“Are you home?”
Your eyes fly open at your sister’s voice. For a second, you think you hear your wife’s voice, even though you know full well that only your sister would come to your house this early in the morning.
“I’m coming in,” she says, and opens your bedroom door. Your sister is holding a tray laden with a bowl of rice and side dishes, covered in a white cloth. She places the tray on the floor at one end of the room and looks at you. She lived here with you until forty years ago, when she built a house by the new road, and ever since, she would get up at dawn, smoke a cigarette, smooth her hair and secure it with a hairpin, and come to your house. Your sister would walk around your house in the dawn light, and then go home. Your wife always heard your sister’s footsteps, quietly circling the house, from the front yard to the side yard to the back yard. Your sister’s footsteps were the sound that woke your wife. Your wife would grunt and turn over and mutter, “She’s back,” and get up. Your sister just circled your house and went home-perhaps she was checking to make sure that your house had remained intact overnight. When she was young, she lost two older brothers at the same time, and parents within two days of each other; during the war, she almost lost you. After she married, her husband came to live in your village, instead of your sister’s going to live in her in-laws’ village. The wound of losing her young husband in a house fire soon after was rooted deeply in your sister, and had grown into a large tree, one that couldn’t be chopped down.
“Didn’t you even bother to sleep on your mat?” Your sister’s eyes, which used to be unfaltering and fierce when she was a young, childless widow, now look tired. Her hair, brushed neatly and secured with a hairpin, is completely white. She’s eight years older than you, but her posture is straighter. She sits next to you, pulls out a cigarette, and puts it between her lips.
“Didn’t you quit smoking?” you ask.
Without answering, your sister uses a lighter printed with the name of a bar in town and puffs on her cigarette. “The dog is at my house. You can bring it back if you want.”
“Leave it there for now. I think I need to go back to Seoul.”
“What are you going to do there?”
You don’t reply.
“Why did you come back by yourself? You should have found her and brought her back!”
“I thought she might be waiting here.”
“If she was, I would call you right away, wouldn’t I?”
You’re silent.
“How can you be like this, you useless human being! How can a husband lose his wife! How could you come back here like this, when that poor woman is out there somewhere?”
You gaze at your white-haired sister. You’ve never heard her talk about your wife in this way. Your sister always clucked her tongue disapprovingly at your wife. She nagged your wife for not getting pregnant till two years after your wedding, but when your wife had Hyong-chol, your sister was dismissive, saying, “It’s not like she’s done something nobody’s ever done before.” She lived with your family during the years when your wife had to pound grain in the wooden mortar for every meal, and she never once took over the mortar. But, then again, she helped take care of your wife after she gave birth.
“I wanted to tell her some things before I died. But who am I going to tell, since she’s not here?” your sister says.
“What were you going to say?”
“It’s not just one or two things…”
“Are you talking about how mean you were to her?”
“Did she tell you I was mean to her?”
You just look at your sister, not even laughing. Are you saying you weren’t? Everyone knew that your sister acted more like your wife’s mother-in-law than her sister-in-law. Everyone thought so. Your sister hated hearing that. She would say that was how it had to be, since there was no elder in the family. And that might have been the case.
Your sister slips out another cigarette from her cigarette case and slides it in her mouth. You light it for her. Your wife’s disappearance must have pushed your sister to take up smoking again. It was hard for you to think of your sister without a cigarette in her mouth. The first thing she did when she woke up every morning was to feel around for a cigarette, and all day long she looked for cigarettes before she did anything, before she had to go somewhere, before she ate, before she went to bed. You thought she smoked too much, but you never told her to quit. Actually, you couldn’t tell her. When you saw her right after her husband died in the fire, she was staring at the house that had burned down, smoking. She was sitting there, smoking one cigarette after another, neither crying nor laughing. She smoked instead of eating or sleeping. Three months after the fire, you could smell cigarettes on her before you went near her, the tobacco seeped into her fingers.
“I won’t live long now,” your sister has said since the day she turned fifty. “All these years, I thought my lot in life was especially… especially harsh and sad. What do I have? No child, nothing. When our brothers were dying, I thought I should have died instead of them; but after our parents died, I could see you and Kyun, even though I was in shock. It seemed we were alone in the world. And then, since my husband died in the fire before I had a chance to grow fond of him… you’re not only my brother, you’re also my child. My child and my love…”
That would have been true.
Otherwise, when you were bedridden, half paralyzed from a stroke in your middle age, she couldn’t have wandered the fields to harvest dew for a year, through spring, summer, fall, having heard that you would be cured if you drank a bowlful of dawn dew every day. To get a bowl of dew before the sun rose, your sister woke up in the middle of the night and waited for the day to break. Around that time, your wife stopped complaining about your sister and started treating her with respect, as if she were indeed her mother-in-law. Your wife, with an awed look on her face, would say, “I don’t think I could do that much for you!”
“I wanted to say to her that I was sorry about three things before I died,” your sister continues.
“What did you want to say?”
“That I was sorry about Kyun… and about the time I screamed at her for chopping down the apricot tree… and about not getting her medicine when she had stomach problems…”
Kyun. You don’t reply.
Your sister gets up and points at the tray covered with the white cloth. “There’s some food for you; eat it when you’re hungry. Do you want it now?”
“No, I’m not hungry yet. I’ve just woken up.” You stand, too.
You follow your sister as she walks around your house. Without your wife’s caring hands, the place is covered in dust. Your sister wipes the dust off the jar lids as she walks by the back yard.
“Do you think Kyun went to heaven?” she asks suddenly.
“Why are you talking about him?”