by Bae Suah
“I’ll send you money,” he promised me. “Mia is starting high school next year, and you’ll need money for your wedding. Stop working nights at that restaurant. I’ll send you money.”
“I’m never getting married.”
“Of course you will. You’ll marry Cheolsu,” he said, grinning.
Don’t say that, brother. You know as well as I do that this is all just theater.
I went with my brother to the bank so that he could take out the loan, and on the way back we had our photograph taken. I combed my hair neatly and reapplied my lipstick in the mirror at the photo studio. Our family had never taken a picture together in a studio. But there it was, right on the way home, as if we were seeing it for the first time. My brother stroked my hair and said, “Let’s take a picture.” We held hands in front of the camera. His hand was hot, as if he had a fever. Then both of our hands were sweating. If I never saw him again after that day, I would think of him a hundred years from now. That photo of him was the last I would see of his face. His final face in some distant future. My brother and I clasped hands tightly, sweat slicking our palms, as if we’d planned it that way from the start.
Then, just like that, he left for Japan with the other employees of the janitorial company. I did not attend the Christmas party at work. My mother and I made Christmas cards to send to people in prison. It was so cold in our poorly heated house that we had to keep blowing on our hands as we worked. When the new year began, I would have to find a new job. Each morning I opened my frost-covered window and looked down at the dead, bony trees lining the road. A new low-income apartment building was going up across the street. That meant the dye factory next to its polluted stream would shut down, but I did not yet hear the sound of construction.
“If only he could have worked at that construction site instead of going so far away,” I muttered to myself.
My mother paused in the middle of gluing a card and shook her head.
“No, men are supposed to aim high and strike out on their own,” she said, her voice filled with conviction. “They can’t get by as day laborers forever.”
“Do you really think he’ll come back?”
I stared out the window as I asked. Maybe she did know everything after all. At least on days like today, when she wasn’t drinking.
“Of course. That child came out of my belly. No one knows him better than I do. I have faith.”
She was unshakable. She kept brushing on glue and did not turn to look at me. Perhaps I still had something to learn from her, my poor alcoholic mother. Despite having eaten at the same dinner table with my family long enough to feel ashamed of them and turn red with embarrassment because of them and feel wretched with them and never breathe a word of my own feelings to them, I would in the end encounter that other me in the mirror. Maybe with time Cheolsu and I would become similar people who sit at a similar table and have similar conversations over dinner and then appear in my mirror. The Cheolsu in the mirror hands me the frozen chicken carcass.
There. Have some chicken. You’ll feel better.
Cheolsu, I will eat your chicken when that day comes. I will gladly become your toilet. When I can, for once in my life, for a brief moment, become ardently pure. When that day comes.
“Did you have a nice visit with Cheolsu?” my mother asked out of the blue.
“That was a while back.”
“How is he?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“Nope. Cheolsu wasn’t there.”
Cheolsu was not there. Cheolsu fell like a crow from a white cliff while I wandered through a village of soldiers in the snow carrying Cheolsu’s dead chicken before returning home and falling ill. Did Cheolsu know? Cheolsu grows up to become his mother and his father. Just as I grow up to become my mother and my father. But the other Cheolsu, who fell from the white cliff, and I would pass by in silence outside the window of an abandoned house in the rain. Rain falls on the corpses of time.
My mother and I put the finished Christmas cards and candy in envelopes.
“You and Cheolsu don’t make sense together. I never understood why you two were so close for so long.”
“You don’t have to understand it. But he’s gone now. I won’t be seeing him again.”
“He was stupid and slow.”
“Please, I beg of you, stay out of it. What do you know anyway?”
Would my father get his card and his candy? Before he went to prison, he told us, “I want to kill myself. I didn’t do anything wrong. Send me letters on poisoned paper. I’ll swallow them whole.”
Instead we sent him poison-free Christmas cards and candy. For all I knew, he might have eaten every page of every book we ever sent him. He’d have been better off looking for a different method. My little sister pranced into the room. Her latest dream was to become a model. Up until recently it’d been to become a beautician. She said she didn’t remember much about our father.
“Studying sucks,” she said, tossing her book bag on the floor before taking off her shoes. “I’m not going to study anymore. I don’t know why anyone would throw their whole body and soul into something so pointless. Being first in class or getting perfect grades is easy as long as you set your mind to it, but I can’t see myself doing only that all the time. There are so many other things that I could be doing.”
She was the only one among us who had hopes for her future.
“I’m going to be a lesbian when I grow up,” she told me, as I jotted down a note in the card for our father. “Then I’ll be in a whole new world. There’s got to be something completely different out there—not just what our eyes can see. My friends think it’s a genius idea.”
She was talking about transcending your origins and your own willpower. Since she was the only one among us who’d gone on a class trip, maybe she could actually accomplish the things she said. Each time I wrote a note to my father, I hesitated. I knew full well that what my father wanted was not these silly notes telling him how the family was doing. Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can’t let go even at the moment of falling. The prison of Cheolsu.
Dear Father,
Our older brother has left for Japan. His visa is only good for one year, but he might never come back. He will spend the rest of his life in Osaka’s sewer, inside tunnels flowing with black wastewater, because down there the police don’t bother looking for illegal immigrants. Mother had only half a bottle of soju yesterday. She sobered up after an hour.
He wouldn’t be interested in reading any of that. Mother was writing the same letter she wrote every year, a letter she would send to an advocacy group. An endless litany of excuses regarding an old incident that no one cared about or believed in anymore.
“It’ll be different this time.”
She never lost hope.
“The church has taken an interest in my letter. Eventually they too will believe me when I say that he didn’t abuse his power to take bribes or make himself rich through illegal means. There might even be protests in front of the courthouse or the prison.”
“Does this church know that you drink?”
“The church will help.”
“Mother, he’s not an activist or a political prisoner or even a prisoner of conscience. Don’t you get it? These days, if you’re not one of those people, then no one cares.”
“But he is innocent!”
“What does it matter now? Besides, do you really believe that? I don’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The truth is that, one way or another, he was corrupt. I don’t think anyone is really qualified to say they got a fate they didn’t deserve. No o
ne is ever completely innocent.”
“You’re calling your father corrupt? You throw around such dangerous words as if they’re nothing! There was no proof, no witnesses. They used him.”
“That’s what they call mass hypnosis, Mother. Do you really think that analyzing everything from an antiestablishment perspective will give you the answer you want?”
“Then I suppose you think it’s right that we have to live this way? Maybe you can accept it, but I can’t. Everyone at city hall knows that your father was a scapegoat. They promised to look after us. They said they would take care of our living expenses. I haven’t heard from anyone.”
“Everyone, including you and me, is living the life they had coming to them. Don’t you get it? It’s not about corruption or crime or conscience.”
“Of course you would say that. You were born with a knife in your heart. That’s why I’m no longer surprised by anything that comes out of your mouth.”
A demonstration had been taking place in front of the prison since dawn. Some political prisoners who’d violated the National Security Law were in the same prison as my father. I heard they’d started a hunger strike in response to the prison guards’ unjustified use of excessive force. The prisoners’ family members were demonstrating to try to pressure the prison into moving one of the men to a hospital, as he had swallowed a dozen nails while calling for retribution. I wrapped a scarf around my throat and walked along the wall of the prison. The final sun of that winter was nowhere in sight. The crowd of demonstrators was growing larger by the minute, and the prison doors remained closed. It would be hard to get inside for a visit today. I left when the television crews arrived. Where had the political prisoner found twelve nails? If you swallowed twelve nails, would they slowly kill you? A group of men who looked like university students got off a bus; they wore backpacks that clanked with Molotov cocktails. Two of them approached me.
“There’s a rally tonight. We must all stand together.”
“Come with us. The dawn of the people has not yet risen.”
I passed by those hot-blooded partisans and bought a cup of instant coffee to sip as I walked to the bus stop. I waited awhile and then bought another cup. The shadows of the brave receded. I took out the card I was planning to send to my father and, while standing there on the windy street, jotted something down on the back of it.
Dad, swallow nails.
That was everything that happened in 1988.
That year was my beginning and my end. It was one year of my life that was neither particularly unhappy nor particularly happy. It wasn’t so different from 1978, and it wasn’t any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998. The people I met in 1988 were no different from those who bumped shoulders with me in the subway in 1978 and whose apathetic eyes met mine outside of a gas station in the middle of the night in 1998. They were family, and they were the unfamiliar middle class, and they were malnourished soldiers. They were each other’s toilets and strangers and cliffs and crows and prisons. They were never anything more than who they were. Third person random.
I went through a number of different jobs after 1988. The university offered to extend my contract for another year, but instead I worked at a law office that my father’s friend had connected me with, because the pay was higher. I quit my part-time job at the restaurant. After the law office, I worked in the public relations office of a department store and at the in-house magazine of an automobile company. Now and then I got to take photographs of buildings, interview people, and write articles. The work wasn’t so different from what I did in 1988, except that typewriters changed to word processors, which soon changed to personal computers. Late at night I would lean back in my office chair and listen to K. D. Lang’s “Barefoot” thirteen times in a row. Exactly thirteen times. At ten o’clock, the lights shut off throughout the building and the flashing lights of cars all pointed in the same direction, like stars floating below the surface of a river. I would listen to the song on repeat with my legs propped up on the desk and my back pressed against the chair, and when it ended, I would spring up out of my chair like a corpse come back to life and pace back and forth across the darkened office.
And I talked to people here and there. At the bus stop, in the subway, at the office, or the park, or the police station, or the shop that sold ramen boiled in a large iron pot. Sometimes it was for work, and sometimes it was a wrong number, and sometimes it was a friend whose name I called out, and sometimes it was someone I wanted to get to know better. There were people I saw nearly every day, and there were business relationships, and there were people I wanted to have a drink with, and people who wanted to borrow money from me, and people I wanted a shot at seducing once we got to know each other better. And then sometimes there were strangers I’d never met before.
“I was in the Fifth Division in 1988.”
That’s how he began it.
“I see.”
“I was doing my compulsory service.”
I said nothing.
“I think I saw you.”
I laughed. I laughed without making any sound so the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t see me smiling. He probably took it as mere silence.
“It was a gray, snowy day,” he said, not paying my silence any mind.
“You have no idea who I am, and yet you’re telling me all of this.”
“Indeed,” he conceded. “We’ve never met, at least not that we were aware of.”
“I don’t know you.”
“I was about to tell you who I am.”
“I’ll give you one minute. Starting now.”
I didn’t bother to look at the clock.
“In 1988 I served as an officer-in-training in the Fifth Division in Yeoncheon. Everyone thinks that rank was invented just to give the presidents’ sons an easier time during their conscription, but luckily even some of us sons of poor families could benefit from it as long as we were able to pass the officer candidate test. Wow, that was already ten years ago. I teach sociology courses at a university, but I’m not a full professor. I’m what you might call an after-hours club performer—a part-time outside lecturer who teaches night classes. By day I’m an ordinary company employee. The official title of my course is criminal sociology; I lecture for three hours straight. The topic changes every week: murder, robbery, burglary, rape, domestic violence.”
“What kinds of people commit murder?”
“Murderers, I suppose.”
“Your minute is up.”
“Do you suppose we will ever be rid of all antipersonnel weapons?”
“Huh?”
“How are such weapons any different from murder?”
“They’re not.”
“I’m planning a demonstration. Everyone will form a human chain.”
“Doing that won’t change a single thing.”
“Will you join us anyway?”
“I might have plans.”
“The people who come to these things are willing to cancel any unimportant plans in order to be there.”
“You’re a rare sort of idealist.”
“I might be the complete opposite.”
“I’ve changed a lot. You probably won’t recognize me.”
Oddly enough, time repeated itself. It outlived memory. Back then Cheolsu was nowhere to be found, and it would be no different in the future. Meaningless sensations lingered on my skin as clearly as teeth marks that refused to fade. Time pushes away that which is intended, rejects that which is rejected, forgets that which is sung about, and is filled with that which it turns its eyes from, such as the white hairs of a loved one.
After my brother left, after about a year had passed, we were no longer able to stay at number 16, where we’d been living. According to the district office, const
ruction of the new apartment building had weakened the ground and put neighboring houses that had not been rebuilt in danger of collapsing. Our home was no more. Number 25. Number 337. Number 1115. All of the places where we lived. We lost touch with my brother—he never wrote, and he never sent money. I do not think of it as a betrayal. What my brother had promised when he squeezed my sweaty hand as if he’d never let go was not money or letters. It was the erasure of time that goes by the name of money and letters. I understood that. The sort of time in which people could become the purest they’d ever been; cancel any unimportant plans they had; and long for a random, distant ideal. Our blood, which refused to be moved by a warm prayer over breakfast, a conversation with a loving family, a life that evolves step by step—that was what made my brother free. My brother, who was somewhere in the dark sewer tunnels of Osaka. I loved that brother. Not because he was family or because he’d bought me a washing machine. What he had left to me was a long-long-lived frigidity. The stillness of a beautiful, taxidermied want.
“Don’t you dare think of leaving.”
My mother had a lot of worries about me.
“You’re still a long way from paying me back. Your debt won’t be over until I’m dead. Not ever.”
My mother worried for no reason. She would outlive all of us. That was the truth. My bright, clever little sister never became a beautician or a model or a lesbian. That was sad. Sadness made her hair fall out. When she’d lost nearly all of her hair, she spoke to me from inside the mirror.
