The end of august, p.22
The End of August, page 22
Aigu, it looks like I’ve killed somebody! Who did I kill? Who do I want to kill?
Thundundun, thundundun. Even her bare feet inside her rubber boots were bloody, this lukewarm sticky blood. Thundundun, thundundun. She cut the gizzard in half and removed the membrane, then pulled out the gizzard. Once she washed away the blood and sediment with well water, the white organ, which looked gray in some places and yellow in others, looked like a blind sea creature that might still swim around the seafloor. Thundundun, thundundun. She found something that looked like a testicle hanging off one part of the ovaries. She opened the membrane carefully with the blade of her knife so as not to damage what was inside; globs of egg white dribbled out, and into her palm dropped a yellow. An egg that would’ve been laid the next day, that would’ve had its shell formed that night. She set the yolk with the other small ones that she had already taken out, then unraveled the guts so they stretched out. Thundundun, thundundun. She put the tip of her knife inside and opened up the intestines. Thundundun, thundundun.
She brought a pinch of coarse salt out from the kitchen, massaged the intestines with it, then washed them. Then, finally, she hit the chicken’s legs with the handle of her knife—thundundun, thundundun—pulled the bones, out, and threw them away.
It had taken rather a long, blood-soaked time. The afternoon light was beginning to fade. A fly that had come out of nowhere was on the gizzard, rubbing its hands together. Whoosh whoosh, the wind chased away the fly, and in its place dropped an ivy leaf, dancing near the bird’s heart. Twitch twitch, whoosh whoosh, twitch twitch, whoosh whoosh.
The woman dug a hole in the corner of the garden and buried the unwanted organs and bones. If they were left unburied an animal might eat them, and neither a dog nor a pig should ever know the taste of chicken, because then they would attack and eat chickens. She returned to the well, drew some water, and threw it on the stone, wiped away the blood and the fragments of the intestines with her hand, then drew more water and cleaned the knife and metal basin. As the blood seeped into the ground, the woman felt the mask that had been stuck to her face slide off.
On the rock the beautiful intestines glimmered, ill-suited to a garden in November. Heart. Liver. Gizzard. Eggs. She looked inside the hen’s empty abdomen, turned her head around slowly, and saw the three eggs that had been left in the corner of the garden. Whoosh whoosh, the north wind got fiercer. To get rid of the warmth that still remained in the hen, whoosh whoosh, thundundun, thundundun, the wind brought the sound of the drum from the far distance. Whoosh whoosh, thundundun, thundundun, getting harder, faster, harder! Harder! Thundundun! Thundundun! Pain, almost like she had been speared, ran through her head; she staggered and fell to her knees. Thundundun! Light exploded in her head, thundundun! Thundundun! Aigo, nunbusyeola! She clung to the rim of the well. Thundundun! Thundundun! Blackness. She could not see a thing. But she could feel someone’s eyes. Someone is looking at me through the darkness. Thundundun thundundun whoosh whoosh, she heard a different sound than the drum. What is that? A light, faint and dim, came, whoosh whoosh, the sound of the wind. She became frantic at the depths of her consciousness. She could not let herself be swallowed up by the darkness yawning open before her. She focused only on the sound of the wind and pushed open the ring of light, and the sound of the drum became farther away. Thundundun thundundun whoosh whoosh, now she could only hear the sound of the wind. Whoosh, she realized that she was leaning into the well and she took two steps back, hana, dul, but her field of vision lurched and she fell, the wall of the well looming over her like a tower. She pushed with both her hands against the side of the well, leaving two red handprints.
Blood? But I just washed it all off. Whose blood?
She brought her palm up to her face. There was nothing on it. Whoosh, whoosh, her vision cleared and the pain in her head lessened. She listened to the quiet of the garden. Whoosh, under the faded ink-colored sky, the shadows of the tree branches and dead leaves and the clothes airer and the earthenware pots quivered.
My mouth is moving. Like I’m talking to someone. But no sound or word is coming out. My face is twitching too. Maybe I should sleep it off a little. Ten or twenty minutes.
She put her hands on the rim of the well and stood up.
“Eomoni, are you all right?”
Whoosh whoosh. Hee-hyang waited for the sound of the wind to die down before opening her mouth.
“I’m fine.”
“You look awfully pale.”
“I just got a little dizzy, that’s all.” Sweat ran down her back, going from her armpits to her sides.
Woo-cheol’s eyes fell to the flat stone. The bird had a small crest and there were eggs, too, so it must be the hen. With only three precious hens, why had she killed one? They’d just had Abeoji’s birthday; and So-won and he were both born in December, so still some time away; Woo-gun was born in April; and Eomoni’s birthday was in May—so what was the celebration? Jungyangjeol, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, was over, and nobody had said anything about anyone getting married, and the ceremony for devotees of Confucian scholars was next month.
“Is company coming?” Woo-cheol asked.
Hee-hyang came out of the kitchen with straw and straw rope, placed the organs inside the chicken’s abdomen, bundled the hen up in the straw, and tied it at both ends.
“Go take this for me.”
“What?”
“Go take this for me,” Hee-hyang said in exactly the same tone.
“Where?”
“The house by the cedars.”
Woo-cheol was silent.
“Your sibling’s been born.”
Woo-cheol raised his chin slightly and looked at the straw bundle.
“Go take it for me,” she repeated.
He hesitated. “Tomorrow’s the big competition, you know.”
“It won’t take you five minutes if you run, surely? So go take this there for your mother.”
He didn’t want to continue this conversation, so Woo-cheol took the straw bundle and ran off, turning his back on his mother.
“And look to see if there’s chilis in the geumjul!”
Whoosh whoosh, the wind and the woman seemed to rest against each other as they watched her son run off. Whoosh whoosh, when she could no longer see her son’s back, she smoothed down her chima with the knife.
Whoosh whoosh, the wind entered his cotton jeogori from the neck. Woo-cheol walked not in the direction of the house by the cedars but toward Gyo-dong, going up a narrow, sloping path. At dusk, the path was quiet, with no sign of anyone else, and it went on forever. Every house’s gate had a piece of paper with a wish written on it for a happy New Year or for good health and good weather. Good handwriting and bad, thick ink and thin. Woo-cheol’s eyes went to the platform in front of an upper-class yangban house’s gates. When they’d been out for a walk recently, Woo-gun had asked him, What’s that?, and he’d answered, That’s for climbing up to ride a horse; now he felt like mounting a horse and riding off somewhere. He heard the snarling of dogs fighting in the garden of a house. He smelled the aroma of dinner, pork soup and garlic in fermented bean paste, coming from a kitchen somewhere. When was it, he wondered, that having dinner with his family became agony?
In February his halmoni had died, and at the funeral he’d heard from some visitors who’d come to pay their respects a rumor that the woman in the house by the cedars was pregnant. Ever since, his eomoni had gotten stranger all the time. She’s mourning your halmoni’s death; they were so close, his abeoji had told him, but after the ceremony on the thirty-seventh day, and then even after the one on the forty-ninth day, Eomoni’s dizzy spells and nausea had only gotten worse. When it was really bad she stayed in bed for three days, unable even to eat or go to the toilet. She had tried traditional medicine and acupuncture, they had even had a mudang do an uhwangut for her, but she didn’t get better, and the reason was, undoubtedly, because the belly of the woman in the house by the cedars was getting bigger by the day.
Woo-cheol adjusted his grip on the bundled hen. What should he say when he handed it over? This is from my mother, congratulations? He couldn’t say that. He needed to breathe in the cold air for longer, much, much longer. Woo-cheol crossed the river, listening for any sound of water under the ice, and stood in the middle of the delta. Whoosh whoosh, the wind blew straight in his face in defiance. Woo-cheol felt his lungs swell with cold air. There were no swans. Usually they swam near Yongdu-mok. Honk! Honk! Honk! Woo-cheol looked up at the sky. The swans were flying. Hana, dul, set, net, daseot, yeoseot, ilgop, yeodeol, ahop, nine of them, their wings reddened by the evening sun, but in the shadow of their wings their bodies were tinged with blue.
How beautiful. Standing in the middle of the river like this, it was like there was no war anywhere. Well, no, he thought, but this delta that I’m standing on right now looks like it’s frozen in place, but the truth is that the water flowing under the ice is constantly wearing it down, and soon my big feet won’t even have a place to stand.
His thumb, with a splinter stuck in it, ached. Woo-cheol bit the flesh of his finger trying to get the splinter out. Where did he get it? Maybe yesterday at the main building of the shrine.
From the gap in the boards, the afternoon light had stretched long to the side. She had reached out to the object of worship and touched it, then taken off her undergarments. Purely because of the location, the previous day’s rendezvous had felt ceremonial.
“Let’s just not move until one of us can’t stand it anymore.”
“With me inside you?”
“Yes.”
So we’ll see who can hold out. We held each other close with no gap between us, feeling only the parts of ourselves that had started to meld into each other, looking into each other’s eyes. She was the one who opened her mouth.
“I can’t take it anymore.”
“Just a little longer, so warm, feels so good. Ah.”
“You’re moving. Don’t move.”
“No, you’re moving, look, you’re shaking again.”
They heard the rustling of someone walking on dead leaves getting closer.
Thump-thump, the sound of his heart, rustle rustle. I moved my hips, slowly, rustle rustle, even when the sound of footsteps stopped I didn’t.
She bit the back of her own hand to stifle herself. The prayer bell rang. I sped up the movement of my hips. Clap clap, the sound of someone clapping in prayer reverberated.
I came.
Thump-thump, our hearts beat in time as the sound of footsteps got farther away. Thump, rustle, thump, rustle.
Chikchik pokpok, chikchik pokpok, the sound of the train almost brought Woo-cheol back to reality, but when the whistle blew and the train disappeared toward Mount Adong, he once again slipped back into his memories.
My fiancée. Six months ago Abeoji asked me if I wanted to be introduced to some girls.
Chee In-hye, the seventh of eight children. Only the first and eighth are boys, so she has four older sisters, who all dote on her like she’s their own daughter. Her family runs a rice store. Oh, you know the one, the big place next to Shimomura’s Barbershop near the station. They have the store plus a house and a warehouse, and they have three or four employees. They’re pretty successful, so imagine the dowry. And Chee In-hye is learning from her eomoni how to cook and do needlework, all the training to be a bride, but she also went to private classes until she was sixteen, so she can read and write hangul and Chinese characters, and she loves to read classics like Myeongsim Bogam and The Tale of Sim Chong.
“She’s two years older than you. She’s no beauty, but you can’t choose a bride by her looks. As long as she’s kind, cheerful, and lively. Anyway, all the talk about her is that she’ll be a good wife, so I think you should meet her. You’ll never know if you don’t,” Abeoji had said.
Woo-cheol had arrived to meet her without much in the way of expectations, and she certainly wasn’t ugly; in fact, depending on the angle she sometimes looked beautiful. And more important, she looked him straight in the eye when they spoke, without affectations. He was charmed by her manner of speaking, imagined that he could spend a lifetime talking with this woman, and decided to have her as his wife.
Once they had exchanged napchae and the nappye, the betrothal, was over, they were allowed to meet just the two of them, and once the rainy season had ended, they had started to see each other every day. Listening to her and her listening to him had started to become vital to him. When she was listening intently to him her eyes smiled, as if her pupils were poking fun at him; they glittered with intelligence—one day in August, entranced by her eyes, he had pressed his lips to hers. Once he had kissed her he could not stop, until her lips and tongue were red and swollen; he kissed her until he didn’t know if they were kissing while talking or talking while kissing.
It happened on the last day in August. Since morning the rain had jumped about on the ground. After noon, the sun had poked its face out from the grave of rain, and unable to wait for the rain to ease off, he had run to her house.
In-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale just as the rain lifted it had become hot, as if a blaze had surged in the sky. In-hale ex-hale if the force of these flames were to burn everything on earth in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale steam rose from the road and my body in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale
She was sitting on a stool in front of her house waiting.
“I thought you might come when the rain stopped.”
“If I didn’t come what would you have done?”
“I couldn’t think about that.”
“You’re an odd one.”
“Oh, how can you say that? After all, you did come.”
She laughed, exposing her small, white front teeth.
He wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his hemp jeogori as he walked along the riverside, with her beside him, treading on his shadow. They climbed, passing a path teeming with green foxtails and plantain, hand in hand, looking out for rocks and brush, until they reached a small meadow hidden by the trunks and branches and leaves of sawtooth oaks.
He gazed at her face.
“What?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“We just saw each other yesterday.”
“As soon as we’ve said goodbye, I want to see you again.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to be together all the time.”
“I want to marry you soon.”
He kissed her under a sawtooth oak that buzzed with the cries of the cicadas.
He took her tongue into his mouth. His mouth filled with her saliva. His tongue caressed the smooth reverse of her teeth one by one. The tip of her tongue flicked into movement, and she took his tongue into her mouth. He let her. More. More. When their lips parted for breath, the cheeks of her down-turned face were blushing, and her hair, in daenggimeori, shone in the afternoon sun. Maeaemmaeaemmaeaem maeaemmaeaemmaeaem maeaemmaeaemmaeaem chireureureut chireureureut chireureureut.
She closed her eyes and leaned against the oak, becoming as quiet as the bark. She undid her sash and slipped off her jeogori, then opened her undershirt, without saying a word. The light filtering through the leaves of the trees fell on her breasts, creamy white apart from the pale brown mole to the right below her collarbone.
“You’re beautiful.”
The words slid from his mouth.
“I love you,” she said, her eyes still closed.
The wind blew; the circles of light on her breasts shook. He knelt. He gently caressed one of her red nipples with his thumb, and it rose, becoming hard. Perhaps because the rain had stopped, the ground and grass gave off a sweaty, moldering scent. Cradling one nipple in his palm, he brought his face to her other breast and took her nipple into his mouth. It hardened more in his mouth, and as he licked and sucked, his heart beating faster now, to its limits, he could no longer check his desire. He put his hand on her blue chima.
“No, we can’t, we can’t do that until we’re married. Andwaeyo, butagieyo, anything else you want, but not that, please, no.”
She smoothed her chima down, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her chima up and pushed her down onto the grass.
“Andwaeyo! Sireoyo! I told you, we have to wait until we’re married.”
She flapped like a hen does when someone grabs its body, thrashing and raising hell.
“Sireo!”
The moment he stopped her mouth with his palm, he felt a dark spirit slip down within him. He pinned down her struggling body and yanked down her undergarments, taking off her undershorts and underwear in one. He grabbed her locked kneecaps with both hands and pulled them apart, and he had just forced his legs between her hips when he realized he didn’t have a clue where he should put what. He was distracted. All muscles were strained, his and hers. Suddenly he was inside her, inside! But no matter how much he thrust he couldn’t go all the way in. He took a deep breath, as he did before starting to run, and thrust again, and a muffled cry of anguish left her throat. Supporting his own weight with his elbows he rammed, harder, faster.
Her nipples, still showing how he’d suckled them, like a bruise; her legs, held open and unmoving; her pale thighs, now scratched; her right hand, grasping the grass; the toes of her left foot, out of its shoe, bent unnaturally—she looked like she were dying. He began to worry and pressed his ear to her chest. Thud thud thud thud thud thud, it was moving; he was glad. Thud thud thud thud thud thud. He stroked her hair and put his mouth to her ear.
“Are you all right?”
“Sireo.”
“Sorry.”
“It was so painful.”
“Sorry.”
