Once the Shore (7 page)

SOJIN KNEW HIM ONCE though that was a different life and then he left and she grew older. Now he had returned. She heard that. This morning, from her neighbor. “Sojin,” the woman said, pulling weeds from her front lawn. “Sojin, did you know? Kori is here.” And the news, like a premonition, brought on the certainty that her days were about to change, alter from their accustomed rhythms, as though the entire island had tilted against the tides and shifted in its geography so that for a brief moment the landscape was unrecognizable. She smoothed a crease in her cotton skirt and then, as she did every day, walked along the road that led to the town.

At the store she waited for him, assuming he would come, although it was presumptuous to think he knew she worked in the town now. Perhaps he was at the house, with her father. Perhaps he was looking for her. Perhaps she would look for him. Her thoughts revolved, afloat, never landing. The hours
went quickly. She sold a T-shirt, camera film, water, candy, postcards, a map of the hiking trails around Tamra Mountain and the nearby waterfalls.

She had done well for herself. She could say this much. She owned the shop, one of the largest on the western part of the island. This would be the fifth spring her store kept business. A good month remained before the monsoons came and the wet heat lingered along the slopes of the hills. Last winter she turned thirty. It had been fifteen years since Kori left on a seaplane flown by a postman. She remembered the engine noises, the water spraying, then the quiet and the plane ascending. He would have been eighteen then.

The early evening arrived. Because of her father she had recently begun to close the shop before dark. But today she stayed on the sidewalk a moment longer, leaning against the metal shutters she had pulled down over the storefront window. The sun disappeared behind the distant forest. The headlight of a moped swung past her. Two boys fed pigeons and then chased them, the birds fleeing to rooftops. An old woman led a tour across the street, lifting a red parasol into the air.

It was a different island now. Mainlanders came for weddings. Foreigners visited the beaches. In the town, streetlamps had been installed, brightening the houses and the signs of the new restaurants that remained open until the late hours. There was a store where visitors could rent snorkels and then board a bus to the coast. A hotel and country club had been built beside
the town and on some nights, after her father was asleep, she sat on the fence to watch the golfers on the driving range, the arcs of their swings gleaming under floodlights. She did not know what he would think of all this. Whether it made a difference.

She herself lived on an unpaved road at the edge of town, across from a field where the cows grazed. The houses there were single-story and painted white. Hers stood at the end. By the time she returned it was dark and she glanced through the windows before heading inside. From her father’s bedroom came the sound of a television. He was sitting on the couch she had moved in there. He wore a cardigan and his hands were clasped over his lap. In the past year a faint scent of staleness had appeared in his room. She was unable to get rid of it and no longer bothered to try.

“Papa,” she said. “Did anyone visit today?” His face was lit blue from the screen and she thought she saw him shake his head. She looked about the house—nothing to suggest a visitor. Perhaps her neighbor had been mistaken, she considered, and then apologized to her father for her tardiness.

In the kitchen she cooked noodles, cracking eggs into the broth. She brought him to the table and tucked a napkin into his shirt collar. She told him about her day, as she always did. He sat hunched over the bowl, his cane hooked to the back of the chair. Thin lines of dried blood were on his cheeks from where he had cut himself shaving. His gray hair had grown past his ears and she reminded herself to trim it.

He had been in Seoul at the start of the war when the bridge was blown. In her bedroom there were photographs of him as a young man in uniform. Beside those were ones of herself as a child with her mother, one under the shade of a tree and another on the coast. The room was sparsely decorated; there wasn’t much else. There was a hook where she hung her shop keys, which were tied to a string she wore around her neck throughout the day. On a bureau was her mother’s jewelry box. After dinner, while undressing, she tried on the necklaces and the rings, the chains cold against her chest. They didn’t look as lustrous on her as they did in the box, she thought. Gold, she assumed, but had never bothered to verify it.

The bathroom was in the old style, with the drain in the middle of the tiled floor. She filled a washbasin with cold water and used a plastic ladle to pour the water down her shoulders and back, scrubbing with soap and a cloth. She felt the day ending and shut her eyes and hummed folk songs. As a child she would wash herself by moonlight, with the window open, and watch her neighbors, the cows, the moths, the world passing. It seemed like something only a child would do, she thought, now that she was older, though sometimes she was tempted to do it again. Once, she looked up to find Kori there, by the window, and she had flung the bucket of water at him and he had run back into the forest, drenched and laughing.

She was washing her hair when she heard a tapping on the door. “One minute,” she called.

“Are you in here?” her father said, pushing the door open with his cane.

Sojin rushed to her towel and covered herself. He wouldn’t have noticed anyway, but all the same her shoulders tightened and her face flushed, she couldn’t help it. Cold air followed him from the hall, the scent of their dinner. He placed both hands on the cane and leaned forward, forming words with his dry lips, though none came forth.

“What is it, Papa?”

“Someone came by for you today,” he said.

“Yes, Papa,” she said. “Who was it?”

His eyes were gentle, apologetic. “No, no, I am sorry,” her father said. “They came by for Sojin. Not you, my dearest.”

And then he shut the door behind him and she listened to the beat of his cane and his heavy feet as he returned to his room to watch television. She stood there clutching her towel. She heard the flicker of the streetlamps beginning to burn, the hollow sound of water draining. Quickly she dried her hair. There was still shampoo in it, spots she missed, though she wouldn’t notice until later as she lay on her mattress, unable to sleep, sliding her fingers through its length and smelling chamomile.

 

Born without a father, Kori, as a boy, lived with his mother in a village in the forest, close to the hills. Where the other whores live, the neighbors said. Rumors spread. His mother had entertained American soldiers during the war. Still did,
the students used to say, as if from experience. Kori neither denied nor confirmed the accusations. The mute, they called him. His mother, when she was seen on the street, wore short skirts and sunglasses like the Hollywood movie stars. Presents, it was assumed, from her customers.

He and Sojin attended the same elementary school. She spoke to him because he was alone. She was seven. He was two or three years older. It wasn’t out of sympathy that she approached him. It was because in her shyness she was unsure of how to join the groups of boys and girls scattered about the playground every afternoon. So she picked the single boy and circled him, widely at first, then narrowing, while he kept a ball of tape in the air with his foot. His legs were thin and tan. And it was only when he missed and the ball thudded into the red dirt that she took a piece of sesame candy from her pocket to give as an offering. She watched him chew, his mouth revealing crooked teeth. She picked up the ball and attempted to keep it aloft. She failed and she looked at him and he did not laugh. He said, “Try again,” and she did.

When he was older, boys began to approach him, other times men. They called him names. He fought them no matter how many there were. Sojin did as well. They used their fists, their nails, their feet. They compared bruises. Once there were six, older and drunk. He and Sojin were walking down the main street. He was twelve years old then. The men took him by his arms and legs and carried him to the center of the
town. He thrashed. She saw his muscles strain, his wild eyes. She chased them and hit a man against the side of his head. He turned and slapped her and from the ground she watched them take Kori’s pants off and beat him. They were quick. They picked him up and put him in a car.

Sojin ran to her parents but before she could speak her mother saw her dirtied clothes and the redness along the side of her face. “Was it Kori?” her mother kept on insisting. When Sojin didn’t answer they sent her to bed. “Enough,” her father said, and forbade her to ever see the boy again. In the middle of the night she snuck out of her house to search for him.

At dawn she found him asleep at the edge of the forest, the bruises on his thighs the color of persimmons. He opened his eyes. She lay beside him and they looked up at a clear sky and spoke of the sea.

From then on, ignoring her parents, Sojin left the house while they slept. Her nights became days. Kori bought a motorbike and they rode to the waterfalls and the caves. They dipped an old T-shirt in gasoline, wrapped it around a stick, and lit it. They moved through the narrow space of a cave, guided by the torch, following their shadows against the curving walls. They went in as far as they could, the cave enclosing them, and they waited for the torch to burn out and then they raised their voices and listened to their echoes and imagined they were in the belly of a whale. In the darkness they felt themselves slipping, as though they
were being swallowed, growing smaller, moving backward through time.

He never talked about his mother. She never asked. Not once did she visit his house or meet the woman. She grew used to this. They lived in fantasy and that was another life and they were young.

It changed with the fire. An entire neighborhood, in a matter of hours, gone. No more whores, one of her neighbors said, more concerned about the trees. They never found the body of Kori’s mother.

After that Sojin saw less of him. She spent afternoons in the grass, looking into the destroyed forest. Often she found herself pausing with her house chores, listening to footsteps approach the road. Sometimes, during the nights, she spotted him at the edge of the field and went to him. They met in the high grass and stood there together as if they were travelers who had recognized each other. They spoke politely. He did not stay long and she watched as he continued across the field to wherever he was headed.

Kori, eighteen years old, left the island that winter. He was going to find work on the mainland. He was going to be rich. She couldn’t convince him otherwise. Then write to me, she said. He promised he would. He never did.

She used to dream of him walking across the peninsula like Johnny Appleseed. In the early months it was like this for some time—her imagination with him, across the strait and
not where she was, her body moving without her, it seemed, without permission. A year turned into another, the seasons repeating. She turned twenty, then twenty-five. She opened the store. Her mother grew ill. She thought less of him and of the fire until it was only an occasional memory. She took care of her mother instead. She spent the evenings at home.

Her mother passed away while Sojin was at work. She was found lying on the rush mat that she had preferred over a mattress. Her ear was pressed against a portable radio. It had awoken her husband in the morning and before he left to gather eggs, he had told her to shut it off. When he returned it was still on, tuned to a station that played swing music. She died grinning. With saxophones and trumpets.

 

It wasn’t until the late afternoon of the following day that she saw him. She had come to the store early and propped the door open, listening to the radio at a low volume—news about a port construction, a US Army base, a sailboat accident, a series of thefts in a northern village. A small group of teenagers browsed the aisles. A man dressed in a tuxedo drove down the main street in a golf cart, holding a megaphone and announcing discounts at the driving range, “Two buckets for the price of one!”

She was arranging pinwheels beside the counter when he appeared at the window, leaning forward to view the displays. She held her breath. She recognized his narrow shoulders and
his arms, their slimness, like the necks of swans. She knew his walk, the way he moved carefully past the window and into the store, as if worried of intruding. He was taller than she remembered him being. He had aged, of course. The boyish skin had become taut, darker, his jawline more defined. His hair was longer, falling past his eyes, which were alert and bright. He rested his elbows against the counter. He smelled of the ocean.

“You’re here,” she said. “You’ve come.”

He had arrived the day before last. Had he been back before? she wondered. The question seemed silly once she thought it and so she asked him instead whether he was just visiting. What she wanted to know was whether he had come to stay but she didn’t say that either. She was shifting her weight from one leg to another, she realized, and stopped.