The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (37 page)

“
Oppa
, please don’t!”

When I open my eyes, everyone is asleep.

Through the broken window of our lone room, the warm spring sun shines in on my brothers. And on Cousin, lying prone with her back in the sunlight. It is such a peaceful sight that I wonder if it was a dream, all that anger exploding all at once. Oldest Brother’s hand is wrapped in bandages and Third Brother has a cut on his lip, swollen red. On my forehead sits a cold wet towel and I can smell medicine on my lips. The door opens slightly and Hui-jae
eonni
peeks in. I, eighteen years old, shut my eyes. Hui-jae’s eyes linger on my closed eyes and I don’t open them again until she looks away. She closes the door and quietly walks down the steps. Only after I hear her arrive at the bottom of the stairs and close the door behind her, I sit up. Cousin hears me move and sits up as well.

“Are you okay?”

“It was scary, wasn’t it?”

“But who would’ve thought you’d actually faint?”

It was May. The Seoul Spring was over. The Seoul Spring that lasted two hundred and three days.

I took my seven-year-old nephew out to lunch. He had been swimming at the pool over the winter and now looked fresh and alive, enough to make the spring weather seem unremarkable. I’d heard he was a handful for his family these days. Whatever caught his eyes, he would inquire about, nitpick, double-check, over and over, making his parents laugh, or feel trapped, or so I had heard. When his mother noticed him passing gas anywhere he went, she told him, “Please don’t pass gas everywhere you go.”

Then one day, his mother was napping and he shook her awake to ask, in all seriousness, “Mommy, may I pass gas now?”

When his mother said, “You may,” and closed her eyes again, this time he pulled up her eyelids and asked, “Mommy, how come after I pass gas I want to go poo?”

He was now beginning to read, and he was hiking in the mountain with his father when he asked, out of the blue, “What’s
sudoegal
?”

“Sudoegal?” His father, my third oldest brother, was clueless, and my nephew said, “Sudoegal, over there.” He was pointing to a signboard outside a restaurant by the hiking route, listing the menu, from boiled beef and barbecued ribs to pig’s feet. The boy had read the list vertically, creating a nonsensical jumble of syllables. Even as I listened to my brother tell the story and burst into laughter, the boy’s expression reflected a curiosity. He had to know what exactly this thing was called
sudoegal.

Sweat gathered inside my young nephew’s hand as it held on to mine. The willow trees lining the street were slender and supple, and the distant mountains were tinted in a mild shade of green. The boy looked up at me as we passed under a gingko tree grown thick with new leaves.

“Auntie?”

“Yes?”

“Are leaves clothes for trees?”

Although we were holding hands, I had not actually been paying attention, my eyes scanning the flowers that had lost their petals overnight in the rain, and this question caught me off guard. It’s finally coming, I suppose.

When I could not quite answer, the child shook off my hand and asked again, “Auntie, are leaves clothes for trees?” Leaves? Clothes? Well, I suppose leaves were the first clothes for mankind. I gave him a vague yes. Wearing a sunny smile, he was just like a soap bubble. We walked on for quite a while longer.

“Let’s turn out the lights and get to bed”—this was his parents’ routine line each night at home. The expression, “turn out the lights,” seemed to have taken on a profound significance in the child’s mind. One day I was leaning back on the sofa with my eyes closed and he had shaken me with his hands.

“Auntie, why do you turn out your eyes?”

Recalling this, I let out a small laugh as he found my hand again and resumed his questions like some philosopher.

“But then why do they take off their clothes in the winter?” He was talking about trees again.

So young, and impatient as well. When I stammered, “Well . . . ,” unable to come up with an answer, he pressed me hard, asking again why they take off their clothes when it’s so cold. “Well, that’s because . . .” I was at a loss when he finally produced his own answer, his voice exploding with a clang. “It’s because they’re going swimming, right?”

Swimming? Since leaves were clothes for trees, and since he took off his clothes when he went swimming, he had probably found his answer in that. When I just smiled, unable to respond whether he was right or wrong, he kept on asking, “I’m right, aren’t I? It’s because they’re going swimming, right?”

Suddenly in my mind a tree performed a handstand.

I let go of his hand and ran off, bursts of laughter escaping from between my lips. He was just as worked up, tailing right behind me and asking, “Right? Right?” What persistence! I turned around and yelled. “Hey! You
Sudoegal
! I don’t know—I don’t know, either.”

May comes around every year. Just as it did back in the days of the poet Yeongnang’s days, when he would cry for three hundred and sixty days, dismayed at the peonies falling in May. Just as it did in 1980, the year I was eighteen years old.

May, the name of our grievous wound.

May that year comes at us as a wound, vanquishing all of the usual vigor that May spurts out at the world. Wherever we were back then, whatever we had been doing, as long as we live on in this land, May will always be May of that year.

May that year. One weekend in May, left-handed An Hyang-suk gets on the train to Gwangju to visit her hometown
Hwasun, famous for the statue of the reclining Buddha. She said she’d be back by Monday but she does not return. One, two, three days . . . It’s only on the seventh or eighth day that she arrives back at school, out of uniform.

“What are you doing out of uniform?”

While checking attendance, the homeroom teacher takes notice of An Hyang-suk’s attire.

“Come see me at the teachers’ office!”

An Hyang-suk returns from the teachers’ office with a pale face. Upon closer observation, I see that both her face and her body have turned visible thinner. We are in the middle of our abacus calculation class. The teacher instructs us to work on ten level three problems from our workbook and paces up and down the aisles. The classroom turns quiet, except for the rattling of the abacus beads. When the teacher walks past us, down the aisle, An Hyang-suk whispers to me.

“It’s complete chaos . . . People have died in great numbers!”

I look at her with confusion.

“Phones don’t work, trains have stopped running, guns are going off—it’s madness.”

“Where?”

“In Gwangju. Nobody will believe me. Not even our teacher. My uniform got all torn up, pushed and pulled by the crowd . . . I made a narrow escape, I tell you.”

The abacus teacher turns around at her desk and heads down our aisle again. An Hyang-suk shuts her mouth and begins working on her abacus again with her left hand. After the teacher has moved on past us, An Hyang-suk whispers again.

“I’m so scared.”

“You said the trains are not running. How did you get back?”

“On a tractor.”

“Tractor?”

“My uncle took me on his tractor through back roads along the highway, to the train station in Iri . . . Gwangju is completely
closed down. It’s turned into a sea of blood. No one can get in or out.”

“Who’s killing who?”

“The soldiers are killing citizens.”

“The soldiers, how come?”

“. . . I don’t know. Uncle told me to keep my mouth shut . . . Keep this to yourself.”

An Hyang-suk gazes deep into my eyes, which are sparkling as I listen to her story.

“How can it be so quiet here in Seoul?”

The Seoul Spring, the forsythia that had blossomed out of the blue in the dead of winter, is trampled over by the armored vehicles of the New Military Group. Perhaps armored vehicles were invented for the purpose of trampling over spring. It was the Soviet armored vehicles that shoved away the Prague Spring. Or were they called tanks back then?

The subway train speeds past our lone room with a loud thump. People split off into separate directions in fear, lifting their fingers to the lips to gesture, “Hush.” Oldest Brother sees off Third Brother as he leaves for a farm in the mountains, carrying a bag full of law books.

The conveyor belts slow down. After the trampling of the Seoul Spring, we no longer get overtime shifts and work slows down visibly as well at the stereo section’s preparation line. Sometimes work stops for two hours straight. Even the foreman’s gait has slowed down as he moves back and forth between lines. There’s talk here and there that the stereo section might be closed down. That export deals have been cut off. The engineering high school student interning at the inspection division sits at the line opposite from us, making scribbles on the conveyor belt. Cousin steals a glance at the back of his neck. Only when he lifts his head, yawning with boredom, Cousin takes her eyes off him and dips
her head. The intern’s eyes are now on Yun Sun-im
eonni
. Cousin looks at Yun Sun-im as well. As she gazes at Yun Sun-im’s wavy curls, Cousin’s eyes well up with sadness.

Whenever I encounter a middle-aged woman with an amethyst ring on her plump finger, I am reminded of our landlady, who owned the house with the thirty-seven rooms. She did not live in that house. The only days we see her are the three days around the weekend toward the end of each month. She stops by in order to collect the rent and utility bills. A black sedan parked in the alley is the sign that she is there. Her chauffeur is always dozing off in the car after parking it in the alley and we have to walk sideways to squeeze past the car whenever we have to go through. The bridge of her nose, powdered white, is as shiny and smooth as the amethyst ring on her finger. This woman is exacting in her calculations where her interests are concerned. The utility bills that she divides up among the tenants each month are accurate down to a single won.