Once the Shore (10 page)

They parted with a nod and a wave, “See you soon,” and Ahrim headed to her blue pickup truck, where she unloaded the shellfish and the seaweed into iceboxes. She did all this with a deliberate slowness, waiting for them to leave first, watching the caravan of cars and trucks follow the coastal road. The gulls cast thin shadows on the sand and the women’s footprints. She thought of the boy Sinaru and the news she would bring him. She thought of her husband long gone. From the horizon came the faint sound of an airplane’s engine and she looked once more out to sea. The afternoon was approaching.
She clutched the braid of her hair. The noise faded and the water remained undisturbed, bright and closed, as if nothing in a thousand years had ever reached the surface and broken through.

 

She was seven when she first dove, thirteen when she started it as a profession, helping her parents earn a living. At seventeen she married the son of a fisherman. This was in the time of the Japanese occupation, at the start of what would become the Second World War. One winter, during an uprising, they fled to the mountains. They slept in sheds and caves. She remembered smoke from distant fires, the speed of planes, a boy whose face was the color of crushed beets lying on the mountain passage, his legs frozen against his chest. Jinsu left on some nights with the other men and she did not see him until the morning when he would bury himself in her for warmth, smelling of wet wool, his body curled from the weight of snow.

The following year he was conscripted by the Japanese military, though to this day it was, for her, an abduction. They came for him riding horses. She clawed at their boots and the horses’ flanks. They kicked her down and she hit her head against the base of a tree. Briefly she lost consciousness. When she woke, her eyes focused on the animals and their soft sighs, their white breaths. Hooves lifting, stamping the ground. Tremendous eyes. As if they had come from myth. And then Jinsu stepped into the view, bending over her, covering the sun
and the leaves. “I won’t be long,” he said, touching her face. She never heard from him again. Her last memory of him was of the horses trotting away and Jinsu turning, trying to wave with his bound wrists. The white of his shirt, the dark of his skin. Her husband the centaur.

He was twenty years old, she a year younger. They had no children. Their marriage had lasted seven seasons.

This was over forty-five years ago. Ahrim never moved from their home, although the majority of her neighbors then had now left for the cities. She lived in a village near the eastern coast, by a road that passed through a field of forsythia. The house was a single room, its walls made of stone, a roof made of reed. Over the years it had changed little, except for the roof. It was now in the Spanish style, with tiles the color of wet clay. Behind the house there was a grove of tangerine trees that she and her husband had planted, intending to harvest the fruit and sell them. These days she donated the citrus to an orphanage or brought them to the city for the homeless.

She never remarried. Her and Jinsu’s parents passed away long ago. A life was formed and she took it. Solitude came to her early, and these days it gave her little reason to seek the comfort of a man. The comfort of something, yes, but she did not know what it was exactly, desire having evolved over the years.

On her days off she took care of her neighbor’s son after his schooling. Sinaru was ten years old. Ahrim could no longer recall how this friendship started, when exactly the boy began
to knock on her door. His father worked in a factory that packaged fruit; his mother worked in a noodle shop on the outskirts of the city. They were emigrants, from a village on the coast of Japan. They had been on this island for three years.

One morning, when they were still living in Japan, Sinaru was swimming with his parents. In the sea they separated for a moment, and a tiger shark followed the boy. “I was caught,” Sinaru once said. That was how he introduced himself, lifting his left shoulder, his arm missing.

He came to her this afternoon while Ahrim was watching television on her bed. She had, that morning, gone to the fish market where she sold half her catches to a man who ran a restaurant in the city; a Thai company bought the other half.

The child Sinaru knocked once, as was his habit, though Ahrim didn’t answer right away. The afternoon light shone against the floors the way it did when she surfaced, the air always lighter than she expected against her, delicate.

Sinaru didn’t knock again. He was a curious child. He was patient. He either waited until the door opened or, after five minutes, left and tried again later on. A minute passed before Ahrim found the energy to rise, rub her face, and walk to the door.

Today the boy wore shorts and an old T-shirt that was, Ahrim guessed, his father’s. It drooped low past his knees and was cinched at the waist by a nylon belt. His left sleeve, empty, swung as he fidgeted. He had last week seen an American film
about Caesar and had put together this outfit. His hair was cropped short, which made his face seem round as a melon. His lips were stained red from a popsicle he had been eating.

“I heard the bed creak,” Sinaru said, looking up. Together they spoke a mixture of Japanese and Korean, the two of them having become familiar with each other’s language in these past years. “It took you one minute to cross the room,” he continued, calling her “Auntie.” He smiled, showing where he had lost a tooth earlier that week. He slipped his tongue through the gap and made a farting noise.

Ahrim patted him on the head and let him in. The boy left his slippers beside the entranceway and then lifted each of his feet to wipe away the pebbles that had stuck against his soles. He took his time, balancing against Ahrim’s doorknob to view the lines running up his toes.

“Footprints,” Sinaru said. “When you see one, where are the lines? You see them on thumbs, you know. Like when you press them against glass.” He lifted his thumb, as though testing for wind. “Did you find the sea turtle?”

Ever since Sinaru learned of the sea turtles in the Pacific—the ridleys, some as long as seventy centimeters and weighing up to forty-five kilograms—he was convinced that one was able to ride them. And every time Ahrim dove, the boy asked her to catch him one. He had already built an aquarium out of a large, clear plastic bin, which he had filled with seawater and aquatic plants to give the semblance of a future home
for the creature. His plan was to keep it there and care for it. His relationship with the sea now came in the form of his imagination, brilliant and tamed.

“They’re clever creatures,” Ahrim told the boy. “Their talent lies in hiding.”

“Did you find one?”

“They eluded me.”

The boy nodded gravely, his expression contemplative. “It’s the winds,” Sinaru said.

Ahrim agreed, “Yes, child, the winds.”

She offered the boy some cold barley tea, stored in a large jar in the refrigerator, but Sinaru declined, choosing instead to walk around Ahrim’s room, as close as possible to the walls. He moved along the boundaries of the bed, the dresser, the stove. And wherever a shadow fell on the floor, he followed its outline. He stared at his feet as he did this.

One day she had spotted him through his bedroom window, dipping his head into his aquarium. He was practicing holding his breath. His hair, long then, spooled across the surface. Although it was customary for women to dive, she thought he was eager to learn. Encouraged, she asked the following morning if he wanted to visit the ocean. She described the jelly-skin of octopus, the cratered shells of abalone, the oily mussels. They could first practice by hunting stones. He grew silent, chewing on his lip, curling his hand. “That’s okay, Auntie,”
he said, no more than a whisper, and she watched his eyes and never brought it up again.

Sinaru had circled the room three times already. He passed the bed and pointed at the mattress and the thin blanket, ruffled and flattened from Ahrim’s body. “I see you there,” the boy said.

The afternoon light was strong and it came through the windows, illuminating Sinaru’s skin, the wooden floor, the steel of her stovetop, the folding screen beside her bed, the bare walls.

“I would like a room,” Sinaru said. “Like this one. And have everything I want in it.”

“And what would you want?” Ahrim asked.

“Water,” Sinaru said.

He wanted a room filled with water. And sea creatures. For in addition to his fixation on turtles, the boy was also convinced that if you tried for long enough, the possibility of drowning grew less, until the danger altogether vanished. He thought Ahrim had accomplished this, no matter how much she tried to tell him otherwise. His theory was supported by her constant scent of ocean water and by the answer she once gave him when he asked why she dove:
because I have yet to die.
And so he believed her to be of another world. His conclusion was logical. “You are a sea woman,” the boy said. “Then you are also a woman of the sea.”

He wanted fresh tangerine juice so they walked to the grove behind Ahrim’s house. He insisted on carrying the stepladder. He held it tucked under his arm, his shoulders stooped from the weight, careful so that the metal legs avoided her body. Instead of the sea they took walks in the fields and hunted fruit, the boy exuding a confidence in these places.

Some nights Sinaru’s parents fought. From what Ahrim could hear, it consisted of bickering, mostly, about shutting doors and noise and cleaning. Oftentimes it was the husband’s voice she heard, and she did not know where the child was when this happened. She asked now of his parents and the child shrugged. “Papa has headaches. They are very bad. He rubs his forehead and makes a face like this.” Sinaru scrunched up his brows. “And sometimes I want to touch the wrinkles on his face but I don’t. When he comes home I cover my mouth and try not to move around too much.”

The boy opened the ladder and placed it against a tree, wiggling it to test its support. Ahrim asked if he wanted to climb but he shook his head. “My legs are sore,” he said, and they left it at that. So Ahrim stepped up onto the ladder and the boy held the bottom rung, directing her on which tangerines to pick. He pointed and she chose them and slipped them into the pocket she had formed with her apron. She was surrounded by their scent, both sharp and light, the smell, she used to imagine, of the sun.

Solid earth. The boy’s feet rooted there. He no longer
swam and he no longer climbed trees. As though vulnerability lay only above or below the ground.

In her years in the sea, thirty women had perished. Some vanished, the currents taking them over the horizon. Others bobbed up to the surface, their backs like miniature bridges. Very few were victims of sharks, as many assumed was the greatest fear in the water. It was, for the most part, the ones who overestimated how long they could hold their breaths, reckless and determined. She had known each of them. Just as she did the women who accompanied her now, all her age, save for one. Interest was fading, the girls heading to the cities.

Her occupation, over time, would cease to exist. She would be relegated to history, that old word she carried with her always, that feeling that there was a time from which she had departed and was now wishing to return to. She existed in the middle, always. But it was different, she thought, in water. For there, time was not linear. It was, in her mind, a globe, spherical. Death perhaps was less important in that space because it remained inseparable from the living. Within the world of the sea, all was enclosed, all was present. The ritual of burial and mourning seemed nonexistent.

“That one,” Sinaru called from below, pointing at a tangerine some distance away. She held on to a branch and leaned forward. She stretched her fingers. She grazed it and the tangerine spun. She felt her calf muscles tighten. The boy urged her to try again. She did so and succeeded and she
blushed because she was proud. “Happy?” she called, showing it to him. Its skin was smooth and she weighed it in her hand.

“You have a big bum,” the boy shouted.

Narrowing her eyes at him, she dropped the tangerine onto his head. She waited for him to say something but he didn’t and she saw him fall. He lay on the grass with his mouth slightly open, and Ahrim quickly descended the ladder, jumping the last two rungs, spilling her pickings. She kneeled before him. “Sinaru,” she said, shaking him, patting his head. “Sinaru.”

The boy, under the sun, opened a single eye and grinned and slipped his tongue through the gap in his teeth. Laughter erupted from within his chest and he squirmed under her grip as she attempted to spank him. He freed himself and, still laughing, ran past the trees, farther into the grove like some infant spirit, his empty sleeve billowing with his speed.

Ahrim did not follow him. He would return. She sat there on the grass and looked up at the looming fruit in the shapes of dozens of faces, tilting in the winds, about to snap their necks and drop. She felt an old sadness, the smell of snow and horses, and then her strange fantasy faded. But the feeling stayed. And she did not know where the years had gone.