by Seong-nan Ha
The other security guard was discussing the previous day’s incident with the women’s association of the apartment complex. He said the boy had slipped on the wet floor of the apartment corridor, which had been mopped earlier that day. But what he didn’t understand was why the floor had not dried by that point. The women soon started to talk about how things are easier when children are still infants who don’t yet know how to walk.
What had my husband used the wax for? He certainly hadn’t used it to polish furniture.
When I came home from work, the people upstairs had returned. The boy’s leg was probably in a cast. I heard the thump of his crutches.
In just one day, the boy grew quite skilled at using his crutches. There were fewer footsteps, but relentless thumping now filled our apartment. The crutches were even used outside their intended purpose, as toys and weapons. They banged against the furniture, floor, and wall. We had believed that we’d have some quiet until the boy’s leg healed, but we couldn’t have been more wrong. My husband jumped to his feet, sending his chair crashing behind him.
“Damn it. I guess a broken leg isn’t enough. I wish someone would take those kids away. Like the pied piper. You know, all the children in the village follow him and they never come back.” It seemed my husband didn’t remember the ending of the fairy tale. Not all the children followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. One child was lame and could not follow quickly enough. Even if the pied piper should come, at least one child would remain and forever torment our sleep with the thump of his crutches.
I’d been getting home later than usual because of all the sales and promotions we were having at the department store. I was about to leave for work when my husband said, “Something fun’s going to happen tonight. Get ready.”
That night, the sound of glass shattering woke us. The luminous hands of the clock pointed to 3:25 A.M.
“They’re awake,” my husband said, looking up at the ceiling.
He didn’t sound at all groggy. A china plate seemed to have been hurled through the air and at the balcony window, crashing through the glass and shattering into pieces on the balcony’s tile floor. A woman screamed. Her two children woke from their sleep and started to cry. I heard the excitable voice of a man, punctuated by a woman’s shrill bawls.
My husband laughed out loud, as if he’d been expecting it all. It was only then I recalled what he’d said to me that morning.
“Is this what you meant earlier? When you said something fun was going to happen tonight?
Anyone can figure out the name of a child and the time she goes to and from school. But my husband had predicted the fight between a husband and wife he had never once met, while lying directly below them in his own bed. Several objects hurtled through the air and bounced off the wall and floor. The children wailed. I heard a woman’s incoherent babbling, along with her screams and sobs.
“He’s a taxi driver. He comes home every night around 2:40 A.M. He got his own cab last year, but he isn’t bringing in much more than when he worked for a company. He needs to make payments on his cab, and now he can’t receive government assistance for his children’s education, no matter how small it might have been. So he’s been wondering if he made a mistake, switching over to owning his own cab.”
“Anyone could know that!”
“Up to this point, maybe. But it all starts now. I picked up our mail and found an envelope addressed to someone else. Sure, it happens. The postman makes mistakes, too. But that piece of mail turned out to be a credit card statement for number 306. It was addressed to a Mr. Kim Yeongsu. At first I was going to just stick it in their mailbox.”
“But you opened it?”
“Most of them were gas purchases. But there was quite a big charge from Lulu Women’s Apparel. A brothel, no doubt. You know how those kinds of places will use store names to charge credit cards to avoid paying tax? Well, Kim Yeongsu’s wife saw the statement before he did.”
All of a sudden, I was wide awake. My husband’s face glowed from the streetlights outside. But I still had some questions.
“Then why didn’t he try to intercept the card statement before his wife got her hands on it?”
In the dimness, I saw the white of his teeth flash and then disappear. The fight upstairs seemed to be dying down. We heard their murmurs. Even the children had stopped crying.
“Let’s go to bed. The show’s over and I don’t think there’s going to be a part two. Still curious? I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.”
He turned on his side, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and closed his eyes. I lay back down and closed my eyes, too, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I shifted carefully, so that the bedsprings wouldn’t creak.
Kim Yeongsu must have snuck back into his apartment around the time the postman delivered the mail. Obviously, he would have only checked the mailbox outside and not gone home. To avoid any chance of his wife seeing his cab, he would have parked somewhere else and walked to the apartment. The reason he hadn’t been able to intercept his card statement was because a kind neighbor had made sure it would be personally delivered to his wife. The statement, which should have been sitting inside the mailbox, was carried in by his little daughter returning from kindergarten. She would have met my husband on the stairwell on her way up. Since the six-year-old sometimes brought up the mail, her mother would have thought nothing of it as she opened the envelope.
“But things aren’t quieter at all! Isn’t this the opposite of what you’d hoped?”
“As the saying goes, if you can’t go in through the front door, go in through the back door.”
“This is an invasion of privacy! You could get charged!”
“You could say the same for them,” he muttered. Then as if my protests annoyed him, he pulled the blanket over his head.
Upstairs, someone was sweeping up the broken glass and china.
•
Children get lost all the time, so I didn’t pay attention at first. After all, announcements looking for lost children were made every two days on average over the intercom. But when I realized it was the children from 306, I couldn’t ignore it.
The younger one was still in a cast. There was no way he could limp out of the apartment complex with a broken leg. A four-year-old with crutches would draw attention. The announcement about the two children, who still hadn’t returned, continued until late.
It was the second silent night we were having since our move. After midnight, the security guard and the woman upstairs searched every corner of the building with flashlights in hand. They went down to the underground parking lot to check the vents, but all they saw inside were a piles of cigarette butts, empty snack bags, and popsicle sticks. They climbed to the apartment rooftop and discovered a pair of high school students who were drinking and smoking.
The children had gone to the playground at around four in the afternoon. The woman said she’d glanced down from time to time, while she hung the laundry on the line or tasted the stew she was making for dinner. Each time, the kids had been on the seesaw or slide. At last when she’d opened the balcony window to tell them that dinner was ready, she’d found the playground completely deserted. Less than ten minutes had passed since she’d checked on them last.
The woman looked as far as her gaze would go, but she couldn’t spot her children. It was hard to believe that in a mere ten minutes, a six-year-old girl and her younger brother, limping on crutches, could disappear completely from view. Were they hiding in the shade of a tree or under the slide? The woman called their names, but they didn’t appear.
Perhaps the boy didn’t know any better, but the six-year-old girl was bright and knew her way around the apartment complex. But like most kids, they had never stepped outside the complex on their own.
By the time Mr. Kim Yeongsu dropped off his fare and sped home, the woman was half out of her mind. Howling her children’s names in a hoarse voice, she was peering into dumpsters. Dangers lurked everywhere. The deep night.
Holes dug in the ground to plant saplings. She raked through the holes, and repeatedly checked the insides of old refrigerators and washing machines that had been left on the curb as people were moving out.
Enraged, Mr. Kim Yeongsu cursed at his wife, and she responded with worse. Two days after they’d filed a report with the Center for Missing Children, they concluded that their children had been abducted.
Many people pitied them. As the incident was relayed over and over again, the girl’s plain looks came to indicate her intelligence, and her aggressive nature, which had caused her to harm other children, was translated as healthy confidence.
The parents waited for the kidnapper to call. When she suggested that they alert the police, he rejected the idea. He said a child abduction case required a great deal of sensitivity, and records showed that working with the police only made the situation worse so that things didn’t end well. His wife recalled the kidnapping cases from the past year and went into shock. She wailed and fell down in a faint.
On the fourth day, when they still hadn’t received a call from the kidnapper, the couple notified the police. The police asked if they were aware of anyone who might be harboring a serious grudge. At first they said no. But the woman opened her mouth soon after. “Actually—” she started to say.
Early in the morning, two strangers rang our doorbell. They asked for my husband, who was still in his pajamas. They claimed he was a prime suspect. Meekly, my husband left with them. A day passed but he still didn’t return, and a plain-clothed detective came to the department store to talk to me. On the outside he looked perfectly ordinary. He wasn’t tall, and though his leather jacket was zipped up, he didn’t look particularly fit.
“I understand your husband didn’t get along with the people upstairs? Did you notice any signs of psychological instability after he left his job at the bank?”
“He resigned from his job to become a carpenter. It was his choice to resign, so why would he feel anxious?”
The detective grinned when I mentioned my husband had quit to become a carpenter, but he wiped the smirk off his face immediately and assumed a professional expression once more.
“I guess it would be hard for anyone else to understand,” I said. “No one would think it strange if he quit the bank to become a university professor. But you should know, it was always his dream to become a carpenter.”
“At this point, all the evidence points to your husband being the kidnapper. He claimed he was home at the time, but there’s no way of checking his alibi. I understand he’s been threatening the people upstairs by both phone and mail?”
“Is it a threat to tell people to be quiet? And I was the one who called them, not him.”
The detective reached into his inner pocket and placed an envelope before me. While I read the letter, he sipped his coffee and glanced about the room.
“At first, they assumed it was a chain letter or something of that sort and didn’t bother to open it. After all, letters like that are a real nuisance. But their daughter opened it. That’s when they read the letter your husband had sent.”
The letter was short and neatly typed. Beginning with “Dear Kim Yeongsu” and a brief greeting, my husband detailed how he was unable to do anything because of the noise coming from their apartment all day, and how repeated pleas for quiet had proved futile, despite numerous calls made to Mr. Kim’s wife. A request followed, for Mr. Kim to talk once more to his wife and children about the noise, in spite of his busy schedule. But here, my husband seemed to have gotten carried away, because he went on to say that he found it troubling what these children would grow up to become, considering their clear lack of social etiquette. He finally ended the letter with a surprising line: “If the problem doesn’t stop, I might have to play the pipe.”
The detective also pointed out this part.
“This here is intriguing. Does anything come to mind when you read this?”
The sentence was underlined in red. He asked me a few more questions and then got to his feet. At the department store entrance, he stopped and said casually as if he’d just remembered, “I noticed you don’t have any kids yourself.”
As if he didn’t need an answer from me, he gave a small smile and turned away. “Play the pipe, play the pipe …” he repeated, as if these words were the chorus of a song, and then disappeared out the door.
I was able to meet with my husband on a sofa in the waiting room of the police station. He looked haggard. There were bags under his eyes, and stubble on his chin and under his nose. As soon as he saw me, he glanced at the wall clock.
“You’re off work already?”
“A detective came by. He told me you threatened Mr. Kim with a letter?” I lowered my voice so that the police wouldn’t hear. “I saw the wax can in your toolbox.”
“Hey, that’s over and done with—why are you bringing that up now?” he hissed, bringing his face close to mine. “They mopped the apartment halls that day. The kid was running around as usual and slipped on the wet floor.” A musty odor came from him, as if he hadn’t bathed.
“Y-y-you’re really the piper then?” I stammered. I couldn’t bring myself to say kidnapper.
He laughed out loud. Several officers and the suspects they’d been questioning looked over our way.
“That’s just a fairy tale, but I have an idea who it might be. If they keep backing me into a corner, I’ll have to tell, but now’s not the time.”
My husband, who’d been heading back to his cell, turned and whispered into my ear, “By the way, I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find that wax can.”
I’d gotten rid of it. I’d slipped it into a shopping bag and tossed it in the trash in the bathroom at work. Over a thousand people swept in and out of the department store each day.
On the way home, I wondered why we still hadn’t had any children.
Someone from the apartment complex recalled seeing the little boy with the crutches. She remembered him because he’d been using small crutches that had been customized for him. There had been a girl munching on a cookie and holding a balloon beside him, and they had climbed into the backseat of a small red car. She couldn’t remember the car make or model.
My husband returned home the next morning and slept through the entire day. When he finally woke, we received the call from the police that they had caught the kidnapper.
When Mr. Kim Yeongsu had heard that the children had gotten into a small red car, he’d hesitated and then said the car might belong to a woman he knew. The woman Mr. Kim had been having an affair with was arrested at the doors of the café where she worked. The woman confessed that when Mr. Kim had ended their relationship, she’d kidnapped his kids as an act of revenge. She’d only been trying to scare him, she said, and burst into tears.
The two children were found in an orphanage in South Gyeongsang Province. The woman upstairs was able to spot her kids at once among the numerous children on the playground. Indeed, they would be easy to spot anywhere. And with that, the kidnapping incident was over.
“So that’s the woman you were going to expose in the end?”
My husband said nothing. I stopped asking what more he knew of the people upstairs. The children came back and the boy’s cast came off. The noise started again. Everything returned to normal once more.
People who came to look at the apartment wondered why we wanted to move before our contract was up. I said my husband had been transferred to another branch at his bank. I added that the apartment was quiet because it was so far from the main road, and that you didn’t even need a fan in the middle of summer, because of the cross breeze that blew in through the front and back windows.
We moved to a satellite city in Gyeonggi Province. The paved roads ended at the edge of the apartment complex, and traditional-style homes huddled together, looking as if time had stopped twenty years earlier. The local people referred to our complex as the new city. If you walked out for half an hour, you could see fields, paddies, greenh
ouses, and pigpens.
My husband found work at a shabby carpenter shop where customers hardly ever came. He didn’t make any money, but he didn’t have to pay to learn the trade. The carpenter, who was over sixty years old, often left the shop in my husband’s hands. Then my husband watched the empty shop, learning to wield a hammer and plane as he practiced on leftover pieces of wood. Sometimes he loaded custom-made desks and cabinets onto the truck and drove into the new city on a delivery.
Gradually, my husband grew more skilled with the hammer. His first piece was a wooden chair, like the kind we’d used in school a long time ago, but because it was off-balance, it creaked every time you sat down or got up. He regained his sense of humor, enough to say that the uneven floor was to blame, not his skills.
Until my husband became a joiner, I had to work at the department store. We still had our savings, but I didn’t want to touch that money. In order to get to work on time, I took the first bus out of the terminal, and transferred onto the subway. Because I then had to take a local bus to get to the department store, my commute was two hours each way.
Since I never got enough sleep, I always dozed off on the bus. When summer came and the weather grew hot, I thought about our previous apartment, which the realtor had said stayed so cool in the summer that we wouldn’t need a fan. Was that really true? Were the children in 306 still running around? What ever happened to Kim Yeongsu’s mistress, who had kidnapped the children? How had my husband known everything? I would think about these things and drift off to sleep.
And what had been my dream, you ask?
I was so tired I didn’t even have time to dream.
Pinky Finger
Never get in a taxi alone at night.
It’s something I’ve heard from the time I turned twenty. More than ten years have gone by, and to be honest, not once did I take these words to heart. The blame lies partly with my mother, who would pick the moments I would be busy tying my shoelaces or pinning back my loose bangs to issue this warning. To my ears, it just sounded like nagging to come home early.
