City of Ash and Red

by Hye-young Pyun

  His coworkers reacted poorly because they assumed the transfer meant something special. The first day the manager had arrived at the branch office, he had given a speech in which he categorically stated that the next branch manager would not be someone from the head office abroad. He also said that the next manager would have to work very closely with the head office, which meant work experience there would be an important factor, and that he was looking closely at potential transfer candidates. Everyone, especially Trout, took this to mean that the person who was transferred would be promoted to branch manager upon their return.

  The man was just as much in the dark about why he had been chosen, so he pretended not to notice when his coworkers got together in the break room or around the water cooler to badmouth him or the branch manager for choosing him, or to criticize Mol, the human resources manager at the head office who had finalized the decision. Nevertheless, he was hurt that Trout, who had always been friendly and prone to pulling small pranks on him, suddenly turned frosty, and that his coworkers badmouthed him now with such fervor. Trout went around pretending to look sweet and innocent—with those fishlike eyes, all he had to do was open them wide—and did not hide the fact that he felt he was the victim of an unfair promotion. The employees spent every free moment at Trout’s side, condemning the branch manager’s biased decision and whispering about the man’s lack of principles. But nobody bothered to ask the branch manager himself what the significance of the transfer was or why the man had been chosen for it.

  “Rats.”

  When he was briefed on his transfer, the man had hesitated and then asked why he was chosen. That was what the branch manager told him.

  “Rats?” the man asked.

  “Yes, rats. As far as I can tell, no one is as fine a rat killer as you.”

  The branch manager’s secretary giggled as she interpreted this for him. The man was crestfallen. There could not have been a more banal reason for him to be chosen for management training. Yes, they were a pesticide company, but wouldn’t it have been better to say he showed great potential, or that he had an exemplary work attitude, or that his performance on the job was outstanding, or that he had a good head for business, or failing all of that, why not a little lip service from the manager saying that he simply liked him for no reason? Why, of all things, did it have to be because of filthy, disgusting, detestable rats?

  “I’m sure I’m not the only one here who can kill a rat,” the man said.

  “Of course not. But other people would buy poison or set traps in the basement or what have you. I doubt any of them would try to kill a rat with their bare hands.”

  The man was still hoping to hear something nicer, but, for the manager, the case was open and shut: he had caught a rat.

  His memorable encounter with the rat had occurred right after the manager’s arrival at their branch. The manager had invited all of the employees to his housewarming. In the corner of the garden, a female coworker and the manager’s preschool-aged son were enjoying a game of catch. The white ball looked so nice as it arced back and forth against the darkening sky that the man couldn’t look away even while turning meat on the grill.

  Just as everyone began tucking into the freshly grilled meat, the ball dropped out of the sky and rolled slowly across the mowed lawn. The woman and the manager’s son turned to see where the ball went and gasped loudly. Past the end of the woman’s stiffly pointing finger, back where the ball had rolled to a stop, was a large rat the size of a man’s forearm, with fur as filthy as a rag used to clean a drain. The rat had stared, eyes round with fear, as the ball rolled menacingly toward it.

  His female coworkers all shrieked, and everyone shouted at each other to kill the rat, that you needed poison to kill a rat, and why had no one thought to bring the branch manager some of the company’s own rat poison, and they would be fine as long as it didn’t come any closer, and maybe they should just let it go since they didn’t have any poison anyway. They were used to handling live rats in the lab, and yet no one thought to simply kill it. After all, this was not one of the small, pink lab rats they were used to but an enormous, dirty, filthy sewer rat. The truth was that rats outside of a lab were terrifying.

  The man was forced to get up and grab a purse on the chair next to him. It was the only thing handy that he could throw without breaking it or sending shards of glass across the lawn. He felt obligated to kill the rat because Trout was standing behind him, nudging him on. Of the male employees at the party, he was one of the more recent hires, and as this made him the most subordinate, he had no choice but to do something, with or without rat poison or rattrap. The rat, too, was clearly the runt of its litter. It was there, in unfamiliar territory, because it had been pushed out of the battle for food closer to its burrow. He and the rat faced each other silently, as if reading each other’s troubled thoughts.

  The moment he hurled the bag at the frightened rat, he heard one of the women scream. He thought it was because she was picturing the rat’s splattered guts, but only after it left his hands did he realize the bag was hers. For better or worse, the bag landed squarely on top of the rat. He might have been imagining it, but the man thought he heard something burst. The sound of a water balloon popping echoed in his ears like a cassette tape playing the same section over and over. The sound did not stop until he heard the woman exclaim that she still had payments left on the designer bag.

  “What a waste.” Trout laughed at him as he stood there looking bewildered. “Why on earth did you grab that bag?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can tell by looking at it that it’s expensive. You should’ve picked a cheap one.”

  “But that was the only thing handy . . .”

  “Then throw the bag but miss the rat. That’s what you should’ve done.”

  “What’s the point of throwing something if you’re going to miss on purpose?”

  “It’s just one little rat. Who cares if it gets away? What matters is that you stepped up.” Trout lowered his voice. “All that matters is the branch manager saw you step up. That’s all that ever matters. But squashing it to death? That’s nasty. I can’t stand nasty.”

  Trout was right about not throwing that particular bag at the rat. He could tell at once that the corner was dented in and the leather was scratched. He didn’t have to look at the bottom of the bag to know there was blood, gray fur, burst rat guts, and lumps of pink flesh stuck to it. The contents were scattered across the lawn. He slowly picked up a pouch, a pencil case, and a small notebook. When he picked up a menstrual pad and saw the logo of a winged angel on the wrapper, an ill-timed laugh almost escaped him, but he heard the owner of the bag burst into tears. He could also hear the others muttering that they’d lost their appetite for barbecued meat and whispering, “What’s he got in his hands now?” He would never laugh at an angel with wings again. Nor would he throw any more purses, and he would have to develop an eye for recognizing designer bags. But above all, he resolved never again to kill another rat. As he stepped forward to clean up the little corpse, his coworkers stepped back to avoid him. They acted like he was the rat. He had picked up the disgusting remains with the burst entrails dangling and carried them over to the trash can, and had vowed to himself that he would sooner be a rat than have to kill another.

  “When I saw you grab that rat by the tail, with its intestines hanging out, and throw it in the trash, I was so moved,” the manager said.

  He didn’t know whether to be modest and say it was nothing or to be bold and promise to kill any rat that appeared in the manager’s garden, so he kept quiet and listened. The secretary pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. The man likewise found it hard to buy the idea that someone could be moved by the death of a rat. He was starting to see why his coworkers kept badmouthing him.

  Thanks to the gossipy secretary, his coworkers found out that he had been selected for the transfer as a reward for the splattered rat, his horrible indifference toward h
is female coworker, and his ruining of a designer bag with payments still left on it, and they started calling him a lucky rat. They used it as further proof of how unfair his promotion was. Whenever he made even the slightest mistake at work, they spoke up in unison about his terrible job performance and criticized the manager for his biased handling of personnel. His coworkers were all too happy to point out his subpar language skills, his lack of leadership abilities, and the fact that he had accomplished absolutely nothing on the job that qualified him for the promotion.

  It was true, every bit of it, but the manager only supported the man all the more, saying that leadership skills were a by-product of position and power, and that accomplishment was a by-product of doing one’s job. In other words, once you had the position, you naturally became a leader, and if given the duties, the accomplishments followed. The manager even claimed that the man’s poor language skills didn’t matter. Being transferred did not mean you were immediately thrown into a work project, the manager said. The man would have several months to adapt, during which he could devote himself to language study. Just look at how much he’d grown in the few years since he started here, the manager added—though he did not specify in what ways the man had grown—and said he expected him to make great strides in his language acquisition as well.

  The man’s mastery of the language of Country C stopped at the basics. Right after he was chosen for the transfer, he had rushed through a three-month-long introductory class. But a long time had passed since then. The transfer itself was so uncertain that he couldn’t justify spending more time on language study. Work was always busy, his coworkers who had more seniority were annoyed with him and kept dumping the kind of work on him that was tedious and time-consuming but would not yield any great accomplishments, and he had to work overtime almost every day. What was worse, his relationship with his wife had been turning sour, so he had no time at all to think about studying another language.

  Since he had barely finished the introductory level, he could only express extremely simple emotions and childish, primitive desires. He could describe basic things, but he could not discuss anything concrete or weighty. He could convey what emotion he was feeling, assuming of course that it was relatively straightforward, but he could not explain how he came to feel that way. When he expressed his intentions or made requests, he did not know how to do so politely and so tended to use imperative sentences or direct orders. His language teacher evaluated him as sounding cold and authoritative.

  The last grammar pattern he had learned in class was the causative-passive form. The pattern was unique to the language, and it implied a kind of forced complicity, being made to do something one did not want to do. He had learned it by memorizing the example sentence in his textbook: “Did you receive a summer vacation bonus from your company last month?” “No, I was let go.” “I’m sorry. That is a shame.” To put it in causative-passive terms, he was forced to repeat something he was loath to say over and over without end. By the time he had mastered the pattern, he felt as low as a worker who thought he was getting a bonus but got fired instead, and any time he found himself having to speak the language, the first words on the tip of his tongue were, “No, I was let go.”

  To make matters worse, he knew almost nothing about the cultural, social, or political situation there. He knew they used the same calendar as the rest of the world, along with their own traditional calendar based on the kings’ reigns, but he did not know which year of whose reign it was. He knew the name of the current prime minister, but he kept forgetting the name of the conservative party to which the prime minister belonged and, though he remembered the names of several previous prime ministers, he could not name them in order.

  The branch manager had noted his opinion of the man’s foreign language learning ability at the bottom of the recommendation letter he sent to Mol, who would make the final decision. After receiving the letter, Mol had called the man directly and interviewed him over the phone, but Mol spoke so fast that it was nearly impossible for someone who had only passed an introductory class to understand him. The man tried to mimic the manager, who mitigated everything he said with “I think,” so that no matter what Mol asked or requested of him, his responses sounded as cookie-cutter as a jobseeker out on his very first interview: “I have a lot to learn, but I think I will do my best.”

  To his coworkers, he was a complete disgrace. The coworkers who sat near him could hear him stammering awkwardly into the phone, but even the ones who sat farther away had all gathered behind him during the phone interview, just so they could eavesdrop and laugh at him.

  At the end of the clumsy interview, he thanked Mol and said, “Sorry to trouble you.” The moment he hung up, his coworkers surrounded him and said sarcastically, “Yeah, you should be sorry,” and “If you know you’re going to be sorry, then why say anything at all,” and “You’ll always be sorry. You’re a disgrace to this office,” before returning to their desks. He remained seated, enduring their sharp stares, and muttered to himself, “You’re the ones who should be sorry.” He squeezed the phone tight until his palms turned sweaty and he had to wipe them off on his pants.

  Though the branch manager was the one who chose him for the transfer, his coworkers took it out on him instead. They continued to follow the manager’s orders, laugh loudly at the manager’s little jokes, and let him choose the restaurant whenever they went out for lunch together. The man, on the other hand, could not get any help from his coworkers while synthesizing and testing new pesticides, and he was left out of all company updates, shared meals, and even jokes. Long after the transfer had been continually postponed and seemed as if it were not going to happen at all, he still kept his distance from the break room whenever he saw two or more of his coworkers in there at the same time, and if someone else was at the vending machine when he went to get a cup of coffee, he would use the machine downstairs instead. He even stopped socializing with the other employees around his age who’d joined the company at the same time as him.

  He knew the transfer was the only reason they tormented him. No one had thought ill of him before that. Up until he was selected, he was, like any other employee, close enough to some of his coworkers to exchange secrets with them, secrets that others in the office did not know—though most secrets ended up being leaked or revealed anyway. There was one colleague with whom he did not get along, yet during meetings they were in sync. He would present an idea, and that colleague would almost always second it. There was another employee too with whom he was not very close. Their desks were far apart, so other than a hello in the morning, they never spoke. But whenever they happened to be seated together, they greeted each other warmly and sounded genuinely regretful about being so distant with each other. In other words, when it came to both interpersonal relationships and office life, his were perfectly ordinary.

  But now, for no other reason than that he’d been chosen for the transfer, he was bearing the brunt of his coworkers’ jealousy. Ostracized by his coworkers, he couldn’t get anyone to cooperate with him on the job, which only fulfilled their criticism of him: he never got to exhibit his leadership skills, and his job performance declined. The less likely it seemed he would ever be transferred, the more he longed to leave. He wanted to free himself of his coworkers, who were itching to stab him in the back. For someone like him, whose life was ordinary beyond compare with no more promise than a tiny, low-interest savings account, the transfer abroad was like an expensive insurance policy with a guaranteed payoff.

  The glass doors that led out onto the balcony revealed a mosaic of lit and unlit windows in the apartments across the airshaft. The glow from the windows spilled into the dark and glimmered like stars against his balcony doors. He stared spellbound at it. As long as he looked only at those lights, as long as he did not think about the smell and the garbage that filled the streets, then this night was no different from those back home. At home, whenever the night felt too dark, all he had to do was look at t
he bright city lights, and when it got too quiet, he had only to listen to the rumbling of voices coming through the walls. Even with everything else here as hazy as a dream and as vague as a ghost, this night, this identical night, filled him with a sense of reality.

  In front of the apartment building was a park, small enough that he could take in the whole thing in a single glance. It had two street lamps and a lighted telephone booth that kept the park illuminated despite the late hour. In the round lawn at the center, trees with wide trunks dangled their long branches in every direction. They looked like they would give good shade at midday. He noticed there were people sitting and lying on the park benches. They never budged, no matter how long he watched, so he figured they must be homeless. As he stared down from his window, a large bird, probably a crow, which had been clinging to a tree branch like black fruit, took to the sky and let out several strange cries. It was the first sound of a living thing he had heard in his new apartment.

  To the right of the balcony door, a single-sized bed was covered in freshly laundered cotton sheets, and near the foot of the bed was a two-door built-in wardrobe. Lined up across from the bed were a television set, a small desk, and a chair. Two types of kitchen knives, bowls of various sizes, and a few spotless pots and pans were neatly arranged on the kitchen counter, and next to the kitchen sink was a separate laundry closet with a small twelve-pound-capacity washing machine. In the bathroom was a toilet and shower booth (so small that it looked like he would be slamming his elbows into the walls whenever he reached for the soap). That was the extent of his lodgings, but it was enough for him.

  Once he had had a good look around the apartment, he decided to change into his pajamas, which were as familiar to him as his own skin, and realized that he’d left his suitcase in the hallway. He ran to the door. The hallway was empty. His suitcase was gone. The suitcase, so heavy that it had seemed to hold the entire world, had vanished. He stared in disbelief at the spot where had left it, at where he was certain he had set it down, but the hallway with its rough carpet was not saying a word. It was so quiet that it seemed there was nothing out there but darkness. The row of evenly spaced metal doors lining the hallway were firmly shut and looked as if they had never once been opened. He began to doubt himself. Maybe no one had snatched his bag, maybe he was mistaken in thinking he had left it out there in the first place.