I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  The water dripping from the ceiling must have tickled because she wiped the drops off with her palm and laughed.

  “Flexible, ha! I was as stiff as a board. I definitely did not take after her in that respect.”

  I smiled.

  “I couldn’t even do something as basic as the splits. The classes centered on my sister. By the time she was doing arabesques, I was still figuring out how to stand in first position.

  But it didn’t matter. I was happy to watch her grow more beautiful and more talented by the day. Since I had no interest in comparing myself to her or surpassing her, I had no complaints. Those were our happiest times. Our parents looked happy, too. They expected great things from my sister.”

  The other women in the bathhouse slowly trickled out until we were the only ones left.

  “You have to have an ear for music to do ballet. I was less interested in doing ballet myself than in watching my sister’s movements grow deeper, subtler, and more sophisticated with each day. But most of all, I liked listening to music with her. My sister understood ballet intuitively. She mastered complicated movements quickly and would lose herself in them. It was like she was born to be a ballerina. When she wasn’t practicing, she read books on ballet. She sounded like a teacher when she talked about the history of ballet, the costumes, the ballerinas and ballerinos. Her cheeks would turn red with excitement whenever she told me something new she had learned. I learned the names of legendary ballet dancers from her—Ulanova, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Nureyev. If the moon was out on a night when she was telling me about ballet, she would go outside and dance under the moonlight. Her dream was to dance the role of the Dying Swan. She really did look like a swan in the moonlight.”

  “I’ve never heard anyone talk about their older sister the way you do.”

  “What kinds of things do other people say?”

  “Most just talk about the fights they have.”

  “Fights?”

  “I think most sisters push and shove each other and argue about which one should get the better room, or wear an outfit they like first, or read a book first, or get to use the hairdryer first. But you put your sister before yourself.”

  “That’s because she was better than me.” She sounded pained. “Do you think we’re unusual?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well?” she asked again.

  “You don’t seem like normal sisters.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  Miru sighed. The water had cooled. I reached over and turned on the faucet to add more hot water. Miru dipped her face. She seemed to be holding her breath. She stayed under so long that I was about to yell her name when she lifted her face and exhaled deeply.

  “Yoon,” she said, “will you go with me to my old house?”

  “When?”

  “After we’re done bathing.”

  She looked sad, so I agreed. After hearing my answer, she stuck her face back underwater.

  The house was up a very steep hill. Miru lifted a rock beside the green front gate to retrieve a hidden key. Inside the gate was a small yard overgrown with weeds. A sunflower, heavy with seeds, hung its head. It was apparent that no one had been by in a long time. A small deck, the wood faded, sat in the middle of the yard as if someone had discarded it there, and a rusted drying rack lay flat beside it. The thick weeds looked as if they would barge in through the front door at any moment.

  “The house is vacant?” I asked.

  “For now,” Miru said, her voice trailing off.

  I saw something poking up from among the weeds like stalks of green onions. Small white flowers hung from the tips. As I was looking at them, Miru told me they were called white rain lilies. I crouched down in front of them and stared at the white blossoms. The petals looked even paler in contrast to the dismal surroundings. Miru walked up the steps to the front door, the keys in her hand, but then she hesitated and turned back.

  “I can’t do it,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Let’s just go.”

  Miru’s face was pale.

  “I thought I could go inside if you were with me,” she said. “But I can’t.”

  Her voice was trembling. She was already at the front gate, so I grabbed my basket and joined her. She locked it and put the key back under the rock. Carrying our shower baskets, we made our way down the hill. The sun was still out when we left the public bath, but now dusk was falling. Halfway down the hill, I glanced back. The lights had already gone on in the other houses; Miru’s old house seemed to be watching us from between them. Was that really where the three of them had lived together? Miru was once again walking with her head down like she was staring at her own heart.

  As if reading my mind, she suddenly said, “It is.”

  “What?”

  “That house—it’s where Myungsuh, my sister, and I used to live.”

  “Why don’t you live there anymore?”

  “Because she’s gone,” she said. “Without her, it wouldn’t look right for me to live in the house alone with Myungsuh, even if he and I did grow up together. I didn’t think anything of it when my sister was around, but afterward we naturally parted ways. He moved in with his relatives in Jongam-dong, and I went to Myeongnyun-dong. I think the house has been empty too long. It looks abandoned. Our parents rented it for us at first, but later they bought it and put it in my sister’s name.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “That our parents were rich … Am I right?”

  When she said it out loud, it seemed I had been thinking that. Night was falling over both of us. We walked through Dongsung-dong and Hyehwa-dong toward Myeongnyun-dong. We didn’t speak the whole way. Passersby stole curious glances at our shower baskets. Miru’s skirt fluttered in the evening breeze.

  There was a demonstration in front of Myeongdong Cathedral today to support laid-off factory workers who are on a hunger strike. I was there with Nak Sujang. Yoon found out somehow and came to find us. Even amid all those hundreds of people, she immediately caught my eye. I must have caught her eye, too, because she came right over to where we were sitting and shouting protest slogans. She sat down next to me. We tried to head farther into Myeongdong, but the riot police came after us and chased us around until we ducked into a small bookstore. The store was packed with people like us. All of the other shops had shut their doors, but the bookstore owner seemed to have kept his open to help the protesters. It wasn’t until we made it inside that I realized Nak Sujang was no longer with us. Yoon and I leaned against the wall, our eyes red from tear gas. When I asked her why she came, she said she wasn’t necessarily trying to find me. She said, “I’m just here because you are.” She picked up a book of poetry from one of the displays and opened it. It had been lying face down, as if someone was in the middle of reading it. Yoon read the copyright date and opened to the first page. She liked to know when a book had first come out. I looked at the price tag: 350 won. In a quiet voice, she read the preface: “I make my way forward like a donkey with its head down, groaning beneath its heavy burden and enduring the taunts of mischief makers.” She whispered the last line, as if it were meant for my ears only. “Whenever you want me, wherever you want me to be, I will be there.” Through bloodshot eyes, she read the poet’s name last: Francis Jammes.

  |||

  Lǔ Xùn was one of the greatest writers of modern China. He was respected by Nationalists and Communists alike, despite having gone to Imperial Japan for his education. I asked the professor about Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Did people in other parts of Asia share in the sense of victory, since it was the first time an Asian country beat a European country, rather than criticizing Japan as an aggressor nation? After mulling it over for a moment, the professor said that Lǔ Xùn was critical of Japan�
��s aggression toward China, but after the Russo-Japanese War, people from all over Asia wanted to learn from Japan. So it was a natural choice for Lǔ Xùn to go there to learn advanced Western medical science. The professor also said that when Lǔ Xùn was a student in Japan, he had a Japanese teacher who took all of his students, including Lǔ Xùn, to a Confucian shrine in Ochanomizu. Lǔ Xùn had left China in order to distance himself from premodern things that symbolized Confucianism, so this must have been a great shock to him. What went through his mind when his teacher, whom he had met in a far-off land that he had traveled to in order to learn new ways, presented him with the very thing he had been trying to discard and made him bow down before it?

  What the professor said gave me a lot to think about.

  |||

  Yesterday I went back to the bookstore where we’d found the collection of poems by Francis Jammes so I could buy it for Yoon. But the owner said it wasn’t for sale. He said it was a private copy given to him years ago by his first love. I walked out of the store feeling disappointed, but he ran out after me and handed me the book. I offered to pay, but he patted me on the shoulder. “What would you pay me for it? 350 won? I think it’s more meaningful if I just give it to you. Later on, if someone wants a book that only you own, you can return the favor.” I watched him walk back into the store. I thought about what the professor had said: everyone has his or her own means of defining value.

  |||

  I’m trying to think about what I can do. But instead all that comes to mind are the things I can’t do. How do we judge truth and goodness? Where are justice and righteousness hiding? A society that is violent or corrupt prohibits mutual communication. A society that fears communication is unable to solve any problem. It looks for someone to shift the responsibility to and turns even more violent.

  |||

  I want us all, starting with me, to be confident and stand on our own two feet. I want relationships that are honest and free of secrets and abuse.

  —Brown Notebook 6

  CHAPTER 7

  Bottom of the Stairs

  Miru stopped in front of a house and swung open the waist-high wooden gate. The gate seemed to be shared by several households. The yard was much bigger than it looked from outside. Miru led me away from the yard toward a staircase just a few steps away from the gate.

  “Watch your step,” she said.

  The stairs led way, way down. Each time I thought we had surely reached the bottom, we turned the corner to find another set of steps. It felt like we were climbing back down the hill we had just come up. Miru’s small studio was at the bottom of the stairs. She took a key from her pocket and fit it into the lock. The door opened, and she reached inside, flipped on the light, and called out, “Emily!” I glanced back at the stairs. It felt like we were cut off from the surface of the earth. Her room was much darker than the abandoned house she had taken me to after the bathhouse. She probably had to keep the light on even during the day.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Miru stepped inside first and slipped off her shoes. I did not see any other shoes except for the sneakers she once loaned me. I thought about how she tied the laces for me that day. Later, I had crouched down in front of the faucet outside my studio and washed them. Those shoes, which I had set out to dry on the sunniest part of the waist-high concrete wall that ran around the edge of the roof, only to accidentally drop them and have to run downstairs to retrieve them and wash them all over again, were the same ones I had worn on the day we went from the riot-swept streets to my place to eat together—the same day that I had grabbed her hand in Professor Yoon’s office. Her fingers had trembled in mine. They would have been slender and pale if not for the scars. Later still, I had grabbed her hand again as she lay on her stomach in my room and leafed through her copy of We Are Breathing. My cousin used to do the same thing to me. If she saw me staring mindlessly at my own hands, she would grab them and say, “You’re lonely.” She thought people tended to look at their hands when they felt lonely. I had never thought of it that way, but later I thought of what she’d said whenever I caught myself staring at my hands. I guess it’s true that people’s habits rub off on each other when they live together. After I touched Miru’s hands for the first time, she stopped hiding them from me.

  Miru quietly called out the cat’s name.

  “Jung Yoon,” she said, “come look.”

  I took off my shoes and set them beside Miru’s. I set my shower basket beside hers as well. Then I joined her.

  “Look how she’s sleeping.”

  Emily was asleep in a small box below the window. She was lying on her back with her mouth open, belly exposed, and all four limbs in the air. I couldn’t help but giggle. The cat was oblivious to our presence. It was the first time I had ever seen a sleeping cat this close up. Her nose and ears, and even the spaces between her tiny claws, were pink.

  “Is that how cats normally sleep?” I asked.

  “No. Sometimes she sleeps curled in a ball or sprawled out flat like a puddle. Sometimes she even sleeps standing up with her eyes closed, or with her face resting on her front legs. She’s so flexible that she can sleep with her lower half stretched out flat and her upper body facing the other way. That’s my favorite. She looks so peaceful when she sleeps that way.”

  The cat did look peaceful. Her pose suggested that she did not care who might walk in. It was very different from when she strutted around elegantly with her tail in the air. There was a green smudge on one of her white cheeks.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  Miru pointed at the window. Level with the base of the window was the yard we had passed on our way in. Long green stalks were peeking into her room. Emily must have been lying on the windowsill.

  “Hungry?” Miru asked.

  “A little.”

  “I should have bought something on the way home. I just realized there’s nothing to eat here. What should we do?”

  “It’s okay. I’m not that hungry. I’ll eat at home later.”

  I looked down at Emily asleep in the box and then went to the window. Because of the long staircase, I had assumed that Miru’s room would be completely underground, so it was a surprise to see all that greenery. It looked like it would fill the room the moment the window was opened. I assumed she left it unlocked even when she was out, because the window slid open with just a slight push. As I had pictured, the tall green stalks unfurled their limbs and spilled into the room.

  “Those are lilies,” Miru said.

  “Lilies?”

  “This room is built into the side of a hill. It’s underground on one side and aboveground on the other. If you stand over here, you can see out. Myungsuh didn’t want me to move here. He said it doesn’t get enough sunlight. I do feel bad for Emily, but I like it because of the stairs. Myungsuh asked me why I wanted to live in an underground cave. But I insisted, and on the day I moved in, he planted those flowers. He said lilies don’t need a lot of sunlight to grow. He planted so many of them that I had to move some when they started sprouting. Last spring, each stem had two or three flowers, and the whole place smelled like lilies. When they bloom, they hang their heads down like they’re staring at the ground. One day, Emily disappeared, and when I went to look for her, I found her curled up in a ball, sleeping beneath the lilies.”

  I ran my hand over one of the lily stems that Myungsuh had planted. The bulbs were buried underground like potatoes. They must have been very strong to bloom so fiercely between spring and summer, only to spend the rest of the year waiting. While the stalks withered above, the bulbs rode out the winter below, and when spring returned, they pushed out fresh shoots that bloomed white and filled her room with their fragrance. I nudged the stalks out of the way to close the window and then looked around Miru’s room. A wooden ladder the same color as the flooring led up to a loft bed. Underneath was Miru’s desk. The twenty books that Professor Yoon had recommended to us were sitting on top. She must have been
reading them or planning to read them. I stared closely at a small poster taped to the wall above her desk. Were those cypress trees? A single small boat was approaching an island floating in a black sea. The caption read “Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.” In the boat, a man dressed in white stood over a coffin draped in white fabric with his back to the viewer. I could just make out an oarsman behind him. The island looked tranquil, but heavy, barren-looking cliff walls encircled it like wings. Inside the walls, a cluster of cypress trees stood as dark as the sea and rose straight up as if to push aside the shrouded sky. They looked like a portal into the island. The small boat rode a bruised wave into the shore, sailing straight for the black water beneath those trees. I was so absorbed in the painting that I did not notice Miru had come over and was standing beside me.

  “The artist painted it after having the same dream over and over,” she said. “He made five different versions.”

  It was my first time seeing this painting.

  “They say the original title was A Quiet Place.”

  It did indeed look like a quiet place. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the cliff walls or the black cypress trees or the dark water, but the boat did not look like it would be going any farther.

  “We should go to Basel someday,” Miru said.

  “You mean in Switzerland?”