“A lot has changed,” Mija said as she sat down.
I nodded. “Yes. I can see you’ve changed as much as I have.”
“I meant…” she smiled briefly, “…this café has changed. The Ivory Tower wasn’t this noisy back then.”
There was something that hadn’t changed: the fine wrinkles that formed around her eyes and the bridge of her nose when she laughed. Seeing that, I suddenly felt weak, my entire body overcome by something like vertigo, as if the most vulnerable part of me was slowly being tickled by someone’s soft touch. It was a subtle pain alerting me to a chronic ailment lurking deep in my belly.
“You’ve gotten prettier,” I said. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Oh, my. Thank you.”
It was true. She looked so mature that I’d had to do a double take and ask myself if it was really her. How could I put it? She had the voluptuousness of a fruit so ripe it could burst at the slightest touch, and a dizzying fragrance, so much that I simply could not believe she was the woman who, in the old days, used to roam around campus like an urchin.
“Come to think of it, you’ve changed a lot, too. Knowing how to flatter a woman. How is it—are you satisfied?”
“What do you mean, ‘satisfied’?”
“I mean, as a teacher.”
Satisfaction…I thought as I pulled out a cigarette to put in my mouth. The matches I kept in my shirt pocket were damp from sweat and would not light easily.
“Sure,” I said. “Our occupation survives on satisfaction, right?”
I answered that way because I thought the story would get too long if I’d said that I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt anger slowly rising in me. As I finally lit a match for my cigarette, I recalled the things that had preoccupied me for the past six months: quarterly tuition charts I’d had to draw for each class, self-study initiatives, truancy lists. I wanted to make all those brats just run away from home as I snapped pieces of chalk between my fingers and smacked them over the head with my attendance book.
There was a brief silence between us. She was wearing black as if she were attending a funeral. But the dress had a neckline that plunged far too low and suggestively to be appropriate for that. I stole glances at her taut, bare skin, exposed by that dress, and I started to feel a tension growing from the bottom of my chest. I knew what I had to say now. It seemed that Mija had realized it, too, after listening to the silence for a while.
“Jangsu…” I said finally.
“Jangsu…”
We both stopped at the same time. Once again, the silence continued. It was a charged silence and—as if to explain its meaning—the lilting voice in the café’s mood music was now letting out a series of urgent, breathy moans.
“Mr. Gu, phone call,” whispered Mr. Yun, the biology teacher who sat in front of me. I frowned and whispered back, “Whoever it is, tell them to call back later.” We were in the middle of a meeting, in the middle of the principal’s speech. He loved giving speeches and, like anyone who loves giving speeches, hated it most when his passionate oratory was interrupted. But Yun passed me the handset anyway. “Take it,” he said. “Whoever it is, he’s very insistent.”
I put the handset to my mouth and whispered, “Hello?”
“It’s me. Your big brother.”
“Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s me, you idiot. Did you already forget my voice?”
A cold shiver ran up my spine. There are things you can forget. But how could I forget that voice?
“Who…Who is this?” I asked again in a whisper. I did not want it to be Jangsu. No, I refused to believe it was his voice. It sounded like it was coming from the cold and dark land of the dead.
“You idiot,” he rumbled. “It’s me. Jangsu. Why are you so surprised? You sound like you’ve seen a ghost. Idiot, I didn’t break out of jail, so relax. It’s been about a week. Here? I’m right under your nose. That’s right. I’ve decided to pay you a visit. What’s the starting salary for a second-class schoolteacher, anyway? Come buy a drink for prisoner number 2509. In the middle of what? A meeting? Fine, I’ll wait. I waited three years—what’s another couple of hours?”
“Jangsu had aspirations,” Mija said.
“Coffee for me. And you, Mija?”
“Me too.”
“From what I know,” I said when the waitress had left with our order, “you were more ambitious than anyone.”
“That’s right. And that was also why I liked Jangsu. In that regard, we had something in common. People thought Jangsu’s plans were reckless. Some even thought they were dangerous and foolish, but I believed in him. I dreamed the same dream as he did.”
When a coil of hair fell on her forehead, she swept it back with her hand. The tops of her breasts were visible in the low-cut one-piece dress she wore.
“After I graduated, I worked at the Korean branch of an American company,” she said.
She stirred her coffee as she started telling her story.
“You know that my degree was in English lit, right? I worked as the secretary for Emory, who was in charge of that company. And I learned that he was a divorced single father with two kids. One day, he invited my family out to dinner. As far as family goes, it’s just Mom and me, but we met at a hotel restaurant. For my mother, it was the first time in her life at a place like that. Of course, it was her first time dining with an American, too. When the waiter was taking our order, she couldn’t recognize anything with all the strange things on the menu. She said, ‘I’m just gonna have a jjajangmyeon.’ I was a little annoyed that she’d order such a low-class dish at a fancy restaurant, but I went ahead and told Emory that what my mother wanted was jjajangmyeon—noodles in black bean sauce. He ordered just that, but the waiter said they didn’t have that dish. He said, ‘If that’s what you want, then you’ll have to go to a Chinese restaurant.’ I translated word for word. Then Emory called the manager. To ask him to order one from a Chinese restaurant. Think about it. The scene it must have made—a Chinese delivery boy, with the eyes of all the other restaurant guests on us, dropping off a bowl of jjajangmyeon at our table.”
She paused for a moment, as if to give me a chance to picture that scene.
“Is that the reason you married him?” I asked.
“That’s when I knew. That Jangsu’s ambitions and that bowl of jjajangmyeon were the same thing.”
“So you abandoned Jangsu and chose the jjajangmyeon.”
“I didn’t abandon Jangsu. I just saw the truth behind the things I’d been dreaming about then. Jangsu had ambition but no power. The American lacked ambition but he had power. That was enough for me. Because I had the ambition.”
I shoved a hand into my pocket. The thing was still there. A warmth, like the body heat of a living person, was transmitted through my fingers. It was pulsing in my hand like the sweltering heat of the summer evening. I suddenly felt like I had to piss.
“What happened?” I asked Jangsu.
We were sitting down, across from each other at a bar, for the first time in many years. I wasn’t asking how he happened to be released from prison with years still left on his sentence. The extent of his illness was obvious from just a glance at his face. His skin was so jaundiced it looked like he’d been dipped in yellow paint. Even the whites of his eyes were yellow, and his close-shaved head made it more noticeable.
Without a word, Jangsu undid his belt and showed it to me. He indicated one end of it with his finger. I saw several newly made holes, besides the original ones, gradually moving closer to the tip. And the last one—showing the white of the inner leather—was precarious, dangling at the very end as if it were about to tear.
“It’s a disease that makes it impossible to buckle your belt,” Jangsu said, as if he were talking to a stranger. He rubbed his belly, which was swollen like a pregnant woman about to deliver.
“It’s full of shitty water,” he said. “Apparently, they didn’t know what to do, either. So, they let me out. You could say they took my punishment out of the hands of man and passed it on to the hand of God.”
He looked up at the empty sky and mimicked the sign of the cross. He had definitely changed—just as garrulous, but his former seriousness had become a kind of brash self-mockery. It was not funny to me as I watched him add the measure of a glass of beer to the already immense volume indicated by the dome of his belly.
“Isn’t it bad for you to be drinking?” I asked.
“At least beer helps me piss,” he said. “With this damn condition, it’s really a bitch. They had to drain me with a rubber hose once. My liver’s so swollen it can’t even filter out piss anymore. Strange, isn’t it? Before I got sick, I didn’t even know what the liver did. When the liver stops working, you get to learn of its existence, and when the appendix ruptures, you become aware of its existence—you see? What it comes down to is that existence is pain, and pain is existence. Have you heard any news about Mija?”
I was flustered, and because his question was so sudden, I couldn’t hide my embarrassment.
“By the time I visited the school, Mama’s House was torn down without a trace,” he said. “No one has any news about her.”
He shot a look straight at me. His shaved head gleamed like a knife blade in the light. It was like cold air flowing down the walls, and it instantly sent a chill down my spine. I ignored his gaze.
“You little shit. You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
“I’m leaving for America, next month,” Mija said. “My husband’s hometown is in Tennessee, a place called Memphis. He’s always bragging about how that’s where Elvis Presley is buried.”
She smiled a little, parting her lips and exposing her pink gums. A desperate longing stirred in my heart.
“Dogs,” I mumbled to myself.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t you remember? What you said to us the day Jangsu was arrested? Under the clock tower?”
There was a light sheen of sweat around her neck. I imagined myself kissing that smooth, white skin, my arms wrapped around her neck. I could taste her fragrant perspiration on my lips and see the vivid marks they left—like tattoos—all over her body. I suddenly, very much, wanted to hear the word darling come from Mija’s mouth.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, getting up. “It’s too stuffy.”