The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (34 page)

Early spring. The mountain path that I sometimes take for walks has turned soft and mushy.

Yesterday I took a trip to Chuncheon. This “she” who lives in Chuncheon was to be featured in a special section in the upcoming issue of
The Writer’s World Quarterly.
When I received the call asking me to serve as the guest writer of the feature “A Visit with the Writer,” I had at first waved it off.

Love has many faces.

Because I admired her as a writer, I possessed an illusion about her even though I did not know much about her. I was twenty years old when I first read her stories. She was like flash of light. The tragic air emitted by the objects in captivity of her gaze pulled me in instantly. I am going to be like her, I thought. I am going to become beautiful in order to get closer to this beautiful person. My attachment to her turned more and more adamant. However, then or now, my adoration of her became the reason I could not readily go to her.

But yesterday, at last, I was sitting in the car driven by an editor from the magazine.

The first time I went to Chuncheon was also on an early spring day like yesterday, like today. I had just entered the college, which
lay at the foot of the Mount Namsan, but I was doing nothing but sitting on the benches on campus, unable to fit in. I was twenty years old, and I had finally gotten away and was alone, having become a college student. We had moved to Dongsung-dong and Oldest Brother was now married. Could it be mere coincidence? The place that Oldest Brother now headed for work every morning as an employee after ending his years as a civil clerk was Daewoo Building, which had loomed over me like a gigantic beast that day I first got off the train at Seoul Station. Cousin had left her job at the Community Service Center and now worked at a trade agent’s office on the floor above Mountain Echo Coffee.

I was in a shop in Namyeong-dong. That spring, unable to adapt to the changes taking place around me, I was doing nothing but sitting still. Oldest Brother’s wife washed everything for me, even my socks, and hung them in the sun until they were fresh and dry. Suddenly there was nothing for me to do. At school, people who were complete strangers to me, the kind of people I had never even come across until then, introduced themselves, dressed in colorful outfits and full of vivacity. It seemed they were about to set out on a picnic.

When I was with them, it felt unfathomable that somewhere in this world there were still factories, that somewhere in this world there were thirty-seven rooms and a marketplace with dim, dark alleys. Suddenly I felt I had become the odd one out. After living for so long in our lone room, it had become the only place that did not feel awkward to me. I would sit awkwardly on a bench at the school that I had worked so hard to enter and when I got tired, I walked all the way to Namyeong-dong where Cousin worked. Then I would wait at Mountain Echo Coffee Shop until she got off work.

One day that March, I set out for school, and only Oldest Brother’s wife was still in the house. But my feet would not head in the direction toward school. I couldn’t possibly go and wait for Cousin at Mountain Echo Coffee Shop at this hour. I walked
around here and there. Then I got on the bus, then the subway, and the place I got off was Cheongnyangni Station. I bought a ticket to Chuncheon but had no plans, had never been there before. The train sped on as mountains and fields, rivers, streams and housing lots swelled up then grew distant outside the window.

I began to heave. The sunlight was blinding.

As soon as I got off at Chuncheon Station, I stopped by a pharmacy and emptied a bag of motion sickness reliever into my mouth. But the heaving still would not stop. After wandering aimlessly around Chuncheon Station, I looked at the clock. If I got back now, I guessed I could make it there by the time Cousin got off work. I bought a ticket to take me back to Cheongnyangni Station, hurrying as if some urgent business had come up.

That was the day when Cousin screamed at me. Her voice was louder than the shouting, “What can I do,” in the Smokie song that the DJ was playing. “Stop coming here,” she said. “Go to school and work hard,” she said.

When I got into a huff and rose from my seat, Cousin took hold of me and led me to a food court across the street from Seongnam Cinema in Namyeong-dong and bought me spicy
jjolmyeon
noodles. Mixing the red sauce into the noodles for me, Cousin corrected what she had said. She said I could come by once in a while, but that I really should work on my studies. And that she wished she could, even if it were only in her dreams, just spend one single day as a college student.

Before I got to know her, the writer, the name Chuncheon only reminded me of that day when I almost got sick. And of Cousin’s gloomy voice saying that she wished she could, even if it were only in her dreams, just spend one single day as a college student. But ever since I began carving her name inside my heart, Chuncheon became for me, from the place of my sickness that spring day, to the place where she lived. She was, since my twentieth year, the jewel embedded in my heart. After spending the entire night awake with my face buried in her writing, a white
stack of moth carcasses were piled under my lamp. Only then the night’s fatigue would come rushing in.

There had been times when I made rash attempts to plunder her. If only I could, I wanted to rob her, without hesitation. If I had not encountered her after leaving the despondent neighborhood of Yeongdeungpo, what would I have done, I wonder.

She had comforted and lightened the barrenness inside of me, leading it into compassion. I had passed through the dark tunnel of the 1980s with her as the firefly illuminating my path.

She, who had been my firefly, spoke, in front of me. She said that for a long time she had felt solitary, her days spent in doubt that her yearning to write had vanished; that there had been many days when she sat blankly all day, wondering if she was going to spend the rest of her life only
saying
that she would write.

Her solitude.

One blue dawn, I read “The Old Well” in
Literary Joongang
, her first publication in five years. Returning after plowing through her solitude, she was like a dried coral sprinkled with water drops. If “The Old Well” was the product of a writer’s fears and intimidations, it seemed to me that those fears and intimidations were the requirements of a writer. Once again she was leading women into the realm of myths, women who had turned squalid from fumbling around the cold truths of being human. Flashes of light that pierce through life, the layers of images that pass through then turn blue as they are reflected on the well. She was heated up, taut. Anonymous women, each dressed in the wardrobe of language that she had woven, came into life then grew hard into a golden carp inside the well, transcending femininity and humanity.

This muddle of emotions that swirled up in my heart that morning as I read “The Old Well”—do I dare call it jealousy? How does she manage to stay utterly unchanged like this? I paced the room back and forth. It seemed that she had returned after reaching the very bottom of the blue well, inside a bucket with its rope cut.

“‘The Old Well,’” she said, “‘The Old Well’ was the result of my desperate struggle to return to fiction writing.”

The vision of a golden carp soaring up toward life’s surface from the deep bruise of loss, from the abysmal depths of darkness, shaking off blue drops of water.

It is Sunday. Oldest Brother calls for me.

“Go and get some sea salt from the market. Get an ample amount. And you know those rice sacks? Get one of those, too.”

“What for?”

“Just go get them.”

Oldest Brother puts on his socks but before setting out, he calls me again. He pulls out some money from his pocket and places it in my palm.

“Buy several heat patches as well.”

“Do you have an ache or something?”

“Put them on Third’s back. He could barely sleep last night.”

I head up the overpass to the market with Cousin, who had been hanging up laundry on the roof. When I tell her what Oldest Brother said, Cousin tilts her head, saying, “Maybe that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Third Cousin. In front of us, he acts like he’s fine, right? But I saw him on the roof yesterday and he was walking with a limp.”

“A limp?”

“When I asked him if he’s in pain and he said he’s fine and walked down without showing his limp. But it seemed like he’s in pain.”

When we return with the heat patches, Third Brother is asleep, lying prone against the wall of our lone room. Oldest Brother is out. I tear the cover off the patches and lift up Third Brother’s shirt.

I lift it gently, but Third Brother is startled and shouts, “What is it?”

His pupils are like those of a fawn being chased by a hunter. His back is bruised black and blue all over. Shocked at the sight of the bruises, Cousin covers her mouth with her palm. When I crawl backward with my hands on the floor at Third Brother’s absurdly loud voice, only then he fixes his wide-open eyes on me, saying, “It’s you.”

“Oldest Brother told me to put this on you.”

Third Brother lies back down, entrusting his back to my eighteen-year-old hands. What had happened to him? The bruises are the darkest around his waist. I feel sick looking at them. I put the patches all around his waist and give him a massage. I try to rub gently, but he flinches with pain.

“Does it hurt?”

He buries his head in his arms and does not answer. Who has done this to him? I recall what Oldest Brother said the night Third Brother came back. When he said, “It’s a relief that it’s not any worse than this,” was he referring to the injury? Third Brother, who was impressively tall and broad-chested, was now lain prone in front of me, crouched up like a baby eagle, his body black and blue all over, his fearful eyes shut. My eyes well up with tears from the stinging scent of the heat patches.

When Oldest Brother sees the salt that we bought from the market, he tells us to heat it until it’s sizzling hot, then pour it into the sack and place it under Third Brother’s back.

“But how did he get like that?”

Oldest Brother does not answer. Cousin glances at me with suspicion. I have no idea, and shake my head. Who in the world did this to
Oppa
? Cousin, twenty years old, follows Oldest Brother’s instructions, placing a stainless steel washbowl on the kerosene stove and lighting it. She pours the salt into the washbowl and sits down by the stove, stirring the salt. The salt makes crackling sounds as it heats up.

Third Brother was a marathoner. Back in the country that we left behind, a festival was held each May to celebrate the
Donghak Peasant Army Uprising. For three consecutive years, Third Brother was chosen for the role of Donghak leader Jeon Bong-jun to carry the matchlock gun, and for three consecutive years came in first place in the local marathon, winning a pile of notebooks as prizes to take home. That was the Third Brother that we knew, but now he had come back black and blue all over like this—where in the world could he have been? The ankles below his long, long calves, with which he used to run like a stallion, lay in the threshold of our room.