Bluebeard's First Wife

by Seong-nan Ha

  He’d never heard the voice of the weeping girl before. His landlord stepped into the adjacent room and dragged her out. The girl who stood before him now was the one who had snuck out of the night room with bloodshot eyes and fled into the fog. The one whose head had poked out from the bushes at the sound of the gunshot. He choked back the scream that threatened to escape from his throat.

  •

  Officer Lim tugged on his trousers lazily. The night room was too small for two people to sit and talk. The man told Lim to come to the woods, where they had heard the gunshot. Lim nodded. Lim’s eyes were red, as though he’d been drinking on duty. He came sauntering up to the pine grove, his hands in his pockets. He snickered, flashing his yellow, nicotine-stained teeth.

  “I knew you were different, but I never guessed you’d act this fast.”

  “Something’s not right. You know that.”

  Instead of answering, Lim put a cigarette in his mouth.

  “I saw her come out of the night room,” the man said anxiously. “Are you still going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know you saw that.”

  “After seeing her with you, how could I sleep with her? I never touched her!”

  “Come on, you expect me to believe that? Everyone will know by tomorrow. I warned you, didn’t I? I told you how small this place is.”

  “You honestly think I’d make a move for your woman?”

  Lim dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out with his shoe. “Who says she’s mine? She was no virgin, that’s for sure. I bet even her parents know. I couldn’t care less what she did while she lived in the big city. The only reason word hasn’t gotten out is because of this place. It’d be a shame if a young woman with a bright future couldn’t blossom because of a few rumors … I had a few drinks with Mr. Kim from the electronics shop last night, but damn, this hangover isn’t going away. I was wondering where she was last night. Turns out, she was with you.”

  Lim started down the mountain, but came back. “Hey, it’s not such a bad deal,” he whispered, as if letting him in on a secret. “She’s a good girl, and she isn’t bad-looking. But you should’ve been more careful. You want to know the difference between us? You got me, but the folks here got you. Your mistake was going to her house. You really shouldn’t have gone there.”

  •

  He waited outside the post office until she got off work. He grabbed hold of her wrist and dragged her into the police station. She tried to shake him off, but followed without a word. He ran his fingertip over her face. He was sure she’d been the one in the room that night.

  “You think I’m stupid? It was you last night! It was you in the room! So what the hell is going on? What are you guys trying to pull? Tell me right now!”

  The girl raised her face and glared at him. “What kind of girl do you take me for? You think I’d sleep around? I wasn’t even here yesterday. I had to go to town and I missed the last bus so I ended up spending the night at my friend’s house.”

  His fingers had left a red mark around her wrist. Massaging it, she looked around the station.

  He sank into a chair. “It’d be different if it had been you,” he mumbled. “I would have stayed here for you.”

  She whipped around and gazed down at him. “Thanks, but no thanks. I hate this stinking place. You expect me to grow old, stamping mail? No way. I’m moving to Seoul soon.”

  “You can tell me. It was you, right? It was you last night, wasn’t it?”

  She gazed out the window, her arms crossed. “The only reason I’m talking to you right now is because of my sister. Do I have to spell it out for you? You were with my sister last night. So please stop harassing me.”

  When he came home from work, his room was bare. The landlord’s wife, who was carrying out the pigs’ fodder from the kitchen, looked at him and said casually, “They came this morning to take your things next door.”

  All his things were in the room he’d barged into that night. The woman, who had been ironing his uniform, got to her feet and greeted him.

  •

  He now came home drunk every night. Whenever the post-office girl saw him, she greeted him with a smile, calling him hyeongbu—brother-in-law. The people whispered when they saw him going to and from the police station. The law, my ass. They’re all corrupt. Just look at him. He shacks up with her, but doesn’t even have the decency to marry her. And he shows his face around here like nothing’s wrong.

  He had changed. When he got drunk now, he picked up a club and smashed the furniture. The mirror in their room broke in weblike cracks. He avoided looking directly at her.

  He was supposed to be on night duty that night. He forced himself to nap, even though sleep didn’t come. She sat near him mending clothes. He had his eyes closed, but he could sense she was walking on tiptoe so as to not disturb him. She appeared demure, a completely different girl from the one who’d snuck out of the night duty room that foggy morning, or the one who’d been hiding in the bushes. He sometimes felt her breath graze his nose and cheeks, as if she’d crept close to peer at his face. He hated everything about her; he couldn’t even stand the sound of her breathing.

  Right then, a fly flew in. It landed on the back of her hand as she was sewing. She shook it off, but it whirled once around the room and settled on the wall. She crept on her knees and swatted at it. But it was no use. This time, it settled on the man’s chest. Her hand came down on him with a thump. At that instant, he heard something shatter inside him. What broke the ice in the end wasn’t a pick, but a needle.

  He bolted to his feet and punched her square in the face. Blood gushed from her nose, covering her mouth and chin. The commotion caused her parents and sister to come running from the main room.

  “It wasn’t enough for you to get kicked out of Seoul and take advantage of a perfectly good girl—you had to start beating her?” cried the mother. She bared her teeth and leapt at him.

  He dodged out of the way, and the mother crashed into the wall behind him. In the broken mirror, he saw a complete stranger looking back at him. The shattered glass looked like a giant fly’s eye, made up of countless lenses.

  “It’s clear he doesn’t care what anyone says!” the post-office girl said. “What kind of man refuses to do what’s right and continues to live in sin?”

  He struck her across the mouth, stopping her tirade.

  He ran out of the house and headed for the bar across the police station, where he downed two bottles of soju. Even after drinking the local soju for several months, he still wasn’t used to the taste. The bar owner set a green-onion pancake in front of him and asked when the wedding was going to be. A few customers watched him as if waiting for an answer. They were all in on it. Perhaps they had all planned it from the very beginning.

  The police station was empty. The entire village was at his mercy. He took down two M2 carbines. He loaded them with ammunition, slung one across his chest and held the other in a shooting position. Two reservists were joking around, standing guard in front of the armory. When he aimed the M2 at them, they laughed. “What are you doing? Don’t fool around.”

  He fired. Luckily, they managed to move out of the way and the bullet hit the slate wall behind them. They faltered, took a few steps back, and fled.

  He walked down the gravel path. The fog was starting to creep in. A light glimmered through the fog—the first house in the village. The hand grenades he had put in his pant pockets chafed his thighs each time he took a step. Every pocket was stuffed with the ammunition he had taken from the armory. He slipped, thrusting out his hand to steady himself. As the fog rolled in, the crunch of gravel under his feet and the bullets rattling in his pockets were the only things he could hear.

  Night Poaching

  The detective in charge of the investigation had turned over every last detail to me, so the town coming into view through the bus windshield didn’t seem all that unfamiliar. According to him, wherever
people lived was pretty much the same. But what struck me immediately were the specialty restaurants lining the small street outside the bus terminal, with enormous pressure cookers out front. If the hunting grounds were in operation, those pressure cookers spewed sticky steam all day long. The grounds were open this year. But it was past midnight, and the restaurants were dark.

  “Turn left where the specialty restaurants come to an end. You’ll see a mailbox right away. Then inquire at the rice shop across the street.”

  The detective’s information tended to be accurate, and sure enough, I saw the mailbox as soon as I turned left at the end of the street with the specialty restaurants. Across the street, the rice shop was dark, but through the frosted glass I saw a gleam of light coming from the living quarters at the back. I could even hear the drone of the television.

  A man looking as if he’d just crawled out of bed helped me find a truck that would take me to my final destination. There was no regular transportation between this place and where I was headed, which meant people had to rely on delivery trucks that weren’t in use at the moment.

  Since all the cab seats were already occupied by other passengers, I had to ride in the back of one such truck, but I was in no position to complain. “Forget about traveling comfortably in the passenger seat. Just count it a blessing if you don’t have to squeeze into the cargo bed with a bunch of the village women,” the detective had added.

  When we left the town behind and had been speeding along for about twenty minutes, the occasional streetlight disappeared altogether. So did the glow of distant houses, glimmering in the darkness like clusters of stars. The asphalt road came to an end and was replaced by a narrow, unpaved road just wide enough for one car to pass. Mountain shadows pressed in from all sides.

  “If you can’t get yourself a jeep, forget about taking your own car,” the detective had said, shaking his head. He’d made the mistake of driving his new sedan to the scene of the accident. “Trust me, it won’t make things any easier. You’ll just end up with a big hole in your gas tank.”

  Just as he’d warned, the truck bounced nearly half a foot off the gravel road. Even after the driver turned on his high beams, you could see only a meter or two ahead. Outside the cones of light was total darkness, and for someone like me, who was traveling this way for the first time, it was like stepping through a black curtain into an unknown world. The truck, carrying five people including the driver, raced through the woods for about an hour. Human beings are a strange bunch. They laid railroad tracks across Niagara Falls, or transported materials up a steep mountainside just to build a snack stand, or they built a village deep in the woods, like this, when there weren’t any proper roads.

  Although it was early November, the temperature in the mountains fell below zero at night. I had on the jacket I usually carried around in Seoul, but it didn’t help. I had to clasp the side of the truck bed to keep from falling out, and my hand stuck to the metal like to ice. Goddamn. The previous detective, who had described every tedious detail, like the exact location of a tearoom, for example, had forgotten to mention the most important thing: the fickle mountain temperature. There’d been another thing; he’d also stayed quiet about his reasons for suddenly quitting a case he was so close to cracking.

  Maybe it was because of the cold, but I had to take a piss. The truck’s bouncing and rattling made it worse. In the end, I had to tap on the rear window. The driver stopped the truck, but didn’t get out. I hopped out from the back and walked up to his side. He stuck his head out the half-open window and threw a nervous glance toward the woods. I heard a stream flowing somewhere in the darkness.

  I was crossing the road to find some privacy behind a tree when the driver leaned out the window and shouted, “Where you going? Just do it there, right there!”

  He was pointing to a spot right in front of the headlights. Among the passengers was a young woman. No matter how desperate the situation, I couldn’t pull my pants down in front of her. Though I couldn’t see inside because of the lights, it was the opposite case if you were looking out. I couldn’t urinate on a lit-up stage. But the driver didn’t give me a chance to protest.

  “Don’t you understand Korean? I told you not to go in the woods.”

  I didn’t blame him for acting this way; it was understandable after an accident like that. These people were going to be afraid of the woods for a long time. I turned my back to the truck and urinated toward the middle of the road. The detective had said it was a peaceful village, not at all the kind of place where you’d expect an accident like that to happen. Still, something told me I shouldn’t blindly trust everything he said.

  When my tailbone was throbbing and the hand gripping the side panel had gone numb, the truck’s headlights swept over the jangseung totem poles marking the village boundaries. It seemed we were finally at our destination. The driver, who had taken the detective to this village numerous times, dropped me off at the house of Mr. Kim, the head of the Kim clan, and sped off into the dark.

  “It’d probably be best to stay with them. They’re not so uptight because they’re used to taking in lodgers from out of town. It’s just him and his wife, and they’ll stay out of your hair. He limps a bit. He’s the cousin of the deceased—their mothers were sisters. Make sure you prepay, and slip them a few thousand won more than what they ask for. Might be a little late in the season, but if you’re lucky, you’ll get some pine-mushroom skewers for breakfast.”

  His words would have made anyone curious about this place.

  Maybe it was because I’d called before leaving Seoul, but the front gate was halfway open and the light bulb in the yard was burning hot, as if it had been left on for a long time. The dog barked at my footsteps. A door opened and Mr. Kim stuck out his head.

  Except for the size of the doors themselves, the layout of the house was similar to any house in the country. The furniture was an odd assortment of new and old, some from the time of the Saemaeul Movement when homes in rural communities had been revamped. The doors to the rooms were more like pet doors, barely big enough for a grown person to pass through.

  “It’s probably because of the cold. The bigger the door, the more it lets in the cold. Or maybe those rooms were used by women before and people wanted to prevent easy access inside? Anyhow, make sure you watch your head.”

  Despite the small door, the room was spacious. Near the corner where the floor wasn’t heated, recently harvested rice in burlap sacks was stacked up all the way to the ceiling. A low desk was the only furniture in the room, and above that was a tiny window the size of a sheet of paper. The room smelled faintly of old grain. The woman brought me a freshly basted sleeping mat and blanket. The starched sheet chafed my skin.

  The house of Park Gicheol, whom everyone had called The Deer, was located outside the village. On a mountain path where trucks and jeeps were useless, it was best to travel on foot. I backtracked the way I’d come the night before, and saw the totem poles once more. The colors were faded as if they’d been standing there for a long time, and the noses and eyes had become a pale clump.

  Even the detective had trouble describing the exact location of Park Gicheol’s house. All he’d said was to get Mr. Kim’s help. Since there weren’t any signposts, I had to simply eyeball the distance and fumble along. When I walked through a carpet of leaves, I left behind footprints filled with water. I climbed until I was out of breath, until the larch trees had disappeared and were replaced by pines. In the shadows of the trees, I became cold as my sweat dried. I continued between the pines on what looked like remnants of a path. Finally, the woods opened up and I saw a wide field. Park Gicheol’s house was situated at the edge of the field a little ways up the hill. I was lucky it was winter. If it had been summer, his house would have been completely hidden by all the bushes and the deciduous trees. The long, narrow house seemed to be clinging to the ground.

  It was early morning, but the house was empty. There were two small rooms and a large kitch
en all on one side. It seemed an animal pen had once stood across from the blackened wood-burning stove where the lid of a cast iron pot hung, covered with a thick layer of dust. I pushed open one of the bedroom doors. In the middle of the room was a low aluminum table; on it was a porcelain bowl of water with grains of rice floating in it, along with a dish containing several pieces of pickled radish.

  I went out through the kitchen to the back yard. An unpicked squash lay rotting in the soil. Dust covered the edge of the porch. Perhaps because the house sat a little up the hill, I could see past the yard, far into the distance. Two jeeps were driving into the village along the road I’d taken last night. Hunting season was in full swing. Hunters from all over the country will flock here, and shots will ring out non-stop until the season ends next February.

  “Park Gicheol’s elderly mother picks pine mushrooms. Folks from the village collect a nice profit from picking them in the fall. She usually eats lunch up in the woods, a rice ball seasoned with some salt and pepper, and then she makes her way back down in the evening.”

  But it was November and the season for picking pine mushrooms was over, so where was she? Even if there were any mushrooms left in the woods, they would have frozen by now, since the temperature had dropped below zero for the past several days. And frozen mushrooms weren’t worth much. But the villagers wouldn’t have missed any, would they?

  A frame hung between the door and the eaves. It wasn’t difficult to find the man I assumed was Park Gicheol. True to his nickname, his large, droopy eyes, not to mention his long neck and pointed chin, resembled those of a deer.

  But there was another reason Park was called The Deer. No one in the village knew the woods as well as he had. He’d even moved like one, leaping through the woods and valleys with his strong, nimble legs. The detective shared some of the stories he’d heard from the villagers. “A hunter saw Park in front of a shop in town. He said the shadow cast on the wall behind Park wasn’t that of a human! What else could this mean except that Park is more deer than human?” The detective knew how to mix just the right amount of hyperbole with facts; he had a certain flair for storytelling.