Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [27]
“Is this your mother?”
His mom was standing behind the young man, shivering in the cold. Before he could say anything she said, “Hyong-chol! It’s me! Mom!” The young man looked at his watch and said, “There’s only seven minutes until the curfew!” and, turning to Hyong-chol’s mom, said “Goodbye!” and ran into the darkness to beat the government-imposed deadline.
Father had been away from home. When Hyong-chol’s sister read Mom his letter, Mom fretted, then went to his high school and got a copy of his graduation certificate and hopped on the train. It was the first time in her life that she’d ridden a train. That young man had seen Mom at Seoul Station asking people how to get to Yongsan-dong. Hearing her say that there was something she absolutely had to get to her son that night, he was compelled to bring her to the office himself. Hyong-chol’s mom was wearing blue plastic sandals in the middle of winter. During fall harvest, she had hurt her foot, near her big toe, with a scythe, and because it hadn’t fully healed, the plastic sandals were the only shoes she could wear. His mom left her sandals outside the night duty room before entering. “I don’t know if it’s too late!” she said, and took out his graduation certificate. Mom’s hands were frozen. Grasping them, he vowed to himself that he would make these hands and this woman happy, no matter what. But a rebuke tumbled out of his mouth, asking her how she could follow a stranger just because he told her to. Mom scolded him right back: “How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!” And she smiled her typical optimistic smile.
He stands in front of the closed office and studies the building. Mom couldn’t have come here. If she could figure out how to get here, she could have gone to one of her children’s places. The woman who said she had seen his mom here remembered her because of her eyes. She said his mom was wearing blue plastic sandals. Blue plastic sandals. He remembers just now that the shoes Mom had on when she went missing were low-heeled beige sandals. Father had told him. But the woman who had told him that Mom’s sandals had cut into her foot because she had walked so far had definitely said that they were blue. He peers into the office, then looks around the streets leading to Posong Girls’ High School and Eunsong Church.
Does the night duty room still exist in that office?
That night duty room was where he slept next to Mom all those years ago, sharing a blanket. Next to the woman who had boarded the Seoul-bound train without a plan, to bring a graduation certificate to her son. That must have been the last time he had lain next to Mom like that. A chilly draft seeped in, in waves from the wall facing the street. “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall,” Mom said, and switched sides with him. “It’s drafty,” he said, and got up to stack his bag and books next to the wall, to block out the wind. He piled the clothes he had been wearing that day next to the wall, too. “It’s fine,” Mom said, pulling him by the hand. “Go to bed; you have to get up for work tomorrow.”
“How’s your first taste of Seoul?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling, lying next to his mom.
“Nothing special,” Mom said, and laughed. She turned to look at him, and started to talk of times gone by. “You’re my first child. This isn’t the only thing that you got me to do for the first time. Everything you do is a new world for me. You got me to do everything for the first time. You were the first who made my belly swollen,