by Jang Eun-jin
To tell the truth, I’d even snuck peeks at their letters. I was so curious about her private life and thoughts and sentences. I had to know about the man she liked, about his thoughts and personality and character. I completely abandoned my calling and conscience as a postman to be in on their secret. Solely for her.
102. She downs her beer in one gulp and says, “I called you once, you know.”
“When?” I ask.
“A year ago. I couldn’t reach you. And no one knew what you were up to.”
“That’s because I was traveling.”
Why had she called? I wonder.
“Why did you call?” I voice my question.
“No reason,” she says.
An uninspiring answer. I shouldn’t have asked.
“Do you still have the studs on your tongue?” I ask.
She sticks her tongue out and waves it around to show me, and says, “Nope.”
Another change I detect in her: When she drank coffee, the studs used to clink against the cup. I liked the sound, and even counted in my mind to see how many times the sound repeated itself while she drank one whole cup of coffee. It was the studs that made me want to kiss her, too. How would they feel against my tongue? I wondered. Would they be cold, or hard? When I kissed her, the first thing I did was feel for the studs. They were neither cold nor hard. They were warm and sweet like her tongue. They also tasted of bitter coffee.
Her cell phone rings. She takes the call without going outside. It must be her cousin. She’s quite drunk.
“I’m with someone,” she says to her cousin, looking at me with her face flushed, and says, “I don’t think I’m going home tonight.”
103. Being drunk, she has a hard time keeping herself steady. It’s pretty late. The woman and Wajo, following behind me, seem very tired, too. She’ll sober up once we go inside somewhere and rest for a bit. Helping her along, I head toward the closest motel, without a thought to the cost. The building is quite big and luxurious, compared to the motels I’ve been staying at. We walk past the rope curtain hanging at the motel’s parking lot entrance and walk in through the door. As soon as he sees us, the receptionist throws us the worn out question. The question is the same, despite the high cost and quality. Today, however, the question sounds scathing somehow.
“We’re staying the night, so give us a room, please,” I say.
“One room? You’re all together, right?” the receptionist asks, looking a little awed. For a moment, I’m confused as to what he means, and I realize that in tending to my ex-girlfriend, I had momentarily forgotten that the woman and Wajo are behind me. A man who says he’ll stay with two women. The woman, probably embarrassed, steps forward and gets a separate room for herself. Having signed the card reader and taken the card key in her hand, she goes up to the second floor with Wajo. My room is on the fourth floor.
104. I get off the elevator and walk up to the door to Room 403. I slide the card key through the thin slot and the door glides open. I stick the card key in the key tag on the wall by the front door, and a soft light comes on in the room. I take my shoes off, and enter the room and put my ex-girlfriend down on the bed.
It feels strange. I’d never been to a motel with her during the two years we were together. It feels disturbing somehow to be in a motel room with an ex-girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend who’s married, at that. There are five condoms in a little crystal container on the bedside table. My heart thumps, as though they’re egging me on. I put the condom container away under the bed as though it’s something sinister. She tosses and turns at that moment, beating on her chest, looking tormented. She must be feeling sick. I’m about to get to my feet, thinking I should go buy some medicine, when she runs to the bathroom with her hands covering her mouth. I hear her throw up as soon as she’s inside.
“Are you all right? Do you want me to pound you on the back or something?” I call out.
Instead of pounding her on the back, I knock on the bathroom door. The door is locked. After quite some time, I hear the sounds of the toilet flushing and the sink faucet being turned on. Then the faucet is turned off, and she comes staggering out of the bathroom and collapses onto the bed.
She looks up at me with unfocused eyes, saying, “You’ve never seen me like this, have you? How embarrassing.”
“Well, you didn’t drink back then,” I say.
“Why won’t you ask?” she suddenly asks in a cold voice.
I sit down, leaning against the bed, not having the courage to face her.
She asks me again from behind my back, “You know you have something you want to ask more than anything. Ask me why I ran away back then without a word. Go on.”
She’s not just asking, but insisting. The sound of the latest hit song comes flowing in from the corridor outside the door.
105. Our relationship ended because she broke it off. Or I should say, my relationship ended. I went looking for her everywhere, but she was nowhere to be found. I wouldn’t have felt so frustrated if I at least knew the reason, but she didn’t tell me anything, other than telling me in a letter that she wanted to break up. She was irresponsible, and I felt as though I’d been hit by a bullet. That letter of farewell was the only letter between us. It was a letter that required no reply, a letter to which there could be no reply. I realized for the first time that there are one-way streets even for letters.
It was odd, though. Why wasn’t I asking her the question, when it was the first thing I’d wanted to ask if I ever ran into her, the first thing I’d wanted to find out? Was it because she was insisting that I ask? Would I have stepped up and asked, if she hadn’t insisted? She answers the question anyway, since I still don’t ask her when I’ve been given the time and the opportunity.
“I got a letter from the guy who was studying in England. He wanted to get back together. He said we could see each other soon, when he was done with his studies. Maybe I’d been wanting to get a letter at the time,” she says.
Would we not have broken up if we wrote each other letters? Being with her, I forgot all about the existence of letters. I thought letters weren’t necessary, since we saw each other every day. But perhaps letters were even more necessary because we saw each other every day.
She loved to write things down. Even when she was sitting at the café chatting with me, she constantly wrote things down with one hand. At times she wrote down key sentences from what I was saying, and at times, she scribbled down her own thoughts. I loved to see her writing things down, and I would just look at her, smiling. I felt that she, more than anyone, loved and appreciated her own memories. I also felt that someone like that would respect and cherish the thoughts of others. So perhaps for her, letters should have been a part of daily life.
“We began to correspond again. Through e-mail. But there was no sense of anticipation in waiting as there had been in the past. I just felt that things were being rushed. Maybe that’s why I married him as soon as he returned from studying overseas,” she says.
She heaves a long sigh. The hot breath reaches my back. I feel thirsty, so I walk over to the minibar and open it. There are two bottles of water, and three canned drinks. I take out a soda and gulp it down.
She waits for me to finish the soda, then goes on, saying, “And then I got divorced within two years.”
Not having expected that at all, I quietly lower my head and crush up the can. I hadn’t expected it, but I feel a little sad. In a way, I feel even more awkward than I did when I heard that she’d gotten married. Because a divorce meant that she had been unhappy. It didn’t mean, though, that all the questions I’d prepared to ask her came back to me. As though a divorce meant the end.
“You resented me a lot, didn’t you?” she asks.
“No, I was grateful to you.”
“For what?”
“You wouldn’t understand, but I could go on living because of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m breathing right now because of
that letter you sent me, saying you wanted to break up.”
“A kind of hatred, you mean?”
“A kind of irony.”
She’s probably staring at my back right now with a look of irony on her face.
She remains silent for a long time, and then says, “It’s a good thing. That I got to see you like this.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“I’m going abroad. To study coffee.”
“When?”
“When the summer’s over.”
“ . . . ”
We’re both quiet, as though there’s nothing more we want to say, and nothing more we need to say. She gently places her hand on my back. The hand is warm, but apologetic. I turn around and look at her. She’s fallen asleep. I push the light button on the remote control and turn off all the lights on the ceiling. I am no longer afraid of the dark.
106. I open my eyes at the sound of someone knocking on the door. I glance at my watch and see that it’s already eleven in the morning. There’s a blanket covering my body. I don’t see her. Instead, I see a letter sitting on the bedside table, like a lady sitting demurely with her hands clasped together. I unfold the letter and read it. The letter reminds me of a quiet dawn. I can imagine what she was thinking and feeling as she filled up the page with sentences. She has left, having written down in a letter the things she hadn’t been able to say.
Once again, I’ve received a letter of farewell from her. A letter that required no reply, a letter to which there could be no reply. The first letter I’ve received on my journey. A letter written by her, not me, in a motel room. In the end, I remain someone who hasn’t written her a single letter. When I realize that, I feel that for me, she has never existed at all.
107. I come out of the motel room. The woman and Wajo are waiting for me in the first floor lobby. The woman seems to be looking for my ex-girlfriend. I return my card key without saying anything to her and come out of the motel. She seems a little hesitant to talk to me as well. I just walk on. Even as I walk, all I can think about is my ex-girlfriend. I recall everything from the moment I ran into her on the subway to the last letter she left me. This is my last recollection of her. And my last show of respect for her.
“Did you guys catch up?” the woman asks.
“Just to let you know, she . . . ” I begin.
“You don’t have to say. It’s not something you need to tell me, anyway. So your wish came true, didn’t it? You finally got to go to a motel with her.”
“Nothing happened.”
“I didn’t say anything. Who asked?”
“Well, I . . .”
At that moment, a feeling of emptiness courses through my entire body. The feeling, like blood, goes around every part of my body, and stops at my hands. My fingers wriggle involuntarily, and my hands get cold. Both my hands are sitting meekly in my pockets now, and the woman is pulling her cart with both her hands.
“Where’s Wajo?” I ask.
“Wajo?” she says, looking around her in confusion.
“I handed you the leash as we came out of the motel,” she says.
“When?”
I seem to vaguely recall being handed the leash. I let go of the leash to say goodbye to my ex-girlfriend. I look down in vain at my large palm. I see the pale face of my bedridden grandfather on the palm, glaring at me. I put Wajo in the woman’s care all day yesterday, and never once gave him a pat. I didn’t even feed him myself. It was the first time that I slept apart from Wajo.
“You let it slip out of your hand thinking of that woman, didn’t you?” the woman scolds me severely.
She begins to run, calling out Wajo’s name, before I do. The wheels of the cart bounce up furiously into the air. It looks as if Wajo were her dog. Coming to myself at last, I begin to run as well, calling out his name. My heart is pounding, about to be torn to pieces. He can’t even see, so how anxious he must be, wandering around without me? He hasn’t been hit by a car, has he? I comb the street with the ominous thought running through my mind. To my relief, Wajo isn’t on the street. That’s a good thing. But in a moment, an even more ominous thought weighs down on me. It would be worse if someone took him or a kennel man spotted him. What’s more, it’s summer now. Like a tsunami, all kinds of thoughts wash over me, and I’m so scared that my body begins to convulse. Wajo is probably even more scared than I am.
I come to a stop in the middle of the street like a child who has lost his way, tearing my hair out. I have no idea which way I should go to find Wajo. There’s no signpost anywhere. The sweat keeps pouring down incessantly, as though I am in a desert beneath the blazing sun. My two feet, helpless and lost, merely circle round and round in their spot like the needles of a broken compass. I hope Wajo is circling round and round in one spot, too, not knowing where to go, so that I may find him easily.
Finding a lost dog is more difficult than finding a lost child. No one pays any attention to a dog wandering around by itself. People think that it’s natural for dogs to go around without their masters, that they’re supposed to go around alone. I wish I were a dog. It would be easier for a dog than for a person to find a dog. They remember things more through their sense of smell than their sight. The human sense of smell is useless. Smell . . . !
108. I run in search of a smell. I am not a dog and can’t trace Wajo’s smell, but I do know where I can find it. The human sight isn’t completely useless. Using that sight, I run toward the place where Wajo should be. I’m certain that Wajo knows where to go, too, and being clever, he must be circling round and round like the needles of a broken compass after his own smell. Wajo’s signpost. A dog that has lost its sight moves according to its sense of smell, and becomes even more attached to its territory. I pray that he’s where I think he is.
I arrive at the motel I stayed at with my ex-girlfriend.
He’s here. I see him in a distance. He’s crouching down at the motel entrance. It’s a miracle. That’s probably the spot where Wajo had performed his ritual of urination. My heart is relieved, and my eyes well up with tears. I run over and take him into my arms, and Wajo recognizes me at once. He recognizes me by my smell. He wags his tail and licks my face. He licks my sweat. He licks my tears.
I hold his face in my palms, the palms that had let him slip away. Then I look for a long time into the black eyes that can’t see. There must be a very thick darkness, unfathomable to me, beyond those eyes. A universe where no star or moon rises despite its darkness. Now that I think about it, I’d never given his darkness serious thought, or made a genuine effort to understand darkness from his stance. But with those black eyes, he looks at my wet eyes in turn one after the other, as though he can see. The eyes can’t see, but they can talk. The eyes can’t see, but I’m in those eyes for sure, alive and breathing. He sees me, and knows his universe. I’m sure that a moon rises, and stars fall, in that universe.
Wajo looks at me without the slightest sign of hatred or resentment in his eyes. I feel terrible. His eyes seem to say that dogs do not know what hatred or resentment is.
109. I go back to where I parted with the woman. I wait for her with Wajo’s leash wrapped tightly around my wrist like handcuffs, determined never to let him slip away again. Since she doesn’t know Wajo very well, she’ll need more time than I did to find Wajo.
An hour goes by, and then I hear the loud sound of a cart being pulled. The woman trudges along toward us, looking drained, then plops down on the hard ground when she sees us. I wonder if her hipbone hasn’t cracked.
“Where did you find him?” she asks.
“The motel we stayed at today,” I answer.
She quietly nods her head as though to say that she hadn’t thought of that, then strokes Wajo’s nape.
“Tie the leash around your wrist so that you never lose him again!” she urges.
I show her my wrist, on which the leash is wrapped like a handcuff. She slaps my wrist without mercy. I wonder if my wrist bone hasn’t cracked.
110. The
woman gets up as her sweat cools off. One of the wheels on the cart is broken, and the cart is tilted to one side. I remember how severely the wheels had bounced up into the air when she began running in search of Wajo. I think it’ll be difficult to move around with the cart in that condition.
I go into a nearby motorcycle dealership and explain the situation, to borrow the necessary equipment. I also stop by at a hardware store and buy some new wheels. I replace the old wheel with a new one through a process of beating and tightening. I replace the other one, too, for balance. The other wheel looked just as unstable, all worn out.
“You must take after your inventor father,” the woman says, quite satisfied.
I think I’ve paid her back for being concerned about Wajo and doing all that she could to find him. I still can’t stand to owe her because my relationship with her began with a debt in the first place. She tries pushing the cart back and forth, and tells me happily that it feels much sturdier.
After returning the equipment, we head toward the bus stop, with the woman pulling the cart and me pulling Wajo.
111. The bus that had been running quite well, like a hare, suddenly slows down like a tortoise.
The woman looks out the window to see what’s going on and says, “Should we just get off here?”
She pushes the bell without waiting for my reply. The driver opens the door for us because the stop isn’t that far anyway. I end up getting off the bus, thinking I should since he opened the door just for us.
Swept up in the crowd, we walk aimlessly. Flags and banners are hanging on the green trees lining the streets, signaling an event. I hear the sound of gongs, which becomes louder and clearer as we continue walking. We follow a little street and turn right, and a big street appears.