Your Republic Is Calling You (20 page)

"Oh, this is fun. Like snowmen," she'd say. Or sometimes she commented: "The draft is blowing on a whistle," an idiom of her own creation. She sobbed when Chol-su read sad scenes and clapped when something joyous happened. Even
though she loved stories, she never had much interest in TV dramas, frowning and becoming agitated when they came on. She preferred being read to, even if it was the same book over and over again, rather than watching a show where scenes changed constantly and new characters appeared. Grandmother's favorite stories were Oscar Wilde's
The Happy Prince
and Frances Hodgson Burnett's
A Little Princess.
For others, it might have been strange to see his grandmother, living in an isolated cottage in the hills of Kangwon Province, listening intently to
A Little Princess,
but that was just everyday life for Chol-su. He thought his friends' normal grandmothers were the odd ones, since they always looked so mean and scary, as if they would bare their teeth at any second and growl, unleashing their coarse, dirty breaths.

One very snowy day, so snowy that the branches outside snapped under their burden, the old couple made love, quietly.

"Stop moving around so much," Grandfather whispered, and Chol-su could hear his healthy right hand raising Grandmother's skirts under the covers. Her muslin slip rustled. The lovemaking ended quickly, with a grunt from Grandfather. Afterward, the old couple whispered and giggled like children under the covers.

On another winter day, Grandfather left the house, limping through the snow-covered fields to get some medicine from the village head for Grandmother, whose cold had worsened. But he didn't come back. Chol-su slept fitfully as his grandmother paced the room. The faraway cry of a pheasant reverberated in the hills. The next morning, the villagers retraced Grandfather's footprints, which headed toward the mountain. He hadn't even started out toward the village head's house. The right prints were clear, but the left were rubbed out, since he dragged that foot along the ground.
The footprints vanished in front of the conglomerate dairy farm, as if he had ascended to heaven. The surrounding area was an open field, without a single tree. In the winter, the dairy farm and its gentle, curved hills resembled a ski slope. Where did Grandfather go? The villagers were befuddled. He had limped four miles away from home, then disappeared without a trace. He must have walked at least two hours in the dark. Since the town was close to the DMZ and a quick-moving person could reach North Korea in a day by taking the Taebaek mountain range, the police came out to investigate whether this was a case of a Southerner going up north illegally. They knew that Grandfather was from the North, from Wonsan in South Hamgyong Province. But it didn't make sense that an old man would leave his beloved wife behind, tromp through ankle-deep snow drifts, and, limping, get beyond the DMZ where tens of thousands of soldiers were standing guard, all just to visit his childhood hometown.

Grandmother knew intuitively what had happened when she received many visitors and Grandfather was nowhere to be seen. In some sense, Grandmother's intuition was far superior to other people's. Instead of relying on language, she picked up the core idea from tone and inflection. In this way, she was a lot like a dog. She huddled in the corner of the room and cried, heartbroken. "I'm sad with the cicadas. I'm sad with the cicadas."

Until then, Chol-su had always thought that she had been afraid of cicadas, but he wondered if she actually pitied them. Her grammar was incorrect, and maybe because of its awkwardness, Grandmother's acute sorrow was delivered directly to Chol-su's heart. It was too intense to be called sadness. It was an emotion so powerful that Chol-su could feel its heavy weight on his back and shoulders, pressing him
down like a sack of potatoes. He fell asleep, praying that his father would hurry up and come and take him away.

His father finally appeared, two days after Grandfather went missing. He embraced Grandmother and didn't say anything for a long time. Grandmother cried like a young girl in his arms. Chol-su's father, whose job was to make people laugh, didn't laugh once while he was there.

It had always been a mystery to Chol-su how his verbose father had been born from his silent grandfather, whose yearly tally of uttered words was fewer than those in the Charter of Citizens' Education, and his grandmother, who didn't know how to string together a proper sentence. Perhaps his father felt pressure to prove his eloquence from childhood. He probably believed that it was the best way to break the perception that he was a stupid child. He became famous by dancing jigs and jabbering rat-tat-tat like a quick-fire gun. One TV program even counted how many words he could utter in one minute. Even a tale long enough for a novel could be told in two minutes if his father had a go at it. His father talked nonstop; people couldn't ask him questions because they were so busy listening. Chol-su's father's most popular shtick was to repeat whatever the other guy was saying, and then tack on what he wanted to say. So he'd often start: "Oh, so you think such and such? Well, I think..."

Chol-su didn't know what words were exchanged between Father and Grandmother. One day, when he came back to the house after venturing into the village to eat dried persimmons, he found Father packing their things. Grandmother had refused to come with them. She had already figured out how to live with her sorrow—she would set the table for her husband and herself, and during meals she would talk with him as if he were sitting there. If a normal person had done this, she would have been sent to the mental hospital, but since it was Grandmother, nobody thought anything of it.

Father and Chol-su went back to Seoul.

"What about Grandmother?" Chol-su inquired.

"The neighbors said they would take care of her."

Three years later, a ginseng hunter discovered Grandfather, covered by a blanket of rotten leaves, in a ravine about three miles away from where his footsteps had vanished. It remained unsolved how he got there and why, but that didn't change the fact that there he was, lying in the depths of the mountains. Not long after Grandfather's burial, Grandmother died in her sleep. Chol-su's father, who was very busy at the time because of a gig hosting a TV show, returned to his hometown to bury his mother. He seemed annoyed and reproachful, as if he were saying, "It would have been easier if you'd both passed away at the same time!"

The cracking of the billiards downstairs drifts up to Chol-su's ears again.

Jong, who's been nodding off, opens his eyes, feeling Chol-su looking at him. "What?"

"Nothing." Chol-su shifts his gaze.

"You should keep tailing the woman. I hear she's pretty?"

"Yeah, but even if she's pretty, she's still the wife. He's lived with her for over ten years."

"Yeah, but I'm sure he'll go see her. Just follow her."

Chol-su gets up from his seat, taking his time.

Jong advises, "Keep your eyes open, 'cause she could be one of them too."

Chol-su nods and is about to head toward the door when Jong's cell rings. "Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, okay," he says, glancing at Chol-su, who decides to wait.

Jong hangs up. "So it turns out that she's not one of them,"
he informs Chol-su, as he scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to him.

"Should I go arrest him?"

"No, just follow him. This asshole's starting to panic."

"Okay."

"If you lose him, follow the wife, okay?"

Chol-su nods and leaves the office.

I
NEED CHOCOLATE.
Ma-ri hangs her head so that her chin nestles in the nook between her collarbones. If she hung her head any further, she would look like a marionette with broken strings. I wish I had some dark chocolate, she thinks, rummaging through her desk. But all she finds are crumpled pieces of silver paper, smudged with chocolate on one side. She's so desperate she almost smoothes out the paper and licks it.

On her desk is a heap of motor show invitations she needs to send to her customers. The invitations are more than a pile of thick paper; they signify the emotions she will soon experience. Her customers will come to the motor show, find her, expect her to smile and welcome them, then go back home without buying a single car. The manager will give her a hard time. So every time she looks at the pile she wishes she had a piece of chocolate. But she doesn't have any.
Last month, when her waistline ballooned to nearly twenty-nine inches, she quit cold turkey. But her waist didn't return to its normal size. Song-uk told her he liked the slight pouch on her belly and her fleshier waist, but she didn't believe him. "You're just saying that to make me feel better. I know I'm getting old."

"No, really, I like it like this."

This conversation repeated itself several times, like codes shared between soldiers at guard posts. Song-uk admired Ma-ri's midsection, stroking it, Ma-ri was unbelieving, and Song-uk reiterated his love for it.

One day, he said, "Girls my age just have all of the negative aspects of women."

"What do you mean?"

"They're critical and picky and self-conscious and they want so many things, like kids. But they don't even know what they really want. You're different, because you have only the good parts of a woman. You're warm, you're a good listener, and you're confident. You're ready to accept what life gives you."

You have no idea, do you? You will never know, and you never should. I'm not that woman, it's just that I'm in love.

She tried to smile like Raphael's Virgin Mary, but she couldn't help smirking. Her young lover didn't notice and they kissed instead of speaking. His tongue burrowed in her mouth, attacking, as if it were a knife about to slice off her tongue.
You're really confident about life. You probably think you can do whatever you want with the older woman in front of you. I used to think I could change the world, but now I realize that I can't even control my urge to eat something sweet.

Ma-ri hangs her head again. She feels a masochistic pleasure in having an affair with a twenty-year-old guy. As if
she were hanging naked from the ceiling, revealing her private parts to the whole world. As if her sensitivity to criticism were becoming more and more acute, leaving her so self-conscious at meeting people's gazes that she's forced to look away, punishing herself even as she sinks deeper into the relationship.

A
LMOND PISTACHIO
for me."

"Green tea, please."

Ki-yong pays for both. The acne-covered clerk sinks his silver scoop into the ice cream containers, carves out balls of ice cream, and deposits them into paper cups for the two men. They docilely pick up plastic spoons and go find seats. Ki-yong glances out the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the hundreds of people walking hurriedly by, scurrying like ants in the mazelike underground tunnels of the Coex building.

"It's been a long time," Ki-yong starts.

"Yes, it really has."

The Baskin-Robbins is nearly empty. In the store are three girls, probably in their early teens, but they're immersed in their own conversation. The two men start eating their ice cream.

"These days I find myself preferring cold food," Ki-yong's companion says, making small talk.

"Really? Usually the older you get, the less you like cold food."

"I think I feel hotter these days."

"That's not necessarily a bad thing, I guess."

"Well, I can get very sweaty. In the summer it's a little too much."

Ki-yong contemplates the man across from him. He didn't think he could find him so easily, as they weren't that close during their days at Liaison Office 130. Lee Sang-hyok managed each of them in completely separate lines of command.

"I thought I had forgotten your name," Ki-yong offers.

His companion isn't amused. His eyes betray a strong suspicion. "It's been a long time. I'm surprised you found me," he replies, edgy.

"I was walking down Chongno and for some reason your name came to me, like a revelation. Like it was written on an electronic signboard," Ki-yong explains.

The man snorts. His skin is dark, perhaps an indication of the vast quantities of alcohol that have wrecked his liver. Overall, his body isn't alert. Ki-yong finds himself frowning at the man's state, and is shocked at himself. He's surveying the man like a reviewer from Pyongyang who's come to verify the man's ideology. Maybe this man sitting across from him is looking at Ki-yong the same way, too. This thought makes him a little uncomfortable.

"So you called me up out of the blue because you remembered my name and thought, 'Oh, I should look him up'?" the man asks, still suspicious.

"No, that's not exactly it." Ki-yong pauses for another bite of ice cream. The sweet creamy spoonful slides down his throat. He raises his head. "Mr. Lee Pil," he calls.

"What?" The man slowly removes his spoon from his mouth, his eyes a conflicting mix of fear and annoyance.

"Did anything out of the ordinary happen today or yesterday?" Ki-yong asks carefully. His leg starts to tremble, shaking the table. Ki-yong presses his elbow on the table in an effort to stop the vibration.

"What's going on?" Pil demands, looking around a little wild-eyed.

"Was there nothing out of the ordinary?"

Pil turns his head and scans the outside of the store.

"There's no tail. I checked on my way here," Ki-yong reassures him.

"Look," Pil says.

"Yes?"

Pil lowers his head and whispers, "My kid is sick."

"What?"

"He has cerebral palsy. I'm divorced and if I'm not here, there's nobody to look after him. I'm barely making ends meet, running a cell phone store. I'm sure you know this. I don't have anything left over after I pay the bill for my kid's special education school." Pil starts to tear up.

Ki-yong feels trapped. "Mr. Lee, why are you telling me this?"

Pil straightens in his seat, wincing every time he moves; it seems as if he's injured his back. "Please take pity on me."