by Seong-nan Ha
The rooftop railing barely came up to her waist. She faced her apartment tower, which caught the sunlight and sparkled like fish scales. She counted the windows and tried to look for Suite #1703, where they said the girl’s family had once lived. But because all the windows looked the same, she kept losing track.
The girl had walked all the way here without shoes. Her socks were reduced to shreds and blood had collected under her toenails, as if she’d stepped on rocks and broken glass. She’d gone up to the roof and sat directly across from #1703, gazing into its balcony window, glowing with an orange light. Although it was spring, mornings and nights were still chilly. What had the girl wanted to see? At that hour, young children in just their underclothes would have been running around in the living room. Their mother would have been reheating the stew for their father, who had come home from work a little later than usual. He would have stepped out of the bathroom, dripping water, and horsed around with the kids. Had the girl noted the new wallpaper and different furniture arrangement? Maybe she’d wondered if the tiny inscription she’d scrawled in the corner of her old room was still there. She and her family had moved out of the apartment a year and a half before. Why had she come this far without shoes, until her toes had started to bleed? The spot on the rooftop directly across from #1703 was strewn with paper airplanes. The girl seemed to have folded them well into the night. More than half of the pages had been torn from her notebook. Eunok spread open an airplane, but the paper was blank, just like the girl’s future now.
V
Not only the photographer, but even Choi Kisu, holding the rattle, was having a difficult time of getting his baby girl to pose in front of the birthday table. When she grasped a paper bill during the doljabi ritual, the people laughed and clapped. Kisu’s wife passed her to Eunok, but her face turned red and crumpled, as soon as she realized she was being held by a stranger. Eunok cooed and bounced her up and down, but the rainbow-colored hanbok was slippery and the baby kept slipping from her hands. Kisu’s wife laughed at how overwhelmed Eunok looked.
Kim Taekyeong, another friend of her husband’s, was drinking alone in the corner of the banquet hall. Shortly after her husband had confessed his wish to become a deadbeat, many changes had taken place. Two couples from that night had ended up separating, and one couple had moved out to the country for a job transfer. Only she and Taekyeong had come to the birthday celebration. He noticed Eunok and greeted her.
“Long time no see.”
His forehead and nose were already blotchy from the liquor. Since Kisu and his wife were busy greeting guests, Eunok was left alone with Taekyeong. After his divorce, she’d heard he’d started selling cars. He knocked back a shot of soju and thrust the glass at Eunok. He poured until it overflowed, but he was watching her face, not the glass.
“So how’s life?”
His bloodshot eyes bored into her. He let out a deep sigh, his breath hitting her in the face. Eunok tipped back the glass and took a sip. The soju tasted bitter.
“Bet life’s treating you well, Eunok. Pour me a shot, will you?”
Taekyeong didn’t bother to wait. He took the bottle and poured himself another shot.
“You look like you’re doing pretty good, a completely different story from Sanghyeon. Goddamn it.”
As he got to his feet, he lost his balance and stumbled, his hand sweeping plates off the table. They shattered, and spicy skate fish, pancakes, and soy sauce scattered all over the floor. People stared at Taekyeong. A young man sitting at the next table tried to help, but Taekyeong shook him off. Shoving his shirttail back into his pants, he looked at Eunok, his lips twitching with anger.
Kisu rushed up to them. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Taekyeong looked from Kisu to Eunok and snickered. “I see what’s happening here. You guys think you’re too good for me, don’t you? I’ll leave you to it then. By the way, Eunok, I never liked you.”
Eunok picked up her purse and walked quickly out of the hall. She could feel everyone’s gaze on her. Taekyeong shouted after her.
“Bitch!”
Kisu followed her out to the elevator. She felt dizzy, perhaps because of the soju.
“Please, try to understand. You know he isn’t really like that, don’t you?”
•
The apartment Eunok had once lived in for eight years was five bus stops from the banquet hall. She had simply started walking in order to clear her head, but when she looked up, she saw a familiar sight across the street. The apartment complex looked the same as it always had. Because it still hadn’t received a fresh coat of paint, the exterior looked ashen, as if it were covered with coal dust. The balcony railings were red with rust. Some were so old that they were barely hanging on. The grounds were strewn with bicycles that children had ridden and flung aside, all pieces of junk no one would think to steal. Even the odds and ends piled high to the ceiling, which she could glimpse through dusty balcony windows, were the same as she remembered. Just like before, she walked past the playground as if she were going for a stroll. Luckily, she didn’t run into anyone she knew. The chains on one of the three swings were broken, exactly as they’d been before she’d moved out.
She stood behind her old apartment. A child’s clothes hung on the clothesline. The stickers on the balcony window had fallen off, all except for one fish. She couldn’t see inside because of the lowered blinds.
Because the complex had been built on the side of a mountain, an embankment stood between the buildings. The first-floor apartment where she had lived was in the shadow of the embankment, so it never got any sunlight, even in the middle of the day. However, if she’d opened the windows and raised the blinds, she’d ended up making eye contact with someone from the building on the other side of the embankment.
The day they had installed the blinds, her husband had gone to the building across from theirs with a flashlight. They’d wanted to determine how much of the blinds they could keep open for air flow without being seen. Every time she lowered the blinds, the flashlight blinked on and off from above the embankment. She adjusted the blinds until you couldn’t see into their apartment from the opposite building.
Eunok struggled over the embankment and went up to the rooftop of the opposite building. Fortunately, the door to the rooftop was not locked. The stairs stopped on the 5th floor and a metal ladder ran up the wall. The ladder was so old and rusty that one of the rails dangled loose. Still, she climbed up. She raised the square trapdoor and saw yellow water tanks. Rainwater had collected in empty clay jars that someone had left there.
She drew closer to the railing and was able to glimpse the inside of her old apartment through the bottom crack where the blind wasn’t completely lowered. The new owners were still using the same flooring she and her husband had put in. A little girl who looked around five years old was eating noodles with her bare hands; there was black bean sauce smeared all around her mouth.
For eight years, Eunok and her husband had argued a lot. She’d believed the reason for their fights had been their dark, cramped apartment, where they’d had to keep the blinds lowered even in the middle of summer. But when they’d moved into their bright, new, spacious apartment, her husband had left for good. Eunok sat on the rooftop, legs dangling over the edge. She thought of the girl who had fallen on top of her car. The girl, too, had probably gazed into her old apartment for a long time.
She didn’t know where it had come from, but there was a dress shirt on the rooftop. It was covered with yellow stains, as if it had gotten soaked in the rain and then dried. White dress shirts were common, but she noticed the third button from the top. One had to look carefully to see that it was different from the rest of the buttons, but it was impossible to fool the very person who had sewed it onto the shirt. Although its size and color were the same as the rest, it had a different number of holes.
This dress shirt, on this apartment rooftop, was definitely her husband’s. The sleeves were always the first to wear
and get dirty. She’d told him to use arm warmers, but he’d never listened.
Her husband, while getting ready for work, had called out to her, “Hey, where’s my shirt? There’s none left.”
Busy enough herself, she shouted back, not bothering to go in the room. “Look again. An extra one should be there somewhere.” Unable to find a clean, pressed shirt, he’d had to wear the shirt he’d worn the day before.
When one of his shirts had disappeared off the clothesline, she had assumed it had flown out the half-open balcony window. But the shirt had ended up here.
Just as the high school girl had, her husband had probably sat in this exact spot and gazed into their old apartment. Light the color of honey would have seeped through the cracks in the blinds and the little girl’s laughter would have rung out. What had he seen here? He would have thought about his selfish wife. About how she’d washed and ironed a week’s worth of shirts at a time. About all the times he’d headed to work in his pressed shirt and tie, which was too tight around the neck. And about the dinner a few years back when he’d said he wanted to become a deadbeat.
That night, he had looked around at his closest friends and confessed his wish to do nothing. Because he’d had his back turned to Eunok, she hadn’t been able to see his expression. If she could go back to that night …
His friends burst into laughter. One friend smacks her husband in the back of the head and another says that everyone dreams about doing nothing. Her husband lowers his head, and brings the beer glass to his lips. Eunok places her hand on his back. He slowly looks up. His bloodshot eyes are glittering with tears. He manages to get his emotions under control. Someone pours more beer into his glass and shouts, “To deadbeats!” The men raise their glasses and cry, “To deadbeats!”
VI
When the kite didn’t fly properly, Eunok muttered under her breath the way he’d had. She picked up the fallen kite and adjusted the line before running across the rooftop again. It looked like it was going to rain. She felt the hot breeze. Past midnight, the apartment plaza twenty-nine stories below was as quiet as a reservoir. Though the light was on in the security booth, the guard was sleeping, his head against the back of his chair. There would be no patrol for a while.
She’d washed the shirt a few times, but the stains didn’t come out. On the way home from work, Eunok stopped by the stationery store and bought bamboo spars and a reel. The stationery owner pulled out a dusty reel from the back of a shelf.
Look, the bowstring needs to be curved about 15 degrees. Tsk, tsk … And there’s a correct order for gluing the spars, too. First the head, then the diagonals, then the spine, and then the waist.
Having skipped dinner, Eunok sat hunched over in the living room and made a kite out of her husband’s shirt. She could almost hear his nagging. Are you serious? You’ve never even flown a kite before? As for the bridle, you’re supposed to use just one string.
The kite caught the wind and shot up into the air. Eunok slowly released the line that was wrapped around her finger. The kite started to spin in circles. The waist spar was too thick. The kite dropped to the edge of the roof. She shaved a little off the waist spar. Once more she ran across the rooftop against the wind with the kite in hand.
It was nearly five in the morning when her kite caught the wind and surged into the air. The line began to unravel from the reel on its own. The kite sailed farther and farther away. When the last bit of line left the reel, Eunok didn’t try to hold on to it. The freed kite rattled in the wind and slowly became sucked up into the dawn sky. At last, it became a dot in the distance and disappeared altogether from view.
There were still many of her husband’s dress shirts left. Eunok rummaged through the fishing equipment he had bought but never used, and hauled out the fishing chair. Since no one was watching, she sat with her knees spread.
The rooftop railings spread below Eunok’s feet like terraces. Her husband had always grumbled at the fact that she couldn’t take much time off work to go on vacation to the mountains or the sea. She removed her flip-flops and placed her bare feet on the cement floor. The rough cement was lukewarm. The railings washed in like the waves, wetting her feet. From somewhere she heard the crashing of the sea. She smelled brine and seaweed. The salty wind tangled in her hair.
Eunok found herself sitting on a watchtower with the silvery sand stretching on for miles. She shaded her eyes with her right hand. The sea seemed to loom closer. She turned her head from side to side, looking carefully to make sure no one was lost at sea.
On That Green, Green Grass
The dog thief was careless. In his greed to swipe all the dogs from our block in one go, he kept at his work until dawn, so that it was light out by the time he lured our dog from our house, the last house tucked away at the end of the dead-end street. For the past several years, the paperboy had been delivering the newspaper at the same time. It was bright enough for him to make out the first few letters of the license plate as the truck crept away.
It was a cargo truck, the boy said, a typical one with a Gyeonggi plate that started with the prefix ba. He also managed to recall the following two digits, as well as the phrase ALWAYS QUICK, ALWAYS RIGHT in white letters on the side. As if to conceal the goods it was carrying, a shiny blue tarp had covered the cargo bed.
If the thief hadn’t been so greedy, if he had executed the job in an “always quick, always right” manner as the words boasted, nothing could have been traced back to him. Greed will always lead to your downfall.
But weren’t we just as guilty of that?
•
In order to find a house with a yard, my husband and I had scoured Seoul’s outskirts for three months. There were many things to consider: my husband’s commute to his job in downtown Seoul; access to good schools in the area, since our child was starting school the following year; and finances, of course, which played the biggest factor in our decision.
We bought a map that showed the entire province of Gyeonggi, and if a house we wanted to see was an hour and a half away, we got in the car and set out. Even the outskirts were crammed with apartment towers, but the ones standing next to paddies and fields seemed especially ugly. When we’d left the apartment complexes behind and skirted the mountain for about half an hour, the view finally opened out before us.
Furniture showrooms, their entrances flanked by placards and banners, lined both sides of the two-lane road. Small factories lay scattered in the distance, and specialty restaurants serving up things like sumac chicken and freshwater-fish stew huddled close together. We even passed a colony of flashy love motels. Though it was the middle of the day, there were several cars parked in the lots.
My gaze had been skimming the motel signs absentmindedly when I happened to see a sign that said Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn. I cried out to my husband, who was driving. Though the motel looked completely different from before, its name, the manmade lake out in front, and the old pine tree beside it were exactly the same. My husband and I had stayed there about eight years before.
“Women remember the oddest things,” he muttered with an embarrassed chuckle.
As we entered the town, the sudden increase in traffic volume forced us to slow down. Though the old road hadn’t changed, shops now crowded either side, making it seem narrower. It was so narrow that cars coming and going out of the bus terminal couldn’t complete a U-turn and were forced to put their cars in reverse. I gazed out the window while we waited for a bus to move out of the way. There were several bookstores, as well as a small library. I also spotted a large supermarket and shopping mall, and even plastic surgery clinics and restaurants squeezed between them. The town went on for another 500 meters or so, and fields appeared once more. As if there were a lot of families like us longing for a house with a yard, signs advertising the sale of single-family homes flapped in the wind. I liked the town. More than anything, I liked the fact that it was close to Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn. To me, the motel felt like home.
When we finally got our yard, we filled it with things we hadn’t even dreamed of when we lived in an apartment. We put in sod and purchased a white plastic patio set. We didn’t forget to get a parasol for the table. We planted persimmon and jujube saplings, and arranged the rocks we had secretly taken from the river. But the yard was curiously inert, as if something were missing. We tried rearranging the rocks, this way and that, but the yard felt empty all the same.
What we had imagined was a child who would giggle and ride a bicycle, who would play ball on the grass. But our child sat under the parasol like a rock or sapling, more like a still-life object. We needed something full of energy that would make the yard come alive. Only when my husband let loose the mutt he’d bought on his way home did the yard finally become the yard of our dreams.
My husband didn’t complain, even when his commute to work was two hours each way. Before our move, he had spent his Sundays napping; after all, there was no need for him to teach our child how to ride a bicycle or play basketball like other dads. But instead of taking a nap, he now trained the dog on Sundays. If I happened to look out while making stew or marinating greens, I saw him in a crouch, tossing the ball. When the dog brought the ball back, my husband laughed as he scratched and rubbed the dog’s chest. Our boy sat under the parasol and quietly drew in his sketchbook. Sometimes, when my husband passed him the ball to toss, he chucked it sloppily, and if the dog retrieved it, he recoiled at the ball now slick with drool. Eyeing his dad, he held the ball with the tips of his fingers and pretended to throw it. When the stew was done, I called out to them in my pretty apron: “Lunch is ready!”
That morning, my husband stepped out to collect the morning paper and knew immediately that the dog was gone. There were morsels of meat in front of the kennel, and his leash was discovered outside the gate. After pacing back and forth with the leash in hand, my husband went out into the street and ran into our neighbor, who was calling for her dog.
