then I end up napping during the day, which makes Seonil’s mother angry. The dream is this: it is very dark but I see Harabeoji’s coffin at the far end of the room. I always feel afraid, but I am compelled to go to him. When I get closer, all around the floor are the ropes they used to carry him up the mountain. Then Harabeoji sits up from inside the coffin. Every time it is horrible and I shout with terror! He is wet through and through, and water pours from his head and falls from his beard. His eyes are holes but he seems to be crying and all this water could be his tears! Then he raises his arms, as if he wants to grab me, and the water runs out from his sleeves and makes waterfalls down his fingers. I am so frightened I shout. That is when I wake up.

  I went to the minister to ask him what I should do. What could it mean? He said I should pray and ask forgiveness for the sins I have committed against my father. Well, I have had my whole life to think about that, and that is nothing different from the suffering of my daily life. This is why I copy the Bible now, hoping it will bring me closer to God and away from this fear, to redeem my many wrongdoings. Finally Seonil’s mother grew tired of my napping and being irritable from lack of sleep, and she insisted I go to visit Harabeoji and pray. It was time to see his grave anyway and see how the grass is growing. So I went there, a long bus ride and a longer walk, and I knew it would be a long day so I didn’t bring Inja or anyone.

  I asked the cemetery director to go up with me to see the grave. He was happy enough to go with me. He remembers Harabeoji because there were many people at his funeral and the path was very steep, especially for the old people. Almost the entire congregation was there. I sent you the pictures. It was a great honor! The director and I went up, and the grave looks peaceful and calm. The grass is growing on the mound, soft and sparse like on a baby’s head. I asked him, when it rains, does the water pool anywhere nearby? He pointed out the hilly land all around, and the stone-lined gullies they installed to control how rainfall streams down the mountain. Even so, those gullies are far from Harabeoji’s site and it has been a dry summer. The farmers complain. There was no groundwater nearby.

  I stayed with Harabeoji a long time after the director left, to pray and ask him to forgive me. I left many tears there. Perhaps his spirit is angry because I did not sleep by his grave for a month. Nobody does that anymore, at least no one I know. All of us still honor him with mourning clothes and his altar at home.

  You are wiser than I am, and the night is the realm of women. Also, your husband is a great man of God and educated in these matters. Maybe he can explain what this means, and give me guidance on what I should do.

  Your loving Dongsaeng

  Najin received this letter ten days after he wrote it. Her mind churned. Then she saw her brother had written to her on the same day she had written to him about the dream, and her heart dropped to her feet. Ice crawled down her back and set the inside of her skin on fire. She thought better of dashing off an incoherent response and telephoned Calvin to read him the letter. Her thoughts were wild with fear and dread, but the sound of his voice calmed her.

  “The dreams are symbolic, not a mirror of reality,” he said with his minister’s authority. “Perhaps it’s a kind of grieving between brother and sister who have long been apart.”

  Najin didn’t say anything to that. She felt only relief to be apart from her brother, though she had come to trust him with Inja. Still, he was a dreamer who wept too easily, a man who was slipshod about practical matters such as work and money, just like their father. Perhaps this was the reason Grandfather came to her, weeping. She still held bitterness toward him for her mother’s hard life, especially since her mother had never complained about the menial work she did to earn money to send her children to school, while her father did nothing.

  “What should we do?” she said to Calvin.

  “It would be unwise to disturb his grave, if that’s what you’re thinking—a worse act than to suffer the unknown of this dream.”

  “You’re right. I suppose there’s nothing to be done, then.” She sighed.

  “I’ll be home at the usual time,” he said.

  She sat a long while by the telephone, then wrote to her brother explaining what Calvin had said, though she didn’t mention the “grieving brother and sister” part.

  Najin set the letter to her brother on the sideboard for Calvin to mail tomorrow at work. There was no urgency with this letter. If nothing could be done, she supposed she must live with not understanding the meaning of the dream, and maybe it would cease now that it had been exposed through letters. She thought of her life and saw that she had always lived yearning in the realm of the unknowable—a young girl seeking her father’s love, desiring education, good work, a full belly; longing to find her husband again, to survive the war, to have had a son, to have birthed more than the one surviving child; praying to freely give up everything in her will to God. Now she prayed for the unknown day when she might again see her mother, the unknown moment when she could hold her daughter close to her heart. These uncertainties had become a permanent state of her being. She had long lived with this paradox, and what did her days hold for her if not that? The terrible dream troubled her deeply, but she would learn to live with that, too.

  21

  * * *

  Hyo

  It seemed the moment Inja turned fifteen in September 1961, her thin body took on curves and her thoughts turned to boys, especially Jeon Hyo, her childhood friend across the road. Until high school, Hyo had taken the tram to prestigious schools in Seoul’s Sinchon district, and she doubted they’d shared two words since their childhood of playing together with the bricks in his yard and begging for candy at the U.S. Army base. Their neighborhood, crowded with old homes, had few high-rises, but since land for apartments was dear, the U.S. Army base closed and the GIs moved to Yongsan Garrison. Hyo attended a private high school for business education, while she attended the equalized or public high school nearby. All of their schools were segregated by gender. If South Korean youth were going to be adults and married one day, Inja often wondered about the wisdom of the Ministry of Education until she remembered it was her own father who had helped establish the current system.

  After classes teens gathered at a small park between the two schools, a rare opportunity to have fifteen stolen minutes of freedom from adult supervision. Hyo, being rich, wore neatly pressed shirts, lined jackets, twill trousers, and shined leather loafers. School uniforms had been abandoned by necessity after the war—few could afford to make them. And though the clothes Inja’s mother sent might have been outdated by a year or two in America, they were the rage of fashion among her peers. She had saddle shoes, sweaters with pearlized buttons, shirtwaist dresses, and plaid skirts, some so brightly colored Uncle said they were unfit to wear in public. Instead they were used to patch their quilts and make floor pillows.

  Inja and her friend Yuna, whose father bought her new clothes when he visited—out of guilt, she said, gleeful to show off a new blouse—would hurry to the park after school, strolling arm in arm as if it were nothing but a lovely day, even if they were crowded under a shared umbrella in the rain. Girls would cluster on one end, the boys on the other, and now and then the bold would walk in between. She and Yuna were regular “walkers,” giggling at each other, feeling grand in their finery, pretending they weren’t looking at the boys, who pretended they weren’t looking at them. Then one day when Yuna was sick, Inja promenaded alone, hugging her books, feeling foolish, wishing she had more than one girlfriend.
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  Hyo detached himself from his group and said, “Want some Juicy Fruit?” His hands were empty, but his eyes were filled with merriment. And such eyes! Round and rimmed with thick lashes, the smooth planes of his cheeks pink with embarrassment.

  “You remembered,” Inja said, so startled—and thrilled—she stopped.

  “I never forgot.” He shuffled. “Sorry, I don’t really have any, but I will the next time.”

  Next time? A ripple ran from her scalp to her toes, and a silence that seemed to go on for hours fell between them. They were halfway between the two groups and in danger of merciless teasing by the girls. “Well, I guess I should go home now,” she said.

  “I may as well go with you since you’re right across the street.” He hoisted his book bag over a shoulder and waved to the boys, who made faces and called him a kissy-sissy. “Never mind them,” he said, “they can be idiots.”

  “Girls can be that way, too.” This simple exchange united them and muted her skittering nerves.

  “How’s it been since leaving Busan?” he said.

  No one had ever asked her that before, not even Yuna. She’d seen Hyo many times since Busan, but it was the type of question neither of them would have considered as children. “It’s okay,” she said, conscious of how easily his footsteps fell in with hers. “I have a six-year-old cousin who hates school, though he’s smarter than he pretends to be. But I barely remember what Busan was like.” How else could she answer? Everyone knew how it was: scarce food, scarcer fuel, families unable to communicate across the demilitarized zone, relatives missing or dead. Few people, except politicians, talked about wartime; its commonality of suffering had made the subject cliché.