My only wish
is to return
to the ocean in the quiet dusk,
to sleep quietly by the forest.
Clear blue sky above the boundless sea,
I’ve no use for colorful flags,
no need for a splendid house.
All I ask is a bed
woven of young branches.
No one weeps beneath my pillow
and all that whispers across the dry leaves
is the sound of the autumn breeze.
It had sounded so romantic and lyrical when we sang it in the house together. But now, maybe because of what happened to Dahn, it reminded me of death. I couldn’t keep singing. To think that beneath that soft, sweet melody lay the cool allure of death. I think you can only sing it so beautifully and languidly if you do not truly know the tragedy of death and have never experienced the threat of death.
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Yoon’s cousin had a baby girl. They’ll be celebrating her hundredth day soon.
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I woke from a dream.
I don’t know where I was, but I was standing next to a river. I had to cross it to get to the other side. The fog was so thick that I couldn’t see anything. I was pacing back and forth, unsure of how to get across, when I spotted a house. Tied up between the house and the river was a ferry. I figured the house was where the ferryman lived and I knocked on the door with delight, but no one answered. I called out, but there was no reply. I pushed on the door, and it swung open. I went inside, but still no one appeared. A book that looked as if someone had just been reading it was lying on the floor, so I picked it up and opened it. I know that I read it in my dream, but after I woke up, I had no memory of what it said. I waited a long time, but the owner of the boat never showed up. So I got into the boat. I tried rowing. The water parted, and the boat slid forward. As the boat began to cross, the fog thinned out little by little. It felt like I was pushing the fog away. The fog was so thick that I could barely see an inch ahead of me, but when I was about halfway across the river, it cleared away almost entirely. It was strange. After the fog cleared, the boat refused to budge no matter how hard I rowed. It seemed to be stuck to the surface of the water. Just then, I heard a shout. The voice sounded desperate. I looked all around and saw someone waving at me from the dock. They were calling out to me. It was too far away to make out the person’s face, but he or she was yelling for me to please help them get across the river. I was already halfway across and couldn’t turn back. If the boat hadn’t stopped, I would never have even turned to look. I tried to keep rowing ahead, but the boat still would not budge. Helplessly, I stopped trying to row forward and rowed backward instead to pick the person up. The boat began to move through the current.
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Sometimes I call Miru’s parents’ house. Eight months have passed without a single phone call or postcard from her. Usually no one answers, but her mother will sometimes pick up. We never talk, though. Before I can even say hello, the line cuts off. There must be something wrong with their phone. I dial again, but it cuts off again. I wait a little while and then call again, but the same thing happens. Once, I let it ring and ring and ring, but no one answered.
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The streets are quiet now. All of that excitement, like we were going to make something happen, has vanished. Our push for change has come to a standstill. Even our solidarity is now just another phenomenon. The people I once marched with have all scattered and dispersed without having changed anything.
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I started working part-time at a magazine where Fallingwater’s older brother is the editor-in-chief. The magazine publishes book reviews and information about new books. Sometimes I take my camera and go to the bookstore to photograph the book covers. The building is far from my uncle’s house, so I keep a sleeping bag in the corner of the office. Fallingwater’s brother asked if I was planning to sleep there. When I nodded, he looked at me as if to say, we’ll see how long you keep it up, and patted me on the shoulder.
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Today, I passed by City Hall and sat with Yoon for a while on the plaza.
Yoon pointed to a long drainpipe bolted to the wall of City Hall and asked, “Do you remember that guy who climbed up the pipe?” I did. When the demonstrators reached City Hall, the doors were locked. I have no idea who that guy was. In the newspaper the next day I saw a photo of him climbing the pipe. We didn’t know who he was, but we were both there when it happened. There was an excitement in the air that made him seem like someone we could believe in. He shimmied up the drainpipe to the cheers of the people gathered in the plaza and climbed onto the roof of City Hall. Everyone held their breath. We watched on pins and needles. The moment he set foot on the roof, everyone let out a sigh of relief and sent up a loud cheer. He shouted out slogans, and they echoed them. As did I, as did Yoon. As did all of the people on top of the stone wall outside Deoksugung Palace, on the stairs leading down to the subway, in the branches of the gingko trees planted along the streets. Where have all of those people gone?
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The instant Yoon told me that Miru’s mother was hanging up on her before she could even finish saying hello, I felt like I’d been hit over the head. She said it was obvious that Miru’s mother was hanging up. I had been thinking all along that something was wrong with their phone or that they kept missing my calls. Why had it never occurred to me that her mother was deliberately hanging up on me, and that there was nothing wrong with the telephone line?
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Sunday. I went to the room at the bottom of the stairs where Miru used to live. I don’t know why it took me so long to think of going there. Someone else has moved in. A forty-year-old woman with a limp. She seems to be living there alone. The woman, who has a lot of wrinkles around her eyes, never even heard of the name Miru. She said the room was empty when she came to look at it, and that she signed the rental contract and moved in right away—all of which took place last spring.
“Did she have a cat?” she asked.
“Yes, its name is Emily.”
“I’m still finding cat hair,” she said.
She didn’t seem to be upset about it, so I told her it was a longhaired cat. After I left, I climbed back up the stairs and just stood there, staring off into space. Where had Miru gone with Emily? How could she move without saying a word to us about it? I felt as if we were strangers to each other. The woman came slowly up the stairs, carrying her trash.
“You’re still here,” she said.
She set down her trash bags and asked, “Did Miru plant those?”
She pointed at the green, overgrown lily stalks. They were at ground level, but I had planted them so Miru could see them from inside her room. When she first moved in, the place was so dark that I had decided to plant flowers in the yard for her.
“Please tell your friend that I’ll take good care of her flowers. When I moved in last spring, those lilies really brightened up the room. I wondered who had planted them. I felt so happy the whole time they were in bloom. I asked the owner, and she said the previous tenant had planted them. So that was Miru!”
The woman nodded politely to me as if I were Miru herself.
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The phone in the office often rings in the middle of the night. Sometimes I am woken up by the rings and cannot get back to sleep. When I unzip my sleeping bag, the sound vibrates in my ear like a sympathetic resonance. It rings and rings the whole time I am slipping out of the sleeping bag, like a snake molting, and walking over to the phone.
Once, I picked up the receiver, and a young female voice said, “I have to find Jisu.”
“Excuse me?”
“Jisu.” Her voice sounded urgent. “I said I have to find Jisu.”
Why on earth would she be calling a magazine company in the middle of the night to say she needs to find Jisu? I knew she had the wrong number, but she sounded so desperate that I could not hang up on her. I started to tell her that I didn’t know any Jisu,
but then I heard the beep beep of the dial tone. She had hung up. I put the receiver back in the cradle and was about to return to my sleeping bag when the phone rang again. I thought I should at least tell her that I did not know who Jisu was and picked up the phone, but it hung up immediately. I guess Miru was not the only one. A lot of people were searching for someone. In other places as well, places I’d never heard of, there were probably other phones ringing off the hook in search of someone.
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Another call came, and I thought it would be the same desperatesounding woman—the one who was looking for Jisu. I stayed in my sleeping bag and let it ring. I thought it would stop eventually, but it didn’t. I frowned, slipped out of the sleeping bag, and picked up the phone. It was Yoon.
“Can I come over?” she asked calmly.
I was usually the one who said that to her. I looked at my watch. It was three in the morning. I could hear her breathing over the phone. I hadn’t heard from her all day. I had tried calling her sometime after midnight, but she hadn’t picked up.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I’ll be right there.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll go to you.”
I felt like the wind was knocked out of me.
“I won’t keep it a secret,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
My hands started to sweat. I didn’t have to ask. I knew she was calling to tell me about Miru.
—Brown Notebook 9
CHAPTER 10
Us in the Fire
The signal changed, and I crossed the street. Hail struck the asphalt and the tops of cars with a sound like glass breaking. On the other side, people were huddled under the bus stop shelter. The blank looks on their faces vanished at once. As if to mock them as they stood there stranded and looking nervous, the hail eased up and then stopped completely. It had come and gone in an instant, like a brief dream during a catnap. Rays of winter sunlight wedged their way back down between the buildings as if it had never hailed at all. But the people at the bus stop did not budge. They looked up at the sky in doubt and eyeballed me as I walked past.
The school was empty. It was winter vacation and the weather was freezing. Myungsuh was already waiting for me in front of the auditorium. He must have been cold, because his face was deathly pale. No scarf or gloves, either.
“Did you get it?” I asked him.
He nodded. “But why do we need Professor Yoon’s office key?”
“I brought Miru’s diary.”
He was usually quick to give me a smile, but this time he looked at me blankly. I braced myself. I had promised myself I wouldn’t stammer when I told him about Miru.
“Let’s go to his office first.”
He started to walk ahead of me, but I grabbed his arm. He wouldn’t take his hands out of his pockets. I took off my glove, put it in my bag, and slipped my hand into the pocket of his coat. When I held his hand, he seemed to flinch.
“I called you again last night, didn’t I?” he asked.
I gave his hand a squeeze instead of responding. I wanted to tell him it was okay, but I had already said those words too many times. It was okay that he called. He could call me any time, any hour of the day or night. So long as I knew where he was calling from. But often, when I asked him where he was, he had no idea. Sometimes it sounded like he was going to say something, but the line would suddenly disconnect. When would we be okay again? My hand was too small to wrap around his.
On the way to Professor Yoon’s office, he turned to look back at the zelkova tree. I looked back, too. Usually surrounded by students, the tree stood alone in the winter air. I remembered the day I had stood in this same spot and looked back to see Miru walking beneath the tree with her bag over her shoulder and a book in her hand. Her walking hunched over with her shoulders rounded as if staring at her own heart. Her white cotton jacket and flared skirt with its pattern of white flowers against a dark blue background. In a flash, I remembered how her skirt had floated up in the breeze, and I squeezed Myungsuh’s hand hard. Maybe he was thinking about her at that moment, too.
I kept my hand in his pocket until we got to Professor Yoon’s office and he needed to take out the key. Even though I knew the office was empty, I knocked on the door anyway as he was fitting the key into the lock.
When we stepped into the office, we were hit with a musty smell. The chilly winter air and the dampness overwhelmed us at first. Myungsuh shut the door and turned on the light. Like a curtain opening, the dim office brightened, and the outlines of books came into view. The books stared blankly down at us. I looked at Professor Yoon’s desk on the other side of the stack of books. I could still hear him saying, “Come right in,” the way he had the first time I had knocked on his office door long ago. If only he would poke his head out from the other side of the books and say, “Have a seat over there …”
“No one’s here,” Myungsuh muttered, though he had known that on the way in.
I went over to the desk. Normally littered with open books and manuscripts, it was spotless. I pictured Professor Yoon straightening up his things and ran my hand over the surface. Dust coated my palm. I had only meant to touch his desk, but I started dusting it with my bare hand instead. When that wasn’t enough, I grabbed a tissue. A cloud of dust rose up from the box. Myungsuh went to the sink installed in one corner of the office and turned on the water. The long-unused tap creaked. He turned the water off and then on again with more force. Water gushed out. He stepped back, brushing off the drops that had splashed onto his clothes, and bent down. Beneath the sink was a pail with a dry cloth inside it. He held the cloth under the tap, wrung it out, and came over to me. Without saying a word, he wiped down the desk that I had been dusting with my hand.
“Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
He ignored me and focused on cleaning Professor Yoon’s desk. He looked like he had come expressly to clean the desk. I watched as the white cloth grew dusty, and then I propped open the window. A cold breeze rattled in.
“It’s a good thing they left his office untouched,” I said.
“He might come back someday,” he said. “I heard they still haven’t accepted his resignation.”
Someday … I murmured the word to myself. He finished cleaning the desk and then removed the cushion from the chair and cleaned the chair, too. He beat the dust out of the cushion and put it back on the chair before giving it a few more firm pats with the palm of his hand. He looked haggard. He had called me the night before, sometime after four in the morning. He must have been drinking, because I could barely understand him. I had asked him where he was but couldn’t make out his answer. This sort of thing had been happening more frequently, and even though it was the next day, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what had happened. He would probably just say the last thing he remembered was boarding the subway and that he must have fallen asleep.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked me.
“Very.”
After he was done dusting Professor Yoon’s desk and chair, he closed the window that I had just opened and peered out between the blinds. No one would be out there.
With his back to me, he asked, “Why did you bring me here?”
“To add Miru’s diary to the bookshelf.”
I opened my bag, took out Miru’s thick diary, and went to the shelf where the books stood with their spines facing in. He let go of the blinds and looked at me.
The first thing that had caught my eye when I visited this office for the first time were those old books that looked like they would crumble at the slightest touch—the books by writers who died young. Holding Miru’s diary, I ran my hand over them, still shelved with their spines to the wall so neither author nor title could be seen. I felt like they were speaking to me but I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I remembered how Professor Yoon asked me, “Are you wondering why I shelved them that way?” And I unconsciously turned to look at the desk. Myungsuh was standing there looking my way, his
face frigid with cold.
“Would you like to do it?” I asked.
His gaze moved to Miru’s diary in my hand. “Have you had it the whole time?”
“I went to Miru’s grandmother’s house. Remember when you tried to call me in the middle of the night, but I wasn’t home? It was that day.”
“How did you find the house?”
“I met Miru’s mother and went with her.”
He stood there quietly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so I had gone to meet her on my own. Afterward, I had sat in front of the telephone until late into the night before finally calling him. He and I were like twins. I had lost Dahn, and now he had lost Miru. He came over to me and took her diary. We were probably both picturing her hands, the scarred hands that recorded what she ate, leaving nothing out. I even pictured myself, as if that me were another being entirely, staring in fascination, having never seen someone who wrote down everything they ate with such devotion. All those days we spent writing stories in her journal. Whenever we were together, our faces would grow flushed with our love for each other. When Miru started filling her diary with the stories of people who had disappeared, we should have paid more attention. Those diary entries were Miru’s distress calls. Myungsuh leafed through the diary and ran his hand over the pages. Then he handed it back to me.
“You do it,” he said.
The diary must have been the reason Miru’s mother didn’t hang up that morning when I called. She usually hung up the moment I said Miru’s name. But I could not resist calling their house whenever she came to mind. I knew her parents didn’t want to talk to anyone about her, but I didn’t know what else to do except to keep calling. Then, one morning, several months after my last failed attempt at making contact, the moment I heard Miru’s mother say hello, I quickly said, “Don’t hang up!”
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