The Court Dancer
Page 36
—Forgive me.
Tears flowed from her eyes.
—Forgive me.
She repeated these words, not knowing to whom they were addressed. She began tearing off the yellowed pages of the dictionary and putting them, one by one, into her mouth. The Queen’s death, brought upon by the rōnin’s blade, her body wrapped in a blanket and burned on a pyre in secret—to the world, it was only rumor. Despite having seen, with their own eyes, the rōnin ripping open the Queen’s inner garment and the sword plunging into her heart three times, they all spoke of the Queen as if she were still alive. No funeral was held. The King was forced to divest her of her title. As rumors of the circumstances surrounding the Queen’s death were being whispered throughout the country, Jin obtained arsenic from the palace apothecary, and in her Banchon room, wearing her Western dresses one over another, she had smeared the arsenic on the yellowed pages of her dictionary. Her shivers refused to cease. Between the French words that she had studied as a little girl, her cheeks flush with youth as she bent over the pages, now lay the poison that would soon stop her breathing forever.
—This is the only way.
As Jin tore the pages out one by one and stuffed them in her mouth, she grimaced at first but was soon firm in her task. She almost smiled. Somewhere from the other side of her wavering thoughts came her memories of the streets of Paris. She remembered Yeon’s face as he listened, completely absorbed, to her telling of the tale of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In one of his final letters to her, found inside the Banchon house, he had written that he had tried to find something to compare his love for her, but his world was too narrow, and he never could find anything that would suffice.
A little while later, the woman Suh entered through the Gate of Dualities and went into the Queen’s Chambers. She searched frantically for Jin. She found her leaning against a stone lantern in the back gardens of the Queen’s Chambers, a spot overlooking Baekaksan Mountain. The cat that had run away from Jin toward the ancient pine had returned and was curled up at her feet. A tiny drop of blood trailed thread-like from her mouth, and her hands clutched fistfuls of torn paper. The early spring sunlight shone on the nape of her neck, and the torn pieces of paper scattered into the spring breeze, fluttering away.
They looked like golden butterflies, spreading their wings to the sun.
Epilogue
One winter evening in 1914, Paris . . .
Victor Collin de Plancy lit the fireplace. Back when he lived in this townhouse, he would begin his winter mornings before a fire drinking milk tea and reading the papers. When would he ever have such leisure again? He was ready to leave once he had burned the stack of things before the fireplace. The townhouse was one of the many that surrounded the square with the beech grove, houses built for the upper classes. The house didn’t look so big from the outside, but Victor was overwhelmed by its four stories. He sometimes felt like the custodian of his dead father’s foolish dreams. His mother had managed the house during the twenty years he lived in the East, and even when they could barely afford a housekeeper, his mother had refused to sell the place. Victor tossed some useless books and documents into the fire and sighed. He had lived frugally and worked hard but the house was exhausting his resources. As a young man, he had chosen a life that had taken him away from the burdens placed on him by his father, but now he found himself looking after his father’s legacy, even after his mother passed away.
Victor was seized with melancholy as he tossed the useless things. Was it our fate to resemble the very things we hated? He had resented his father’s ambition, but perhaps his life ended up being a continuation of it.
Europe, which extended its reach all the way to the Far East, was at war. A young Serb had sparked it by assassinating the Austrian archduke and his wife in Sarajevo. When it was discovered that this man was a Serbian agent, Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia, Serbia’s Slavic ally, mobilized its troops against Austria in support, which led Europe into war. The world was a tangled mess of interests and allegiances. Germany joined Russia and Austria against France and Britain. The stoic Germans in their gray uniforms were pit against the boisterous French, singing their military songs, and the oddly gloomy British. The battle between them was destroying the continent’s achievements in modern civilization. The war that began in the summer and produced hundreds of thousands of victims showed no signs of abating in the winter. With rumors flying that the Germans would march into Paris, all hopes ended for the war to be a short one. The killing continued without much awareness of what they were fighting for. Youth gathered at Les Invalides and paraded along the Seine, urging its citizens to take up arms. Parisians made themselves ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.
Victor was burning whatever he could not take with him, but something made him pause. Among his things was one of the Eastern books published by the Guimet Museum. The translation in Hong Jong-u’s name. He turned to a page in the introduction. “Korea is situated between two of the most sailed oceans in the world and its shores are glimpsed by countless sailors, but it is also one of the least explored countries.” Victor closed the book. He also found an old edition of Le Figaro. He looked at the date on the front page. 1910? Four years ago. Why had he saved that edition? Victor, his sideburns almost gray now, spread open the old newspaper. There was an article on the Japanese annexation of the Korean Empire. Victor stared at the words, Korean Empire. He remembered the morning he had read this paper. The “Korean Empire” moniker still sounded strange to him. This new incarnation had lasted no longer than the snow that falls in the evening and disappears before the sun rises the next day. He would always remember Korea by the name of its centuries-old reigning dynasty, Joseon. Four years ago, the headline had made him drop his teacup when he turned the newspaper page. He read the article three times. So that’s where I put this newspaper. Victor frowned and threw it into the fire. The news that once made him break a teacup now fed the flames, which soon settled down again. Britain had welcomed the annexation, given how they disapproved of Russia’s ambitions toward its southern neighbors. They thought it would stymie Russia’s territorial expansion. Even America, which had just dynamited the last phase of the Panama Canal and opened it for business to steamships, welcomed the annexation, saying that it was for the good of the people of the Korean Empire. Russia, which once provided the Korean king with shelter in its legation, signaled its de facto approval of the annexation through the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. China was almost the only country that expressly disapproved, conscious of its sharing a direct border with Korea. As China predicted, Japan was petitioning Germany for the Shandong concession, using the unrest in Europe as an opportunity. With Korea established as its colony, Japan focused on obtaining the English and French rail and mining developments in China. Victor tossed the book Hong Jong-u had translated into the fire as well. As if to rid his mind of something, he hurriedly threw more documents and books into the fire, these objects that seemed so reluctant to depart.
—It snows.
Victor’s wife entered, bringing him a teacup filled with milk tea.
—You still have so much left. This could take all night.
She placed the teacup and saucer on a table next to the fireplace and shook a box full of torn-up letters into the fire. A photograph that must have been wedged between the pages of one of the books fluttered to her feet. She picked it up.
—Who is this Oriental woman, Victor?
Victor gave a start. It was Jin. How could he have missed the photo? He had used one of his breaks during his later Korea posting to clean out the Oriental Room and donate the objects to the Guimet Museum. Anything else he found of Jin’s, he sent to the woman Suh. This was at Suh’s request. Then one day, he had plucked every single one of her photos from his albums and burned them. He thought he had burned them all.
—Who is she?
His wife asked again, as Victor seemed to have fallen into a trance. Her voice sounded as if it were coming
from far away. Victor remembered carrying a concealed camera in his first audience with the King. He remembered meeting her for the first time on a bridge over the Silk Stream. She followed the senior lady attendant with the blue shoes, and her dark eyes looked back at me.
Victor fell into a rocking chair by the fireplace.
The memories overwhelmed him, of his pulling the camera string the moment his eyes met hers for the first time. Of his saying, in the heat of the moment, “Bonjour!” And her utterly natural reply: “Bonjour!” The friendliness of her regard, as if they were old friends. The official had urged him to keep walking, and when he looked back, he pulled the camera string once more as she also looked back, with those dark eyes that he thought he would never forget for the rest of his life.
—Are you crying, dear?
His wife was alarmed as she looked into his eyes.
Victor had written a final letter to Jin when he had been posted again to Korea from Morocco. He wrote that he was returning to Korea, but they could never return to the past. That he’d had time to think about them while he was in Morocco. That it wasn’t just because of his mother’s objections that he never married her, nor was it because he was afraid of rejecting his father’s ambitions for becoming a nobleman. He wrote, honestly, that it was because of himself. As a diplomat, he lacked the will to defend his love for her. He was returning to Korea, but he could not return to their life together. I love you, Yi Jin, but I must bury that love in my heart and return to Korea only as a diplomat. He sent his letter, and after his difficult voyage back to Korea, the interpreter Paul Choi was waiting for him at Jaemulpo Harbor, waiting to tell him of Jin’s fate. She had died only five days before he reached Korea. The letter she left him was a detailed testimony of what happened on the night of the assassination of the Queen, or Empress Min as she was later named. That was all. Victor had been too shocked to think about why Jin had chosen to die at the palace, or why she had smeared poison on the pages of her beloved dictionary to do it.
Regret shadowed the creases by Victor’s eyes as he rocked in his chair.
Had Jin’s dying wish been for Victor to let the world know exactly how Empress Min had died? Was that it? Was that why she wrote him a detailed account of the Empress’s assassination and chose the palace, rife with weeds, to be the place where she took her own life? He had written that they could never go back to what they were, but he was devastated nonetheless when she didn’t leave a single word for him in her final letter. That devastation made him tear it up without showing her words to anyone.
—You must have loved her.
His wife looked disappointed as she left the hearth.
Was he responsible for making her death meaningless? Aside from a few close friends, no one knew of her death, and she was soon forgotten. Once the King returned to the palace from the Russian legation, the country was renamed the Korean Empire. The Queen was posthumously given the title of Empress, with proper funeral rites observed. Victor heard a rumor of a man with no fingers who was found frozen to death before Jin’s grave that winter, but he never visited her gravesite. Hong Jong-u, having returned from China, was said to have had the man with no fingers buried next to Jin. Victor tried to forget the woman who had refused to think of him in her hour of death. He had tried not to think of her for the ten years he’d lived in the land once called the Korean Empire, where he helped build a French school and cathedral.
He brought the photo of Jin to his cheek, warm from the light of the fire.
His memories of holding this photo to his heart, longing to see her again, came rushing up to him like the rough waves of the ocean. The days of standing underneath the phoenix tree and staring at the light coming from her room’s window. Jin in the photograph was as beautiful as a butterfly that had briefly alighted on a trumpet creeper and was poised to fly off into the sky. But now he thought she was trying to tell him something through her dark eyes. She hadn’t left him without a word; he realized with anguish that she had left him with countless words, but all this time it was he who had failed to understand them. He threw the photo from his cheek into the fire. As the red flames touched it, he thought he could hear her glad voice call out, Gillin! He looked back at the fire once more. There she was, standing on the Silk Stream bridge, turning back toward him, her eyes meeting his, the darkness in hers staring into the years of regret in his.
Victor stood up and went to the window. He swung open the windowpanes to the beech tree grove, and the cold, snow-flecked air rushed into the room.
THE COURT DANCER
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 W. 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 Kyung-Sook Shin
Translation © 2018 Anton Hur
First Pegasus Books edition August 2018
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-787-0
ISBN: 978-1-68177-842-6 (e-book)
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