Lost Souls

by Hwang Sunwon

  T’aesŏp used his cigarette butt to light a fresh cigarette. Whereupon the girl remarked that her mother smoked; she understood it was an ingrained habit, something her mother did when her feelings were hurt, but she was displeased that her mother even now attempted to conceal this habit from her. And then she said that something had happened a few days earlier—that her father’s concubine had visited, saying that his rheumatism had worsened and asking for money to buy medicine for him; that her mother, hearing this, had jumped to her feet and in a choking voice had shouted that that was what the bitch deserved for sucking up all his money and was she now to harass them with the intent of seizing what was theirs as well? The concubine had told her mother that she had met her father after he and her mother had split their assets and that she was by then widowed with two children, that the father had continued to have relations with other women, and that even while undergoing various hardships she had put up with these women and stayed with him. Her mother had responded that a woman with two children who served as a concubine was worse than a bitch, and continued to curse the woman over and over. But she herself no longer considered the woman hateful, and when the concubine suggested that maybe it would be good for them to take back the sick father, her mother clutched her bosom, clenched her teeth, and screamed that it was his choice to shack up with this mongrel bitch, and even if he had lost all his money and was about to be driven out by the concubine, there was no way she would take him back. And with that her mother had collapsed in a faint. While relating this to T’aesŏp the girl had not so much as blushed at the vulgarity of “shacked up with this mongrel bitch.” And when she mentioned that her mother had fainted, the girl had shown no more concern than she did when attempting to solve an algebra problem. Finally the girl added that although she had run out to call a doctor to attend to her mother, how could she not feel more kindly disposed toward this woman and her rheumatic father?

  Not knowing what else to say, T’aesŏp merely observed that the mother’s heart problem sounded serious as well. And then he wondered if on the basis of the girl’s remarks her mother had assumed that his relationship with his friend’s wife was something sordid, and when he recalled how obvious it was that the girl’s mother had been keeping a close watch on him and her daughter, he instinctively shuddered.

  The girl considered T’aesŏp and said she realized it was windy, but he must really be cold to be shivering like he was, and then her face was transformed into an innocent smile and she nodded toward an alley across the street where there was a movie theater. The smile brightened when the girl discovered a boy standing in front of a tearoom next to the alley. She quickly approached the boy; it was as if T’aesŏp were no longer there. T’aesŏp remained where he was. The boy had dark eyebrows. While the boy spoke with the girl, the darkness of his eyebrows appeared to give a reddish cast to his white face, but when the girl returned to T’aesŏp his face seemed to turn pale again. The boy, she told T’aesŏp, was the older brother of a school friend, and the friend was sick in bed and wanted to see her. Don’t lie to me, T’aesŏp thought, but then he said to the girl that it was all right and she could go ahead. When the girl suggested that T’aesŏp might as well watch the movie now that he was here at the theater he heaved a violent shudder. Feeling an urge for a steaming cup of coffee, he escaped into the tearoom.

  One day, as T’aesŏp was waiting for the girl to return home from school, her mother carefully slid open the door and entered. She sat silently for a time before telling T’aesŏp that she sensed the girl was seeing a man; didn’t he feel the same way? She blushed as she said this. Without thinking, T’aesŏp shook his head no. The girl’s mother lapsed back into silence, then mumbled that no matter what her daughter thought, she wasn’t going to let her do as she pleased. Then she seemed to realize that it was time for the girl to return, and she hurriedly left.

  The girl arrived. But no sooner had she opened her algebra book than she began talking about the boy, saying that he had been studying philosophy in Seoul but had suffered a nervous breakdown and returned home, and that there was something about him that reminded her of T’aesŏp. T’aesŏp, feeling his ears flush for no good reason, replied that he’d finally realized that the girl’s rebellion against her mother must have started when she met the boy; that it didn’t seem the boy’s edgy expression would deceive anyone, but these days who could know what a man was thinking; and that he himself was having a difficult time fathoming his own thoughts. With a twinkle in her eye the girl said it was amazing: T’aesŏp was beginning to sound like her mother.

  T’aesŏp pointed to a factoring problem in the algebra book. The girl produced her notebook, moistened the tip of her pencil with her tongue, and began to write. Immediately T’aesŏp found the notebook placed before him. Instead of an answer he saw written “scaredy-cat teacher.” T’aesŏp snatched the pencil from her, crossed out her scrawl with two long strokes, and asked the girl what was to become of her if she couldn’t solve such a simple problem. So saying, he looked up, and when the javelin standing in the far corner of the room caught his eye he told the girl that she ought to reduce the amount of time she spent training.

  The girl rose, picked up the javelin, and said that she had recently started throwing but couldn’t get the hang of the posture, and stretched out her left arm in front of her. T’aesŏp imagined the girl placing the javelin on her shoulder and breaking into a run, and then the sight of her hair flying and the vivid arc of the javelin, but in the meantime the girl replaced the javelin and found her discus. The girl swept the discus back and forth as if to throw it and said she found it absolutely thrilling when she released the discus or javelin right behind the line and then was able to keep her body from crossing the line, and that it was only then that she was able to forget her home life and things like math homework. She continued to sweep the discus back and forth, and began to pivot. T’aesŏp noticed the wrap around her right wrist, then found himself imagining the hooks of the training shirt across her taut bosom coming undone as she pivoted, and moved out of the way of the discus. But then she stumbled, and before T’aesŏp could reach out to catch her, her ample form had tumbled into his lap, knocking his frail body over.

  The first thing T’aesŏp did after raising himself to his feet was to slide open the door. The girl’s mother was rinsing vegetables at the faucet in the yard. She turned to look at him and then the girl slid the door shut, saying the open door distracted her from studying. T’aesŏp picked up the girl’s geometry notebook with its clumsily drawn circles and straight lines. But instead of opening her geometry book the girl said she had been feeling weak lately, and that must have been why she fell. And then she seemed to remember something and she herself slid open the door and told her mother, who was still rinsing vegetables at the faucet, that she had to go to school that evening for an assembly on self-improvement. Without waiting for an answer, she slid the door shut and said in an undertone to T’aesŏp that she had something to talk to him about and could she please see him at nine o’clock that evening at the pond to the right of the road that led out of town.

  That night as he waited for the girl T’aesŏp walked around the oval-shaped pond. The clock tower in the distance showed that it was past the appointed hour of nine. He observed where the trees bordering the road came to an end, wondering whether the trees or the girl, when she appeared, would cast the darker shadow in the moonlight. On a sudden impulse he looked for his own shadow, but it was lost in the blackness of the pond.

  T’aesŏp resumed his walk around the pond. As he looked down at the black surface his imagination went to work. Before he had completed a circuit of the pond the girl would burst out of hiding and playfully place her hands over his eyes, and then for the first time he would take her by the hand, and what the girl had in mind to tell him was that just as she was able to block everything out when she threw the javelin or the discus, they should do likewise now and jump into the pond together, and he would consent and she woul
d take the hem of her skirt with its mandarin ducks and wrap it around both of them and they would jump into the water and sink to the bottom of the pond and feel the cold water of the stream that fed the pond flowing up their backs. Then they would suddenly realize they had to find their way to the surface; the girl would find him a burden and try to get free of him, at which point he would grab her hair so as not to sink farther, and the girl would then swim to the surface, holding him around the waist, and when the girl released him he would do nothing but shudder because of the cold—and in fact he now found himself shuddering.

  He completed his circuit and inspected the trees lining the road, his body shuddering and shuddering in the chill wind. He tried to make out the clock tower in the distance but it was no longer lit—had the bulb gone out? Again he looked toward the trees but then noticed his own slender shadow cast by the moon, and for a moment he had the startling sensation that the shadow was not his. He had the illusion that the girl’s mother was watching him, that she had placed the girl in his presence as a kind of experiment, and this thought occasioned yet another burst of shuddering. Finally he turned back toward town, and as he observed the setting moon he imagined the girl and the boy meeting not at the pond but in some dark alley, and then he had the illusion that his shadow was instead that of the girl’s mother, or of the girl and the boy, and with each successive illusion he shuddered yet again.

  T’aesŏp returned to his apartment and for several days was sick in bed with a fever. The day he awoke to find his fever and chills gone he undid the towel he had wrapped about his head and rose. For the first time in a while he watered his flowerpots. And then his absent gaze moved to the window, where he thought he could see the play of a butterfly’s wings. Initially he passed it off as the reflection of his haggard face, but then the movement seemed to reappear. He looked more closely and saw a pattern of mandarin ducks. Startled, he turned to see the girl standing in his room. But instead of the duck pattern, her skirt had a pattern of wind and waves. T’aesŏp, suddenly dizzy, toppled down onto his bedding.

  The girl played with the gas stove beside the bedding as she offered an excuse for not appearing at the pond that night: she had intended to meet the boy and go together to the pond, where they would explain to T’aesŏp a plan they had developed, but somehow that day she had felt sorry at the thought of leaving her mother alone and instead had ended up going to bed, telling her mother she had a headache. She added that the boy must have felt betrayed after waiting in vain to see her, because he had cut some of his hair and sent it to her. T’aesŏp shuddered, whether as an after-effect of his fever or from something else he couldn’t have said, and then without realizing it he uttered a loud laugh. The girl’s eyes widened in surprise. In a deliberately stern tone T’aesŏp told the girl that the more delinquent boys were like this clownish one. With a twinkle in her eye the girl said that she had never expected to hear him talking just like her mother.

  T’aesŏp then asked, having noticed a new strength in the girl, what would happen to her mother—once her daughter was gone she might collapse, never to awaken. The girl produced a cynical smile and said in a fearless tone that it was none of her concern if her mother, who had never taken back her sick father, should collapse, and that she and the boy were going off together. T’aesŏp adopted a cold tone and said that they wouldn’t get far before misfortune struck them. The girl’s hand flew out and slapped him across the cheek. “Devil, you devil!” she screamed; no matter what happened they would be happy, she shouted, tears pooling in her sparkling eyes. The waves on her skirt rippled as she pushed open the door and disappeared. T’aesŏp could hear the girl descending the unusually shallow stairs of the apartment several steps at a time. Calmed by the sound, he took his sprinkling can and resumed watering the flowerpots.

  SCARECROW

  Chun’gŭn started down the sloping path to the village. Now that he was out of the shade, the crowing of the roosters made the village sound closer than it actually was. The astringent odor of the pines that curtained the village coursed deep into his lungs, and he felt a coughing fit coming on. When the coughs arrived he put down his walking stick, squatted, clutched a handful of earth, and spat out a great glob of mucus. He noticed that the earth in his hand was part of an anthill and the ants were red. Nearby some of the red ants were swarming over a pine caterpillar.

  Chun’gŭn sat, taking care to avoid the mucus, and observed the caterpillar. It would curl itself almost into a circle and then straighten, dislodging the ants, which then used their feelers to relocate the caterpillar and crawl back onto it. The intervals between the curling episodes gradually lengthened, as did the gap between the ends of the curling caterpillar.

  He wondered what would happen if he placed an earthworm among the ants. He recognized a modest slope covered with mossy soil, a place where he had dug earthworms as a boy. There he found a worm and lifted its elastic body with a stick. By now the pine caterpillar was only barely squirming—although the swarming of the ants made it seem to be moving more vigorously.

  Chun’gŭn dropped the earthworm onto the anthill. The worm wriggled, scattering the ants. He pressed down with the stick, severing the worm into two segments, each of which became another crawling worm. Chun’gŭn watched the head and the tail segments move in separate directions, then severed one of the segments and placed the two pieces near the ants, before rising to return home.

  The morning sun shone on the leaves of the aspens at the entrance to the village. The village dogs kept up a chorus of barking. Strangely, now that he was close he seemed to hear the barking as if from a distance. In the village he found Myŏngju lingering beside the road, baby on her back. The baby burst into tears, its cries drowning out the barking.

  “All you do is cry,” said Myŏngju as she gave the baby’s bottom a good slap.

  Chun’gŭn came to a stop.

  “Remember me? I used to snatch the wild garlic you picked.”

  Nodding, Myŏngju turned her back to him. Chun’gŭn’s eyes came to rest on her jet-black hair and he felt a sensation akin to dizziness.

  During the day Chun’gŭn enjoyed resting in his family’s ancestral burial ground on a hill behind the village. He could see, directly below the gentle slope where he lay, the man everyone called Chaedong using a broom to remove spiderwebs from the thatch of his hut.

  “Miserable sonofabitchin’ spiders!”

  With every pass of the broom the threads of the webs glinted in the sunlight.

  After he had finished this task, he stood the broom in the corner of his yard, sat down beside his beehive, and muttered, “Damn me if I don’t get rid of every last one of those miserable sonofabitchin’ spiders.”

  Chaedong turned his attention to the bees arriving at the hive. Every once in a while he would press down on one of them with his finger. When he removed his finger, the small dark object dropped to the ground.

  Myŏngju, baby on her back, appeared at the birch trees near Chaedong’s hut.

  “What are you killing those bees for?”

  “They’re drones and all they do is eat up my honey.”

  Chun’gŭn kept a tally as the bees fell lifeless to the ground.

  “Well, instead of the bees, we could eat that honey—why don’t you give us some?” said Myŏngju.

  “It ain’t ready yet,” said Chaedong. “How’s the little fuss-budget?”

  “Still fussy.” Myŏngju peeled a strip of bark from one of the birches.

  “Can’t say as I blame it when our mama can’t give it milk. Anyway, we’d settle for some of last year’s honey.”

  “Huh—supposing some of it was left.”

  Chaedong went around behind Myŏngju, took one of the baby’s feet, and licked it. The baby began to cry. Chaedong chuckled, revealing dark, toothless gums. Myŏngju tossed the strip of birch bark at his face. Chaedong chuckled again.

  “Look at these pretty little feet,” he said, taking the baby’s foot and licking it again.

>   “That’s disgusting.”

  Chaedong’s dark gums revealed themselves in a smile.

  “That’s why your wife ran off.”

  Instantly Chaedong’s face hardened.

  “You little twit,” he muttered. “What do you mean, she ran off—I ran her off, that’s what. Want to know why? She was wasteful.”

  Myŏngju placed her hands beneath the baby’s bottom and gently rocked it up and down.

  “Then why don’t you get yourself another wife?” she asked, smirking.

  Chaedong’s bent frame disappeared into his yard. He returned with a shovel.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I got more soil to dig up. You won’t believe the size of the sweet potato crop I’m putting in next year.”

  Hearing this, Chun’gŭn was reminded of what his father had said a few days earlier as he squatted to attach a new rope to his plow: “I wish we could work that plot instead of Chaedong.” To which Chun’gŭn’s mother had replied: “Are you serious? We’re barely keeping up as it is.” “I know,” his father had said, “but buckwheat, millet, you name it—once they catch the sun they grow like crazy.” “And sweet potatoes too—the ones he grows are huge,” muttered his mother. “You know, he’s worked that land of ours for years all by himself.” To which his father had replied, “Heck, it’s time we worked that land ourselves—we wouldn’t have to worry about trees and roots and such.” And then he rose. At that point Chun’gŭn had said, “But there’s the ancestral graves—is it all right to be planting so close by?”

  Chaedong cleared spiderwebs from the birches with the blade of his shovel, then shouldered the tool.