The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (20 page)

The body remembers. Sixteen years have passed and I no longer have the need to sleep perfectly still, but there are nights when I go to bed wrapped up in that same guarded pose only to wake in the morning, unmoved.

Mom comes from the country to visit us. In her pocket she carries the money she made off a litter of pups.

“That dog turned out to be quite prolific. Produced seven little ones. I fed them well for two months till they were chubby and sold them for a good price on market day.”

Mom takes the money she made from the puppies at the country market to the market in the city and buys an electric rice cooker and a thermos. It makes me so happy that we no longer have to cook rice on the kerosene stove. As she heads back home, Mom warns us not to get friendly with the storekeeper.

“Why not? He’s so nice to us.”

“Don’t you see that scar on his face? Doesn’t it scare you?”

“Not really. He makes pretty figurines.”

“What difference does that make? Don’t you go making small talk or anything like that with the man. When you’re away from home, there’s nothing you should fear more than people.”

“But you said people who make things with their hands are never bad.”

“I never said that.”

“Don’t you remember, Mom? That time when I was little and that beggar stayed with us a few nights. The one who wove us a straw basket! I was scared of him and asked you to make him go away, and you said you can always trust people who make things with their hands.”

“The things you remember! That was ages ago. Why must you dig up ancient history as old as the Goryeo Kingdom?”

After Mom leaves, I stand there, marveling at the rice cooker and thermos. Now all we need to do is rinse the rice, add water, and plug it in. Every morning up to now, at the crack of dawn, Cousin and I had to light the circular wick on the stove to steam rice, then breathe in the smelly burning kerosene that made our heads ache. We love the electric rice cooker that Mom bought. And the thermos that keeps boiled water hot for us all day long.

Oldest Brother graduates from college and prepares for military service. He files for leave from his job as a clerk at the district office. When he returns, he casts a despondent gaze toward his desk, toward his statute books, with titles like
Criminal Law, Civil Law.
I watch as he lets out a single sigh.

“If someone could support me for just one year . . . two years at most, if only someone would, I might have a shot.”

But there is no one to support him for a year, not even for a month. He has no choice but to put on the froglike camouflage uniform and the froglike camouflage cap and commit to one and a half years as a soldier. My tall brother fills my sight. Why am I so young? Why wasn’t I born his older sister?

Oldest Brother waits, and looks out toward the subway station, his towering height blocking the entire window from my
view. At other times, arms across his chest, he gazes down from the roof of our building, absently watching the chimneys of the No. 3 Industrial Complex. Then he hands over his desk and its stacks of statute books to Third Brother and settles on the floor.

He says to Third Brother, “I am going to do whatever I can to back you up, so . . .”

He pauses. “So focus on your studies and nothing else, consider yourself deaf and blind.”

Third Brother hangs his head and does not answer. Oldest Brother keeps going. “I know our country is troubled. And I know how hard it is for a young law student to shut up and keep his head down these days. Nevertheless, keep your eyes and ears shut, don’t think too much . . . There will be plenty to do later on, once you have some power.”

During the bus ride from Garibong-dong to his school in Myeongnyun-dong, Third Brother turns into a hardcore activist. He goes everywhere in his campus military drill uniform, saturated with a dense, smoky odor. His eyes sink like the inside of a well.

Cousin wears makeup and knows exactly what colors and styles flatter her shape. She finds it awkward, after all this time, to put on a school uniform and go out with an unmade-up face. Wearing the round-collared uniform blouse now, not her V-neck shirt, she stands before the mirror, lipstick in hand as usual. She seems tempted. She hesitates, then replaces the cover and slips the lipstick in her pocket.

Five o’clock any afternoon of the year 1979. This was the hour that I loved. For this was when I could leave my station at the conveyor belt. For this was when we could walk off the production line, drenched with the roar of the conveyor belt, the buzz of air drivers, the zap of smoky soldering irons. As we wash our hands under the tap beside the men’s bathroom and change into our school uniforms in the locker room, the
national anthem plays on the PA system, signaling the lowering of the flag. Five o’clock, 1979, when we stop and place our right hand over our hearts as we face the flag . . . May Heaven look after us /until the East Sea goes dry /and Mt. Baekdu wears away. Five o’clock, when we are served cold leftovers for dinner at the cafeteria then take the bus out of the industrial complex to head for school. Five o’clock, when the bus conductor would open the door at our stop in Singil-dong, holding in one hand a mini English vocabulary book the size of a die.

To leave the conveyor belt at five o’clock, Cousin and I spend every single moment of our workday attaching screws to PVC boards, without uttering a word. We begin our work half an hour earlier than the others because we have the number one and number two positions, respectively, on the A line of the stereo section; because production cannot continue seamlessly without us; because we must stack enough PVC boards next to the number three workstation before five o’clock in order for the production to go on once we leave for school. At lunchtime, we eat quickly, then immediately resume our places along the conveyor belt.

“I can’t lift my arm.”

One day during lunch break, Cousin tries to lift her chopsticks but gives up. Her job is to operate the air driver that hangs above her head, pulling it down repeatedly to attach the screws. She is now in tears. I mix the hardened rice into her soup of bean paste and marshmallow leaves, and bring the spoon to her mouth. Then, with chopsticks, I feed her the fried anchovies. At first, Cousin refuses to be fed, but I hold the spoon to her mouth and wait, then she relents.

“You’re acting like an older sister.”

“Then treat me like one. Call me
Eonni
.”

Cousin tosses a sideways glance at me, then chews her anchovies.

We are out on the roof and I massage Cousin’s arm as we sit in the sun. Something glimmers white on the roof of the factory building across the street, which we both notice at once.

“What are those people doing?”

They are women. Naked women. They are lined up along the railing at the edge of the rooftop, as if they are about to jump. All of the workers leaving the cafeteria stop and watch. The naked women seem to be shouting something down toward the people on the street, but no sound reaches us. Policemen swarm in on them from behind. I close my eyes as I wrap my arms around Cousin, who is so young but unable to lift her own arm. When I open my eyes again, the police officers are dragging the women in off the roof, grabbing them by their arms, heads, necks.

All afternoon, our production line is abuzz.

“The production supervisor pressured a female worker to quit the union but when she refused, he forced her into the warehouse and raped her.”

“The female worker reported everything to the union.”

“But management sued
her
, accusing her of trying to frame an innocent man. That’s why the union leaders took their clothes off and went up to the roof. They were daring the managers to act out in the open where everyone can see, not in some dark corner of the warehouse.”

In the meantime, Cousin must have recovered the use of her arm because she reaches up for the air driver and pulls it toward her without any problem. She compresses her lips for a moment, then whispers in my ear.

“I’m getting out of here, no matter what.”

To attend school, Cousin and I work through the lunch break and the two ten-minute breaks at ten thirty and three thirty. Miss Lee from the union comes to find us working on the line.

“Why don’t you ask for a transfer to the preparation line?”

Cousin and I did not join the others in protest when they refused to work overtime and we had to quit the union so we could go to school. Nevertheless, Miss Lee is friendly toward us. The one that Cousin and I worry about is Foreman. It doesn’t matter to us whether we switch to the preparation line or not, all we ask is that Foreman, who is now
also Chief Manager, continue to leave us alone.

“There is no conveyor belt at the preparation line, so it should be less stressful for you there.”

Cousin and I can’t bring ourselves to look at Miss Lee—Scurrying Miss Lee, we call her, for her busy, hurried walk. She seems to realize how sorry we still are, and she pats our backs.“Hey, it’s not as if what happened was your fault.” But her kind words make us hang our heads even lower.

“At least the two of you had an excuse. You didn’t have a choice if you wanted to start school. But so many people are quitting the union now. They say being a member has brought them nothing but harm.”

Scurrying Miss Lee lowers her eyes, as if weighed down by the disappointment.

“We’re up against so much, we would be overpowered even if we stood in solidarity.”

Cousin takes the lipstick from her pocket and offers it to Miss Lee.

“What’s this for?”

“I don’t need it anymore. You said you liked the color, remember, and asked me where I’d bought it.”

Cousin’s lips are pale, now that we are students and not allowed to wear lipstick. Her long, slender calves are encased in black opaque tights instead of flesh-toned sheer stockings. As she works all day, reaching for the air driver that hangs in midair to attach screw after screw onto PVC boards, it seems as if photography is the furthest thing from her mind. But in my mind, albeit on rare occasions, the egrets appear again, the birds in the photographs that Cousin showed me on the night train. In the book, the egrets sleep in the treetops with their wings tucked in. Beneath the dark night sky, the egrets dot the forest, sleeping peacefully like the stars.

At seventeen, I am the youngest
in our entire school. Most of the other students are three or four years older. Kim Sam-ok, who occasionally skips school to attend rallies, is a whopping twenty-six years old. She wears her hair in the required schoolgirl style, cut straight right below the ear, wears the same flat shoes, carries a schoolbag as well, but her face still looks like that of a twenty-six-year-old. On her, our uniform, with the tulip-shaped school badge, looks awkward. The uniform and the face do not quite match. The uniform is so girlish, while her face is soaked with exhaustion.

In class, I sit beside a girl named An Hyang-suk, a lefty who works at a confectionary factory. I have met other left-handed people before, but she is the first person I’ve seen actually write with her left hand. The process looks so easy for her, as if she has been writing this way for ages. When she’s not watching, I hold my pen in my left hand and give it a try, but my writing feels utterly inept. When we both take notes during class, her left elbow bumps my right arm. Each time she bumps my arm, her mouth spreads into a slight, apologetic smile.