The end of august, p.26
The End of August, page 26
“Shh!” In-hye put her finger to her mouth.
Chun-ho, Chong-hu halbi, and Yu-won put a little spit on their fingers and punched holes in the sliding paper doors, and with that, the tradition of peeking into the newlyweds’ bedroom had begun, so Woo-cheol first took off his own jeogori, undid the ties around his ankles, and took off his paji; then he took off In-hye’s crown and removed her dodeurakdaenggi and apdaenggi, before undoing the string and taking off her jeogori. In-hye pulled out the golden hairpin with the turtle decoration and let her one long braid fall down; then, in her underwear, she quietly got into the bed. Woo-cheol put out the candles near the bed, and the snickering on the other side of the door retreated with the sound of footsteps sneaking away.
“So she figured it out somehow.”
“Yeah. But we still have to go through the rituals of you taking me to your house and you being invited back here.”
“I don’t want my abeoji and eomoni to find out.”
“Your mother might guess though.”
“Well, I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. . . . Are you starting to show?”
“A little.”
“Let me see.”
Woo-cheol pulled down In-hye’s sokpaji and placed his palm near her navel.
“The baby’s here, right?”
“I think so.”
“Can you feel it moving?”
Woo-cheol lay down on his back next to In-hye.
“Not yet; that’s still a ways off. The baby’s legs are still like this,” she said, her pointer and middle fingers walking their way up to Woo-cheol’s chest.
“You’re making me ticklish.” He grabbed the small “legs.”
“My, what big hands.”
“Yours are just small.”
“No, no, your hands are especially big. Look, I can fit two of my hands into one of yours.”
Woo-cheol gently cradled his wife’s head and traced the line of her parting with his tongue. In-hye tried to tickle him, her hands clambering up his frame, but she felt his hot sigh near the whorl of her hair and stifled her laughter in his shoulder. The perfume of the camellia oil in her hair and the tang of sweat melded into a scent they both breathed in deeply.
She sensed that her husband’s slightly tensed body wanted to be inside her, that he wanted her warm, soft body to embrace him. There wasn’t the same reckless intensity with which they had sought each other in the summer by the riverbed, but each was seeking the other out; that was certain. They stayed in their embrace, gently shaking.
“I want you.”
“Andwaeyo.”
His big, swollen-knuckled hand took hers in it and took it down, down; his thick tongue lapped at her teeth and gums and tongue until no other taste remained; moving her tightly grasped hand up and down, he put her head beneath the blankets, down, farther down; he stroked her chin, he cradled her head, like she was in a cradle, like rocking a cradle.
Your hands, my hands, rocking and being rocked, rocking and being rocked, In-hye, aigu, In-hye, and then your voice from somewhere high up, In-hye! Higher than the eaves, higher even than the stars, In-hye, In-hye, In-hye!
In-hale . . . ex-hale . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . She heard his deep, sonorous snoring. After the desire was gone she always felt a sadness, like her song had been cut off. However many breaths she took she couldn’t continue the song, and however close she listened she couldn’t hear it. It had vanished completely. Just like that. In-hye gingerly squeezed her husband’s hand. It was warmer than before. She let go of his hand and pressed hers to her stomach. She might vomit. She felt nauseated. But there was nothing left to throw up. She didn’t want to dirty the bed with foul-smelling brown bile. Sleep. If she could just get to sleep, she wouldn’t vomit. If she could just go to sleep now . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . she was breathing a little faster than him . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . she was neither fully awake nor asleep . . . she lay on her back in a small boat . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . drifting over a sea of sleepiness and warmth and nausea . . . was this really what your wedding night was supposed to be like? She’d wanted to have a white cloth spread under her, to show as proof of her virginity . . . what would she do if the worst befell them . . . the sin of having sex and getting pregnant before marriage . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . there were legs next to her legs . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . and arms by hers . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . . forever . . . in-hale . . . ex-hale . . .
* * *
• • •
Kkokkio, that’s the rooster, I’ve got to go running, Woo-cheol thought as he opened his eyes, battling against drowsiness that pressed on him like gravity. Wait. Where am I? Oh, right, I’m at In-hye’s family’s house. His right arm was numb and his wrist was stiff. He was still far too asleep; he hadn’t even turned over. That last dream he’d had was a good one, but he couldn’t remember it now. He’d known throughout that it was a dream, a little like he was looking onto someone else’s dream. The wind sounded loud; was it clear out? I want to run! The wedding rituals would go on for another week, but going a week without running was no joke—once he took In-hye home he could run, and how could Abeoji and Eomoni stop him! Woo-cheol pacified his impatient leg muscles as he listened to the quiet of the house. It was quieter even than at night, so quiet that the throngs of people who had been there yesterday seemed like a lie; everyone must be sleeping it off. Woo-cheol stretched and looked around at the room, now lighter than it had been just a little while ago. It was the first time he’d slept in someone else’s house. He turned his head to look next to him and saw In-hye, asleep, with no trace of makeup on her face. How strange it felt, to have a woman sleeping this close to him, and he wasn’t stealing glances either, he was staring straight at her, but she showed no signs of waking.
Is the baby inside of her sleeping too? Or is it up already? Is it a boy? Or a girl? Will it look like me or In-hye? In-hye’s sisters are all full-figured; will she be, too, soon? She’d gotten thicker around the hips since she got pregnant, and her ass had gotten bigger too. She hadn’t been particularly slim when they’d started seeing each other, but her waist had been smaller and her abdomen had been flat as a palm.
But those days were gone. No, the days stayed where they were; we left them behind, hand in hand. And there weren’t two of us anymore, no—that’s my baby there, inside her. When the autumn comes, my wife and child will see me off as I leave the house. My wife and child will wait for my return. And when I come home they’ll come to greet me. From now on, until one of us dies, either me or In-hye. I’ll sell rubber boots for fifty sen a pair and I’ll have to provide for them until I die. Is that what they call happiness? It must be. What if I can’t bear the weight of it? Must I still carry it nonetheless?
In-hye opened her eyes. Then, unconsciously, she smiled. Woo-cheol looked at her smiling mouth from a close distance. She shut her eyes. He gently pressed the pad of his middle finger to her eyelid, and she opened her eyes and smiled again. They moved their faces closer together than they ever seemed to have been before and smiled at each other. In-hye wanted to commit to memory the smiling face of her new husband looking at her, but her face was so close that all she could see were his two eyes. Her eyes were full of his, as if she had drunk them in with her eyes.
It was the first morning they had greeted together. To share in the quiet of the morning together, they both closed their eyelids again and lay down in the silence.
“Oh, I meant to ask, have you had any dreams about bears?”
“What?”
“If you do, then it’ll be a boy, or snakes means it’ll be a girl, they say.”
“Oh, taemong, right. Isn’t that only for the mother?”
“My sister said sometimes the father has them too. So you haven’t? Any time since we met?”
“Well, maybe I did, but I just can’t remember, you know. I asked my dad once, and he said that before a great hero is born, you have a dream about swallowing the sun or a star.”
“I read that once too. In the folktale, Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon’s mother dreams that a fairy gives her a flower, and the mother of Yi Seong-gye, the founder of Joseon, apparently dreamed that a turtle came down from the heavens and went into her stomach. What did you dream last night?”
“I can’t remember. It was a really good dream, but the rooster woke me up straightaway. . . . Oh, wait, I can kind of remember. . . . Someone was coming. . . .”
“Someone was coming?”
“Hold on a second, I’m trying to remember. . . . I was running in the mountains—not sure where—the sun was shining down through the leaves on the trees and everything looked so soft, and the road was . . . I was breathing so deeply and so freely that it was hardly like I was running at all, and my breaths were, oh, what would you say . . . I felt so happy. . . . The light was coming in between the leaves, they were rustling as if the light itself was shaking . . . this pure, white light. . . .”
“Was it night?”
“I don’t know . . . but I don’t think it was. The greenery was so dense it must’ve been bright. Oh, when I try to explain it, it’s nothing like it was in the dream. I’ll tell you how it was, and you listen . . . dead leaves were falling, but all the leaves on the trees were lush and green, like it was the middle of summer. . . . But it wasn’t hot, or cold . . . so, I was there, watching myself running, over here . . . the me that was running was over there . . . so I knew, I knew that it was a dream.”
“You must’ve dreamed this when you were just about to wake up, when you were slipping out of sleep?”
“Yeah . . . Well, I can’t remember what happened next, so I’ll just skip over that part. I was in the courtyard at school . . . and next to me was . . . Woo-hong, yeah, that’s right, Woo-hong was there! I opened up an aluminum lunch box and we each ate half. My lunch box. As we ate he laughed. And he, kind of, accidentally spat out some rice. I didn’t know what he was laughing about, but anyway the two of us were chuckling. . . . But, and this is strange, the whole time I was breathing like I was running; the dream I told you about earlier, about running in the mountains, this was still part of it, and another ‘me’ was still running.”
“Then what?”
“That’s it. Boring, right? Dreams never sound like much when you talk about them, do they? But when I was dreaming, I was so happy that I thought, Please don’t let me wake up. . . . That’s the first time I’ve ever told someone about one of my dreams.”
“It’s not boring at all. I want to know about your dreams. Promise you’ll keep telling me about them.”
“Every day?”
“Every day. So this Woo-hong, is he your friend?”
“He’s my best friend.”
“Did he come yesterday?”
“No. He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“He moved?”
“Yeah.”
“Far away?”
“To Hanseong.”
Woo-cheol had now lied to his wife for the first time.
Woo-hong told the truth to me, only me. He ran off to Shanghai without telling even his own abeoji. How are his abeoji and eomoni doing? I wonder. Their only two sons have both run off to join the Heroic Corps; has their abeoji been questioned by the police? No, I’m sure that I’m the only one who knows that his brother’s in the Heroic Corps. I don’t want to lie to In-hye, but she might let slip to her eomoni or her sisters, and then they might tell their husbands and friends, and then that might put Woo-hong’s and his family’s lives on the line.
“Whatcha thinking about?” In-hye leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“Nothing . . .” He traced her eyebrow with his finger, then gently touched her temple and her lips. The morning light was falling on the left of her face, making her skin gleam. As he stroked her long neck draped with her loosened hair with his palm, taking her warmth and softness in with his whole body, he felt his desire begin to rise again. Woo-cheol cradled his wife’s face in his hands, her lips slightly parted as if she were sleeping, and leaned in toward her.
But the sound of footsteps outside came closer, and In-hye’s eyes opened wide. They both got out of bed and put their jeogori on.
“Can I come in?” It was In-yu.
“Sure, come on in,” Woo-cheol said.
“Good morning, jal jasseo. Of course, usually your new bride would make this for you, but since she’s not at her best, I made it. So get your stories straight.” In-yu carried in a breakfast tray laden with rice porridge with pine nuts and sesame seeds, stir-fried noodles with beef and vegetables, and kimchi.
“How are you feeling?” She looked at her sister.
“I slept so deeply; I’m feeling very well today. All this week, the nausea woke me up every morning, but nothing today. I could almost forget I’m pregnant.”
“You’ll feel worse later if you don’t eat something after you wake up, so please, have a little something. You barely ate at all yesterday, right? The baby’s making you hungry.”
“Thank you, In-yu, jal meogeulgeyo.”
“Enjoy,” she said, as she carried the tray from last night out of the room.
As Woo-cheol brought the spoon up to his mouth, he thought about Woo-hong.
I’m seventeen and I’ve taken a wife. Will Woo-hong still be single when he’s twenty, thirty even? But no, turning twenty or thirty means nothing to him. The only thing that has meaning for him is getting closer to the life that he decided on; no, wait, he isn’t concerned about his own life. He said he wanted to do something worth dying for. Will he ever come back? To the way of living that most people call “life,” with a wife and kids? I want to do something worth dying for. I have the feeling at some point I’ll be guided by those words. But when? And to where?
The door opened, and In-yu brought in a metal basin filled with well water. Woo-cheol washed his face and took a cloth from In-yu to dry it.
“Is Father awake?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get ready, and then I’ll go meet him.”
Woo-cheol brought the front panel of his paji up and to the left and tied it at the waist, then wrapped the strings around his ankles and tied them in bows.
“Right, I’ll go first.” He stepped out of the room.
In-hye sat down in front of the mirror and let down her ponytail. She put two or three drops of camellia oil in her palm and ran it through her hair, then combed it until it was lustrous, before dividing it into three and plaiting it. She tried to wrap it into a bun at the base of her head, but there was too much hair, or the bun was too big, and she couldn’t get it to stay together.
Aigu, why?
In-hye took a deep breath and removed the hairpin, then redid the plait. It was fine until the day before, when she could still just have her plait running down her back, but how long would it take her to be able to put her hair up as quickly and beautifully as her sisters? A month? Two?
In-hye twisted her hair into a ring and stuck in the hairpin, then hid the tail of her braid in the rest of her hair.
I don’t know how this is staying up, but I can tell, as soon as I start walking, it’s all going to come loose.
She walked out of the bedroom and called out to her sister, who was doing laundry near the well.
“In-yu! I can’t get my hair to stay!”
“Aigu, I taught you before, didn’t I? There’s nothing worse than a wife who sleeps in late and can’t do her own hair.”
In-yu wiped her wet hands on her apron, then sat her sister down in front of the mirror and combed out her hair.
“Ready? So you make a loop at the base of the braid, and then you wrap the braid around it. Are you watching me? First, braid it tightly, then tie off the end of the braid with a black cloth, and you’ll have a perfectly sized loop.”
As In-hye let her hair be done by her sister, two years older than her, with whom she’d played gonggi, a game like jacks, or kongjumeoni nori, a beanbag-throwing game, she felt a sweet sadness come over her. Tonight, I’ll go to sleep and when I wake up, I won’t be a part of this family anymore. In ten or twenty years, when my baby’s old enough to get married, will I look back on this day fondly? And will I tell my child and make them hear about it? You know, your eomoni, when I got married at nineteen, I couldn’t do my own hair the first morning after, and so on.
“The trick is in the size of the loop. If it’s too tight you won’t be able to get your hairpin into it, and if it’s too big, the hairpin won’t hold it up. Once you’re done wrapping the tail around the loop, you stick the hairpin into the loop, and it’ll hold. Aigu, if you sit with your chima like that it’ll get wrinkled.”
In-hye straightened out her chima and adjusted herself, her eyes following the movements of her unni’s hands. A deep forest . . . a mountain path thick with dead leaves . . . bright white light . . . in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale, in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale . . . He’d said that the feeling of his breath as he ran was happiness. I like watching him run. I like seeing his face as he runs up to where we agreed to meet, too, but I like it better when he’s running away from me, waving his hand in the air, telling me to take care. We’ll never again meet by the riverside or at the shrine; what a shame.
I wonder what this Woo-hong is like. He called him his best friend, and he doesn’t have many friends, so they must have been pretty close. In-hye realized she felt something like jealousy toward her husband’s friend. Has he ever dreamed of me? Ever since we first made love, I’ve had the same dream over and over. In it, I’m naked. . . . I don’t know if he is or not—my eyes are closed anyway—he whispers my name . . . In-hye, In-hye. . . . His voice soaks into every inch of my skin, even the softest, smallest hairs on my body that I usually wouldn’t notice, are standing up, and the core of my body starts tingling. . . . I’m breathing him in, in, out, in, out. . . .
