Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [29]
Can get to Kangnam in 20 minutes, Chongno in 10 minutes.
Cons: Small bathroom. You’re not going to live in it.
It’s probably hard to find something this cheap in Yongsan.
The reason I’m moving: I got a car and need a parking
space. Please text or e-mail. I’m renting the room
myself to save on broker fees.
Having read even the cell-phone number and the e-mail address, he pushes the gate slowly. The gate opens, just as it did thirty years ago. He looks inside. A U-shaped house, the same as thirty years ago, the door to each unit facing the courtyard. The door of the unit he used to live in has a padlock on it.
“Anyone home?” he calls out, and two or three doors open.
Two young women with short hair and two boys around seventeen look at him. He steps into the courtyard.
“Have you seen this person?” He shows the flyer to the young women first, then quickly hands one to the boys, who are about to shut their door. There are two girls around the same age peering out from inside the boys’ room. The boys, thinking he’s looking into their room, bang the door shut. The outside looks the same as thirty years ago, but each unit has become a studio. The owners must have renovated, creating one space, combining the kitchen and the room. He can see a sink in the corner of the women’s unit.
“No,” the young women say, and hand him the flyer. They have sleep in their eyes; perhaps they were napping. They watch him turn around and head back to the gate. He’s about to step outside when the boys’ door opens and someone calls, “Wait! I think this grandmother was sitting in front of the gate a few days ago.”
When he approaches the room, the other boy sticks his head out and says, “No, I told you this isn’t her. This lady is young. That lady was really wrinkly. Her hair wasn’t like this, either—she was a beggar.”
“But her eyes were the same. Look only at her eyes; they were just like these. If we find her, are you really going to give us five million won?”
“I’ll give you some money as long as you tell me exactly what happened, even if you don’t find her.” He asks the boys to step outside. The young women, who had closed their door, open it again and look out.
“That lady was the one from the bar down the street. They keep her locked up because she has dementia, and it looked like she snuck out and got lost. The owner of the bar came and took her home.”
“Not that lady; I saw this lady, too. She’d hurt her foot. It was covered in pus. She kept chasing away flies … though I didn’t look closely, because she smelled and was dirty.”
“And? Did you see where she went?” Hyong-chol asks the boy.
“No. I just went in. She kept trying to come in, so I slammed the gate.…”
Nobody else had seen Mom. The boy follows him out, saying, “I really did see her!” He looks down the alleys, running ahead of Hyong-chol. Hyong-chol gives the boy a hundred-thousand-won check as he leaves. The boy’s eyes sparkle. Hyong-chol asks the boy to get the lady to stay with him if he sees her again and to give him a call. Not listening very carefully, the boy says, “Then you’ll give me five million won?” Hyong-chol nods. The boy asks for a few more flyers. He says he will hang them up at the gas station where he works part-time. He says that if Hyong-chol finds his mom from that he should be rewarded with five million won, because it will be thanks to him. Hyong-chol tells him he will.
They have faded—promises he made to himself for Mom, who changed places with him in the night duty room to protect him from the draft, saying, “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall.” The pledge he had made that Mom would sleep in a warm room when she came back to this city.
He takes a cigarette from his pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point his emotions ceased to belong only to him. He went about his life, having mostly forgotten about Mom. What was I doing when Mom was left behind on that unfamiliar subway-station platform, having failed to get on the train with Father? He looks up once more at the office