I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

Brokenhearted over losing the house, Miru had started looking for her sister’s boyfriend again. She would show up at my place looking disappointed and weary, stay for a few days, then set out again. I had gone looking for her, to see if she wanted to go with me to visit Dahn, but she was gone.

  “How are you doing?” Belatedly, I asked Dahn about his own life.

  “Like I’m trapped in a spider web.”

  “I thought you weren’t afraid of spiders anymore.”

  “I’m not. Not of the spiders that live in the mountains. But I think I’ve found a much bigger spider.”

  He sounded sad. I felt him move toward me, and suddenly his face was directly over mine.

  “I hate the sound of rifles. And the feeling of my finger on the trigger.”

  The smell of the soju on Dahn’s breath filled my nose. He stared deep into my eyes. They wavered, and then his lips were against mine. His uniform pressed against my street clothes, and his hand slid inside my shirt and over my breast. When his breathing grew rough, I pushed him away from me. I could feel the strength in his hands when he grabbed my wrists.

  “Dahn, please.” I felt his breath against my skin. “Don’t.”

  I tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t stop. As I struggled, my hand brushed his cheek and I felt his hot tears. His lips pressed against mine again, and he tried to unbutton my shirt.

  “You’re the only exit I have left,” he said.

  The next thing I knew, my shirt was pushed halfway up my chest, and Dahn was trying to unzip my pants. I twisted away from him, but he climbed on top of me and held me down. I do not know if it was because of his tears on my fingertips, but I felt confused and lost all strength in my body. I realized that the whole time I had been debating how to respond to Dahn’s invitation, I had known deep down that this would happen.

  “You don’t love me,” Dahn said finally, and rolled away from me. “It’s because of him, isn’t it?” he asked. I knew who he was referring to.

  Embarrassed by what had happened, the two of us probably got no sleep all night. I reached out and felt for Dahn’s hand, but he did not move. At some point, it started to rain. If the sound of rain could be counted, I probably would have counted the drops. In the morning, our eyes met as we were folding the blankets up. His eyes were bloodshot. We took the same path we had taken the night before. I felt indescribably sad. We walked over the pinecones wet from last night’s rain, made our way along the deserted forest path, and stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sea. Below the dazzling sun sitting just over the horizon, barges were rocking in the waves. The sun seemed to shine even brighter after the rain. A tractor made its way around the driftwood and fishing nets scattered along the beach. What was a tractor doing on the mudflats? It was an unusual sight for me, as I was more accustomed to seeing cultivators moving back and forth between rice paddies. Each time the wind blew, the water wrinkled and grazed the sandbanks, one fold after another. The distant sound of engines sounded like something in a dream. A flock of seagulls wheeled through the morning sky and called out to one another.

  “About last night,” Dahn started to say, a glum look on his face. I quickly cut him off.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. We’ll forget all about it in a few days.”

  “Okay.” He nodded gravely.

  “So, have you caught a spy yet?” The question popped out before I could stop myself.

  “No one in my unit has, but they say someone caught a whale a few years ago.”

  “A whale?”

  “Yes. We don’t normally get whales in the West Sea. But once in a while, one gets lost and crosses the South Sea to this side of the peninsula. They say that when whales swim toward the coastline in the dark, they sound like North Korean spy submarines infiltrating. The soldier on duty followed procedure and fired off a flare, then remote detonated a claymore and opened fire with a machine gun. After the sun rose and they went in for a closer look, they discovered that it wasn’t a spy, after all, but an enormous whale floating belly up and ripped to shreds.”

  “Poor whale.”

  “The colonel gave the soldier a commendation and rewarded him with a seven-day pass because he performed his guard duty properly without dozing off.”

  After the story of the whale mistaken for a spy, we didn’t have anything else to say. It was the first time we had ever felt awkward around each other. We walked back between the cornfield and pepper field that we had passed the night before and arrived at Dahn’s unit. I told him I would be on my way and turned to leave. After a few steps, I glanced back to see that he was still standing there, glued to the spot, watching me go. After a few more steps, I glanced back again, and he was still there. I gestured at him to go on in, but he did not move. I got farther away and looked back again. His head was hanging down.

  Yoon.

  Right now, the rain is falling. A heavy bluish mist hangs over the pine forest and the sea. I keep picturing the way you glanced back at me the day you left. When I’m lying under my blanket, your breath and your voice tickle my ear. I wonder what you’re doing right now. Are you also looking out the window at the falling rain?

  After that visit, I stopped answering his letters.

  I lowered my head until my chin was nearly grazing the paper and started to write to him.

  Dear Dahn,

  The places I have visited the most in this city are Gyeongbokgung Palace and the museum on Sejong Street. At first, it took me about an hour and ten minutes to get there from my neighborhood. Now I can get there in fifty minutes. I’m not walking any faster, I just know the streets better. But I don’t always go inside once I get there. If I’m on my way to school, I just pass by. Also, sometimes I like to walk around the outside wall of the palace rather than going in. I walk all the way to Samcheong-dong and then head home from there. I only go inside the museum or pay for a ticket into Gyeongbokgung Palace on days when the things I don’t want to think about have built up inside of me and filled my head with noise. It’s strange, but entering the palace is like entering another world. The moment I step through the gate and walk onto the palace grounds, the hustle and bustle of the world outside, the speeding cars, and the sky-high buildings all vanish. I guess that’s why I go there. When I am inside the palace, I forget about who I am outside the palace. The first time I went there, everything felt so fresh and new. I felt stupid for never having realized how close I lived to a royal palace. Did I tell you about my plan to walk around the city for a couple of hours every day? I started doing this so I could learn about the city, and so far it has helped me to discover these places. All of these city dwellers live beneath the sheltering wings of this palace, so why don’t they visit it more often? It’s strange to me. Considering that I had always thought of Gwanghwamun Gate as just another intersection and not as the front gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace, I never even took a good look at the gate itself until after I had gone inside. Of course, it has only occurred to me that those are my two favorite places now that I am writing you this letter.

  Last Sunday, it started drizzling in the middle of the night. I got up very early and walked to Gyeongbokgung Palace. Carrying an umbrella seemed like too much of a bother, so I wore a hooded jacket. The drizzle was very light. By the time I got there, my hair and clothes were damp. The palace is usually crowded on Sundays, but there was hardly anyone there that day, probably on account of the weather. I hadn’t planned on going inside, but I changed my mind because there were no lines at the ticket booth, and the palace looked abandoned and alone. I had been inside numerous times, so I thought I knew it really well. But the old buildings looked completely different in the rain than they did on sunny days. Even Bugaksan Mountain, which I could see from Geunjeongjeon Hall, looked like an entirely different mountain. The hexagonal Hyangwonjeong Pavilion on the island in the middle of the wide lotus pond where I went all the time also looked new to me. And that’s not all. Gyeonghoeru Pavilion looked so mysterious in the rain. It was only a
little rain, and yet everything looked so different. As I walked through the palace, I came across something new. Every time I go there, I make a point of going to Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, so I know the area around it really well. But this time, I spotted a wooden staircase that I had never noticed before. The stairs led up to the second floor. There was a “no trespassing” sign, but I went up there anyway. The pavilion was open on all sides. I was stunned by all that open space. It was even more overwhelming because I had only ever paid attention to the outside of the octagonal roof, which looks like it could take to the air at any second, or the decorative tiles shaped from wet clay to look like open-mouthed birds before they were baked and affixed to the ends of the roof ridge. The bottom floor had stone pillars, so I guess it never occurred to me that the second-floor pillars would be made of wood.

  Do you remember how we used to go sledding over the ice in the winter? I mean the icy road next to the levee where the water parsley sprouts up fast and green in the spring. We would throw a rock at the ice before getting on the sleds. We did that to see if it was thick enough to support our weight. Do you remember the time we threw a rock and the thin ice cracked? As I was climbing up to the second floor of the pavilion, I thought I could hear that keerack! in my head. I raced up the rest of the stairs but managed to calm down once I got to the top. My forehead was sweaty, but it immediately cooled. I stood there in a daze. My eyes ached from all that beauty. The floor was lined with planks of wood of varying heights. I felt like I had uncovered one of the city’s secrets. I was so thrilled at my triumph that I couldn’t stop smiling. Now I know that anytime you see a “no trespassing” sign, it means you’ve got to go in and take a look. Maybe that sign was the reason I had never noticed the wooden stairs, despite the many times I walked around the outside of the pavilion or sat gazing at it from a wooden bench.

  I stood there for a long time and then tiptoed carefully onto the wooden floor. I walked as lightly as I could, creeping forward one step at a time. The lotus pond looked amazing from above. The floating water hyacinth waved in the breeze, and the raindrops sent ripples, big ones and little ones, skidding across the water. On very clear days, you can probably see the pavilion’s reflection in the pond. I’ve seen all the way to Inwangsan, Bugaksan, and Namsan Mountains before. The soil that was dug up when the lotus pond was built had been used to create Amisan Garden, behind the queen’s living quarters. I could see that, too, right before my eyes.

  I carefully sat down. The moment I did, all the nervousness I felt about trespassing vanished, and I relaxed. I’d been feeling angry at myself for not keeping the promise I made to Miru to help her look for him, and now she’s gone off on her own again. But as I sat on the wooden floor of the pavilion, even that anger seemed to loosen its grip just a little. The floorboards seemed to speak—their words, muted for a hundred years, pierced through a deep silence and rose into the air.

  Dear Dahn,

  Remember how both of our houses where we grew up had narrow wooden verandas that ran around the sides of the building?

  My mother always kept the wood polished. She told me my father built it himself using trees from the mountain behind our house that had fallen during a typhoon. She said the wood would last a long time if you took good care of it and kept it swept and cleaned and lacquered. Do you remember how we used to lie on our stomachs reading books on the veranda, and how we would fall asleep facedown on the wooden floor while doing our homework or playing?

  Don’t laugh.

  That day, I woke up on the second floor of Gyeonghoeru Pavilion to find someone shaking me. It was the groundskeeper. I must have been asleep there for forty minutes. After you get out of the army, I’ll tell you how I managed to get away from him. It’ll be my discharge gift to you.

  Dear Dahn,

  Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there.

  I stopped writing. With my face nearly grazing the paper and the fountain pen clenched in my hand, I stared at the sentences I had just written.

  The tiny letters in the word someday grew bigger and bigger until they were all I could see.

  How I wish I could take Dahn up to the second floor of Gyeonghoeru Pavilion someday. If the day were ever to come when we could go there together, I would tell him the rest of the story. I would tell him that when the groundskeeper shook me, I bolted upright from where I had fallen asleep facedown on the wooden floor. That the first thing on my mind was not “What am I doing here?” but rather “Where on earth am I?” That I then remembered walking around the lotus pond in the falling rain, seeing the “no trespassing” sign, and climbing the stairs to the second floor. I would tell him how the rain kept falling. How the dirt ground of Gyeongbokgung Palace was wet, and how Inwangsan Mountain was covered in mist. I would tell him that the groundskeeper gave me a hard look and scolded me and asked what I thought I was doing sleeping in a restricted area. That I immediately dropped to my knees and swore to the groundskeeper that I would scrub and polish the floorboards myself. I would come every day and polish them until they shone. The groundskeeper stared at my sleep-addled face and let out a hearty laugh. He said that I couldn’t polish the floor, since visitors were not supposed to be up there without permission, but that I should never forget my promise. “If the day ever comes that people can come and go up here as they please, you’ll keep your promise then, right?” He asked the question again, but with a softer look this time. Before I could even answer, he said, “As long as you never forget your promise, as long as you mean it when you say you would scrub this floor everyday, then I’ll let you go this time.”

  So many forgotten promises. Broken promises that have long since vanished from memory.

  I placed the tip of the fountain pen beneath the words Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there, and prepared to write the last line, but instead I sat there without moving. All I had meant to write was Sincerely or some other closing word, but I felt like I had driven myself into a corner. Like someone stammering for words because they have reached a dead end but have to say something, I wrote, Take care, and then crossed it out. I wrote, Stay strong, and crossed that out. Then I wrote, I’ll write to you again, and crossed that out, too. My last image of Dahn standing there with his head hanging down flickered over the blacked-out letters of my final farewell to him. The blue of his shaved head spread in my mind like ink. I bit my lip and crossed out the words Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there. I wrote them again. I erased them again. Wrote them, erased them, rewrote them.

  The page was one giant smudge.

  “Yoon!”

  I had fallen asleep at my desk when I heard someone calling me. I lifted my head from the smudged notebook and listened carefully to the sound coming from outside the door.

  “Yoon!”

  It was my cousin. I got up and opened the door. My pregnant cousin’s freckled face looked happy to see me. She was carrying a container of kimchi.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she asked.

  The phone had rung? She set the kimchi down in the kitchen and looked at me.

  “Your father said he tried to call this morning,” she said.

  He had?

  Early one morning six months ago, my father had called to tell me about Dahn. He said he thought it was better for me to hear the news from him rather than through someone else. I think he still walks to my mother’s grave every day at sunrise and sunset. When the days grow cold, he wraps straw around the base of my mother’s crepe-myrtle tree to insulate it, and when spring returns, the very first thing he does is remove the straw. The branches grew out wide over my mother’s grave, like an umbrella on rainy days and a parasol on sunny days. It didn’t look like it had been uprooted and replanted but rather like it had always been there.

  “He asked me to come check on you because he’s been trying to call since the day before yesterday. Do you know what time he called me today?”

  I looked at her without answering.

  “Six in the morn
ing. He must have been waiting for the sun to come up first. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “I didn’t hear it ring.”

  “I tried calling several times as well.”

  I looked over at the phone. My father had delivered it to me personally so he could check on me in the city.

  “Is it unplugged?” she asked as she ran the telephone line through her hand to check. “Looks fine to me. Why didn’t you hear it ring?”

  After that rainy Sunday when I had walked all the way to Gyeongbokgung Palace and back, I stayed in for several days. Whenever my room got too stuffy, I would go out onto the rooftop and look down at the city. I would stare for a long time at Namsan Tower shining in the same spot as always like some kind of symbol. When was the last time I’d left my room? I suppose it was the day I had put on my sneakers and walked to school, as I always did, and found out about Professor Yoon. I went to look for Myungsuh, who barely showed his face at school anymore since he was busy participating in a hunger strike that had been going on at Myeongdong Cathedral. I told him that Professor Yoon had submitted his letter of resignation to the university. He had resigned voluntarily. The reason he gave was that he could not continue teaching when so many of his cohorts in the university were being fired for political reasons. Myungsuh did not look surprised. Even when I gave him a copy of Professor Yoon’s letter—the one that began, To my students—Myungsuh just took it calmly and said, “I guess Miru won’t be going back to school now.” Even when I told him that Professor Yoon was leaving the city and moving to the countryside, all he said was, “That sounds like something he would do.” Sure enough, once Professor Yoon’s classes were canceled, Miru stopped going to school. After her old house was sold, she would sometimes come by my place and gaze down at it. Once, she muttered, “They’re fixing it up,” so I assumed she had been by there. After the new tenant moved in and the house was lit up again at night, Miru said, “I hope they’re happy there.” It was strange to hear those words coming from her, after she had fought so vehemently with her parents about selling the house. I stared at her face as it glimmered in the city lights. She looked sad and asked me how Dahn was doing. I told her, “He’s probably fine.”