Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [39]
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,