You recall your maternal grandmother’s death last winter. What started out as a mild cold soon turned into pneumonia, and she was admitted to the hospital. She’d been there around a fortnight when you and your mother went to visit her, one Saturday afternoon when you were basking in the relief of having got through the end-of-term exams. But then, without warning, your grandmother’s condition deteriorated. Your mother contacted her brother and told him to come as quickly as possible, but he was still stuck in traffic when the old woman breathed her last.
Your childhood visits to her home inevitably included a quiet “follow me” as the elderly woman, her back bent into the shape of the letter ?, led the way to the dark room that was used as a pantry. Then, you knew, she would open the larder door and bring out the cakes that were stored there to use as ceremonial offerings on the anniversary of a relative’s death: pastries made from oil and honey, and block-shaped cakes of pounded glutinous rice. You would take an oil-and-honey pastry with a conspiratorial grin, and your grandmother would smile back at you, her eyes creasing into slits. Her death was every bit as quiet and understated as she herself had been. Something seemed to flutter up from her face, like a bird escaping from her shuttered eyes above the oxygen mask. You stood there gaping at her wrinkled face, suddenly that of a corpse, and wondered where that fluttering, winged thing had disappeared to.
What about those who are now in the gym hall—have their souls also escaped their bodies, flying away like birds? Where could they possibly be going? It surely wasn’t some alien place like heaven or hell, which you’d heard about the one time you ever went to Sunday school, when you and your friends were lured there by the prospect of chocolate Easter eggs. You’d never been convinced by the historical dramas on TV, where the spirits of the dead were supposed to be scary figures, dressed all in white and wandering around in an eerie fog, their disheveled hair the sign of an unquiet rest.
You feel drops of rain pattering down on your head. As you look up, the raindrops splash against your cheeks and forehead. Seemingly in an instant, the individual drops meld and blur into thick streaks, pouring down with ferocious speed.
The man with the microphone shouts out, “Please sit down, all of you. The memorial service hasn’t finished yet. This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.”
The chilly rainwater, which has crept inside the collar of your uniform, soaks your vest as it trickles down your back. The tears of souls are cold, all right. Goose bumps rise on your forearms, on your back, as you hurry to shelter under the eaves projecting over the main door. The trees in front of the Provincial Office are being lashed by the rain. Squatting down on the highest step, the one closest to the door, you think back to your biology lessons. Studying the respiration of plants during fifth period, when the sunlight was always on the wane, seems like something that took place in another world, now. Trees, you were told, survive on a single breath per day. When the sun rises, they drink in a long, luxurious draft of its rays, and when it sets, they exhale a great stream of carbon dioxide. Those trees over there, who hold those long breaths within themselves with such unwavering patience, are bending under the onslaught of the rain.
Had that other world continued, you would have sat your midterms last week. Today being Sunday, and with no more exams to prepare for, you would have slept in late before going out to play badminton in the yard with Jeong-dae. The time of that other world seems no more real, now, than does the past week.
It happened last Sunday, when you’d gone out alone to buy some practice papers from the bookshop in front of the school. Frightened by the sight of armed soldiers, who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, you took a side alley leading down to the riverside. A couple were walking opposite you, the man wearing a suit and holding a Bible and hymn book, and the woman in a navy-blue dress. Something about the way they were talking made you think they must be newlyweds. A thin scream rang out several times from the top of the road, and three soldiers carrying guns and clubs raced down over the hilltop, surrounding the young couple. They looked to have been pursuing someone, and to have turned down this alley by mistake.
“What’s the matter? We’re just on our way to church…”
Before the man in the suit had finished speaking, you saw a person’s arm—what? Something you wouldn’t have thought it capable of. Too much to process—what you saw happen to that hand, that back, that leg. A human being. “Help me!” the man shouted, his voice ragged. They kept on clubbing him until his twitching feet finally grew still. The woman stood there and screamed when she should have just backed off; you saw them grab her by the hair, but you don’t know what happened after that. You were too busy crawling, trembling, into the next street, a street where a sight even further from your experience was unfolding.
—
You jerk your head up in alarm, startled witless by the hand that just brushed your right shoulder. A slender, outstretched hand that seems wound around with cold scraps of cotton, like some fragile apparition.
“Dong-ho.”
Eun-sook, soaked to the skin from her braids to the hems of her jeans, bends down over you and laughs.
Your face white as a sheet, you muster a halfhearted chuckle in response. You dummy, what would a ghost need hands for?
“I meant to come back earlier; sorry you got caught up in this rain….I was worried that if I left, the others would start leaving, too. Has anything much happened?”
You shake your head. “No one came looking for anyone. No passersby either.”
“It was the same at the service. Not many people came.”
Eun-sook squats down next to you and pulls a sponge cake out of the pocket of her hoodie, the wrapper rustling. A yogurt pot follows it.
“The church aunties were handing these out, so I thought I might as well get some.”
You hadn’t even realized you were hungry; now you tear off the plastic wrapper and cram the sponge cake into your mouth. Eun-sook peels the lid off the yogurt and hands it to you.
“I’ll stay here for now; you can go home and change. If anyone was going to come, they would have been and gone by now.”
“No, you go, I barely got wet,” you say, mumbling around a mouthful of sponge cake. You swallow the cake and gulp down the yogurt.
“The Provincial Office doesn’t exactly have many home comforts, you know,” Eun-sook says delicately. “And it’s hard work you’ve been doing…”
You blush; you know you stink of sweat. Whenever you go to wash your hands in the tiny annex bathroom, you always try to give your hair a quick wash, too. The putrid smell seems to have soaked into your skin, so at night you even splash the cold water over your whole body, teeth chattering and sneezing violently; now it seems you might as well not have bothered.