The old woman, who had weeded her way to the end of the field, is now heading back this way. The man’s car is parked along the edge of the field, its wheels hidden by tall weeds. The disposable razor scrapes along his cheek, moving over his thick scar. He’s shaving, using the woman’s mirror. When he had first seen the old woman, he had assumed she was scattering seed. But even after weeding the whole field, all she does is simply wait for the weeds to grow back. Summer is almost over. It’s too late to sow corn.
The woman is sitting in a plastic chair, squinting at the sun. Crumpled candy wrappers fill a bag. Each fruit candy is wrapped in a different-colored cellophane according to its flavor. She holds up the wrapper to her eye and gazes at the sun. The children had done the same, glued to the window like beetles. The man sees her and laughs.
“You look like a squid,” she says.
One side of his face is still unshaven. “It’s like I can see underneath your skin.”
The bathroom is much too big for their room. She stands at the dim sink, washing her face, and gazes into the mirror. Her face is covered with soap foam. Everything from the past month feels like something that had happened a hundred years ago. The moment she leaves this house in the woods, her hair will turn white, and her face will grow wrinkled, and her fingernails and toenails will become long, like strands of thread.
Yesterday she had called the day care. After the phone had rung over ten times, an unfamiliar voice had answered. She was about to ask if she’d gotten the right number, but there was no need, because she heard the all-too-familiar voices of the children and the songs she’d heard countless times. So she replaced the receiver gently in the cradle. Her place at the day care was gone. The paper hats she had made and glued, the letters, the mobiles—slowly they will become someone else’s creations and all traces of her will disappear. It all seemed like a game she used to play as a child, where she would flick her stone across the sand and draw a line wherever it fell, claiming those areas as hers. But each time, her piece had ended up in some ridiculous spot, completely different from what she’d intended. Her eyes sting from the soap. She turns on the cold water tap. All of a sudden, hot water gushes onto her hands. She shrieks and backs away. She had forgotten that the hot and cold taps were reversed.
The mongrel follows the man around constantly. If he’s putting on his shoes, the dog comes bounding and puts his front paws on the man’s shoulders and licks his glasses. The man picks up a baseball and puts it in the dog’s mouth.
She uses the living room phone to call the pediatric clinic. All day, he trains the dog in the yard. If he throws the ball, the dog stands in place, blinking its big eyes. The annoyed voice of a receptionist comes on the line.
“On July 12th …”
“It’s her,” the receptionist whispers to someone.
“Please, it’s important,” the woman cries urgently. “What happened to the baby who was smothered to death that day? I saw an ambulance taking someone away. I saw it with my own eyes, so how can you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Oh, that?” the receptionist says with a laugh. “You’re mistaken. A pregnant woman who came with her child went into labor. She started crowning right here, and so they even decided to name the baby after this clinic.”
Even after she hangs up, the woman sits before the phone for a long time. Outside, the man limps along in his cast. He picks up the ball and throws it at the dog once more.
“Go on, get it! Get it, boy!”
The dog picks up the ball in his mouth and runs back to the man.
“That’s it. Good boy!”
He hugs the dog and they both fall to the ground. In the dog’s mouth is a ball wet with saliva.
He looks through the business listings in the phone book and underlines all the sushi and seafood restaurants. There are over ten restaurants by the name of East Sea Sushi. On the first day they had arrived at the house, he had called Mr. Kim, but the fishing boat was docked at port because of a storm moving north through Japan. Even if the boat were able to go out, the man needed to wait until the price of squid fell. In the meantime he needed a job. His sashimi knife is in his car.
Gangneung Seafood, Gyeongsang-do Seafood, Gyeongchun Seafood.
“Excuse me, are you looking for a cook by any chance?”
He makes many calls, but no one is hiring. From the first letter of the alphabet to the last, he calls over forty places, but even before he can finish talking, the line goes dead. The port is located about forty minutes away. Family, soybean paste stew, light bulb, children, tricycle, and dog. He wants a dog and a yard. He moves down to the last restaurant. Haedong Seafood.
A middle-aged man picks up the phone. Brass bowls crash together in the background.
“Young people, they just want something easy. They quit the moment things get hard. We weren’t like that when we were young. Kids these days …”
The owner talks non-stop. It seems he’s sitting at the counter, tallying up bills and handing out change.
“I mean, I gave him one little lecture yesterday, and he’s a no-show today? Can you believe it? Jeez,” he says. He hacks and spits.
“Well, I can fillet anything that swims. Heck, I can even make anything swim in water,” he says, desperate.
“What? I don’t need all that fancy stuff. All I want is someone who’s hard-working. We start a bit early, but I’m sure it’s the same everywhere. Let’s see, come by around ten tonight. It’ll be less busy then. By the way, people who are always late …” he stops speaking for a moment, searching for the perfect word. “I can’t stand them. See you soon.”
With that, the owner hangs up. It’s only when the man is copying down the number on a different slip of paper that he realizes he had called Haerang Hangover Soup, not Haedong Seafood.
“We’re experiencing significantly higher volumes heading into the city due to the summer holiday traffic. We’ve been having a long, hot summer this year—”
The man listens to the traffic report and spreads open a map to find detours into the city. He has about an hour to get to the restaurant. The woman hesitates. She is planning to ask him to drop her off at a bus terminal as soon as they enter the city. The dangerously narrow road ends and they finally come out to the highway. The dog, who had followed them all the way to the bridge, falls behind. The house in the woods cannot be seen anymore, hidden by the chestnut tree. The sparsely placed streetlights cast weak light onto the road. Up ahead, he sees a newly paved road. He steps on the gas pedal.
The man’s car smashes into a steel beam. The impact sends the car flying. It skims the stalks of corn and lands upside down in the cornfield. The car had crashed into one of the two beams supporting a colossal billboard, which depicts a road marked with reflective paint. This billboard road, which had sprung to life in the car’s headlights, is buried in darkness once more. The small dent the car made in the steel beam is barely noticeable. The woman’s hair is hanging upside down. It squirms like the limbs of a swimming squid. He calls out to her, but his mouth doesn’t move. He tries to lift his arm to check the time, but his arm doesn’t move either. Nor can he move his legs, head, or his other arm. But there’s no pain. The thought crosses his mind that he’s become a fish. His mind is so clear that he even starts to think up an excuse to tell the restaurant owner for being late.
7
A helicopter hovers in the sky. The midday sun beats down. The camera operator peers into his viewfinder and searches for a focal point. Cars that look like miniature toys are lined up along the highway. What he shoots will air on the nine o’clock news for about twenty seconds. He has put up with the scorching sun for two hours now, all for these twenty seconds. He’s thirsty. He imagines gulping down a glass of cold water and takes a sweeping shot of the endless line of traffic. Those who see the helicopter stick their hands out of their cars and wave. A sandal appears in his viewfinder. It’s a neon pink sandal. He zooms in. Even from where he is, he can tell it’
s a shower sandal. He dreams of making a movie one day. He captures the pink sandal left behind by someone going on vacation, but it doesn’t make it on the nine o’clock news. The report of a world leader’s visit to Korea runs long, and so most of what the camera operator captures is cut in editing. Only a far shot of the traffic at a standstill is aired for a mere five seconds.
Ha Seong-nan was born in Seoul in 1967 and made her literary debut in 1996, after her graduation from the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Ha is the author of five short story collections and three novels. Over her career, she’s received a number of prestigious awards, such as the Dong-in Literary Award in 1999, Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize in 2000, the Isu Literature Prize in 2004, the Oh Yeong-su Literary Award in 2008, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award in 2009.
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has appeared in Brick: A Literary Journal, Lit Hub, Asia Literary Review, Words Without Borders, and the Korea Times. She has received PEN American Center’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, the Modern Korean Literature Translation Award, and grants from English PEN, LTI Korea, and the Daesan Foundation. Her other translations include Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale and Ancco’s Bad Friends.
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High Tide
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Rock, Paper, Scissors
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Juan José Saer (Argentina)
The Clouds
La Grande
The One Before
Scars
The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
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In Praise of Poetry
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Maidenhair
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The Last Days of My Mother
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Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and
Her Daughters
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Lodgings
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Everything Happens as It Does
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The Canvas
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Party Headquarters
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American Fictionary
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Fox
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The Guinea Pigs
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Season of Ash
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Radiant Terminus
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The Elusive Moth
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Ma Bo’le’s Second Life
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