Bluebeard's First Wife

by Seong-nan Ha

  “The campfire ended around ten o’clock. Then they all went inside to sleep. The kids were all there. Please believe me.”

  As they all knew, it would take a kindergarten child a little over two hours to walk the gravel road to the store, and about thirty minutes by bus. If she had passed the store around 11 P.M. she would have had to leave the campground by nine at the very latest. The campfire was still in full swing at that time. Amid the noise of fireworks and the children’s excited hollering, a child could have easily slipped away without anyone noticing.

  The woman’s throat was parched. “Are you positive my daughter was there? Can you swear?”

  Miss Kim gave a deep nod. “She was sleeping next to Jinhye. She said her hair pin was bothering her, so I took it off for her.”

  The girl that Miss Kim was remembering was not the woman’s.

  “That’s not her, you’re thinking of someone else. My daughter’s never worn anything in her hair before. Her hair wasn’t long enough.”

  Miss Kim had stopped crying and was now biting her lower lip. Kyeonghui’s mother, who was sitting across from the teacher, raised her voice.

  “It’s obvious you’re not sure of anything! You wouldn’t have noticed even if ten kids went missing.”

  Cornered, Miss Kim turned white. She started to stammer. “They were all there, I swear. Listen, I know how you feel. This past year wasn’t easy for me either. But they were all there that night. I wish what you’re saying is true. I wish at least one of them were still alive.”

  The woman’s daughter had been ordinary. She was barely noticed, just like in all the pictures. If someone like her had slipped away during the campfire, no one would have noticed. All of a sudden, Miss Kim slapped her knee, as if she’d remembered something important.

  “We recorded the campfire that night! I have the video.”

  A bonfire was set up on the beach. The children’s laughter rang out. Even the sound of the waves hitting the shore could be heard. Children in yellow stood around the fire, giggling, yawning, playing with the friend next to them, or gawking around them, waiting for the wood to be lit. When a burning stick of kindling was brought near and the wood caught fire, the children whooped and hopped up and down. Cheerful music soon blared, and they moved closer to the fire and started to dance, shaking their bottoms.

  One by one, the camera panned over the children, who wore party hats and had their faces painted like Native American chiefs. The mothers wailed and burst into tears when the camera captured their children, but the woman’s daughter was nowhere to be seen. This time, too, the camera had passed over her too quickly, or else she was standing out of frame.

  When the campfire died down, the children’s candlelight time began. Lit candles filled the dark screen. The children sang quietly, holding their candles with care so that they wouldn’t go out. The scene stopped abruptly at that moment. The next scene showed the children shoving one another as they filed into the dormitory. At that instant, the woman saw her daughter. She saw her for only a split second, but it was definitely her. This time, again, the camera caught only the side of her face. But the woman was more used to seeing her daughter’s profile anyway. Her daughter’s eyes looked sleepy. Then she disappeared outside the frame, pushed by the child behind her. As she fell forward, the stain on the chest of her yellow uniform caught the woman’s attention. There was no need to rewind the video; it was her child. It was only then that she remembered the stain. She had completely forgotten it over the past year.

  •

  The waves crashed and retreated below. It sounded like the tide was coming in. Her husband found the shortcut to the campground easily enough, since they had been to the site many times. The store where the owner had claimed to have seen a little girl in yellow was now closed. The house connected to the store was also dark. It was past midnight and the small town was as quiet as the inside of a well. From time to time a young woman came out of the teahouse and sputtered away on her scooter to go on a delivery.

  As the paved road came to an end, so did the occasional light by the side of the road. The car rocked from side to side as they drove along the pitch-black gravel road. The woman and her husband had not said a single word to each other after leaving Seoul. He turned on his high beams. Though they could see a little farther than before, they couldn’t go any faster, because of the bends in the road. Beyond the lights’ reach, the cliffs fell away into nothingness. A squirrel caught in the headlights huddled, motionless in the middle of the narrow road. Her husband honked the horn lightly and scared it away into the forest. A sign to the campground appeared in the headlights.

  After traveling on the gravel road for nearly an hour, they finally reached the camp parking lot. Even with a flashlight, they couldn’t find the trail that led down to the campground proper. After trying repeatedly to make his way through the bushes and overgrown grass, her husband gave up and got back in the car.

  A year ago around this time, a child had come this way after slipping away from the campground. The light from the campfire would have made it easy enough for her to find her way up, and the lights in the parking lot had been working back then. The gravel road didn’t split off or lead anywhere else, so she couldn’t have wandered off.

  “This is crazy,” her husband said, speaking for the first time in a few hours. “I want to believe that old man just as much as you do. When I heard him, it felt like something inside me was coming alive again. But I saw her body with my own eyes.”

  She opened the door and stepped out of the car. The mosquitoes caught a whiff of her flesh and swarmed in. She moved forward slowly, trying to match her steps to those of a six-year-old. The gravel was slippery, as if dew had fallen. Her husband followed behind in the car. The road sprang to life in the white of the headlights. He yelled out the window.

  “They found twenty-two bodies! They could have gotten them mixed up, but no one was missing. Listen to me, stop this nonsense and get in the car! Let’s try to forget. Let’s forget and move on.”

  The woman sometimes imagined what kind of girl her daughter would have become. She pictured the child getting her first period and washing out her stained underwear in secret. She pictured her heading to school in a new spring outfit and spotless white socks. The woman had planned to get off work early the day her daughter came back from camp. She’d planned to go to the kindergarten to wait for the bus to arrive, and when the bus came and her sunburned child trudged off, she’d planned to give her a big hug. On the way home, she would have peered into the plastic bottle to see how many crabs her daughter had caught. But instead, she was compensated for what she’d imagined, using the Hoffman tables to calculate future losses.

  “He said it was a star-shaped pin!” the woman cried without looking back. “But it wasn’t a pin, it was a stain!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The morning their daughter left for camp, the woman had woken up at six o’clock as always. She’d made toast and fried an egg, while her daughter, who had gotten up earlier than usual, wandered around the living room in her underwear. It was only after she’d put the yellow uniform on her daughter that she realized she’d forgotten to wash it. On the chest was a chocolate syrup stain, the size of a large coin. Her daughter whined about the dirty shirt. The woman tried to wash out the stain, but instead of disappearing, the syrup spread into the shape of a star.

  “The other kids are going to make fun of me. They’ll say my shirt’s dirty and I spill food like a baby.”

  She soothed the girl, while helping her arms through the sleeves. “You’re bound to get dirty by the end of the day. Your friends’ clothes will get dirty, too, so just hang tight.”

  She helped her daughter put on her backpack and hung the plastic bottle across her chest. Because of the stain, she was going to be late for work again. She grabbed her daughter’s hand and half ran to the kindergarten. Her daughter had a hard time keeping up and stumbled a few times. After saying goodbye in f
ront of the building, her daughter walked up to the front door, and then all of a sudden, she turned around. “So long, Mommy!” she called, waving her hand.

  “What do you mean ‘so long’?” she said, as she waved back. “You’re supposed to say ‘see you soon.’”

  Stamped across the bottom of Miss Kim’s footage, at the moment the woman’s daughter was captured on camera, was the time of the recording: 9:50 P.M. A six-year-old could not have gone from the camp to the store in a little over an hour, even if she had run all the way. The star-shaped pin the owner claimed to have seen could have actually been a star-shaped stain. Children that age were always getting stains on their clothes. Or just as the owner’s wife had said, he could have been spewing nonsense because of the alcohol.

  Her husband honked lightly from behind, as if to scare away a squirrel, but she didn’t scamper into the forest. Little by little, she walked forward. No matter what everyone else said, she wanted to believe the missing child was hers. She wanted to believe the reason her child hadn’t come home in over a year was because she took such small steps. If she were to come home at that pace, they would have to wait much, much longer. No matter what everyone said, this is what she wanted to believe.

  Bluebeard’s First Wife

  The wardrobe was so heavy the three movers struggled for a long time outside the front door, sweating and catching their breath. I hovered by the entrance, afraid they might dent the corners. All I could do was shout, “up!” “down!” “left!” and “right!” which pretty much summed up my English. But whenever the wardrobe tilted or came dangerously close to scraping the doorway, Korean sprang from my mouth: “Josim haseyo!”

  After repeated maneuvers to get it in the house, my twelve-foot-wide princess tree wardrobe, which had made the long journey from Incheon’s port to Wellington, New Zealand, finally occupied one side of our bedroom.

  The move took half the day, since there were more things shipped from my parents’ house than I’d thought. After the men brought in the last box, filled with knickknacks like my old journals and high-school graduation album, I sat hugging my knees on the corner of our bed and gazed at the wardrobe.

  I could almost smell the morning air from back home. I could even hear the wind sweeping through the forest. Whenever I heard that sound, lines from a poem I’d read as a child would come to me.

  Who has seen the wind?

  Neither I nor you:

  But when the leaves hang trembling,

  The wind is passing through.

  My heart swelled. I’d brought my princess tree, which had stood on the hill behind my childhood home, across thousands of miles to our bedroom in this foreign land.

  My father, who’d been an elementary school teacher, had planted the sapling on the hill behind our house when I’d been born. The princess tree grows fast and is used to make furniture and musical instruments because the wood won’t split or warp, but he wanted to turn it into a wardrobe for me when I got married. The forest behind our home was full of chestnut trees; in order to easily find the princess tree among the chestnuts, he even had a plaque made. Written on it was my name, as well as the date the sapling was planted.

  The life of my tree was nearly cut short. If things had gone according to plan, I would have married at the early age of twenty-two, before I graduated from university. But as the wedding day approached, both my fiancé and I changed our minds. His short height, which had at first made him appear sweet, suddenly struck me as unsightly, and his field of study—astronomy—which seemed to guarantee he’d stay wholesome and romantic, felt all at once like an awfully impractical choice. The wedding gifts our families had exchanged were returned, and all ties were severed. I never heard from him again. And the tree, whose life should have ended when I was twenty-two, was allowed to grow for another ten years before it was chopped down to become a twelve-foot-wide wardrobe. Just as Mother said, a wardrobe was best at twelve feet. The wood grain flowing like a quiet stream in the pale, pumpkin-colored timber was lovely. Not a blemish was to be found anywhere.

  I still remember the moment it was cut down. It resisted stubbornly as the chainsaw dug its teeth into the trunk. The saw spun in place, bending as though it would snap. Sawdust sprayed in all directions. The whine of the saw was deafening, and the air was heavy with the smell of sap. When my thirteen-meter tree, which had grown unhindered for thirty-one years, began to tip over, people laughed and cried: “Timber!”

  Inside the wardrobe, three large drawers sat beneath the clothes rail. Because the drawers were brand-new, they kept sticking in the tracks. I put my journals and graduation album inside. To be honest, when I first arrived at the Wellington International Airport, I’d been both nervous and excited. Staring about like some country bumpkin, I’d hurried after Jason so that I wouldn’t lose him. But soon enough, these drawers will slide in and out easily. By then, this foreign land will have become our children’s home.

  Jason, who had come home late, seemed stupefied by the wardrobe that took up an entire side of our bedroom. “This is what you’ve been waiting for?”

  You couldn’t exactly say the bulky, pumpkin-colored wardrobe complemented the white wooden house. As I picked up the clothes he tossed onto the bed, I launched into an explanation about the princess tree.

  “The first tree you cut down is called a modong. When it re-sprouts from the stump, it’s called a jadong. When it re-sprouts again, it’s called a sondong. Sondong princess trees are the best, in terms of quality. I’m going to watch over that tree, and make a wardrobe for our daughter out of the jadong and one for our granddaughter out of the sondong.”

  Of course he didn’t understand any of this. Jason had lived in New Zealand since tenth grade. When I explained everything again, slowly this time, Jason waved his hands in the air, drew his lips together in a small circle, and enunciated, “No thanks.”

  I wasn’t sure if “no thanks” referred to children or the wardrobe, but either way, he didn’t seem too fond of the latter.

  •

  I followed Jason into a restaurant, gazing at the back of his head. His hair was neatly combed, not a single strand out of place. From the back, he looked like a stranger. Did he not like children? All of a sudden, I realized I hardly knew him. But the same went for him. In fact, he probably knew far less about me.

  We had married three months after meeting. My married friends warned that a couple needed to get to know each other before marriage, but I knew they’d failed to take their own advice. But from the very beginning, I could tell the kind of person Jason was.

  We had met three thousand feet in the air. About 90 percent of the passengers en route to Jeju Island had been honeymooners. Those traveling to the island for different reasons occupied the few remaining seats in the back. Although it was a clear day, there was a lot of turbulence. Every time the airplane rattled, the brides in the front shrieked.

  I was gazing out the window when someone said, “Aren’t you even a little scared?”

  Nothing felt real when I looked down at the flat roofs of houses below, or the mountain peaks that didn’t seem much taller than the cars crawling around like ants. Without bothering to turn my head, I said, “There’s no husband to impress.”

  He chuckled. Shortly after, he asked, “Did you drop something?”

  I checked the floor under the seats, but there was nothing. Only then did I look at him. There was a greenish shadow on his face from shaving, like the end of a daikon radish. He laughed again.

  “I meant outside. You’ve been staring out that window since takeoff.”

  Our families wished for us to marry as soon as possible. I was past the age where I could take all the time I wanted, but he was twenty-nine, three years younger than me, which wasn’t a late age for a man to marry. Still, his parents hurried the proceedings along just the same as mine, if not more. Once our parents met, we held a lunch reception at a hotel where we exchanged engagement rings in the presence of family and close friends. Everythi
ng happened so quickly. And unlike ten years before, there was no time to change my mind.

  My mother, who had just returned from selecting an auspicious date for the wedding, glanced toward the living room where my father sat and said a man’s heart was impossible to understand, even after a lifetime together. After doling out some more advice, she said, “I wonder if a twelve-foot-wide wardrobe will fit in your New Zealand bedroom.”

  My friends teased me when they learned I was marrying a man who was not only younger, but also from New Zealand.

  “Immigration is hard work. No matter what happens, make sure you sit tight for two years.”

  What they meant was that I could always get a divorce once I had my citizenship in hand. We clinked our beer glasses together and cheered: “To a brand-new life!”

  He was different from the men I’d known, those who would slip their arms around my shoulders or take me to dark lounges with partitioned booths. He had escorted me home late one night when I’d had too much to drink. After coming into my apartment where I lived alone, he left promptly once he’d finished his coffee. I knew he was trying to be honorable, waiting until we were married. I found his old-fashioned behavior charming, and respected him for it.

  Out of the three months I’d known Jason, we ended up spending only a month and half together, since he headed back to New Zealand once the wedding date was set. We talked on the phone for over an hour every day, and I discussed the wedding preparations with his parents. When Jason would be having dinner at the bottom of the world, I’d drive to the industrial complex on the outskirts of Seoul. The manager of the furniture factory took me on site to show me the princess tree wood that had gone through two cycles of the soaking bath and drying process to prevent warping. The lacquer fumes stung my eyes. As I was leaving, I reminded him once more that I needed the wardrobe on time.

  Jason flew back to Seoul the day before our wedding. When he kept delaying his return date, his parents called the pharmacy more frequently. They made small talk, asking if I’d eaten lunch or if there were many customers that day, but I knew they were checking to see if the wedding preparations were going smoothly. They seemed a little uneasy. Because there wasn’t enough time for a fitting, Jason’s suit was a little big in the waist and had to be taken in with pins, which created wrinkles in the seat of his pants. My father’s past colleagues came by shuttle bus. Those from my hometown came on the same bus, but they kept talking throughout the ceremony and the officiant had to stop four times to tell them to be quiet.