We Do Not Part, page 2
* * *
I was walking along a deserted road with some companions whose faces I cannot recall. We came across a black passenger car parked on the shoulder, and someone said, He’s in there. No name was mentioned, but we understood immediately that the one who had ordered the massacre that spring was in the car. As we stood watching, the car pulled away and turned onto the premises of a large stone building. Someone said, We should follow. We headed toward the building. There were several of us when we set out, but by the time we stepped inside the empty building, only two of us, including myself, remained. Someone stood quietly by my side. I sensed that the person was a man, and that he seemed to be following me reluctantly. We were only two—what could two people possibly do? Light leaked from a room at the end of the dim hall. When we stepped inside, the mass murderer was standing with his back to a wall. He held a lighted match in one hand. That’s when I realized that my companion and I were each holding a match as well. We could speak for as long as the matches burned. No one had told us, but we knew that was the rule. The murderer’s match was almost burned out, the flame down to his thumb. Our matches remained but were burning fast. Murderer, I thought I should say. I opened my mouth.
Murderer.
My voice refused to come out.
Murderer.
Louder, I had to speak louder.
What are you going to do about all the people you’ve killed? I said, using every last ounce of energy I had.
Then I wondered if we were supposed to kill him now, if this would be the last chance any of us had. But how? How could we possibly? I glanced to my side and saw the orange flame of my companion’s frail matchstick—my companion of faint face and breath—wane. In that light I sensed with vivid clarity how young the keeper of that match was. He was only a gangling boy.
* * *
I finished the manuscript and visited my publisher in January of the following year. I wanted to ask that they publish the book as quickly as possible. For I’d thought, foolishly, that once it was out, the nightmares would cease. My editor told me it would be better in terms of promotion to push the launch to May.
Wouldn’t it be best to time the release so that one more person is likely to pick it up? they asked.
I was persuaded by those words. While I waited, I rewrote another chapter of the book. Then it was the editor’s turn to rush me, until I at last handed in the final manuscript in April. The book came out almost to the day in mid May. The nightmares, unsurprisingly, continued regardless. In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively—brazenly—hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?
* * *
Then there is the night I awoke from that black forest and covered my eyes with the palm of my cold hand.
Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere. This dream is like that. As I eat my meals, drink my tea, ride the bus, walk hand in hand with my child, pack our bags ahead of a trip, or walk up the countless stairs out of a subway station, to one side of me it is perpetually snowing, over a plain I have never visited. Over black trees chopped down to torsos, dazzling hexagonal crystals form, then crumble. Startled, my feet underwater, I look back. And there it is: the sea, rushing in.
Unable to let go of this scene, which rose up repeatedly before my mind’s eye, that autumn, I had a thought. I could find a suitable place and plant some logs there, as they had appeared in my dream. Planting them in the thousands might not be feasible, but ninety-nine—a number that opens to infinity—could work; and then, together with a dozen or so people of shared purpose, we could clothe the trees in black meok. Ink them with the same devotion with which one might swaddle them in gowns woven out of deep night, so that their sleep may remain eternally unbroken. And once it was all done, we could wait. Not for the sea but for snow as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.
And the whole process could be documented in a short film, I suggested to a friend who had worked with photographs and on documentary features before. She readily agreed. We promised to see it through to fruition together but finding the right moment in both our schedules wasn’t easy, and before long four years had drifted by.
* * *
Then there is the heat-drenched night I walk back through the baked-asphalt air to an empty house and a cold shower. Every evening the people in the flats above and below and to either side of me turn on their ACs, and I am forced to seal shut my own doors and windows against the infernal air spewing out of their fans. I take a seat at my desk in what may as well be a steam room, before the lingering coolness of the shower evaporates. The envelope containing my will sits on the desk, still unaddressed. I pick it up and tear it to pieces.
Start again.
A spell that is always right, always correct.
I start again. Within five minutes, sweat is running down my skin. I take another cold shower; I return to the desk. I rip up the terrible note I wrote a moment ago.
Start again.
Write a proper letter of farewell, a true leave-taking.
The previous summer, as my private life began to crumble like a sugar cube dropped in water, back when the real partings that were to follow were only a premonition, I’d written a story titled “Farewell,” a story about a woman of snow who melts away under sleet. But that can’t be my actual, final farewell.
Whenever the sweat stung my eyes too much to continue, I returned to the shower. Back at the desk, I’d shred what I’d written. When I eventually laid my clammy body on the floor, with yet another letter I had to begin anew remaining, the day was breaking blue. Like a blessing, I felt the temperature drop by a fraction. I thought I might be able to get some rest at last and was in fact half asleep, when the snow began drifting over the plain. A snow that seemed to have been falling for decades—no, centuries.
* * *
They’re still safe.
That is what I told myself as I stared in defiance at the snowy field, refusing to turn away from the awareness that gripped me like a heavy, suspended blade.
The trees planted along the ridge to the top of the hill were safe, being outside the reach of the flood tide. The graves behind the copse were also safe, as the sea couldn’t rise that high. The white bones of the hundreds buried there remained cool, clean, and dry. The waves couldn’t steal them away. Black trees stood their ground under falling snow, their bases neither wet nor rotting. A snow that had been falling for decades—no, centuries.
That’s when I knew.
That I had to go, that I had to turn my back on the bones lower down, which were already lost to the billows. I had to head to the crest, before it was too late, parting the livid water that was now up to my knees. Waiting for no one, trusting no help would come, without hesitation, all the way up the brow. Up where I could see white snow crystals breaking over the woods.
There was no time.
It was the only way, that is
if I wanted to go on.
Go on living.
2
Threads
But I still had trouble sleeping.
I could barely eat.
My breath remained shallow.
I continued in the manner that those who left me had said they couldn’t bear to witness.
The summer in which the world attempted to speak to me, relentlessly and at overwhelming volume, was over. I no longer had to sweat at every turn. I no longer had to lie on the floor, my body slack and listless. I no longer had to take endless cold showers.
A desolate boundary had formed between the world and me. I found a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, put them on, and walked up the road, where the muggy air had lifted, to the juk shop. I still couldn’t cook. Couldn’t stomach more than one meal a day. Mostly I couldn’t bear to remember what it was like to cook for or to share a meal with someone. But routine did return. I continued to meet no one and answer no calls, but I resumed checking my emails and phone messages with regularity. Every morning, at dawn, I sat at the desk and wrote, each time from scratch, a letter of farewell addressed to everyone.
By degrees night lengthened. With each day I noticed a cooling in the air. For the first time since I’d moved here, I went for a walk along the trail just behind the complex. It was early November and the tall maple trees were ablaze and glimmering in the sunlight. Beauty—but the wiring inside me that would sense beauty was dead or failing. One morning, the first frost of the season covered the half-frozen earth, and as the soles of my sneakers touched the ground, I heard dry crunching. Brittle autumn leaves as big as young faces tumbled past me, and the limbs of the suddenly denuded plane trees, as their Korean name of buhzeum—flaking skin—suggests, resembled grey-white flesh stripped raw.
* * *
On that late December morning when I received Inseon’s text message, I was on my way back from the trail. After a month of sub-zero temperatures, the hardwood trees had dropped all their leaves.
Kyungha-ya.
That was the entirety of her message: my name.
I met Inseon the year I graduated. I was hired by a magazine where the editors mostly took their own photographs, as the publisher didn’t have photographers on payroll, but for important interviews and travel articles we’d pair up with freelancers we’d booked ourselves. Going on the road meant as many as three nights and four days spent in company, and, on the advice of my seniors, who said it was best for women to team up with women and men with men, I called around several photo production houses until I was introduced to Inseon, who happened to be the same age as me. For the next three years we went on monthly assignments together until I left the magazine, and as we’d been friends for well over two decades, by now I knew most of her habits. When she started a conversation by calling my name, I knew she wasn’t simply checking in but had something specific and urgent she wanted to discuss.
Hi. Is everything all right?
I removed my woolen glove to send a reply, then waited. Seeing there was no answer, I was pulling the glove back on when another text arrived.
Can you come right away?
Inseon didn’t live in Seoul. She was an only child, born when her mother was past forty, and thus encountered her mother’s growing frailty earlier than most. Eight years ago, she returned to a mountain village in Jeju to care for her mother, whom she lost four years later; she’d remained in that house on her own ever since. Prior to that, Inseon and I used to drop by each other’s place all the time to cook and eat together and to catch up, but what with the physical distance and each of us having to deal with life’s curveballs, our visits grew less frequent and further apart. Eventually the interval grew to an entire year, then two. My most recent trip to Jeju was in autumn of the previous year. During the four days I stayed with her, in the unassuming stone house with its exposed wooden beams, a house that had been renovated only to the extent of having a toilet fitted indoors, she introduced me to a pair of small white budgies she’d brought home two years ago from one of the markets that opened every five days. One of the pair could even say a simple word or two. Then she led me across the yard to her carpentry workshop, where she said she spent the better part of her day. She showed me the chairs she’d made from tree stumps, planed but without any joinery. These sold fairly well for some reason and helped her make ends meet. Sit down, feel how comfortable it is, she urged. Later she threw some wild mulberries and raspberries in a kettle and made me a sour and rather bland tea over the wood stove. She’d picked the berries that summer in the woods above her place. While I drank the tea, grumbling about its taste, Inseon in her jeans and work shoes tied her hair firmly back, stuck a mechanical pencil behind her ear like some master artisan featured in a TV documentary, and got to work measuring and drawing lines on a board with a set square.
She couldn’t mean come to her Jeju house. Where are you? I asked in my next text, just as Inseon’s message arrived. It was the name of a hospital in Seoul, though one I wasn’t familiar with. Then came the same question as before.
Can you come right away?
Then another message.
Bring ID.
I wondered if I should stop by my place first. I had on a long puffer coat that was two sizes too big, but at least it was clean. The wallet in my pocket contained a credit card I could use to withdraw cash, along with my ID card. I was halfway to the next subway station and the taxi rank there when I saw a free cab approach and waved it down.
* * *
The first thing I saw was the black lettering on the grimy banner boasting Nation’s Best. I paid the fare and walked toward the hospital entrance, wondering why, if it really was the nation’s best in surgical wound closures, I had never heard of the place before. I passed through the revolving door into a dimly lit lobby with worn finishing. On one wall there were some photographs of a hand and a foot, each missing a finger and a toe. I wanted to look away but forced myself to cast my eyes over them. Knowing my memory might distort the images into something more fearsome, I thought I may as well look. But I was wrong; these photographs grew more painful the closer I observed them. My eyes reluctantly moved on to the next set of photos: the same hand and foot, now with sutured-on finger and toe. There was a marked difference in skin tone and texture on either side of the suture lines.
I realized Inseon must have had a similar accident in her workshop, that that must be why she was here.
There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised. After studying photography in college, Inseon developed an interest in documentary filmmaking in her late twenties and spent a decade steadily pursuing this badly paid profession. She of course took on any directing work that came her way to make ends meet, but as whatever money she made was rerouted back into her own films, she was always broke. She ate little, spent little, and worked a lot. She packed a simple lunch wherever she went, wore no makeup, and cut her own hair using a pair of thinning scissors. She sewed cardigans into the linings of her one cotton parka and her one coat to make them warmer. Amazingly these habits came across as natural, unaffected, even stylish.
Of the short films she made every couple of years, the first to receive favorable reviews was a series of interviews she’d done in the dense forests of Việt Nam. The women she’d interviewed spoke about the sexual assault perpetrated by Korean military personnel during the war. On the strength of that film, in which nature itself seemed the main subject, so arresting were the images of sunlight and thick tropical foliage, Inseon received a grant from a private cultural foundation to produce her next documentary. The resulting film had what was, for her, a relatively big budget, and focused on the daily life of an elderly woman who had been active in the armed groups in Manchuria fighting for Korean independence into the 1940s and who now had dementia. I liked this work: the quiet shots of the woman’s empty eyes and her silence as she leaned on her daughter or used a cane to move about indoors, intercut with shots of the interminable winter forests on the plains of Manchuria. After this, everyone expected Inseon’s next project to focus once again on testimonies of women whose lives had intersected with history, but, surprisingly, she turned the camera on herself. Shadows, knees, hands: a woman visible only as a faint figure sat in darkness, slowly piecing her words together. Unless you knew her well enough to recognize her voice, you couldn’t tell that the interviewee was Inseon. Apart from brief cutaway shots showing black-and-white footage of Jeju in 1948, there was no clear narrative; the pauses between words were drawn out and long; and throughout its running time, smudges of light over a limewashed wall in shadow repeatedly faded and reappeared. The film left people perplexed and disappointed, especially those who had hoped for a reiteration of the straightforwardly moving accounts of her previous work. Irrespective of the response, Inseon had planned to pull the three shorts together to make her first feature-length documentary. Then for some unknown reason she shelved this triptych, as she called it, and instead applied and was admitted to carpentry school, the fees for which were covered by public funding.
I knew that Inseon was a regular at a carpentry workshop near her home, that during periods when she wasn’t working she would hole up there for days at a time to cut timber and measure and join panels to make her own furniture. I marveled at it. Still, I couldn’t quite believe that she’d quit filmmaking to become a carpenter. Nor was I entirely convinced when she told me of her decision to move down to Jeju permanently to care for her mother, before she’d even completed her one-year carpentry course. I assumed she’d spend some time reconnecting to her birthplace and soon return to resume her film work. But not long after she arrived in Jeju, Inseon set about converting the shed, once used to store harvested mandarins, into a workshop, and started making furniture. And when her mother’s awareness slipped so much she couldn’t be left alone, Inseon installed a small workbench in the central room of the main house and, with a hand plane and chisel, cut and shaped and oiled small wooden items, from chopping boards and trays to spoons and ladles. It wasn’t until after her mother had passed away that she dusted and reorganized the workshop and went back to making larger items of furniture.
