Princess Bari

by Sok-yong Hwang

  Just then the door cracked open, and Grandmother stuck her head in.

  “Hey! We’re here,” she said, and stepped inside. Then she glanced back at someone and said: “Well, come in already.”

  The bob-haired girl followed her in, head hanging down, and bowed wordlessly at the professor. Father’s face turned bright red. He got up without saying a word.

  “We don’t need to discuss this any further,” the professor said. “I’ll issue you a pass so you can escort your mother home. You’re married now. Time to go home and consummate it.”

  “I have to finish school first …”

  “You should’ve thought about that before you got married! Go on, now. If you stick around any longer, I’ll have to tell your comrades. If the Youth Association gets wind of this, you’ll be marked as a bad element, maybe even as a decadent, and you’ll be expelled.”

  So that was how Father wound up being dragged back to Chongjin. From the moment they boarded the train, Grandmother started laying down threats.

  “No more running around from now on. This union was arranged by my guardian spirit, so if you don’t do as I say, we’re through. You’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine.”

  Grandmother produced a baby sling from somewhere and tied one end around Father’s leg where he was sitting. Then she tied a round knot into the sling and held it up to Mother’s ankle.

  “Lift your foot, girl. Slip it through this.”

  Mother took off her rubber shoe, pulled up her sagging sock, and said: “Make it tight.”

  Father told us that when he turned his head to see what the two women were doing, Mother met his eye and stuck her tongue out at him. (Right up until we were all separated, any time that story happened to come up when they were fighting, Father would burst out: “I should’ve chopped my leg off and run away to start a new life back when I had the chance!”) Grandmother wrapped the free end of the sling around her wrist several times and then let out a long sigh, as if she could finally relax. At this point in the story, my sisters and I would ask her: “Why did you decide to make Mother your daughter-in-law?” Grandmother would tell us about the dream she’d had, and how she had gone to our mother’s village to find her.

  “I dreamed that a celestial maiden fell out of the sky and landed with a loud thud right on top of the house. She rolled off the roof and into the courtyard. I called out: ‘Hello, hello, if you’re a ghost, then back off, and if you’re a person, then be on your way.’ But she told me she had tended the garden of the Great Jade Emperor in his heavenly palace, and that she’d been dropped to Earth as punishment for overwatering the flowers and causing them to fall from their stems.

  “I glanced around the courtyard, and sure enough, there were exactly seven flowers lying on the ground. She picked them up one by one and offered them to me. I put out my hand to take them, but before I could, that crazy girl opened the gate and took a hop, skip and a jump backwards and ran off. I ran after her. I chased her all the way to a sorghum-stalk fence in front of someone’s house, and then I woke up.

  “The dream was so strange that I went outside to take a look. The road the celestial maiden had taken led to the next village. I wound my way down the road just like I had in the dream, and ended up at a house surrounded by a sorghum-stalk fence and thought: How curious is this? When I went into the yard, a girl was singing. She was wiping down the large clay jars on the jangdokdae. She had cleaned the soybean paste jars and soy sauce jars to a high shine. From behind, she had a nice rump, and though I’m a woman myself and not a man, that butt of hers was as plump and tantalizing as a peony. So I invited her to come and live with us. I met her parents too and told them all about your father.”

  Everyone in the family knew that Grandmother had a strange gift, but Father alone refused to acknowledge it. Nevertheless, whenever it was the end of the year or the start of a new one, or when he woke up in the morning from an unsettling dream, he would stealthily ask her what his fortune held. “Oh, and then,” he would mutter, as if to himself, “this water jar split in two, and a catfish the size of my forearm came wriggling out.”

  But not only would Grandmother not interpret his dream for him, she would toy with him by playing stupid: “Mm, we should boil up some catfish stew! Give the whole family a feast.”

  Since our mother kept winding up pregnant with another of us while she was still struggling to recover from the last pregnancy and take care of the latest newborn, she wasn’t able to go to work like the other mothers. Our parents must have been more careful after Mi, the third girl, was born, because it was three years before Jung came along. Mother used that time to finally get out of the house. She helped with making side dishes in one of the food factories that had started on the collective farms and in cities and counties across the country during the postwar recovery years; then, later, she was assigned to a recreation centre where she learned hair cutting and styling techniques. After six months, she worked in the barbershop of a public bath in the city.

  But because of Father’s and Grandmother’s unquenchable desire for a son and grandson, Mother was only able to work for about a year, including her apprenticeship period, before she had to quit. After the incident where Father held Sook under the bathwater, Mother seemed to give up entirely on the idea of doing something different with her life. Everyone said Sook wound up the way she did after having the measles, but Mother and Grandmother blamed Father for it and talked behind his back about how it was his fault for holding the newborn under water. Up until she’d passed her third birthday, it seemed as if she was just slow to start talking, but then they realized she’d been a deaf-mute all along.

  *

  I was attending a local kindergarten at the time, so I must have been about five years old. The azaleas had bloomed a bright red at the top of the hill, and my sisters were out filling their baskets with freshly-picked shepherd’s purse, which means it had to be early spring.

  I was sitting on the sunny twenmaru porch just off the main room, basking in the warm sun, when Hindungi suddenly crossed the courtyard, heading straight for the front gate and growling. Her ears were folded back, and she bared her teeth and started barking ferociously. Wondering who it was, I went over to the gate and pushed open the wooden door. A little girl, just a bit bigger than me, was standing there. She wore a shin-length mongdang skirt and a jeogori blouse, both made from white cotton. I thought she was one of Hyun’s friends coming over to play. I said: “Hyun’s not home right now,” but the girl just stared straight at me without saying a word. Hindungi was still barking wildly behind me, but the girl didn’t look the least bit scared.

  I thought I heard her say: “This isn’t the place.” No sooner did I hear those words than she turned and ran off. Actually, I’m not sure whether she ran away or faded away right before my eyes. I hurried out the gate, wondering where she’d vanished to, and saw that she was already way down at the far end of the path that ran along the other houses, which were all similar in size and shape to ours. Her ponytail swayed back and forth as she went. She stopped in front of a house with an apricot tree in the yard, turned to look my way, and slipped inside. The reason I remember that ponytail is because of the bright red ribbon fluttering at the end of it. That night, while we were all eating dinner, our mother told Father there’d been a death in the neighbourhood.

  “We need to give some condolence money to the head of the neighbourhood unit. Her family just lost their grandson.”

  “What? How did he die?”

  Before Mother could answer Father’s question, Grandmother muttered to herself: “Must have been something in his past life. It’s fate.”

  “You don’t think it’s the typhoid fever that’s been going around?”

  I tugged on the hem of Grandmother’s skirt to tell her what I’d seen earlier.

  “Grandma! Grandma!”

  “Yes, yes, let’s eat.”

  “I saw something earlier, Grandma. A little girl came to our door and then left. She
went into the house with the apricot tree in the yard.”

  No one paid any attention, but after dinner Grandmother pulled me aside, sat me down on the twenmaru and asked me a lot of questions.

  “Who did you say you saw?”

  “A little girl dressed all in white. Hindungi barked at her and tried to bite her. When she saw me, she said, ‘This isn’t the place,’ and left. I wondered where she was going so I followed her outside, and I saw her go into the apricot-tree house.”

  “Did you make eye contact with her?”

  “Yes! Right before she went in, she turned and looked at me.”

  Grandmother nodded and stroked my hair.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ve got the gift in your blood. Now, do as Grandmother tells you. Spit on the ground three times and stamp your left foot three times.”

  That day I became very ill. My body got really hot, and I started talking nonsense. It went on all night. Father carried me on his back to a hospital down near the harbour. Children and old people who’d been brought there from towns and villages nearby were lying in rows in every room. I don’t remember how many days I spent there. All I do remember is seeing that little girl perched on the ledge of the lattice window, close to where several people were lying. I stared up at her. I wasn’t afraid. After I was sent home, my sisters were moved out of the back room where we normally all slept, and my grandmother stayed by my side. She was the only one who would come near me. My fever would dip during the day and then set me afire again at night. Hives the size of millet seeds broke out all over my body and took a long time to go away. Grandmother kept asking me about the girl.

  “Do you still see her?”

  “No, but I did at the hospital. Grandma, who is she?”

  “That’s the typhoid ghost. Nothing will happen to you. My guardian spirit is keeping watch.”

  I don’t know how long I was sick. I kept slipping in and out of sleep both day and night. I can still remember the dream I had:

  I enter the grounds of what looks like an old temple. A stone wall has collapsed, and tiles from the half-caved-in roof lie scattered about in the reedy, weed-filled courtyard. I don’t go into the darkened temple, but instead stand nervously next to a slanting pillar and peer inside. Something moves. A dark red ribbon comes slithering out of the shadows. I turn and start to run. The ribbon stands on end and springs after me. I run through a forest, wade across a stream and cut through rice paddies, clambering over the high ridges between them, and make it back to the entrance of our village. The whole time, that red ribbon is dancing after me. Just then, Grandmother appears. She looks different – she’s wearing a white hanbok and has her hair up in a chignon with a long hairpin holding it in place. She pushes me behind her and lets out a loud yell:

  “Hex, be gone!”

  The ribbon slithers to the ground and vanishes.

  I woke up in a panic. My body and face were drenched in sweat as if I’d been caught in a rainstorm. Grandmother sat up and wiped my face and neck with a cotton cloth. “Hold on just a little longer, and it’ll pass,” she said.

  Though I was awake, my body kept growing and shrinking over and over as the fever rose and fell. My arms and legs grew longer and longer until they were pressed up against the floor and the walls. Then they shrivelled and shrank up smaller than beans, like rolled up balls of snot dug from both nostrils, and got softer and softer until the skin burst. The warm floor against my back dropped and carried me down, down, down, into the earth below. Faces appeared in the wallpaper. Their mouths opened, and they laughed and chattered noisily at me.

  I made it through the typhoid fever, but for several years, right up until I started school, I remained frail. I started hearing things I hadn’t heard before and seeing things that weren’t there before. That was also when I started communicating with our mute sister, Sook. Jung, the fourth-oldest, and Sook, the fifth, were only a year apart and were always at each other’s throats. It was the same with Hyun and me – as she was the second-youngest after me, I never bothered treating her like an older sister and she was always irritated with me because of it. Jin, Sun and Mi were much older than the rest of us, and they were bigger too. After all, a good three years separated Mi and the next one down, Jung. Anyway, Hyun and I were both treated like babies by everyone else, but Jung and Sook were awkwardly positioned in the family. Whenever an errand had to be run, it always fell to them. Between the two of them, Jung was the easier mark. Since Sook couldn’t talk, there was a limit to what she could be ordered to do. For instance, if you told them to run down to the greengrocer at the bottom of the hill and bring back some tofu and green onions, Jung would push her bottom lip out and glare menacingly at Sook.

  “I get stuck having to do everything because of her.”

  Because she couldn’t communicate through words, Sook was short-tempered. She would get along with everyone fine for a while, doing what she was told, but the moment she lost her temper she was ripping out clumps of hair and kicking in stomachs – big sister, little sister, none of that mattered when she was on the attack. For that reason, our parents did their best to treat Jung and Sook equally. When they bought us clothes, Jung and Sook were given identical styles and patterns, and even pencils were doled out in identical sets of three.

  One morning, my sisters were running around getting ready for school, taking turns going to the toilet, washing their faces and combing their hair when Sook began to shriek. Her face turned bright red from screaming, but since she couldn’t speak, no one knew what was wrong. She was holding something in her hand and shaking it: a single scorched trainer. It seemed that the trainer, which had been washed the night before and set on top of the warm, wood-burning stove to dry, had fallen in front of the open flames. Naturally, Sook and Jung wore identical blue trainers. Clever Jung had snatched up the unscathed pair and put them on, claiming they were hers, and left the burned shoe where she’d found it. Sook threw the burned shoe and hurled herself at Jung, grabbing her around the waist and tackling her. Jung squirmed and struggled as Sook pulled the undamaged shoes off Jung’s feet. That was her way of saying they were hers. Unwilling to admit defeat, Jung bit her arm. Their screaming and crying shook the whole neighbourhood. Father, who was steaming with anger, changed his mind about leaving for work and made them line up at the edge of the twenmaru so he could take a switch to their calves.

  “Not a moment’s peace in this house on account of you two girls!”

  The morning had been ruined for everyone; the entire family stood and watched as Father hit the girls on the calves with the switch. But right then, I heard Sook’s voice inside my head: But it was Jung’s. Her shoes were on top of the stove. Mine were by the gate. The neighbour’s cat has been sneaking into the kitchen to steal dried fish. I saw the cat run off with one last night. I unconsciously babbled these words, which were buzzing in my ears. Father paused and Grandmother went to check the top of the cupboard next to the stove.

  “What happened to that dried pollock I was planning to add to the soup?” she asked.

  Relieved, Mother grabbed the switch away from Father and said: “See? It’s the cat’s fault.”

  Father muttered something about “too many damn girls killing me with all this racket” as he picked up his files and documents one by one and left for work, while Grandmother comforted Jung and Sook.

  “Why don’t we ask your father to buy you two some new shoes on his way home from work? Hurry on to school now.”

  After my sisters had all gone, and I was the only one left at home, Mother said: “Well, that was strange. How did she figure out what Sook was trying to say?”

  “What’d I tell you? Our Bari inherited the gift.”

  Mother blanched.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t ever mention those old wives’ tales of yours in front of their father.”

  Two

  One day, I think around the time I started school, Hindungi met up with a boy dog and got pregnant, despite
being, as Grandmother put it, well into her old-lady years. The grown-ups all clucked their tongues and exclaimed what a disgrace it was, but Hindungi strutted about the courtyard, her sagging belly and teats swaying. She gave birth late one winter night when no one was looking. We were all lying in a row beneath the blankets when we overheard Grandmother and Mother whispering outside the door.

  “How many are there?” Grandmother asked.

  “One … two … three … What the –! Seven!”

  “Will wonders never cease? They say flowers can bloom on an old tree, and sure enough this old granny’s had herself seven babies.”

  The next morning, before Mother could come in, pull back our blankets and smack us on the butt to tell us to hurry, get up, get ready for school, we all rose at once as if on cue. Some of us rushed to change clothes first while the others spilled out into the courtyard in our long underwear. As we crowded in front of the doghouse like a school of minnows at the water’s edge, fighting over who would get to stick her face in the tiny doorway first, Hindungi – who had always been so gentle with us – stuck her head out the doorway, bared her teeth and growled. Mother warned us to back away.

  “Give her space. She’s worried you’ll hurt her babies.”

  When my older sisters took a hesitant step back, I saw my chance to get a peek inside, so I crouched down in front of the doghouse. Then, with my mouth firmly shut, I spoke inside my head: It’s me. Bari. The seventh. Don’t worry. I just wanted to see my little brothers and sisters.

  Then, would you believe it? Hindungi staggered to her feet and stepped right out of the doghouse. The puppies, so tiny they could have fit inside my own tiny hand, were clustered together with their eyes shut tight on scraps of straw sacks. I stuck my hand into that warm puppy pile, gently pulled one out and cradled it against my chest. I could feel its heart beating softly against my fingertips. So you’re the seventh one too, just like me, I thought.