“Park So-nyo.”
No, that’s my name.
“Who’s Park So-nyo, Father?”
I’m curious about that, too. What am I to you? Who am I to you?
Seven or eight days after I met you, your situation weighing on my mind, I took a strand of seaweed and stopped by your house, but only the newborn was there, not your wife. You told me that your wife had suffered from three days of high fever after the birth, and finally left this world; she was so malnourished that she couldn’t make it through childbirth. Your blind mother was sitting on the old porch, and it wasn’t clear whether she knew what was going on. And the three-year-old. I suppose that man by your sickbed could be the three-year-old, not the baby.
I don’t know who I was to you, but you were my lifelong friend. Who would have known that we would be friends all these years? The first time we met, you made me feel so despondent by stealing the basin with the flour I needed to feed my children. Our children wouldn’t understand us. It would be easier for them to understand that hundreds of thousands of people died in the war than to understand you and me.
Even though I knew that your wife was gone, I couldn’t just leave, so I soaked in water the seaweed I’d brought. I made dough from the remaining flour I’d given you the other day and made dough-flake soup with seaweed; I put a bowl for each person on the table and was about to leave, but stopped to put the newborn to my breast. It was a time when I didn’t have enough milk for my own daughter. You were going around the village with the baby and feeding him donated breast milk. Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong. My elder daughter says that when you mow down weeds with a tractor, the weeds cling to the wheels of the tractor and spread seeds, to breed even at the moment they’re being cut. Your baby latched on ferociously. He suckled so hard that I felt I would be sucked in, so I slapped the baby’s bottom, which still had traces of redness from his birth. When that didn’t work, I had to force him off. A baby who’s lost its mother as soon as it’s born intuitively doesn’t want to let go when it’s near a nipple. I laid the baby down and turned to go, and you asked me what my name was. You were the first person since I got married to ask me my name. Suddenly shy, I ducked my head.
“Park So-nyo.”
You laughed then. I don’t know why I did what I did next, just that I wanted to get you to laugh one more time. Even though you didn’t ask, I told you that my older sister’s name was Tae-nyo, which means “big girl.” Our names-Little Girl and Big Girl. You laughed again. Then you said that your name was Eun-gyu and your elder brother was Kum-gyu. That your father gave you names containing the words “silver” and “gold,” with the hope that you would earn money and live well. That he called you Silver Coffer and your brother Gold Coffer. That, perhaps because of that, your brother, Gold Coffer, lived a tiny bit better than you, Silver Coffer. That time I laughed. You laughed, watching me laugh. Then or now, you look best when you’re laughing. So don’t frown like that in front of the doctor; smile. A smile doesn’t cost you any money.
Until your baby was three weeks old, I went to your house once a day and let the baby suckle. Sometimes it was early morning, sometimes in the middle of the night. Could that have been a burden for you? That was all I did for you, but for thirty years after that, I went to you whenever I hit a difficult patch. I think I started to go to you after what happened to Kyun. Because I just wanted to die. Because I thought it would be better to die. Everyone else made things difficult for me; only you didn’t ask me anything. You told me that any wound healed as time passed. That I shouldn’t think about anything, just calmly do what I was supposed to do. If you hadn’t been there I don’t know what would have happened to me; I was out of my mind with grief. You were the one who buried my fourth child, the stillborn, in the hills. Now that I think about it, did you move to Komso because I was too much for you? You weren’t someone who was meant to live on the coast or work as a fisherman. You were someone who tilled the earth and planted seeds. You were someone who didn’t have land of his own, and so tilled someone else’s. I should have realized, when you went to Komso, that you left because it was hard for you to put up with me. I see that I was a terrible person to you.
It must be that a first meeting is important. I am sure that, deep down, I always thought you owed me, and I showed it by doing whatever I wanted. Just as I found you after you stole my basin on your bicycle, I found you after you moved to Komso without telling me. You didn’t fit in at Komso. You looked out of place and strange standing by the sea. I can still see the expression on your face at the salt fields by the ocean. I was never able to forget that expression, but now that I think of it, maybe your expression was saying, Did she manage to find me even here?
Komso became a place I couldn’t forget because of you. I always came to look for you when something happened that I couldn’t handle by myself, but when I recovered some peace of mind I forgot about you. I thought I forgot about you. When you saw me in Komso, the first thing you said to me was “What’s wrong?” I’m only saying this now; when I went to see you then, it was the first time I’d gone just to see you, not because something had happened to me.
Except for that one time when you ran off to Komso, you always stayed in the same place until I stopped needing you. Thank you for staying in the same place. I might have been able to go on living because of that. I’m sorry for going to see you every time I felt unsettled, but not even letting you hold my hand. Even though I went to you, when it seemed like you were coming to me I acted unkindly. That wasn’t very nice of me. I’m sorry, so sorry. At first it was because I felt awkward, then because I felt we shouldn’t, and later it was because I was old. You were my sin and my happiness. I wanted to seem dignified in your eyes.
Sometimes I told you stories I said I’d read, but I didn’t actually read them. I had asked my daughter, and told you about them. Once, I told you that there was a place called Santiago in a country named Spain. You kept asking, “Where did you say it was?”-finding it hard to memorize that name. I told you that there was a pilgrimage route there that took thirty-three days to walk. Chi-hon wanted to go there-that’s why she told me about that place-but I told you about it as if I wanted to go there. And you said, “If you want to go so badly, let’s go together one of these days.” My heart sank when I heard you say that. I think it was after that day that I stopped coming to you. Truthfully, I don’t know where that place is, and I don’t want to go there.
Do you know what happens to all the things we did together in the past? When I asked my daughter this, although it was you I wanted to ask, my daughter said, “It’s so strange to hear you say something like this, Mom,” and asked, “Wouldn’t they have seeped into the present, not disappeared?” What difficult words! Do you understand what that means? She says that all the things that have happened are actually in the present, that old things are all mixed in with current things, and current things mingle with future things, and future things are combined with old things; it’s just that we can’t feel it. But now I can’t go on.