Please Look After Mom (4 page)

In the shed that day, Mom, whose face was marred with pain, told you she couldn’t even cry when her sister died.

“Why not? You should have cried if you wanted to,” you said, feeling a little relieved that she was returning to the Mom you knew, even though she spoke without revealing any emotion.

Your mom blinked placidly. “I can’t cry anymore.”

You didn’t say anything.

“Because then my head hurts so much it feels like it’s going to explode.”

With the setting sun warming your back, you gazed down at Mom’s face cradled on your lap as if it were the first time you were seeing it. Mom got headaches? So severe that she
couldn’t even cry? Her dark eyes, which used to be as brilliant and round as the eyes of a cow that is about to give birth, were hidden under wrinkles. Her pale, fat lips were dry and cracked. You picked up her arm, which she’d flung on the platform, and placed it on her stomach. You stared at the dark sunspots on the back of her hand, saturated with a lifetime of labor. You could no longer say you knew Mom.

When your uncle was alive, he would come to see Mom every Wednesday. He had just returned to Chongup, after a nomadic life of roaming the country. There was no specific reason for the visit; he just rode in on his bike and saw Mom and left. Sometimes, instead of coming into the house, he called from the gate, “Sister! Doing well?” Then, before your mom could get out to the yard, he called, “I’m going now!” and turned his bike around and left. As far as you knew, Mom and her brother were not that close. At some point before you were born, your uncle had borrowed quite a lot of money from Father, but he never paid it back. Your mom sometimes brought that up, bitterly. She said, because of your uncle, she always felt indebted to Father and Father’s sister. Even though it was your uncle’s debt, it was hard for your mom to come to terms with the knowledge that he didn’t pay it back. When four or five years went by without news from your uncle, your mom always wondered, “What could your uncle be doing these days?” You couldn’t tell if Mom was worrying about him or resenting him.

One day, your mom heard someone push the gate open and enter, saying, “Sister, are you in?” Mom, who was inside
eating tangerines with you, threw open the door and ran out. It happened so quickly. Who was it that got her so excited? Curious, you followed her out. Mom paused on the porch, looking at the gate, shouted, “Brother!” to the person standing next to it, and ran to him—not caring that she was barefoot. It was your uncle. Your mom, who had run out like the wind, beat his chest with her fist and cried, “Brother! Brother!” You watched her from the porch. It was the first time you had heard her call someone “Brother.” When she referred to her brother, she always called him “your uncle.” You don’t understand why you were so surprised when you saw Mom run to your uncle and call him “Brother” in a delighted nasal tone, when you had known all along that you had an uncle. You realized, Oh, Mom has a brother, too! Sometimes you laughed to yourself when you remembered what your mom was like that day, your aging mom jumping down from the porch and running across the yard to your uncle, shouting “Brother!” as if she were a child—Mom acting like a girl even younger than you. That mom was stuck in your head. It made you think, even Mom … You don’t understand why it took you so long to realize something so obvious. To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom. Until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you sometimes thought of Mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newlywed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.

You couldn’t leave Mom and return to the city after seeing her like that in the shed. Father was in Sokcho, with some people from the Regional Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. He was supposed to be home in two days. Although Mom got over the severe pain, she couldn’t free herself from the headache, and she couldn’t crack a smile, let alone cry. She couldn’t even understand your suggestion that she should go to the hospital. When you helped her into the house, she walked gingerly, trying to keep her pain in check. A long time passed before she could talk. Mom said that she always got headaches but only had terrible ones “once in a while,” and that she could put up with it since those moments passed.

Did your siblings know about Mom’s headaches? Did Father?

You wanted to tell them, and to take her to a big hospital as soon as you returned to the city. When she was able to move around by herself, Mom asked, “Don’t you need to go back?” At some point your visits home had become shorter; you would come for only a few hours and return to the city. You thought of your date the next day, but told your mom that you were going to stay the night. You remember the smile that spread across her face.

You left the live octopus you’d bought at the Pohang fish market in the kitchen, since neither you nor your mom knew what to do with it, and you sat across from Mom at the table like old times, quietly eating a simple meal of rice and panchan, side dishes of water kimchi, braised tofu, sautéed anchovies, and toasted seaweed. When Mom wrapped a piece of
seaweed around some rice, as she did when you were little, and held it out, you took it and ate it. After dinner, to digest the food, you and Mom walked around the outside of the house. It was no longer the same house you grew up in, but the front, side, and back yards were still connected, like before. In the back yard, on the ledge, there were still so many tall clay jars. When you were young, they were filled with soy sauce, red-pepper paste, salt, and bean paste, but now they were empty. As the two of you walked, Mom sometimes leading and sometimes falling behind, she suddenly asked you why you’d come home.

“I went to Pohang.…”

“Pohang is far from here.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s farther to come here from Pohang than from Seoul.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“What made you come here from Pohang, when it seems like you don’t ever have time to visit?”

Instead of answering, you grabbed Mom’s hand, desperately, as if you were grasping for a lifeline in the darkness, because you didn’t know how to explain your emotions. You told Mom that in the early morning you had gone to lecture at a Braille library in Pohang.

“A Braille library?” Mom asked.

“Braille is what the blind read with their fingers.”

Mom nodded. As you circled the house, you told Mom about your trip to Pohang. For a few years, the Braille library had been asking you to visit, but each time you couldn’t because of a previous engagement. In early spring, you’d received another call. You had just published your latest work. The librarian told you that they wanted to publish your newest
book in Braille. Braille! You didn’t know much about it, except that it was the language of the blind, as you told Mom. You listened to the librarian impassively, as if you were hearing about a book you hadn’t yet read. The librarian said they wanted your permission. If the librarian hadn’t said “permission,” you might not have agreed to go to the Braille library. That word “permission” moved you: blind people wanted to read your book, they were asking for your permission to recreate your book in a language only they could communicate through.… You answered, “Sure,” suddenly feeling powerless. The librarian said that the book would be completed by November, and that Braille Day was also in November. He said they would appreciate it if you could come that day and participate in the dedication ceremony for the book. You wondered how things had gotten to that point, but you couldn’t go back on your “sure.” It probably helped that it was early spring, and November seemed far away. But time passed. Spring passed, summer came and went, fall came, and soon enough it was November. And then that day had arrived.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through. Your trip to the Braille library and the events that occurred there were all things you could have predicted if you’d really thought about the Braille library. But you were busy in the spring, summer, and fall. Even on the day you headed to the Braille library, you weren’t thinking about the people you were going to meet there; you were worried that you would be late for the ten o’clock meeting time. You barely made it onto the 8 a.m. flight, then
arrived in Pohang, took a cab to the Braille library, and went to the waiting room. The director sat down facing you, with the help of a volunteer. He greeted you politely—“Thank you for coming all this way”—and held his hand out. Trying to mask your nervousness, you shook it, saying brightly, “Hello.” His hand was soft. The director talked about your book until right before the event. You smiled and nodded at this blind man who had read your work, even though he couldn’t see you smile or nod. That day was Braille Day, their holiday. When you entered the auditorium, four hundred people awaited you, some still trickling in with the help of volunteers. There were men and women of all ages, but no children. The ceremony began, and a few people came to the front, one by one, and made little speeches. Some people received certificates of appreciation. They spoke about your book, and you went to the front to receive the Braille version. Your one book became four volumes in Braille. The books given to you by the director were twice as big as yours, but they were light. You heard applause as you returned to your seat with the books in your hands. The ceremony continued. As plaques were given to congratulate readers, you opened one of the volumes. At once you felt faint. An infinite number of dots on white paper. It was as if you had fallen into a black hole—as if you were walking on stairs you knew so well that climbing them didn’t even register in your mind and, while thinking about something else, you missed a step and tumbled down. Braille proliferated the white paper, each letter a hole made by a needle, words you couldn’t decipher at all. You told Mom that you’d flipped past the first page and the second page and the third page, and then closed the book. Because your mom was listening intently to your story, you continued.

At the end of the ceremony, you stood in front of everyone and talked about your work. When you laid the books on the dais and looked out at the audience, your back stiffened. You had no idea what to focus on, standing in front of four hundred people who couldn’t see.

“So what did you do?” your mom asked.

You told her that the fifty minutes given to you seemed never-ending. You were the type of person who looked into someone’s eyes when you talked. When you talked you sometimes told the entire story, or maybe only half, depending on the feeling you got from the person’s eyes. Some eyes coaxed out stories you’d never told anyone. You wondered, Does Mom know that I’m like that? In front of four hundred blind people, you didn’t know whom to look at or how to start talking. Some eyes were closed, some half open, and some hidden behind dark glasses; some eyes seemed to stare straight through you and your nervousness. Even though all eyes were aimed at you, you became silent in front of eyes that couldn’t see you. You wondered what would be the point of talking about your book in front of these unseeing eyes. But it wasn’t appropriate to talk about something else, such as anecdotes from your life. If anything, they should be telling you their life stories. Because you felt stuck, the first thing you said into the mike was “What should I talk about?” They all burst out laughing. Did they laugh because they thought you meant you could tell any story? Or to make you feel more comfortable? A man in his mid-forties replied, “Didn’t you come to talk about your work?” The man’s eyes were pointed at you but were closed. Focusing on them, you started to talk about the inspiration behind the book, the things you experienced emotionally during its writing, and the hopes you had for the book
after you were done. You were surprised. Of all the people you’d met, they listened to your words the most intently. They demonstrated with their bodies that they were listening carefully. One person was nodding, and another pushed one foot forward, and someone else was leaning into the person in front of him. Even though you couldn’t understand a word of their writing system, they had read your book and asked questions and shared their thoughts. You told Mom that they revealed such positive feelings about that book, more than anyone else you had encountered. Mom, who was listening quietly, said, “Still, even they’ve read your book.” A short silence flowed between you and Mom. Mom asked you to go on. You continued.