The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (56 page)

In the old apartment where we lived until Oldest Brother got married, whenever I woke in the middle of the night I snuck into the room where my brothers were sleeping, carrying my pillow. And I would try to go back to sleep as I listened to their breathing. While I listened to the sound of their breathing, I was able to forget the anxiety and loneliness, growing more distant every day. Only when my chest filled up with the breathing of my family, my blood relations who would never abandon me, only then I was able to go back to sleep.

I take the physical fitness test with the daytime students. The autumn day is so clear and bright. I, nineteen years old, am wearing my PE uniform, the sky-blue V-neck shirt. The breeze feels cool and soft on my face. It seems there is sweetness in the scent of leaves in the wind. My turn to do sit-ups. Six students form a line and lie down on the white mat. Go! Hands clasped behind the head, elbows jerk forward to touch the bent knees.

After finishing six, I can’t bring myself to lift my torso.

From amidst clear white clouds her face emerges. It approaches, then pulls back, each time I sit up then fall back down. I give up doing sit-ups and lie on the mat, gazing up at the clouds. Before I realize it, a tear rolls down my cheek. The proctor in charge
of counting calls out, “Twelve!” probably thinking I was crying about my poor performance.

Thanks to this, perhaps, I get eighteen points, an unexpectedly high score, on the fitness test.

I sit among strangers, not a single face I know, and take the scholastic achievement test. There are far more questions I can’t answer than ones I can. The last test is math. I fill out the answer sheet without even reading the test. When I leave the classroom, the first one in the room, parents are waiting outside the gates. I do not bother looking around since I don’t expect anyone to be there, then hear a familiar voice call my name. It’s Third Brother.

“
Oppa
!”

I rush toward him. Who knows where he got it, but he’s carrying a thermos bottle, filled with hot coffee.

That’s what my brothers used to do, appear in an unexpected place or situation, calling my name. Then reach out to caress my hands and my face, quickly growing old since leaving that lone room.

While writing this, from time to time I would be filled with a feeling that someone was watching me. When this happened, I would look back, nervous and tense. For a while it seemed that the gaze visited me regularly, at a specific time. This would make many things impossible for me. I could not sleep, could not lock the doors for the night, got sick and tired of having to be honest, could not bring myself to be gentle to him.

Looking back now as I am about to come to an ending, I realize that the person watching me was none other than myself. That I was trying, awkwardly, to have a conversation with myself.

It is now August. I have nothing more to say. I should send off the manuscript to my publisher, but the other me within me keeps whispering to me, tenaciously, Start over from the beginning . . . Start over from the beginning.

Start over from the beginning . . . from the beginning . . . from the beginning . . . once again . . . from the beginning . . . once again . . . start over from the beginning . . .

When putting certain events down in writing, there is much that does not go as planned. Important parts get reduced to short passages and parts that had seemed vague become long and extensive. I am the one writing it but I cannot do as I intend. These moments that keep surging and vanishing. But I start thinking that now, whichever story I choose to tell, the story should not be aimed solely at myself.

Since that day when I ran out of that place, my hands empty save for the fluorescent teddy bear that Chang had given me, I never went back, not even once. I tried so hard never to think about the room that sometimes it really seemed as if that time in that space has vanished within me. But then I would once again see her in my dream and everything would be vivid again. My heart would beat rapidly, making me feel as if I were suffocating, then I would turn blank, in a state of excessive alertness. But now the dark and damp shed inside of my heart is calling to me. Whispering, “All you need to do is take the subway bound for Suwon at Seoul Station or Jonggak, and get off at Garibong Station. Walk down the steps that lead to the Design and Packaging Center, not to Industrial Complex No. 3, and you will arrive at the vacant lot. No. You will arrive at the building that was under construction in what used to be the vacant lot.” Will the photo studio, where Cousin used to rent a camera, still be there? Will the barbecue place, where Oldest Brother used to treat us
to pork belly, still be there? Will the storekeeper granny still be alive? Does the number 118 bus still make its last stop by the vacant lot? What was the high-rise building they were constructing on the lot? Will the house with the thirty-seven rooms still be there?

Will the rubber basin still be there, placed upside down? What about the clothesline?

Trying to avoid this growing urge to visit the lone, remote room, which was amassing like a snowball, I called him on the phone. Asking if he would give me a ride to the bus terminal because I was visiting the country. He willingly drove me to the terminal, my luggage loaded in the trunk. It was 10:20 when we arrived and 10:40 tickets were available at the booth. I got a seat on the 10:40, but exchanged it for an eleven o’clock ticket. I didn’t want to part right away. We had coffee at a tearoom inside the terminal where the tables were arranged haphazardly. As I got on the bus he waved at my back, saying, “Have a good trip.” We had gone a short while after the rest stop. It was still a long way until Jeongeup Interchange, but the bus came to a stop. The door opened and people climbed on, covered in sweat. The bus before us must have been in an accident. I didn’t give it much thought at first, but seeing the shards of glass scattered on the pavement, I wondered, The bus ahead of us? They said it was the 10:40. The seat that I gave up because I didn’t want us to part right away. If I hadn’t felt that way, I would have gotten on the bus in the crash. The bus was parked in the middle of the highway at midday, crushed and contorted. They said people had been injured and taken away by ambulance. His face passed before my eyes.

When people say, “Back when we lived in that house,” or, “Back when we raised chickens,” they seem happy. I start wishing that this book would contain such happiness.

There are dishes I crave when I visit this house in the summer. Sweet potato sprouts, peeled and pickled like kimchi, and bean paste mixed with freshwater snails.

They were dishes that Mom often cooked in the summers before I left this house. Mom seemed to just throw these dishes together like they were nothing special, but when I tried to make them in the city, I couldn’t get them to taste that way. How mouthwatering, to take a spoonful of rice, mixed with thick bean paste, cooked with snails from the bogs, and some chopped young radish. But I would be afraid of green chili peppers. When my brothers picked up the long, plump peppers and dipped them in bean paste sauce before taking big, juicy bites, I would stare, saying, “You’re going to scream soon that they’re too hot.” But instead of screaming, they would reach with the other hand to grab another pepper.

Mom is stubborn, as stubborn now as she’s always been. What I really want is sweet potato sprouts, peeled and pickled like kimchi, and bean paste mixed with freshwater snails, but she insists that Father head out to the butcher in town. He takes his motorcycle and brings back a large bundle of meat for marinated beef and leg bone soup. Mom gets a large white pot of water boiling on the gas stove in the backyard for the soup. She said she had a pumpkin this big (she stretched out both arms to make a circle) growing old and fat in the patch behind the house but, sadly, someone had taken it.

“Our vines had crept next to the ones in the neighboring patch, so I gather they must’ve taken it, thinking it was their vine.”

“Why don’t you go ask, then. Asking, those vines are ours, and I thought you took our pumpkin thinking it’s from your vines, maybe?”

I stick out my chin enacting the conversation, and Mom quickly forgets about her disappeared pumpkin and laughs, her large eyes narrowing into slits.

“Just that it was my first pumpkin of the year. Every day I looked into it, thinking when it fattens up, I’m going to simmer it for my daughter to eat, but just like that, it was gone, that’s why.”

Concerned that my face and my feet are prone to swelling, each year after the harvest was done, Mom would make pumpkin juice and bring it to the city in a kettle for me.

After dinner Mom and Father discussed the house at length over slices of red watermelon. Father wanted to rebuild the house. He’d been renovating an old structure over and over, so things stuck out here and there, giving the house an unstable air, as if it were just a temporary accommodation. There was no room for guests, either. Mom was against the idea. Ours was one of the best functioning houses in the village and if we wrecked it and built a new one, the villagers will not look at it kindly, she said. But that the veranda was too narrow, letting too much sun into the rooms, so we need an extension, and that was all.

At first I sided with Mom, then with Father, going back and forth. Mom said they didn’t have that much longer to live, not long enough to wreck the house and build a new one. That they should use the money to get Little One an apartment when he graduates and finds himself a wife. Father said that he could never live in any other place, and that if he didn’t build a new house, no one would visit this place after he’s dead. I was leaning more and more toward Father. He seemed to be having a discussion with Mom, but I could tell that he’d already made up his mind. Father was not a man of many words. This was the first time I’d seen him engaged in such a long conversation with Mom. He was not discussing the issue with Mom; he was persuading her.

“Is it just for us that I want to build it now? Doesn’t matter what kind of house we live in. Our children, they visit because we live here now, but do you think they’ll come visit when we’re dead? We gotta leave behind a new house so that they’ll visit long after we’re gone, that’s what.”