Lost Souls

by Hwang Sunwon

  Hyŏn found his way out of the park. Just before the sewer ditch he took a shortcut down an alley next to a small shop, and in no time he was home. He went upstairs to his room and found the cat inside, licking the floor—probably some blood had dripped from the baby rabbit. The cat noticed Hyŏn and lifted its vigilant eyes toward him, but the next moment its red tongue was diligently licking the floor again. Hyŏn decided he would give the cat to the woman he had just seen at the park. He approached the cat, petted it briefly, then grabbed it. The cat licked its mouth, unconcerned, twitched its ears this way and that, and started licking the backs of Hyŏn’s hands—still that smell. Hyŏn tied a small towel around the cat’s eyes. The cat struggled a moment, then licked Hyŏn’s hands some more.

  Hyŏn held the cat to his chest and stole from the house. This time he took the long way to the park, following the sewer. Moonlight suddenly appeared as he walked along the ditch. Hyŏn tucked his jacket tightly around the cat. Now it was dark again. Hyŏn entered the park and went straight to the foot of the broadleaf tree. The leaves, damper and cooler than before, brushed against his ears, chilling them. Hyŏn placed the cat under his arm and struck a match, but the flame touched a moist leaf and went out. He struck another match, but there was only the blackish gleam of the leaves; no one was there. Hyŏn lit a cigarette and went to the bench where the boy and the girl had been laughing. He sat down. The market had closed, and it was dark there now. Hyŏn spied something shadowy moving back and forth in the gloom in front of him. Wondering if this was an illusion, he looked carefully and discovered two dogs mating. Locked end to end, they were taking turns trying to move forward. The moon reappeared. The thin dog nearer Hyŏn, its eyeballs and long, drooping tongue glistening, pulled the other dog a couple of steps forward. The other immediately pulled the first dog back those few steps. This action was repeated over and over under the moonlight.

  Clouds covered the moon again and Hyŏn got up, but there was a weight on his shoulder. It was a drunken woman—whether the same woman, he couldn’t tell. Hyŏn tried to move aside, but the woman wrapped her arm roughly about his neck and brought her lips close to him; they reeked of liquor. “Bet you thought no one knew. You’re abandoning a baby. Yes, you are.” Instead of explaining, Hyŏn gripped the cat more securely and tried to avoid the woman. But she kept after him, asking whether the baby was a boy or a girl. Hyŏn heaved the woman aside. She staggered and then squatted in a heap. “This is the best time of year to abandon a baby,” she said. She herself had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and gotten rid of them here. The woman broke into hollow laughter. Hyŏn escaped before the moon came out again.

  He reached the edge of the park, and it occurred to him that giving the cat to the woman with the cigarette might be tantamount to returning it to the young lady in his boardinghouse. The cat would be better off as a stray, he thought. He decided to set it loose in the park. He removed the towel from the cat’s eyes and flung the animal into the darkness as hard as he could. Then he ran from the park. When he got to a street that had some lights, he took a good look behind. The cat wasn’t following him. Hyŏn took the shortcut home rather than the route next to the sewer. He wondered what would happen when the young lady returned to find the cat gone.

  But when he got up to his room, Hyŏn found the cat lapping the water in the fishbowl. He turned off the light. Moonlight filtered through the window. The cat kept on drinking. Hyŏn approached the cat as if to pet it, then grabbed it around the belly. But as he picked it up, the cat’s forepaws hooked the fishbowl and it toppled over. In the moonlight the goldfish looked like a single huge fish scale flopping in the spilled water. Hyŏn seized the cat by the neck. It had eaten up all the baby rabbits; now it would be the goldfish. The cat licked the hands clutching its neck. Hyŏn gripped harder. Die! The cat clawed at Hyŏn’s hands, its eyes burning blue in the moonlight. Hyŏn squeezed the cat’s throat harder and harder. Die! Die! He finally let the cat go when he saw sparks in its eyes. The cat fell to the floor, and after clawing at the air, it bolted up and slinked out the door, which had been left open a crack.

  The goldfish had stopped moving. Hyŏn returned it to the bit of water remaining in the fishbowl and took the bowl outside to the pump. Its white belly listing to the side, the fish lay motionless in the water, which was too shallow to cover its back. Hyŏn ran fresh water into the bowl and was about to turn around when he spotted something at the dark opening of the drain. Something was moving among the flower stems the girl had planted there. Hyŏn gently parted the stems, whose petals had already fallen, and picked up a small fish. Could it have come up from the sewer through this pipe? Did it mean there were fish living in the sewer? And if there were, how could this one have gotten all the way here? He quickly rinsed the fish, placed it in the bowl, and took it upstairs.

  Hyŏn turned on the light and examined the fish from the sewer pipe. In the place where its eyes should have been there were faint hollows like festering sores. Blind and dark all over, the small fish wriggled about. Time and again it collided with the goldfish, which had barely been able to right itself and was moving its fins anxiously. The goldfish’s reaction was to wiggle briefly. Indifferent to the blind fish, it came to rest, finning vigorously. The blind fish got more jumpy, butting the sides of the bowl and almost leaping out of the water. Suddenly it turned on its side; soon it had stopped finning. The goldfish now began to swim about animatedly, as if completely recovered. The blind fish rocked slightly in the churning water, its tail resting on the surface.

  Hyŏn picked up the blind fish. Its belly had already begun to swell. He went to the window and threw the fish out. It continued to shine like a muddy scale as it fell in the moonlight. The cat dashed over from the rabbit hutch, took the fish in its mouth, and ran back under the hutch.

  The day Hyŏn took the mother rabbit back to the laboratory, he passed the empty lot on his way home and saw the sign reading IF YOU’RE NOT A DOG, DON’T URINATE HERE. Next to it, DOGS’ TOILET had been written on the wall. Decomposed rats, dung, and broken dishes were scattered every which way. He got to the place where the sawyers worked. Today the boy was sitting apart, his back to Hyŏn. Probably making a mound of sawdust, Hyŏn thought. But then as he passed behind him he caught a glimpse of what the boy was doing. Hyŏn stopped in surprise. Wasn’t that a baby rabbit? The boy was about to serve the rabbit some sawdust in an attractive, smoothed potsherd. But the rabbit didn’t budge. It was dead. Had the boy taken the baby rabbits one by one after losing the girl as a playmate? Had he been playing with them like this? Hyŏn was about to leave before the boy noticed him, when suddenly the cat appeared and just as quickly was gone, the dead baby rabbit in its mouth. With a guttural shout the boy set off in pursuit. Hyŏn joined the chase, following the boy into the evening shadows.

  CUSTOM

  “Now what are you doing with those?”

  He was on his way outside again when my wife took the scissors from him.

  Was that all she could do, snatch the scissors from the boy? It gave the impression that she was dull-witted. She tossed the scissors aside, but the three-year-old went after them again as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  My wife pushed the boy aside: “You little nuisance, what’s a boy doing playing with scissors?”

  Unfazed, he found his ball in the far corner of the room and headed outside with it.

  “Play inside, you,” said my wife. Then she stuck her knitting needle in the bun of her hair and mumbled to herself, “It’s about time you pooped,” and she led the boy to the chamber pot.

  By now the boy was more than able to answer nature’s call by himself, but my wife treated him as if he were younger. Granted, that’s the way my own mother treated me—and still does.

  The boy strained for a time but produced nothing.

  “Remember, if you do it in your pants, I’ll spank you,” my wife said.

  The boy didn’t seem concerned and began to play with the ball.

>   I produced two coppers from my pocket and tossed them in front of the boy. “Son, I want you to go outside and play.”

  The boy looked more surprised than my wife. This had never happened before, and he looked back and forth from my wife to the money.

  “Tell him to pick it up!” I said.

  “Yes, pick it up,” said my wife.

  “I’ll give you some more in a bit. Now go out and play.”

  This surprised the boy again, and the ball rolled out of his hand.

  A piece of sorghum stalk had come to rest in the room across the courtyard. The boy had probably been playing with sorghum stalks.

  Hand trembling, Father flicked the piece of stalk aside. His hand continued to tremble as he placed it on his knee.

  “And where have you been gadding about?”

  Finding fault is Father’s job, and at home he has to do it whenever he can.

  “Why don’t you stay put and sweep the yard or something if you don’t have anything else to do?”

  I observed the fingers of Father’s left hand, which continued to tremble even after he had rested it on his knee. Father’s frowning face turned toward Mother.

  “I keep telling you you’re spoiling him and still you give him money.”

  My mother’s large frame was slumped over as she sat. Her moist eyes looked up, then lowered. For some reason I didn’t understand, Mother was scared of Father.

  And then Father muttered to himself, “I’ve never seen an only son who cares so little about family matters.” He sighed.

  Along with his fault-finding Father had, not too long before, started feeling sorry for himself. The wrinkles in his face seemed always to have been there, but now they were deeper.

  I didn’t feel like letting Father feel sorry for himself, and said, “Educating your children and planting grain are two different things.”

  Usually Father would respond to such words by shouting “Unfilial son!” But not this time. I was displeased, though, by the absence of that response, so I said, “We don’t always reap what we sow.”

  Father would certainly have been within his rights to take his wooden pillow to the head of a son who made such untoward comments.

  Mother’s face blanched in fear. “Now, child.” She was pleading with me to desist.

  Still I carried on: “No matter how Father tries to get me to harvest the crop, it won’t work. I’ve no mind to work in the fields and paddies.”

  But Father wasn’t shouting today and he wasn’t throwing the wooden pillow. Just the fingers of his left hand trembled.

  Mother’s face, cocked at me, changed color as she grew more fearful. Her cheekbones were more prominent, and from the side her face looked older.

  Mother’s reddish eyes tended to pool with tears if she peered at something too long. That’s why she was forever dabbing at her eyes.

  Mother pinched the end of the thread and tried to stick it through the eye of the needle. She missed. She moistened the end of the thread, twisted it between her fingers, and tried again. It was as if she were waiting for me to help her thread the needle. But I kept to myself.

  Mother brought the end of the thread to the eye of the faintly glinting needle, then gave up. “Here, you do it.”

  I held the needle against the lighter background of the rice-paper door panel, threaded it, and returned it to her.

  “You’ve been good at threading needles since you were young. You probably started doing it around the age Changson is now,” Mother said while she knotted the end of the thread. And then: “Is something worrying you?” She turned her tired eyes my way.

  I shook my head, noticing as I did so that numerous fine wrinkles had appeared in Mother’s eyelids. I found myself wondering which of them, Mother or Father, would pass away first. Maybe Father, and it wouldn’t take much.

  As Mother began her stitching she said, “Is it because you don’t like your wife?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, the fact is, there’s something about the color of her face. . . . And she’s not much to look at, is she? Too bad she couldn’t change her looks with yours—you’ve had a very pretty face ever since you were a child. But it wouldn’t do to abandon her, no it wouldn’t. And it won’t do to mistreat a wife who’s produced a child. I’ve never seen a family that got on well when the wife was mistreated, no I haven’t.”

  “You know I don’t earn enough to feed one woman properly, let alone two. What’s more, a healthy wife has her own kind of beauty.”

  Those words must have reminded Mother of the time Father kept a concubine, because she turned up the hem of her skirt and dabbed at her eyes.

  A spider was descending from the corner of the ceiling. I grew dizzy looking at it.

  One day I was watching the spider weave its web on the ceiling.

  “Did you know,” I asked my wife, “that a spider will devour its mother? And supposedly if you eat a lot of roasted spiders you won’t feel dizzy and you’ll put on weight.”

  My wife kept her head lowered instead of answering. Her hair was especially dark and also thick. Long, drooping tresses of hair were probably the fashion when she was a girl.

  After a while she replied, head still bowed, “I don’t know anything—I’m ignorant.”

  “Your hair looks darker these days. How about if I eat some spiders and see if I can get strong like you?”

  Her thick earlobes flushed. Suddenly I noticed that the hair in her bun had been trimmed.

  “Why do you make your hair so ugly when you cut it?” I couldn’t help saying.

  She hung her head even lower.

  The spider that had been weaving its web scuttled into hiding in the corner of the ceiling. A single thin strand of web was left to dangle in the air.

  “You better not let me see you do that to your hair again!”

  Before I knew it my wife was weeping, her shoulders heaving.

  Wasn’t Mother going to cry too, as she usually did at times like this? I asked myself.

  “For heaven’s sake—I can’t even open my mouth without somebody starting to cry. I feel stifled, staying home all the time,” I said, as Father did on such occasions, and then I left.

  The street is so long. I feel dizzy. Before my tired eyes balloons fly dizzily. Their surface is moist and I can see rainbows all over them.

  The rainbows twist and fly along with the balloons. One rainbow collides with another and both dissolve. Balloons, popped and unpopped. I paw the air in front of me, but from the place where the balloons pop, all sorts of new balloons float into the air. Balloons, balloons, balloons—when enough of them fly into the air, the rainbows dissolve. Like foam spit by fish. Foam, foam, foam, rainbows, rainbows, balls, balls. . . . I’m thirsty.

  There must be a teahouse around here. Water. Ah, that’s better. A young man tells me that life is like collecting streamside pebbles at sunset. I leave him like I would leave a pebble, and emerge from the tea house.

  Outside a house-front shop a squirrel is scampering on a wheel inside a cage. The wheel makes a circle. The circles keep accumulating. Circles, circles, circles. . . . Finally only one circle remains. That’s why the scampering squirrel is now a stationary squirrel. I want to lie down. Home we go.

  I was lying down.

  “Who is better-looking, Grandfather or Grandmother?” my wife asked our boy.

  “Grandfather,” the boy drawled. No doubt this was the first lesson in cunning that my own mother had given me.

  “Grandmother or Mother?”

  With his chin the boy indicated my wife: “Mommy.”

  Her earlobes flushed.

  The boy answered after his own fashion, no matter what she tried to teach him, so she couldn’t help being embarrassed.

  My wife glared at the boy and asked again: “Who?”

  “Grandmother,” the boy drawled.

  Often my wife followed by questioning the boy about herself and myself. The boy would go along with her and answer, as inst
ructed, that it was I who was better-looking.

  But this time I sat up and asked first: “Who’s better-looking, Daddy or Mommy?”

  The boy remained still, then gazed at my wife.

  “Me?” I asked.

  He began to cry, this boy who normally didn’t cry even when my wife snatched the scissors from him and pushed him away.

  “And who’s better looking, Daddy or Baby? It’s Baby—this much.”

  I spread my arms wide. But there was only emptiness to embrace.

  The room across the courtyard was littered with crumbs from the cookie our boy had eaten.

  Mother, sitting by herself, picked up the crumbs and ate them, then said, “It’s looking like rain—don’t tell me the rainy season is here already.”

  “Maybe so.”