The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (58 page)

I’ve just started college and Oldest Brother tells me he’s going on a business trip. But the next day, after telling me he’ll be away on business, he calls me from Jeongeup, Mom by his side. I think it was a Saturday. Oldest Brother says he’s getting engaged the next day, and tells me to come down to Jeongeup. Engaged? I couldn’t believe it but it didn’t seem like he was lying, so I take the night train home. I don’t even have time to tell Cousin. The next day, at a restaurant in Jeongeup, I meet my brother’s fiancée-to-be for the first time. It was their engagement ceremony, so we met for the first time as family. She has large eyes, light complexion, and is short in height. It seems that Oldest Brother doesn’t know much more about her, either. Except that she went to university in Seoul; went back home to the country to stay with her father; and that she was a delicate and understanding woman who, despite
her father’s difficult nature, never once made him upset. What more could he know, having been introduced to her on Friday and getting engaged on Sunday. Right away I take a liking to Oldest Brother’s fiancée. But even during the cake cutting, I just stand there blankly, unable to believe that he is getting married. Then when he put the engagement ring on her finger, I begin to sniffle. I can’t understand my tears, so I don’t know how to stop.

People turn and stare at me. Mom comes over to me and tells me to stop. But I can’t. Mom gets teary as well while trying to comfort me. That was their engagement and a month later they get married. At the wedding, Cousin starts to sniffle, just as I did at the engagement. She sniffles and sniffles, and this time I comfort her.

Oldest Brother’s wife was diligent, her eyes clear and kind.

All of a sudden I am addressed as Sister-in-Law. Everything—the cutting board, the kitchen knife—is hers now. Only then I realize how much I enjoy sharpening a dull knife on the little stone that Father gave us, rinsing the rice to steam in a pot, chopping and seasoning radish to make a spicy salad. I realize that as I focused on moving my hands to sort out unhulled grains in the rice, I was comforting the undulating solitude deep inside my heart. Is it because my room is the one closest to the kitchen? No longer allowed to work in the kitchen, I start to hear the smallest sounds that she makes. The sounds of her wiping her hands on her apron, the sounds of her skirt brushing against the refrigerator. Early one morning, after days of sitting in my room trying to guess whether it’s a ladle or strainer or rice paddle that she’s taking down from the rack on the cabinet, I paste on my window a black cardboard of the same size. The sunlight at daybreak is blocked by the cardboard, turning my room into a cave. While I am out, she takes down the cardboard. I come home and put it back up. She takes it down again. I put it back up. She would disapprove, of course. How inappropriate, a dark, cavelike room in her home for the newlywed couple, where pink sheets and white drapes
should be more fitting. One day she throws out the cardboard. I go see her next to the washing machine, where she’s doing the laundry and ask her, in a barely audible voice, not to come into my room. She bends down toward me.

“I can’t hear you,
Agassi
, what did you say?”

“Don’t come into my room!”

This time I scream, out of the blue. She is surrounded by the scent of fabric softener as her eyes well up with tears. Oldest Brother comes out of their room and takes her inside. A while later he comes over to my room. He looks into my eyes and says he wants to get me a present to celebrate my new start in college, asking me if there’s anything I want.

I tell him I want books.

“What kind of books?”

“Novels.”

The next day the complete set of Samsung Publishers’
Contemporary Korean Literature Collection
is delivered to me. I count the books, with their ivory and scarlet covers, as I arrange them on my bookcase one by one, one hundred volumes in all.

My conflict with Oldest Brother’s wife was quickly over, thanks to the books. I no longer put up black cardboard since I had to read the books, and while reading them I forgot about the kitchen.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness inside the well, I could make out the black surface of the water. As my eyes grew accustomed to the black surface, I could make out the myriad stars glimmering on the water. The stars were floating on the water, like some sentence. For a moment, the stars in the well tossed and rolled, as if a wind was sweeping across the sky.

These were the sentences that I went after my publisher to take out of my essay collection right before going to print.

The wound left behind by Hui-jae’s death, which I had inadvertently gotten involved in, turned me into an infinite blank. Her traces still exercise their influence over me. Ever since then, I have possessed a great fear in establishing relationships with others. She was a ruined part of my heart, keeping me from building more intimate ties. Whenever I got close to someone, I felt compelled to tell the person that it was me who had locked that door. And I feared that this new relationship might again impose on me, without giving me a choice, a role that I cannot comprehend. I contemplated that my secret might be revealed after my death. I could accept the revelation but I feared distortion. To prevent my secret from getting distorted, it would have to be either that my life was thicker than the life of the discloser, or that I never tell anyone. I chose the latter. Never tell anyone, which meant never establish relationships, with anyone. I kept my lips sealed for ten years, suffering from blame, grudge, and longing. And after ten years, I tried writing, not to a person but within my work, that I had fastened the lock on that door. More years accumulated. Having spent so long keeping it inside of me, not letting it out, now it seems like a dream. Perhaps it was a dream . . . I try thinking. Yes . . . perhaps it was a dream . . . My heart insists and my hand sneers. The hand remembers. What it felt like when I fastened the lock, the clicking sound it made. I gaze down at my hand.

The body remembers in a way that is more placid, frigid, precise, and persistent than the way the mind does. The body is more honest.

Twenty some years ago in this house I learned to ride the bike. Before I was able to pedal all the way down the hill, I crushed my nose and skinned my knee myriad times. On the day I rode my bike to school for the first time, I got so flustered on a downhill road on my way back home that I forgot to grab the brakes. The bike sped downhill and threw me, in my white uniform, into a
rice paddy, my hands trembling as I held on to the handles. The textbooks in my schoolbag got soaked in the water at the bottom of the paddy, and I had to study with these yellowed books all year long. But after this incident I was able to grab my brakes at the right moment and through three years of middle school rode my bike to school, my schoolbag in the back. Later I would even let both hands go as I pedaled, feeling the wind on my face. I haven’t had the chance to ride a bike since arriving in the city.

Have not even seen one. It seemed that my mind had forgotten about biking. But it was my body, wounded and hurt while I learned to ride, that never forgot it. I would not ride one for a year, sometimes two, then when I happen to come across one I’d start pedaling and the bike would push forward with a swoosh.

I have been thinking again and again all this time. If I had opened the door, just once, before fastening the lock, would things have turned out differently. Would they?

Inside the well the night wind blew and the sky settled. A fresh fragrance flowed into me. Forgetting that I’d been gazing into the well, I look around, trying to find the origin of this fragrance that was flowing into me. Somehow I felt that if I didn’t try to identify this smell right now, I would regret it for a long time. It was the scent of water, the scent of moss. Ah, I looked into the well again. It must be that the damp smell of the water and the moss, covered up for a long time under the roofing slate, has sucked up the new air and new stars after the lid was lifted. The wind inside the well died down. The stars died down. Her face floated up inside the well like a sentence. That bashful expression she used to wear when she said something from her heart.

“. . . No need to feel sorry for me. I’ve lived in your heart for a long time. Open your heart and think of the living. The key to the story of the past is in your hands, not mine. Spread the grief
and the joy of those you’ve encountered to the living. Their truth will transform you.”

A wind seemed to blow, making ripples inside the well. She is inside the fresh-scented water, searching.

“What are you looking for?”

“The pitchfork you threw inside.”

“What for?”

“I’m going to pull it out . . . then your foot won’t hurt anymore.”

She lifts the pitchfork, from the bottom of the most remote gorge inside the well. What myriad water routes within a water route. The pitchfork drags inside her grip, scraping the ground. A spray of water. All that had sunken to the bottom of the well stirs up in a whirl. Where is she headed now as she departs from my heart? I do not know where, but I imagine it will not be somewhere inside a whirlpool, under the sediments or within dead silence. For inside my heart new stories are springing, of hopes and wishes.

I ran into Hui-jae’s man exactly once. It was on the busy streets on Myeongdong and I was on a bus. As I stood, my body rocking, my hand gripping the handle, I saw someone standing under a tree, off the sidewalk. Since the crowd at the bus stop was crammed in one direction to get on the bus, he stood out, standing on the road under the tree. The sight caught my eye and only then did I realize it was him. He just stood there. He didn’t try to get on the bus or walk on, just stood there on the road, his back against the tree. Grimacing each time a cab passed, as if the lights hurt his eyes.

A cold wind swished by. I felt a chill on my face in the middle of this summer night. I even started to shiver. I walked away from the well, leaving it uncovered. I crossed the yard and stepped onto the veranda, and when I looked back as I opened the door, I saw the starlight flow into the well, filling it up. The water and the moss, nourished with starlight, will take on an even fresher
scent. I stepped inside the room and buried my face on the pillow. Mom and Father were lying asleep close to each other, the room filled with the sound of their breathing. Mom went out to the vegetable patch in the afternoon and picked a basketful of sweet potato sprouts.