“Oh! What are you doing?”
The nurse let out a short yelp and stepped back. Jangsu had pulled up her skirt. She stopped wrapping the blood pressure cuff around his arm and turned toward the doctor with a look on her face that said, Is this guy crazy? The doctor’s affirming nod and Jangsu’s cackling that followed were almost simultaneous.
“Please hold him down,” the nurse said to me.
I held on to Jangsu’s shoulders. While she inflated the blood pressure cuff, the nurse continued to watch his face, her brows furrowed. Her expression was reminiscent of a shaman’s looking down at a malicious spirit possessing a client’s body. Jangsu constantly writhed and cackled, spitting out fragments of words in between his laughter, but I couldn’t understand any of it.
All the while, the nurse was making cheerful sounds as she chewed her gum with well-practiced movements of her mouth. It almost looked as if she were scorning the patient’s crazy behavior with the sound of that gum chewing.
“What about his temperature?” she asked.
“Put a thermometer in his mouth,” the doctor said.
The hospital room at two in the morning was not very warm, but the young doctor’s face was serious, and he was sweating profusely. He must have been feeling an intense occupational excitement and sense of duty. This time I had to pinion Jangsu’s neck with both arms so he wouldn’t spit out the thermometer.
“His temperature is normal,” the nurse said, sounding disappointed.
The doctor contemplated deeply, with his head down for a long time, then looked up at me as if to say he’d finally come to a conclusion.
“What’s happened?” I asked in as polite a tone as possible.
He answered a little hesitantly, “Well…not here….”
It seemed to mean that he could not say it in front of the patient.
“It’s alright,” I said. “It looks to me like nothing’s going to get through those ears.”
“Still, for some reason I feel sorry to say such a thing in front of the patient.”
It seemed the doctor had finally decided to hand down a grim sentence. He stopped talking again and took off his glasses. I was impatient but had to wait a long time until he wiped the sweat from around his eyes and adjusted his glasses.
“That is the final stage,” he said. He pointed to Jangsu with the tip of his chin. “It’s the final symptom of liver cirrhosis, called hepatic encephalopathy. There are two types: one where the patient throws fits as if they’ve gone mad, and the other where they fall asleep as if they’re dead. There’s a chance of both occurring at the same time. But in either case, the fact remains—they will not wake up.”
The doctor was laying out his technical knowledge as if he were reciting something from memory. He didn’t seem to have any sense that what he had pronounced was a death sentence for Jangsu.
“Is there no hope?” I asked.
“The time for intervention on our part has already passed. You shouldn’t have left him in that condition until now. Are you a member of the family?” He threw me a quick glance, as if he were rebuking me.
“No,” I said. “I was the class after him at university.”
“Then you should contact the family. Quickly.”
“How much time does he have?”
“Um…well…that’s the rotten part. It could drag out for a long time in this condition. You see, his mind is gone, but because he’s young, his heart and lungs are strong. If it’s quick, a few hours, and if it’s slow…it could go on for over a day.”
“You’re saying there’s nothing at all the hospital can do for him? Like, extend his life just a little bit….”
“Well…this is just my personal opinion, but in that shape, what would be the point of extending his life? Even for the patient, I mean.”
Just then, as if to applaud the doctor’s words, Jangsu burst out in laughter, and the nurse jumped back in horror. One of the first symptoms of hepatic encephalopathy—the fits that seemed like insanity—was intensifying by the hour.
“I think you should contact the patient’s family and start the discharge process. Wouldn’t it be better for him to be with his family than in the hospital?”
“…Truth is, he doesn’t have any family to contact.” Damn it. The last part I added silently in my heart. In my head, what had unfolded was the horrifying scenario of not being able to contact anyone and having to shoulder the burden of Jangsu’s death by myself.
“Both his parents passed away,” I said. “I think he has relatives back home, but they all seem to have disowned him. Because he went to prison and such….”
“Oh, I meant to ask earlier, but…” The doctor surreptitiously lowered his voice. “Who is Oh Mija?”
“What?”
“Wasn’t that her name? Who the patient was asking for.”
“She was his girlfriend.”
“Is she pretty?”
I looked straight into the doctor’s long face. When he smiled, he resembled a horse silently baring its teeth. He happened to be smiling now, his expression saying, I’m just kidding.
“Yes, she’s very pretty,” I answered, making a face that said, I’m in no mood to kid around.
He instantly wiped the smile from his lips and nodded his head seriously.
“It’s really a shame. To leave this world when he’s still so young. On top of that, leaving a pretty girl behind.”
Raucous cries startled the doctor and drowned out what he was saying. Jangsu was bouncing around like a madman, the worn bedsprings popping with the force, the legs of the bed scraping across the floor with sharp metallic shrieks.
The bug that was trapped in the window screen now started buzzing loudly again, as if it had been waiting for this moment.
To tell the truth, I’d never thought of Mija as being pretty. If you had to describe her, you’d say she was more like a guy than a woman. No—it would be an exaggeration to say she was a guy. But, to be precise, she was like a girl who had been deprived of all sexual charm.
Carelessly cut hair, a loose-fitting shirt with rolled-up sleeves, faded jeans, and a stack of books always held against her chest—that’s what typified her appearance. In short, she looked like a female guerrilla from some South American country that you see from time to time in the newspapers, and she was—of course—considered irredeemable among us. And when speaking of Mija, you could not leave out her mother.
It was now demolished to widen the road, but in those days, there was a shantytown clustered against the front of the school. There was an unlicensed restaurant called “Mama’s House” among the shacks, where we always sequestered ourselves to get drunk in broad daylight. The proprietor was an old woman who wore a greasy money belt and spouted obscenities from her native Pyeongan-do up north. She was very fat and had such a husky voice that she sounded like a man. We loved the fried bean cakes she made, and we called her “Comrade Mama” because of her Pyeongan-do disposition and her superbly foul language. Calling her that didn’t mean we thought she had some sort of suspicious ideology; we were just imitating a corny anti-communist drama we all watched on TV. She had a daughter she cherished—a lone girl among the many boys who frequented her place—and in consideration of that fact, we would sometimes honor her with the title of “Mother-in-law.” Her daughter was Mija.
Mija would occasionally shuttle bean cakes and makgeolli when it got busy and didn’t hesitate to squeeze in between us drunkards to imbibe the cloudy rice wine from the makgeolli bowl. The one who used to set the mood at our drinking bouts was Jangsu, and we had no choice but to timidly submit to his drinking prowess and his loud voice making pronouncements on the latest election, or the people, or the current state of the country’s division into North and South, and on and on. Jangsu always walked around campus in white rubber shoes that shone brightly like a symbol of protest, and they had become his trademark. He was tacitly stating that he was on the side of the poor masses, since rubber shoes were what poor farmers wore. And Mija was always by his side. I would often see her at a table in Mama’s House, mingling with Jangsu and others, participating in those intense debates that revived old political labels, tagging along behind him, calling him “hyu-eong, hyeong” in her clipped voice. On such occasions, I wondered if she’d grown up entirely ignorant of appropriate gender roles.
One especially clear fall day, I witnessed a peculiar sight as I walked toward the school rotary between my third and fourth period classes. In the middle of the rotary—which everyone in school had to pass at least once a day—was a white clock tower emblazoned with the logo of a well-known conglomerate. Someone had climbed to the top. Scores of people had gathered around the rotary to look up at the clock tower at the man who was shouting, shaking his clenched fist. As I continued walking, what caught my eye was Mija standing in the crowd, and I realized the man atop the clock tower must be Jangsu. He was wearing a white dress shirt and black pants, but more noticeable were his bare feet, pale and glowing in the bright sun.
He was continuously shouting something, but at that distance I couldn’t understand what he was saying—it looked almost as if he were performing some sort of especially complicated pantomime. As I got closer, I could gradually make out what he was shouting:
“Down with the military dictatorship that obliterates democracy!
“Let’s topple this autocratic regime and achieve freedom of the press!”
I reached Mija and stood right next to her, but she was looking up at Jangsu through tear-filled eyes, her face flushed. I saw a pair of white rubber shoes neatly placed at the base of the clock tower. Those kinds of shoes were prone to slipping off, and they must have been a hindrance to Jangsu’s climbing the tower. They reminded me of the shoes left behind by people who threw themselves off of a bridge over the Han River.
“Guarantee the three basic rights of labor! Stop the oppression!
“Resume South-North talks to achieve peaceful unification!”
Among the scores of students and faculty staring up at the clock tower, there was no one who responded to his cries. His loud, clear voice just scattered, without an echo, into the air.
According to Emergency Measure No. 9, any gathering, protest, or act that denied or opposed the constitution—or advocated for or incited its amendment or abolishment—resulted in a prison sentence of over one year. All of us gathered around the base of that clock tower knew this. At a certain point, the police had started living on the school grounds, and the sight of riot policemen playing hacky sack on campus had become an everyday thing. Anyone who shouted an anti-government slogan anywhere on campus could be gagged and dragged off in an instant.
That was probably why Jangsu had climbed to the top of the clock tower. It would take time to crawl up there to capture him—and he could always threaten to jump.
Out of nowhere, two men, who were obviously plainclothes cops, appeared and started to climb up the clock tower.
Jangsu started singing the national anthem.
’Til the waters of the East Sea run dry and Mount Baekdu is worn away…
Someone near me started singing along.
Under God’s blessing, long live our country…
The source of that tearful voice was Mija, but aside from her, there were no others who had dared to open their mouths.
Jangsu didn’t jump from the clock tower as we all expected. He gave himself up, without resistance, to the plainclothes cops.
And the second verse hadn’t even ended yet.
“You dogs!”
That’s what I remembered as the last thing Mija had said. It was in the school rotary while Jangsu was being dragged away, right before our eyes, and hauled by the plainclothes cops into a black van. She hadn’t pointed me out specifically, but she’d cursed all of us who were at the scene. And since I was among them, in her eyes I, too, must have been a dog.
Shortly after that, I enlisted and did not have a chance to see Mija again for a long time. In the military, I occasionally thought of her, and her last words would resurface vividly. When I was alone on guard duty, or at bedtime when I lay under my blanket with my hand in my shorts, I would recall every woman I knew one by one, and Mija was always the last in line.
“Dogs!”
Under the rough wool of my army-issued blanket, the breathless tangle of intimate pink flesh parading through my mind, I could finally hear Mija’s cry in my ear, and when that happened, I could not resist the sharp, intense pleasure that stabbed me like the blade of a knife.
After I was discharged, I learned that Mama’s House in front of the school had been torn down. No one had any news of Mija, but there was talk about Jangsu. He’d been tagged with additional charges for colluding with a treasonous organization, so he wouldn’t be seeing the outside of a prison for several years. I re-registered in school and started drinking at the new draft beer hall across from the front gate. The president had been assassinated while I’d been in the military. A former general had become the new president, and an alarming rumor was circulating about several hundred people being killed by the military in a city in the south. But school was unaffected. It was as if nothing had happened.
If one thing had changed on campus, it was that the clock tower at the rotary had disappeared. Now an impressive fountain stood in its place, shooting up endless streams of water in the sunlight, creating rainbows as solid as steel, putting on a show of peace that only seemed breakable if a bomb were to be chucked at it.
One day, I discovered some graffiti neatly printed on the wall in a corner of the men’s room in the Teacher’s College:
DRIVE OUT THE YANKEE BASTARDS WHO AIDED AND ABETTED THE GWANGJU MASSACRE!
The slogan seemed obscene somehow, as much as it was secretive and cowardly, and—out of nowhere—it brought back to mind the scrawled graffiti I had seen in middle school about the blond American woman, the Peace Corps volunteer who had been my English teacher.
The next time I saw Mija, it was by happenstance after I’d graduated. I was walking down to the bus stop just after work when I heard a woman’s voice call out, “Gu Bonsu!”
A chocolate-colored luxury sedan pulled up next to me, and I could see the woman’s face, in heavy makeup, through the half-open car window. Actually, what I saw first were the aviator shades that covered half her face.
“It’s me,” she said. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“Do I know you?”
“How thoughtless. Not to recognize me.”
When she took off the shades, a shockingly familiar face appeared. I could hardly believe she was Oh Mija. And when she said, “Say, hello. This is Emory. My husband,” and indicated the driver’s seat next to her, when a large hand—hairy like a fleshy sea crab—was stuck out in front of me, I couldn’t figure out what was heads or tails. I took the hand, and when I bent down to look inside the car, I saw that its owner was a white guy, his face the color of a pale wine you might see in an American film. He clasped my hand tightly and spewed a long series of words I couldn’t understand.
Mija laughed uproariously. “He’s saying it’s nice to meet you. Say something. You know how to say that much in English, don’t you?”
Unfortunately, I did not know how to give even such a response. What made me finally open my mouth was seeing the old Korean woman in the back seat.
“Oh,” I said. “How are…you?” I almost called her “Comrade Mama.”
“Do you recognize me?” Comrade Mama was as assertive as ever. “How long has it been, Bonsu?”
“Well, I think this must be the first time since graduating.”
“So, two and a half years? Three and a half? What have you been up to?”
“I went into the military and…”
“Oh-ho…that’s plenty enough. Serve in the military, get a job, get married…that’s right. Are you married?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Get in, Bonsu. You’re going into the city, aren’t you? We’ll give you a ride.”
I sat in the back seat with Comrade Mama.
When the car started moving, she opened her mouth again. “You must work around here,” she said. “Where is it?”
I vaguely gestured toward the rear window. The building, built precariously like a castle on a hillside, seemed to grow taller as the car moved farther away.
“You mean that building? Isn’t that a school?” Mija asked, turning her body.
Once again, I gave a vague nod.
“You’re a schoolteacher? That must be hard work.”
Mija must have been telling her husband what I did, and whatever she’d said, it made the middle-aged American laugh out loud. I stared, stupefied, at the network of fine wrinkles that instantly formed on his face.
“What do you make?” Mija’s mother asked.
When I didn’t understand what she’d said, she clapped me on the shoulder with her large hand.
“Hey, I mean your pay.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “About three hundred thousand won….” More or less, I added under my breath.
“That must be tough. Can you live on that?”
“You don’t teach for the money.” It sounded like a lie, even to me.
“Right,” she said. “You must be doing it for the satisfaction it gives. You were always on the slow side when it came to money, you know. Always months behind. You could never pay your tab on time.”
She laughed vigorously, and I followed with a meek chuckle. Mija and her husband were laughing and giggling continuously up front. The American’s arm lay across Mija’s shoulders, glistening, covered in golden hairs. His thick hand was fondling her—the edge of her ear, the back of her neck, sliding all the way to her shoulder—and I watched in wonder: this foreign stranger fondling a Korean woman I knew well. Whenever he said something, she answered, “Yes, darling. Yes, darling.” Mija had been an English lit major in college, but I’d never known that she spoke English so well. I’d never realized that the word darling could sound so sweet.
After waiting, and after long deliberation, I finally managed to speak. “Mija,” I said. “I heard Jangsu was asking for you. From prison.”