Drifting House (7 page)

“Son.” His voice struck me like a fist. He rocked to his side and held an empty
soju
bottle to his eye. “Where is my heaven?”

“Abeoji.” I backed away. “Drinking like you do, you’ll lose your way to heaven.”

He hooked my ankle with his foot and tripped me, then laughed when I fell.

“Adeul–ah.” His head sagged. He stared at the bottles surrounding him as if they were a message from God. “Funny how I keep talking and talking but no one seems to answer. I can’t sleep because I can’t see her…She was my Ruth, my Esther, my Mary.”

He stood up, his head nearly touching the ceiling, a permanent dampness above us, as if the basement ­home—more a cave than a ­home—had been a sponge for cycles of wet monsoon summers. He wobbled over to New Mother’s potted begonia, adjusted himself, then peed on the plant. The sound of the spraying was a stunted dribble, a waterfall in dry season.

“She’s gone,” he said as he dried himself on a leaf. “Everyone’s gone.”

“I’m here,” I said. “And New Mother’s making lunch.”

“Everyone leaves me, eventually,” he said. He looked through me, his eyes dark and full with his absent family: my mother and his daughters; his mother, brothers, and sisters trapped north of the 38th parallel since 1953, when America and Russia carved up
the country and left my father stranded in the south, where he had been volunteering, against his family’s wishes, in the joint U.S.-Korean forces.

He wanted my sympathy, but I was young, angry at him, angry at God, in a country that didn’t feel like mine, living with a man I thought I didn’t love. I wanted to be part of a house where the father wasn’t king and his kids the subjects, to be a boy whose stomach wasn’t always knotted up, afraid each word he said was the wrong word. I wanted to be like my American friends, to be Gary, who called his professor father “Dad” and so naturally, so democratically, argued with him about who should be the next U.S. president. I wanted my mother, who was gone forever, no matter what they told me at church.

“Abeoji,” I said. “Let’s be objective here. No one made you remarry.”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was saying. But the ardor of his gaze, that vast and lonely seeking, couldn’t immobilize me anymore; it no longer impressed me how he would hit his children, then after, pull out strands of his own hair and butt his head against the walls until he bled, angry at his sins. So I walked away from him only a little afraid, because I was no longer the boy who confused his father with God.

It was past one before we sat as a family for lunch. We could see the feet of passersby through a barred window. New Mother had upgraded this subterranean life of ours with a lace tablecloth and silver candlesticks arranged over the piano bench; she had insisted on a grand piano, which meant in this space, there was no dining
table or even a low
saang
. All the while my real mother gazed down at the new us.

I blessed the food, my sisters overseas. Before I finished, my father uttered “Amen,” then slurped kelp soup from one of New Mother’s flowery china bowls. With his chopsticks halfway to his mouth, he fell asleep, dropping a cube of steaming tofu into his lap.

New Mother poked her finger deep into his ear. “That’s what you get for drinking the night long!” she said, as if he hadn’t done the same thing throughout their short marriage.

She wiped his mouth with a napkin. One hundred percent linen, she proudly informed us. New Mother had brought these things, and more, into the marriage. Most of all, she had brought with her a faith in new beginnings. While we ate, her feet tapped staccato notes, her fingers waltzed across the table, her head danced left and right as she tried to convince ­us—even Mother’s portrait, it ­seemed—that all was well. She turned her heavy breasts in my direction. There were too many teeth in her smile and her green pantsuit was a size too small, so I saw more than I wanted to. God, my father liked to say, had punished New Mother with her face.

She said, “Jingyu, did you make nice friends yet?”

“School’s one long vocabulary lesson,” I said. I missed America, the two dark, ­chain-smoking, antisocial friends I’d make in every city we moved to when my father grew restless, the anonymity.

“You should set yourself to memorizing a hundred new words a day.” She clapped her hands, straining to be helpful. “I’ll make you memory cards! In my student days, our
hakwon
teachers beat us unless we learned three hundred each day.”

“I don’t want to learn.” I picked the black beans out of my rice, which she frowned at. “I want to go home.”

“Home, home….” my father said. “Even Odysseus longed for home.” He hacked up a globule of phlegm, spit it into the linen napkin, and folded it up.

New Mother blinked. Her pointy nose flared, but she focused on me as if nothing had happened. “Jingyu, women like men who have good posture; it makes you look taller. And you should smile more ­often—we’ll get that tooth fixed one of these days.”

My father had knocked out that tooth when I was eleven, but that was a family secret.

“Leave my son alone,” my father said. His voice rattled the chopsticks. “He’s not from your bloodline anyways. Old women like you get to a certain age and think too much. Only God knows what moves in the heart.”

“He spends half his waking hours hiding in his room, sleeping and reading his mother’s old Bible. If you took interest in anyone but ­yourself—”

“I am interested.” His voice was clipped, dangerous. “Just not interested in you.”

She flashed a large, unnatural smile that made her look more wounded than cheerful. “It’s my money,” she said. “Don’t forget.”

“Can’t we just eat like other families?” I said.

“Is this a family?” He turned toward me, his hands gripping the bench by both sides. “Where is my family?”

In the late afternoon at my father’s
hwanggap,
the guests parted like the Red Sea as he made his way down the hotel’s ballroom, a
playground for the rich that he had insisted on renting. He contemplated his guests with a studied pastor’s modesty. As the emcee lauded my father’s piety with limp anecdotes, my father timed his entrance from behind the towering cylinders of nuts, dates, fruits, and rice cakes that would be wheeled out again the next day for the next
hwanggap
party.

“Friends.” He leaned across the podium as soon as the emcee fell silent. The gaudy silk screen of swooping cranes and lotus flowers made his eyes blacker. He paused, lifting his head slowly as if fatigued, and I wondered if this time he wouldn’t be able to perform. Then he began.

“What it means to be back after all these years away. Some of you I haven’t been privileged to see for twenty years, but none of you have forgotten Seoul’s prodigal son. No matter how far I strayed, the good Lord does not forsake His children; He did not let me know the darkness of being a sheep without a shepherd for longer than I can bear.” His voice broke, and his hands swept across his eyes, but he continued. He outstretched his hands and embraced the audience. “Jesus laid down his life for the sheep, so that we, the blind, would not be exiled from the Lord.”

“Yaesu,” someone said, calling out the name of Jesus.

“Oh, Juyeo,” someone said even louder.

“­Yaesu-nim,” someone said, louder still.

“But even Jesus prayed into the night. Like Jesus who knew what it meant to suffer, our hearts must muse and our spirits must inquire, until the miracle happens.”

He looked confusedly at the audience, as if he had forgotten that he was not at church, and that they were not his congregation. Then he recovered and said, “Now, it is another miracle to see so
many decades of lives, so many generations here facing me, a miracle made true by God.”

He spoke of the time our family had spent overseas, my mother’s death, and especially the ministry that he said had saved him and made him better than he was. Finally he gestured to us.

“My busy daughters are married and working in America, but there they are, my son and his new mother.”

When we stood and bowed, he beamed. New Mother’s face lit up like a votive candle. From looking at them, you wouldn’t think that each believed their life ruined by the other.

He began to pray, his voice thundering in the quiet hall. It was a voice that as a kid I used to mistake for God’s. The entire ­chandeliered hall rang as his voice led us to the promised land, and for the length of that prayer, even skeptics must have believed. But when I opened my eyes, the certainty in his voice didn’t match his face. His eyes were shut, his face tight and seeking, as if he had lost his way. I didn’t want to see my father like this. I didn’t look again.

When the prayer ended, he made his way down the hall, greeting women in ruffled blouses and men in ­gray-checked suits with his hands clasped around theirs; he anointed with his touch the heads of children scrambling between their mothers’ skirts and the tablecloth; he kissed the wasted cheeks of women who had been wheeled out from nursing homes; he embraced the people whom he had reunited with in the past six months in Seoul: CEOs, factory workers, gang members, professional
pansori
singers in horsehair hats, a dizzy number of church people. He forgot no one. But when he sat between New Mother and me, our dwindled family, he seemed to shrink.

­Middle-aged women in pastel suits pushed around the buffet tables heavy with sweet fried pork; salted mackerel; chunks of beef soaked in soy sauce and honey, and garnished with gingko nuts; crispy tofu; cold jellyfish salad; abalone porridge; raw fish and squirming baby squid; a dozen fermented vegetables and wild roots. Older women with hands like cigarette paper stroked my cheek.

“He’s a goldfish copy of his mother,” they said.

Each time, I made my greeting and darted away.

A ­silver-haired man in a plaid suit and oxfords said, “I think of your mother all the time.”

But I wasn’t ready to talk to strangers about my mother. I wasn’t about to tell them how her hair had grown in coarse and gray, how I had circled the block several times after school before facing her relentless pain, the moans that ground into my every thought until I never wanted to think again, or how she had begged me to put her to sleep as the morphine reached toxic levels without easing the pain, and that wasn’t the worst of it. It must have been the same for my father, though he thanked the man for his kind words. New Mother, who overheard, started tapping that foot of hers.

The men concentrated on eating. These men who had grown up in wartime didn’t let conversation interrupt. As the saying goes, they wouldn’t have noticed even if someone at the table had died. They swallowed in hurried, dogged silence; they knew the value of food. In the rest of the hall, men drank and complained about jobs; women bragged about their children while wrapping extra food in the hotel’s napkins, some even brought Tupperware and plastic bags; others sang and danced to a rented karaoke machine, changing the cassette tape each time the music ran out; kids my
age roamed around the hall as bored as I was; others passed out business cards. At our table, the conversation inevitably turned to God.

A man with a bushy monobrow said that the church needed to prepare for the future of North Korea. “Just think about all those unsaved souls in Pyongyang alone. It makes me want to get on my knees and pray.”

“Basic needs first,” my father’s voice barreled down the table. “Those people suffer; they’re still living the war. Give them democracy, and meat, first.”

“Prayer is our food,” said the man with a nose like a fishhook. “Next you’ll be saying that Jesus and Buddha are brothers.”

“Ah,” New Mother said. “There’s a thrilling book on just that subject.”

As if these men stuck in another era were interested in a woman’s opinion, she began talking. Even I, who didn’t think of myself as a real Korean, knew my place. She jabbed her fork at the center­piece of roses while she made her point. “As early as ­1979—”

“Why don’t each of you stand up and say something nice about me?” my father said. His voice was needy. I slipped lower into my seat, ready for the evening to be over.

“Pastor Ryu saved my life, in the army,” said the eyebrow. “You could’ve left me on the field.” His lips trembled. “But you took me out of there on your back.”

New Mother’s head jerked up obstinately. “I was ­saying—”

“This man loaned me money when my own family turned me out,” said another. “No questions, nothing. Like a brother. Better than a brother.” He embraced my father. “You are my brother.”

The stories kept coming, some that I knew, many that I’d
never heard because my father rarely talked about his past. He kept his eyes turned above the crowd to the frosted cupcake of a ceiling. His face was greedy, insecure, solitary. New Mother was biting down on her fingernails; I could see her thinking that if she were my mother, Father would have let her finish her sentence. The sad fact is my mother would have gone into a cave of quiet, with opinions and feelings I only wondered about once she was gone. Long before any of us were born, it seemed, she had given up hope of changing a thousand years of tradition, or my father.

“Look at my boy eat.”

My father patted me. The entire table looked over as I popped a piece of fried pork in my mouth.

“He’s all appetite. He stays skinny like that because all he does is run. You did twenty kilometers this afternoon, didn’t you, Jingyu? In the rain, too.”

I shrugged.

My father sighed. “He reminds me of me.”

His friends disagreed.

“No, he’s more like his mother’s body, long and lean.”

“Well, he’s got your bones, but he’s too pretty to look like you.”

“You’re one of those quiet but notice everything types, aren’t you?” said a man with a dribble of soy sauce down his chin. “Your mother was like that, a rare woman. That’s a wise way to be. People shouldn’t waste words.”

New Mother’s heel tapped harder under the table. It got so the silverware rattled. The conversation continued to swirl around and past her. She picked at a mound of glass noodles, her face absurd, mournful. When the men happy with
soju
began toasting
one another, she pushed back her chair so quickly, it caught the tablecloth and sent her silverware crashing to the floor. She weaved out of the hall, her face volcanic with misery. Abeoji laughed.