The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (45 page)

“What in the world is this!”

I jump up at her screams, as if someone has yelled, “Snake!” I jump up, then ask, “What is it?”

“There’s no film. It was empty!”

“. . . What?”

She puts the film in and we take pictures all over again. Still nothing gets printed. Cousin returns from the photo shop, all glum.

“They said light got inside.”

“Light?”

We had disappeared after swallowing light.

A wet autumn day. I recall Gangnam Sacred Heart Hospital in Daerim-dong. For the first time, I visit a hospital funeral parlor. Choe Yang-nim, an employee at Kumho Electronics, smiles from her photo, framed with flowers. Carbon monoxide from briquettes. Her dark-skinned mother from the country sits staring at Choe Yang-nim, barely holding on to her mind. Her little sister is asleep, her head resting on the mother’s lap. Mi-seo, our class president, places the condolence money that we have collected in front of Choe Yang-nim’s mother.

“Three of them were sleeping in that room. How come only Yang-nim died, I wonder.”

Choe Yang-nim’s little sister opens her eyes slowly from her dark-skinned mother’s lap.

“Can it be real . . . Must be a dream, right?”

The dark-skinned mother is so dumbfounded she has no tears to cry. All she can do is mumble, her blurred gaze on her departed daughter. All she can remember is her daughter’s fingernails were cracked and festering when she came home for Chuseok. What
pain she must be in, traveling down that long, long path, with such fingernails.

Hui-jae
eonni
gets a perm. Now she never wears her uniform. Instead of her student shoes, she now wears her dark red high heels. Now on her shelf the student shoes sit like a symbol. She’s changed. Instead of her white-collared uniform, she wears a blouse, buttoned up to her neck and tucked inside her plaid skirt. Her flared skirt flaps against the wind. I sometimes catch sight of her carrying a slim bag on her shoulder instead of the red schoolbag. Her back to me as she makes a turn at the end of the alley. The tip of her shoes as she descends the steps on the other side of the elevated walkway from me, the movement of her small body as she hastily disappears into the marketplace.

Again, Oldest Brother asks if she works at a bar. I start as if I’d just heard something I shouldn’t have, offering a firm denial.

“No, I told you that’s not true.”

I must sound like I’m on the verge of tears, because he looks at me quizzically even as he kept adding garbled sentences, saying, “Then why does she come home in the morning hours? I saw some man leaving her room early in the morning.”

“Man . . . ?”

When I answer back with a question, Oldest Brother says, “Her brother, maybe?” as if it’s occurred to him he said something he shouldn’t have, and closes his mouth.

I also see the man leaving Hui-jae’s room. He goes out the front gate, his head sunk so low his nose could almost touch the ground. On one of his cheeks, I see a blue spot the size of a palm, like the one on Hui-jae’s back. That spot? Where did I see it before? Jinhui Tailor Shop. Ah, that’s him. The tailor who was working next to Hui-jae when I went to borrow money. The man walks with his hands dipped inside his pockets, deep in thought,
almost bumps his nose into a telephone pole and finally exits the long alley.

Cousin makes an announcement. “I’m going to rent a room in Yongsan.”

Oldest Brother, a commuting soldier serving military duty, is quiet, refusing to answer. “I can’t go on living with your family forever,” Cousin says. And her younger sister is finishing middle school so she’ll bring her to Seoul and share the room. She says that one of the staff at the district office has promised to find her sister a job there, and that she’ll try and send her to a commerce school.

Mambo. A winter’s night, our mambo dance. Saturday, we come home from school and the lights are on in Hui-jae’s room. Cousin heads straight to her room, still carrying her schoolbag.

“I’m moving out tomorrow.”

Hui-jae, in the middle of doing her laundry, opens her eyes wide and looks at me.

She asks if I’m leaving as well. “I’m not moving. It’s just her.”

“We should have a farewell party.”

We agree to meet on the roof in thirty minutes. Cousin and I change clothes, wash up, tell Oldest Brother that we’re having a farewell party, then go up to the roof, bubbly with laughter. Hui-jae has already laid out a bamboo mat. There are candles on the low table, and an ample dish of spicy rice cake slices. Hui-jae tells us to wait and goes back down to get her cassette player. When she presses play, “La Cumparsita” comes on.

Pampampampam Pam Pam Pam Pampampam—Pararara Ah—

In the middle eating the rice cake slices, Cousin gets up and sings out “Pam pam pam,” her arms straight out, her fists tight,
and heads downstairs. Where are you going? Cousin drifts into the distance as she dances. When she comes back, she pulls out from her pocket a bottle of clear
soju
.

“What if
Oppa
finds out?”

“We told him it’s a farewell party.”

The cheap, potent liquor quickly makes us fragrant with alcohol. Hui-jae hands Cousin a paper shopping bag.

“What’s this?”

“A going-away present.”

Inside the bag is a pair of jeans.

“Try them on. They’ll fit you nicely.”

Cousin, who had always somewhat disapproved of Hui-jae, is quiet amidst all the
pampampam
-ing The candlelight flickers then goes out. The rooftop is still bright.

“The moon’s out!”

The moon, high and round, above the factory chimneys. Were they working a night shift? The windows in the Design and Packaging Center are lit bright. A train rattles past. Today’s last number 118 bus leaves its last stop on the route. Under the moonlight Cousin tries on the jeans, Hui-jae’s going-away present. They fit her perfectly.

“I made them myself.”

“For me?”

“Well, not exactly . . .”

“For whom, then?”

“My little brother back home is about your size.”

“Your brother?”

“Doesn’t matter if I made it for a guy or a girl, they’re jeans. And they’re baggy disco pants.”

“Then what about your brother?”

Hui-jae smiles meekly. “I can always make another pair.”

Cousin, always cheerful, nodding whenever she hears music, even in the middle of cleaning the floor, starts with the
pam pam pam
again in her new jeans. Swaying, shaking, under the moonlight, on the bamboo mat, like a tree shadow.

“You try it, too.”

Hui-jae is reluctantly pulled up and I’m dragged along with her. Like sea crabs that have crawled onto the shore by mistake, we move in side steps,
pam pam pam
—Cousin, with her cute moves, Hui-jae, stiff and awkward, smiling softly. The moon hangs in the sky, on the Design and Packaging Center’s steep chimney. The moon on the chimney sucking up the black smoke. The darkening moon. Cousin, who was the first to dance, lets out an exhausted breath and sits down on the mat. I sit next to her. Hui-jae sits next to me. The night wind wipes the sweat off our foreheads, and we quickly get cold. We cuddle closer, arms on shoulders as if in an embrace. We sit like that for a long time. As we sit shoulder to shoulder, the steel wheels of the day’s last train rattles by our heads. The dark moon on the chimney of the Design and Packaging Center sticks out its clear white face. On this little island . . . where the frozen shadow of the moon fills up the waves, and a harsh wintry surfs gather. I think of the solemn, beautiful love, inside heart of the lighthouse keeper . . . We are three moons. Warm feelings surge, as if we had shared something in our hearts as we sang.

That winter, after dancing the mambo on the rooftop above our lone room, Cousin leaves the alley. Like a migratory bird. To be Oldest Sister to her little sisters, as Oldest Brother was to me.

I visit Cousin in her rented room in Yongsan. Samgakji Rotary. A long, long alley. Houses clustered close together. Bags of trash frozen in the cold wind. A side door installed between two walls, its lock exposed; from next door, a woman leaps out, her hair dyed blond and wearing red lipstick, black leather skirt, and leather boots. A black man with big, bright eyes steps out after her, his back bent low. The two of them walk down the frozen alley, cuddled close. The wind is cold but the woman’s calves are completely exposed.

“Come in!”

“You haven’t lit any briquettes?” I blurt out as I step inside Cousin’s room.

“When it gets colder I will . . .” Twenty-one-year-old Cousin has suddenly gotten very old. Her expression seems to suggest that there’s nothing in the world that will surprise her now. Another lone room, a long, narrow room. My feet are freezing.