Your brother shook his head, murmuring to himself about how something wasn’t right with me. He’d been suggesting I move in with him for a few years now. “Where did she run off to?” I heard him mutter.
The tarmac held its heat for three days straight, but eventually it cooled down. Nothing to feel regretful over there, I knew, but I couldn’t help wishing it’d stayed. All the same, I’d wander out there after lunch to stand on it for a bit and wait. After all, I thought, it might still be just that bit warmer than other places. And if I stood there and kept a good look out, who’s to say I wouldn’t spot you again, striding by like the last time?
I can’t get my head around why I didn’t just call your name that day. Why I just came tottering on behind, struggling for breath and dumb as a mute. If I call your name next time, will you please just turn around? You don’t need to say “Yes, Mum?” or anything like that. Just turn round so I can see you.
—
But it wasn’t really you, was it?
No.
It can’t have been.
I buried you with my own two hands. Removed your PE jacket and your sky-blue tracksuit bottoms, and dressed you in your dark winter uniform, over a white shirt. Tightened your belt just so and put clean gray socks on you. When they put you in a plywood coffin and loaded it up onto the rubbish truck, I said I’d ride at the front to watch over you. I didn’t have a clue where the truck was heading. I was too busy staring back to the rear, to where you were.
Those hundreds of people in their dark clothes looked like ants carrying coffins up the sandy mound. My memory’s hazy, but I can recall your brothers standing there, tears trickling down over lips pressed tight together. The words your father said to me before his death, how stunned he’d been when, instead of crying like all the others, I’d pulled a handful of grass out of the turf they’d removed for the grave, and swallowed it. Swallowed it, sank down to the ground and vomited it back up again then, once it had clawed its way out of me, yanked up another fistful and stuffed it into my mouth. Mind you, I can’t remember any of that myself. The stuff that happened before, before the truck carried us off to the cemetery, that’s clear enough. More than clear enough. How your face looked that last time, right before the lid was put on the coffin. How ashen it was, how haggard. I’d never realized you were so deathly pale.
Later, your middle brother explained that your face was so white because of all the blood you’d lost when they shot you. And that was why the coffin barely weighed a thing. Not just because you were such a little slip of a thing. Your brother’s own eyes were all bloodshot as he ground out the words. I will pay them back for this evil, he said, and I can tell you that knocked me for six. What are you talking about? I demanded. How could it ever be possible to “pay back” the evil of the country murdering your brother? If anything were to happen to you, I wouldn’t be long for this world.
And even now thirty years have gone by, on the anniversaries of your and your father’s death, I find myself troubled when I watch your brother straighten up after bowing over the offerings. The thin line of his lips, the stoop of his shoulders, the flecks of white in his hair. It’s the soldiers, not him, that your death should have weighed on, so why did he grow so old before his time, so much quicker than all his friends? Is he still troubled by thoughts of revenge? Whenever I think this, my heart sinks.
—
Your eldest brother’s quite the opposite, always sure to keep a smile on his face, and never a hint of anything else. Twice a month he comes down to visit, to slip me a little something for the housekeeping and make sure I’m all set up for meals. Then he’s back up to Seoul the very same day, so his wife will never even know he was gone. Your middle brother lives practically round the corner, but the eldest has always been kindly by nature.
You, your father, and your eldest brother are all cut from the same cloth, you know. Your long waist and sloping shoulders are a family trait. As for your ever-so-slightly-elongated eyes, your square front teeth, you were a carbon copy of your brother. Even now, when he laughs and reveals those two front teeth, broad and flat as a rabbit’s, the look of youthful innocence they give him clashes with the lines etched deeply around his eyes.
Your eldest brother was eleven when you were born. He turned into a teenage girl around you, running home as soon as school was out so he could dandle you on his knee. He cooed over your pretty smile, supported your neck with tender care while he held you in his arms, and rocked you back and forth until you gurgled with delight. After you’d passed your first birthday and he could carry you on his back in a sling, he’d strap you on and proceed to stride around the yard, singing painfully out of tune.
Who would’ve thought that such a sweet, sensitive boy as that would end up scrapping with your middle brother? That now, more than twenty years down the line, they’d find it so painful even to be in the same room, barely able to exchange more than a handful of words?
It happened three days after your father died, when the eldest had come back home to join us for the grave visit. I was busy in the kitchen when I heard something smash, and when I ran into the main room, there they were going at it, full-grown lads of twenty-seven and thirty-two, panting fit to burst and trying to grab each other by the throat.
“All you had to do was take Dong-ho by the hand and drag him home. What the hell were you thinking of, letting him stay there all that time? How come you let Mother go there on her own that last day? It’s all very well to say you could tell that your words were just going in one ear and out the other, but you must have known he would end up dead if he stayed there; you were perfectly aware, how could you let it happen?”
An incoherent, drawn-out howl burst from your middle brother; he flew at the eldest and grappled him to the floor. The pair of them were yowling like animals.
I suppose I could’ve tried to pull them apart, sat them down, and straightened the whole thing out. Instead, I turned and went back into the kitchen. I didn’t want to think about anything. I just carried on flipping pancakes, stirring soup, and threading meat onto skewers.
—
I can’t be sure of anything now.
When I went to see you that last time, what might have happened if you hadn’t promised to be back that very evening? If you hadn’t spoken to me so gently, setting my mind at ease?