by Bae Suah
ALSO BY BAE SUAH
Highway with Green Apples
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 1998 Bae Suah
Translation copyright © 2015 Sora Kim-Russell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published by Jakkajungsin in Korea in 1998. Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477827550
ISBN-10: 1477827552
Cover design by David Drummond
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014919162
CONTENTS
In 1988 I . . .
At some point . . .
If you gently . . .
I couldn’t believe . . .
The last criminal . . .
I became very . . .
That was everything . . .
I go in . . .
He and I . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
In 1988 I was temping at a university in Gyeonggi Province.
Mostly what I did there was send lecture requests to part-time instructors, make adjustments to their class schedules, mail them their pay stubs, and field complaints from students. As far as the work went, I didn’t have any major complaints of my own. It was the kind of clerical work that anyone could have done without any special qualifications or expertise. As long as you had a decent memory and an elementary work ethic, there was nothing to fear. In other words, it bore no resemblance at all to the type of job you could get only after having studied hard for years and years, turned in thousands upon thousands of pages of reports, written a tome of a thesis, earned a degree, and created a winning résumé composed entirely in English.
At this job we could chew gum or do our nails while answering the phones and take over two hours to type even the sparsest syllabus. We weren’t lazy or indifferent or anything. It was just the nature of the work. The office got a lot of visitors, so it wasn’t unusual for me to make more than twenty cups of coffee in a single day. Of course, it was muddy instant coffee.
Every person and every procedure marches on at a measured pace. That’s how things get done, just as the less delicate components of a machine submit to the will of the machine without any conscious thought or shred of volition while being steadily ground down. So while I was busy not having any conscious thought, I became a cog. The office I worked in was not a place where revolution happens. Nor should it have been. The general ethic there was of loyalty to one’s assigned task, whether that meant stirring twenty cups of instant coffee or fielding requests from professors for photocopies, for the purpose of solemnly achieving that ethic itself. Though that applied only to the members of the lower classes, of course. When I put it that way, you might think I’m being cynical, but that’s not it. The work didn’t bother me—except, of course, for the little things, like having to ride the bus for over an hour to get there and having no hope of ever getting a raise since I was only a temporary contract worker. As for my friends, one was a government bureaucrat, another had just started working at a brokerage firm, and another was teaching in an orphanage, but most were unemployed. It’s possible I harbored a vague sense of fear back then.
I didn’t have too many tasks, but I also wasn’t so idle that I could have passed the time knitting. When I was working, the hours went by at what I can only call a measured pace. My salary was, of course, very small. If not for that, I might have worked there longer. We got a month off while classes were out of session. I spent that month working part-time in a dye factory close to my house. My job was to screw caps onto tubes of dye using a mechanical device. That was a long time ago. I’m sure that dye factory has since found a more modern solution to that primitive final step of production. But then again, if they had modernized any earlier, I wouldn’t have spent that summer wrapped in the suffocating smell of acrylics.
Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.
If you get off the subway at city hall and walk behind the Plaza Hotel, you’ll find the restaurant where I used to work nights after finishing my shift at the university. Inside the old wooden gate, a pine tree twists up out of the yellow soil of the courtyard at uncannily exquisite angles, and a gravel pathway leads you to the building where you must slip off your shoes, step up onto the raised wooden floor, and walk past a row of small rooms hidden behind sliding doors covered in white paper. The whole thing looks shabby and run-down. People go to this restaurant, which squats behind the hotel like an old man, to eat dinner or drink alcohol or to rent one of the private rooms on Friday nights to play poker, and sometimes even to smoke a little marijuana. I washed dishes, served food, mopped the floor, and fetched cigarettes for customers. Sometimes I even earned a thousand-won tip.
Tired. I was tired. I was only twenty-four, but I was tired. For a long time I’d been feeling dizzy just from getting up from the toilet. On the bus in the morning, I would doze off while standing, one hand gripping the hanging strap. Dry lips I couldn’t hide behind lipstick. Bloodshot eyes and the nausea of an empty stomach. The horror of rough skin, rough tongue.
I’d once dreamt of becoming a veterinarian. It was a dream I’d given up on long ago. In order to make that dream come true, I would’ve had to go back to college, but that was impossible. I was the only person in my family who was making any money. Our family looked perfect from the outside: a mother, a father, a brother ten years older than me, and a sister ten years younger. I don’t know how my parents created such an odd age gap. Even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day. Their dim, indistinct faces will ultimately, and meaninglessly, become the faces of the people in my life, though at the present moment they are unfamiliar strangers with no influence over me whatsoever. The shoulders of strangers that bump against mine in the subway. The lukewarm touch of a hand proffering a tip in a restaurant. The voice over the phone of a guest lecturer on criminal sociology whose face I’ve never seen.
“This week’s topic is murder.”
“Oh.”
“Eight o’clock on Saturday night. I’ll be lecturing for three hours.”
“Will you be using video?”
“No.”
“If you do decide to, I’ll have to put in an equipment request.”
“There’s no need. I don’t plan on showing any videos. But . . .”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“I heard the midterm exam grading sheets were changed.”
“That’s correct.”
“You don’t normally mail those out?”
“All of the new forms were mailed to you.”
“I didn’t
receive any.”
“I’m certain I mailed them. Aren’t you Professor Gang Jin-gu of Kangnam University? They were sent to your office.”
“I’m not Professor Gang Jin-gu of Kangnam University. I don’t teach at any university. I work for a company and teach part-time at night. You must have me confused with someone else.”
My mind went blank for a moment. For the past several months, I had assumed that the person teaching criminal sociology was Professor Gang Jin-gu of Kangnam University, and I had sent that person all sorts of materials and brochures. I had also taken the occasional phone call that I thought was from him. Professor Gang Jin-gu had taught something similar up until last year. I hurriedly rummaged through my files and pulled out the list of instructors. Sure enough, the man on the phone was right. I felt embarrassed.
“You’re right,” I said in a small voice.
“I’m sure it was a simple mistake.”
“I’m so sorry. I’ll send the forms again.”
“It’s no big deal.”
He seemed like a nice person.
“If you’re free on Saturday, would you like to come to my lecture? It’ll be an interesting one—”
I cut him off. “What kinds of people commit murder?”
“Murderers, I suppose.”
“Why do they do it?”
“I’m sure they have their reasons.”
“Is this how all of your lectures go?”
“Of course not. I make it a rule to read directly from the textbook. If I want to confuse the students, I read the chapters in reverse. That keeps them on their toes, since none of them have read to the end yet. It’s a simple method but an effective one. So do you think you can come on Saturday?”
“I don’t think so. I work nights downtown.”
“Every night?”
“Yes, every night.”
“What do you do?”
“Dishes and cleaning,” I said with a sigh.
There was silence for three seconds.
“You’re not serious,” he said. “Anyway, I’ll take that to mean you can’t make it.”
If anyone in my family could be described as still incomplete of character that would be my little sister. She was a bony wisp of a girl with a chest that seemed to have stopped in the middle of developing and gangly arms and coltish legs, but among us siblings she had the highest grades in school. Still in middle school, she would amaze my brother and me by using a clever technique to solve simultaneous equations or figuring out perfectly and in less than twenty seconds some type of square root that we’d never seen before. But that was the extent of what I knew about her. We were too far apart in age to really feel like sisters, and we hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time together as we were growing up. We’d never shared a room or liked the same boy or fought over a pair of lacy underwear; instead we lived our lives barely aware of each other’s existence.
One Sunday afternoon, possibly in the spring of that same year, I woke up late, took a bath, and was passing through the kitchen to hang my wet towel outside when I heard her crying. I wondered what was wrong. The first thing that came to mind was that she must’ve finally started her period. It was a silly idea. I had no idea whether she was already menstruating, but I assumed that was what would make a girl her age cry. She was too old to be crying over cookies or watercolor pencils, and too young to be crying over a boy.
“Mia, what’s wrong?”
Out of a desire to help my young sister, I told her it was nothing. She wasn’t alone. All girls went through it. It was a little uncomfortable at first but once she got used to it, she would hardly notice it at all. It was just something you had to deal with, no different from brushing your teeth in the morning or showering. And so on, and so on.
“I want to go on a class trip.”
Her words took me completely by surprise. I would truly never have guessed that she would want to go on a trip with her class. I’d certainly never gone on one, and I can’t imagine it was any different for our brother: school excursions had never been an option for us. When the other kids went off on trips, I reported to school and did my homework alone in the empty classroom. I neatly copied hundreds of pages from the Korean textbook into my notebook, solved equations, drew apples on plates, and wiped down the tops of the desks with a damp rag. The leisurely spring or autumn sky would stretch out beyond the windows of that deserted classroom, and the only sound I would hear was a pencil rolling across the floor between the empty seats. For my brother and me, staying behind wasn’t that bad.
“Neither of us ever went on a class trip,” I told her, not bothering to conceal my surprise. “We didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”
“This is different. They’re going on an airplane. On an airplane. All anyone can talk about is this trip. If I don’t get to go, my friends will stop talking to me.”
Her voice was so firm. Our brother and I had never had any friends—at least not the kinds of friends you wanted to go on a class trip with or hold hands with on the way home from school. When we were in school, we probably wouldn’t have been that sad at the thought of being ditched by our friends. But our sister was different. She wanted to braid her hair exactly like the other girls did and fold over her socks exactly as they did. On her birthday or other special days, gifts of cookies and flowers from her friends would show up at our house. Mia had an androgynous charm about her, like Tyltyl in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, which attracted other girls to her. For all I knew it was an act of cruelty to tell a child like her not to go on a class trip. I couldn’t go on any trips because we were too poor, and as for my brother, I’d heard it was because he didn’t get along with the other students. Neither he nor I mourned our family’s poverty or our maladjustment to the group. Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.
“I’ll die if I can’t go on this trip.”
After the years had passed and my little sister was grown up, would she too inherit the cynicism and apathy toward the world that enabled our family line to endure poverty and maladjustment, just as my brother and I had? Maybe, but she hadn’t yet.
“I’m getting my paycheck from the restaurant today or tomorrow,” I said, stroking her hair. “You can use that to pay for the trip.”
“That’s your lunch money.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll pack my lunch this month.”
I didn’t tell her that I would most likely be skipping lunch that month since it was hard to wake up early and there was rarely any leftover rice or other food in the fridge.
My brother sometimes came by the restaurant to walk me to the subway after I got off work late at night. One Sunday night we were in the city hall station underpass when the last train was leaving. My body felt heavy, like it was sinking deeper and deeper into the underpass.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
My brother was a man of few words. Though we lived under the same roof, I rarely heard his voice. He’d once had a job guarding the Blue House, the president’s residence. After quitting he’d become one of the many ordinary people who failed at everything they tried to do. He hadn’t gone to college, and he wasn’t a computer genius.
“I’m a little tired, but it’s manageable,” I said to him there in the underpass. “At least the restaurant isn’t too busy on Sundays.”
“Do you have to keep working nights? You barely get any sleep before you’re up again for your day job.”
The worn-down heels of my brother’s sneakers descended the stairs. Up until last month he’d had a job as a night watchman on a construction site.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more for you,” he said.
“You don’t have to say that. I’m all right.”
“When?”
“Not sure yet. Maybe as soon as next month.”
“What kind of work?”
“A janitorial service in Osaka. If I work hard, I’ll be able to save up and not be cheated out of my pay this time.”
“What kind of cleaning do they do?”
“Different kinds. Sewers, roads, septic tanks.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“For as long as possible. The visa is only good for a year, but if I can’t get an extension, I’ll stay there illegally if I have to. Once I’m settled, I’ll send you money.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You’re struggling too hard for someone who has an older brother and parents, albeit incompetent ones.”
“No. I’m healthy and I went to college, which you didn’t even get to do. I’ll get by. But what about you?”
My brother was thirty-four years old and still unmarried, though he’d once lived with a woman for about a year until they broke up over money. I sometimes felt bad for him because of that. I was in high school when he broke up with her and moved home. One Saturday afternoon, when the sunlight was turning everything golden, I’d returned home from school and was washing my clothes under the tap in the courtyard. For some reason I turned to look behind me. My brother was standing there. How long had he been watching me? He asked me to go with him to the market. I said I had to finish the laundry, but his voice took on an uncharacteristically crabby tone.
“Just drop it and let’s go,” he said.
At the market he bought me a plate of mandu. Then, to my utter astonishment, he bought me a washing machine. I was so overjoyed that I couldn’t stop grinning. A seventeen-year-old girl was so happy about receiving a washing machine that she could have cried. Later I learned that he had used the deposit from the apartment he’d rented with his girlfriend to buy it for me. He left home that night without eating dinner. Each step he took seemed to kick up a breeze.
