The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (44 page)

“What are you doing here?” In the shop’s cutting room, Hui-jae opens her eyes wide, her face pale. The cramped hallway. A mess of fabric scraps strewn on the floor. With no chairs to sit on, Hui-jae’s tiny body is placed upon a wooden chest that looks like a piece of shipping cargo.

“I need to borrow some money.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand won.”

She hands me 5,000 won without asking me what I need it for. Instead of going to school, I head to Seoul Station. Each time I think of Oldest Brother, yelling at me to pack up and go back to the country, my heart suddenly feels numb.

Mom.

What will I say to Mom if I go back to the country? I won’t go back. I won’t go where you can find me. I will go away and never come back. See if you can get by without me. I get a ticket
for a night train to Busan. Pledging, I won’t ever go back to you, I won’t ever go back to that room.

As soon as the train leaves Seoul Station, I want to get off. I see Oldest Brother’s heavy shoulders glimmering at the window. His wig hanging on the attic door. His hands washing his socks in the kitchen, as if it were a habit. His movements as he sat up in the dark and headed to the rooftop after his girl left him. The smells his body carried when he came back after a long while, the cold scent of the night wind, the scent of his wounds.

But my neck quickly stiffens as I think of his voice, telling me to pack up and go back to the country. I’m not going back. The train speeds past a trail of lights at the bottom of distant mountains. The train enters a tunnel.
Oppa.
The train is full of a myriad odd smells.

A baby cries and a woman bursts into a scream trying to calm the baby, an old man snores while a group of young women chat and grin, chewing strips of dried squid, and strange men play cards, loud and rowdy. I see my eighteen-year-old self on the window, looking scared amidst the swarm of people. Busan? Where can that be? Each time the door opens, a pungent odor drifts in with the wind. My hearts pounds with a longing to return to Oldest Brother. Getting off at Busan Station at the break of dawn, I buy a ticket back to Seoul then sit there and wait without taking a single step outside the station, to board the train once again. Daylight starts to spread. Outside my window, a flock of baby birds flies from wire to wire. The train’s steel wheels go
click-clack-click
as it runs at full speed, back toward our lone room.

From Seoul Station, I take the subway, get off at Garibong Station, walk past the photo studio, past the corner store, and arrive at the front gate. I step inside, pushing the gate open, and Oldest Brother runs down from the third floor.

“Where have you been?” He looks like he hasn’t been able to sleep all night. His eyes are bloodshot as he presses me for
an answer. His palm lands with a slap on my eighteen-year-old cheek.

“You wretched girl.” I am bursting into tears when he pulls me into his arms. “I thought there’d been an accident or something!”

As my quivering tension melts away, tears keep rolling down my face. Oldest Brother tears my face from his chest and makes a thundering sound.

“If you do that one more time, I’m going to kill you, I swear!”

Yun Sun-im. She comes to see me in the middle of the day, as I lay alone in the lone room. I sit up, startled. The sound of radio playing in one of the rooms. Why has she come to me? I sit there fidgeting. Why has she come to me?

“You wanna hear a story?”

Yun Sun-im, with a snaggle tooth that makes her lips roll up each time she smiles, revealing her gums, cheery and red.

“I dropped out of high school . . . You know why?”

“. . .”

“I happened to open my desk partner’s pencil case, without thinking, really, and found two thousand-won bills. I didn’t dream for a second that I’d steal the money. But before I knew it, my hands were picking it up. With this money, I thought, I could buy myself a girdle. I wanted one because I seemed to be developing a paunch. The entire class was turned inside out. We had to have all our belongings checked, even the insides of our pockets. I had the money hidden inside my underwear. The teacher sent a student to the hill behind the school to pick pine needles, enough for the whole class. Then he handed them out, one for each student. He told us to place the pine needle on our palm, then grab it tight while keeping our eyes closed. The
pine needles are all the same length, he said. And that after ten minutes, only the needle inside the hand of the one who stole the money will have grown five centimeters. Then we’ll all know then who did it, so the person who took the money should just raise her hand now, he said. If you think about it now, it’s complete nonsense, isn’t it? How can a pine needle grow inside your hand? But at that moment, it really felt as if the needle was growing longer right inside my hand. When I thought about what would follow, my heart began to pound and my head felt as if it were about to burst. I could almost hear the pine needle growing longer inside my hand, rustle, rustle. I got so scared I broke into tears. I even wet myself right where I was sitting. The whole class found out that I had stole the money. I didn’t go back to school after that and my life took a strange turn. I would tell my parents I was headed for school, then sit all day by the dam and wander around the marketplace. My parents eventually learned that I stole the money and I got beat up bad. Mom said to me, holding up her rod, ‘A thief, is that what you had to turn out to be, of all things?’

“The minute Mom called me a thief, I decided that I should end my life . . . Planning to die as far from home as possible, I stole Mom’s money and left home . . . But I ended up here somehow . . . It was five years before I visited home again.”

“. . .”

“If I didn’t need that money desperately, I wouldn’t have written you that letter.”

“. . .”

“Come back to work tomorrow. . . . I don’t think of you as a thief. And nobody knows about it. It was just a guess because I’d seen you going home early that day as I was returning from my errand. You could’ve just played innocent.”

“. . .”

“They say the company will fold soon. Will be handed over to the bank or something. Just hang in there until then and you’ll
get your severance pay and the overdue wages also . . . If you stop working now, things’ll get a little complicated and they’ll most likely cheat you out of that money.”

“. . .”

“You will come to work tomorrow, won’t you?”

“. . .”

“If you don’t, I’m going to keep coming back.”

I go to work the next day. I get the time stamped on my card. Yun Sun-im puts on a big smile. Foreman, no, Chief of Production now, calls for me.

“You think this factory is where you come when you feel like it?”

I stare down at the cold cement floor. Nothing has changed at work. With no assigned spots at the workstation, workers sit around here and there. On the roof, on the benches, by the water tap. Chae Eun-hui, the young woman who works as the administrative staff at the assembly line, also sits idly in the empty office. It’s Chae Eun-hui’s job to check production output at the end of each work day, but now there is no output for her to check. The company is emptying out.

I sat amidst the noise, trying to suppress my exasperation by flipping through my book, held up a page of poetry and read it out loud.

All the little ones of this world
raise their splendid tails at me
calling out to me, mama . . .
How my little one would miss my milk?
I would cry as squeezed out my milk
Those innocent eyes
dared not dream of escape
I cannot abandon you for anything else
for anywhere else
I turn back down from my uphill hike
Ha, in the puddle, rice fish still swim safe.
*

I am begging you, please stop this noise. I am on the threshold of a home being crushed and torn apart.

Granny Emily Dickinson
carried me on her shoulders to sea
the distant sandflats where I’d never been
Not a tired beast in sight
just shellfish inside their shells
living in comfort
Granny soaked her green sleeve in the sea
washed my wounded feet
gently
putting them down
like silent tears.
†

I beg you, please just come toward me so I can soar above them . . . the drills . . . the hammers . . . they are all coming toward me, stamping and trampling, getting lost between the interior and the exterior of my narrative.

Leaves land on grapes shy and discreet.
Long ago set out a man after the leaf’s shadow.
‡

Like the ocean surf, sleep rushes in. The one stroking my hair, he will soon turn back.

The crashing cascade awakes the mountain.
The pheasant jumps, a pine cone falls.
A squirrel raises its tail and the trail secretly lights up.
Ah! A
pansori
virtuoso giving a full performance of his epic song.
§

Yes, he will. He will soon turn back.

Tears arise when close / knocking on your room / my ankles shook so . . . Tears arise when close to you . . . I kept my head down but a few steps before me / I saw your fingers locking the door / I saw them now and then.

I find Chang’s letter in the mailbox, completely unexpectedly. Oh! My delight released in a single cry. I ran into Ippi. Ippi, my younger sister’s nickname. I heard from Ippi about the letters. I thought you weren’t answering my letters because of my father. Chang has written my name with affection. So what if we can’t exchange letters? I’m going to write in my notebook whenever I want to write to you. I’ll show you what I wrote when we meet. You can do the same, too. You’ll be home for Chuseok, won’t you?

We don’t make it home for Chuseok. Cousin has borrowed a camera. We pack a wooden lunchbox and go hiking to Mount Gwanak with Hui-jae. Carrying her borrowed camera, Cousin is all excited. It seems she’s mistaken Hui-jae and me for the birds atop the trees.
Click
, under the maple tree,
click
, under the rock,
click
. “Turn around. Sit. No, you stand . . . Hold hands. Try to be more natural . . . Hui-jae, give me a smile now!” After Cousin is
done taking one shot after another, as if we were those birds, we sit down for lunch up on the peaks, when Cousin lets out a scream.