The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (23 page)

I do not remember how old she was. She looked three or four years older than me, so perhaps nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Prone to blushing from time to time, she seemed like a young girl, I now think, but then again, she might really have been just a young girl.

This girl, whom I now dearly miss, suddenly looked up at the sun’s direction, as if she’d just come to her senses, got to her feet, shaking off.

“I must sleep.”

“Sure.”

“I’m not playing the game anymore. I’m really getting sleepy.”

Suddenly putting on a cold air, she hurried down from the roof. After she left, I sat squatting on the roof, digging the dirt from under my nails. Her blouse, her skirt, her hand gestures, the veins on her slender neck stayed with me, trickling like a brook into some part inside of me, making me ask myself, “Is it a dream?” and turn around with a swirl. The comforter cover flapped like a curtain drawn over some secret, and one of her handkerchiefs had been pushed by the wind down to the ground. I clipped her handkerchief back on the line with a clothespin and descended from the roof.

Cousin, back a long time ago from the bathhouse, is clipping her fingernails when I come down from the roof and she gazes straight at me.

“Where have you been all this time?”

I don’t answer.

“Where?”

“On the roof.”

“Roof? What were you doing there all this time?”

I am unable to give her an answer.

“You sound like a fool all of a sudden. What’s going on?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re acting weird.”

“What do you mean?”

Cousin looks right at me. “What?”

Cousin rolls up the tissue with the nail clippings and throws it into the trash can, as if she can’t figure it out.

“I don’t know. Let’s just go get groceries.”

Cousin brings it up again as we’re crossing the overpass.

“You got a scolding from Oldest Brother while I was out, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What is it then?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You seem all down and drained, as if you got a bad scolding.”

Stammering, I tell her about Hui-jae
eonni
. About how we played together on the roof.

“Sound like you had fun. So why so down?”

“Don’t know.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Ever since the first chapter of this novel was published, it seemed that I had become a subject of gossip. Every call I answered was from a women’s magazine. I answered and told them that I was not home. If they asked who I was, I said that I was my younger sister,
and that Older Sister had gone to the country and that I didn’t know when she’d be back. It was also difficult for me to listen to the messages left on the machine, and I kept the phone line unplugged for about two weeks.

I plugged it back in, thinking that should have done it, and when the phone rang, far past midnight, I answered it in my sleep. The caller was looking for me and I answered, “This is she,” without thinking. Only when the caller named her magazine, I said to myself, “Ah,” but it was already too late.

“You’re back from Germany.” She sounded glad. I must have told her that “Older Sister” had gone to Germany.

When she said she wanted to see me, I began, “Well, actually . . .” and told her the truth. That it was me who had answered all the previous calls, that I had answered her call and told her that I was in Germany.

“But why?”

“Because I didn’t want to do the interview.”

She laughed instead of getting upset.

“You’ve put your name out in the world, so how can you always do only the things that you want?”

I did not reply.

I pleaded with her. I pleaded, to this woman whose face I’d never seen, that I’d only just begun the serialization and that I’d like to focus on the writing without other distractions. Asked her to please leave me alone. She was a pro. She had already begun throwing me questions and before I realized it, I was answering her. I can’t let this go on, I thought, and said I was going to hang up when she retorted, in an affable manner.

“Then why did you do the newspaper interview?”

I pressed the receiver hard to my ear.

“Just because I did an interview with a newspaper, does that mean I have to say yes to you as well?”

“Well, in whichever case, we will make our decision and get in touch again.”

I was dumbfounded. It was my business and I was saying no, so who was going to make what decision? It looked like she was going to write her article based on this phone conversation and print it with a photo from another occasion.

“I have made it clear that I’m not doing an interview. I am going to look closely through your magazine next month and I will be very upset if you have a story on me in there.”

“I’m not in a position to decide, you see. I will have to speak to my editor at work tomorrow and then I’ll be able to give you an answer.”

“But this is my business. Who’s going to give what answer? Let me tell you once again, I said I’m not doing an interview. I ask you to not ignore my words. Or I’ll be very upset.”

I quickly hung up and pulled out the phone cord.

I could not sleep. I tossed and turned, again and again, hearing the phone ringing in my ear even when it had been unplugged. I remembered a familiar face who worked at the same women’s magazine that the caller worked for. I shall call him in the morning, I told myself, but my unsettled heart took no comfort.

When I awoke, I put on a CD of Lee Oskar’s harmonica album and pressed play. My chest felt congested and my head throbbed. I opened the window halfway. About thirty minutes into the music, I finally felt calm. At first I didn’t even notice the cold wind and only then did I feel a chill on my forehead and the ridge of my nose. I pulled up the covers and sadness came over me for no reason. What am I doing, here and now?

I rose to pick another CD and gazed into the face that belonged to Chet Baker, holding his trumpet. What am I doing, here and now? What? Chet Baker held his mouth closed, looking hollow, the wrinkles on his face carrying his yet incomplete wanderings. I pulled the Lee Oskar out, put the Chet Baker in, turned up the volume and took out the liner notes to read.

“Chet Baker’s landmark album recorded two weeks before his death.” Released in 1988, this album is a historical recording
of the concert that took place two weeks before the death of this legendary musician.

1988? He must have recorded this album while we were hosting the Olympic games in Seoul. I continued reading producer Kurt Geise’s reminiscence. “The stage was completely filled up with two orchestras and Chet Baker, standing alone between them, appeared very small . . .” Geise wrote, “Two weeks later, he was found dead . . .” And that the Amsterdam police . . .

I programmed the player so that this man’s voice, which turned out to be his last words, would keep playing over and over in my room even if I fell asleep, and lay down again.

There were times when I would encounter, on the bus or from storefront speakers on the street, the voices of people who were no longer on this earth. Of singers like Kim Jeong-ho or Cha Jung-rak or Bae Ho or Kim Hyeon-sik . . . The reason I flinched the moment I heard their voices, the reason I fell into silence, as if time had come to a stop, was that I thought the only thing these deceased people left behind was their songs.

Some time ago, I used to work as a scriptwriter for a radio program that played Korean oldies for an hour. The DJ was a news announcer nearing his retirement. He was a fan of Bae Ho. On Tuesday mornings we recorded the show for the coming Sunday, and when we wrapped for the day, the old man would sit me, a young woman, down to share a midday drink. Singing Bae Ho’s “Turn Back at the Rotary.”

Dark rain here at the rotary as this lonely man, sighing and soaking in the rain, longing for the love that he has lost, arrives at the rotary, sad and forlorn . . .

One day the old man asked me, sitting there with my glass of
soju
untouched, “Do you know what kind of a singer Bae Ho is? I mean, do you know why his songs still live in the hearts of so many fans?”

“Well, he’s a good singer.”

At my pointless answer, he responded, “No, it’s because there is death permeating his voice. Because these are songs that he sung in his sickbed, nursing his nephritis, out of breath as he shifted back and forth between life and death. Because these were songs that he spit out from a chair, unable to even walk. That bastard . . .”

Tipsy from his midday drink, now he was referring to Bae Ho as the bastard. “You know what he said upon his death at twenty-nine? ‘My dear fans, thank you. But I think I am beyond hope . . .’ That’s what he said. Crazy bastard, thankful for what? He had no clue that it was the damned songs that killed him.”

I once asked him, “What do you feel like when you listen to a dead singer’s song?”

The winter tree branches outside the window of the coffee shop where we were sitting were lit with twinkling lights that reminded us of Christmas. The twinkling lights on the branches, luminescent in the dark, stirred inside of me some deep instinct to return home. I wanted to go back if only I could. But to where? Perhaps he felt it was an odd question, because he simply gazed at me across the table.

“There’s nothing different, it seems, when we encounter a work by a dead writer or a dead artist, but isn’t it a strange feeling to listen to a dead singer’s song?” When I asked my question again, he lifted himself up from his comfortable position, sunken deep in his chair.

“Probably because it’s their actual voice. Because it’s too real. And it’s not just songs. I once heard the voice of a colleague of mine who had died reciting a poem and it was quite bizarre. Perhaps
eerie
is a better word. A person’s voice is like a part of his body. Like that person is alive right there in front of you.”

Could it be that Hui-jae still remains with me in body? For whenever I think of her, I suddenly fall silent, just as when I hear songs by those who are no longer here on this earth.

The following day after school. When classes are over, Cousin always comes to my classroom to head home together, so I am sitting there waiting for Cousin when, unexpectedly, Hui-jae
eonni
’s face appears in the hallway window instead of Cousin’s.

Can’t be
, I think, and stay seated, and Hui-jae gazes toward me through the window. When I just keep sitting there blankly even after I see her, Hui-jae comes in through the door at the back of the classroom and puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Aren’t you going home?”

Before I can tell her that I am waiting for my cousin, Cousin comes running down the hallway and taps on the window. She’s signaling me to hurry and get going. When I glance toward Cousin, tapping on the window, Hui-jae glances that way as well. Perhaps noticing something’s unusual, Cousin comes into the classroom.

“What are you doing? Let’s get going.”

I introduce Hui-jae to Cousin, saying she’s the person I met on the roof the day before.

“Ah, I see.” Cousin gazes blankly at Hui-jae for a moment, then asks, “I heard you live on the first floor, right?”