3

I’m Home

A YOUNG WOMAN is peeking in, standing in front of the firmly closed blue gate.

“Who are you?” When you clear your throat from behind her, the young woman turns around. She has a smooth forehead and hair tied neatly back, and her eyes shine in delight.

“Hello!” she says.

You just stare at her, and she smiles. “This is Auntie Park So-nyo’s house, right?”

The nameplate of the long-empty house has only your name engraved on it. “Auntie Park So-nyo”—it’s been a long time since you heard someone call your wife Auntie, not Grandma.

“What is it?”

“Isn’t she home?”

You are quiet.

“Is she really missing?”

You gaze at the young woman. “Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m Hong Tae-hee, from Hope House in Namsan-dong.”

Hong Tae-hee? Hope House?

“It’s an orphanage. I was worried because she hadn’t stopped by in so long, and I came across this.” The woman shows you the newspaper ad your son created. “I’ve come by a couple of times, wondering what happened, but the gate was always locked. I thought I would have to go away empty-handed today, too.… I just wanted to hear what happened. I was supposed to read her a book.…”

You pick up the rock in front of the gate, take the key out from its hiding place, and unlock the gate. Pushing open the gate of the long-vacant house, you look in, hopeful. But it’s silent inside.

You let Hong Tae-hee in. Supposed to read her a book? To your wife? You have never heard your wife mention Hope House or Hong Tae-hee. Hong Tae-hee calls out for your wife as soon as she sets foot inside the gate, as if she can’t believe that your wife is really missing. When there’s no response, Tae-hee’s expression grows cautious. “Did she leave home?”

“No, she’s missing.”

“What?”

“She went missing in Seoul.”

“Really?” Tae-hee’s eyes grow wide. She tells you that, for more than ten years, your wife came to Hope House and bathed the children and did the laundry and tended the garden in the yard.

Your wife?

Tae-hee says that your wife is highly respected and that she donates 450,000 won a month to Hope House. She explains that your wife has always donated this amount.

Four hundred fifty thousand a month?

Every month, your children in Seoul would pool together six hundred thousand won and send it to your wife. They seemed to think that two people could survive on that amount in the countryside. It wasn’t a small sum. At first, your wife shared this money with you, but at some point she said she would take the entire amount. You wondered where this came from all of a sudden, but your wife asked you not to question how she was using the money. She said she had the right to use the money, since she was the one who had raised all the children. It seemed that she had thought about it for a long time. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have said, “I feel that I have the right to use the money.” That wasn’t the kind of thing your wife would say. It sounded like something from a television drama. Your wife would have practiced that sentence by herself for a few days, into the air.

One Parents’ Day in May, years ago, none of the children called. Your wife went to the stationery store in town and bought two carnation buds, each tied to a ribbon that said “Thank you for giving me life and raising me.” She found you standing by the new road and urged you to come home. “What if someone sees us?” You followed her home. She persuaded you to come inside and lock the door, then pinned a carnation to the front of your jacket. “What would people say if we went around without a flower pinned to our clothes, when everyone knows how many children we have? That’s why I bought these.” Your wife fastened a flower on her clothes, too. The flower kept drooping, so she repinned it twice. You took off the flower as soon as you left the house again, but your wife went around the whole day with the flower on her chest.

The next day, she took to her bed, ill. She tossed and turned for a few nights, then sat up abruptly and asked you to transfer three majigi of land to her name. You asked her why, and she said it was because her life was pointless. She felt useless now that all the children had gone their separate ways. When you explained that all of your land is her land, too, and that if only three majigi were transferred to Park So-nyo she would lose out, because this would make it clear that the rest was yours, she looked disappointed and said, “I guess that’s true.”

But she was firm when she announced that she wanted all of the children’s money. You didn’t feel like going against her when she was like that; you thought you would get into a big fight if you did. You agreed on one condition: she could take all the money, but she couldn’t come to you for more. Your wife said that would be fine. It didn’t seem she was buying clothes or doing anything in particular with the money, but when you took a peek at the account books, 450,000 won was taken out of the bank account on the same day every month, in one lump sum. If the money came late, she called Chi-hon, who was in charge of collecting it from her siblings and sending it, to remind her to send the money. This, too, was unlike your wife. You didn’t ask her what she was doing with it, because you promised you wouldn’t, but you thought she was taking the 450,000 won every month to put in a savings account, to create purpose in her life again. You once searched for a savings-account passbook, but you never found one. If Hong Tae-hee is right, your wife had been donating 450,000 won a month to Hope House in Namsan-dong. You feel bludgeoned by your wife.

Hong Tae-hee tells you that it’s really the kids who are waiting for your wife, more than she is. She tells you about a boy named Kyun, says that your wife practically became the boy’s mother, that he was especially saddened that your wife had suddenly stopped coming to the orphanage. She says he was abandoned at the orphanage before he was six months old without even a name, but that your wife had named him Kyun.

“Did you say Kyun?”

“Yes, Kyun.”

She says that Kyun is going to start middle school next year; your wife has promised to buy him a book bag and a uniform when he does. Kyun. A chill comes over your heart. You listen quietly to Hong Tae-hee’s story. You can’t believe you didn’t know that your wife has been going to the orphanage for more than a decade. You wonder whether your missing wife could be the same woman Hong Tae-hee is talking about. When did she go to Hope House? Why didn’t she say anything to you? You gaze at your wife’s picture in Hong Tae-hee’s newspaper ad and go into your room. From a photo album buried deep in a drawer, you peel off a picture of your wife. Your daughter and wife are standing at the pier on a beach, clutching their clothes, which are blowing astray in the wind. You push the picture toward Tae-hee. “Is this the person you’re talking about?”

“Oh, it’s Auntie!” Tae-hee calls out happily, as if your wife is standing in front of her. Your wife, her brow furrowed against the sun, is looking at you.

“You said you were supposed to read to her? What do you mean?”

“She did all the difficult work at Hope House. She particularly enjoyed bathing the children. She was so efficient that, after she came to visit, the whole orphanage would be sparkling clean. When I asked her what I could do to thank her, she said there was nothing, but one day she brought in a book and asked me to read it to her for an hour each time. She said it was a book she liked but that she couldn’t read anymore, because of her bad eyesight.”

You are quiet.

“It’s this book.”

You stare at the book Hong Tae-hee takes out of her bag. Your daughter’s book.

“The author is from this area. I heard she went to elementary and middle school here. I think that’s why Auntie likes this author. The last book I read her was by this author, too.”

You take your daughter’s book, To Complete Love. So your wife had wanted to read her daughter’s novel. Your wife had never told you as much. You had never even thought of reading your wife your daughter’s books. Does anyone else in the family know that your wife can’t read? You remember how your wife looked hurt, as if you had insulted her, the day you found out that she didn’t know how to read. Your wife believed that you did everything you did because you looked down on her, because of her illiteracy—leaving home when you were younger, yelling at her at times, rudely replying to her questions, “Why do you want to know?” That wasn’t why you did those things, but the more you denied it, the more she believed it to be true. You wonder if you did look down on her, unconsciously, as she insisted you did. You had no idea that a stranger was reading your daughter’s novel to your wife. How hard your wife must have worked to hide from this young woman the fact that she didn’t know how to read. Your wife, wanting so badly to read your daughter’s novel, couldn’t tell this young woman that the author was her daughter, but blamed her bad eyes and asked her to read it out loud. Your eyes sting. How was your wife able to restrain herself from bragging about her daughter to this young woman?

“Such a bad person.”

“I’m sorry?” Hong Tae-hee stares at you, her eyes round, surprised.

If she wanted to read it that badly, she should have asked me to read it to her. You rub your dry, rough face with your hands. If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.

   “I’m home,” you mumble to the empty house, after Hong Tae-hee leaves.

All you wanted in life was to leave this house—when you were young, after you were married, and even after you had children. The isolation you felt when it struck you that you would spend your entire life in this house, in this dull town stuck to the south of the country, in the place of your birth—when that happened, you left home without a word and wandered the country. And when ancestral rites came around, you returned home, as if following genetic orders. Then you left again, and only crawled back when you became ill. One day, after you recovered from some illness, you learned to ride a motorcycle. You left home again, with a woman who was not your wife on the back. There were times when you thought you would never return. You wanted to forge a different life and forget about this house and set out on your own. But you couldn’t last more than three seasons away.

When the unfamiliar things away from home became commonplace, the things your wife grew and raised hovered before your eyes. Puppies, chickens, potatoes that kept coming out when they were dug up … and your children.

   Before you lost sight of your wife on the Seoul Station subway platform, she was merely your children’s mother to you. She was like a steadfast tree, until you found yourself in a situation where you might not ever see her again—a tree that wouldn’t go away unless it was chopped down or pulled out. After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.

It’s only now that you clearly see the condition your wife was in for the past two or three years. She had sunk into numbness, would find herself not remembering a thing. Sometimes she would be sitting by a very familiar road in town, unable to find her way home. She would look at a pot or a jar she’d used for fifty years, her eyes wondering, What is this for? She became careless with the housekeeping, with strands of hair all over the house, not swept away. There were times when she couldn’t follow the plot of a television drama that she watched every day. She forgot the song she used to sing for decades, the one that started with “If you ask me what love is …” Sometimes your wife seemed not to remember who you were. Maybe even who she was.

   But that wasn’t how it was the whole time.

   Your wife would remember some tiny detail, as if she’d recovered something from ever-evaporating water. One day she mentioned how you had once wrapped some money in newspaper and stuck the bundle on the doorjamb before you left home. She told you that, even though she hadn’t said it then, she was grateful you’d left those bills for her. She said she didn’t know how she would have survived if she hadn’t discovered that newspaper-wrapped money. Another time, your wife reminded you that you needed to have a new family picture taken, because the most recent portrait didn’t include your younger daughter’s third baby, who was born in America.

   Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife’s confusion.

   When your wife’s headaches made her unconscious, you thought she was sleeping. You wished she wouldn’t lie down with a cloth wrapped around her head and sleep wherever she wanted to. When she was flustered, unable to open the door, you actually told her to look where she was going. Having never thought that you had to take care of your wife, you couldn’t understand that your wife’s sense of time had become jumbled. When your wife prepared slop and poured it in the trough in the empty pigpen and sat next to it, calling the name of the pig you had raised when you were young, saying, “This time, have three piglets, not just one—that would be so nice,” you thought she was joking. A long time ago, that pig had had a litter of three piglets. Your wife had sold them to buy Hyong-chol a bicycle.

   “Are you here? I’m home!” you call to the empty house, and pause to listen.

You expect your wife to shout a greeting—“You’re home!”—but the house is quiet. Whenever you returned home and called, “I’m home!” your wife would, without fail, stick her face out from somewhere in the house.

Your wife wouldn’t stop nagging you. “Why can’t you stop drinking? You could live without me, but you can’t live without alcohol. The children tell me they are worried about you, and you still can’t kick the habit!” She would go on nagging even as she took care of him, handing him a glass of Japanese raisin tea. “If you come home drunk one more time, I’m going to leave you. Didn’t the doctor tell you at the hospital, didn’t he say that drinking was the worst thing for you? If you want to quit seeing this nice world, then keep drinking!”

This was how your wife despaired when you went out for lunch and had some drinks with friends, as if her whole world had turned upside down. You didn’t know that one day you would miss your wife’s nagging, which used to go in one ear and out the other.

But now you can’t hear anything, even though you got off the train and went into a blood-sausage-soup house nearby and had a glass, just so you could hear that nagging when you got home.

You look at the doghouse next to the side-yard gate. Your wife grew lonely when the old dog died, and you had gone into town and brought back another one. The dog would have made some kind of noise, but it’s completely silent in your house. You don’t see the chain; your sister must have taken the dog with her, having tired of coming by to feed it. You don’t close the gate, but leave it wide open and walk into the yard to sit on the porch. When your wife went to Seoul by herself, you often sat on the porch like this. Your wife would call from Seoul to ask, “Have you eaten?” and you would ask, “When are you coming home?”

“Why? Do you miss me?”

You would say, “No, don’t worry about me, just stay as long as you want this time.” No matter what you said, after she heard you say, “When are you coming home?” your wife would return home, regardless of why she had gone to Seoul. When you chided your wife, “Why did you come back so soon? I told you to stay as long as you want!” she would reply, “Do you think I came for you? I came to feed the dog,” and give you a look.

You returned home because of the things your wife grew and raised, even though coming home meant that you had to cast away the things you’d obtained in other places. When you walked in through this gate, your wife would be digging for sweet potatoes, or making yeast with a soiled towel wrapped around her head, watching over Hyong-chol at his desk. Your sister liked to say that your nomadic leanings stemmed from your youthful habit of not sleeping at home, to avoid being drafted into the military. Once, however, you actually went to the police station, because you were tired of hiding. Your uncle, a detective, and only five years older than you, sent you away. He said, “Even though our family is ruined, the eldest son of the eldest son has to survive.” Despite the family’s decline, you had to survive to maintain the family graveyard and oversee the ancestral rites. But that wasn’t a good enough reason for your uncle to stick your forefinger in the straw cutter and slice off a knuckle: it wasn’t you but your wife who looked after the family graveyard and took care of the ancestral rites each season. Was that why? Did you become a vagabond because you were forced to leave home and sleep outside, blanketed in dew? That might have been it. The habit of sleeping on the street could have been why you wandered away from home. When you slept at home, you were overcome by anxiety that someone would rush through the gate to grab you. Once, you even ran out of this house in the middle of the night, as if you were being chased.

One winter night, you came home and your children had suddenly grown up. Everyone was sleeping huddled together because it was so cold outside. Your wife took the rice bowl she had left in the warmest part of the room and put a small table draped with a cloth in front of you. There was a snowstorm that night. Your wife toasted seaweed on the brazier. The nutty smell of perilla oil woke your children one by one, and they crowded around you. You wrapped some rice with seaweed and put it in each child’s mouth. You put some in your eldest son’s and your second son’s and your elder daughter’s mouths. Even before you got to your younger daughter or the baby, Hyong-chol was already waiting for more. It took you longer to prepare the rice than it took your children to eat it. You grew frightened of your children’s appetites. You wondered what to do with all of them. That was when you decided that you needed to forget about the outside world, that you couldn’t leave this house again.

“I’m home!”

You open the bedroom door. The room is empty. A few towels are neatly folded in one corner of the room, where your wife left them before you headed to Seoul together. The water you took your pills with on the morning of your departure has evaporated from the glass you set on the floor. The clock on the wall shows that it is 3 p.m., and the shadows of bamboos lean into the room, which faces the back yard.

“I said I’m home,” you say to yourself in the empty room, your shoulders slouched. What were you thinking? When you shook off your son, who vehemently disagreed with your coming home by yourself, and you took the morning train, a small corner of your heart nurtured the hope that when you walked in and called, “Are you here? I’m home!” your wife would greet you as in old times—“You’re home!”—perhaps while she cleaned the room or trimmed vegetables in the shed or washed rice in the kitchen. You thought that might happen somehow. But the house is vacant. It feels deserted, having been left empty for so long.

You get up and open all the doors in the house. “Are you in here?” you ask at each door. You open the doors to your bedroom and the guest room and the kitchen and the boiler room. It’s the first time you’ve desperately searched for your wife. Did she look for you like this every time you left home? You blink your dry eyes and open the kitchen window, to look at the shed. “Are you in there?” But there’s only the bare platform.

Sometimes you stood in this spot and watched your wife busily doing something in the shed, and she would look over at you even if you didn’t call her. And she’d ask, “What? Do you need something?” If you said, “Where are my socks? I want to go into town,” she would quickly peel off her rubber gloves and come inside to find your clothes for you.

You stare at the empty shed and murmur, “Hey … I’m hungry. I want to eat something.”

When you said you wanted to eat something, your wife would stop what she was doing without hesitation and come to you and say, “I picked some fatsia in the hills; do you want some fatsia pancakes? Do you want to eat those?”—even if she had been slicing off the tops of peppers or folding sesame leaves or salting cabbage. Why didn’t you know then that you had a peaceful and lucky life? How could you have taken what your wife did for you for granted, without ever once making her seaweed soup? One day your wife came back from town and said, “You know that butcher you like in the market? I was passing by today, and his wife kept calling me, so I went in, and she invited me to share some seaweed soup, so I asked, ‘What’s the occasion?’ She said it was her birthday, and her husband had made her the soup that morning.” You just listened, and she said, “It wasn’t particularly tasty. But for the first time, I was envious of the butcher’s wife.”

Where are you …? If your wife would just come back, you would make not only seaweed soup but also pancakes for her. Are you punishing me …? Water pools in your eyes.

   You left this house whenever you wanted to, and came back at your whim, and you never once thought that your wife would be the one to leave.

Only after your wife went missing did you recall the first time you saw her. It was after the families had decided that the two of you would marry, before you had met each other. The war was over, thanks to the cease-fire agreement between the UN commander and the communist commander at Panmunjom, but the world was more unsettled than it had been during the war. During this time, hungry North Korean soldiers came out of hiding in the hills at night and ransacked villages. When night fell, people with daughters of marriageable age were busy hiding them. A rumor that the soldiers from the hills snatched young women spread throughout the villages. Some would dig holes near the railroad tracks and hide their daughters there. Others spent the night huddled in one house together. Some quickly married off their daughters. Your wife lived in Chinmoe from her birth until she married you. You were twenty years old when your sister told you that you would be marrying a young woman from Chinmoe within a month. She said it was a young lady whose horoscope matched yours perfectly. Chinmoe. It was a mountain village about ten ri away from your village. In those days, it was common for people to marry without ever having glimpsed each other’s faces. The ceremony was to be held in October in the yard of the young lady’s house, soon after rice stalks were gathered from the paddies. Once the ceremony date was set, people teased you if you smiled, saying that you must be happy to be getting married. You neither liked nor disliked the idea. Because your sister did all of the housework in your house, everyone said you had to hurry up and get married. It made sense, but it occurred to you that you couldn’t live with a woman you’d never even laid eyes on.

You never wanted to live your entire life farming in this village. At a time when there were so few people available to work that even children were called to the fields, you wandered around town with friends. You made plans to run away and set up a brewery in a city with two friends. You were preoccupied not with marriage but with how to raise the money to open a brewery, so what was it that made you head over to Chinmoe?

Your bride’s house was a cottage embraced by a thicket of bamboo trees in the back, with ripe red persimmons hanging low on a tree in one corner. Your bride, wearing a cotton chogori, was sitting on the porch of the cottage, embroidering a phoenix on an embroidery frame. Bright light bounced off the roof and the yard, but the young woman’s expression was dark. She looked up at the clear autumn sky once in a while, craning her neck. She watched some geese flying in a row until they disappeared. The young woman got up and left the porch. Unseen, you followed her to the cotton fields. Your future mother-in-law was squatting in the fields, picking cotton. The young woman called from afar, “Mom!” Your future mother-in-law answered, “What?” without looking up, continuing to pick cotton. White cotton danced in the brisk air. You were about to turn back, but something made you inch closer to the women and hide, crouching amid the white tufts. The young woman called “Mom!” again. Your future mother-in-law replied, “What?” without looking.

“Do I have to get married?”

You held your breath.

“What?”

“Can’t I just live with you?”

Cotton blossoms waved in the breeze.

“No.”

“Why not?” The young woman had sorrow in her voice.

“Do you want to be dragged off by the mountain people?”

Your bride was silent for a moment, then crumpled in the cotton field, her legs stretched out, and burst into tears. At that moment, she wasn’t the well-groomed, demure woman who had been embroidering on the porch of the cottage. She wept so achingly that you wanted to cry, too, just from watching her. That was when your future mother-in-law waded out of the cotton fields and went to the young woman.

“Look, you’re feeling this way because you’re still young. I would have kept you by me a few more years if it wasn’t for the war. But what can we do when the world is so frightening? It’s not a bad thing to get married. It’s something you can’t avoid. You were born deep in the mountains. I wasn’t able to send you to school, so if you don’t get married what can you do? When I matched your horoscope with the groom’s, it said that you two will be very lucky. You won’t lose a single child, and you will have many children, and they will grow up and succeed. What else could you want? Since you came into this world as a human, you have to live happily with your mate. You have to have your babies and breastfeed them and raise them. Stop crying, stop crying. I’ll make you special blankets with willowed cotton.”

The young woman kept sobbing loudly, and your future mother-in-law slapped her on the back. “Stop, stop crying …”

Your bride didn’t stop, and your future mother-in-law burst into tears, too.

   If by pure coincidence you hadn’t seen the two women crying in each other’s arms in the cotton field, you might have left home before October. When you thought of that young woman, however, embroidering on the porch of the cottage, calling out “Mom!” at the cotton field, when you thought she might be dragged away by a soldier into the mountains, never to be seen again, you couldn’t pick up your feet to go away.

When you came back to the empty house after your wife went missing, you slept for three days. You couldn’t fall asleep at Hyong-chol’s; at night you lay there with your eyes closed. Your hearing grew so sensitive that your eyes would fly open if someone came out of the room across the way to go to the bathroom. At each mealtime, you sat at the table for the others’ sake, even though you weren’t hungry, but in your empty house you didn’t eat anything and slept like the dead.

·   ·   ·

You thought you didn’t love your wife very much, because you married her after seeing her only once, but every time you left home and some time passed, she reappeared in your thoughts. Your wife’s hands could nurture any life. Your family didn’t have much luck with animals. Before your wife became a member of the family, any dog you got would die before giving you a litter. It would eat rat poison and fall into the toilet. Once, without anyone’s realizing that the dog had crawled into the floor heater, a fire was kindled in the furnace, and not until you smelled the stench did you lift open the lid and pull out the dead dog. Your sister said that your family should not have a dog, but your wife brought home a newborn pup from the neighbors, one of her hands covering its eyes. Your wife believed that dogs, being smart, would return to their mothers if their eyes were not covered when they were taken away. Your wife fed that puppy under the porch, and it grew and had five or six litters. Sometimes there were as many as eighteen squirming puppies under the porch. In the spring, your wife coaxed the chicken to sit on eggs and managed to raise thirty or forty chicks without killing them, except a few that were snatched by a kite. When your wife sprinkled seeds in the vegetable garden, green leaves shot up in a riot, more quickly than she could pluck the tender shoots to eat. She planted and harvested potatoes then carrots then sweet potatoes. When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall. Anything she touched grew in profusion. Your wife didn’t have time to take the sweat-soaked towel off her head. As soon as weeds poked up from the fields, your wife’s hands pulled them out, and she chopped the food waste from the table into small pieces and poured them into the puppies’ bowls. She caught frogs and boiled them and mashed them to feed the chickens, and collected chicken waste and buried it in the vegetable garden, over and over again. Everything your wife touched became fertile and bloomed, grew and bore fruit. Her talent was such that even your sister, who endlessly found fault with your wife, would call her and ask her for help sowing the fields and planting pepper seedlings.

On the third night after you return home, you wake up in the middle of the night and lie still, staring at the ceiling. What is that? You’re staring at a box with a yin-yang symbol, perched on top of the wardrobe, and quickly get up. Memories of your wife waking one day in the early dawn, stirring, and calling you, flood in. You didn’t answer, even though you were awake, because you couldn’t be bothered.

“You must be sleeping.” Your wife heaved a deep sigh. “Please don’t live longer than me.”

You remained quiet.

“I have your shroud all prepared. It’s in that yin-yang box on top of the wardrobe. Mine is in there, too. If I go first, don’t panic, take that down first. I splurged a little. I got them in the best hemp. They said they planted the hemp themselves and wove the fabric out of it. You will be amazed when you see it—it’s beautiful,” your wife murmured as if she were casting a spell, even though she didn’t know if you were listening.

“When Tamyang Aunt passed away a while ago, her husband was bathed in tears. He said that before Tamyang Aunt died she made him promise he wouldn’t get an expensive shroud for her. She told him that she had ironed her wedding hanbok and asked him to put that on her when he sent her off to the next world. She said she was sorry that she was going first, without even seeing their daughter get married, and that he shouldn’t spend money on her. Tamyang Uncle was leaning on me when he told me that, and he cried so much that my clothes got completely wet. He said that all he did was to make her work hard. That it was wrong of her to die, now that they were a bit more comfortable, and that she’d made him promise he wouldn’t buy her a nice outfit even at her death. I don’t want to do that. I want to go wearing nice clothes. Do you want to see them?”

When you didn’t move, your wife sighed deeply again.

“You should go before me. I think that’s for the best. They say that although there’s an order to when people come into this world, there isn’t one when you leave, but we should go in the order we came. Since you’re three years older than me, you should leave three years earlier. If you don’t like that, you can go three days earlier. I can just live here, and if I really can’t live by myself, I can go to Hyong-chol’s and be useful—peel garlic and clean—but what would you do? You don’t know how to do anything. Someone has waited on you all your life. I can just see it. Nobody likes a smelly, silent old man taking up space. We are now burdens to the children, who have no use for us. People say you can tell from the outside a house that has an old person living in it. They say it smells. A woman can somehow take care of herself and live, but a man becomes pathetic if he lives alone. Even if you want to live longer, at least don’t live longer than me. I’ll give you a good burial and follow you there—I can do that.”

You climb on a chair to take down the box from the top of the wardrobe. Actually, there are two boxes. From its size, it looks like the box in front is yours and the one behind is your wife’s. They are much larger than they looked when you were lying down. She said that she hadn’t seen such beautiful fabric in her life, that she’d gone far to get it. You open the box, and there are hemp cloths, mourning clothes, wrapped in blindingly white cotton. You undo each knot. The hemp to cover the mattress, hemp to cover the blanket, hemp to wrap the feet, hemp to wrap the hands, all inside, in order. You said you’d bury me first and then go.… You blink and gaze at the pouches that would wrap around your and your wife’s fingers and toes after your deaths.

Two girls run in through the side gate toward you, calling you, “Grandpa!” Tae-sop’s children, who live near the creek. They soon wander away from you, looking around the house. They must be looking for your wife. Tae-sop, who is running a Chinese restaurant in Taejon, left his two children with his elderly mother, who was so old she could barely take care of herself, and never showed his face. Perhaps he isn’t doing too well. Your wife always clucked her tongue when she saw the children, saying, “Even if Tae-sop is like that, what kind of person is Tae-sop’s wife to do this?” Neighbors whispered that Tae-sop’s wife and the restaurant’s cook had run away together. Your wife was the person who made sure the children ate, not their own grandmother. Once, your wife saw that they hadn’t eaten and brought them home to feed them breakfast; the next morning, the girls came over, sleep still in their eyes. Your wife placed two more spoons on the table and seated the girls; after that, they came by at each mealtime. Sometimes they would arrive before the food was ready and go lie on their stomachs and play, and when the table was set they would run over and sit down. They stuffed their mouths as if they would never see food again. You were flabbergasted, but your wife took their side, as if they were her secret granddaughters: “They must be so hungry to do that. It’s not like before, when things were difficult for us.… It’s nice to have them around, it’s not as lonely.”

After the girls started to come for meals, your wife would, even in the morning, cook an eggplant dish and steam mackerel. When your children visited from Seoul with fruit or cake, she saved the treats until the girls poked their heads through the gate, around four in the afternoon. Soon enough, the girls started expecting snacks on top of three meals, and your wife also started to assume that she would feed them. You don’t know how she managed to feed the children when Pyong-sik, the owner of the store in town, had to bring her home because he found her sitting at the bus stop, not knowing which bus to take home. Or when she left to go to the garden to pick some adlay but was found sitting in the fields beyond the railroad by Ok-chol. What did the children eat during your absence? You didn’t think of the girls while you were in Seoul.

“Where’s Grandma, Grandpa?” the elder child asks you, figuring out that your wife isn’t here only after she has looked by the well and in the shed and the back yard and even opened the doors to the bedrooms. It’s the elder who asks the question, but the younger girl comes right up next to you, waiting for your answer. You want to ask the same thing. Really, where is she? Is she even in this world? You tell the children to wait, and you scoop some rice from the rice jar and wash it and put it in the electric rice-cooker. The girls run around, opening every bedroom door. As if your wife might walk out of one of the rooms. You pause, not knowing how much water to pour in, because you’ve never done this before; then you add about half a cup more and press the switch down.

That day, in the subway car leaving Seoul Station, how many minutes did it take you to grasp that your wife wasn’t there, in the moving subway car? You assumed that she had gotten on behind you. As the car stopped at Namyong Station and left it, you felt a sudden terror. Before you could examine the source of that feeling, something, despair that you had committed a grievous mistake that you couldn’t go back on, punched your soul. Your heart was beating so loudly that you could hear it. You were afraid to look behind you. The moment when you had to confirm that you’d left your wife in Seoul Station, that you’d boarded the train and traveled one stop away, the moment that you turned around, accidentally hitting the shoulder of the person next to you, you realized that your life had been irreparably damaged. It didn’t take even a minute to realize that your life had veered off track because of your speedy gait, because of your habit of always walking in front of your wife during all those years of marriage, first when you were young, then old, for fifty years. If you had turned around to check whether she was there right as you got on the car, would things have turned out this way? For years your wife used to make comments—your wife, who always lagged behind when you went somewhere together, would follow you with sweat beaded on her forehead, grumbling from behind—“I wish you’d go a little slower, I wish you’d go at my pace. What’s the rush?” If you finally stopped to wait for her, she would smile in embarrassment and say, “I walk too slowly, right?”

She would tell you, “I’m sorry, but what would people say if they saw us? If they saw us, who live together, but one person is all the way up there and the other person is all the way back here, they would say, Those people must hate each other so much that they can’t even walk next to each other. It’s not good to appear that way to other people. I won’t try to hold your hand or anything, so let’s just go slower. What are you going to do if you lose sight of me?”

She must have known what would happen. The thing your wife said to you most frequently, ever since you met her when you were twenty, was to walk more slowly. How could you have not gone slower, when your wife asked you to slow down your entire lives? You’d stopped and waited for her, but you’d never walked next to her, conversing with her, as she wanted—not even once.

   Since your wife has gone missing, your heart feels as if it will explode every time you think about your fast gait.

   You walked in front of your wife your entire life. Sometimes you would turn a corner without even looking back. When your wife called you from far behind, you would grumble at her, asking her why she was walking so slowly. And so fifty years passed. When you waited for her, she stopped next to you, her cheeks reddened, saying with a smile, “I still wish you’d go a little slower.” You assumed that was how you would live out the rest of your days. But since that day in Seoul Station when you left on the subway train, that day when she was only a few steps behind you, your wife still hasn’t come to you.

   You raise your leg, the one that was operated on for arthritis, and prop it on the porch, watching the girls wolf down the undercooked rice with only kimchi as panchan. After the surgery, you no longer felt pain or had circulation problems, but your left leg became impossible to bend.

“Want me to put a hot pad on it?”

You can almost hear your wife say that. Her hands dotted with dark sunspots, her hands that would put a pot of water on the stove and dampen a towel with the hot water and place it on your knee even if you didn’t answer. Every time you saw her unshapely hands pressing down on the towel on your knee, you hoped that she would live at least one day longer than you. You hoped that, after you died, your wife’s hands would close your eyes one last time, wipe down your cooling body in front of your children, and put the shroud on you.

“Where are you?” you, whose wife is missing, who’s left behind, shout, your leg stretched out on the porch of the empty house, the girls having run off after they finished eating. You shout, trying not to succumb to the sobs that have been climbing to the top of your throat since your wife went missing. You couldn’t scream or cry in front of your sons or daughters or daughters-in-law, but now, because of the rage or whatever it is, tears are pouring down your face, unstoppable. Tears that didn’t come when your neighbors buried your parents, who died two days apart when cholera made the rounds in the village. Not yet ten years old, you couldn’t cry, even though you wanted to. After your parents’ burial, you walked down from the mountain, shivering, cold, and scared. Tears that didn’t course down your face during the war. Your family used to own a cow. During the day, when South Korean soldiers were stationed in the village, you plowed the fields with that cow. In those days, North Korean soldiers would come down from the mountains into the village under cover of night and drag away people and cows. When the sun set, you would walk into town with the cow, tie it up next to the police station, and go to sleep leaning on the cow’s stomach. At dawn you would bring the cow back to the village and plow the fields. One night, you didn’t go to the police station, because you thought the North Korean soldiers had left the area, but they swarmed into the village and tried to drag the animal away. You wouldn’t let go of the cow, even though they kicked you, beat you up. You ran after the cow, pushing aside your sister, who tried to block you from going, and even when you were beaten with the barrel of a rifle, you didn’t cry. You, who didn’t shed a tear when you were thrown into a water-logged rice paddy with other villagers, having been accused of being a reactionary because your uncle was a detective; you, who didn’t cry when a bamboo spear went through your neck—you are sobbing loudly. You realize how selfish you were to wish that your wife survived you. It was your selfishness that made you deny that your wife had a serious illness. In some corner of your heart, you must have known that your wife, who often appeared fast asleep when you came home at night, kept her eyes closed because her headache was so severe. You just didn’t think about it too hard. At a certain point, you knew that your wife would go outside to feed the dog, but instead would head for the well, or that she would leave the house to go somewhere but would stop in her tracks at the gate, not remembering where she was going, then give up and come back inside. You just watched as your wife crawled into the room, barely managing to find a pillow and lie down, a frown etched on her face. You were always the one in pain, and your wife was the one who looked after you. Once in a while, when your wife said her stomach hurt, you were the kind of person who would reply, “My back hurts.” When you were sick, your wife put a hand on your forehead and rubbed your stomach and went to the pharmacy for medicine and made you mung-bean porridge, but when she wasn’t feeling well, you just told her to take some medicine.

   You realize that you’ve never even handed your wife a glass of warm water when she couldn’t keep food down for days, her stomach upset.

   It all started when you were roaming the country, immersed in playing traditional drums. Two weeks later, you came home, and your wife had given birth to your daughter. Your sister, who’d delivered the baby, said it was an easy birth, but your wife had diarrhea. It was so severe that she didn’t have any color in her face, and her cheekbones were protruding sharply even though she had just had a baby. Her condition didn’t improve. It seemed to you that she wouldn’t get better unless you did something. You gave your sister some money for some Chinese medicine.

   Your sobs grow louder as you sit on the porch of the empty house.

Now you see that this was the only time you’ve ever paid for medicine for your wife. Your sister bought three packets of Chinese medicine and boiled it and gave it to your wife. Afterward, when your wife had stomach problems, she would say, “If I could have had two more packets of Chinese medicine back then, I would have been cured.”

   Your relatives liked your wife. All you said to them was hello when they arrived and goodbye when they left, but your many relatives came because of your wife. People said that your wife’s food brimmed with love. Even if all she did was to go to the garden and bring in some greens for bean-paste soup and a Chinese cabbage for a simple salted-cabbage dish, people dug in heartily, praising the bean-paste soup and the salted cabbage. Your nephews and nieces would come to stay with you during school vacations and comment that they had gained so much weight that they couldn’t button their school uniforms. Everyone said that the rice your wife made fattened people. When you and your neighbors planted rice in your paddies and your wife brought them a lunch of rice and scabbard fish stewed with new potatoes, people would stop to stuff the food in their mouths. Even passersby would pause to eat. Villagers vied to help in your fields. They said that when they ate your wife’s lunch they got so full that they could do double the amount of work before getting hungry again. If a peddler selling melon or clothing happened to peek inside the gate during the family’s lunch, your wife was the kind of person who would welcome him in and give him a meal. Your wife, who happily ate with strangers, got along with everyone, except with your sister.

When your wife was suffering from stomach problems, she would complain as if that offense had occurred the day before. “It would have been good if I’d taken two more packets of Chinese medicine back then.… Even you said that I needed two more portions because I’d just had a baby and had to get well, but your sister said, with that mean face, ‘Why do you need more medicine? This is enough.’ And she didn’t get me any more. If I’d taken two more portions I wouldn’t have to go through this.” But you had no recollection of it. And even though she repeated the story, you never got medicine for your wife when she had diarrhea.

“I should have taken more medicine. Now nothing works.” When your wife had diarrhea, she stopped eating. You didn’t understand how someone could stop eating for days. You ignored it when you were younger; not until you were older did you ever ask if she should eat something. Then your wife would say, with a miserable expression, “Animals don’t eat when they’re sick. Cows, pigs … when they’re sick they stop eating. Even chickens. The dog stops eating when it’s sick. When it’s sick, it doesn’t look at food, even if I give it something good, and it digs a hole in front of its house and lies down in there. A few days later, it’ll get up. And that’s when it will eat. People are the same way. My stomach is not feeling well, and even if the food is great, it’s like poison when it gets inside me.”

When the diarrhea didn’t stop, she would grate dried persimmons and eat a spoonful. She would refuse to go to the hospital. “How can dried persimmons be medicine? Go to the hospital, and see the doctor, and get medicine from the pharmacy,” you urged her, but she didn’t listen. Finally, if you insisted, she would snap, “Didn’t I say I wasn’t going to the hospital?” and wouldn’t let you bring it up again.

One year, you left home in the summer and returned in the winter, and when you got back you found a lump in your wife’s left breast. You remarked that it wasn’t normal, but your wife wasn’t moved. Only when her nipple caved in and was filled with discharge did you take her to the hospital in town, her work towel still wrapped around her head. They couldn’t tell you what it was right away, but examined her and said it would take ten days to get the results back. Your wife sighed. What happened during those ten days? What were you doing that was so important that you didn’t go back to hear the results? Why did you put off going back to find out what was wrong? Finally, when her nipple became abscessed, you took your wife and went back to the hospital. The doctor said your wife had breast cancer.

“Cancer?” Your wife said that it was impossible: she didn’t have time to lie in bed sick, she had too much to do. The doctor explained that your wife didn’t fit the profile for a high risk of breast cancer. She hadn’t had children late in life, she breastfed all five children, she didn’t get her period when she was very young, since she got it the year she married you, and she didn’t enjoy meat—in fact, she couldn’t afford to. But cancer cells were growing in your wife’s left breast. If you had gone back to hear the results right away, they might not have had to cut off her breast. Soon after the surgery, her chest still wrapped with bandages, your wife planted potatoes in the field. Burying the sprouted potatoes in the field—which now belonged to someone else, because you’d sold it to pay for the surgery—she declared, “I will never go to the hospital again!” Not only did she refuse to go to the hospital, but she also wouldn’t let you come near her.

Around the time you were to go to Seoul for your birthday, your wife was suffering from stomach problems. You worried whether she could go to Seoul if she was so weak, but she asked you to go to town to buy bananas, having heard about some remedy or other. Before you went to Seoul, she ate a mixture of two dried persimmons and half a banana for three meals straight. Even though she’d never stayed in bed for more than a week after giving birth, she was laid up in bed for ten days with the occasional stomach problem. And your wife started to forget the dates of ancestral rites. When she made kimchi, she would stop and sit staring into space. If you asked her what was wrong, she would say, “I don’t know if I added garlic or not.…” She would pick up a boiling pot of fermented-bean-paste stew with her bare hands and burn them. You just thought, She’s no longer young. You just thought, Even I spend my days without giving a thought to traditional drums, which I used to love so much. At this age, our bodies can’t be the same. You just thought, It’s about time things get broken. You assumed that ailments would be a constant companion at this age, and you thought that your wife was at that stage, too.

“Are you home?”

Your eyes fly open at your sister’s voice. For a second, you think you hear your wife’s voice, even though you know full well that only your sister would come to your house this early in the morning.

“I’m coming in,” she says, and opens your bedroom door. Your sister is holding a tray laden with a bowl of rice and side dishes, covered in a white cloth. She places the tray on the floor at one end of the room and looks at you. She lived here with you until forty years ago, when she built a house by the new road, and ever since, she would get up at dawn, smoke a cigarette, smooth her hair and secure it with a hairpin, and come to your house. Your sister would walk around your house in the dawn light, and then go home. Your wife always heard your sister’s footsteps, quietly circling the house, from the front yard to the side yard to the back yard. Your sister’s footsteps were the sound that woke your wife. Your wife would grunt and turn over and mutter, “She’s back,” and get up. Your sister just circled your house and went home—perhaps she was checking to make sure that your house had remained intact overnight. When she was young, she lost two older brothers at the same time, and parents within two days of each other; during the war, she almost lost you. After she married, her husband came to live in your village, instead of your sister’s going to live in her in-laws’ village. The wound of losing her young husband in a house fire soon after was rooted deeply in your sister, and had grown into a large tree, one that couldn’t be chopped down.

“Didn’t you even bother to sleep on your mat?” Your sister’s eyes, which used to be unfaltering and fierce when she was a young, childless widow, now look tired. Her hair, brushed neatly and secured with a hairpin, is completely white. She’s eight years older than you, but her posture is straighter. She sits next to you, pulls out a cigarette, and puts it between her lips.

“Didn’t you quit smoking?” you ask.

Without answering, your sister uses a lighter printed with the name of a bar in town and puffs on her cigarette. “The dog is at my house. You can bring it back if you want.”

“Leave it there for now. I think I need to go back to Seoul.”

“What are you going to do there?”

You don’t reply.

“Why did you come back by yourself? You should have found her and brought her back!”

“I thought she might be waiting here.”

“If she was, I would call you right away, wouldn’t I?”

You’re silent.

“How can you be like this, you useless human being! How can a husband lose his wife! How could you come back here like this, when that poor woman is out there somewhere?”

You gaze at your white-haired sister. You’ve never heard her talk about your wife in this way. Your sister always clucked her tongue disapprovingly at your wife. She nagged your wife for not getting pregnant till two years after your wedding, but when your wife had Hyong-chol, your sister was dismissive, saying, “It’s not like she’s done something nobody’s ever done before.” She lived with your family during the years when your wife had to pound grain in the wooden mortar for every meal, and she never once took over the mortar. But, then again, she helped take care of your wife after she gave birth.

“I wanted to tell her some things before I died. But who am I going to tell, since she’s not here?” your sister says.

“What were you going to say?”

“It’s not just one or two things.…”

“Are you talking about how mean you were to her?”

“Did she tell you I was mean to her?”

You just look at your sister, not even laughing. Are you saying you weren’t? Everyone knew that your sister acted more like your wife’s mother-in-law than her sister-in-law. Everyone thought so. Your sister hated hearing that. She would say that was how it had to be, since there was no elder in the family. And that might have been the case.

Your sister slips out another cigarette from her cigarette case and slides it in her mouth. You light it for her. Your wife’s disappearance must have pushed your sister to take up smoking again. It was hard for you to think of your sister without a cigarette in her mouth. The first thing she did when she woke up every morning was to feel around for a cigarette, and all day long she looked for cigarettes before she did anything, before she had to go somewhere, before she ate, before she went to bed. You thought she smoked too much, but you never told her to quit. Actually, you couldn’t tell her. When you saw her right after her husband died in the fire, she was staring at the house that had burned down, smoking. She was sitting there, smoking one cigarette after another, neither crying nor laughing. She smoked instead of eating or sleeping. Three months after the fire, you could smell cigarettes on her before you went near her, the tobacco seeped into her fingers.

“I won’t live long now,” your sister has said since the day she turned fifty. “All these years, I thought my lot in life was especially … especially harsh and sad. What do I have? No child, nothing. When our brothers were dying, I thought I should have died instead of them; but after our parents died, I could see you and Kyun, even though I was in shock. It seemed we were alone in the world. And then, since my husband died in the fire before I had a chance to grow fond of him … you’re not only my brother, you’re also my child. My child and my love …”

That would have been true.

Otherwise, when you were bedridden, half paralyzed from a stroke in your middle age, she couldn’t have wandered the fields to harvest dew for a year, through spring, summer, fall, having heard that you would be cured if you drank a bowlful of dawn dew every day. To get a bowl of dew before the sun rose, your sister woke up in the middle of the night and waited for the day to break. Around that time, your wife stopped complaining about your sister and started treating her with respect, as if she were indeed her mother-in-law. Your wife, with an awed look on her face, would say, “I don’t think I could do that much for you!”

“I wanted to say to her that I was sorry about three things before I died,” your sister continues.

“What did you want to say?”

“That I was sorry about Kyun … and about the time I screamed at her for chopping down the apricot tree … and about not getting her medicine when she had stomach problems …”

Kyun. You don’t reply.

Your sister gets up and points at the tray covered with the white cloth. “There’s some food for you; eat it when you’re hungry. Do you want it now?”

“No, I’m not hungry yet. I’ve just woken up.” You stand, too.

You follow your sister as she walks around your house. Without your wife’s caring hands, the place is covered in dust. Your sister wipes the dust off the jar lids as she walks by the back yard.

“Do you think Kyun went to heaven?” she asks suddenly.

“Why are you talking about him?”

“Kyun must be looking for her, too. I see him in my dreams all of a sudden. I wonder how he would have turned out if he’d lived.”

“What do you mean, how he would have turned out? He’d be old, like you and me.…”

   When your seventeen-year-old wife married twenty-year-old you, your little brother Kyun was in the sixth grade. A smart child, he stood out among his peers: he was sharp and outgoing and handsome and got good grades. When people passed Kyun, they turned around to take another look, wondering which lucky family had him as a son. But he couldn’t go on to middle school because of your financial straits, although he begged you and your sister to let him go. You can almost hear it now: Please send me to school, brother; please send me to school, sister. He cried up a storm every day, asking you two to send him to school. Even though a few years had passed since the war, it was pitiable—you were unbelievably poor. Sometimes you think of those days as if they were a dream. You survived miraculously after being stabbed in the neck with a bamboo spear, but you were mired in a desperate situation as the eldest son of the extended family, responsible for feeding everyone. That might have been why you wanted to leave this house, because it was so difficult. It was difficult to find food, let alone send your brother to school. When you and your sister didn’t listen to him, Kyun begged your wife.

“Sister-in-law, please send me to school. Please let me go to middle school. I’ll spend my whole life making it up to you.”

Your wife said to you, “Since he wants it so badly, shouldn’t we send him to school somehow?”

“I couldn’t go to school, either! At least he was able to go to elementary school,” you retorted.

You couldn’t go to school because of your father. As a doctor of Chinese medicine, he wouldn’t let you go anywhere there were a lot of people, whether school or anyplace else, after he lost his two older sons to an epidemic. Your father, sitting knee to knee with you, taught you Chinese characters himself.

“Let’s send him to school,” your wife said.

“How?”

“We can sell the garden.”

When your sister heard that, she said, “You’re going to be the ruin of this family!” and she sent your wife to her hometown. Ten days later, drunk, your feet headed toward your in-laws’ at night. You stumbled along the mountain path, and when you got to your in-laws’ cottage, you stopped near the glowing window of the back room, the one closest to the bamboos. You didn’t go there thinking you would bring your wife back. It was the rice wine that had brought you there, the makgoli you had been given after you helped a neighbor plow his fields. Even though you weren’t the one who had sent your wife back to her childhood home, you couldn’t step into your in-laws’ house as if nothing had happened, so you just stood there, leaning against the dirt wall. You could hear your mother-in-law and your wife talking, just as you had in the cotton fields a short time ago. Your mother-in-law raised her voice and said, “Don’t go back to that damn house! Just pack up your things and leave that family.”

Your wife, sniffling, insisted, “Even if I die, I’m going to go back into that house. Why should I leave that house when it’s my house, too?” You stood against the wall until the dawn light rippled into the bamboo forest. You grabbed your wife as she came out to make breakfast. She had cried all night, and her large, dark, guileless eyes were now so swollen they had become slits. You took your wife’s hand and pushed through the bamboo woods, back to your house. When you got past the bamboo forest, you let go of your wife’s hand and walked ahead of her. Dew dropped onto your pants. Your wife, falling back, followed you, breathing hard, saying, “Just go a little slower!”

When you got home, Kyun ran over to your wife, calling, “Sister-in-law!

“Sister-in-law,” he said, “I promise I won’t go to school. So don’t leave like that again!” Kyun’s eyes welled up; he had abandoned his dream. From that point on, Kyun, unable to go to middle school, threw himself into helping your wife and doing housework. When they worked in the hillside fields and Kyun couldn’t see your wife behind the tall millet stalks, he would call out, “Sister-in-law!” When your wife said, “Yes?” Kyun would smile and call out again, “Sister-in-law!” Kyun would call and your wife would answer, and Kyun would call her again and she would answer him again. The two would finish up the work in the hills like that, calling and answering. Kyun was a faithful companion for your wife whenever you wandered from home. When Kyun got stronger, he plowed the fields with the cow in the spring, and harvested rice in the paddies in the fall, before anyone else. In the late fall, he went to the cabbage garden in the early morning and harvested all the cabbage. Back in those days, people hulled rice over straw mats on the paddies. Each woman would set up a brusher, a contraption of metal teeth in a four-legged wooden frame, and pull the stalks through, forcing the rice kernels off. All the village women owned such brushers, and they would go to the fields of the family who was harvesting that day and set these up. And they would thresh the grain until sunset. One year, Kyun, who had grown almost ten centimeters over the previous year, went to work at the brewery in town. With his first paycheck he bought a brusher, and brought it home to give to your wife.

“What’s this brusher for?” your wife asked.

Kyun smiled. “Your brusher is the oldest in the village—it doesn’t look like it can even stand on its own.”

Your wife had told you that her brusher was so old that it took more effort for her than the other women to skim the grains, and had said she wanted a new one. Her words had gone in one ear and out the other. You thought, Her brusher is fine, what’s the point of buying a new one? Holding the new brusher that Kyun had bought, your wife grew angry at Kyun, or maybe it was at you. “Why did you buy something like this, when we couldn’t even send you to school?”

Kyun said, “It’s nothing,” and his face turned red.

Kyun got along well with your wife, perhaps thinking of her as his mother. After he bought the brusher, he brought home various things for the house whenever he had the money. They were all things that your wife needed. Kyun was the one who bought her a nickel basin. He explained, a bit embarrassed, “This is what the other women use, and my sister-in-law is the only one who uses a heavy rubber bin.…” Your wife made various kinds of kimchi in the nickel basin and used it to carry lunch to the fields. After she used it, she would polish it and put it up on top of the cupboards. She used it until the nickel wore off and the basin turned white.

·   ·   ·

You get up abruptly and go into the kitchen. You open the back door of the kitchen and look up at the shelf made of poles in the all-purpose room. Squat tables, their legs folded, are stacked on top. At the end sits the decades-old nickel basin.

   You weren’t home when your wife gave birth to your second son. Kyun was there with her. You heard what happened later. It was winter, and cold, but there was no firewood. For your wife, who was lying in a cold room after having given birth, Kyun chopped down the old apricot tree in the yard. He pushed the logs into the furnace under your wife’s room and lit them. Your sister burst into your wife’s room and scolded her, asking how she could do such a thing, since people say that family members will start dropping dead if you chop down a family’s tree. Kyun yelled, “I did it! Why are you accusing her?” Your sister grabbed Kyun by the throat. “Did she tell you to chop it down? You bastard! You awful boy!” But Kyun refused to back down. His large, dark eyes glittered in his pale face. “Then do you want her to freeze to death in a cold room?” he asked. “Freeze to death after having a baby?”

Soon after that, Kyun left home to earn money. He was gone for four years. When he returned, penniless, your wife welcomed him back warmly. But Kyun had changed quite a bit while he was away. Though he had become a strapping young man, his eyes were no longer animated, and he appeared gloomy. When your wife asked him what he had done, and where he had gone, he wouldn’t answer. He didn’t even smile at her. You just thought the outside world had been unkind to him.

It was the spot where the apricot tree had stood. Maybe twenty days had passed since Kyun returned home. Your wife ran up to the store in town, where you were playing a game of yut, her face ashen. She insisted that there was something wrong with Kyun, that you had to come home right away, but you were immersed in your game and told her to go ahead. Your wife stood there for a moment, stunned, then flipped over the straw mat on which the yut game was set out. “He’s dying!” she screamed. “He’s dying! You have to come!”

Your wife was acting so strangely that you started for your house, a knot in your stomach.

“Hurry! Hurry!” your wife shouted, leading the way. It was the first time she had gone ahead of you, running. Kyun was lying on the spot where the apricot tree had stood. He was writhing, frothing at the mouth, and his tongue was hanging out.

“What’s wrong with him?” You looked at your wife, but she was already overcome with grief.

It was your wife, who had found Kyun in that condition, who was called to the police station several times. Before they determined the cause of death, a rumor that she’d poisoned her brother-in-law with pesticide spread to the neighboring village. Your sister screamed at your wife, her eyes reddened, “You killed my baby brother!”

Your wife was calm as she was being questioned by the detectives. “If you think I killed him, then just put me away.”

Once, the detective had to bring your wife home; she’d refused to leave the station, asking to be locked up in jail. Your wife would rip out her hair and grab at her chest in grief. She would bang open the door and run to the well and gulp down cold water. Meanwhile, you ran around in the hills and in the fields, crazed, calling the dead boy’s name: Kyun! Kyun! The burning in your chest spread and you couldn’t stand the heat in your body. Kyun! There was a time when the dead didn’t speak and the ones left behind went crazy like that.

   Now you realize how cowardly you were. You lived your entire life heaping all of your pain onto your wife. Kyun was your brother, yet your wife was the one who needed to be consoled. But because you refused to speak about it, you’d driven her into a corner.

   Even though she was out of her mind with grief, it was your wife who managed to hire someone to bury Kyun. Years passed, but you never asked for the details.

“Don’t you want to know where he’s buried?” she would sometimes ask.

You wouldn’t say a word. You didn’t want to know.

“Don’t resent him because he went like that.… You’re his brother. And he doesn’t have parents. So you have to visit him. I wish we could rebury him in a good spot in the ancestral graveyard.”

You would yell, “Why do I need to know where that bastard is buried?”

Once, when the two of you were walking along some road, your wife stopped. She asked, “Kyun’s burial spot is nearby; don’t you want to go?” You pretended that you didn’t hear her. Why had you hurt her like that? Until two years ago, on the anniversary of Kyun’s death your wife would make food and take it to his grave. Coming down from the hills, she would smell like soju, her eyes red.

   Your wife changed after that happened to Kyun. A formerly happy person, she stopped smiling. When she did smile, the smile quickly disappeared. She used to fall asleep as soon as she lay down, tired from her work in the fields, but now she would spend nights unable to sleep. She was never again able to sleep soundly until your younger daughter became a pharmacist and prescribed her some sleeping pills. Your poor wife, who couldn’t even sleep. Maybe your missing wife still has undissolved sleeping pills stacked in her brain. The old house has been rebuilt twice since Kyun’s death. Each time you rebuilt it, you threw away old things that had been stacked in a corner somewhere. But your wife took care of the nickel basin herself, worried that someone would lay hands on it. Perhaps she feared that, if it was mixed in with all the other items, she might never be able to find it. The nickel basin was the first thing she brought into the tent you lived in while the house was being rebuilt. When the house was done, before she did anything else, she would bring in the nickel basin and place it on a shelf of the new house.

   Until your wife went missing, it didn’t cross your mind that your silence about Kyun must have pained her. You thought, What is the point of talking about the past? When your daughter mentioned, “The doctor asked if there was anything that gave Mom a deep shock. Is there something I don’t know about?” you shook your head. When she said, “The doctor recommended that she see a psychiatrist,” you cut her off, retorting, “Who needs a psychiatrist?” You always thought of Kyun as something you had to forget about as you aged, and now it did feel as if you’d forgotten about him. After she turned fifty, even your wife said, “I don’t see Kyun in my dreams anymore. Maybe now he’s able to go to heaven.” And you thought your wife was fine, as you were. Only in recent years did your wife start talking about Kyun again; you’d assumed she’d forgotten all about him.

   One night a few months ago, your wife shook you awake. “Do you think Kyun wouldn’t have done it if we’d sent him to school?” Then she whispered, almost to herself, “When I got married, Kyun was the nicest to me.… I was his sister-in-law, but I couldn’t even send him to middle school, even though he wanted it so badly. I don’t think he’s been able to go to heaven yet.”

You grunted and turned over, but your wife kept talking. “Why were you like that? Why didn’t you send him to school? Didn’t you feel bad for him when he was crying like that, wanting to go to school? He said he would find a way to continue if we just enrolled him.”

You didn’t want to talk to anyone about Kyun. Kyun was a scar upon your soul, too. Although the apricot tree was gone, you remembered clearly where he had died. You knew that your wife stared at that place sometimes. You didn’t want to pick at your wound. There were worse things in life.

You clear your throat a few times.

Only after your wife went missing did you think that you should have spent some time that night talking candidly about Kyun with your wife. Kyun remained in your wife’s heart as it grew emptier. In the middle of the night your wife would suddenly run out to the bathroom and crouch next to the toilet. She would put her hands out as if she were pushing someone away and scream, “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!” If you asked whether she’d had a nightmare, she would blink and stare at you blankly, as if she had forgotten what she was doing. That happened more and more frequently.

·   ·   ·

Why didn’t you think about the fact that your wife had to keep going to the police station about Kyun? That she was rumored to have killed him? Why is it only now that you realize Kyun might have something to do with your wife’s headaches? You should have listened to your wife, at least once. You should have let her say what she wanted to. The years of silence, after you had blamed it on her and didn’t even let her talk about it—that pressure might have pushed your wife toward her pain. More and more frequently, you found your wife standing somewhere, lost. She would say, “I can’t remember what I was going to do.” Even though the headaches were sometimes so bad she could barely walk, she refused to go to the hospital. She insisted that you not tell the children about her headaches. “What’s the point of telling them? They’re busy.”

When they did find out about them, she covered them up, saying, “I had one yesterday, but now I’m fine!” Once, she was sitting up in the middle of the night, and when you made a noise her face turned stone cold and she asked, “Why did you stay with me all these years?” Still, she continued to make sauces and pick wild Japanese plums to make plum juice. On Sundays, she rode on the back of your motorcycle to go to church, and sometimes she suggested going out to eat, saying she wanted to eat food someone else had cooked, at a place that served a lot of panchan. The family discussed consolidating all of the many ancestral rites into one day, but she said that she would do so when the time came for Hyong-chol’s wife to take over the rites. Since she’d done the rites her whole life, she would continue to do them individually while she was alive. Unlike before, however, your wife would forget something for the ancestral-rite table and have to go to town four or five times. You just assumed that this was something that could happen to anyone.

The phone rings at dawn. At this hour? Filled with hope, you quickly pick up the phone.

“Father?”

It’s your elder daughter.

“Father?”

“Yes.”

“What took you so long to answer? Why didn’t you answer your cell?”

“What’s going on?”

“I was shocked when I called Hyong-chol’s house yesterday.… Why did you go home? You should have told me. You can’t leave like that and not pick up the phone.”

Your daughter must have just found out that you came home.

“I was sleeping.”

“Sleeping? The whole time?”

“I guess so.”

“What are you going to do there by yourself?”

“Just in case she comes here.”

Your daughter is quiet. You swallow, your throat dry.

“Should I come down?”

Of all the children, Chi-hon is the most energetic in looking for your wife. It’s probably partly because she’s single. The Yokchon-dong pharmacist was the last person to call to say he’d seen someone like your wife. Your son placed more newspaper ads, but there have been no more leads. Even the police said they’d done everything they could, and could only wait for someone to call, but your daughter went from emergency room to emergency room each night, checking on every patient without family.

“No … Just call if you hear anything.”

“If you’d rather not be alone, come right back up, Father. Or ask Aunt to come stay with you.”

Your daughter’s voice sounds strange. As if she has been drinking. It sounds as if she’s slurring her words.

“Have you been drinking?”

“Just a couple of drinks.” She’s about to hang up.

Drinking until these morning hours? You call her name urgently. She answers, her voice low. Your hand holding the phone grows damp. Your legs give way. “That day, your mom wasn’t well enough to go to Seoul. We shouldn’t have gone to Seoul.… The day before, she had a headache and rested her head in a basin filled with ice. She couldn’t hear anyone calling her. At night, I found her with her head in the freezer. She was in a lot of pain. Even though she forgot to make breakfast, she said we had to go to Seoul—you were all waiting for us. But I should have said no. I think my judgment is getting worse because I’m old. One part of me thought, this time in Seoul, we would force her to go to the hospital.… And with someone like that, I should have held on to her.… I didn’t treat her like a sick person, and as soon as we got to Seoul I just walked ahead.… My old habit just took over. That’s how it happened.” The words you couldn’t say to your children spill out of your mouth.

“Father …”

You listen.

“I think everyone’s forgotten about Mom. Nobody’s calling. Do you know why Mom had such a headache that day? It’s because I was a bitch. She said so.” Your daughter’s voice slurs.

“Your mom did?”

“Yes … I didn’t think I could come to the birthday party, so I called from China and asked what she was doing, and she said she was pouring liquor into a bottle. For the youngest. You know he likes to drink. I don’t know. It wasn’t even worth it, but I got so angry. He really has to quit drinking.… Mom was bringing it because it’s something her baby likes. So I said to Mom, Don’t take that heavy thing; if he drinks it and makes a scene, it’s going to be your fault, so please be smart about it. Mom said, weakly, You’re right, and said she would go into town and get some rice cakes—she always brings rice cakes for your birthday. So I said, Don’t, nobody eats those rice cakes anyway, and we just take them home and put them in the freezer. I told her not to act like a country bumpkin, she should just go to Seoul without bringing anything. She asked me if I really stuck all the rice cakes in the freezer, so I said, Yes, I even have some that are three years old. And she cried. I asked, Mom, are you crying? and she said, You’re a bitch … I told her all that so things would be easier for her. When she called me a bitch, I think I went a little crazy. It was really hot in Beijing that day. I was so angry that I yelled, Fine, I hope you’re happy that you have a bitch for a daughter! Okay, I’m a bitch! and hung up on her.”

You’re silent.

“Mom hates it when we yell … and we always yell at her. I was going to call and apologize, but I forgot, because I was doing a million things at once—eating and sightseeing and talking to people. If I had called and apologized, she wouldn’t have had such a bad headache … and then she would have been able to follow you around.”

Your daughter is crying.

“Chi-hon!”

She is quiet.

“Your mom was very proud of you.”

“What?”

“If you were in the newspaper, she folded it and put it in her bag and took it out and looked at it again and again—if she saw someone in town she took it out and bragged about you.”

She’s silent.

“If someone asked what her daughter did … she said you wrote words. Your mom asked a woman at the Hope House orphanage in Namsan-dong to read her your book. Your mom knew what you wrote. When that woman read to her, Mom’s face brightened and she smiled. So, whatever happens, you have to keep writing well. There’s always the right time to say something.… I lived my life without talking to your mom. Or I missed the chance, or I assumed she would know. Now I feel like I could say anything and everything but there’s nobody to listen to me. Chi-hon?”

“Yes?”

“Please … please look after your mom.”

You press the phone closer to your ear, listening to your daughter’s forlorn cries. Her tears seem to trickle down the cord of your phone. Your face becomes marred with tears. Even if everyone in the world forgets, your daughter will remember. That your wife truly loved the world, and that you loved her.