Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  But I knew the reason. She had gone because of her sister who had been kidnapped. She had followed her as far as she could. I wondered why my mother didn’t tell Hannah the story, now.

  “I had never dreamed of leaving Korea,” my mother said. “By the time I met your father I was tired of the military government, of curfews and school closings and the tear gas. In some ways, I was ready to leave. But I had dreamed of that place, that border. I had to go.

  “So I went. I bought a ticket and didn’t tell your father. I meant to return the same day, but then I got there, and looked across the DMZ, and there were so many soldiers, just boys, you understand, dressed up in uniform. And it didn’t look like anything but a field with an ugly wire fence and boys standing too still around it, and I thought, Is this all?

  “And I couldn’t leave. I looked at the mountains that stretched into the north and into China. I wondered if somewhere out there, maybe there was a woman I once knew sitting in one of the Diamond Mountains, maybe singing a song to her child. And I thought if I left Korea I would never have a chance to see her again.”

  “Who was she?” Hannah asked.

  My mother smiled. “Someone from another life,” she said. “Someone I knew when I was a little girl.”

  “And what happened next?” Hannah asked. “Why didn’t you come home?”

  “I skipped my train back.” My mother looked down at her hands. “I slept in a house that belonged to people I didn’t know. I gave them money for a bed.”

  She looked at my father, who no longer looked like my father, and then she reached out and touched his face, which stayed frozen in that terrifying expression of pain under her hand. “How could I do such a thing?” she said to him. “How did I ever think I could leave you?”

  So she had almost left us. I heard Hannah exhale slowly, and I looked over at her. She nodded.

  My mother continued. When she heard the first explosion, she did not sit up, but lay in the dark in her unfamiliar bed, staring at the ceiling. The second time, the stand near her bed rocked back and forth, and she got up and put on her clothes. It was past curfew, but my mother put on her shoes.

  She wondered vaguely as she prowled through the dark hall to the front door if the soldiers would arrest her if they saw her outside; she wondered if the war had come. She should be running away, she knew, or hiding. But the thought of that empty field pulled at her. She wanted to see if there were soldiers running across it, the lines of guards dissipating into scattered men.

  No one stopped her from leaving the house; it was silent throughout, as if they were used to the explosions, to the sound of her padding through the hallways, walking out in the middle of the night.

  My mother walked a mile to the DMZ, shuffling in the dark. She wondered what my father would say if he could see her. How she would explain.

  And then she saw them.

  Behind the soldiers, behind the fence, was a group of deer running in the moonlight. Their throats glowed pale and milky, their undercoats gleaming luminous against their darker fur.

  My mother had never seen anything as graceful as those deer, their spindle legs gliding weightlessly beneath them. Her breath caught. It was like ballet, my mother said. It was like flight. She watched the deer skim over land no human foot had ventured to cross in twenty years.

  The thought came to her suddenly, with the shock of revelation: All boundaries are imagined.

  She could not see into the dark of the other side.

  When the first deer exploded, it was into a deafening light. Afterward, the darkness thickened with smoke, and though my mother squinted, she could see nothing but the ghostly forms of the deer veering silently away from the sound. My mother stood and watched them through the line of soldiers, framed by the cold glint of the wire fence. She shivered, she thought, We are doomed.

  She turned to walk back to the house she was staying in. Ahead of her, the moon drifted down and hung like a lantern from a nearby tree branch. She looked up: beyond the low-hanging moon, the night was deep and constant. My mother watched the stars divide and divide again: beautiful and impossibly remote. They shattered the sky.

  23.

  My father’s stillness seemed interminable. The nurse wandered in and changed his IV bags, she took his pulse and blood pressure; she went back to her room shaking her head. My mother ran out of stories. When this happened, she sang. He had always loved her voice. Every day Hannah and I wandered around the house and the property; we took turns making rice and fixing the most basic meals. Our clothes began to hang off our bodies as if we, too, were wasting away. Meals were just sustenance; we ate only enough to keep going. My relatives brought food, and everything piled up in the kitchen. But my mother did not leave the room in which my father lay. And she did not stop singing. She had stopped sleeping, and it seemed that every corner of each day was filled with the sound of my mother’s voice, as if she was casting a spell: even when she was resting, she sang to my father, softly, under her breath.

  And then it began to snow. It was too early, weeks early, though the year’s harvest had mostly been gathered. The snow that came down was light and melted instantly on the ground. Such large white snowflakes! And my mother sang on, as if she had called it down upon us.

  My father, who lay in his bed expressionless, not seeming to really see anything, even when we massaged his body, or put lotion on his dry skin, or moved his limbs, seemed somehow to sense the falling snow. He had not stirred for anything, not even noticing when the nurse gave him a new shot, or changed his needles. He had not even turned his head to my mother’s voice, but the snow, falling silently outside, seemed to waken him from his stupor. He began to stir. His eyes moved, searching, and for a few seconds fixed on us.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “Maybe he’s starting to recover from his trip here,” I said.

  Hannah went outside, and in front of the window she gathered enough snow to make a tiny snowman. She put him on a plate and brought him in. “See?” She showed my father.

  She took the snowman back outside and arranged him on the windowsill. She made three more, each smaller than the last. A little family of snowmen, looking in on us. I touched my father’s hand. How slow it all was, I thought. There was enough time for the snow falling on the roof, for my mother’s stories. There was time enough for all of it.

  That day my father began to take water when we gave it to him. He began to look at us. Encouraged, I offered him some persimmon in a spoon: he opened his mouth. The persimmon was so ripe that the skin caved away and the soft inside just fell into the spoon. It slipped smoothly in.

  He swallowed. He blinked. He blinked again. His voice sounded strong when he spoke. “That’s good!” he said.

  “He just talked!” I said, looking to see if anyone had heard.

  My mother and Hannah rushed over, calling out to him, excited. They stroked his arms and said hello. He didn’t speak again, but let them take turns feeding him spoonfuls of the persimmon. We should have given him one mouthful each, and stopped, but it had been weeks since he had eaten anything, so long since he had responded to anything, that we got carried away. It seemed miraculous. We let him eat the persimmon until he closed his mouth and turned away.

  In the long list of many mistakes, this is the one I regret most. Because after that, my father did not speak again, but several hours later he began to moan.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, leaning forward and rubbing his arm. My mother and Hannah came to his side, just in time to see him shit himself. This was the first time he’d moved his bowels in weeks, since we’d put him on the IVs back at the hospital. We’d waited for him to do so, encouraged him. We’d known it was bad when he’d stopped, just as it’d been bad when he stopped peeing on his own, and had to have a catheter put in.

  But this was worse. This was not what we’d been hoping for. Now my father grimaced and writhed, holding on to the rail of the hospital bed, and each time he shuddered he shit b
lack water and a horrid, putrid smell filled the air. We turned him over each time, the nurse rushing over to help my mother slip the soiled sheets out from under him while Hannah and I spread clean new sheets beneath him. He cried out each time we moved him; he held out his hand, begging us to stop.

  By nightfall of that long, horrible day, my father’s breath was rattling. We had run out of clean sheets, and we went back and forth from the laundry room to the bedroom, an endless exchange of linen, except that now my father had to lie in his fouled bed until we came back, yanking his poor body back and forth as we cleaned it up.

  Here’s a secret. You think there are limits, you think it can’t get worse, there’s just dead and that’s it, but there’s worse. There’s your father’s mouth, open, but he can’t speak, and instead he makes sounds no person should make. There’s the sore you discover on his back the size of your fist, and you don’t know how long it’s been there or how you missed it this whole time he’s been lying there, arched and stiff, looking at you, everything in his face begging for help.

  Then lesion after lesion breaks open on his legs, and when he runs out of pants, the black watery shit has ruined them all, you sit beside your father who is naked for the first time in front of you, a tube running out of his swollen, misshapen penis, and tubes running into his stick-like bruised arms, and you rub aloe into the open wounds of this man whom you have loved your entire life. And here’s the thing: you are the one who has brought him here. You are the one who forced him to be bumped and jostled in a van for five hours while he struggled to breathe through whatever’s been filling his lungs; you are the one who gave him that first spoonful of sweet persimmon; and it is you who have forced on him again and again the foolish, impossible weight of your wanting.

  The price you pay now is his open mouth, which is screaming and not screaming, the price is the gurgle in his throat, the tendons in his neck stretching and aching, and yes, yes, for the first time you wish for his death because you finally know you have been asking too much, and that neither of you can bear it.

  24.

  The next morning my father’s spasms had quieted. He had emptied himself out, and the world was covered with pure, white snow. It was so beautiful from the window that the previous night seemed like it could have been a joke. Hannah’s family of snowmen had been blanketed so they were no longer recognizable, just four white lumps. My father was lying in his bed, utterly motionless, his face etched with the pain of the previous day. But now there was a relief to his stillness, and I was grateful he had not died in the night.

  The three of us sat exhausted by my father’s side. His breath still rattled. It came shallower and shallower. It snowed all that day. It held our little house in its shifting embrace, and the world was blanketed in a hush, the only sound the grate of my father’s breath.

  My mother called our relatives, one by one. I didn’t want her to: I wanted it to be just us with my father huddled under the snow. But of course they came. Car after car pulled into our driveway, and my relatives entered the room and walked up to my father and touched him. My grandmother came, too, and she put her face close to my father’s and called his name. Then she pulled away and looked at my mother, and then me, and then Hannah. We had not seen her in weeks, and she looked smaller than she had before. I wondered if it was true that she’d been unwell, but we did not say anything to each other. We just looked. I felt as if we were enacting some ritual. She did not blink. Then she slipped to the back of the room, and waited there.

  As for everyone else, I did not take notice of them, did not raise my eyes from my father’s face, but I did not like to see all the hands come and brush over his body lightly, as if something was already gone and he belonged to everyone else now. As if they were taking something of him away with them by their touch. I leaned forward and chanted the name of the Buddha into my father’s ear, very low, so that if he was listening, only he could hear.

  When my aunt walked in, the room was already crowded with my father’s relatives, but as she entered, a silence fell. Hannah was standing between her and my father, and my aunt pushed her aside with her hand as she came. Her head and coat were covered in a thin layer of snow. She had brought the cold with her from outside.

  “Jeehyun,” my mother hissed from across my father’s body. I got up reluctantly and crossed the room.

  “Komo,” I said. “Let me take your coat.”

  But my aunt turned away from me. She took my sister’s face in her hands, and looked hard into her eyes. She seemed ready to say something terrible. I reached out for her arm and pulled on her sleeve, my hand melting the snow where I touched. “Komo,” I said. “Let her go, and I’ll put your coat away.”

  My aunt shook her head. And then she burst into angry sobs.

  From around me I felt the murmur of my relatives as they closed in around us, anxious to touch my aunt and reassure her. Then in the hallway a door opened; Keith and his father came into the room, brushing snow from themselves.

  My father’s breath rattled from the corner like a wind trying to escape, and when I turned my head to look at him, Hannah broke free of my aunt’s grip and the circle that had gathered around us, and ran out of the house and into the snow in her slippers, without her shoes or her coat. There were too many people around us, and I was suddenly overwhelmed. I stepped forward—I should have gone after her, but I just watched her through the snow on the window as she ran from the house with her head down, clumsy and flailing.

  I knew I should go after her, but I looked at my father breathing so laboriously in his bed and could not leave him. She had not returned an hour later when my father’s breath became harsh and slow. “Wait,” I kept telling him, “wait.”

  At the exact moment he took his last breath—a harsh, grating sound like the juicer we had used to grind his carrots every morning in the house we’d rented by the river what seemed like years ago—my mother moaned, and the noise seemed to come from beneath the floor. She fell into the chair next to him, and was still.

  “I love you,” I said into his ear. And then, because Hannah wasn’t there, I said it again for her so he would know she had said it, too. “I love you,” I said. That was hers.

  There was a moment of motionlessness, of quiet, and my uncle put his arm around Keith. I was astonished by the jealousy that suddenly overtook me with the realization that I no longer had a father, and that Keith did. I turned back to my father and gripped his hand in mine. It was still soft, and I could arrange his fingers around mine, but my mother said harshly, “Open his hand. Don’t let it go stiff like that or it will set like a claw.” Horrified, I let go and smoothed it open.

  “We should chant,” my mother said, so I lowered my head and chanted with her. We took no more notice of those around us, who moved back and forth in eddies, touching my father and then moving away. I felt that I was floating and my hand smoothing my father’s hand was the only thing keeping me down. I held it open and tried to keep it soft for when Hannah returned.

  There were so many different death-related ceremonies in Korea. At first there was the three-day wake, for which my father’s body was driven back to Seoul. Then came the funeral, for which my father’s body would be driven again, back to the countryside. Then there would be the 49th day ceremony, and the 100th day ceremony. And every year there would be Chuseok, and his birthday, and New Year’s, and the anniversary of his death.

  What I remember of my father’s wake: A bright light. The clean smell of chrysanthemums and white light so clear it pierced the solidity of things. We bowed to everyone in our white dresses; my grandmother sat pale and silent at a table, my uncle tapping his feet next to her. I tried to talk to her, but when I approached, she reached out her hand and fixed my hair, and told me to talk to the other guests. She looked away from me, and she did not go to my mother or Hannah.

  I asked if she was angry with me, and she shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “No,” she said. “But tell your mother she must come
to me later, when this is all over. But this is not the time for it, my dear.”

  So I went and greeted my father’s cousin, who was counting the flowers. There were so many flowers, but there was no one to pour the wine.

  “Let Keith do it,” Big Cousin said. “It should be a boy.” The oldest son was supposed to pour the wine and offer the first prostrations to my father’s shrine, which was waiting, laden with fruit and rice, and presided over by a photo of him taken several years ago.

  “Really, it’s the son’s job,” Big Cousin said. He was commandeering all the arrangements. I’d been surprised when he stepped in, but he was the head of the family. This was his responsibility. Earlier, when the other relatives arrived, he had suddenly raised his handkerchief and pressed his hand hard to his eyes, flexing his wrist. This man had loved my father, I realized, actually loved him.

  “Yes,” my aunt said. “More’s the pity that he never had one.”

  “My father didn’t care,” Hannah said, defiantly. “He told me he was glad he had us instead. And that he was always glad of it, and would never have traded us in for anyone else.”

  “When did he say that?” my mother gasped. As if she was the one who had felt unwanted all these years.

  “A couple months ago.” Hannah shrugged. “When we first got to the hospital.”

  Why had he never said that to me? I wondered. I stepped forward. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll pour the wine.” I thought they would protest, but Big Cousin, my aunt, and the rest of my relatives stepped aside, and nodded, just like that.

  I glanced at Hannah, and then at my mother, who was crying, covering her mouth. Nobody moved to comfort her, and I also stood where I was. Yes, I thought. I would play the part of the son.

  . . .

  Afterward, my mother, Hannah, and I took a break in the little room given to immediate family for privacy: right outside the room were all our guests, including my aunt and Keith. I thought we had handled things pretty well, and said so.