Why didn’t anyone help Mom brush on the new paper, when there were so many men in the family? His sister probably just fooled around, swirling her finger in the bucket of watery paste. Mom would take the brush and quickly slap the paste on the paper as if she were expertly drawing orchids for a traditional ink painting and, all by herself, would glue the paper on the clean doorframe with sure strokes. Her gestures were lighthearted and cheerful. Mom did work that he wouldn’t dare attempt now, even though he’s much older than she was at the time, and she did it swiftly and with ease. With a big brush in her hand, she would order his sister, who was playing with the paste, or him, who asked whether he could help, to pick Korean-maple leaves. Even though their yard had a lot of trees, persimmon trees and plum trees and trees of heaven and jujube trees, Mom specifically ordered maple leaves, which they didn’t have at home. Once, to get maple leaves, he left the house and passed the alleys and the creek and went all the way down the new road to Aunt’s house. As he picked maple leaves there, Aunt asked, “What are you going to do with them? Did your mother tell you to get them? What is this nonsense that your mother’s doing? If you look at a door with a maple leaf on it in the winter, you feel colder, but she’s going to do it again—even though I’m always telling her to stop!”
When he brought back two handfuls of maple leaves, Mom would neatly place the prettiest ones right next to the handle of every door, one on either side, and paste sheets of mulberry paper over them. The leaves decorated the spot where extra sheets of paper were layered to prevent tearing, right where people touched the door to open and close it. On his door, Mom put three more leaves than on the others, spreading the five leaves like flowers, pressing them carefully with her palms, and asking, “Do you like them?” It looked as if a young child was opening his hand. No matter what Aunt said, they looked beautiful in his eyes. When he said they looked wonderful, a big smile brightened Mom’s face. For Mom, who disliked going into the holidays with holey or ripped doors, worn from being flung open and shut throughout summer, pasting on new door paper was the true start of fall and the beginning of Full Moon Harvest. She probably wanted to keep the family from getting colds from the chillier wind after summer, too. Was that, he wondered, the most romance Mom was able to experience in those days?
He unconsciously sticks his hands in the pockets of his slacks, like his sister. The maple leaves pasted by the door handles stayed with the family in that house after Full Moon Harvest was over. They stayed through winter and snow; they stayed until new maple leaves sprouted in the spring.
Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory, moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.
Yokchon-dong isn’t the old Yokchon-dong he remembers. When he first bought a house in Seoul, it was a neighborhood of many alleys and houses, but now it’s crowded with towering high-rise apartment buildings and clothing stores. He and his sister walk back and forth twice, both in front of and behind the apartment buildings, unable to find Sobu Market, which was in the heart of Yokchon-dong back then. Finally, they ask a passing student where the market is, and it turns out it’s in the opposite direction from where they thought it’d be. A big box store has now replaced the telephone booth that he used to walk by every day. He can’t find the yarn store where his wife used to take knitting classes, wanting to make sweaters for their newborn daughter.
“I think it’s over there, brother!”
Sobu Market, which he remembers as being next to a large road, is buried between new boulevards, and he can’t see the signs very well.
“He said it was in front of Sobu Market.…” His sister runs toward the entrance and turns around to look at the stores. “There it is!”
He looks where his sister is pointing and sees the sign that says “Sobu Pharmacy,” sandwiched between a snack bar and an Internet café. The bespectacled pharmacist, who is in his mid-fifties, looks up as he and his sister enter. When his sister asks, “You called about the flyer your son had brought you?” the pharmacist takes his glasses off.
“How did your mother happen to go missing?”
This is the most awkward—and frequent—question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment. At first they would explain in detail, “Well, you see, she was at the Seoul Station subway …,” but now they simply reply, “It just happened,” and assume sorrowful expressions. That is the only way they can get past the question.
“Does she have dementia?”
His sister doesn’t reply, so he denies it.
“But how can you be like this when you’re trying to find her? I called a while ago, and you’re only here now?” the pharmacist asks reproachfully, as if they could have been reunited with Mom if they had arrived earlier.
“When did you see her? Does this look like our mom?” His sister pulls out the flyer and points.
The pharmacist says he saw her six days ago. He lives on the third floor of the building, he explains, and he came down at dawn to open the pharmacy’s shutters and saw an old woman sleeping by the garbage cans in front of the snack bar next door. He tells them she was wearing blue plastic sandals. He says she’d walked so much that there was a deep cut on her foot, almost to the point of revealing bone. Her wound had become infected and reinfected, so much so that there was almost nothing that could be done.
“As a pharmacist, I couldn’t just leave her alone when I saw that gash. I thought at the very least it should be disinfected, so I went inside and brought out some disinfectant and cotton balls, and she woke up. Even though a stranger was touching her foot, she stayed still, completely still—weak. With that kind of cut, it’s normal to scream when it’s being treated, but she didn’t react at all. Surprised me. The infection was so severe, pus kept oozing out. The smell was really awful, too. I don’t know how many times I disinfected it. After that I put some ointment on it and a Band-Aid. But it wasn’t big enough, so I wrapped her foot with a bandage. It looked like she should be protected somehow, so I went inside to call the police, but then came back out to ask whether she knew anyone. She was eating sushi rolls from the trash. She must have been hungry. I told her I would give her something to eat and she should throw that away, but she didn’t, so I grabbed it from her and threw it out. Even though she didn’t let go of it when I told her to, she didn’t do anything when I took it away. I asked her to come inside the store. She just sat there, as if she didn’t understand me. Is she deaf?”
His sister is silent, so he denies it.
“I asked her, ‘Where do you live? Do you know someone who can come get you? If you know someone’s number, I’ll call for you.’ But she sat still. Just blinking her eyes. I couldn’t do anything, so I went inside and called the police, and when I came out she was gone. It was strange. I was inside for only a few minutes, and she was already gone.”
“Our mom wasn’t wearing blue plastic sandals,” says Chi-hon. “She was wearing beige sandals. Are you sure they were blue plastic ones?”
“Yes. She was wearing a light-blue shirt, and over it a top that was either white or beige, it was so dirty I couldn’t tell. Her skirt was something that might’ve been white once—but that got dirty enough to become beige. It was pleated. Her calves were bloody. They were … well, they were ravaged by mosquito bites.”
Except for the blue plastic sandals, that’s the outfit Mom was wearing when she went missing.
“Mom’s wearing a hanbok here. Her hair is completely different…. She’s really made up in this picture, but she didn’t look like this when she went missing. What made you think of our mother when you saw that lady?” His sister seems to hope it wasn’t Mom; the woman the pharmacist saw was so pathetic.
“This is the same woman. Her eyes are the same. I herded cows when I was young, so I’ve seen eyes like hers, earnest and gentle. I recognized her even though she looked different, because those eyes were the same.”
His sister collapses into a
chair.
“Did the police come?”
“I called them right back, told them they didn’t have to come. Like I told you, she was already gone.”
· · ·
He and his sister leave the pharmacy and split up, agreeing to meet at the playground of one of the new apartment complexes in two hours. As the wind picks up, he searches the dimly lit streets around the new apartment buildings that have taken the place of the houses from when he lived here, and his sister looks near Sobu Market, where a few old alleys remain. Because of the pharmacist’s story that the woman who might be Mom was eating sushi rolls out of the trash next to the snack bar, he looks carefully at all of the garbage cans near the buildings. He also searches near the recycling bins. He wonders where the house he used to live in could be. It was the second-to-last house in the longest alley in the neighborhood. The alley was so long and dark that when he came home late from work he felt compelled to keep looking behind him before he reached the gate.
His sister is waiting for him on the wooden bench at the playground. She sees his slumped shoulders and slow footsteps and gets up. Because it’s late at night, there are no children on the playground, only a handful of old folks sitting around, having come out for a walk.
Did Mom come here to that house?
The first time Mom came to visit here, she got off the train holding a nickel kettle as big as a steamer filled with red-bean porridge. He didn’t have a car, and when he took the kettle from her and snapped, “Why did you bring this heavy thing?” Mom just kept smiling. As soon as they turned into the alley, she gestured at a house and asked, “Is this it?” When they walked past it, she pointed at the next house and asked, “Is that it?” She grinned wider when, at last, he stopped in front of his house and announced, “This is it.” Mom looked as excited as a young girl on her first journey out of her hometown as she gently pushed the gate open. “Wow, there’s a yard, too! A persimmon tree, and—what’s this?—grapevines!” As soon as Mom set foot in the house, she poured out a bowl of porridge from the kettle and sprinkled it all around the house. “This is how you ward off bad luck,” she said. His wife, who was also a first-time homeowner in the city, opened the door of one of their three rooms and said, excitedly, “This is your room, Mother. When you come to Seoul, you can stay here in comfort.” Mom looked inside and exclaimed, with an apologetic expression, “I have my own room!”
That night, past midnight, he heard something in the yard and looked out the window. Mom was walking around. She touched the gate and laid a hand on the grapevine and sat on the steps leading to the front door. She looked up at the night sky and went over to stand under the persimmon tree. He opened the window and called to her, “Come in and sleep.”
Mom asked, “Why aren’t you sleeping?” and, acting as if she were calling his name for the first time, said, secretively, “Hyong-chol, come out here.”
When he reached her, Mom took an envelope from her pocket and put it in his hand. “Now all you need is a nameplate. Use this money to get a nameplate.” He looked at Mom, the bulging envelope in his fist. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you buy this house,” she said.
Later, coming back from the bathroom in the early dawn, he opened the door of Mom’s room quietly. Mom and Chi-hon were lying side by side, deep in slumber. Mom seemed to be smiling in her sleep; his sister’s arm was, as ever, flung away from her body, freely.
Before that, from her first night with him in the night duty room, there hadn’t been a comfortable place for Mom to stay in Seoul. Often he and his siblings went to meet her when she came to Seoul on a chartered bus to attend a relative’s wedding. Mom would have a huge load with her. Before the wedding was even over, she would rush him and his siblings to the rented room they were living in. She’d take off the suit she’d worn to the wedding; food wrapped in newspaper or plastic or squash leaves would tumble out of her bundles. It didn’t take even a minute for Mom to change into a loose shirt and a pair of floral-print pants, which she’d brought rolled up in a corner of one of her bags. The side dishes that came out of the newspapers and plastic and squash leaves were moved onto plates and into bowls from the cupboard, and Mom brushed off her hands, quickly peeled the covers off the blankets, and washed them. She made kimchi with the salted cabbage she had brought, and scrubbed the pot that had turned black from the coal fire, and cleaned the portable stove until it shone, and sewed the covers back on the blankets after they dried in the sun on the roof, and washed rice and made bean-paste soup and set the table for supper. On the table were generous portions of stewed beef, sautéed anchovies, and sesame-leaf kimchi she’d brought from home. When he and his siblings took a spoonful of rice, Mom placed a piece of stewed beef on each person’s spoon. They urged her to eat, but she insisted, “I’m not hungry.” After they were done, she cleaned up and filled the rubber basin under the tap with water. She’d go out to buy a watermelon to keep cool in the basin, and then she’d quickly change back into her suit, the only one she had, which she wore only for weddings; then she’d say, “Take me back to the station.” It would already be late. “Spend the night and go home tomorrow, Mom,” they would say. But she would reply, “I have to go. I have things to do tomorrow.” The only thing Mom had to do was work in the rice paddies or the fields; that kind of work could wait until the following day. But Mom always went back on the train that same night. Even though it was really because there was only one room, a small room where her three grown children had to sleep huddled together, unable to move about, Mom just said, “I have to go. I have things to do tomorrow.”
He always made renewed resolutions when he brought Mom, exhausted, back to Seoul Station to wait for the night train so she could return home empty-handed. I’ll make money and move to a two-room place. I’ll rent a house. I’ll buy a house in the city. Then I’ll be able to have a room that this woman can sleep in comfortably. He bought a platform ticket whenever Mom took the night train so he could accompany her to the platform. He would find Mom a seat on the train and hand her a bag full of snacks, maybe banana milk or tangerines.
“Don’t fall asleep; remember to get off at Chongup Station.”
Mom commanded him—sometimes sadly, sometimes firmly, “Here in the city, you are your siblings’ father and mother.”
As he stood there, rubbing his hands together, only twenty-some years old, Mom would get up from her seat and open his hands and straighten his shoulders. “The eldest brother has to be dignified. He has to be the role model. If the eldest brother goes the wrong way, his siblings will go that way, too.”
When the train was about to leave, Mom’s eyes would fill with tears, and she’d say, “I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”
It would be in the middle of the night when his mom got off at Chongup. The first bus to town would be after six in the morning. His mom would get off the train and walk, in the dark, toward home.
“I wish we’d brought more flyers to post around here,” he says, burrowing into his jacket against the night chill.
“I’ll come back tomorrow and do that,” Chi-hon assures him, and she pushes her hands into her pockets.
Tomorrow he has to escort the CEO’s aides to the model apartment in Hongchon. He can’t afford to excuse himself. “Should I have my wife do it?”
“Let her rest. She’s taking care of Father, too.”
“Or you can call the youngest.”
“Or he’ll help me.”
“He?”
“Yu-bin. When we find Mom, I’m going to marry him. Mom always wanted me to get married.”
“If it’s that easy to make up your mind, you should have done it already.”
“After Mom went missing, I realized that there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important. I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that. I’m not going to get on a plane anymore, either.”
He pats his sister’s shoulder and sighs. Mom didn’t like it when his sister g
ot on a plane and went abroad. Mom’s opinion was that if it was during war you couldn’t help it, but otherwise you couldn’t leave your life up to fate like that, as if you didn’t care a whit about it. When Mom’s meddling about planes got worse, his sister boarded them in secret. Whether it was for business or for pleasure, if she had to take a plane, she left without telling Mom.
“The roses at that house were so beautiful …,” his sister says.
He looks at her in the dark. He has just been thinking about those roses. The first spring after he bought his house, Mom visited and suggested they go buy roses. Roses? When the word came out of his mom’s mouth he had to ask, “You do mean roses?” as if he’d misheard her.
“Red roses. Why? Isn’t there a place that sells them?”
“Yes, there is.” He took Mom to a nursery that supplied the saplings lining the streets in Kupabal. “I think this is the prettiest flower,” Mom said, and bought many more rosebushes than he had expected. Later that afternoon, she dug holes near the wall around his house and planted them. He had never seen Mom plant something to look at, not to harvest and eat, like beans or potatoes or seedlings of cabbage or radishes or peppers. Watching over her bent form, he asked whether she was planting the roses too close to the wall. Mom looked up at him and said, “That’s so that people outside can enjoy them, too.” Every spring, the roses came into full blossom. People passing by outside during the rose season paused under the wall and inhaled the scent of roses, just as Mom had hoped. After it rained, red rose petals would be strewn everywhere, having fallen on the other side of the wall.
At the bar in the big box store in Yokchon-dong, his sister, who downed two draft beers in place of dinner, takes out a notebook from her bag, opens it to a particular page, and pushes it toward him. Her face is flushed from drinking on an empty stomach. He tilts the notebook toward the light and reads. Unlike her imaginative and emotional personality, her handwriting is surprisingly compact.