by Cho Se-hui
The dog wouldn’t eat after Grandfather died. Uncle was going to take the dog. Father told him no. The dog was past its prime, it was an old dog, but Father wanted Uncle to know that he had assumed all of Grandfather’s prerogatives. At the time of Uncle’s death from the knife of a worker at the Ŭngang plant, Father, standing next to my aunt and cousins, had dabbed at the tears poised at his eyelids. I had to force myself not to laugh. From my seat in the visitors’ gallery at the courthouse I had watched the worker who killed Uncle. The old dog was out of sight. I heard a voice, and Father’s security guard broke through the fog and retrieved the thick book I had thrown hoping to kill the old dog.
The girl appeared with the book and coffee. “Your aunt is here with the young master.” Her voice was still sleepy. She wore a white apron over a dress the faint color of sky. “Anyone else?” I asked. “They brought the lawyer.” I slept naked from the waist up. And so the girl couldn’t look directly at me. She’d arrived at the age of fifteen the year I’d entered college, and I hadn’t realized how she’d grown in the two years since. Extraordinary how she bulged out at the chest. I took her by the hand as she was about to leave. “Bet you don’t have this on the television in your room.” I selected a video cassette and pressed the start button on my VCR. The previous night’s sleep seemed stuck to her. I brought my cup of coffee to her lips. “I’ll be sent home,” she said as the music of Berlioz scattered the hair of the girl on the screen. What is it with these Europeans nowadays? No matter what your country, you don’t use Berlioz with this sort of tape. The title was Sixteen. A sixteen-year-old girl in a red sweater was waving goodbye to her friends. I fast-forwarded to the end. Something startling was playing out on the screen. “What’s wrong? I didn’t do anything to you.” The girl wouldn’t answer. I sensed that her body had awakened from its sleep. Her gaze moved from the screen to regard me with cold reproach, and she freed her hand from mine.
The three people who had arrived at dawn to see Father sat like a portrait in the second-floor living room. Father and Mother were still asleep. The lawyer brought by my aunt had closed his eyes. I felt like retching the moment I saw those two. My cousin sat across from them leafing through a newspaper.
“Hyŏng,” I called out to him. “Come here.”
“You’re up early,” said my aunt. I ignored her.
The lawyer, eyes open now, adjusted his glasses and stared at me. He had been Aunt’s lawyer from the day Uncle died. My cousin walked up the spiral staircase to where I was standing. “You’re early,” I said. We walked down to the end of the hall and stepped down to the fire escape. The fog had lifted. The first of the sun’s rays fell across the corner of the landing where we’d arrived, and then the white wall of the house, and then the leaves of the tall trees. My cousin wore a black suit and tie.
“What are you doing here?”
My cousin made a sad face.
“They should have stayed in bed. How come she brought the lawyer?”
“Let’s not talk about that.”
My cousin had been in America when Uncle died. My two older brothers were also studying there, but they weren’t the sort to return for their uncle’s funeral. If it had been Father, they would have been frantic to get home. But they wouldn’t have shed a tear on the plane. No, their main worry would be to make sure of their share of Father’s estate as soon as possible. Thinking about them kept me awake at night. It was clear in my mind that they would go to absurd lengths to minimize my share. We passed the rose garden. The security guard was patting the old dog. Apparently my aim hadn’t been so bad after all. Tending to the wound in its head, he led the old dog away.
“Go on back to the States.”
At the side of the pool I kicked off my shoes. My cousin sat down on the bench in the wisteria arbor and lit a cigarette.
“You must think I’m a bother too,” he said in a sad voice.
“No,” I said. “There’s no one who thinks you’re a bother. I merely had your interests in mind when I said that.”
“Thanks.”
I didn’t hear what he said next. I bounced several times on the diving board and plunged into the water. The bottom of the pool was still murky and the water felt ice-cold. I stayed under for a minute or so. That minute—or so it felt—of holding my breath crouched in the corner of the pool, that minute of make-believe despair, made me tense, changing into a feeling of distress that my world would eventually be lost, was even now growing distant. I kicked and floated to the surface, and there sat my cousin at the far end of a procession of ripples that were lit up by the sun’s rays. I stretched out, kicking and stroking, one arm and then the other, clawing at the water. I relaxed my ankles, knees, hips as I kicked. I rotated my head, breathing in when my mouth broke the surface, then breathing out into the water. I climbed out and my cousin threw me a towel. The sun felt warm this early in the morning. Beads of sweat had formed on the forehead of my dressed-up cousin. Through the spindle trees I saw Father’s chauffeur pull up in his car and get out.
“Aunt seems to have misunderstood something,” I said. “I guess you know how stupidly she’s been behaving.”
“I don’t know what to make of it. Like you said, I’d better go back to America and get on with my studies.”
“That’s the first thing you should tell Father when you see him. There’s nothing to be gained by doing things Aunt’s way.”
“All right. That way, Uncle ought to be satisfied,” he said.
“He’ll emphasize that you’re a member of the Ŭngang Group. Remember, hyŏng, our companies pay four percent of all the tax in this country, they account for four point two percent of everything sold on the domestic market, and they produce five point three percent of our exports.”
“Amazing.”
“You better believe it’s amazing!” I said. “Father doesn’t believe in running a dumb business. Do you think her request for Uncle’s share of the business will register with him? The most logical thing is for you to finish your studies, come back, get used to the work, and take part in running the business. You’re the only one Father’s acknowledged. You’re not going to like this, but Aunt is no longer part of our family.”
“How’s that?” My cousin looked completely out of sorts.
“I believe that’s what Father said.”
My cousin looked at me as if he didn’t understand. Compared with my two brothers, he was a paragon of virtue. “Why did that young man from Ŭngang have to kill with a sharp knife?” he had asked others. He was inherently good. He had wanted to know if Uncle had been in pain from the knifing when he breathed his last. When he learned it was actually Father that the murderer had targeted, he had fallen silent. My cousin saw the criminal as a schizophrenic whose powers of reasoning and emotion were out of balance with his will. He shouldn’t have stood trial, my cousin had said. Not until he went to the courthouse and saw for himself did he admit that the defendant was a normal person. He tried the patience of those around him by insisting that the premeditated murder committed by this person who had killed his father was a case of justifiable self-defense. The visitors’ gallery was crammed with factory workers.
Through the very same spindle trees Father’s young secretary could be seen going inside with his briefcase. Father’s car gleamed in the sun. It was a luxury car manufactured by the Germans. My car, also made in Germany, was smaller and made for the masses, a cute white car. My cousin lit another cigarette. One day American workers began chanting something, he had said. “How much do Korean textile workers make?” With a union rep leading the chorus, the workers had shouted: “Nineteen cents an hour!” As the workers, more than ten thousand of them, marched about the square, their voices ringing, my cousin had decided they were lying because they wanted to restore the balance of trade with our country. He didn’t believe there was a managerial group that would force the workers to work for the equivalent of $45.60 a month. And so from my cousin’s standpoint it was only natural that the young man
from Ŭngang Textile had drawn a knife. Our system was about to be destroyed from the inside, he said. He went so far as to say that we lived in a three-dimensional world, while the person with the knife, his co-workers, and their families lived in a two-dimensional world. Reality had stripped itself of one dimension. In the two-dimensional world there were fixed boundaries and limits. My cousin had a way of overanalyzing and inhibiting himself. He was a tiresome person of whom one couldn’t expect improvement.
“The lawyer’s leaving, isn’t he?” he asked.
“Father’s secretary is getting rid of him,” I said. “He should have gone to see Father’s lawyer. He’s wasting his time with Aunt.”
“A lawyer sees a situation for what it is. He locks onto the core of a problem much faster than the average person. I trusted him. Mother telephoned him at daybreak to come out here. She didn’t sleep at all. Without him there’s nothing she can say. He’s good at presenting the facts in a systematic way, and now that he’s gone there’s no use in Mother seeing Uncle.”
“Wait a few years and you’ll automatically be on the board of directors,” I said with a smile. “Go on in—Father’s up now.”
“I wish we didn’t have so much money,” my cousin said in a tired voice.
It was a trying day for him. My aunt sat alone in the living room. I went upstairs to my room, changed, and came back down, and still she was sitting there. On the north wall, behind her back, there hung a large painting of Grandfather looking out at Ŭngang Shipbuilding. He didn’t appear to be in a good mood. Grandfather feared change. Long before, he had made great profits selling various products he had manufactured utilizing technology and machinery. Detailed management of a few import-export firms and companies that made consumer products had enabled him to safeguard shareholder investments, stabilize the financial affairs of those businesses, and succeed in making his fortune. To Grandfather there was no special reason to be in the very forefront of the changes demanded by society. As long as you continued to make money, there was no need to bother your mind with untried methods and new technology. Together Father and Uncle broke Grandfather’s resistance to change. We were wrong, Father said. If we limited ourselves to the management methods we’d used so far, he said, then one year from now profits would decline, in two years it would become difficult to maintain the status quo, and in three years we would lose our position as the leading group. I was young then, but I knew Father was right. When I grew old and had my own grandchildren, they would hear stories about the absurd times in which their great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had lived and would grow shame-faced. They would be told that ethics, morals, order, and responsibility were considered counterproductive in that economically convulsive age, and our noteworthy legacy would be dismissed. Father used his head. The scale of the economy had grown, its structure had become more sophisticated, and so the patterns of business activity had to change, he thought. Grandfather’s group of enterprises, centered in light industry, were going nowhere. Using only his mind and some subventions, Father had turned it into a comprehensive organization of heavy chemical industries, including machinery, iron and steel, electronics, shipbuilding, construction, automobiles, and petrochemicals. In his last years Grandfather professed to get dizzy at the frightening pace of Ŭngang’s growth. To Grandfather the golden era of the 1960s was just child’s play in comparison with the years of upheaval into which Father and Uncle had dived. Father now met with my aunt and cousin in his reception room.
“Are you back here for good?” Father asked my cousin.
“No,” he said. “I’m thinking of going back and resuming my studies.”
“It’s fine that you’ve seen your father buried, but you could have gone back right away. Instead you’re wasting all these months here—why? Do you think I ought to siphon off one of our companies and place it in your mother’s hands?”
“I really don’t know.”
My aunt’s face blanched.
“Well, you ought to know,” said Father. “Your father would consider this unforgivable. And I’m the same as your father.”
“But Brother-in-Law,” my aunt finally managed to say.
Father ignored this and continued with his nephew: “You’re the very person to succeed to your father’s position. You must finish your studies, return, and take up your father’s work. You’ll find out what it’s like to have no time to rest. We have a lot of interests we’ve got to protect. At the same time, we’re always trying to think of a revolution that we can achieve through action. There are quite a few people who don’t think we earned our success, and given the opportunity they’d try to hammer us down. If we can’t persuade them, then we need the strength to drive them off. There are too many people who don’t realize how thankful they should be for what we do for them. Until my eyes close for the last time I’ll remember what happened to your father. We have never made such a great sacrifice. If this had happened between nations, we would have an all-out war. It’s sufficient reason for a holy war.”
“I see your point, Uncle,” said my cousin. “And in that respect the factory workers would say the same thing. They’d present the issue in terms of a holy cause, too, saying they’ve got to take action to protect themselves.”
“Let’s talk about that later. Get the money you’ll need in the States from our branch office there.”
Father then turned to regard my aunt. As my cousin had indicated, she couldn’t speak a single word properly. Father wanted to bring an end to this business once and for all. And so he proferred her an envelope containing several photographs, asking what she thought she was doing when the grass on his younger brother’s grave wasn’t even dry. The instant she felt my cousin’s gaze she turned away. To Aunt this was unbearable. With utter ease Father had driven a wedge between my aunt and my cousin. She had taken Uncle’s death as a liberation. If not for that, she wouldn’t be committing such an outlandish act with a younger man who was just starting up a company. I couldn’t see these photos of Aunt sleeping with the man. The instant she peered at the photos, eyebrows drooping, a brief gasp escaped from her parched lips. There was nothing more to the interview. My aunt left by herself.
My cousin and I had breakfast in the dining room. He asked if I swam early in the morning every day. I told him I’d been after Father to have a yacht built, and if it ever became a reality, I wanted to set out on an adventure and so I was doing some endurance training in preparation for a solo voyage across the wide ocean. A look of surprise came over my cousin. He wanted to know if we in our country, with our technology, could build the kind of boat that Chichester had sailed. And was I really at the stage where I could talk openly of an adventure? Of course, I answered. I presumed he knew, I said, that the United States, with less than eight percent of the world’s population, consumed half the world’s resources, and that the daily caloric intake of one affluent American was no less than the weekly amount of calories derived by the poor of Africa and Asia from their meager meals. As long as it’s acknowledged that the strong have such an impact on the weak, it was only fair, I argued, that the position of our country be acknowledged as well. I gave an impassioned explanation of the technology we had imported. But my cousin said he couldn’t understand what I was saying. And the way he talked, it really did seem that way. And so I told him that no one else would think of launching such an adventure when there was a family matter to be resolved. And I mentioned the natural differences in sexual development.
“I feel a sexual urge more often than other boys my age. And I’ve probably had a lot more opportunities to satisfy that urge with girls.”
My cousin looked at me. “You’re a strange one. You keep jumping from one thing to another.”
“You’re the one who’s strange, hyŏng, feeling like that.”
“I know, I haven’t been my normal self. I have a headache. Was there something Mother was unhappy with? I suppose a lot of people have seen those photos?”
“Got me,” I
told my cousin. “If I were you, I’d go back to the States after the guy who stabbed Uncle is sentenced. I’d forget everything, get my fill of life over there. Just relax, hyŏng—your share of the profits will pile up.”
“I guess that makes sense,” my cousin said as he rose. “You know all the angles, don’t you?”
I decided not to worry about him anymore. Refusing my offer of a ride, he walked out the door. It was very hot outside. The midsummer sun fell on my cousin’s suffering body. He once said that on the basis of my mindset, constitution, and habits, my nationality was becoming less and less clear. Here his observations were correct. He was as much as admitting that nothing was wrong with me.
Now and then I thought about what I would do in the future. It was clear I would end up working with my brothers before too long. Before Father passed on, my cousin would end up working with us too. I had never considered my cousin to be a problem. Ever since I was small it was my two brothers I had feared. They were both smart and they were both strong. We weighed my small desires for certain toys against one another, but I always lost out to them. I had my steam locomotive taken away—and my tank, armored car, airplane, artillery pieces, machine gun, pistol, even my toy soldiers—and I played with my sister putting dolls to bed in dollhouses. “Daddy, turn off the light, our baby’s asleep,” my sister would whisper, and as I carefully turned the bean-sized light switch and the lights went off my heart would flutter as I wondered if my brothers would fire their artillery, bring in their forces, and shatter the peaceful world of the dolls. And then my brothers would tell me to pee sitting down, and if Mother’s friends happened by they would take me in their arms and kiss me countless times, saying, “Look how pretty Kyŏng-hun is, prettier than a girl, he’s so pretty!” It was at my studies that I wanted to show them up, but my two brothers, who thought only of cheating on their teachers, took the wind out of my sails by getting good grades without ever really cracking a book. My very first tearful prayer in this world was for those two devils to be dead and gone from my side—they could even go to heaven, for all I cared. The second time I offered up a prayer was when my oldest brother had an accident. He was grown up by then and tooling around in a car with some girl. His car hit a tree and the girl who tagged along with him, naked and sucking his filthy semen, died at the scene. My brother was taken to the hospital and attended to while he lay on a bed bandaged like a mummy. That prayer didn’t come true either. Less than two weeks later my brother was out of the hospital. Instead of my brother it was Mother’s chauffeur who went to the police station, though at the time of the accident he’d been asleep in the room where the boiler man and the chauffeurs slept. Grandfather then summoned Father and told him to pay the dead girl’s parents a sizable sum. When Grandfather passed on, I shed not a tear. During his lifetime the word Grandfather always harped on was sacrifice, but that word bore no relation to his own life. After my brothers left home I convinced myself that Father would have to acknowledge me. Father was beside himself with delight when he learned I was very interested in his work and wanted to grow up soon and follow in his footsteps. What Father feared most was war. It was strange, but various social changes held the same significance as war for him. In an instant such changes could strip Father of everything. It didn’t take a lengthy explanation to make me aware of this. For I thought the same way. I was most scared of my two brothers. There was nothing frightening about my cousin. He was weak. I sat with him in the visitors gallery in the courtroom listening to a man named Han Chi-sŏp from our factory in the south say that the murderer who stabbed Uncle had committed no crime.
