The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (30 page)

Hui-jae
eonni
is the first to disappear into the first floor, then Cousin and I into the third floor. The next morning at dawn I, seventeen years old, slip out the front door carrying a knife inside the plastic bowl we use to rinse our rice. I look around as I enter the lettuce patch on the vacant lot. The lettuce leaves are covered thick with night dew. The dew feels cold on my fingers but I turn red below my ears. Even though I am bending low, and even though there are few people out at this hour, I feel as if someone will show up any minute. Show up to scold me for entering someone else’s lettuce patch. I also get the feeling that the owner of this lettuce patch, although I’ve never seen him before, will show up right there in front of me and scream, “Thief!”

I suppress my fear and pick as much lettuce as I need for cooking soup in the morning. Right as I step inside the front gate with the bowl containing the lettuce I picked, Hui-jae
eonni
opens her door and steps out. I quickly hide the bowl behind my back and walk up the stairs. Cousin is on her way out the door when she lets out a laugh.

“You and I were thinking the same thing. I was worried about what we should make soup with then remembered the lettuce, so I was just now on my way to pick some.”

Only when I put down the bowl with the lettuce that I secretly picked, my fear subsides. “A president sure is a big deal. Making us come straight home without even stopping at the market. We could say the president ordered us to steal, right?”

When this writing is complete, will I be able to make it wholly to the other side, into another passion? Could I be released from the violence and savagery, the chaos and frailty, which, by fits and starts, had been tormenting me from inside?

Martial law is declared following the president’s death. Third Brother does not return to our lone room even at night. It is a crime for just five people to get together to talk, Mi-seo whispers to me while reading Hegel. When we find ourselves sitting around in groups of three or four, we scatter in the middle of a conversation. The streets are blanketed by a quiet restlessness, as if a pack of wolves have ransacked them.

“I just hope he’s okay,” Oldest Brother says, scanning the room for Third Brother as soon as he gets home late in the evening, wearing his wig.

One day while Oldest Brother is out to teach his early morning tutoring class in his wig, Third Brother walks into the room.
He must have stayed out in the night dew, for his shoulders are damp. Before we have a chance to talk to him, Third Brother starts packing his clothes and books.

“Are you going somewhere?”

Cousin brings in breakfast and Third Brother sits at the table, his nose sharp.

“Tell Oldest Brother that I’m going to be away in the country for a while.”

“What about school?”

“The university’s been closed.”

“So you’re going home?”

“No, not home.”

“Then where?”

Third Brother is unable to answer.

When I keep probing where he’s headed, he only asks me to tell Oldest Brother not to worry and once again walks out, through the same door that he just walked in.

Cousin, twenty years old, has a fancy for the handsome engineering high school student interning at the inspection division. Sitting behind Cousin, with her heart on the high school intern, I am copying
The Dwarf Launches His Tiny Ball
onto a notebook. I have very little to go before I am done.

“Don’t cry, Yeong-hui.”

“Please don’t cry, someone’s going to hear.”

I could not stop crying.

“Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“I’m asking you, stop crying.”

“Any scoundrel calling Father a dwarf, I want you to kill him.”

“I will. I’ll kill him.”

“Promise me you’ll kill him.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Promise.”

The name of the new president elected by the National Council for Reunification is Choi Kyu-hah. On the center wall where a photograph of Park Chung-hee used to hang in the production department office, a photo of the bespectacled new president goes up. President Choi Kyu-hah. Choi Kyu-hah the president. It feels odd. Until then, the president had been Park Chung-hee and Park Chung-hee had been the president, therefore it feels odd to say either President Choi Kyu-hah or Choi Kyu-hah the president.

The new president appears mushy. The slant of his chin is not sharp like the dead president’s; his ears, on which his glasses rest, are not pointy like the dead president’s. He looks like a regular old man around the neighborhood. A man like him, as president. Had it been because he was neither steely nor sharp? On a December night, not even seven days into his presidency, gunshots are heard out of the blue around Hannam-dong, Samgak-ji, and the Gyeongbok Palace. Someone must be trying to threaten someone in secret. Or is someone trying to kill someone once again? The following day, the Ministry of Defense issues a short statement that in the course of investigating President Park’s assassination, charges were brought against Martial Law Commander Chung Seung-hwa and that he was arrested by the Joint Investigation Headquarters.

Then what about the gunshots?

It was Sunday. I had gotten together with Third Brother’s family for dinner. Ribs were cooking on a charcoal grill. My nephew, who had just turned five, was playing with his ball, throwing it against a wall. A waitress had come over to cut up the grilled ribs with a pair of scissors when all of a sudden, Third Brother asks, “The novel you’re writing, is it about the time we lived in Garibong-dong?” My face flared up, like the ribs on the charcoal fire.

Anxious about what he was going to say, my heart pounded, but he brought up something unexpected.

“You know, the 12/12 Incident, they’re saying it will be ruled as a military coup brought on by revolt against senior ranks, and yet they’re saying they will not prosecute—does that make any sense?”

“Please, are you going to get into all that, with your sister?” Sister-in-Law must have heard it too many times at home and interrupted him, complaining that he was at it again.

“All has failed now, but . . .”

Brother took the bottle of
soju
and poured some into his glass.

“What I wanted to do was write.” It seemed this was an unexpected answer to Sister-in-Law.

“If you wanted to write, how come you majored in law?” Brother picked up his drink and swigged it down.

“I concluded that I could not change anything through writing.”

“What did you want to change?”

“Society.”

I scooped up a spoonful of clear juice from the bowl of radish kimchi on the table.

“The novel you’re working on is set in those times and I just want to say, this country can never change exactly because a revolt like 12/12 can succeed. Where will we ever find order if this is what goes on in the military, where the law is upheld to a frightening degree?

“Chun Doo-hwan was a man Park cultivated as his protection to sustain the Yusin regime. The incident was Chun’s coup, staged in response to talks within the military following the assassination to eradicate soldiers involved in political activity, and with Chung Seung-hwa replacing the major command positions in the metropolitan area with his own men as soon as he took office as Martial Law Commander. Chun was a mere major at the time. A mere major throwing out the Army Chief of Staff without even a nod from the supreme commander. If that kind of thing is acceptable in
this world, what isn’t? If 12/12 goes unpunished by the law, no matter what the state might say, the public will never accept it. What follows will be an endless cycle of upheaval, deception, betrayal, the same old topsy-turvy . . . Try writing about that kind of thing.”

I simply sat there listening.

“If you’re a writer, you must not look away from such things. That coup in the end caused what went on in Gwangju. It’s a frightening thing.”

I poked at the ribs on the grill with my chopsticks.

“What good is a civilian government? They conclude that it was a military coup brought on by revolt against senior rank, but they can’t even prosecute . . . And what good is having a civilian president in office? The man who gave the order to open fire during Gwangju has a seat in the National Assembly as if nothing ever happened. The least he could do is stay away from public office, his conscience should at least do that much. Don’t you think?”

I don’t know,
Oppa
. To me, worrying about whether our briquette fire was still going, or whether you had to sleep on the streets after packing up and leaving, things like that feel more important. Like why it was so cold back then. When I took and sliced a strip of kimchi, set it on a plate and served it on the table, a thin coast of ice would form and the plate would slide all the way across and down. The plate would break and the kimchi would scatter all around.
Oppa
. What I really hated back then was not the president’s face but things like the knife refusing to slice through the radish that we had bought to make soup because it had frozen solid. Like on a snowy morning when I turned the tap. I loved it when the water gushed out unfrozen, and hated it when it was frozen and refused to come out. I wanted to write not because I thought writing would bring about change. I simply loved it.
Writing, in itself, allowed me to dream about things that in reality were impossible to achieve, things that were forbidden. From where had that dream seeped in? I consider myself as a member of society. If I can dream through my writing, doesn’t that mean the society can dream, too?