Junshik entered the restroom, and when he saw the principal standing in front of a urinal relieving himself, he tried to turn around and sneak back out. But before he quite got out the door, he was caught from behind by the principal’s voice.
“Oh, Mr. Hong.”
Junshik pretended to be startled, as if he had just noticed the principal, and hastily bowed his head in greeting.
It had been three years since he’d been appointed to the position of a regular teacher, but even now, he felt uncomfortable to have the principal call him “Mr. Hong.” Before he’d been promoted to a teaching position at the school, he had been working as a general employee for five years while attending college classes at night. He had pretty much been an errand boy prior to that, and during all that time, the principal had just called him “Hong.”
“Are you busy right now, Mr. Hong?”
“Well…not really.”
“Then let’s talk for a moment.”
Junshik had to finish calculating his semester grades and compile his attendance report by the end of the day. More immediately urgent was the fact that he had to use the bathroom, but he wasn’t able to ask the principal to wait. The principal had already started down the hall without looking to see if he was coming.
To get to the principal’s office, Junshik had to pass by the open windows of the teaching staff’s common office. He worried that his colleagues might think it odd to see him following behind the principal. But, fortunately, none of the teachers was looking their way.
“So, Mr. Hong, I hear you moved in to an apartment recently? It’s a bit tardy, but I wanted to congratulate you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Here, have a seat.”
They sat down facing each other on the sofa. The air-conditioning in the room made the air as cool as early fall. Against the wall, a large glass cabinet displayed various trophies and medals. These awards, won by various high school sports teams over the past decade, still gleamed as if they were new. Junshik knew that whenever he had the time, the principal polished them by hand as if keeping them shiny was a hobby of his. The whole athletic field was visible through the large windows, which were all shut. Outside, students were having PE under the scorching summer sun, but it was all silent, like a scene in a film with the sound turned off. It was so quiet in the principal’s office that Junshik thought he could hear himself swallowing.
“So, how big is the place?”
“It’s small, sir. Twenty-three pyeong.”
“You’re still young. That’s plenty big for getting started. As life goes on, you’ll eventually be getting a bigger place.”
Junshik sat straight, his knees together, waiting for the principal to continue. Clearly, he hadn’t brought Junshik to his office to chat about the new apartment. Junshik’s heart had already been pounding for a while because of the tension and the anxiety of not knowing, and now his stomach was aching. He suffered from what they called “irritable bowel syndrome” these days, and it tended to get worse when he was anxious.
“Mr. Hong, what’s the mood lately among the teaching staff?” the principal suddenly asked in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know, sir. I guess…it seems pretty good.”
“Why so vague? Have you noticed anything? Anyone in particular? Dissatisfied with the school…?”
“No. Nobody like that comes to mind.”
Junshik sat on his hands. He had a habit of hiding his hands when he was nervous. When he wore a suit, they would crawl up inside the sleeves of his jacket, but he was in a short-sleeve shirt at the moment, so he kept unconsciously slipping his hands under his buttocks. The discomfort in his bowels was getting extreme, and he was probably unaware of the fact that he was trying to block the pain there.
“What about Mr. Kim? Kim Dongho?”
“He doesn’t talk much lately. It looks like he’s just devoting himself to his teaching.”
“Does it seem like he’s still active with the National Teachers’ Union?”
“From what I can tell…it looks like he hasn’t been involved at all since he resigned.”
“About the summer school courses…because of liberalization or whatever, word came down that we’re only to offer them if more than half the students want to enroll. But it all depends on the homeroom teacher. Do it if you want, they say, but what kid wants to come to school and study during summer vacation? And I’m aware that, among the teachers, there are lots who don’t like teaching extra classes. But what’s the point of staying home doing nothing? Even coming in to teach one thing is to a teacher’s benefit. So, Mr. Hong, devote yourself to the success of our summer school courses this year.”
The principal looked directly at him, over his glasses. Junshik wanted to avoid that gaze, but he couldn’t find another appropriate place to look.
“I think of you differently than the other teachers, Mr. Hong. I trust you more than any of them. What I mean is, you’re someone who thinks of this school as your home. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Junshik understood the principal perfectly. In fact, he had only become a teacher at the school thanks to the principal. Fifteen years earlier, the one who had hired him as a gofer was the deputy headmaster, now the principal, and afterwards it was him, again, who permitted Junshik to take night classes while he was employed in the administration. Of course, Junshik had been working hard during that time, so it wasn’t as if the principal was doing him favors for nothing. But it was a fact that, without him, Junshik would not be the person he was today. The principal had just hinted that Junshik shouldn’t forget his indebtedness.
“Thank you, sir. I understand.”
“Your wife must be happy moving to a brand-new apartment. Tell her I send my best,” the principal said with a smile as Junshik left his office. His tone was informal, as if to confirm that he was close to Junshik’s family, but Junshik felt only awkwardness to hear him call his wife “Madame” and not “Misook” as he had in the past. He knew, well enough, that the principal was a hypocrite. But he also knew he wasn’t particularly more hypocritical than anyone else.
As he left the office Junshik exchanged glances with Yang Guman, who happened to be talking to someone in accounting in the common office. Yang caught on to things much faster than anyone else. He smiled at Junshik as if he had just learned something about him. Junshik felt his cheeks suddenly flush.
After leaving the principal’s office and hurrying to the bathroom, Junshik returned to his desk. At the desk across from him, Kim Dongho was looking down, reading a book. For some time now, Kim had seemed constantly sad and hardly ever spoke anymore in the staff office. Now he appeared to be reading only half attentively, his thick eyebrows squirming like caterpillars as if he were consumed by some painful thought. Those dark eyebrows reminded Junshik of his brother, Minu.
It wasn’t until that morning, when he was leaving the house, that Junshik was able to tell his wife that Minu was going to stay with them for a while. Knowing her temperament, he’d been afraid of her reaction when she found out. But she must have suspected something even before he told her. As he rushed to get ready for work and was just about to step out the door, she had given him a knowing look and walked into their daughter’s room. She meant for him to follow her. When he went into the room, she locked the door.
“Who the hell is this guy?” she asked sharply.
“What do you mean? I already told you—he’s my little brother.”
“Why did he come to our house?”
“Since when do you need a reason to visit your brother?”
“Alright, you have a point. But do you think he’s planning to move in here?”
“Move in?” Junshik said. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s the next day, and he doesn’t look like he has any intention of leaving!”
“Shhh! He’ll hear you! Why are you talking so loud?”
“I don’t care. Let him hear.”
“He said he needs to stay here for a few days. He asked me yesterday, and I told him it would be alright.”
“Without even asking me?”
“I didn’t have time to ask you,” Junshik said.
“You know you should have called me. It’s easy enough for you to invite someone here, but I’m the one who has to prepare the meals and go out of my way to take care of everything. When you go to work, how do you think I’ll feel being stuck here alone with him? In this sweltering heat!”
“Well, it’s too late. Just be patient for a few days and be nice to him. He’s the only brother I have, after all.”
“No. I don’t care! I don’t care, so do whatever you want!”
Junshik got up. It was a good idea to call home in any case. But strangely, though he could hear the ringtone, no one answered. He tried again an hour into the class, but it was the same. Could his wife have gone to the market? But even if that was the case, she was gone for too long and his brother would have been in the house. He couldn’t understand why they were both gone.
When he got home, the front door was locked. He rang the doorbell several times without getting a response. He had left without his keys, and standing there, not knowing what to do, he was overcome with confusion and worry. He went down the few steps that led to the custodian’s shed and waited, annoyed. A main road passed in front of the building, and beyond it stretched a wasteland still scorching with the heat of the summer sunset. Junshik saw the silhouette of a family walking toward him in the twilight. It was a young couple holding hands with a little girl, and Junshik felt like he was looking at a painting. He envied this happy family. But the feeling was only momentary. How could he have been so blind! It was his own family, but his place had been taken by Minu, who had cleaned himself up and looked very different from the day before. As he watched them approach, Junshik noticed that Minu was wearing one of his navy blue shirts. They were talking about something funny, his wife laughing, her head raised, looking unexpectedly beautiful in the ruddy glow of the setting sun.
It was his daughter who saw him first. “Dad, we saw ducks!” she cried. “Ducks!” She ran to him to share her enthusiasm.
“Sangmi was pestering me so much we took a walk out past Nokcheon Station,” his wife explained, looking embarrassed. “It’s the countryside out there. Sangmi liked it so much….”
“I called a bunch of times from school, but no one answered. I was so worried! I forgot the aquarium again….”
“What’s the big deal?” his wife said as she drew closer, anger suddenly tarnishing her face. “What were you worried about?”
Junshik didn’t know what to think about the sudden change in his wife’s mood, but at the same time he was happy to see her on such good terms with his brother. All that change in one day.
After dinner, while Junshik watched TV with Minu in the living room, she brought out a small table with two bottles of beer and some snacks. She seemed to have completely forgotten her icy attitude from that morning.
“You have a drink with us, too,” Minu politely offered.
“Oh, I’m really not used to drinking…but I’ll have a drink with you, anyway,” she declared, sitting down with them.
Her tone was particularly gentle and kind. Junshik barely recognized the woman he rubbed shoulders with every day. The atmosphere around the table was relaxed. A refreshing breeze came through the open window and even the lights in the building across from them seemed to be peaceful.
“Oh! How can you have such beautiful hands?” his wife exclaimed quietly when she saw Minu’s hands holding the glass as she poured his beer.
He did, in fact, have slender, long fingers—the hands of a woman. Obviously embarrassed, he smiled and hid them.
“They’re the hands of someone who’s never worked in their whole life, aren’t they?” he said. “That’s why I’m ashamed to show them.”
“What do you mean? I like men who have long, thin fingers like yours!”
Junshik considered his own fingers, knowing full well that they were short and stubby. That meant that he did not fall into the category of men loved by his wife—at least as far as fingers were concerned. Talking about one’s taste like that was to express an intimate feeling that belongs only to oneself. What did she mean by announcing her preferences like that?
“Finish the story you were telling,” his wife said. “So how did she react—the student?”
She approached Minu without looking at Junshik. It must have been a story his brother had started earlier that afternoon.
“She was surprised of course! I asked her to listen to a poem after suddenly blocking the road in the middle of the night. She probably thought I was crazy.”
Minu told the story about when he was still a high school student: one night, while he was studying at the library, preparing for the university entrance exam, he suddenly felt like he was suffocating. What am I doing here? he thought. What is the point of studying? What does it mean to live? He was taken with a sudden, mad impulse to write a poem, and thus inspired, his heart began dictating to him, whispering an uninterrupted series of words. He filled a whole page, but there was no one there to listen to it. He tore the sheet out of his notebook and went outside. A student was approaching. She walked across the street in his direction, where he was standing in the dimly lit alley. He stepped out, blocking her way. “Uh…sorry,” he said. “I just wrote a poem and I wanted someone to hear it, but there was nobody…Would you listen for a moment if I read it to you?”
“So she agreed?”
Junshik noticed that his wife’s eyes, fixed on Minu, were shining with a strange glow. He’d never seen her so avidly interested in a story before.
Minu’s eyes sparkled. “No. She was scared. She asked if she could listen to it the next day.”
“So what happened?”
“ ‘I get it,’ I told her. ‘Go on! Tomorrow is too late.’ She ran off, looking relieved. Like she’d escaped with her life. I walked home all alone, sad that no one would ever hear my poem.”
“Oh, what a shame. I would have listened to it,” Junshik’s wife said. She sighed. “Do you remember it?”
“I forgot most of it,” Minu said. “I only remember one of the lines that went something like ‘Time paints a shadow of nothingness….’ ”
“I’d love to hear the rest of this story, but I have to go to bed,” Junshik said, interrupting them as he stood up. “I’m really tired. It’s the end of semester and we have a lot of work.”
“Time paints a shadow of nothingness…. That’s really a beautiful line,” his wife said. She also got up, but it was obviously with some regret.
She threw Junshik a quick glance out of the corner of her eye, but he could see the boredom in her, the unbearable indifference toward him, and it felt to him as if her gaze had pierced his skull.
In the bedroom, she sat in front of her dressing table, her face reflected in the mirror. She seemed absorbed in thought. Of all the things they’d brought with them since their marriage, that dressing table was her most cherished piece of furniture. It was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and was the only thing they had of any value. But it had been much too tall and too garish, out of place in the unworthy little rented rooms they had occupied until then. It was probably in those rooms that they had developed the habit—though Junshik no longer remembered when—of looking at each other in the mirror rather than face-to-face. He had been sensing it for a while now: his wife’s eyes, reflected by the mirror, attentively fixed on him.
“It’s amazing,” she said with a sigh. “I know you’re only half brothers, but you still have blood in common. How can you be so different from him?” Their gazes crossed.
“He looks like my father,” Junshik said. He was trying to push away an unpleasant emotion he felt quietly rising from the bottom of his heart. “And I look like my mother,” he added.
“How old did you say he was?”
“He’s two years younger than me.”
“But he still looks like a student! And people would already take you for a middle-aged man.”
“What are you talking about?” Junshik said. “I’m still in the prime of my life!” He turned off the light and stretched his arm out across his wife’s back as she lay next to him. She pushed him away in annoyance.
“Oh, I’m hot! Don’t bother me!” she said.
She turned away abruptly. He could only contemplate the whiteness of her back through her pajamas. He understood very well what she had meant by pointing out how little he resembled his younger brother, and that stirred an inexplicable, seething fury in him.
It was always the same. Compared to Minu, he’d never had anything in his favor. Junshik’s mother had a wide face and a flat nose, with cheekbones prominent like a man’s. With her long horse face, she was far from the ideal of beauty or feminine grace. Junshik had inherited all his physical characteristics from her. Compared to his mother, his father was the exact opposite: a very handsome man whose face inspired nothing but sympathy. Junshik’s mother had not even completed elementary school, and she was illiterate, while his father was a schoolteacher whose intelligence commanded respect. To put it bluntly, one couldn’t speak of a providential bond between his parents. One might even go so far as to claim that the union of a handsome, elegant, and intelligent man like his father with a woman like his mother was a tragedy. Or was the tragedy the custom that led to such a marriage? Couldn’t it also have been a great happiness?
His father had abruptly resigned from his post as a schoolteacher in the city of Daegu. As Junshik later learned, it was because of his relationship with one of his colleagues, a teacher who would become Minu’s mother. So Junshik’s father found himself unemployed, with his wife having to support the whole family. Back then it was no different—when a man who was accustomed to wearing a suit and tie lost his job, he couldn’t take just any job afterwards. Men capable of speaking more eloquently than anyone about international affairs—intelligent men who would spend sleepless nights discussing current affairs or the social contradictions inherent in Korean society—could thus be left destitute and unable to afford enough for their family’s next meal.
So it was Junshik’s mother who took on the responsibility of providing for the needs of daily life: to pay the rent, to buy the charcoal briquettes for heating and cooking, to give her husband his pocket money—and even to make sure that his ramie clothes were always starched properly so he could read his books lying down in summertime. One of her many gifts was the ability to prepare food out of what appeared to be nothing. She could make soup from cabbage leaves she picked off the ground at the market where merchants had thrown them away. Sometimes there would be nothing to eat for breakfast, but if Junshik’s father invited someone over that day she would somehow magically have a generous lunch prepared. And there were so many guests!
When they were there, all dressed in their suits and ties like his father, Junshik and his brother would enter the room and bow to them. For some reason, it was Minu, and not Junshik, who invariably captured their attention. Compared to Minu, Junshik’s life was like being left out in the cold. Reflecting on it now, Junshik realized that his father’s friends probably paid more attention to Minu because they were sympathetic, because he was born from a tragic love affair and was forced to live far away from his birth mother. In any case, Junshik, unlike his younger brother, had never gotten any sympathy from anyone since his childhood. Nor had he ever managed to feel proud of himself.
They said Junshik was someone who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps because he’d come to Seoul alone at the age of sixteen and managed to finish high school by taking night classes while working in a school. And then—after he was hired as an administrative employee—he had finished his college degree once again through night classes and earned his teaching certification.
But every time someone mentioned this, Junshik knew he felt cynical, or something like contempt for himself rather than pride or satisfaction. To put it simply, he had become jaded. His wife was the same. When he was working in administration at the school, she had worked in the same office. But she had graduated from management school and was a regular employee, and she had always looked down on Junshik, whom she’d considered just an errand boy. Even later, after they had somehow gotten married, after Junshik had graduated from night school and become a teacher in charge of technical subjects, her first impression of him hadn’t changed at all.
The next morning, Junshik noticed a big change in his wife. She was wearing makeup—pink lipstick and a light touch of mascara on her lashes. Except on the rare occasion of an outing, he couldn’t remember ever once seeing her in makeup.