Drifting House Read online

  But you know that there is no home to return to, and Jayeong is right to have made up her mind. There are the remaining assets and the children to protect. When your wife rises, it seems impossible that you once knew her body so well.

  Along with the divorce papers, she presses an envelope into your ­hands—money, as you knew it would ­be—and though you will regret it later, you throw her charity at her. It slaps her chest and falls, scattering King Sejong’s somber face across the floor like nightclub advertisements.

  Her arms tremble; as she picks up the money, you flounder in your dark thoughts. The children have gone so still and quiet, they do not seem like children.

  You tug at the top button on your jacket until it comes off in your hand.

  “You need it more than we do,” she says.

  “Don’t make me pathetic!”

  Your agitated hands knock down the house of sugar cubes that Jeongmin has built, which makes him cry. You are astonished and ashamed by your ability to hurt them. Your wife hugs Jeongmin with her right arm and Yoona with her left, calming them.

  “Keep your mind together,” she says. “Think of the children.”

  You are, you are thinking of yourself without them. You touch your children’s faces, then yours, making sure that all of you are still there. You want to hold Yoona, but that will break you. So you kiss Jeongmin’s cheeks. You restack the sugar cubes.

  You tell Yoona, “This is what our house will look like when we live together.”

  Though Yoona’s hands ball up on her hips, her mouth prim with suspicion, Jeongmin, for whom the past is already forgotten, struggles into your lap.

  He says, “Appa, I can read now.”

  He can read, and you were not there to teach him.

  It is winter when you skid across an ice patch. Yeongsuk is gone. He secured a visa to America after all. In your drowsy, drunkenness you miss him. You no longer visit the employment center. You have forgotten why you wanted a job in the first place. Late at night, you raid the bags of those new to Seoul Station while they sleep. You take money, soju, napkins, anything of use, just as people once stole from you. Outside, when winds scissor through your clothes, you warm up beside vendors firing chestnuts and sweet potatoes over coals, and when you walk the Han River’s many bridges, you occasionally entertain jumping.

  When you are sober you think about your parents, or Jayeong. You now think that your wife, now ex–wife, since you finally went to city hall and signed the documents, was right to leave you. You, a docile fool, had believed that if you worked hard enough, you could protect those you loved.

  The drinking makes you content. The pavement is warm even when the Siberian winds hook into your skin; the universe and its people love you when you drink. You will do anything for a drink. Sometimes you prowl large discount stores and filch soju from the stacked aisles. If someone sees you, you go to jail for a few days where they feed you regularly. You even like Daehoon when you’re drunk.

  But when you are not drunk, you wish you were brave enough to be alone. Just yesterday Daehoon told you with his usual cheeriness, “People care more about their hairstyles than a dead stranger.” During slow hours he demonstrates his ­one-handed push–up and tells you with a bravado you despise that you’re lucky because if he wanted to, he could really hurt you.

  In Gwanghwamun most people, still unused to the sudden swell in the number of homeless, are embarrassed by you. You had first constructed a cardboard sign that read: WILL WORK FOR FOOD. You had crouched in front of the sign to hide your face, your hands outstretched to these people with jobs and families who marched up the stairs, who did not look left or right. Someone stepped over your legs. Now you wear a sign that says: I AM DEAF AND DUMB. PLEASE HELP ME. You walk up to people, hand outstretched, and shame them into giving.

  It is rush hour, the time of day when you stare boldly at women in their ­dry-cleaned dresses and suck in their scented soap and hold the smells. A year has passed since you have been in the company of women.

  Among all these untouchable women, you spot Haemin Lee, who studied marketing with you at university. She sports no wedding band. Like many women, in a surge of patriotism she has probably donated her jewelry to the government in order to reduce the national deficit. It is a shock, remembering what you have lost, especially when she recognizes you and her face is transformed by pity, a look that follows you everywhere. You hide behind the waves of your ­shoulder-length hair.

  “Obba!”

  She calls you Older Brother as she used to, and noses her way down until her ­almond-shaped face is level with yours. Her once lovely features now submit to gravity.

  “Dear Lord.” Her breath warms your ear. “How could this happen to you?”

  With your face averted and your cap out, in your best imitation of a Busan accent, you say, “Please, help me. I’ve spilled my soup, all of it.”

  “Obba.” She steps back. Already, there is curiosity to her pity. “Is it you?”

  You realize that you, too, are no longer the man that Haemin knew, not the student who once saved up for summer cycling trips, not the student who feebly demonstrated against the military regime in order to skip a day of classes. You no longer play folk music or believe in progress. You became a salaryman. And now you are not even that.

  Something drops into your hat. The sound, a soft rustle, is bills.

  You keep your eyes to the ground but touch her skirt. “Haemin,” you say. “Thank you.”

  “It’s all I have right now,” she says, apologetic for being a witness. The next train of commuters, rising up from underground like riot police, pushes her along.

  Your cap now cradles five mint-green bills. Fifty thousand won total. Enough for twenty bottles of soju and at least a dozen cups of instant ramen. Or? They say money can even buy testicles on a female virgin. You rub the bills against your papery cheeks. With this money you have choices.

  Daehoon, crouched on cobbled newspapers opposite, stares at you. His sign says: INDUSTRIAL LAYOFFS. AM FEEDING A FAMILY OF THREE.

  “Listen,” he says. “Where you’re ­sitting—that was my spot. It’s been my spot almost every day.”

  You bury the money in your briefcase. “You have a land deed?”

  He stands up, agitated. He says, “At least share.”

  “‘Sharing,’” you quote him, “‘is for losers who can’t protect what they’ve got.’”

  For the rest of the day Daehoon refuses to speak to you. You are used to this. For a ­twenty-seven-year-old, he is quite childish.

  It may be two or three in the morning when you wake to a rustling. You think it is a mouse until you see Daehoon rifling through your briefcase that you had fallen asleep hugging. With his bag and your briefcase over his shoulder, he is preparing to flee. You will not let him do this to you. The green bills separate you from who you were the day before, and you want to live because you are a human being and you deserve it.

  He pivots away as you sit up, but you manage to hold on to the bag’s strap. You claw at your bag with both hands and butt him with your head. He only steps back a few inches, ready now with a pocketknife, the blade flipped up. With a wild kick, you knock it skittering out of his hand and across the cement. You trip him and land on top of his chest, your right hand roped around his throat, and take his fast, furious blows while your left hand gropes in your bag for anything that you can trust. “Help!” you shout, but everyone near you is asleep, or pretending to be. He pries you off and grips you ­one-handed by the throat and holds you up like a hanged man. As you gag, saliva pooling at the corners of your mouth, he laughs and says, “You’re dead, princess,” as he lowers you to the floor. That’s when you touch the metal chopsticks in your briefcase and thrust them into his stomach with both hands as far as you can. He doubles over, looking astonished and a little ashamed that he has permitted this. You feel a small pleasure in stopping his laughter.

  The chopsticks jut out from his belly. A triangle of blood bloo
ms beneath your shoes. You touch your right hand flecked with blood and bow down to his heaving body. You did not know chopsticks could enter so deeply.

  The chopsticks are valuable to you so you hold him by the shoulder, pull them out, and wipe the coat of blood against his shirt. He grunts twice, eyes wide open. As you look for money in his bag, take the pocketknife, rummage for anything that might be useful, he calls your name. You cannot look at him. You run, you flee, gripping your briefcase of belongings and your precious blanket.

  You are a human being, a human being, human. Being.

  DRIFTING HOUSE

  THE DAY THE siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a marooned cart, above the lintel of the gray post office, on placards scattered throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Kim Jong–il. And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Woncheol’s back, their crippled sister, the weight of a few books.

  The younger brother, Choecheol, ran ahead. Like a child, Woncheol thought, frowning, though he was also a child, an ­eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, and the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick. He picked across the public square, afraid to step where last month the town had watched two men dragged in, necklaces of bones, and hanged for cannibalizing their parents. They passed a vendor and woman haggling as if on the frontier of madness. On the straw mat between them, one frozen flank of beef? Pork? Or human? No one knew anymore, though they pretended to.

  “She’s slowing us down,” Choecheol whined as he circled back. “We’ll be dead before we reach China.”

  Woncheol tied his brother’s laces in symmetrical bows. “Shut up,” he said. For younger children obeyed the older one who obeyed the mother who obeyed the father who obeyed the Dear Leader. For the school textbooks stated that a swallow had descended from heaven at the Dear Leader’s birth, that trees bloomed and snow melted in the Dear Leader’s presence. He stubbornly ignored the salmon fishery and the town’s vegetable gardens that the soldiers guarded, shooting intruders on sight. For there was an order to everything. Or there used to be.

  Still, he soldiered his siblings up the mountain slope of granite and bare, spectral trees with the assurance of an oldest son. His legs shook under his sister’s slight weight. As they continued, the town’s narrow harmonica houses, the empty factories, even the glorious statue of Kim Il–sung, their Great Leader and the Dear Leader’s father, shrank to the size of a thumbnail. Then their town was gone. He labored with his back heavy with Gukhwa’s weight, his face scraped raw with exposure to the weather, until his knees buckled once, twice, in the snow. Ahead of them were only the white backs of the mountain range, and the Tumen River still nowhere in sight. He could carry her no farther.

  Choecheol walked ahead, his nose so close to the ground as he looked for acorns, he passed one near his shoe. Woncheol picked it up and waited until his brother was deep in the forest before he set his sister on a hillock of granite. While he struck the nut against a rock, she watched with the expectancy of someone who knew she was loved. The Tumen River to China would be frozen for crossing, and he had to make the necessary sacrifices. He knew this, but still he peeled the woody skin back a thin strip at a time. The acorn’s meat wrinkled and gray. The size of a rat’s brain. He broke it into nearly perfect thirds, and into her waiting, open mouth, fed Gukhwa the largest chunk. His hands were shaking. It was good, without insects.

  “Obba, where are birds?” Gukhwa said, her breath a sick hiss.

  “You babo, it’s too cold for birds.” He was angry because she still trusted him.

  Then he remembered her thirst and scooped up some snow, which she licked off his palm.

  “Obba, it hurts.” She stuck her frozen yellowed tongue out for inspection. “Obba,” she said again, and smiled, a little, as if the words older brother were a song she liked to sing.

  He cleaned her face with his mittens, softly scraped under her fingernails with pine needles. Reminded himself again how impossible it would be to carry her on the long walk to China. Then he closed his eyes, twisted their mother’s scarf around Gukhwa’s neck, and choked her. It was better this way, he was convinced, than to leave her afraid, starving slowly to death. He did not let go until she stopped moving.

  Oldest Son, please forgive my selfishness, his mother had written. You’re their mother and father now. No one but them, in the village created after the Korean War for those the government called the wavering or hostile class, was surprised when their mother fled a week ago. She, a woman rumored to pollute her widowed flesh by selling herself to feed her three children, was only following the thousands escaping to China after the government stopped food rations altogether in 1997. Hunger changed people, destroyed the strongest bonds between parents and children, and young and old, and a woman with disgraced flesh was already a broken woman. As the old saying went, If you starve three days, there is no thought that does not invade your imagination. But Woncheol believed they would find her, the way he believed in the sky and the snow, the American imperialists that the Dear Leader said were starving the country out of existence. It was so inconceivable to be without his mother, he had even sacrificed his sister.

  But with the sack now the weight of a house, a squid boat, Woncheol could not give up as planned. He lugged the sack with her body across rock and ridge, his hands burning through his mittens, until he couldn’t any longer. In the sun his cheekbones were nearly visible through the stretched skin. Gukhwa’s fingers were still haunting his back.

  “What do we do?” he said. “What did I do wrong?”

  Choecheol’s face was blank with waiting because his hyeong, his older brother, always knew what to do.

  But Woncheol only stared at the sack.

  “We can’t bury her,” he finally said. “The ground’s all rock.”

  The downbeat of his words skittered across the icy plain. Choecheol pivoted away. Eyes wild for escape.

  He sang, “One dead American plus one dead American equals two dead Americans,” while crushing snow into powder, trying to distract Woncheol.

  But it was time. Woncheol turned back the lip of the sack. She tumbled out. He moved his hands over Gukhwa’s face, unable to comprehend what he had done. He could only look at her a fragment at a time. Her cheeks the shade of boiled snails. Her arms two stiff twigs.

  “I can do my arithmetic,” Choecheol sang. “One dead ­American—”

  Woncheol forced his brother’s face close. Their sister’s forehead was stippled with sores. She was so quiet, and each moment that passed there seemed to be a little less of her than before.

  “Look hard,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  His brother stopped. His eyes as blank as coffin lids.

  “Ten comrades died this year,” Choecheol said. He smiled so hard he became teary from the effort. “If I don’t think about her, she’s not there.”

  Their baby sister. The sun, dancing on Woncheol’s chilled face, changed Gukhwa into polished bone. Into something unworldly, numinous. Once he had fed and bathed her, had been her drifting house. Something stirred in him, a memory of an earlier time. The trees, heavy with swallows. When the birds rose into the air, the trees lifting with them. His sister’s feet the size of a swallow. Swallows, they could go anywhere, his mother had said, but they returned because it was their home. Suddenly Woncheol was afraid.

  “I killed her.” He said this with surprise.

  “­You—didn’­t—kill—anyone!” Choecheol covered his ears and began to sing.

  Woncheol began folding the sack in neat creases. The praise of his teachers, his mother’s trust. Nothing could help him now. He folded until Choecheol complained of the cold, his ­blue-tinted lips puckered like an old halmeoni looking for her teeth.

  Only then Woncheol took two fistfuls of snow. He smoothed it down over his sister and all his memories. H
e added fistful after fistful until he could no longer feel the cold. Added snow until a shape grew resembling the tumulus graves of their ancestors. He stepped back and circled the mound, watching it.

  Sooner or later, everyone in town heard the stories about those who crossed the border and returned with a miracle of money and food. There were stories of an ironmonger Lee safe in something called an embassy, or ­rice-cake-turned-grass-cake-vendor Miss Han furtively married to a Chinese farmer, despite the Chinese government’s bounty on North Korean heads. But Mrs. Ku with child was beaten off the U.S. embassy gates by the Chinese police. Woojin, a boy of eight, was killed by border guards. Someone called Daejon’s uncle, drowned in the ­monsoon-swollen Tumen River to China. A young and beautiful Seoyeon (they were always young and beautiful in the whispered stories), raped but lucky to be alive. ­Thirteen-year-old Sora, caught and sold by Chinese traffickers. Which meant rape, too, Seungwoo’s aunt had said. Whether any of this was actually true, no one knew, the same way they silently speculated whether someone was an ally or informer, or whether someone who disappeared in the night had been imprisoned or sent to a reeducation camp or had escaped to China, and watched and waited as the rumors turned into hardened truth.

  Still, as the sun set, the two black dots moved across the great white back of the mountain’s summit, past the last stately granite boulders carved with the Great Leader Kim Il–sung’s and the Dear Leader Kim Jong–il’s epithets. The brothers unknowingly moved in the same path that their mother had embarked on a month ago when she had made her terrible decision, followed the ghostly steps of others whose hunger had strained their allegiances to family, to country, to love. Behind Woncheol his brother struggled from rock to rock. So small, Woncheol thought, so breakable, turning every few minutes to watch his brother’s progress as if he would lose him if he stopped looking.

  “Careful!” he said, afraid for him.

  “Yes, Hyeong.”