KI-YONG ENTERED COLLEGE in the South in 1986. During the previous year, he had taken a prep course in Noryangjin, studying for the high school equivalency exam and college aptitude test. Though he didn't graduate, he majored in English at Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, and he always liked math, so those subjects weren't much of a problem. He did have a harder time with the other subjects. With his inadequate South Korean vocabulary, it would have been difficult to pass if the exams hadn't been all multiple choice. Compared to the four brutal years he had spent as an agent trainee, studying in a warm library was like heaven. Also, subjects like politics, economics, and citizen ethics helped him adapt to southern society. Citizen ethics, which taught him about the importance of putting the state and societal morals before anything else, was familiar. It all made sense if he replaced "state" and "nation" with "Leader" and "Party." Like the prince and the pauper in Mark Twain's classic, the ethics of the South and the North were similar enough that when they ran into each other, each recognized something in the other.
In those days, he didn't have a woman to distract him or even a drinking buddy. He studied hard, and, that winter, he was able to gain admission into the math department of the prestigious Yonsei University. On a cold day, with the damp wind freezing his ears, he crossed the large field at Yonsei, dotted with patches of snow and ice, to read the list of accepted students posted on the bulletin board. Eighteen-year-old students, who had confirmed their admission over the phone but still came out to personally find their exam numbers on the list, were chatting in groups around him. Ki-yong knew why he, who had been at the top of his class at the University of Foreign Studies, had been selected to be sent south by Liaison Office 130. They needed agents who could get into the South's prestigious universities.
Ki-yong's mission was an audacious attempt. Pyongyang was observing with interest the South's rapidly growing leftist student activist movement. At the time, in 1986, with Kim Yong-hwan of Seoul National University leading the way, Juche Ideology was at the cusp of popularity, poised to spread across college campuses nationwide. The North Korean leaders believed they needed a new process to create better agents. Before, they used undercover agents disguised as immigrants, as well as homegrown communists. Pyongyang's new, ambitious plan was to get a well-trained agent to infiltrate a college freshman class in the South and have him mature and develop with budding student activists.
For Ki-yong, college life in Seoul was amazing. At the end of March, forsythia began to bloom, competing fiercely with the busily flowering azaleas. The freshmen took one group picture after another in front of the primary-colored flowers. The flowers were so brilliant that even eighteen-year-old youth paled next to them. April was even more gorgeous. Magnolias broke off branches and fluttered to the ground at the lightest sprinkling of rain. From the back gate of the women's university beyond the small hill, the intense scent of lilacs drifted with the southern wind. Ki-yong often sat on what was known as Turgenev's Hill behind the medical school and read the Russian greats of the nineteenth century and Korean classics of the 1970s, borrowed from the library. He was amazed that nobody ever looked for him. In Pyongyang, happiness at school meant he could promptly respond when his name was called, then relax until he was called again. But in Seoul, the time outside of lectures was all his, and no one cared if he didn't go to class. He wasn't required to attend nightly critiques and he wasn't forced to find fault with himself and confess his failings to his peers.
In May, a menacing mood permeated the campus. The smell of tear gas hung heavily in the air. Protests to amend the constitution to provide for direct presidential elections started in Inchon and spread to other cities. A hurricane of change was approaching. Young activists, armed with passion and ideology, breathed in the revolutionary energy, but Ki-yong was oblivious to these changes. All he could see were cherry blossoms covering the hills and girls around him in short skirts. It was to be expected, since he didn't know what South Korean colleges had been like before 1984. He'd never lived through the days when a government-controlled students' national defense corps represented students instead of the student government, riot police ate side by side with students on campus, and a few die-hard activists were arrested for breaking large windows of the library and distributing literature, roped together. In movies, characters who travel through time often go back to important moments in history. They arrive just as the fire that will kill Joan of Arc is being kindled, or as Napoleon is marching toward Waterloo. In some ways, Ki-yong was just like them, having been dropped into the making of history. The only difference was that he didn't know what would happen next.
On a hot June day, after the flowers had given way to greenery, he knocked on the door of the Political Economic Research Society, which was housed in the student union. Four young men and one young woman greeted him in the smoke-filled room. That sole young woman was Ma-ri.
One of the older students told them, grinning, "You two should be friends since you're both freshmen. But don't fall in love or anything." Later, when they got together, Ki-yong and Ma-ri remembered this half-joking prediction of their destiny almost at the same time and, like many couples, used it to paint the story of their love as a product of fate.
That day in June, Ki-yong sat on a creaky wooden chair and chatted with them about his interests. The room was musty and stagnant from cigarette smoke; a portable butane burner lay next to a nickel pot with strands of old ramen stuck to the bottom. The room was furnished with an old sofa, one side of which had been chewed up by rats. A rolled-up khaki sleeping bag and a guitar had been flung on the sofa, and a reproduction of O Yun's wood carving of a masked dancer and Sin Dong-yop's poem "Kumgang" were hanging on the wall, side by side. They asked him where he was from and why he wanted to join the group. A junior explained that they studied politics and economics, which weren't dead disciplines, as the group focused on putting the theories into practice in the real world. Ki-yong replied that he had always been fascinated by the contradictions inherent in society, but because he hadn't been able to figure out the fundamental reason for such contradictions, he wanted to find like-minded people with whom to discuss these problems. The upperclassmen, who had been trying to recruit freshmen, liked his answer. They took Ki-yong to a bar near the school and drank fermented rice wine together. A few months later, he participated in his first protest with one of the upperclassmen.
"Hey, you're a really fast runner!" the upperclassman commented, in awe of Ki-yong's speedy retreat from tear gas. After that, Ki-yong remembered to slow down and put less force in his arm when throwing rocks. When winter vacation approached, an upperclassman from Mokpo approached him. "I think you're ready for intensive study."
"Oh, do you really think so?"
"You can't change the world with only passion and a sense of justice. You need to be immersed in revolutionary ideology so that you can lead the masses and arm the workers."
Ki-yong followed him into an empty lecture hall, where a group had gathered: members of other student organizations he'd encountered at protests as well as unfamiliar faces. A deeply tanned guy came up and offered his hand, saying, "Nice to meet you. I'm Lee Tok-su."
Tok-su first advised them of the secretive nature of the gathering. "This meeting is top secret, even from other members of your organizations. You must realize that you are the driving force of the revolution, and you should be proud of this. As a member of the vanguard, you should be as strong as steel, be the best you can be, and be a model for the masses."
But in Ki-yong's eyes, Tok-su was far from a steely revolutionary vanguard. His gaze was forceful, but he was really only a frightened twenty-two-year-old kid. "Our pressing goal is to adopt the ideology of Kim Il Sung as our revolutionary coda and complete South Korea's revolution, driving American imperialists from our land." Tok-su then taught them the secret lingo. Kim Il Sung was KIS, Kim Jong Il was DLCK for Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il, Juche Ideology was JI or Sub, North Korea was NK. Ki-yong quietly memorized the secret code, but the exaggerated seriousness of the meeting in the empty lecture hall made it seem like a farce. Were these really the revolutionary vanguards who would overthrow the South Korean regime? These young kids, with peach fuzz still on their faces? Would they be able to survive the KCIA's notorious torture and go on to overthrow the oppressive state? Ki-yong had a hard time believing it. The revolutionaries he had been used to seeing in the North were old men in their seventies, like Oh Jin-woo and Kim Il Sung. Of course, Kim Il Sung started the revolution when he was in his twenties, but that never felt real to him, since he associated the revolution only with what he saw in the North's propagandist operas like Bloodbath. Despite his reservations, Ki-yong became an activist of the NL camp at this meeting.
Scholarly pursuits in the name of the revolution occurred in the dead of night. During the day, the members participated in legitimate organizations, like the student government or other groups, but at night, they met with the education cell and learned about Juche Ideology. Fearful and hesitant, they met clandestinely and learned about Kim Il Sung's days as a freedom fighter against the Japanese occupation, exchanging looks of awe and referring to Kim Il Sung as Dear Leader and Kim Jong Il as General. For Southern youths in their early twenties, having been indoctrinated in anti-Communist education in schools, speaking this way felt vulgar, much like hearing a prim woman referring to a penis as a cock. At first, it was difficult for them to refer to the two heads of state as Dear Leader or the General, but once they did, they shivered with the excitement that came with breaking the law.
Of course, it was different for Ki-yong. He had to hide the ideological tattoo that was inked into his soul. Since he didn't grow up in a place where people had to refer to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in code, he sometimes slipped and uttered their names together with their titles, and received warnings from the upperclassmen who were vigilant about security. He quickly learned to appear hesitant as he shut his eyes tightly and recited in a low voice, "Long live the great general Kim Il Sung," just like the others. Like gangsters who took turns stabbing their brothers who had betrayed them, they ensured their safety by becoming accomplices to the same crime. Saying those words was definitely a violation of the law. And this surreptitious vocalization might have been the most important initiation rite, more so than learning about the forbidden Northern ideology. Perhaps Juche Ideology spread so quickly precisely because it was so dangerous.
The group thought Ki-yong was a not too bright but dedicated, circumspect activist, which was the kind of person everyone sought to recruit. People who asked too many questions or bragged that they were official members of the group were not welcome. Ki-yong wasn't like that, not that he could be even if he wanted to. He just periodically asked whether Juche Ideology really was the greatest ideology in the history of philosophy. He'd cautiously ask: "When all things and ideologies are supposed to change and develop in a dialectical manner, how can all processes stop when it comes to Juche Ideology?" But the others had a ready answer for this question because it was one that everyone asked, and laughed off his comments. Ki-yong listened to their impassioned but ultimately unpersuasive answers and nodded along. Their blind belief in Juche Ideology actually started to chip away at his own ideological certainty. How could they believe all of it without harboring any doubts, after reading only a couple of thin pamphlets and incomplete broadcast transcripts of the National Democratic Front of South Korea? A few members even argued that Juche Ideology was so powerful precisely because it was easy to understand. Unlike difficult and confusing bourgeois philosophies, this was a new idea that workers could adopt as their own, created with their comprehension in mind by the generous leader. Ki-yong's few questions, which he posed only to ensure a perfect disguise, boomeranged back at his soul.
After he became a member of the Juche Ideology faction in compliance with his initial orders, the Party didn't send down orders for a while. He lay in the dark in his room at the boardinghouse and wondered what Pyongyang ultimately wanted from him. He didn't fully comprehend the meaning behind the order—why he, a member of the Workers Party of Korea, had to pretend to learn about Juche Ideology instead of leading these students. Only after a long time did he come to the conclusion that Lee Sang-hyok and other power players in Pyongyang wanted him not to lead the South's student activism, but to assume a persona formed by authentic experiences. Liaison Office 130 might have wanted him to obtain a criminal record by breaking a group demonstration law. It was crucial that he copy everything the Southerners did—if he wanted to be exactly like them—without circumventing the scars they received in the process.
But fortunately—or unfortunately—he was never arrested. It was partly because he had been trained to evade arrest, but it was also because he didn't stand out in a crowd. He was often skipped over when the group, at a bar, counted how many people were there. Sometimes a bunch of them would be talking among themselves and suddenly notice Ki-yong sitting next to them and ask, surprised, when he got there. But a couple of members always remembered and included him, in spite of his invisibility. The young Juche Ideology faction members, though they attended rallies, defiantly handing out leaflets and throwing Molotov cocktails at cops, were really only boys who had grown up too quickly, whose faces were covered with acne scars. They went out for spicy rice cakes, talked about girls they had crushes on, and obsessed over Hong Kong movies like A Better Tomorrow. On New Year's, knowing Ki-yong didn't have family, they would bring him home with them and share a bowl of rice cake soup.
One summer day, three of them—a disheveled guy who went by the nickname Magpie, another who answered to Snout, and Ki-yong, who was known as Hammer—visited Wolmi Island near Inchon. Magpie, drunk off soju and the marine wind, lay across a bench on the beach and asked: "Do you guys think the revolution will come?"
Magpie's older brother was a loyal activist and a central theorist of a minority group known as PD. As someone who had given everything to the student movement, he opposed Magpie going to college. What's the point of going to college when it will only make you a servant of the bourgeoisie? You might as well go straight into the factories and organize the workers. Learn from my mistakes. I'm always regretting that it took me so long to quit college to organize the factories. You should become a worker as soon as you can and throw yourself into class struggle, so you can live without guilt like I do. Having always been close to his older brother, growing up together in a single-room house without space for even a desk, Magpie had a difficult time dealing with this pressure. Magpie's brother even confiscated his books and threw out the apple crate he was using as a desk. Oh, so you don't want me to go to college when you got to go? At least you got to go to college in the first place. Magpie, feeling rebellious, studied hard, hiding it from his brother, and got into Yonsei. But just like his brother, he became deeply involved in the student movement as soon as he stepped foot on campus and he never went near a lecture hall. The only difference was that he chose a different group from his brother and became an NL, accepting Juche Ideology as the fundamental truth.
Snout replied: "Don't you think it will happen at some point?"
"Actually," Magpie said, carefully, "I'm afraid that it will happen."
"What do you mean?"
"If the revolution happens, I won't be able to go rent comic books or play video games."
Snout nodded, although he would have sat up straight and rebutted that sentiment if he hadn't been so drunk, saying, "Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do any of that."
"I mean, even if we ousted America and overturned the dictatorship and smashed the imperialist, feudal system and the world became the kind of place where every man was the master of his destiny ... then what? What would we do? Wouldn't we be bored?"
Ki-yong quietly listened to their conversation, thinking that they really had no idea what it was like to live in a world where everyone got up at the same time when the morning siren went off at seven, went to work at the same time, got a Sunday off only when the Central Committee of the Party mandated it, and came together with the whole community every night to rehash and criticize the day's mistakes. Of course, you could be happy in a society like that. You could play badminton or a pick-up game of soccer, or ice-skate. But you wouldn't be able to sit by yourself in a dark room watching porn, listen to the Eagles through your earphones, or read violent Japanese manga.
Snout, noticing Ki-yong's silence, nudged him. "What do you think?"
"I don't know. You probably wouldn't be able to do any of that. I'm sure it'll be a little boring, like Magpie says. But couldn't it be fun in its own way?" Ki-yong replied.
Years later, Ki-yong often recalled the conversation they had that day at Wolmi Island. They worried about the quality of life after the revolution that would never come, sitting on a beach strewn with young lovers and drunk, singing soldiers on leave, smelling whiffs of salty marine wind. Instead of revolution, the International Monetary Fund came in and completely restructured South Korea, like the American military did in 1945.
In the 1980s, when Ki-yong was in college, South Korea was closer to North Korea than it was to today's South. Jobs were guaranteed for life and college students never worried about their futures. The banks and conglomerates, with their lobbies of imported marble, seemed indestructible. Adult children took care of their parents and respected them. The president was chosen by a huge margin, through indirect election, and the opposition party existed only in name. Most people weren't too interested in the world beyond South Korea's borders. The North's motto, "Let's Live Our Way," described South Korea during the 1980s. In redistributing resources, the government's whim was more powerful than market principles, so government employees were severely corrupted by rampant bribes and fraudulent dealings, just like in the North. All students, whether they were in high school or college, were in the government-controlled students' national defense corps, heading to school a few times a week in drill uniforms. And once a month the entire citizenry would participate in civil defense drills. The capitals of both countries would turn pitch black once every few months for the mandatory blackout drills, initiated to better prepare for possible air raids.
The South today is nothing like the South of the 1980s. Today's South is actually a completely different country, one that morphed organically into something different from the North. Now it's probably more like Singapore or France. Married couples don't feel the need to have children, the per capita income is around twenty thousand dollars, the futures of banks and large conglomerates aren't set in stone, tens of thousands of foreigners arrive every year to marry Koreans and to obtain jobs, and elementary school students fly out of Inchon International Airport daily to study English abroad. Russian guns are sold in Pusan, sex partners are found on-line, people watch live broadcasts of the Winter Olympics on their cell phones, San Franciscan Ecstasy is transported in FedEx boxes, and half the Korean population invests in mutual funds. The president, humorless and unable to laugh off satire, is the target of jeers, and a party representing the workers was elected to the National Assembly for the first time after liberation from the Japanese occupation. If Ki-yong had predicted that the South would change like this in twenty years, he would have been treated like he was crazy.
Sitting on a red plastic Lotteria chair in Chongno o-ga, Ki-yong thinks about the three countries he's lived in—North Korea, the South of the 1980s and 1990s, and the South of the twenty-first century. One is already a relic of history. He is standing at a fork in the road of his life. Which should he choose, the North or the South? For the first time in his life, he wants to kneel in front of someone and ask: What would you do? No, he would just ask, What do you think I should do? For the past twenty years, he believed that he was working a job that was a little more dangerous than your average one. In a world filled with large-scale layoffs and series of bankruptcies, collapses of department stores and bridges and fires in the subways, he didn't think that his life as a forgotten spy was that perilous. But he forgot about his destiny, which hadn't forgotten about him, just like Paul Bourget's poem that stated, One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Ki-yong's cell vibrates. It's Song-gon. He presses the talk button.
"Hello, sir, it's me."
"Hi, Song-gon."
"I just got back from buying the keyboard, and I was wondering where you were."
"Oh, sorry. Something came up. I don't know if I'll be back in the office today."
There's a brief silence. Normally, he wouldn't think twice about it. But with his nerves on edge, he feels this silence to be very unnatural.
"But ... where are you?"
"Why, did someone ask for me?" he says, calmly.
"No, but I was wondering what I should tell people if they ask for you?"
"Just tell them to call back tomorrow."
"Sure, sure. Oh, and—"
Ki-yong cuts him off. "Sorry, I have to go. I'm talking to someone."
"Okay, got it—" Song-gon is speaking too slowly.
Ki-yong hangs up on him and powers off his phone. He's unsettled. He has a nagging thought that he shouldn't have trusted his own employee. It's a feeling he experienced as he was coming South on the midget submarine from Haeju. The vessel descended slowly, after filling up its oxygen tanks. He'd been excited at the prospect of embarking on a voyage into the vast ocean but at the same time had felt a little claustrophobic from being shut up in the small submarine. He'd given in to a feeling of intense but temporary resignation. There wasn't anything he could do, at least not while they were underwater. Especially for Communists, who aren't able to depend on God or prayer for everything, there was nothing to do other than to consciously surrender to the situation. This sensation is what Ki-yong recalls right at this moment.
He enters a cell phone store. The employee greets him cheerfully. Ki-yong smiles, a little embarrassed, and asks, "Do you have any prepaid phones?"
The clerk, who has punkish hair sculpted with wax, squints at him. "Prepaid phones? What kind are you looking for?"
Ki-yong scratches his head, sheepish. "I can't really open an account under my name because I have bad credit..."
The clerk understands quickly. He takes out an old cell phone from a drawer, covered in scratches and nicks.
"How much is it?" Ki-yong asks. He adds an extra bill on top of what the clerk tells him. The clerk, his face expressionless, tells him that he doesn't know in whose name the phone is registered, and that Ki-yong doesn't have to know either. Pressing several buttons, he shows Ki-yong how to use the phone. Ki-yong thanks him and leaves.
IF HE CONCENTRATES, Chol-su can hear the billiard balls, faintly, hitting against one another downstairs. He closes his eyes once in a while to listen to their clicks. They sound like heavy snow breaking branches in the dark of the night. Crack. Clack. That kind of snow, heavy with moisture, falls quietly onto branches struggling to remain whole. Tree branches are groomed to reach for the sky, stretching higher than the other branches in order to obtain more sunlight. With too much snow piled on it, any branch will break.
When his father's earnings as a comedian weren't sufficient, Chol-su was sent to his grandparents' house in Hoenggye, in the foothills of Taegwallyong in Kangwon Province, two thousand feet above sea level. Potato fields surrounded Chol-su's grandparents' house. Their roof was built low to the ground to withstand strong winter winds, and it was secured at the ends with rocks. A stroke had left Chol-su's grandfather with a limp, and his grandmother was mentally disabled. Despite his pronounced handicap, Grandfather was able to do everything. Their small storage room was filled to the brim with firewood, and they had more than enough potatoes, corn, and rice. During the last week of October, Grandfather would pick up a hoe and dig holes, where he would bury pots of kimchi for the winter. Grandmother was slow, but she wasn't dumb or crazy. She was consistent, a warm and quiet being who loved Chol-su more than anyone else, and was capable of expressing every ounce of that love. Chol-su's gentle, sweet grandmother was a rare soul amid the stoic grandmothers who populated the hills of Kangwon Province. She wasn't good with numbers—in fact, she knew basically nothing about them, as she had a hard time understanding any number beyond five—and didn't know how to read, but she didn't have any problem understanding what people said. When young Chol-su read his children's books out loud for her, Grandmother would lie on her stomach like a kid, immersed in the stories.
"Oh, this is fun. Like snowmen," she'd say. Or sometimes she commented: "The draft is blowing on a whistle," an idiom of her own creation. She sobbed when Chol-su read sad scenes and clapped when something joyous happened. Even though she loved stories, she never had much interest in TV dramas, frowning and becoming agitated when they came on. She preferred being read to, even if it was the same book over and over again, rather than watching a show where scenes changed constantly and new characters appeared. Grandmother's favorite stories were Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. For others, it might have been strange to see his grandmother, living in an isolated cottage in the hills of Kangwon Province, listening intently to A Little Princess, but that was just everyday life for Chol-su. He thought his friends' normal grandmothers were the odd ones, since they always looked so mean and scary, as if they would bare their teeth at any second and growl, unleashing their coarse, dirty breaths.
One very snowy day, so snowy that the branches outside snapped under their burden, the old couple made love, quietly.
"Stop moving around so much," Grandfather whispered, and Chol-su could hear his healthy right hand raising Grandmother's skirts under the covers. Her muslin slip rustled. The lovemaking ended quickly, with a grunt from Grandfather. Afterward, the old couple whispered and giggled like children under the covers.
On another winter day, Grandfather left the house, limping through the snow-covered fields to get some medicine from the village head for Grandmother, whose cold had worsened. But he didn't come back. Chol-su slept fitfully as his grandmother paced the room. The faraway cry of a pheasant reverberated in the hills. The next morning, the villagers retraced Grandfather's footprints, which headed toward the mountain. He hadn't even started out toward the village head's house. The right prints were clear, but the left were rubbed out, since he dragged that foot along the ground. The footprints vanished in front of the conglomerate dairy farm, as if he had ascended to heaven. The surrounding area was an open field, without a single tree. In the winter, the dairy farm and its gentle, curved hills resembled a ski slope. Where did Grandfather go? The villagers were befuddled. He had limped four miles away from home, then disappeared without a trace. He must have walked at least two hours in the dark. Since the town was close to the DMZ and a quick-moving person could reach North Korea in a day by taking the Taebaek mountain range, the police came out to investigate whether this was a case of a Southerner going up north illegally. They knew that Grandfather was from the North, from Wonsan in South Hamgyong Province. But it didn't make sense that an old man would leave his beloved wife behind, tromp through ankle-deep snow drifts, and, limping, get beyond the DMZ where tens of thousands of soldiers were standing guard, all just to visit his childhood hometown.
Grandmother knew intuitively what had happened when she received many visitors and Grandfather was nowhere to be seen. In some sense, Grandmother's intuition was far superior to other people's. Instead of relying on language, she picked up the core idea from tone and inflection. In this way, she was a lot like a dog. She huddled in the corner of the room and cried, heartbroken. "I'm sad with the cicadas. I'm sad with the cicadas."
Until then, Chol-su had always thought that she had been afraid of cicadas, but he wondered if she actually pitied them. Her grammar was incorrect, and maybe because of its awkwardness, Grandmother's acute sorrow was delivered directly to Chol-su's heart. It was too intense to be called sadness. It was an emotion so powerful that Chol-su could feel its heavy weight on his back and shoulders, pressing him down like a sack of potatoes. He fell asleep, praying that his father would hurry up and come and take him away.
His father finally appeared, two days after Grandfather went missing. He embraced Grandmother and didn't say anything for a long time. Grandmother cried like a young girl in his arms. Chol-su's father, whose job was to make people laugh, didn't laugh once while he was there.
It had always been a mystery to Chol-su how his verbose father had been born from his silent grandfather, whose yearly tally of uttered words was fewer than those in the Charter of Citizens' Education, and his grandmother, who didn't know how to string together a proper sentence. Perhaps his father felt pressure to prove his eloquence from childhood. He probably believed that it was the best way to break the perception that he was a stupid child. He became famous by dancing jigs and jabbering rat-tat-tat like a quick-fire gun. One TV program even counted how many words he could utter in one minute. Even a tale long enough for a novel could be told in two minutes if his father had a go at it. His father talked nonstop; people couldn't ask him questions because they were so busy listening. Chol-su's father's most popular shtick was to repeat whatever the other guy was saying, and then tack on what he wanted to say. So he'd often start: "Oh, so you think such and such? Well, I think..."
Chol-su didn't know what words were exchanged between Father and Grandmother. One day, when he came back to the house after venturing into the village to eat dried persimmons, he found Father packing their things. Grandmother had refused to come with them. She had already figured out how to live with her sorrow—she would set the table for her husband and herself, and during meals she would talk with him as if he were sitting there. If a normal person had done this, she would have been sent to the mental hospital, but since it was Grandmother, nobody thought anything of it.
Father and Chol-su went back to Seoul.
"What about Grandmother?" Chol-su inquired.
"The neighbors said they would take care of her."
Three years later, a ginseng hunter discovered Grandfather, covered by a blanket of rotten leaves, in a ravine about three miles away from where his footsteps had vanished. It remained unsolved how he got there and why, but that didn't change the fact that there he was, lying in the depths of the mountains. Not long after Grandfather's burial, Grandmother died in her sleep. Chol-su's father, who was very busy at the time because of a gig hosting a TV show, returned to his hometown to bury his mother. He seemed annoyed and reproachful, as if he were saying, "It would have been easier if you'd both passed away at the same time!"
The cracking of the billiards downstairs drifts up to Chol-su's ears again.
Jong, who's been nodding off, opens his eyes, feeling Chol-su looking at him. "What?"
"Nothing." Chol-su shifts his gaze.
"You should keep tailing the woman. I hear she's pretty?"
"Yeah, but even if she's pretty, she's still the wife. He's lived with her for over ten years."
"Yeah, but I'm sure he'll go see her. Just follow her."
Chol-su gets up from his seat, taking his time.
Jong advises, "Keep your eyes open, 'cause she could be one of them too."
Chol-su nods and is about to head toward the door when Jong's cell rings. "Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, okay," he says, glancing at Chol-su, who decides to wait.
Jong hangs up. "So it turns out that she's not one of them," he informs Chol-su, as he scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to him.
"Should I go arrest him?"
"No, just follow him. This asshole's starting to panic."
"Okay."
"If you lose him, follow the wife, okay?"
Chol-su nods and leaves the office.