Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  Hannah shrugged dismissively. “I don’t want Komo or Keith at the funeral,” she said.

  My mother looked taken aback. “She’s his sister,” she said. “It’s not a matter of invitation.”

  “Then I won’t go,” Hannah said. She was sitting on the little sofa, her hands tucked inside the sleeves of her white dress. I recognized the stubborn tilt of her chin.

  She had come in two hours after my father had died, her feet cut and bleeding, shivering and cold. She’d waited until the cars had left the driveway, she’d waited for everyone to go away. She must have known then that he was dead, even before she saw him.

  I wondered if this was revenge for that. “You’ll ruin things,” I said.

  “If they come, I won’t,” she said.

  I looked to my mother, but she didn’t respond. She was just quiet, looking at Hannah thoughtfully.

  I said, “You can’t do that.”

  Hannah pinched her lips together and didn’t respond. I looked at her and at my mother, who had also become markedly quiet, and I wondered how they had both learned this particular trick of being silent while everything else fell down around them.

  “Don’t you care what it will look like?” I said. “Don’t you know what people will say?”

  “So what?”

  “It’s his funeral,” I said. “This is the last thing we can do for him.”

  “That’s not what this is really about. It’s just another chance for a performance by the perfect daughter.”

  “Did you really just say that?” I asked. “Is that what you think?”

  She shrugged.

  “Only someone as self-centered and narcissistic as you could come up with something like that. At the end of the day, everything has to be all about you.”

  “Fuck you,” Hannah said.

  “The truth hurts.”

  “Stop it,” my mother said, coming between us. “Stop.” Someone knocked at the door, and my mother turned to it. “Go away,” she cried, and cast herself onto the sofa, sobbing. We ignored her.

  I said, “You always get what you want in the end, no matter who it hurts.”

  Hannah gasped, “What?”

  “You’ve always done what you wanted to do,” I said. “You never have to think about anyone else. You never have to be responsible. I’m sorry that I couldn’t protect you from everything. But, Hannah, I didn’t even know about Gabe. And I was twelve years old.”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  Someone rattled at the door again. I looked at it. Outside that door were all our guests, and I wondered how much they could hear. I didn’t care. “You got to have everything,” I said. “Whatever you wanted, and I was the one who had to keep you safe.”

  The unfairness of it rose up and choked me. I had always been the dutiful one, the one who tried to always be the missing daughter, the missing son, the one who had to try to fill the missing pieces and keep our family together. “You always got to be the one who was loved,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Hannah gasped. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “And I love you. But I can’t be in charge of everything. I’m tired.” I knelt in front of her then without meaning to; my legs gave way beneath me. For three days I had bowed over and over to all our guests, and now, exhausted, I could no longer stand.

  When I touched her she melted down onto her knees, and she clasped her arms around my neck. I tried to push her away, to tell her that the weight was too much. Her tears ran down my neck, and I trembled at the feeling of them, unless it was her body trembling in my arms. Her fingers laced together as she cried, and my knees were sore against the grounds as I held her awkwardly.

  “Hold on,” I said. I was afraid we would topple. But she had let herself go limp, and awkwardly, unsteadily, I held her.

  The next day, my mother rode with my father’s body for the five hours back to the country, and Hannah and I rode with my uncle. My grandmother did not come. We were wearing the same white dresses we’d worn for the last four days. Hannah was quiet and subdued. It seemed wrong to think of anything like the future while my father was being buried. There would be time for that, I told myself. Time and time, and only today for this.

  When we parked at the house, I looked at the courtyard covered with snow. The ghost of our old footprints remained. Hannah’s snowmen had blended into a single lump on the windowsill. Up where he was to be buried, the sun shone. A clearing had been made around his gravesite, and from it we could look out into the valley.

  It was a good place, with a beautiful view, but I was worried that the grave looked too shallow. It was only a few feet into the ground, maybe chest deep. I asked Big Cousin if it was okay. He said it would be fine because it’d be covered with a mound, but I wasn’t sure. I stared at the gap in the ground. The dirt to the side was mixed with rocks and snow. My grandmother had said the dead rise with the rain. My father had dreamed of a woman who floated down a river, her hair covering her face.

  I felt a hand on my arm. “After this,” my aunt said into my ear, her clawlike fingers grasping my elbow, “every death will call you back to this one.” I tried to pull away from her, but she continued. “Every great sorrow will lead you back to this.”

  I wrenched my arm free. I turned my back on her and looked up at the sun, which was still shining as bright as I had ever seen it.

  After the ceremony, after the first shovelful of dirt had been thrown on the coffin, during which time I looked neither at my mother nor at Hannah but fixedly at the ground, my aunt threw herself onto the snow and screamed.

  “Not again,” I muttered. Her husband knelt forward and tried to pull her up.

  Keith stood above her and looked around uncomfortably. He caught my eye. We had not spoken since the day he came to my father’s wake, when he muttered his awkward condolences. I thought of the day he came to our house and we walked around the pond, how comfortable we had been and how friendly, until he saw the snake in the pond. I felt as if I owed him something, a word, a reassurance. He was my cousin. But it was too much, and I blinked and looked down and made my face utterly blank.

  When my aunt finally rose, she began to wail, going from person to person, pressing their hands again and again. “He was my only brother,” she said. “He was all I had.”

  I was ashamed of her, making a scene like this, although I’d also been told that the women of the family ought to make a scene. It was expected. But neither my mother nor Hannah nor I had.

  “We had only each other,” my aunt continued. “How could he die before me?” she said. She stopped in front of me. “How could he?”

  I was aware of everyone watching us. I was angry with her for pulling me into this performance, the pageantry of it.

  “I never loved anyone as much,” she said. “This was my sin. This was why God took my son.”

  Her husband stepped forward. “Don’t say such things,” he said, but his voice sounded so much older than the deep, commanding voice I remembered from childhood.

  My aunt was finally silent. I met Keith’s eyes. He looked away. I wondered if my aunt had ever said that before, if she’d been waiting to say that all these years.

  She clutched the white sleeve of my dress and looked at me. Her eyes, I realized then, were just like my father’s eyes. “I carried him,” she said, tugging my sleeve, her voice desperate. Her hand on my sleeve was the briefest of weights. “I carry him still.”

  In the days following my father’s funeral, my mother and Hannah and I packed up our things. We washed and folded all the sheets, clean and sweet-smelling again, everything foul washed away. I tried to work on my dissertation. It seemed suddenly important to take it up again. “I’ll dedicate this to you,” I’d said to him, in his grave.

  While I was working, I heard a clatter in the bathroom. When I went to see what had happened, I had to look over Hannah’s shoulder. She had gotten there first. My mother was s
itting on the floor: perhaps she had fallen, and there were pills still spiraling around her and she was trying to gather them up. My father’s pills, I realized. The painkillers he had not taken.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hannah said, turning a white, frightened face to me. “Just help me clean it up.” She knelt down by my mother. “We don’t need these anymore,” she said, very gently opening her fist and taking the pills from her palm.

  My mother’s hands shook. I helped her up while Hannah swept the floor with her hands. I told my mother she ought to go to bed. “Take a little rest,” I said, and she shuffled away from us, her hand on the wall for balance.

  I turned to Hannah. “What happened?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Let it go,” she said.

  So I did. I left her there to clean up the mess by herself.

  Here’s a story about a place I’ve never been to called Nak Wha Am: The Cliff of One Thousand Falling Flowers. It’s a real place, a true story from hundreds of years ago, when Korea was still three kingdoms. The kingdoms were always warring, fighting to be one. When the Silla Kingdom defeated Paek Jae, the maidens of the castle rushed out the gates. Their white-slippered feet pounded as desperately as their tightly bound hearts. Their legs rustled through and through their petticoats, so delicate that it seemed with every step that their waists might break.

  They giggled breathlessly under their hanboks, holding hands, each pulling each farther and faster. Their lips pressed tightly together to hold in the ecstasy of their sudden escape. Together they flew, in all their bright colors, streaming toward the inevitable cliff: leaping like deer. Their stride broke, almost at the edge.

  And then in a rush they strained against their clothes, against their own bodies, and broke free into flight. They burst into the air as silently as the beating of wings, like so many scattered leaves: each falling maiden with her skirts blossoming through the rush of air, opening like a fan as she flew toward the ocean below. Together they fell like a downpour of brightly colored rain, each petal suspended in air before drifting down to the crashing of the sea.

  My whole life I had always belonged to my family, and there had been a comfort in the belonging. I’d always thought Hannah and I were irrevocably entangled: the connection always between us no matter how far she went. I had spent my whole life afraid that I would be bound to her, responsible. I had been afraid my family would never let me go.

  A few years after we moved to Michigan, my family had taken a trip to Chicago and we went to the museums there. Our favorite of them all was the Adler Planetarium. We went to the star show. We’d loved the stars ever since my father first read us The Little Prince, and Hannah asked the guy who ran the presentation about wormholes. I asked about infinity.

  He had asked how old we were and told us to wait until after the show. So we waited around while all the other families asked their questions and then got up and left.

  He had eyed us warily. “Real scientists don’t ask those kinds of questions.”

  “Yes they do, we have books about them,” Hannah had retorted, referring to our Child Genius picture book series at home. “Have you written any books on science?” His answer had been unsatisfactory, and she immediately lost interest in his expertise. “Well then,” she said.

  My father told his acquaintances about that for years, even though both Hannah and I had given up on wormholes and the Child Genius series very soon afterward. This must have made my father sad, as it had made him sad when we stopped being excited by family vacations, when we stopped being open about our interests, and left home and pursued lives of our own. It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does—but it still hurt him, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn’t see me through the tinted glass.

  I waved, trying to get his attention as he walked up and down the platform trying to figure out where I was sitting. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he’d seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn’t know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.

  25.

  Hannah and I bought our tickets to leave Korea about two weeks after my father’s funeral. She was scheduled to leave a day before me. We were leaving my mother to do the 49th day ceremony, the 100th day ceremony, New Year’s in Korea—we were leaving her to do it all alone.

  “I can’t stay longer,” Hannah said, and I told my mother I couldn’t either. I told myself I needed to get back to my own life, though I wasn’t sure what that meant. I knew that it was cowardly to leave her in Korea alone, now that my father was gone.

  “You must take care of your mother,” my grandmother told us. “You’re all she has left now.”

  “She has you, too,” I said, but there was a new constraint between them, as if grief had made them strange to each other. They were careful and polite together, but my grandmother would pull me aside whenever she could and overwhelm me with questions about my mother’s spirits.

  We did not know when my mother would leave my father’s cousin’s house, but we knew she’d live with my grandmother for the four months she had to remain. We didn’t know where she’d go next. We did not ask; we did not fuss, but bought our tickets one after another, and then left each other carefully alone.

  The night before Hannah was scheduled to leave, I dreamed of fireflies. They hung suspended in the air, thick as leaves, beyond counting. The air was hazy with their light. Their bodies were stifling. Their wings beat against my mouth like tiny pulses, tiny beating hearts. There were so many of them I could hardly breathe.

  I awoke to darkness and quiet. I could hear Hannah breathing in the other room. I turned over and looked at my clock. It was four-thirty a.m. I knew it was no use trying to get back to sleep, but there was nothing else to do. I knew, though, that I could not lie here, waiting for the day to come and usher Hannah away.

  My own mind was strangely blank. It seemed the darkness of the countryside had embraced it, covered it up somehow, and this blankness was a relief. I sat up and dressed in the dark, as quickly as I could. I tiptoed past my mother’s room, and past Hannah’s. I opened the front door. It had snowed again in the night, and I could barely make out the driveway in the dark as I stepped out into the cold.

  I walked toward the hulking forms of the mountains, toward the hiking path. I could hardly see the road, but it was lined in trees, looming shadows, and I stepped between them. My lungs hurt. I thought of all those North Koreans, starving in their huts. I had heard they ate their children. Did anyone really believe that? The snow crunched under my boots. I tripped on a log. I told myself that my father had walked these paths as a child.

  Somewhere, my mother had also been living, walking similar paths. I could see now that all the lives I’d mapped out for us intersected here. My father was in the ground. Beneath the dirt, his face was stuffed with cotton. I kept walking. If I could walk to the end of the earth, I thought, I might survive this. I was aware of my legs beneath me, going on.

  The dark was pulling back, and as I walked I could feel the fog lifting like a breath. My mother and Hannah were sleeping in their rooms, breathing in, breathing out. I wished I could believe in something. Heaven. A place. In these woods my father had grown up in, it seemed I could be in any wood, in any country in the world.

  The sky lightened as I walked, finally, up the steep path that had just been cleared. I could make out the dim outline of footprints in the thin snow, and I wondered whose they were. Hannah’s? My mother’s? For a moment, it seemed they could even be the ghost prints of my father’s own feet.

  Then I was there: in the clearing, and standing over his mound at the center was my sister. How had she come to be here?
I had been so sure she was asleep. She turned to me and smiled, and there was such an unreality to her in the dim light I could almost imagine she was a vision, anyone but my real and breathing sister. I felt a momentary fear. And then she spoke.

  “God, you startled me,” she said, and stepped to the side a little, so there was a place for me to come beside her, and I did. So the footprints had been hers.

  I faced the valley, which spread out before us. Everything white. Everything covered with a layer of snow that looked, in the dark, like ash. We had stood here two weeks ago, my mother and Hannah and I, each in our white dresses. Now my sister and I stood in front of my father’s grave together.

  “What do you think happens when somebody dies?” she said. “Do you believe in heaven?”

  “No,” I said. “No heaven.”

  “Me neither.”

  I looked at her. I thought of the year she’d lived away from us, of all the things we didn’t know about each other. “All I ever wanted was for everyone to be okay,” I said.

  She tilted her head, a funny smile on her face. “But that’s impossible,” she said. She started to laugh.

  “I know.”

  After a while, she said, “I think that life is only okay because we die. I mean, because things end.”

  “That’s grim.”

  She smiled again. “Do you want to know what I think happens when you die?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you kind of just fade away, your body, your consciousness, all of it. No heaven, no reincarnation. You just dissipate a little more every year, but slowly. Slow enough so that you’re still around a little bit while everyone you love is alive, but fast enough that you’re gone by the time no one needs you anymore.”

  “Sounds nice enough,” I said. I didn’t ask if she felt like she still needed my father.

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?” I said.