The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (5 page)

“You can’t keep spending money on bread like this. We have very little money and we won’t be making any until we find a job and get paid.”

I relent and take a spoonful of the soup from the strange tray to my mouth. I am again reminded of my bowls on Mom’s kitchen shelf, which brings tears to my eyes. Floating on top of the soup, inside the strange tray, I see my seven-year-old brother’s sleep-soaked face the day I left home, asking, “Where are you going, Sis?”

I take a big scoop of my rice. I drink up the soup. I chew on the stringy and odd-tasting kimchi, and swallow.

The teachers all refer to us as the
industrial labor force. Even in the middle of soldering classes, we are reminded that we are here as part of the industrial labor force. The doors of our dormitory rooms at the training center are each marked with a sign carrying the name of a flower, as in kindergarten classrooms. What was the name of my room? Rose? Lily? All I remember is that there were lockers attached to our wooden beds. Some years later, there was a popular comedy skit on TV, titled
Atten-HUT!
I used to watch closely whenever it came on because the interior of the military barracks in the show was very much like the dormitory room where I slept as a sixteen-year-old. The only difference is that our rooms have a loft, accessible by a ladder. Five of us sleep on each floor. Cousin and I help each other, as Mom told us to, and climb up the loft to our designated beds. Following roll call at nine
P.M.
, lights must all go out. Nights when I cannot sleep and lie staring at the ceiling in the dark, I get to thinking about the pitchfork inside the well, just as I do when I awake in the early hours of dawn. The sole of my foot hurts when I think of the silence of the pitchfork, sunken deep under the water, which makes me toss and turn and reach my hand out to touch Cousin’s forehead, her eyes. If she seems to be sleeping, I shake her awake.

“What is it?”

I almost bring up the pitchfork, then decide not to. But I do not want to lie awake alone, so I keep reaching for Cousin’s forehead and eyes, until she slaps my hand with her palm.

Cousin is nineteen years old. She uses scented lotion on her hands. When I get back to the dorm room after washing my face, she uses cotton pads to dab skin toner around my skin, pressing gently. Then she speaks to me in a whisper.

“One of our teachers, Mr. Kim, isn’t he dashing?”

I nod. Mr. Kim teaches liberal arts. It is from him that I hear about the life of words, instead of industrial labor force, something I have not heard about since
arriving at the training center. He tells us life is beautiful. Did he also tell us what made it beautiful? I cannot remember. He simply said, “Life is a beautiful thing.” What its beauty will bring us, and what its beauty will take from us, he does not say. Simply beautiful, is all he says.

Everything turns white inside my head. I think of the entrance of the industrial complex. I stand at the entrance of the industrial complex, with Cousin by my side. Where did everyone go, leaving only Cousin and me here? There were twenty of us sharing one dorm room, but I cannot recall a single face. Out of the blue, a pair of eyeglasses appears then disappears again. The only reason I remember this face is because it was the only one wearing glasses, not only among our roommates but in the entire dormitory. So it is the eyeglasses that I remember, not the face itself. A pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses placed on a pale face. And I only remember a single name: Kim Jeong-rye. In this case it is only the name I remember; the face has been erased. All I have left is a faint impression that her face was rather big compared to her body. Kim Jeong-rye. The name belonged to an orphan. Each Saturday, when we are given permission to spend the night outside the dorm, this name leaves the Job Training Center, saying she is going to visit her orphanage. On one of these Saturdays when Kim Jeong-rye has gone to the orphanage, a commotion breaks out in the dormitory.

“The bread is gone.”

“I lost my wallet.”

“My clothes!”

We open Kim Jeong-rye’s locker. It has been emptied out. Was Kim Jeong-rye really an orphan? Whichever the case, it turns out Kim Jeong-rye has also taken Cousin’s lotion and she does not return when roll call comes around Sunday night. She has deserted the training. Also
gone are seven of my new panties and three of my new handkerchiefs, which Mom bought in town and folded up for me into small squares to be packed with my other things.

Even when the weekends come around, Cousin and I have nowhere to go. We do not even know which roads lead where on the other side of the center’s walls. Those who don’t have anywhere to go play volleyball on the athletic field. Cousin and I join them in chasing after the ball. When we get tired, Cousin and I take a shower at the shared washroom inside the center, scrubbing each other’s backs clean. On other days, we have to finish washing within a given time, but after the trainees leave for the weekend, we can take things slow and easy. After the shower, Cousin lies on her stomach on the hardwood floor of our dorm room, her face smothered with facial cream, and writes a letter to Aunt. I lie next to her and stare up at the ceiling while playing around with my feet. My foot keeps poking at Cousin. Irritated, Cousin suggests that I try writing a letter as well. I roll over on my stomach and whisper into Cousin’s ear.

“I am going to write something other than a letter.”

Cousin stares at me, the tip of her ballpoint pen still on the letter pad.

“Like what?”

I whisper into her ear my secret, something that I have not told anyone in all of my sixteen years.

“Like a poem or a novel.”

Cousin’s eyes grow wide.

“You mean you want to be a writer?”

Scared that Cousin is going to throw cold water on what I said, I keep speaking, trying hard to explain that this is what I have wanted to do for a long time, and that there is nothing else I’d rather do. Cousin tilts her head, lifting her pen from the letter pad to her chin.

“I thought those kinds of people were born different, you know?”

I am so distressed to think she
might say, “That is why you will never be a writer,” so I keep talking. “They are not born different. They think different.”

Cousin does not say anything and is lost in thought. I pull myself closer to her, my face red with the fear that she is unable to understand what I am saying.

“It’s no different from your wanting to be a photographer, taking pictures of those birds.”

Cousin folds up her letter and puts it away in her locker, then lies down next to where I am stretched straight on my back, my eyes on the ceiling. Cousin lifts her legs toward the ceiling, crossing her slender ankles.

“What are you going to write about?”

For a moment, the pitchfork at the bottom of the well passes in front of my eyes.

“That I don’t know yet.”

Cousin is tender toward me, more so than usual, and I get to talking about how I struck my foot with the pitchfork. I even show her the sole of my foot.

“Look. It’s all healed now but it still hurts when I walk too long, as if my tendon’s being pulled.”

Cousin gazes at my foot.

“What does this have to do with wanting to write?”

I cannot find the words to answer her question. How do I explain to her, that if do not keep something pure inside my heart, I will inevitably strike down at my foot again with a pitchfork? Instead, I say to her, “Only this will protect me.”

I feel silly about my overly emphasized words and so I add, “No need to worry anymore about the pitchfork, because I threw it in the well.”

Cousin sits up.

“What did you say?”

“The pitchfork. I said I threw it in the well.”

Cousin stares at me as if she’s completely clueless.

“Deliberately?”

I nod.

“Why would you do that?”

I cannot answer. I do not know how to explain that I was scared. I was scared that one day I would take it down from the shed again, intending to turn the barley hay over, and hurt my foot again. Cousin still looks puzzled as she speaks to me in a dignified tone.

“When we go home for a visit, you should tell Uncle so that he can pump out the well.”

I could not speak.

“The water is probably all tainted by now. Did you think about the fact that people drink from the well?”

The water? I am speechless, never having thought about how the pitchfork would have tainted the water.

When Oldest Brother comes for one of his visits and takes us to a bakery near the entrance of the industrial complex, Cousin announces in a loud voice, pointing at me, “She says she’s going to be a writer.”

“A writer? You?”

Oldest Brother looks at me so dumbfounded that I throw Cousin a mean glance.

“What’s the matter? It’s not like it has to be kept a big secret.”

Oldest Brother takes us to a Chinese place for
jajang
noodles and walks us back to the Job Training Center, sending us in with a bag full of milk and pastries and things. Then he walks across the athletic field with his eyes on the ground and his towering back hunched, and disappears through the center’s gate.

At last, my sentences begin to take shape. Short, very simple. The past in present tense; the present in past tense. Clear like a photograph. Lest the door to
the lonely room close again. Let the sentences convey Oldest Brother’s loneliness as he walked toward the center gate, his eyes on the ground.

When I heard Ha Gye-suk say, clearly, “Your life seems different from ours,” I realized that it was my heart that was sore. My heart ached. There was another person who had said this me, not exactly in Ha Gye-suk’s words, but in the same vein:
You are different from me.
It was my mother.

Sixteen years after my sixteenth year, I am a writer and I am working on something to meet an urgent deadline. Mom is visiting me in Seoul and she keeps talking to me. I take down one of my books from the shelf and hand it to her.

“Why don’t you read this for a while. I’ll be done soon.”

When I am finished, I find Mom sleeping, her face covered with my book.

“Mother!”

She seems apologetic that she fell asleep instead of reading my book, and says, as she hands the book back to me, “You are now different from me.” Her words, at the time, seem natural and indisputable. Of course we’re different: Mom was born in the 1930s and I was born in 1963. By “different,” I gather that Mom is referring to generational gap. But this is not the case. There is something that I have never known. That the only letters Mom can read are the letters in her prayer book, and that although she may be praying with the book open on her lap, she has all the prayers memorized. I learn from Youngest Brother only the following year that he has been teaching Mother to read and write.