After the policeman stamped on your stomach, you chose to leave the labor union. After you got out of jail, you rejoined Seong-hee for a while in the labor movement, but you went against her advice in transferring to the environmental organization, which was quite different in character from Seong-hee’s union. Afterward, you chose not to seek her out again even while knowing how much this would wound her. The Dictaphone and tapes in the backpack, which is cutting into your shoulders, will, after all this, wind up in the post to Yoon as soon as you can get to the post office on Monday morning. Unused.
But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come around again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you’d made then. Like those times during a primary school dodgeball game when, having nimbly avoided danger thus far, there was no one but you left standing on your team and you had to face up to the challenge of catching the ball. Like the time your feet led you to the square, drawn there by the resonant song of the young women on the bus, even though you knew that armed soldiers were stationed there. Like that final night when they asked who was willing to stay until the end and you quietly raised your hand. We mustn’t let ourselves become victims, Seong-hee had said. We mustn’t let them dismiss us like that. That spring night with the moon’s watchful eye silently bearing witness to the girls gathered on the roof. Who was it who slipped that sliver of peach between your lips? You can’t recall.
Now
You walk away from the hospital’s main building. The morning’s half-light comes creeping over the grass as you cut back across it. You slide both hands beneath the straps of the backpack, its dragging weight like a lump of iron. Like a child you’re carrying on your back. So perhaps your hands are supporting, comforting, the backpack a baby’s sling.
I’m the one who’s responsible, aren’t I?
You ask this of the blue-tinged darkness undulating around you.
If I’d demanded that you go home, Dong-ho; if I’d begged, while we sat there eating gimbap, you would have done as I asked, wouldn’t you?
And that’s why you’re coming to me now.
To ask why I’m still alive.
You walk, your eyes’ red rims seeming carved with some keen blade. Hurrying back to the bright lights of the emergency department.
There’s only one thing for me to say to you, onni.
If you’ll allow me to.
If you’ll please allow me.
The streetlights lining the road that branches off to the funeral hall and the emergency department, the main building and the annex, all switch themselves off at exactly the same time. As you walk along the straight white line that follows the center of the road, you raise your head to the falling rain.
Don’t die.
Just don’t die.
I followed you as soon as I spotted you, Dong-ho.
You had a good head of steam on, whereas I’m a bit doddery these days. Would I ever catch you up? If you’d turned your head just a little to the side, I’d have been able to see your profile, but you just kept going, for all the world as though there was something driving you on.
Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you—I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s hand-me-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirtsleeves. It was your narrow shoulders, your own special way of walking, loping like a little fawn with your head thrust slightly forward. It was definitely you.
You’d come back to me this one time, come back to let your mother catch just a glimpse of you, and this doddery old woman couldn’t even catch you up. An hour I spent searching among the market stalls, down the alleyways, and you weren’t there. My knees were throbbing something awful and I felt dizzy as a whirligig, so I just plumped right down on the ground where I was. But I knew if someone from the neighborhood saw me there, they’d be bound to kick up a fuss, so I pushed myself to my feet even though my head was still swimming.
Following you all the way into the market alleys, I guess I hadn’t realized what a distance I’d come; getting back home was such a slog that my throat was soon parched. Of course, I’d gone and come out without so much as a single coin in my pocket, so all I could think of was to stick my head into the nearest shop and cadge a glass of water. Then again, they might think I was some old beggar-woman come to bother them. So I just had to keep on walking, supporting myself against the wall whenever there was one to hand. I shuffled by the construction site with my hand clamped tightly over my mouth. There was dust flying all over the place, and it set me coughing. How had I not noticed it when I’d gone by in the other direction? Somewhere where there was such an almighty racket as all that, where the road was being carved up.
—
Last summer the torrential rain made potholes in the alley in front of our house. The kids from the neighborhood were forever losing their footing there, and if the wheel of a stroller accidentally went in, it was in danger of never coming out again. In the end, the city council sent some people to re-lay the tarmac. This was early September, when some days were still real scorchers. They fetched the boiling tarmac in a wheelbarrow, bubbling like a stew. Poured it down, smoothed it out, and gave it a good trampling until it’d firmed up.
On the evening the workmen finally packed up their stuff and left, I thought I’d just go and have a look at it. They’d strung a thin rope barrier around the newly laid tarmac, though, so I kept to the edges and tried to tread as lightly as possible. I could feel my battered old body slowly absorbing its warmth like a tree sucks up water: first my ankles, then my calves, then my aching knee joints. The next morning the rope was gone, so I ventured out onto the surface. It was much warmer in the center than the edges had been, flooding into me like a wave. I walked right the way up and down the alley after lunch and dinner, and the next morning, too. Your elder brother and his wife were down from Seoul, and I could see her wondering what’d got into me. “Wouldn’t you like to sit down, Mother?” she asked. “That tarmac must still be awfully hot…”
“Ah, the cold’s deep in my bones. Do you know how warm this stuff is? It’ll do my joints a world of good.”