The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (54 page)

“I made these drawings whenever I thought of you.” The stifling feeling that has persisted in my heart dissolves at his words. It is late now and Chang asks me to make a phone call.

“To whom?”

The girl looks down without saying anything. Chang pushes a note toward me and says it’s the girl’s older sister’s number. He asks me to tell her that the girl will spend the night at my place.

“My place?” I look up at Chang, startled. The girl does not look up and Chang smiles shyly. He writes down the girl’s name on the note. So her name is Hae-seon. Chang calls her Seon-i, so I thought her name was Seon or Seon-hui. I get up and dial the number. A woman with a high-pitched voice answers the phone.

“Hello, this is Hae-seon’s senior from school. It’s getting late so I invited Hae-seon to sleep over at my place.”

“Where do you live?”

“In . . . in Garibong-dong.”

“Can Hae-seon come to the phone?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to speak with her.”

I hand over the receiver to the girl who is standing next to Chang. While she is speaking to her sister, I ask Chang when he’s heading back to the country.

“Tomorrow . . . Hae-seon was coming to visit her sister so I came to see her off.”

“Did you get your train ticket?”

“I’m going to take the express bus.”

“When do you enter service?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

I return to my lone room after parting with Chang and the girl, and stay wrapped under my blanket for a long time without
turning on the light. Then I get up, turn on the light and open the notebook that I got from Chang. I fiddle with the fluorescent teddy bear in my pocket. What is he doing, at this hour? I sit gazing into Chang’s little drawings, then walk down to Hui-jae, carrying my pillow.

“I’m going to sleep here,
Eonni
.”

Hui-jae says okay. “Is anything wrong?”

“No.”

“Talk to me. Talking makes it feel better.”

I don’t talk. Hui-jae looks at me, with my mouth shut tight, then gets up, goes into the kitchen and puts a pot of water on the kerosene stove.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll make you some noodles. You’ll feel better with a full stomach.”

In the morning, I, nineteen years old, take the subway to Seoul Station and from there take the bus to the express bus terminal. My face is puffy and swollen after having Hui-jae’s noodles at a late hour. I wait for Chang at the booth for the tickets to Jeongeup. Past noon, and still Chang does not show. It’s past three in the afternoon when Chang finally appears in the distance, walking with his shoulders drooped. His eyes widen when he sees me.

“Since when have you been here?”

“A short while now.”

“But you didn’t know when I’d come.”

“I felt I’d see you if I came.”

We just sit there, on the waiting room bench.

“Your studies going well?”

“Uh-huh.”

Neither Chang or I mention the girl. I want to tell him something nice but instead blurt out something completely different. “I’m not going to write you!”

“I know.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s been a long time since you’ve written.”

The harder I try to speak cheerfully, the stifling ache in my heart worsens. It makes me so uncomfortable to put on an expression that is opposite of how I feel inside. I get to thinking that from now on I will start living in a manner opposite to my feelings. Laugh when I feel like crying, say I’m not angry when I am, answer that I’ve been here a short while when it’s really been a long time. His departure time arrives and Chang gets to his feet. At the ticket gate he looks back at nineteen-year-old me and says, “I’ll be back soon.” As if he’s going on an errand for his mother, not entering military service.

A thunderous summer night. It looks like the typhoon is about to blow our roof off. Startled by the lightning rays assaulting the lone room, I head down to Hui-jae’s room, carrying my pillow. She is sitting with her door open, staring into nowhere.

I close the door behind me as I step inside but she remains still.
Eonni
. I cover her eyes with my palms. My palms feel wet. She’s crying.

“Why is life so hard?”

I sit there clasping my pillow.

“Is it just me? Or is it hard for other people as well?”

Oldest Brother sends money from Chungmu. My oldest brother. In his letter, he writes as if he was born into this world to take care of me. Pay rent on time, don’t be too frugal, the weather’s hot so buy some melons to eat.

Since I began writing this, fall, winter, and spring have come and gone, and now it is summer. I should finish before summer was over. Ever since I began I hoped it would be done soon, but now my heart felt stifled, as if I’d never contemplated an ending for this. The phone had been unplugged for more than ten days. But only now I made myself sit at the desk, just barely. During those days, with my phone unplugged, I just lingered by the desk day and night, laying myself down, then lifting myself up again. To keep myself from getting anxious amidst continuing rain, I closely followed the news in print and on TV. The typhoon passed and an oil tanker hit into a rock off the southern coast. The TV screen showed black oil slicks formed on the southern seas. Oysters and fish in aqua farms were afloat on the water after dying en masse. As I watched choppers spray dispersant over the sea, my eyes attached to the screen, I wondered if I was memorizing everything I was reading and seeing. No living creature will be able to live in those mudflats now.

Why did they fire at civilians waving white flags? The prosecutors’ office decided not to indict any of the fifty-eight men accused of charges related to the May 18 Gwangju Uprising. They said they will not take the case to court for a criminal trial. The prosecutors’ approach to solving the May 18 Uprising case is to conclude that they do not have power of prosecution. That a successful coup cannot be penalized. This man, who had pushed for a civilian government every chance he had, who had solemnly declared, as he abandoned his path as an opposition leader and joined the ruling party, that in order to catch the tiger one had to enter the tiger’s cave, the same man was now saying that we should leave the May 18 Uprising case to history.

Why aren’t they going after the tiger? He responds to my question with a smile, as if to say it’s nothing new. How come there are people who died but no one who killed them? His expression remains sullen.

“The top leaders of this country view the citizens as mere subordinates. Why should they be afraid of their lackeys? When a
subordinate disobeys his superior, their impulse is to court-martial them. There’s this radio drama titled
The Fifth Republic
and . . .”

The mention of the term
Fifth Republic
pulled me in.

“In the early days of the Fifth Republic, the harvest was bad and in 1982 they had to import rice. The show featured a scene where the chief executive of the Fifth Republic reminisced about those times . . .” He stopped mid-sentence and straightened his neck. Then he spoke in a voice that imitated that of the chief executive. “I engaged in psychological warfare at that point. The people of this country were anxious with worry about food because of the bad harvest. I sent down orders for the trucks to drive six, seven times through downtown before unloading the rice subsidies at Gwangju Station. The same thing for the trucks headed for Daegu. I was waging a psychological war.”

He seems to be putting on a comedy routine and I let out a chuckle, but his face hardened.

The government imports rice after a bad harvest—how does that call for psychological warfare? He took power after a sweeping victory at the battle in Gwangju in May 1980, so even after he became President, he is engaged in a war against the people. It might be understandable if we were at war and the military was running out of rice provisions and the soldiers’ morale was at stake, but this president was waging a psychological war against civilians in a time of peace . . . There was no other way of looking at it, that he saw the nation as military barracks, and the people as subordinates under his command.

I feel as if my face and my heart were swelling up, puffy and plump.

I have sat myself down at the desk now, so my writing will be done before long. I will now finish it. Soon I will no longer have more to say.

At night, when I sat at the chair with all the lights turned off, I saw the forest outside my window. When the wind blew, the pine trees shook and swished. When it rained, magpies sat at the tips of
white pines, making a fuss. Have you ever gazed out at the forest stirring and shifting under attack by rain and wind? Have you ever heard pines trees, laceshrubs, and crape myrtles, stirring and prattling? It seemed that at night trees turned into spiritual beings. They seemed to bring back those who were forgotten. Bringing back to mind what we still remember—the person’s finger, neck, even the spot under one eye. Have you ever felt that this person was walking toward you down the narrow path between the trees, this person you can no longer be with, this person who has lost his words? If you have never felt a chill in your heart at the forest stirring and prattling on a windy, rainy night, it means you have no sin to repent. I, for one, get scared. Nevertheless, each night I turned out all the lights and sat in my chair, gazing out at the forest. Whenever I was overcome with fear, I straightened by body and placed my arms on the window frame.

Yes, say what happened that morning. Get it done and over with.

That morning I ran into her in the alley. Thinking back now, we did not run into each other. She would have been waiting for me. We walked out of the alley together and as we were about to part, she tells me something, as if she just remembered. She’s going on vacation. She’s heading to the country in the afternoon but she forgot to lock the door. She’ll be in the country a few days, so would I lock her door when I come back in the evening, she asked. Adding that the lock was hanging on the door latch. It was no big favor and I answered that I would. No. I think I might have asked, what about during the day, wouldn’t it be safer if you went back now and locked it? There’s nothing to take even if I don’t lock it, she said. Which was true. We did not own anything that others would want to steal. In the evening I returned from school and before heading up to our room on the third floor, I fastened
the lock on her door on the first floor. The lock was hanging on the door latch, unfastened. I think I might have peeked into the kitchen for a second as I hooked the lock onto the latch. Her washbowl and soapbox were arranged neatly, like any other day. I could sense the traces of her hands in the dishcloth that had been washed and wrung, and her pot, wiped and scrubbed with a metal pad, sat upside down on the kerosene stove, quiet and twinkling. I think I might have also caught a glimpse of her student shoes, which she had worn for a short while. But that was all. All I did was to take the lock that was hanging on the door and fasten it to the latch, as she had asked.