Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  She went into her bedroom to change. She would visit him. She had yet to see his home. For it was a home he wanted, the reason why he returned, he said, and perhaps that was as good a reason as anyone could give. Perhaps she was wrong, she had thought all day. She would tell him she had been afraid. He was too quick. Whether they deserved each other or not seemed irrelevant. There was history, there was that. In front of the mirror she imagined her naked stomach growing. She gave a quick smile at her image.

  She opened her mother’s jewelry box. Her hand jerked away, her body went weightless. The box was empty. She knew at once, though at the same time refused to believe it, the way it had always been. She reached for the string around her neck. The key was still there. Hurrying, she dressed.

  The sun was setting. She pushed her bicycle down the road, the gears groaning and rusted. She pedaled up the hill, standing, passing the fields, the cows motionless and indifferent. She climbed as fast as she could, her neighborhood receding. She felt the pressure of the warm winds, the monsoon season approaching.

  Kori’s house, a one-story, stood on the slope of the hill. Two windows, their glass broken, faced the distant town. The front door of the house was boarded with plywood, a hazard notice nailed to it. She called his name, though realized it was useless. She went around the back. A stray dog licked the end of a rusted hose, then ran away upon seeing her. The rear windows were boarded as well. There was a space that a board didn’t cover, near the bottom of one window, but she saw nothing inside. Dust colored the glass.

  She pedaled down the hill. She rode into the woods where his mother’s house once stood, though she could no longer recall where exactly. There were new houses now. In a small clearing she found a pair of socks and empty bottles but she couldn’t tell how long they had been there. She looked for his tire tracks but found several, unable to distinguish the motorbike’s.

  She would have given him the jewelry if he had asked, she told herself now. She would have given him cash if he preferred it. She would have. When Kori left the island she gave him all her savings, which wasn’t much, but enough for a few days. To get used to things, she told him, and then they embraced and she placed her lips against his neck. She did it quickly, without thinking, tasting the salt of his skin. It had been morning, early, the sun not yet warm. She waved to him as the plane sped across the water and lifted, soaring. He would have remembered it. He should have known she would have helped him again.

  She never asked him where he was on the evening when the trees and his mother burned. He never said.

  She rode fast, past the fields and to the town. The day was fading. At the country club she looked for him. “He was going to work here,” she said to a man behind the reception desk. “Cutting the grass. He was to work the machines.” They didn’t know who he was.

  There had been times when she feared him, knew what it was he had done. “You’re imagining things,” he might have said. And perhaps he would have been right. But even if it were true, she would have been quick to forgive. Because she understood. Because in fear there had been love, though she didn’t say that either. She had said nothing, not to anyone. She had lived with that, she wanted to tell him now.

  At the house her father was sitting in front of a muted television. The lights were off, the shades drawn. “Papa,” she said, rushing to him, leaning forward. “Did Kori visit again? The man who came for dinner the other night?” She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “Papa,” she said, and shook him harder, and he looked at her uncomprehending, his breath salty from the noodles he had eaten. He had not bathed in weeks. She shook him and he groaned, his neck craning sharply from her pushing.

  She let go.

  Her father’s lips trembled and she could hear his breathing. His hands, in loose fists, rested on his thighs. He was looking at a point behind her. She sank to the floor and pressed her head against his knees. The room was lit from the television. On the screen a man was boarding a ship.

  “Was it Kori?” she said one last time. She steadied her father’s hands. His chin was damp with his spit and she wiped it away with her thumbs, brushing over his coarse stubble. “I will tell you about him,” she said. “You will remember.” She picked up his cane, which he had dropped, and placed it across her lap. She turned and sat with her back against his legs. “I knew him as a boy,” she said. “And then he left.”

  Her father did not respond.

  “He traveled great distances. He started fires.”

  She heard her father stir, his breathing slow.

  “And I thought it beautiful. And loved him.”

  Cityscapes flickered on the television.

  Her father, his chin against his chest, had fallen asleep. Sojin remained beside him. She felt the heat of the closed room, the bare walls and the shaded windows. The blue light. She waited, unaware that across the entire island there had been others before her and others who would, in the following months, find certain valuables missing. That he had made a life of this. That he had come not for her but for many.

  Outside, the hills opened into night. The winds, like great birds, came in from the sea.

  SO THAT THEY DO NOT HEAR US

  THEY WERE KNOWN AS THE SEA WOMEN and she was one of them. On the beach, clad in a wetsuit, Ahrim walked barefoot toward the water’s edge, carrying an empty cage tied with rope across her back. A pocketknife hung from a leather strap around her wrist. In her hands were a pair of rubber fins and a set of goggles. She walked with the gait of the young and her posture had remained straight all these years. She had, last spring, turned sixty-six.

  Three of the women had already arrived on this morning and as Ahrim performed her stretches, she asked of their children and their grandchildren. They asked of her house and her neighbors. The sun was rising and with it the waves shifted in color, striped red and violet. Above them, gulls hovered in the air, taking the slight winds. Summer was ending; the monsoons had calmed. Soon the cold would come. There was a sense of transition in the water, the sand losing its warmth. She liked this time best, the days in between seasons. She slipped on her fins and wished the others a good journey. She rubbed her fingers, as she always did, to bring them luck. And then together the women swam out to the sea.

  When her body had warmed and she had swum far enough away from the shore, away from the others, Ahrim leaned into the water, kicked her legs, and forgot for a moment that she ever needed air. She dove blind. The sea was dense, constricting. Then the water cleared and made room for her. She felt it shudder. The ocean floor lay twelve meters below. Now eleven. Submersion and the world consisted of light towers, sunlit, and she swam among them.

  There was the market to consider. What sold, what didn’t, the time of year. Fresh mussels and clams, eaten raw with a spicy dip, seemed more popular during the spring and summer; seaweed in a beef broth was preferred in colder weather. She considered this, thought it through, sacrificed one for another. Octopus she often caught, in part due to her own pleasure at touching their bodies, their childlike gestures.

  She stayed under for two minutes. Then the dizziness arrived and her vision began to blur. At first she ignored it, pushing herself forward, but her chest took over, caving. Pressure attacked the sides of her head as though a sea god were yanking her by the hair and she succumbed to the shock of it, straightening her body, her eyes focused upward on the aqueous sun. When she surfaced she sucked in air, too fast at times, so that she was suffocated by it, coughing, swallowing the seawater.

  There was the common fear, each and every time. But always she looked down to see her hand below the water, clutching her prize. She had not let go. And always she dove again. She had done so for over fifty years now, as her mother did and her grandmother before that.

  She went on until she was satisfied with her catches, her cage full, and only then did she return to shore. The others, too, waded to the beach and they gathered in a circle in the shallow water, and she joked with them, relieved that all of them had retu
rned. They compared their catches and sometimes they traded. They spoke of the houses several of them were building with the money they had earned. They spoke of the growing tourism industry and the export business that had, over the recent years, provided for them. They spoke of profit.

  They parted with a nod and a wave, “See you soon,” and Ahrim headed to her blue pickup truck, where she unloaded the shellfish and the seaweed into iceboxes. She did all this with a deliberate slowness, waiting for them to leave first, watching the caravan of cars and trucks follow the coastal road. The gulls cast thin shadows on the sand and the women’s footprints. She thought of the boy Sinaru and the news she would bring him. She thought of her husband long gone. From the horizon came the faint sound of an airplane’s engine and she looked once more out to sea. The afternoon was approaching. She clutched the braid of her hair. The noise faded and the water remained undisturbed, bright and closed, as if nothing in a thousand years had ever reached the surface and broken through.

  She was seven when she first dove, thirteen when she started it as a profession, helping her parents earn a living. At seventeen she married the son of a fisherman. This was in the time of the Japanese occupation, at the start of what would become the Second World War. One winter, during an uprising, they fled to the mountains. They slept in sheds and caves. She remembered smoke from distant fires, the speed of planes, a boy whose face was the color of crushed beets lying on the mountain passage, his legs frozen against his chest. Jinsu left on some nights with the other men and she did not see him until the morning when he would bury himself in her for warmth, smelling of wet wool, his body curled from the weight of snow.

  The following year he was conscripted by the Japanese military, though to this day it was, for her, an abduction. They came for him riding horses. She clawed at their boots and the horses’ flanks. They kicked her down and she hit her head against the base of a tree. Briefly she lost consciousness. When she woke, her eyes focused on the animals and their soft sighs, their white breaths. Hooves lifting, stamping the ground. Tremendous eyes. As if they had come from myth. And then Jinsu stepped into the view, bending over her, covering the sun and the leaves. “I won’t be long,” he said, touching her face. She never heard from him again. Her last memory of him was of the horses trotting away and Jinsu turning, trying to wave with his bound wrists. The white of his shirt, the dark of his skin. Her husband the centaur.

  He was twenty years old, she a year younger. They had no children. Their marriage had lasted seven seasons.

  This was over forty-five years ago. Ahrim never moved from their home, although the majority of her neighbors then had now left for the cities. She lived in a village near the eastern coast, by a road that passed through a field of forsythia. The house was a single room, its walls made of stone, a roof made of reed. Over the years it had changed little, except for the roof. It was now in the Spanish style, with tiles the color of wet clay. Behind the house there was a grove of tangerine trees that she and her husband had planted, intending to harvest the fruit and sell them. These days she donated the citrus to an orphanage or brought them to the city for the homeless.

  She never remarried. Her and Jinsu’s parents passed away long ago. A life was formed and she took it. Solitude came to her early, and these days it gave her little reason to seek the comfort of a man. The comfort of something, yes, but she did not know what it was exactly, desire having evolved over the years.

  On her days off she took care of her neighbor’s son after his schooling. Sinaru was ten years old. Ahrim could no longer recall how this friendship started, when exactly the boy began to knock on her door. His father worked in a factory that packaged fruit; his mother worked in a noodle shop on the outskirts of the city. They were emigrants, from a village on the coast of Japan. They had been on this island for three years.

  One morning, when they were still living in Japan, Sinaru was swimming with his parents. In the sea they separated for a moment, and a tiger shark followed the boy. “I was caught,” Sinaru once said. That was how he introduced himself, lifting his left shoulder, his arm missing.

  He came to her this afternoon while Ahrim was watching television on her bed. She had, that morning, gone to the fish market where she sold half her catches to a man who ran a restaurant in the city; a Thai company bought the other half.

  The child Sinaru knocked once, as was his habit, though Ahrim didn’t answer right away. The afternoon light shone against the floors the way it did when she surfaced, the air always lighter than she expected against her, delicate.

  Sinaru didn’t knock again. He was a curious child. He was patient. He either waited until the door opened or, after five minutes, left and tried again later on. A minute passed before Ahrim found the energy to rise, rub her face, and walk to the door.

  Today the boy wore shorts and an old T-shirt that was, Ahrim guessed, his father’s. It drooped low past his knees and was cinched at the waist by a nylon belt. His left sleeve, empty, swung as he fidgeted. He had last week seen an American film about Caesar and had put together this outfit. His hair was cropped short, which made his face seem round as a melon. His lips were stained red from a popsicle he had been eating.

  “I heard the bed creak,” Sinaru said, looking up. Together they spoke a mixture of Japanese and Korean, the two of them having become familiar with each other’s language in these past years. “It took you one minute to cross the room,” he continued, calling her “Auntie.” He smiled, showing where he had lost a tooth earlier that week. He slipped his tongue through the gap and made a farting noise.

  Ahrim patted him on the head and let him in. The boy left his slippers beside the entranceway and then lifted each of his feet to wipe away the pebbles that had stuck against his soles. He took his time, balancing against Ahrim’s doorknob to view the lines running up his toes.

  “Footprints,” Sinaru said. “When you see one, where are the lines? You see them on thumbs, you know. Like when you press them against glass.” He lifted his thumb, as though testing for wind. “Did you find the sea turtle?”

  Ever since Sinaru learned of the sea turtles in the Pacific—the ridleys, some as long as seventy centimeters and weighing up to forty-five kilograms—he was convinced that one was able to ride them. And every time Ahrim dove, the boy asked her to catch him one. He had already built an aquarium out of a large, clear plastic bin, which he had filled with seawater and aquatic plants to give the semblance of a future home for the creature. His plan was to keep it there and care for it. His relationship with the sea now came in the form of his imagination, brilliant and tamed.

  “They’re clever creatures,” Ahrim told the boy. “Their talent lies in hiding.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “They eluded me.”

  The boy nodded gravely, his expression contemplative. “It’s the winds,” Sinaru said.

  Ahrim agreed, “Yes, child, the winds.”

  She offered the boy some cold barley tea, stored in a large jar in the refrigerator, but Sinaru declined, choosing instead to walk around Ahrim’s room, as close as possible to the walls. He moved along the boundaries of the bed, the dresser, the stove. And wherever a shadow fell on the floor, he followed its outline. He stared at his feet as he did this.

  One day she had spotted him through his bedroom window, dipping his head into his aquarium. He was practicing holding his breath. His hair, long then, spooled across the surface. Although it was customary for women to dive, she thought he was eager to learn. Encouraged, she asked the following morning if he wanted to visit the ocean. She described the jelly-skin of octopus, the cratered shells of abalone, the oily mussels. They could first practice by hunting stones. He grew silent, chewing on his lip, curling his hand. “That’s okay, Auntie,” he said, no more than a whisper, and she watched his eyes and never brought it up again.

  Sinaru had circled the room three times already. He passed the bed and pointed at the mattress and the thin blanket, ruffled and flattened from
Ahrim’s body. “I see you there,” the boy said.

  The afternoon light was strong and it came through the windows, illuminating Sinaru’s skin, the wooden floor, the steel of her stovetop, the folding screen beside her bed, the bare walls.

  “I would like a room,” Sinaru said. “Like this one. And have everything I want in it.”

  “And what would you want?” Ahrim asked.

  “Water,” Sinaru said.

  He wanted a room filled with water. And sea creatures. For in addition to his fixation on turtles, the boy was also convinced that if you tried for long enough, the possibility of drowning grew less, until the danger altogether vanished. He thought Ahrim had accomplished this, no matter how much she tried to tell him otherwise. His theory was supported by her constant scent of ocean water and by the answer she once gave him when he asked why she dove: because I have yet to die. And so he believed her to be of another world. His conclusion was logical. “You are a sea woman,” the boy said. “Then you are also a woman of the sea.”

  He wanted fresh tangerine juice so they walked to the grove behind Ahrim’s house. He insisted on carrying the stepladder. He held it tucked under his arm, his shoulders stooped from the weight, careful so that the metal legs avoided her body. Instead of the sea they took walks in the fields and hunted fruit, the boy exuding a confidence in these places.

  Some nights Sinaru’s parents fought. From what Ahrim could hear, it consisted of bickering, mostly, about shutting doors and noise and cleaning. Oftentimes it was the husband’s voice she heard, and she did not know where the child was when this happened. She asked now of his parents and the child shrugged. “Papa has headaches. They are very bad. He rubs his forehead and makes a face like this.” Sinaru scrunched up his brows. “And sometimes I want to touch the wrinkles on his face but I don’t. When he comes home I cover my mouth and try not to move around too much.”