The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (2 page)

The springs and the summers, the falls and, especially, the winters . . . the wide wintry fields, the assault of snow-blasted winds, and heavy snows that would go on for days—yet somehow I do not recall winters in the country as being cold. The mittens that Mom had knitted with yarn that she had unraveled from Brother’s sweater were so worn they could not keep out the wind, making the tips of my fingers frigid. Sometimes Mom had no time to mend my socks, leaving me to go around with cold feet, in socks where my heels poked out like potatoes. So how is it that I have no memory of being cold? The winter chases everyone, male and female, the young and the old, from the wide fields into rooms. In these rooms, the winter makes them roast chestnuts in the brazier, makes them take out the soft, ripe persimmons
from the rice jar, and fetch sweet potatoes from the pantry to throw them out the back door into the snow, to peel the skin off with a knife when they are frozen solid. It was during one of these winters that I saw them.

For some reason, I stand by the brook, gazing at the winter fields beyond the brook. Under the distant white snow, under the snowy wind again starting to blow from the direction of the railroad, which is the only path that lay open to other lands, the fields embosom flocks and flocks of mallards. Having lost the grass seeds and tree fruits and the invertebrate insects, these mallards now searching for ears of rice in the snow are so beautiful to me. These hungry flocks blanketing the wide open winter fields . . .

In the middle of writing my letter, with cow dung on my foot and my stomach on the floor, I lift myself up and drag myself toward the shed. Ever since I got my foot pierced, I feel as if the pitchfork is glaring at me wherever I go. I pull the pitchfork down from the shed wall. Still feeling as if it is glaring at me, I drag the pitchfork across the yard, to the well. Without hesitating, I throw it in. The water splashes. Much later, I gaze into the deep, dark well, which swallows the pitchfork then quickly goes quiet and still, welcoming in the sky as if nothing has happened.

Writing. Could it be that the reason I am so attached to writing is because only this will allow me to escape the feeling of alienation, that I, my existence, is nothing?

One day, standing outside Deoksu Palace, captivated by a sentence surging up my chest, I grab a taxi, and as I head back home I see a passage framed and set up on the dashboard that reads, “May today be another safe day.” Right above these words, the infant savior, dressed in white, sits kneeling in a column of light pouring down on him, his palms pressed together. Next to the painting of Samuel
, praying, “May today be another safe day,” are photos of the taxi driver’s family—his wife and children. This was surely not the first time for me to encounter such a set-up, but somehow, this day, the Samuel portrait and the family photographs press down my unrealistic sentences and fill up my heart with a sense of reality. Only then I start to wonder why I am hurrying back home, breaking my appointment with the person standing outside Deoksu Palace.

Having lost my sentence, I tell the taxi driver to turn around, back toward Deoksu Palace.

Last April, one day not long after my first novel was published, in the middle of a languid nap, I received a phone call. A woman’s voice of substantial volume asked for me. An unfamiliar voice. I thought then that it was my first time hearing this voice. When she learned that the person on the line was the one she was looking for, she did a double take then expressed her delight, noticeable by the change in the texture of her voice when she asked if I remembered her, offering her name.

“It’s me, don’t you remember? It’s Ha Gye-suk.”

“Ha Gye-suk?”

On other occasions, even if I hadn’t the faintest idea who it was after the person on the phone stated his or her name several times, if that person seemed to know me for sure, I would have mumbled, “Ah, yes,” trying not to let that person realize that I could not remember him or her, but that day, I had answered the phone in my sleep and ended up blurting, “Ha Gye-suk?” She must have been dismayed by my being unable to remember her, but she acted as if she didn’t mind and right away explained who she was.

“Back in school you and Mi-seo were friends, remember? And I was friends with Mi-seo as well. You know, I was kind of plump.” Here she burst into laughter, perhaps because she was plump back then but
had now gotten fat. “And was an hour late getting to school every day.”

When she got to “an hour late getting to school every day,” I was abruptly awakened from my stupor. When she first said “back in school,” I had wondered if she meant middle school or college, but when she introduced herself as the one who was an hour late getting to school every day, a door had discreetly opened, the door to a classroom in Yeongdeungpo Girls’ High School, behind Janghun High School in Sindaebang-dong, Yeongdeungpo.

This girl, Ha Gye-suk.

The class is already underway. The girl in uniform with the ribbon bow tie, the purple-red schoolbag placed on the hallway floor, her hips slightly pulled back behind her as she discreetly opens the door at the back of the classroom, the girl with the bright red lower lip. Her plump cheeks, the curly hair, her eyes that always seemed to say to us, “I’m sorry.”

It was now 1994. It was 1979 when we first met. The girl had called me up, as if to chastise me for napping, saying, “It’s me, don’t you remember?” and was now sliding open the classroom door from sixteen years ago.

Our daily schedule comprised four classes. Ha Gye-suk’s lower lip always appeared slightly redder than the upper lip, and when she arrived an hour late and opened the door at the back of the classroom, her lower lip would turn even redder. How red it looked. This girl, her eyes, nose, and mouth were all gone now and all that remained with me was her red lower lip.

Thanks to this lower lip, the girl, Ha Gye-suk, had now come back to life in my memory. One day, when, again an hour late, she discreetly opened the door and stepped inside, Mi-seo whispered in my ear. “She works for this really vicious company. All the other companies dismiss their workers in time for them to get to school, but this place always arranges the hours so that the students miss the first class. You know why her lower lip is always so red? It’s because each time she gets to the classroom door an hour late, she stands outside the door
biting her lip over and over.” When I realized that the person on the phone was the girl who used to discreetly open the door at the back of the classroom, that she was one of the girls who had, between 1979 and 1981, gone to school with me, it was my voice that changed texture. “My, who’d have imagined I’d hear from you.”

Here I am on an island; feeling as if I have reclaimed nature, from which I thought I had grown apart since my childhood. For several days I have been walking around the island. Walking around town the first day, I found a bookstore. Its humble storefront made me stop and smile. There was a sliding glass door with drapes hand-embroidered with tiny patterns. Because of these drapes, I never would have thought it was a bookstore had it not been for the sign. Pleased about encountering a bookstore in an unfamiliar place, I slipped inside, even though I was not looking for anything. I had to smile again. The shop was small, even for a bookstore, but in one corner, they were selling razors and school supplies—pencils, erasers, and fine-point pens—and in another, rice puffs and sweet chips were on display. The store’s owner was, unlike what one would expect, a pretty young woman, which made me smile to myself.

And then I smiled yet again, for among some one hundred books on the bookcase, there it was—the book that had made Ha Gye-suk call me up. My novel.

I took down a hymnbook from a corner of the bookshelf and paid for it before leaving the store. I was not a churchgoer but I had wondered about the composition of hymns and wanted to investigate. But back in the city, it is never easy to get things done except things that need to be done right away. My days were always wrapped up in one hassle or another, and I always had a long list of books I had to buy. From time to time it would again occur to me that I wanted a hymnbook and each time I would tell myself that next time I was
at a bookstore I should pick one up, but that was all. The thought had passed me by for several years, and in the end, this was where I finally purchased a hymnbook.

With the hymnbook under my arm, again I walked around the island for hours and hours. The landscape that I was used to was the plains of the peninsula’s inland region, and its springs and summers and falls and winters, but now, I am standing before the island’s unfamiliar oleanders, windmill palms and crinum lilies, and the endless rows of dark blue waves. What I realize, out of the blue, is that nature is, to all of us, a nourishing nutrient, that it is nature that pushes us to travel back in time, to a remote path inside our hearts. Back in the city, designed so that we never once have a chance to step on soil, I would once again have let several years go by before I bought this hymnbook, which I have no immediate need for.

Ha Gye-suk’s phone call was the first I received from people from that time in my life. After her call, people from those days began to call from time to time, asking if I was that person from that classroom in that school. When I confirmed that I was that person from that classroom in that school, they said, “It’s really you,” and revealed who they were. It’s really you, this is Nam Gil-sun. This is Choe Jeong-bun. I saw you in the newspaper ad. It was your name and the face resembled yours, but I didn’t think it was really you. Still, I wondered and called the publisher. They wouldn’t give me your phone number, so I had to plead, you know. Most of the callers said they had seen me in the advertisement in the newspaper. And they said they were happy for me, as if it had happened to them.

One of them, whose name, she said, was Yi Jong-rye, said she had pointed out to her husband my photograph in the newspaper ad and told him this was her friend, and she felt this sense of pride; but her voice turned teary in the end. “It was a school, all right, but since nobody keeps in touch, my husband asked once, ‘You sure you went to high school?’ He had brought it up casually only in passing, but it’s funny, because it really hit me hard, you know . . . How could he say that, when
I worked so hard to get that diploma? I felt hurt, left with this ache in the pit of my stomach, and for days slept with my back to him. So when I saw you in the newspaper and I was able to tell him, ‘This is my high school friend,’ imagine how proud I was.”

Listening to her words coming from the other end of the line, I laughed, but after we hung up, I was also left with an ache in the pit of my stomach and remained sitting there for a while, caressing the receiver. It’s not just you. I am not any different. That was true. I had once been a high school student as well, but I did not have a single friend from high school, either. When middle-aged women on some TV drama not even worth your time chatted about meeting up with high school friends, I would gaze at them blankly. Even now, when someone introduces the person next to her, saying, “She’s a friend from high school,” I falter and take another look at the two of them.

Pouting when a friend finds a new friend; pressing a fallen leaf dry and writing her name on the back; going biking with friends; writing a letter through the night and slipping it between the pages of her book—neither I nor the friends who had called me up, had ever experienced such times. No time to pout, no time to press leaves—we had none of that among us.