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Kim
Mi-wol Translated by
Brother Anthony of Taizé
Deciding on our destination was her job. “This
time, let’s go to the Plaza,” she said. I promptly
turned on the computer.
Booking was my job.
It
was some four or more years ago that my wife first
mentioned a hotel. When she
said she wanted to spend the coming summer vacation
in a downtown hotel, I chortled.
What kind of vacation was that? Suggesting we go to
a hotel in the very center
of the town that I crossed every day on my way to
and from work, rather than a
resort in some nice vacation spot. What on earth
were we going to do there?
But
finally I went along with her proposal. On
reflection, it was not something to
be laughed at. Actually, since I have always been of
the persuasion that the
best kind of vacation consisted of dozing lazily at
home during the day,
watching repeats of premier league matches I had
missed, going to some nearby
hotel rather than a remote holiday resort was far
less bother.
That
was the start of our hotel outings, which became an
annual event. The Sheraton
Walkerhill, the Lotte Hotel, the Shilla, the
Millennium Hilton . . . my wife never
booked us at a hotel we had already stayed in. She
rather enjoyed the process
of deciding where we would go for our holiday this
time. As I watched from the
sidelines, I came to wonder if what she really
wanted was not simply to spend
vacations at a hotel, but to stay in this and that
hotel far and wide until
there were none left to conquer, like a master of
martial arts moving about
from one training school to another.
The difference in price between the
lowest class of hotel room, the superior room, and
the next class above, the deluxe
room, was forty thousand won. The mouse pointer slid
naturally toward the
booking button of the deluxe room. My wife, who was
standing behind me, laid a
hand on my right shoulder.
“Do you know, you’ve changed?”
“What
do you mean?”
I did not take my eyes off the
monitor.
“You always used to complain.
Asking what we were going to do in a hotel.”
Three hundred and twenty thousand won
a day. With tax and service fee included I would
have to pay nearly four
hundred thousand won.
“Don’t
you remember? You used to say that the cost of a
hotel stay was the most wasteful
thing in the world.”
Was
that so? I suppose it was. Once you’ve seen what the
hotel facilities are like,
what the service is like, in the end you go there to
sleep, surely? And
sleeping is just the same no matter where you sleep,
so that four or five years
back I probably could not have seen why I should
spend a small fortune to no purpose.
“You’re
right. I used to say that.” I
nodded slowly. “You
know, what’s really wasteful . . . is not the cost
of a hotel room.”
With
that, I suddenly had the feeling I had grown very
old.
In
my twenties, I used to think the cost of a taxi ride
was the most wasteful
thing in the world. Until I came to Seoul to enter
university, I had never once
left my palm-sized hometown where a base taxi fare
would take you anywhere, and
I was appalled that in Seoul if you stayed out
drinking until the buses had
stopped running and went home by taxi it might cost
a whopping twenty or thirty
thousand won. Then if I decided to save the taxi
fare by going on drinking
until dawn, when the buses started running, the cost
of the drinks would be
more than the taxi fare. Yet I did not regret that.
You still had what you’d
drunk. But once I got a job and began to drive my
own car, I could not help
resenting paying for parking. Being asked to pay for
doing nothing, just
parking the car briefly, I used to feel was sheer
robbery. When
you drink, the drink stays inside you, and when you
read a book, the book stays
inside your head. But when you park briefly, there’s
nothing left afterward, is
there? With that illogical logic, I would willingly
pay a hundred thousand won
for drinks but be furious about paying ten thousand
for parking.
And now I am suddenly in my
mid-thirties. At present I no longer bother
wondering what is most wasteful.
But it certainly is not taxi fares, nor parking
fees, and not hotel prices either.
So what is it?
“Really, we should have gone there during
the World Cup.”
Wondering
what she was talking about, I glanced up at my wife.
“Then
we could have looked straight down at City Hall
Plaza crammed full of Red Devils.”
In
front of City Hall? Hold on. What was the name of
the hotel? I turned my eyes
back to the screen. Right. I had failed to realize,
even while I was booking,
just where our destination was located. Seoul Plaza
Hotel, that anyone passing
near City Hall is bound to cast at least a glance
at, rising majestically as
though standing guard over Seoul Plaza across the
road. I sniffed hard. I felt
as though a fierce winter wind was blowing over the
tip of my nose. The sound
of a bell being rung beside a Salvation Army
collection pot, drifting through
the cold, bright air, echoed clearly in my ears.
The older students looked surprised.
It was because three of us freshmen had turned up at
the freshers’ orientation,
which was not the same as the matriculation
ceremony, wearing suits. The three
of us had in common the fact of being newly arrived
from the provinces. I was
ashamed of having begun college acting like a
bumpkin, but I squared my
shoulders, confident that my suit was the most
expensive. The suit Father had
ordered for me on the day the university entrance
results were announced, at
the only tailor’s shop in our small town, had cost
three hundred thousand won,
even without a waistcoat. But what interested the
older students was the suit
one of the others was wearing.
“It’s an Armani. It looks genuine.”
“How
much, then? Two million?”
Two
million? What were they talking about?
“No, just over one million.”
It was only when I heard the reply
that I understood they were discussing the price of
his suit. To think that
there existed such expensive clothes, that there
were people wearing such
clothes, and that there were people recognizing them. I was
not
so much dejected as dumbfounded. But the attitude of
the students toward that
son of a local worthy was unexpectedly cold. Some
even went so far as to say
openly that in such times of dark despair he should
be ashamed of his luxury
goods. Even though I had no idea what a time of dark
despair was, or what
luxury goods were, that was the first insight
I
gained
as a
university student.
Ah,
what an amazing place Seoul is!
That
was not the only amazing thing. In university we had
no homeroom teacher, no
pre-assigned class schedules. The freshmen went
crowding into the computer room
to register for their courses. Intent on exercising
in the best way the right,
acquired for the first time in my life, of choosing
what courses I would take,
I weighed which class would be interesting, taking my time
to compare each
course’s goal and outline. But then, on looking
around, I was surprised to find
there were only three of us left in the computer
room. We were all wearing
suits. Upon enquiring, it appeared that unless one registered
quickly the class quotas would be full, so everyone
had finished in a flash and
gone off for lunch. In the end we in the suits
registered for any course at
random and barely managed to reach nineteen credits.
Since there were thirty
freshmen and the quota for each class was thirty, I
was unable to understand
why registration was impossible for lack of room
unless one registered quickly,
but on seeing intellectual-looking course titles
such as Introduction to
Philosophy or Basic Humanities, we flattered
ourselves that we had become
intellectuals.
The freshmen who reached the
student cafeteria first had put several tables
together in a row and were
eating facing each other. I sat down at one end.
Looking around, I saw beside
me a girl, in front of me too was a girl. I had
attended middle and high
schools where all the students were boys, all the
teachers
men, so that for the past six years I had never once
been within one meter of a
woman. Unable to raise my head to make eye
contact, not
knowing if the soup was salty or the rice properly cooked, while
nobody said anything and the noise of chopsticks
clashing together hovered over
the table, I furtively added the sound of my
chopsticks to the rest. Then the
girl in front of me spoke:
“Hey,
everyone, don’t eat the bean sprouts. They’ve
gone bad.”
I had just picked up a clump of
seasoned bean sprouts with my chopsticks and was
stuffing them into my mouth.
Our eyes met. I reckoned that I should say
something.
“Oh,
I don’t know. They seem okay.”
I
was not meaning to support my words but without
thinking I gulped down what I
had in my mouth. With that, from all sides voices
rose: They taste odd; I knew
they were bad from the start; I took one mouthful
and spat it out. Damnation!
“Is
this the first time you’ve eaten bean sprouts?”
She
spoke primly, but she was laughing. Suddenly all the
strength went out of the
hand holding the chopsticks. It was the first time I
had ever seen a girl’s
laughing face so close up. Her face was the size of
a fist. Her skin was white,
her eyes black, her lips red. Like Snow White, in
other words. What a pretty
girl, and here she was sitting across from me. So it
was that I met Yun-seo,
laughing at a bum who had worn a suit to freshman
orientation, a half-wit who had
made a mess of class registration, an idiot who
could not tell when bean
sprouts had gone bad. She
was twenty-one, having repeated her university
entrance exams. Since my
birthday was early, I entered primary school when I
was only seven, so I was nineteen
when we met. Still, since we were beginning school
in the same year, she said
we should use the familiar form of address. Yun-seo-ya. Yun-seo-ya. Every
time I called out her name, I had the feeling I had
gained a small bonanza,
like extra cash. But chances of that kind of bonanza
were few and far between.
Yun-seo often skipped classes. If I looked for her,
she was all the time
sitting in the department meeting room or hanging
out at a bar in front of the
school. Twenty-one-year-old men, repeat students
like her, were always
loitering round her. Because of them, and the way
they treated us younger
fellow students
like children as if they alone were adults, it was
not easy for me to get near
Yun-seo.
Look,
you guys, I didn’t repeat. And what’s
so great about
repeating?
Unable to say anything in their
presence, I could only kick an innocent roadside
pebble.
Spring days went flashing by
without my knowing where they had gone. After poking
my nose into this student
club and that, I finally joined none of them while
Yun-seo, who I had assumed
would be interested in none, became a producer in
the school’s radio station. Whenever
I happened to hear a broadcast coming from the
speakers on campus, I used to
stand there with my eyes closed. It was not her
voice coming out but when I
thought that Yun-seo had written the text the
announcer was reading, I imagined
her face floating behind the words emerging from the
speakers. Once, when I saw
Yun-seo after listening in that way I made a great
fuss about how good the
program was, how fresh her commentaries, how
outstanding the selection of
songs, I must have sounded like a devoted listener
so she could not be blamed
for offering me a chance to appear as a guest.
“On
the program? Me? How?”
“Just
ten minutes. It’s all recorded, there’s nothing to
worry about. Please.”
As
part of a recent reorganization, she explained, they
had been planning to
include a conversation corner with schoolmates once
a week, in order to get
closer to them. How could I ever say no to any
request from her? From
that day on I consumed one
raw egg a day to clear
my voice.
I endured agony trying to decide whether my request
song should be Kim Gun-mo’s
“Meeting Gone Wrong,” Lula’s “The Angel Who Lost Wings,” or
R.ef’s “Formula for Parting.” On the day of the
recording, I made sure to
arrive ten minutes early for the recording session.
Only the segment where I appeared
was totally edited out; not one second got
broadcast. I could understand.
Having gone there feeling I was off to a picnic, I
was asked questions about
the founding of the World Trade Organization, the
irregular ownership
succession practices of conglomerates, the
liberalization of private academies — in short,
questions about the age of dark
despair — and grew so flustered that anyone would
have thought I was mentally
defective. Worse still, the guy they called the
manager, who looked old enough
to be a professor, would click his tongue at me with
a pitying expression, as one
would at a
broken bowl. Instead of my request song, they played
Nochatsa’s
“Dry
Leaf
Come Back to Life.”
I
ask you! How can a dry leaf come back to life? Is
it Jesus?
As I listened to the broadcast, I
once again kicked a guiltless roadside pebble.
The
next day, Yun-seo came to apologize for not having
let me know the topics for
the program in advance and I got her to agree to a
date, so the broadcast that
ended in a fiasco turned out to be a harbinger of
good things to come. After
eating a pork cutlet and drinking a glass of draft
beer in Myeong-dong, we
decided to take a stroll. Yun-seo skillfully led the
way out of Myeong-dong’s
complicated network of alleys. The mere sight of
streets lined with stores bearing
the names of famous fashion brands, such as Get
Used, Nix, Boy London, was a pleasure.
High-rise buildings, fancy shop windows, strolling
groups of young men and
women. Every step I took was a new world. Back home,
a street I walked along
would look the same ten minutes before or ten
minutes after; here, it seemed to
change every minute. We passed the subway station at
the head of Euljiro street
and walked on in the direction of City Hall. That
there was nowhere a familiar
face to be seen was fascinating, too.
Ah, Seoul is really amazing.
Once again I was shouting to
myself. And more than anything else, the way this
moment, this world belonged
entirely to Yun-seo and me alone was so exciting, I
could not stop joking and
chattering. She laughed as she listened to me
relating humble memories about
how I had won an anti-communist speech contest in
middle school, then gone
camping in high school and caught snakes barehanded.
But perhaps inside herself
she was thinking of other things, for the moment I
paused, out of the blue she
said,
“I’ve always wanted to go in there
once.”
“There? Where?”
Though I felt hurt that she had
changed the subject, my curiosity was aroused. Her
finger was pointing in the
direction of a tall building that rose beyond the
fountain in the middle of
traffic in front of City Hall. At the very top, on
the left-hand side, a
floodlit sign sparkled golden: SEOUL PLAZA
HOTEL.
The room was at the end of the
corridor on the sixteenth floor. As soon as the door
opened, our eyes were
struck by the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window.
Either because the glass was
tinted or because of the rain outside, the sky had
an unreal purple hue, like
in a sepia-toned photo. Without even waiting to
change into slippers, my wife
went to the window and exclaimed:
“Why,
from here we can see Deoksu Palace!”
While
she was gazing at Deoksu Palace, I looked
around the room. On the whole, the structure,
furniture and fittings were not
particularly different from other hotels we had been
in. I perched on the bed.
The mirror on the dressing table on the opposite side reflected
the face of an office worker on the first day of his
vacation. It was a face
that looked as though it knew very well that the
hours to be spent in this
place would be less interesting and rewarding than
catching up with the
episodes of the “Prison Break” series missed because
of being too busy
recently.
No wonder. Vacations
spent in hotels were always predictably similar. You
check in. You eat in the
hotel restaurant. You have a drink in the sky lounge
bar. You go back to the
room, have sex, then sleep. That was it. The next
day, since you had to leave
the room, you simply kicked back at the spa, then
visited the fitness club or
the swimming pool. As a result, none of the
vacations had left me with any
special memories. The hotels we had visited last
year or the year before were all
as alike as the eggs in a refrigerator.
The mattress was
well-sprung. The sheets were fluffy and smelled like
towels that had been dried
in the sun. I stretched out. Air sufficiently cooled
by air conditioning
settled pleasingly over my face and arms. I shut my
eyes. The perfect
temperature, perfect humidity, perfect cleanliness,
perfect service, a feeling
of being perfectly pampered. Surely it’s because we
like that feeling of
perfection that we keep visiting hotels? Isn’t that
the blessing of capitalism,
to pay money and buy perfection?
My wife
was arranging her possessions on the dressing table.
Unlike the woman who used
to wrap her luggage in bundles like a peddler even
for just a single night’s
outing, this time she seemed to have packed only a
few cosmetics. One of the
things which amazed me most after I got married was
just how many women’s
cosmetics there were. I had not realized they could
be divided into various
categories. Toner, lotion, and
cream. I knew that much. Essence and serum I could
understand. But that was not
all. Eye cream, neck cream, hand cream, foot cream,
body cream, lip cream, and
so on; before the endless proliferation of species
of cosmetics the human body
was dissolved and segmented. Neck or hand or foot
are all parts of one body,
yet so divided up into different categories that you
have the impression it
would be a disaster to apply foot cream to the neck.
When I heard that color
cosmetics were distinct from basic cosmetics, I had
to throw up my hands, not
wanting to know anything more.
It was the same with household
goods. What with humidifiers and air-conditioners
and heaters and air
purifiers, water purifiers, lint removers, food waste
driers
and dishwashers, bidets and toothbrush sterilizers,
necessary items only
multiplied more and more. Things you could perfectly
well live without changed
into things you should have or absolutely had to
have. Insofar as it was a
chance to get away from such things, coming to stay
in a hotel was a real
vacation.
What made me open my eyes again was
the way everything was so quiet. I could see my
wife’s back. She seemed to have
finished arranging the dressing table and was
looking out of the window again with
folded arms.
“What are you looking at like
that?”
“Roh Moo-hyun.”
“What?”
I
sat up. My wife
was looking down toward the main gate of Deoksu Palace.
“I
was remembering Roh Mu-hyun. That’s where the
memorial altar was, isn’t it?”
It
had been only a few months before. All day, the
death of former president Roh
Mu-hyun had been dominating the news, online and
off, and that day my wife
did not come home even late in the evening. She had
not answered her phone all
through the day. Then I saw her on the 9 p.m. TV
news. She was standing in the long line of mourners
stretching all the way
along the walls of Deoksu Palace, holding a
white chrysanthemum. Seen in a close-up, her eyes
brimming with tears, she
somehow looked not so much sad as weary. I later
heard that she had queued for
five hours to pay her respects. She must have been
tired.
I pulled my cigarettes from my
trouser pocket. I could not find my lighter. Yet I
was sure I had brought it
with me as we left home. Perhaps I had put it in my
bag instead of my pocket?
“Do you know where my lighter is?”
My wife scowled at me and began to
rummage through the bags packed away in one corner.
The sky stretching outside
the window sixteen floors above ground level was
still purple. On the sidewalks
far below varicolored umbrellas met and parted. Unexpectedly,
black umbrellas were the most common. Perhaps the
rain was letting up. I
noticed one group of people lingering at the
entrance to the plaza without
umbrellas. They were all dressed in black.
“I can’t find it. What about asking
the front desk to send up some matches?”
“Oh,
all right. That will do.”
My wife
moved toward the phone. Over her shoulder I could
see Taepyeongno
Street extending all the way from City Hall to
Gwanghwamun Gate. The accustomed
buildings, familiar streets, scenes that I could see even
with my eyes shut. I pulled an umbrella out of my bag.
“No, I’ll go out and buy one.
Stretch my legs at the same time.”
My wife
put down the receiver, looking pleased.
“Good. And buy me an iced Americano
on your way back.”
Just then the time on the bedside
clock moved from 17:14 to 17:15.
The crosswalk in front of the
hotel. A tour bus that had missed the signal was
awkwardly parked across it. I
could see the passengers dozing, their heads leaning
against the windows. I
wonder when I started feeling that everybody always
looks weary. Why? I opened
the umbrella. The rain had slackened, but not enough
to walk about bareheaded.
I examined the buildings beside Deoksu Palace and in
the direction of Euljiro. Not
one of the convenience stores you keep tripping over
at any other time could be
seen. I reckoned I had better look round the back of
the hotel. As I walked, I
glanced idly at the buses full of weary passengers.
Behind there is City Hall,
the subway station, the intersection, the fountain .
. . and somewhere it
seemed there must be Yun-seo and me.
After
that first date the two of us spent time together on
one other occasion. It was
in May, at a demonstration demanding the truth about
the violent suppression of
the Gwangju Democratization Movement. I was
attending it reluctantly at the insistent
urging of an older member of the student association
who had been kind to me. Mingling
with the crowd, until we went out through the school
gate I was not very
impressed. But as we reached Myeong-dong I began to
gape. The demonstration had
grown into a huge crowd, as though all the students
in Seoul were gathered
there. Along the way I had intended to slip away
unnoticed but we were so
tightly packed in a scrum that it was not easy.
After several attempts I
finally succeeded in leaving the crowd. I had just
set foot on the sidewalk
thronged with citizens watching the demonstration
when suddenly, from behind me
a great roar arose. I looked back toward the roadway
where I had been sitting
only a short while ago. Far away, at the front of
the crowd, a life-sized straw
effigy of Chun Doo-hwan had appeared. Someone
shouted that they were
going to burn the wicked murderer at the stake. Cold
sweat was running down my
spine. The onlookers, intent on seeing more clearly,
were jostling for a better
view and standing on tiptoe.
I forced my way through the crowd,
heading for the nearest subway station. My only
thought was to wash my
sweat-soaked body. Then, as I reached the back of
the demonstration, I noticed
a familiar face. It was that manager of the
broadcasting system, who looked old
enough to be a professor, together with two students
carrying cameras, and one
female student standing beside them.
“Yun-seo!
Lee
Yun-seo!”
She
turned to look at me, tear gas grenades
exploded, the riot police charged, the scrum
collapsed, screams rang out. I do
not know which came first. When I came to my senses
I was holding Yun-seo’s
hand and we were running like mad. When we stopped
with shaking legs, unable to
run any further, we were in front of the blood
donation center. Gasping for
breath, we blindly dived inside. “Come in. Welcome.”
A gently smiling nurse
greeted us. Inside it was snug and peaceful, totally
unlike what lay outside.
Seoul was really amazing.
We
were both told we could not donate blood.
There was no way our blood pressures could be normal
just after running like
mad. Yun-seo’s blood type was A, mine was O. The
combination of an A-type girl
and an O-type boy is supposed to be so good. My face
flushed hot at the very
thought. Yun-seo said nothing. She merely wiped away
a drop of blood from the
tip of her index finger with an alcohol swab. Then
she asked,
“Later, once we’re older, will we
be like those citizens back there?”
“What do you mean? What about those
citizens?”
“Will
we end up just looking on calmly, saying, ‘I took
part in demos a bit back in
the old days’?”
“No
way! There can’t be people who think like that.”
“No,
I heard that just now. Some middle-aged guy said
that. Young students think
they know, then after they graduate they go out into
society and forget it all,
so why do they keep demonstrating? All they do is
snarl the traffic; the world
doesn’t change.”
Looking
troubled, Yun-seo threw the bloody swab into the
trashcan. I ripped open the
wrapping of a choco-pie that was on the table and
asked:
“That
guy,
Chun
Doo-hwan,
could he really be killed?”
“He
can’t really be killed. That’s why they burn a straw
effigy instead.”
“What
I mean is, suppose he could really be killed, what
would you do?”
“I
. . . couldn’t do it. How could I kill somebody?
“Right.
How could you kill someone?”
“……”
Yun-seo
picked up the choco-pie. The nurses did not drive
out the two students who, in
addition to pilfering snacks despite not having
donated blood, were chattering about
risky topics.
Again we walked to City Hall
station. As we were passing the Bank of Korea,
Yun-seo asked me, as if I were
someone she was meeting for the first time, whether
I found living in Seoul suited
me. I realized that I had already been living in
Seoul for three months. It was
rather different from the fantasy I nourished when I
was small, if I heard Cho Yong-pil
singing “Seoul, Seoul, Seoul,” or Lee Yong’s “Our
Seoul,” but still it was not
so bad. Yun-seo said she was born in Seoul.
“I
hate it here. There are too many people, it’s too
noisy. There’s nothing in the
streets but apartment blocks that all look alike and
the air is bad. By night
it’s so light I can’t get to sleep.”
I
rather liked it because of the many people and the
noise. I found it exciting.
No matter where you went in Seoul no two places were
the same, and if you tried
it was possible to plan 365 different dating courses
for
365 days in
a year. And because it was light at night, it made
me feel less lonely. But
there was no need for me to express an opinion
contrary to Yun-seo’s. Rather,
when it came to Yun-seo I preferred to be persuaded
about everything as she
wished. The side of Plaza Hotel could be seen in the
distance.
“Why did you say the other
day that you
wanted to go there?”
Her
expression grew serious.
“For
one, twenty years ago I was an orphan, abandoned by
my parents and adopted
overseas . . . “
“You?
Really?”
“Of
course not. It’s just a thought.”
Her
voice was low. The fact that we had been running
through streets in Myeong-dong
full of tear gas
fog felt very remote. There were no stars in the
sky, no flowers on the ground,
yet I was thinking how good it would be if this walk
with her along nighttime streets
would never end.
“Once I turned twenty, I visited my
homeland for the first time. I had come to meet my
birth parents. So I stayed
at the Plaza Hotel. It’s symbolic by being in the
very center of Seoul. It’s
right in front of City Hall and close to Point Zero.
Anyway, on the evening
before I was due to meet my parents, I was plunged
in thought as I looked down
at the capital of my native land.”
Yun-seo stopped and looked up at
the sky.
“So,
is that the end?”
“Yes. I was curious what that would
feel like, so I wanted to go and see.”
“But
that’s just a notion. You’re not an orphan.”
“In
a situation like that, the Seoul being gazed at
would be incredibly unfamiliar
and new. Like some place I had never seen. Not the
familiar native land I have
suffered and lived in for twenty years but a
fascinating foreign land seen for
the first time, a cold-hearted city that had
rejected me. I wanted to see
that.”
I
slowed my pace; I wanted to help somehow. I wanted
to grant her wish. How much
would a night in the Plaza Hotel cost? Not so easy;
it looked expensive. It would
be okay if I could find the money. I cleared my
throat.
“What
are you doing for Christmas?”
She
burst out laughing. Christmas was still seven months
away. I did not laugh. I
slowly clenched then unclenched my fists. My palms
were damp with sweat.
“If you’re doing nothing special .
. . will you join me then?”
For
me, it had taken a lifetime’s courage. I felt as
though I had just proposed
marriage. The few seconds while I waited for her
reply were appallingly long.
“Okay.
Let’s do that.”
She
smiled brightly. Just like in the student cafeteria
that first day. I clenched
my teeth to keep back a whoop of delight. I had
kicked at a stone and it had
gone flying far away.
The price of a disposable lighter
was three hundred won. I hadn’t bought one for a
really long time. To think
that there are still things that cost only three
hundred won. Even gum is five
hundred won a pack. I looked down again at the
transparent green lighter. Back
when I was a student, it would have cost a hundred
or so. Still, back then, the
most wasteful thing in the world must have been the
cost of the lighters that
unavoidably I had to buy. Those were days when I
frequently went to billiard halls and bars and there
were times when the drawer
in my desk held up to thirty varicolored disposable
lighters I had picked up
one by one in such places.
I went back toward the hotel. Now I
had to buy an iced coffee. My wife had not
specified any brand but she liked the Americano from
Coffee Bean most of all. I
recalled having once noticed a branch of Coffee Bean
near the Seoul Finance
Center. I stood below the traffic light, which was showing
red.
On
the far side of the crossing, I noticed some people
dressed in black standing
without umbrellas
at the entrance to Seoul Plaza. They seemed to be
the same people I had
glimpsed from the hotel room window. At the head of
the loosely formed line
some women were standing. They were wearing mourning
dress. Standing to the
left of the women was a man whose face I seemed to
have seen many times
somewhere, either a politician or a social activist.
Then behind them stood an
old man with a bushy white beard wearing clerical
garb, leaning on a walking
stick. Despite the rain, the slogan on the banner
the old man was holding up
remained clear:
President!
Apologize
to the families of the dead! Resolve the Yongsan
Tragedy!
The Yongsan tragedy? That was early
in the year. Had it still not been settled, then? If
I remembered that
incident, where five evictees died — or was it six?
several, anyway — it’s
because I happened to pass the site with my wife
that very evening. We were on
our way to Ichon-dong, where her parents live. What
with police buses, armed
riot police and reporters camping out, traffic in
the whole area round
Sinyongsan station was completely blocked. Inside
the car, my wife
kept repeating, “Oh dear, oh dear.” There was no
telling if she was referring
to the Yongsan tragedy or the blocked traffic. That
day we were more than an
hour late reaching our destination.
The clock on the façade of City
Hall marked 5:30. The women in mourning suddenly
dropped to the ground. The man
who looked like a politician and the white-bearded
priest and the six or seven
citizens beside and behind them did likewise. Three
steps, then a prostration.
Three more steps, then another prostration. A formal
pilgrimage in Buddhist
style.
The signal turned green. In a flash
the sky seemed to judder and rain came pouring down.
With that, strong gusts of
wind came blowing. After crossing the street I stood
struggling to straighten
my umbrella that was being blown inside out. The
rain was so heavy I could
hardly see ahead. Someone offered raincoats to the
women in mourning but they
refused to take them. In the pouring rain without
raincoats or umbrellas they made
their way around the plaza, taking three steps, then
making one prostration.
They were few in number and those watching were few,
too; it was
a gloomy sight. I turned back halfway over the
crossing. Coffee Bean was too
far to go in this kind of rain. Besides, since my wife was not
fussy about the choice of coffee, she would be fine
with an Americano from the
Dunkin Donuts beside Deoksu Palace.
Water was dripping from my soaked
sleeves and trouser bottoms. The attentive doorman
smiled as he handed
me a dry towel.
“Konnichiwa.”
Too
embarrassed to explain that I was not Japanese, I
replied as I handed back the
towel,
“Arigatou
gozaimasu.”
He
could surely not imagine that in the vacation season
a Korean man could be spending
his vacation in a hotel at the center of Seoul. I
suppose I might be taken for
a Korean who had come up to Seoul from a provincial
workplace, but with my
palm-tree-patterned shirt, my shorts and my leather
sandals on bare feet, it
was nine times out of ten more likely to mistake me
for a Japanese tourist.
The moment I entered the hotel
lobby, a feeling of comfort surrounded me, like
coming back home. Unlike the
heat and humidity outside, which provoked an Ugh,
here it was cool and
comfortable enough to bring forth an Ahh. The doors
of the elevator closed. Once
alone, I breathed out idly. It was only as I got out
on the sixteenth floor
that I realized I was no longer holding the iced
coffee. I had put it down
briefly in the lobby while I was wiping the rain off
with the towel and then
forgot to bring it with me. I turned back toward the
elevator. Too late. 15,
14, 13 . . . the illuminated numerals on the panel
indicating which floor it
was on were lighting up in descending order. I
glared around. There was nobody
in the corridor. I recalled a scene from a famous
foreign movie I had watched
one weekend on the television. In an empty hotel
corridor a tubby man had
charged full speed at the wall.
“I’ll show you just who I am!”
He cried. He struck the wall and
passed straight through it. I stared at the wall in
front of me just as I had
stared at the hole through which the man had passed.
More exactly, at the table
placed in front of it. Or even more precisely, at
the telephone lying on the
table. If I picked up the receiver I knew what would
emerge. Something I had
heard once before, long ago. “Thank you. What can I
do for you?” It would be
something of that kind, but at the time I was
completely incapable of
understanding the fluent Japanese of the employee on
the front desk at the
other end of the line. That had been just as well. I
had not wanted to talk,
but simply reassure myself that I was not the only
person in the world.
The temperature had fallen sharply
that day. There were six or seven people like me
waiting for someone in front
of City Hall. My hands were numb, I was shivering,
my teeth were chattering.
Still I could not help giggling. It was my
nineteenth Christmas. Soon a girl
for whom it was the twenty-first Christmas would
arrive. How long and how
painstakingly I had prepared for this moment. The
appearance of Seoul by night
as I waited for the person I liked was amazingly
cold and bright and beautiful.
As they passed, pedestrians put money into the
Salvation Army collection pot positioned
on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. The sound of
the hand bell being rung by
a man in uniform spread limpidly through the chilly December air.
“I’ve booked a room in Plaza Hotel
for you.”
Such was the Christmas present with
which I was going to surprise Yun-seo. Of course,
that implied that I was going
to go into the hotel with her but there was no other
meaning. To say that I did
not want to lay a finger on her would have been a
lie, but that was not what I
really wanted. In that hotel room I wanted her to
experience the feelings of an
orphan visiting her homeland for the first time in
twenty years and to long
remember the sight of an unfamiliar Seoul reflected
in her eyes
It was thirty minutes after the
appointed time. I phoned her home. In those days
there were no mobiles or
pagers and as I phoned from a public phone booth I
kept looking back, afraid
that Yun-seo would come and we would miss each
other. An hour went by. Still
nobody answered the phone. Another thirty minutes
passed. Finally her mother
answered the phone. She said that Yun-seo had
already gone out at lunchtime to
meet up with her friends. She had completely
forgotten her promise to me. I
plodded toward the hotel. I wonder why I did not
even think that I could still
cancel the reservation.
Seoul seen by night from the window
of a room on the sixteenth floor. Cars with their
headlights shining were
speeding to and fro along Taepyeongno street, that
stretched from City Hall Plaza to Gwanghwamun Gate. Most of the
cars were white. Having been stood up by the person
I liked, the nighttime
Seoul I gazed down at was still cold and bright and
beautiful. And lonely. So I
spent the night I had purchased with the money I had
earned through many odd
jobs in the course of seven months. I never told
anyone about what happened
that night: that I had been alone in a hotel room;
that I had kept looking out
of the window until at last I fell asleep; that
waking early, suddenly feeling
lonely, sad, desolate like an orphan returning to
his homeland for the first
time, I had lingered in the corridor; that there I
had discovered the telephone
placed on a table beside the elevator and listened
to the voice of the employee
at the front desk.
Later, I told Yun-seo how I had
waited for her shivering in front of City Hall but
did not mention the hotel. I
wanted to keep the memory of that night to myself.
Supposing I had told her,
she might not have believed me. In those days, the
price of one night in the
hotel was a sum equivalent to three months’ rent for
my student lodgings.
I wonder if she would believe me
now, more than ten years later. Would she even
remember things from back then?
Could I prove that I am the same I as then, that we
are just the same we as
then?
I reflected that, as I handed over
the iced coffee I would go and buy and bring back
through the rain, I ought to
mention it to my wife. It did not matter if she did
not believe me. Nor
would it matter if she did not remember. It was not
really
important. This was only the first day of our
vacation, so there were still
several more days left. |