“I would offer you something, but all I’ve got is water.”
“I’m fine,” she tells him. “I’m not thirsty.”
From the lack of expression on his face, it is impossible to tell what he is thinking. If he is still wary of her, he no longer lets it show.
“I didn’t know when I met you at the deposition. I didn’t know that you’d known them. I guess I don’t know many people who knew my parents,” she says, choosing her words carefully.
He takes out a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and grabs the blue plastic lighter from the table. When he inhales, there is a hint of a gurgling sound from his throat. He has a weak heart, Suzy thinks. Weak lungs. This man should not be smoking.
“The police claim it was a random shooting. But the murder was professional. It was precisely executed. It was obvious. It made no sense that no one was getting to the bottom of it.” Suzy raises her eyes, fixing him with a clear, steady gaze. “I’m not sure what I’m asking you to tell me. But I know you might’ve had reasons to hate my parents.”
He is looking down at the black plastic ashtray on the table, the kind that belongs in a bar, not in the solitary home of a man well past sixty. When he exhales, the smoke casts a fog between them.
“So you think I had something to do with your parents’ murder?”
The question comes so abruptly that Suzy does not know how to respond, except to continue staring at him. He does not return her gaze. He looks tired. Of course, he must have just come home from work. A man of his age should not be hauling boxes all night.
“Your father…” He pauses, as if just a mention, the uttering of the name, brings up memories he’d rather do without. “He’d worked with me many years ago. About eight years before he was killed, so I guess thirteen years now. A fruit-and-vegetable store, the only kind of work I know how to do.”
He takes a deep breath, as though it is not easy for him to talk at length. Suzy wishes now she had asked him for that water. Her throat feels dry suddenly. She swallows hard, looking across at the red glow of his cigarette.
“Whatever you’ve heard is your business. It’s been thirteen years, a long time. Nothing left now, nothing left to say.” When he says “nothing” in Korean, the word leaves an echo, the peal of hollowness. Looking around, Suzy is again struck by the austerity she observed upon entering. It is obvious that he is not attached to his living quarters. Nothing gives a clue, nothing personal here. Except for a photograph framed by his bedside. A snapshot of a middle-aged woman with a short permed hair and pursed lips. Koreans rarely smile before a camera. It makes them uneasy, such a mechanical documentation of history.
“Is that your wife?” she asks, hoping to engage him, who seems determined to end this talk.
“Was… She’s been dead for thirteen years,” he mutters. Suzy cannot tell if he is annoyed by her interest.
“I’m sorry,” says Suzy, vaguely recalling something about it from his testimony. A suicide, it was. The plaintiff’s lawyer, the older one with a brand-new Honda Accord, brought it up a few times, only to back away when pummeled by objections from Mr. Kim’s attorney. Nasty ones do that. Any tragedy in your past can be used to bring down your case. The more tragic, the easier it is to paint a bad character. A man who cannot be trusted, a man who’s driven his wife to death.
“Thirteen years… seems like yesterday,” he adds, contradicting what he said earlier. Suzy cannot help noting the coincidence. Thirteen years ago, he’d known her parents. Thirteen years ago, his wife committed suicide. Suzy was sixteen then. A junior in high school. They were living in either Jackson Heights or Astoria.
“I understand,” she says softly, surprised at her own confession. Sometimes tragedy throws people together, even when they must stand on opposing sides and guard their ground.
He glances at her for a while and then lowers his eyes again. He taps the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. Not because he really needs to, but because it gives him something to do, a slight motion of fingers, a scatter of ashes.
Suzy takes note of his every move. It is a habit. An interpreter must listen always, even when no words are being spoken. Language comes in all forms. A witness’s sighs and hesitations might determine the tone in which she interprets his claim.
“A brave woman, but not brave enough maybe,” he says as if to himself. It is obvious that just the mention of his wife brings him home, if only for a moment. Suzy says nothing. She knows that this is his moment, that his mind has drifted far from here.
“Some guy once told me that the airport is where the American dream begins. It’s all up to whoever picks you up there. If it’s your cousin who owns a dry cleaner, you go there and learn that business. If it’s your brother who fillets fish for a living, you follow him and do that too. With me, it was my wife who’d come before me and found a cashier job at a fruit-and-vegetable store. Women are harder than men. The only thing I thought she knew how to do was be a housewife. She was eighteen when we got married right after I was released from the army. I never doubted that we’d grow old together. People who marry that early, they often do.”
In his mind, he is a young soldier stationed at a remote country near the 38th Parallel. Every night, before falling asleep in his barracks, he takes out his wallet to steal a glimpse at a photograph. Even in the wrinkled black-and-white photo, he can tell that her lips are the shade of a cherry blossom, the ribbon in her hair is a matching pink. A bashful girl smile. Anticipating her lover’s gaze, she forgets the usual reserve before a camera.
“It was always the two of us, from the beginning, all the way until…” His voice is a bit shaky now, as though he is overwhelmed by the rushing memory. “We’d never had any children. She couldn’t conceive. Neither of us knew when we got married, and later, when we found out, my wife was more terrified than me. She thought it was a sin. She even said that I should divorce her. In Korea then, and maybe even now, those things mattered a lot, having kids, carrying on a family name. Sure, I was upset. I never thought that I’d be without a son, or even a daughter. That was what one did, get married, have children. But then, once I accepted the fact, I wasn’t so bothered. I even told my wife that it worked out better, imagine dragging children through the pain of it all, of leaving Korea and getting here. My wife, I don’t think she ever got over it. She felt forever like a sinner. She thought she’d wronged me by not producing a son. Sometimes I think that might’ve been why we left Korea. Leaving a homeland, it cuts into you like nothing else. It’s like an illness, haunting generations. But I wonder if we hadn’t also hoped that America might make us forget, that in this new country a tradition wouldn’t shun you because you’re a middle-aged couple with no children.
“I’d been a manager at a small trucking company in Korea. I was forty-one when they went bankrupt overnight and left me with nothing, no severance pay, no workers’ compensation. Jobs were scarce then. It was the late seventies. They say that it was our economy-building era, but I tell you, the only economy that was building was for the rich, Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, the megacorporations, chebul, you know. It was the rest of us, the working people, who paid for it. No small company survived. Bank loans, mortgage rates, trade regulations—everything worked against you. It was the time. There wasn’t much any of us could do, except wait for a better time, or get out, which is what I did.
“I’d heard of a guy who’d moved to a place called Brooklyn in America and made a good life. Korea is a small country; once you lose your chance, there’s nowhere you can run to and start over. So we looked for ways of getting to America. Not legally, of course, because obtaining the American visa was even harder than finding a job. We found a broker who hooked my wife up with this church group whose yearly choir tour to New York was due in just a few months. I followed, about a year later. The same broker got me in through the Canadian border. Fake papers, fake names, it’s a miracle what those immigration brokers can fix. I landed at JFK in the fall of 1980. My wife wept at the airport. I couldn’t believe how much older she looked in just one year. Those first years were hard, the things I saw and did when I first got here, this country called America, this number-one country in the world, it had nothing to do with home.