“If you don’t believe, I understand,” he said.
“Does your family observe jesa?”
“No.” Isak smiled. No one in his family observed the rituals for the dead. The Protestants he knew didn’t, either.
“My husband thought it was unnecessary. He told me so, but I still make his favorite foods and prepare a shrine for him. I do it for his parents and my own. His parents thought it was important. They were very good to me. I clean their graves and the ones for all my dead babies. I talk to the dead although I don’t believe in ghosts. But it makes me feel good to speak with them. Maybe that is what God is. A good God wouldn’t have let my babies die. I can’t believe in that. My babies did nothing wrong.”
“I agree. They did nothing wrong.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.”
Yangjin said nothing but felt strangely calmer.
“If Sunja will talk to you, perhaps it can help. I don’t know how, but maybe it might.”
“I will ask her to walk with me tomorrow.”
Yangjin turned back, and Isak walked beside her.
8
After Isak finished the letter to his brother, he rose from the low table and opened the narrow window in the front room. Isak pulled the crisp air deep into his lungs. His chest didn’t hurt. Throughout his life, everyone around him had talked about his early death as a certainty. He had been sick as an infant and throughout his youth with serious ailments in his chest, heart, and stomach. Consequently, little had been expected of his future. When Isak graduated from seminary, even he had been surprised that he was alive to see such a day. Oddly enough, all the talk of his inevitable death hadn’t discouraged him. He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time.
His brother Samoel, the eldest son, was never ill, but he had died young. He had been beaten badly by the colonial police after a protest and did not survive the arrest. Isak decided then that he would live a braver life. He had spent his youth indoors with his family and tutors, and the healthiest he had ever been was when he attended seminary while working as a lay pastor for his church back home. While alive, Samoel had been a shining light at the seminary and their home church, and Isak believed that his deceased brother was carrying him now, no different than how he had done so physically when Isak was a boy.
The middle Baek brother, Yoseb, wasn’t religious like Samoel or Isak. He had never liked school, and at the first opportunity, he had struck out for Japan in search of a different life. He had taught himself to be a machinist and now worked as a foreman of a factory in Osaka. He had sent for Kyunghee, the beloved daughter of a family friend, and they were married in Japan. They didn’t have any children. It had been Yoseb’s idea for Isak to come to Osaka, and he had found him the job at the church. Isak felt certain that Yoseb would understand his decision to ask Sunja to marry him. Yoseb was an open-minded person with a generous nature. Isak addressed the envelope and put on his coat.
He picked up his tea tray and brought it to the threshold of the kitchen. He had been reminded numerous times that there was no need for him to bring his tray to the kitchen, where men were not supposed to enter, but Isak wanted to do something for the women, who were always working. Near the stove, Sunja was peeling radishes. She was wearing her white muslin hanbok beneath a dark quilted vest. She looked even younger than her age, and he thought she looked lovely as she focused on her task. He couldn’t tell if she was pregnant in her full-bodied chima. It was hard to imagine a woman’s body changing. He had never been with a woman.
Sunja rushed to get his tray.
“Here, please let me take that.”
He handed the tray to her and opened his mouth to say something but wasn’t sure how.
She looked at him. “Do you need something, sir?”
“I was hoping to go into town today. To see someone.”
Sunja nodded like she understood.
“Mr. Jun, the coal man, is down the street and will be headed to town. Do you want me to ask him to take you?”
Isak smiled. He had been planning on asking her to accompany him, but he lost his courage suddenly. “Yes. If Mr. Jun’s schedule permits it. Thank you.”
Sunja rushed outside to get him.
The church building had been repurposed from an abandoned wood-frame schoolhouse. It was located behind the post office. The coal man pointed it out to him and promised to take him back to the boardinghouse later.
“I have to run some errands. And I’ll mail your letter.”
“Do you know Pastor Shin? Would you like to meet him?”