Bluebeard's First Wife

by Seong-nan Ha

  I ended up attending church again in twelfth grade, by chance, when I went to a high school in Yongsan to earn my typewriting credit. I sat at the front of the classroom. The girl sitting next to me, who was from another school, sat twirling a pen between her fingers. As soon as class started, the room clamored with the noise of clicking and banging. Although I was concentrating on my typing, I could see the girl out of the corner of my eye. It seemed she hadn’t practiced at all. She couldn’t even finish drafting up the table, let alone typing the words that went inside.

  We happened to be on the same subway home. We even got off at the same stop. It was a Sunday and it was still light out. I didn’t want to go home early, and so I went with her to church, for the first time in a year. The service was in full swing. I sat in the back row, and glanced at her hymnbook and mouthed the words. A few seats in front of me sat a young man who looked like a college student. He looked back and we made eye contact. He continued to stare, as if he’d forgotten to look away. At that instant, I remembered a line I had read somewhere: The first eye contact is like God declaring, “Let there be light!” He faced forward again only when another student noticed and started to smirk.

  He attended a university in Sinchon. But I had started working at a trading firm after high school instead of going to college. One day on my way home from work, the doors of my subway car slid open and there he was, waiting to get on. He seemed just as taken aback. Humiliated that I’d been caught in work clothes, my hair down like an older woman, I ran off the subway without looking back.

  Perhaps he’d been hurt by that incident, but he was late coming to the next Sunday service. During prayer time, I had my eyes closed and my hands clasped together, but I wasn’t praying. I heard footsteps coming down the sanctuary aisle. They stopped by me, and I felt a light breath on my cheek. Someone was standing close, staring at me. Instead of opening my eyes to see who it was, I squeezed them shut even tighter. When I finally opened my eyes at the end of the prayer, he was sitting in the seat right in front of me. As bland as it was, this was the entirety of my first love.

  I stopped going to church around the same time he was drafted into the army. On Sundays, I pulled the blanket over my head and slept. I was still that same girl, who had gone to church only to receive juice or candy.

  I sometimes went to Sinchon Station, hoping to run into him like before. But nothing happened by chance anymore. I heard about him through other people. How he’d lost his younger sister in a car accident, how he’d gotten married, how he’d become a singer. What did he know about me? Even if he were to read this, he probably wouldn’t realize this was about him. Until I was twenty-five years old, I had the habit of loitering around Sinchon Station, all because our eyes had met in twelfth grade.

  •

  Furious sounds of chopping came from the kitchen all morning. Stainless steel bowls crashed together. My mother had been in a rage, since my father hadn’t come home these past few days. Her anger continued at the breakfast table. According to her, it was all because he hadn’t been baptized, because he hadn’t received forgiveness for his sins.

  But I couldn’t afford to pay attention to anything she said. I was completely focused on the radio. The transistor radio, bound to a brick-sized battery with a rubber band, was my most prized possession before we owned a television. I liked the noise of the static that would hiss whenever I twisted the dial to tune into the right station. I liked the dramas most of all. I listened to them every day without fail. It was through them that I came to know the works of Kim Malbong. The radio often broadcasted her novels, which had been adapted into dramas, or dramatized the events of her life.

  The transistor had a strap attached to it. I took it everywhere—when my mother sent me to the store on an errand, even when my father called me out to the yard for a family picture. That’s why the radio makes an appearance in the few pictures that were taken when I was seven years old, and also the reason I look so serious in them, because even while they were being snapped, I was listening to the broadcast. Park Il was my favorite voice actor. He always played the dashing hero on radio dramas. Even to this day, when I hear his voice in dubbed foreign films, it’s like meeting an old friend. His voice seems ageless.

  All of sudden, there was a flash before my eyes. My mother had struck me in the forehead with a spoon.

  “What are you doing? I called you over ten times.”

  I knew what she was going to say next. It was: “If you have your head screwed on straight, you’ll survive even if a tiger carries you off.” Tears came to my eyes, but it was because I had missed the most important part of the drama.

  It was impossible to concentrate on the radio because of her nagging that went on for days. I lay on my belly on the warm floor and thought about my two fathers. How could they be so different from one another? I didn’t tell my mother, but I had an idea where my father was at that moment.

  •

  As the oldest of three daughters, I was my father’s favorite. Because the second one came only a year after me, she claimed my mother, and so I couldn’t be breastfed for long. I fell asleep with my father at night, and he was the one who spooned soup into my mouth or fed me pieces of sponge cake. I followed him around until eleventh grade.

  My father could not stay put in one place for long. At the start of every school break, I took the long-haul bus or train to wherever he was, whether it was to Ulsan, Masan, or Pusan. I scrubbed a seaweed called gompi with salt, and set the dinner table. When evening fell, I closed his shop. Once I shut the plywood doors, we had to use the small door punched through the plywood to go in and out. Sometimes my father sent me on errands to bakeries and shops to collect money. Wherever my father lived at the moment, I was known as the student from Seoul. I made friends, too. We got along well, even though I only saw them during school breaks. I would help my father until the end of break and then return home. Although I would speak in dialect with friends all summer, the moment I arrived at Yeongdeungpo Station, I would thank the station employee in a courteous Seoul accent.

  I set up a low table in the small room attached to my father’s shop and did my summer vacation homework. The room had only one window, and someone seemed to be peering into the room, but whenever I would turn around, I didn’t see anyone. This went on for several days.

  Then one day, my father was hauled into the police station. When he was able to return almost half a day later, he was livid. I’d never seen him so angry. Someone had mistaken him for a spy and reported him to the police, but that someone had ended up being his friend. It was the friend who had been peering through the window.

  My father had moved to Seoul when he was seventeen years old. He used both the Pusan and Seoul dialects in his speech. This had been one of the reasons his friend had suspected him. It also seemed strange that he was living on his own without a family. In the end, his friend came to the shop and begged for forgiveness. He and my father drank at the shop until late.

  My father’s restless wandering ended when I was in my last year of high school. When he closed up his store and came home for good, my mother muttered while preparing dinner. You’ve come back, now that you’re old and useless? After that, for fifteen years, my father never left home again, except to go on trips with my mother.

  •

  Whatever I did, whether it was drawing, singing, or reading, I was the best in my father’s eyes. And so until I entered middle school I truly believed I was the best. I worked hard to live up to his expectations. When his friends came to the house, I performed a folk song for them called “Seongjupuri.” Sometimes when I was out on an errand and grownups would ask me to sing, I’d do it right away without hesitation. Once, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher asked me to sing during free time. Even then, I replied brazenly, “How about a pop song?”

  We saved old calendars to draw on the back. On my errands, grownups would hand me a page from a calendar and a ballpoint pen and ask me to draw them something. Their eyes
followed every move of my hand. And so what happened in my first year of middle school was a big shock. I had been singing “Spring Girl” during a performance test, when my music teacher, who had been accompanying me on the organ, stopped playing all of a sudden and asked, “Do you have a sinus infection or something?”

  •

  Because I was seven years old, I was strong enough to walk long distances. My father liked to take me along on his wanderings, and for that reason, I ended up learning all his secrets.

  One day I followed my father onto the bus. Because she had my two sisters to look after, my mother welcomed the times my father took me along. We got off the bus and stepped into a narrow street. I clung to my father’s hand as I stared around at the unfamiliar surroundings. I saw several dead-end streets, and we turned left and right many times. We crossed a set of train tracks that cut through the street. Once we passed through more small streets, clusters of shabby houses came into view. My father stopped in front of one such house.

  Inside, rooms lined both sides of the hallway. The hallway light was on even though it was broad daylight, since the sunlight didn’t penetrate that far into the house. The ceiling was shabby, and on one side of the wall was a steep staircase like a ladder, which led up to the second floor. As soon as we stepped into the hallway, a face popped out from the hole above. It was a girl around my age, with a slender face and dark eyebrows. She hurried down the stairs as soon as she saw my father. Her name was Jini. I learned later that she was a year older than me.

  Jini’s mother looked nothing like her daughter. She was plump all over, and had a husky voice and laughed loudly at everything I said. Jini and I took to each other right away. She was taking singing classes. I followed her there. She ran up to the second floor of a house located back near the railroad tracks. Children around our age kneeled on the floor around the cramped room. A young man with a guitar sat in a chair and signaled to each child; that child would then stand and sing a pop song. The man was temperamental, but to my surprise, the children were well-behaved and quiet, which was unusual for children that age. They mostly sang songs by Kim Serena. A train passed now and then. Jini kept making mistakes, and each time, the man jabbed her in the stomach with the headstock of his guitar.

  “He’s a real singer,” Jini told me on our way back.

  “Yeah right,” I snapped. I was in a foul mood. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  I was jealous of Jini and her singing lessons. She was the child singer who performed during intermission at a local theater. About a year later, I went with my father to see her perform, but because of the tall man sitting in front of me I couldn’t see a thing.

  That night after Jini’s singing class, we all went for dinner, holding hands like one happy family. My father praised Jini the same way he praised me. Feeling jealous, I sang “Seongjupuri” in a loud voice. Jini sang a ballad called “Saetaryeong.”

  “Well, I have to say, Jini’s the better singer.”

  It was the first time I’d felt my father was cruel.

  I saw Jini again when I entered middle school. In the midst of all the girls with bobbed hair playing basketball, I noticed one student with her hair in two braids. She was tall and slim. Though I hadn’t seen or heard anything about Jini after second grade, everything came back to me at once. I slowly approached her. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do I know you?”

  I saw her flinch. “Sorry, you got the wrong person,” she said, and tossed the basketball to her friend. But it was definitely Jini.

  The next day when I came home from school, a woman was sitting in our living room, speaking with my mother. This time, too, I recognized her right away. It was Jini’s mother. After Jini had told her she’d seen me at school, she had made her way to our house. The reason Jini was allowed to grow her hair long was because she was in dance.

  How could I describe the relationship between my mother and Jini’s mother? When she was no longer seeing my father, she and my mother grew close. Women were confusing creatures. Jini’s mother called occasionally and even dropped by our house sometimes. She eventually married a man from the market when Jini left for the United States. My mother sometimes went to go see her in their home, and even visited her at the hospital when Jini’s mother became sick.

  Jini’s mother died two years ago. My mother said she had kept seeing Jini’s mother in her dreams and had given her a call, but it was her husband who’d answered. He said she’d died a week ago and had been cremated, her ashes scattered in a river. He mentioned that Jini had come from America and gone back. My mother was crying as she told me the news.

  •

  The day I’d gone to Jini’s house for the first time, I’d come back with purple earrings dangling from my ears; Jini’s mother had bought them for me. I’d wanted to go home quickly, but we’d been forced to slow down repeatedly because my drunk father had kept stumbling. He urinated for a long time against a stone wall. As he straightened his pants, he peered at me with bloodshot eyes.

  “Hey, this is a secret from Mom, got that?”

  Now, thinking back, I knew for certain where he was: Jini’s house. He was, without a doubt, with Jini and her mom. Anger surged through me. It just wasn’t the right day for radio dramas.

  My mother crept closer and peered into my face. “You better tell me everything you know.”

  It had finally happened. Why was she asking me about my father’s whereabouts? What did she think a seven-year-old would know?

  “Where did you go last time with Dad? You remember, don’t you? Hurry up and get dressed.”

  My mother put on her “going out” clothes and secured my youngest sister on her back. She left my middle sister at Mi-eum’s across the street. I followed my mother to the bus stop.

  “What did you and your father do next?”

  “We got on the bus.”

  But all I could recall were the narrow streets tangled together like a spider web and the train tracks cutting through them, and the white building where the singing classes had been held. My mother grilled me for more details, but like a parrot, I repeated the words I had already said: “There were train tracks and the train went by.”

  I sat pressed up against the window and looked for the spot where I had followed my father off the bus. “Was it here?” my mother asked every time the bus stopped.

  That day, my mother and I searched every railroad in downtown Seoul. My legs hurt, and I was thirsty. We sat down on the benches in front of the shops and rested our legs. My mother stood on the side of the street and untied the baby blanket that sagged with the weight of my sister. She fixed it, securing her tightly to her back. I’m now the same age as my mother. But back then, she seemed so much more grownup to me.

  •

  There used to be a troublemaker who lived on our street. Although he was the same age as me, he only came up to my shoulders. He always bullied and picked on my middle sister, probably because she was smaller than him. One day, she came home with a bloody hand. He had scratched her with a penknife. Anger swept over me. At times like this, I wanted nothing more than an older brother who would protect and stand up for us. Although we had Mi-eum, I knew the boy might harass us the next time Mi-eum wasn’t there. My mother said to my sister, as she put ointment on her wound, “If he tries something like this again, throw a rock at him at least. I promise I won’t punish you.”

  Broken pieces of concrete littered our little street. When that boy blocked our way and picked a fight, my mother’s words flashed across my mind. He thrust an iron poker at my sister. She looked at me and burst into tears. I don’t remember what happened after that. The next thing I knew, the boy was standing in front of me, gripping his head and crying. Beside him on the ground was a piece of concrete. My sister’s eyes were standing out of her head as she looked from the concrete to me.

  When his mother marched through our gate, pushing him ahead of her, I grasped the reality of what I had done. We heard her shouting from the street even bef
ore she stepped into our house.

  “How could you let a girl grow wild like that? You call that a girl?”

  My mother didn’t say a single word to the boy or his mother. In silence she dabbed ointment on his wound and covered it with a bandage. When the boy’s mother kept on about how a girl could be so wild, all my mother said was, “Don’t you have any girls of your own?” As a mother with three sons and no daughter, there was not much she could say. After they left, I was afraid I would get in trouble, but as promised, my mother didn’t say a word.

  He no longer bothered my sister after that. But because I wasn’t sure when he would change his mind, I couldn’t put my guard down, even for a moment, whenever I stepped into our street. His family moved away soon after and I could walk around the neighborhood in peace again.

  But I ran into him again on the school field. He hadn’t changed at all. “Hey, you!” he yelled when he saw me. “Stop right there!”

  I took off blindly. I heard him say from behind, “That bitch threw a rock at me. Catch her!”

  I looked back to see him and two of his friends chasing me. At this rate I wasn’t going to make it all the way home. Right then I noticed that the front gate of my friend’s house was open, and so I ran inside. But he didn’t go away. He prowled outside the house, spewing every kind of curse. I was finally able to head home in the evening. After that incident, I had to be on alert at school for a long time. But I didn’t see him again. It seemed he had moved far away this time. I sometimes wonder if he thinks of me every time he sees the scar on his head.

  •

  We searched every railroad in downtown Seoul, but I couldn’t find the one I had crossed with my father. We finally headed home on the bus. My sister, grimy from being outside all day, had fallen asleep on my mother’s back. The bus went around the Yeongdeungpo Rotary. At that instant, I saw the same street I’d followed my father into.