We Do Not Part, page 6
Before I left the house, I remember looking back at the room where my mother slept. The sliding door was open, the duvet neatly folded, but the electric blanket and cotton mattress were spread out on the floor. I knew she kept a coping saw beneath the mattress. My mom believed the superstition that lying down to sleep over sharp metal warded off nightmares. Yet even with the saw under her mat, she was often plagued by bad dreams. Her breath would catch and she would shudder, or she would yowl like a wild cat as she sobbed. Seeing her like that, hearing the sounds she made, was hell for me. I swore then that I wouldn’t regret leaving, that I would never come back. I wouldn’t let that person darken my life any longer. With her stooped back and her feeble voice. The weakest, most cowardly person in the world.
I changed into my regular clothes in the restroom at the ferry terminal, then bought a ticket to Wando and took off. From Mokpo, I caught the express bus to Seoul and arrived well into the night. I booked a cheap room near the bus terminal, and I remember feeling anxious no matter how many times I checked the locks on the door. I balked when I found strands of someone else’s hair on the bedsheets, and even after I had wiped them away with wads of wet tissue, I slept curled up in a ball. As if I could protect myself from the filth that way.
The next day, I went out and called my niece who was living in Seoul. I must have told you about her before, my mom’s older sister’s granddaughter—she’s in Australia now. My aunt died early, but, unlike my mom, she married and had kids young, so my cousin is old enough to be my mother, and her daughter is two years older than me. I got scolded by the grown-ups if I just called her unni, so ever since I was little I awkwardly called her my niece unni.
My niece unni was a first-year in college at the time. She answered my call and told me to meet her in the lobby of the Jongno district YMCA. Luckily, she kept my trust and didn’t show up with any adults in tow, but the moment she saw me, she started laying into me. She asked what on earth I was doing and told me to hurry home. Shouldn’t I at least finish high school? Had I called my mother? Did I have the money to get back? Where was I staying? I tore out of there without saying a word. I had asked her to keep quiet, but I knew she would be telling everyone that day.
On my way back to my lodgings, I swore to myself. That I would do the opposite of everything my niece unni had said. I wouldn’t call my mom, no way would I go back to the island, and I wasn’t going to graduate from high school. The first thing I had to do was find a job. I spotted a Help Wanted ad posted outside a Japanese restaurant near the bus terminal and went in for an interview. Trembling inside the whole time, I lied and said I was on a leave of absence after my first year at the nearby teachers college and, surprisingly, the restaurant owner didn’t question me. He put me in an apron, set me to work waiting tables for two hours, then told me I could officially start the next day.
I left the restaurant, teeming with excitement on the walk back. With each step I took, the crowds on the streets seemed to part for me, saying, Come—from this moment on you only need to move forward. Even as one side of my chest was constricted with anxiety, my mind was as sharp as if I had ice water raining on my head. I remember thinking, Is this what they mean by freedom? Night was falling fast and, though my mid-length coat would have been sufficiently warm back in Jeju, the Seoul chill burrowed itself deep inside the folds. I had turned up my collar to keep out the biting wind when I slipped on an embankment coated in thin ice and snow. I remember how the emptiness felt against my feet as I fell. There’s nothing beneath me. No ground. I’m going to die, I thought. Later I would learn that it had been a five-meter drop.
They said I was discovered around noon the following day. There was a construction dig site beneath the embankment, and it just so happened that ownership of the site, where construction had been stalled since the summer, had recently transferred to a new owner who was visiting with the estate agent that day. They were terrified, thinking they had come across a dead body. They were even more stunned to find that I was still breathing.
I’d fallen on a heap of construction fabric meant for groundwater drainage. That was what had spared me. By some stroke of luck, I hadn’t broken any bones either, but my head had absorbed the shock. I spent ten days in a nearby hospital, unidentified and unconscious, before I briefly came to. When I did, the nurse asked my name and I apparently answered, but I don’t remember that at all. All I remember is that my niece unni was sitting at my bedside, her eyes blood red. I blacked out again, and the next time I woke, my mom was sitting there instead. The hospital room was dark except for a night light, but my mom’s coal-black eyes seemed to glow all on their own as she looked down at me.
Inseon, my mom said. Try to answer. Do you know who I am?
When I groaned “mmm” in reply, my mother didn’t cry, didn’t tell me off, didn’t shout for a nurse. Instead, she started rambling. At some point, she had grabbed my hand tight, and her eyes were gleaming.
She told me she had known I was hurt. Even before the hospital got in touch with her, she’d known. She’d seen me in a dream the night I fell from the embankment. I was five years old and sitting in a field of snow, but the snow that landed on my cheeks wouldn’t melt. Even in her dream, that sight made her tremble in fear. Because why would snow not melt on a baby’s warm face?
* * *
I heard that story before I met Inseon’s mother in person. Ten years later, not long after Inseon moved back to Jeju, I was also on the island attending a training session for work. When I managed to find some time in my schedule one evening to take a taxi to Inseon’s house, I was surprised to see her mother, who I’d heard was in the early stages of dementia, looking unexpectedly kempt and collected. Unlike Inseon, she was rather short, with delicate features and a lovely voice that made her seem like a young girl at heart. Enjoy your visit, she told me right before I stepped out of her room, quietly holding my hands.
Later, in the kitchen, Inseon said, She becomes more lucid when she meets strangers, maybe because she’s nervous. She’s always hated being a burden. She only cries and gets cross and acts like a child around me. A lot of the time, she mistakes me for her older sister.
The next day as I boarded the plane to Seoul, I thought back on that winter years ago when I’d first heard the story about Inseon running away from home. Strangely, I had come to feel as sorry for Inseon as I had for her mother. A girl of only seventeen—how deeply must she have hated herself and the world to despise someone so slight? Someone who slept on a saw. Who ground her teeth and sobbed through nightmares. Who spoke in a frail voice and constantly made herself small.
* * *
We left the noodle shop and walked the streets in silence. The snow clung desolately to the thick strands of Inseon’s hair, as I’m sure it did to mine. As we rounded another corner, a white untrodden road would open ahead of us like pages in a giant picture book. The sounds of our feet crunching over the snow, our parka sleeves brushing against our sides, and the shutters on the shopfronts closing in the distance were all resoundingly clear in the stillness. White steam poured from our mouths and noses. Snowflakes landed on the bridges of our noses and our lips. They were quick to melt on our warm faces, and new, startlingly cold crystals settled over their wet traces. Neither of us seemed to be thinking about the separate paths we would have to take to get home. As we kept walking away from the subway station like lovers who choose a roundabout route to delay their brief goodbyes, as we traversed the hushed pedestrian crossings that appeared around every corner like yet another page in that book, I waited. For Inseon to break the silence and continue her story.
* * *
The night I was released from the hospital and went back to Jeju with my mom, she brought up the snow again. Not as she’d seen it in her dream so much as the real events that had given rise to the dream. I wasn’t fully recovered, but she lay beside me through the night and held me by the wrist as if she were worried I’d have the strength to run away again, startling and grabbing on tight again whenever she accidentally let go in her sleep.
She told me about how, when she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village. My mom had been in her last year of elementary school and my aunt was seventeen. The two of them had been away on an errand at a distant cousin’s house, which was how they managed to avoid the same fate. The next day, having heard the news, the sisters returned to the village and wandered the grounds of the elementary school all afternoon. Searching for the bodies of their father and mother, their older brother and eight-year-old sister. They looked over the bodies that had fallen every which way on top of one another and found that, overnight, a thin layer of snow had covered and frozen upon each face. They couldn’t tell anyone apart because of the snow, and since my aunt couldn’t bring herself to brush it away with her bare hands, she used a handkerchief to wipe each face clean. I’ll wipe them, she told my mom, and you get a good look at them. She didn’t want her little sister touching dead people. But something about the words “get a good look at them” so terrified my mom that all she could do was grab her sister’s sleeve, shut her eyes tight, and cling to her as they walked. Whenever my aunt said, Look at them, take a good look and tell me what you see, my mom reluctantly opened her eyes. That day, she came to understand something clearly. That when people died, their bodies went cold. Snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.
* * *
The following year, Inseon began to make documentary films in earnest as she had long been interested in doing. Later it occurred to me that the story she had told me that snowy night probably sprang from rough ideas she must have been sketching for future projects.
We were now retracing our steps toward the subway station, turning back the pages we had opened as we walked. My toes were freezing inside my drenched sneakers. My fists, shoved deep inside the pockets of my parka, were numb with cold. The snow on Inseon’s head was as thick as a white woolen hat, and with each word she spoke, her breath blazed out like gossamer flames in the dark.
* * *
Until then, I’d had no idea. All I knew was that my grandparents on my mother’s side were long gone and that my aunt’s family were our only relatives, but I thought this was because my mom had just one sibling. I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid to think this. Then and now, the grown-ups never talked about what had happened.
I think my mom brought it up that night in the grip of some sort of fervor. Or perhaps a chill—her jaw kept clattering like she was cold. I was at a loss, seeing her in such a different state from the quiet, sad grandmother-type I thought I knew so well. It wasn’t clear in that moment if this sudden change had been brought on by the horror from decades earlier that she was relaying to her daughter for the first time, or by the shock of the accident that had almost robbed her of her child. Remarkably, though, she didn’t say a word about my running away, not then and not after. She didn’t blame me, and she didn’t ask why. Just as she never spoke about how two young sisters managed to find their dead family and see to their burial, or what perseverance and good fortune was required for them to survive afterward. She only spoke about the snow. As if there were a causal link between the unmelting snow she had seen decades before in reality and the snow on my face in her recent dream, and this link was the single most terrifying logic running through her life.
Then my mom said: The thing is, every time it snows, it comes back. I try not to think about it, but it keeps coming back. So in my dream that night, to see your face whited out by snow…as soon as I opened my eyes to the dawn, I thought, my baby’s dead. Aieee, all I could think was that you were dead.
* * *
Inseon told me this hadn’t eased her ambivalence toward her mother. She remained conflicted afterward, and in some ways felt more confused. But the loathing she had once found too excruciating to bear, even briefly, vanished that night as if it had never existed, and she said she no longer knew exactly what the object of the fire blazing in the pit of her stomach had been.
She never brought up that story again, let alone hinted at it, but whenever it snows like this, I remember her. The girl roaming the schoolyard, searching, well into the evening. A child of thirteen clinging to her seventeen-year-old sister as if her sister wasn’t a child herself, hanging on by a sleeve, too scared to see but unable to look away.
* * *
The wipers are streaking across the bus windshield, powerless against the pelting snow. As the blizzard thickens, the bus slows down. The driver’s profile is tense as he peers ahead, his field of vision obscured. The tourist sitting behind the driver looks on edge too, as he stares out of the windshield, chin in hand.
When I step off this bus, I’ll have to plow my way through that snow. I’ll have to trudge ahead, one unsteady step at a time, barely able to open my eyes in the gale winds.
Inseon would be used to this weather. If I were her…
I think of Inseon’s self-assuredness, her tendency to not give up, to persist. I imagine what she would do in this situation.
If she were me, she would buy a lantern. Since if she couldn’t transfer directly to the local bus and night had completely fallen by then, she’d have to walk up the unlit field paths. She would find rubber boots and a hand shovel too. Because, unlike the coastal roads, the roads through the uplands will be snowed under.
This is absurd, I mutter to myself. I’m not Inseon. Not only am I not used to this kind of weather, I’ve never experienced anything like it, and I certainly don’t love that bird enough to make the trek to her house tonight in this storm.
* * *
I can tell we have finally entered P— when I see the signs for Nonghyup and the post office. I reach out and press the bell to signal my stop, and the bus slows to a halt. The wind outside seems to ease up then too, as if on cue. But no, on second glance, I see that the wind must have died down at some point along the way. I feel as if I’ve stepped into the eye of the storm. It’s a little past four in the afternoon but so dim that it seems like another heavy storm is approaching.
The streets are lifeless. No passing cars on the road either. Only heavy snowflakes making their unfathomably slow descent. A traffic light glows bright red behind the dense arrangement of falling snow. The bus has driven on and sits stopped at the crossing, waiting on the signal to change. As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.
4
Birds
A few times on the bus ride over here, I’d noticed the winds die down as abruptly as they have now. Each time I’d assumed the weather conditions must have changed. Now I wonder if I was wrong. Maybe those areas didn’t see much wind. If I were to return there at this moment would I be met with the same static calm and steady precipitation as here?
I hear the bus continue on its way, the sound of its engine muffled by snow. Wiping the flakes from my eyelashes, I try to find my bearings. This is the coastal road; other than the express buses, regular transit buses don’t stop here. I have to remember where the bus stop by the intersection was, the one Inseon pointed out to me before as we drove down past it in her truck. Is it the junction I can see up ahead or the one behind me? At which of the two corners should I turn? I decide to walk ahead. I’m not worried about losing my way. I’m headed toward the large snow clouds shimmering over the uplands. If I don’t see a bus stop from the corner, I can turn and walk back.
It is unbelievably quiet.
If not for the chill of the icy particles falling and settling on my forehead and on my cheeks, I might wonder if I’m dreaming. Are the streets empty because of the storm? Or are the lights out in the small shops selling cold seafood soup and noodles in anchovy broth because it’s a Sunday? The metal chairs upended on tables and the pavement signs lying toppled behind locked doors have an air of disuse, and suggest that these establishments have been closed for some time. The business selling outdoor goods under a shoddy front sign is shuttered. Mannequins wear flimsy autumn clothes behind one window, through which I glimpse cloth the color of rice draped over a long rack of clothes. The one place with its lights on in this silent little town is a tiny corner shop.
I need to find a lantern and a hand shovel. The corner shop might not carry what I’m looking for, but I can ask them to point me in the right direction. If I’m lucky, someone might even loan me what I need. I can also ask where I might catch the bus for Inseon’s village. But as I head toward the shop, the lights go dark. A middle-aged man, presumably the owner, walks out in his jacket. Seeing him wrap a chain around the handles of the glass doors and turn the padlock with practiced ease, I quicken my steps.
