The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (26 page)

“I’m not just standing here doing nothing. I’m very upset right now.”

At my brusque response, Mi-seo, who works at a pharmaceutical company, once again pulls out her Hegel and reads.

I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to do abacus calculation and I don’t want to take out my bookkeeping notebook. I tell Cousin that I’m not coming to school anymore.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t want to go to school.”

“You? Not wanting to go to school?”

Cousin laughs as if she can’t believe me.

“Starting today, I’m not going to school. You go on alone.”

Cousin just smiles, as if she were hearing a joke, but when, at five o’clock, I turn onto the street that leads to our lone room instead of to the bus stop, she pulls my arm.

“What’s wrong?”

I just stare at her.

“You’re really going to quit?”

I nod.

“Stop joking now, we’re going to be late.”

“I’m serious. I’m not going.”

“Oldest Brother’s going to get very upset, you know that.”

“How will he find out unless you tell him?”

“What is it all of a sudden?”

“I don’t like school anymore.”

“What don’t you like about it?”

“I don’t like abacus calculation, I don’t like bookkeeping. There’s nothing I like. So you go on. I’ll get the groceries, do the cleaning, have everything done.”

“What if Oldest Brother happens to come home early?”

We part and I walk slowly along the streets of the industrial complex and back to the lone room. It looks like Oldest Brother just now changed out of his military uniform and into his suit, put on his wig and left again. I hang his uniform on a nail and sit around idly. Unable to quite grasp the fact that I am alone in this room, which has always felt crowded, I sit, then stand, then try lying down. I lie on my stomach and read a few pages of
Saban’s Cross
, the book Chang gave me, then lie with my eyes to the ceiling, then turn over again and start writing a letter to Chang. I no longer want to endure everything. What I wanted to do at school was not abacus calculation or typing. I wanted to read books and write. In order to do that, I thought I had to go to school. But it seems this school has nothing to do with any of that. I stop here and open the window to look out at the subway station. Each time a train makes a stop, a mass of heads surges up, then they disappear in an instant. I step out to the kitchen and take out the bottle of
soju
from the bottom shelf of the cupboard, pour a small amount and drink. I come back and continue to write.

. . . There are only horrible people around.

I head out to the subway station and squat down to wait for Oldest Brother. It is almost midnight when he walks out the exit from afar.

“
Oppa
!”

His eyes, sunken deep from fatigue, turn wide with wonder. Seeing him out here, wearing his wig, I feel as if he is a stranger, not my family. I burst into giggles, as if I’ve run into some comical character. He seems to find it funny as well, and when we turn into the alley, he takes the wig off and carries it in his hand.

“How come you’re out here? How come?”

“I was bored.”

“You have time to be bored?”

Oldest Brother, walking ahead of me, breaks into a hollow laughter.

The next day, upon returning from school, Hui-jae
eonni
comes up to the third floor and opens my door. It looks like she hasn’t even stopped by her own room because she’s carrying her schoolbag in one hand. In the other, she’s carrying a white paper bag filled round and taut with something. She does not even ask why I wasn’t at school. She puts down the paper bag and just smiles faintly before heading back down the stairs. The sound of her footsteps tapping down the stairs to the first floor. I look inside to find sweet chrysanthemum buns, still warm inside the bag.

It has been about a week since I’ve stopped going to school. Returning from school, Cousin opens the door and calls me quietly.

“Your teacher’s here.”

I stare blankly at Cousin.

“He said he wants to pay a home visit, so I brought him.”

I’m anxious that Oldest Brother might come home and see him, but Teacher Choe takes his time looking around the room. He asks me to walk with him to the bus stop. I put on my shoes and jacket and follow him out. Outside in the alley, he gently taps my shoulder.

“So what is going on?” I stare silently ahead.

“I noticed you’re a reader and that you seemed to enjoy school, so why is it that suddenly you’ve stopped coming to school?”

“. . . ”

“Was I wrong?”

“. . . ”

“The school makes it a rule to report to the company if a student doesn’t show up for class.”

I guess they would. And when a student quits work, the school would probably be notified. One qualifies to attend school only if she is working. If I don’t go to school, I will not be able to leave the conveyor belt at five o’clock. At the bus stop, Teacher Choe urges me to come to school the following day.

“Let’s talk further once you’re back at school.”

As he gets on the bus, he waves his hand at me. Behind his hand, rows of factory chimneys stand tall and jagged. I feel as if I’ve met a person at the factory for the first time. After the bus has left, I stay standing there. Putting my hand on my shoulder, still warm from Teacher Choe’s touch.

The following day, Teacher Choe calls me to the office and tells me to write a self-examination about missing school.

“Write down everything you want to say and hand it in in three days.”

To write the self-examination, I buy a college notebook at the student supply store across from the school. Just as I had written such and such about why Cousin and I must attend school to the union leader, this time I write such and such about why I do not want to go to school to my teacher, and as I write, things start pouring out from my heart.

I write that this was not the city life that I had in mind, and that this was not the school life that I had in mind. That I don’t want to do abacus calculations or bookkeeping, that the only thing in my mind right now is Little Brother and that what I want is to go back and live with Little Brother. The self-examination turns out long, almost one third of the notebook.

After reading my self-examination, Teacher Choe says this to me.

“Why don’t you try writing novels?”

This word, writing, fell on me. This was the first time someone ever said this to me. Try writing novels.

He went on. “You don’t have to do abacus calculations if you don’t want to. Just come to school. I’ll talk to the other teachers. Do whatever it is you want to do. But you must not miss school.”

He hands me a book. “This is the best novel I’ve read recently.”

On the cover is written,
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball
. I return to the classroom and open it.

The math teacher walked into the classroom. The students noticed that he was not carrying his book in his hand. The students trusted the teacher. He was the only teacher in the school whom the students trusted.

My teacher Mr. Choe Hong-i. Now I go to school in order to see him. All the longing that had been locked up inside my heart after making an uneasy move away from home finds new direction and heads toward Teacher Choe. I, seventeen years old, carry
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball
with me always. Wherever I go, I read
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball
. I almost know it by heart. Hui-jae
eonni
asks me what kind of a book it is.

“A novel.”

“Novel?” she asks, just once, and turns her head down, looking uninterested. Teacher Choe fills my heart completely. Even when I don’t work on my abacus, the abacus teacher passes me by. Even when I don’t write balance sheets in my bookkeeping notebook, the bookkeeping teacher does not make a case of it.

In abacus class, I open my Korean class notebook to the last page and copy down
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball.

People called Father a dwarf. People saw right. Father was a dwarf. Unfortunately, people were right only about how they saw Father. They were wrong about everything else. I am willing to risk everything that belongs to the five of us in our family—Father, Mother, Yeong-ho, Yeong-hui and me—to say at any given time that they were wrong. When I say “everything,” it includes the lives of the five members of our family.

I now transcribe
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball
onto my notebook even when I am sitting at the conveyor belt. People who lived in heaven did not have to think about hell, I write. But the five of us lived in hell and thought about heaven, I write. Not a day went by that we did not think about heaven, I write. For each day of our life wore us down, I write. Our life was like war, I write. We lost every day in that war, I write.

Mother, however, endured everything, I write.

If Teacher Choe had suggested that I write poetry instead of suggesting that I write novels, then I would have dreamed of becoming a poet. That was how it was. I needed a dream. In order to make it to school every day; to not be bothered as I brushed Oldest Brother’s wig; to endure the smoke from the factory chimneys; to live on.

This was how novel writing came to me.

I carried the letter from the teacher at the factory school, Han Gyeong-sin, with me in my bag into mid-December. From time to time I pulled out the letter and read the part that said that I
could call this phone number from five thirty to nine in the evening. 842-4596. After pulling out the letter and reading it, again and again, I now had her phone number memorized. But in the end, I was unable to call her. Time kept passing and the weeks between early and mid-December, which was when Han Gyeong-sin had wanted me to visit, were gone. When I got to thinking, They should be on winter vacation now, I took the letter from my bag and put it inside a drawer, counting the years since I left that school. It had been thirteen years. I had thought I would have gained objective distance by now. When I had decided to write about them, it had seemed that I had overcome that time in my life. That was why I had decided to write in as much detail as I could about that time. To restore my memory from that time so that I might open up, so that my footsteps, which had been cut off at the closed gate of my life, might be reconnected.