The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (7 page)

I would see the egrets in the forest, the forest after nightfall, the flocks of egrets leaning close together in clusters, blanketing the entire forest beautifully with their sleep, as if they had forgiven everything in this world. One day, I promised myself, with even more desperation on days filled with despair and loneliness, I would make my way beyond the ridge that was blocking my view, my arm rattling on the windowsill of my train car.

It has been sixteen years since this promise.

I still have not made my journey to see the birds. It is not that I have forgotten. On the contrary . . . with the passing of each year, there were even more days when I reminded myself of the promise, the white egrets emerging even more splendidly in my heart. Even when I massaged my tired feet, I would think about the forest that I had yet to visit and the flocks of egrets asleep with their faces to the stars, and somehow I could maintain composure in the face of the weariness that my fatigue brought me, and even in the face of the rare joys
that found their way to me. Even the bitter miseries, the cold solitudes that fell for days like rain—they would somehow feel insignificant and ephemeral, giving me the strength to greet the new day and live on.

But now, this name, Hui-jae, haunts me—have the flocks of egrets flown into the distant sadness from all those years ago, from that time when her absence came to be? Was I able, back then, to remind myself of my promise to someday go see the forest?

I am sixteen. I step inside the lone, remote room. I open the window. My eyes turn round and wide. Had the train arrived just as I opened the window? The window, the size of a wrapping cloth, looks out on the subway station across from the vacant lot, and an uneven flow of heads, nothing else but the heads of these peoples’ bodies, is pouring out. As the people move up the stairs of the subway station and rush out, like an incoming tide, to the fork in the road, only their heads and nothing else are visible. In less than five minutes, however, the people have seeped away somewhere and the fork in the road is completely empty. All those people, where have they gone? It seems it was a dream, these people, who in just five minutes crowded in and emptied out. I stand looking, listening to Cousin open the small window in the kitchenette. Cousin and I sweep and wipe down our room. We sweep up the traces that the former tenant left behind into the dustbin; pick up a shard of red brick that seems to have been used to level the cupboard; throw out scattered pieces of tissue paper from the attic, and the old, abandoned kerosene stove.

Oldest Brother places some money in Cousin’s nineteen-year-old hands.

“Ask the landlady for directions to the market and go buy the things we’ll need to cook food.”

After Oldest Brother leaves
, Cousin and I lie on the floor on our stomachs and write on a sheet of white paper the things we will need to cook food, just as he said. A pot, a strainer, a large bowl for rinsing rice, three small bowls, three sets of spoon and chopsticks, three plates, a kerosene stove, three rice bowls, three soup bowls . . . Cousin and I follow the alley all the way out to the market, which we are told is located on the other side of the overpass, and buy the kitchen items on the list. Older Brother’s belongings are delivered from the night duty room at the Yongsan Community Service Center to our lone, remote room. A desk and a chair.
The Complete Compilation of Six Major Laws
and books on criminal law are inside his suitcase. I open a small bag to find a bundle of Older Brother’s underwear, which needs washing. After looking around the room and the kitchen, Older Brother leaves again then comes back with a newly purchased vinyl wardrobe, a small cupboard, and a sack of rice. He connects metal beams to set up the wardrobe next to the desk and tells us to hang up the clothes in our bags. We leave once again to buy our bedding. Older Brother walks to the market the way he crossed the athletic field to leave the Job Training Center, his eyes on the ground. An intermittent sigh,
phew
, drifts out from his mouth. We buy floor mattresses, acrylic mink blankets, and three pillows, and divide up the load to carry. Older Brother says only what is necessary and does not even smile. “Let’s eat out tonight.” He takes Cousin and me to the alley outside our lone room and treats us to pork rib barbecue for dinner. He does not eat. He looks like he is extremely angry, or perhaps enervated; he just sits there watching us eat the ribs.

One does not always age according to conventional number sequence. One can go from sixteen to thirty-two in one day. It was that day at the restaurant that I, then sixteen years old, suddenly turned thirty-two. That day when I saw Older Brother sitting there, weary inside the smoke of pork ribs, treating Cousin and me to a barbecue dinner but not taking a single bite himself, I believe that I turned thirty-two, the age that I am now.

Out of our week-long vacation
, we spend five days back in the country. It is our first time traveling back to the country from Seoul. Since Cousin and I only know our way around the route between the training center and our lone room, Older Brother comes along to get us our tickets and takes us to our seats and buys us an armful of pastries and soft drinks for us to eat on the train.

Here in the present, outside of my writing, I feel an ache in my heart.

Back then, eating was such a major issue; Older Brother, back in that time, is continuously treating us to food. At the restaurant across from the community center, he treats us to bean sprout soup; at the Job Training Center snack stall he treats us to pastries and milk; and outside our rented room he treats us to pork ribs . . . He is a mere twenty-three-year-old. A youngster already with a lot on his plate, working at the community center by day and attending law school by night. Cousin boards the train first, and Oldest Brother places some money in his sixteen-year-old sister’s hand. Tells her to get a carton of cigarettes for Father, a slab of beef, and cookies for Little Brother to take home.

Mom is on her way out, carrying a lunch pail for Father working on the other side of the railroad. When Mom sees me walk in the gate, the pail falls from her hand. Hearing his sister’s voice from inside one of the rooms, Little Brother pushes the door open. Sister!

Running outside in his bare feet, the seven-year-old brother clings to his sixteen-year-old sister’s arm.

“Where have you been?” Mom’s eyes well up with tears. “No more going away, promise?”

Little Brother jumps up and climbs his sister’s back. “Get down, you’re going to hurt your sister’s back.” But Little Brother is persistent.

“No more going away ever again, okay?”

Little Brother wraps his baby
arms tight around his sister’s neck. Mom picks up the lunch pail.

“After you left, he made a big fuss crying and whining, asking where you’ve gone. How are we going to go through that all over again?”

I head out after Mom with her lunch pail to see Father, carrying Little Brother on my back.

“After you left, he closed the shop for three days, just lying in his room.”

That was what Father had done? I am reminded of that night, seeing Father standing blankly in the dark, which makes my nose sting. But Father shows none of this when he sees me. “It’s you,” is all he says. With this, the sting I felt in my heart is relieved. In the evening Father returns home near the center of the village. Mother has gone to town to her sister-in-law’s house for the memorial rite for Grandmother. Father is a good cook, although he does not cook that often. According to Mom, Father’s cooking tastes good because he is generous with the seasoning, making no attempt to be frugal.

“Whenever your father enters the kitchen, ten days’ worth of seasoning disappears. How could his cooking possibly not taste good, when he uses so much seasoning.”

Father dips long strips of pork into a red sauce made with scallions and garlic and red chili powder and sesame seeds and sesame oil and cooks them on the grill for us. Second Brother is now a military cadet and Third Brother is staying at a boarding house in Jeonju. Like baby swallows, Younger Sister and Little Brother and I nimble and chew the sauced pork that Father has grilled for us. Father says tomorrow he will cook
jajang
noodles for me.

“That’s okay,” I say.

And Father says, “But your face is all sunken.”

He, whom I met sixteen years later
, would not know, that once when he was making fried rice with kimchi in my kitchen I had thought of Father. He took out some soured kimchi from my fridge, chopped the lettuce into fine strips, then melted a cube of butter on a heated pan. Putting two fingers together, he said, “I need just this much sliced beef.” As I took out the beef from the freezer, I let out a frail giggle behind his back, and in the middle of frying the beef on the pan, he stopped and asked what I was giggling about.

I answered, “Just because. It’s just that I’m happy.”

Only when he was cooking did Father stop thinking about what other people thought about him.

Right now, right this moment, writing this makes me happy.

Only when he was cooking, Father stopped thinking about what other people thought about him, I write, and I feel happy. For I am probably the only one in my family who can describe Father like this. If Mother found out that I had described him this way, she might throw me a sidelong scowl.