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By Root 383 0

is Tae-sop’s wife to do this?” Neighbors whispered that Tae-sop’s wife and the restaurant’s cook had run away together. Your wife was the person who made sure the children ate, not their own grandmother. Once, your wife saw that they hadn’t eaten and brought them home to feed them breakfast; the next morning, the girls came over, sleep still in their eyes. Your wife placed two more spoons on the table and seated the girls; after that, they came by at each mealtime. Sometimes they would arrive before the food was ready and go lie on their stomachs and play, and when the table was set they would run over and sit down. They stuffed their mouths as if they would never see food again. You were flabbergasted, but your wife took their side, as if they were her secret granddaughters: “They must be so hungry to do that. It’s not like before, when things were difficult for us.… It’s nice to have them around, it’s not as lonely.”

After the girls started to come for meals, your wife would, even in the morning, cook an eggplant dish and steam mackerel. When your children visited from Seoul with fruit or cake, she saved the treats until the girls poked their heads through the gate, around four in the afternoon. Soon enough, the girls started expecting snacks on top of three meals, and your wife also started to assume that she would feed them. You don’t know how she managed to feed the children when Pyong-sik, the owner of the store in town, had to bring her home because he found her sitting at the bus stop, not knowing which bus to take home. Or when she left to go to the garden to pick some adlay but was found sitting in the fields beyond the railroad by Ok-chol. What did the children eat during your absence? You didn’t think of the girls while you were in Seoul.

“Where’s Grandma, Grandpa?” the elder child asks you, figuring out that your wife isn’t here only after she has looked by the well and in the shed and the back yard and even opened the doors to the bedrooms. It’s the elder who asks the question, but the younger girl comes right up next to you, waiting for your answer. You want to ask the same thing. Really, where is she? Is she even in this world? You tell the children to wait, and you scoop some rice from the rice jar and wash it and put it in the electric rice-cooker. The girls run around, opening every bedroom door. As if your wife might walk out of one of the rooms. You pause, not knowing how much water to pour in, because you’ve never done this before; then you add about half a cup more and press the switch down.

That day, in the subway car leaving Seoul Station, how many minutes did it take you to grasp that your wife wasn’t there, in the moving subway car? You assumed that she had gotten on behind you. As the car stopped at Namyong Station and left it, you felt a sudden terror. Before you could examine the source of that feeling, something, despair that you had committed a grievous mistake that you couldn’t go back on, punched your soul. Your heart was beating so loudly that you could hear it. You were afraid to look behind you. The moment when you had to confirm that you’d left your wife in Seoul Station, that you’d boarded the train and traveled one stop away, the moment that you turned around, accidentally hitting the shoulder of the person next to you, you realized that your life had been irreparably damaged. It didn’t take even a minute to realize that your life had veered off track because of your speedy gait, because of your habit of always walking in front of your wife during all those years of marriage, first when you were young, then old, for fifty years. If you had turned around to check whether she was there right as you got on the car, would things have turned out this way? For years your wife used to make comments—your wife, who always lagged behind when you went somewhere together, would follow you with sweat beaded on her forehead, grumbling from behind—“I wish you’d go a little slower, I wish you’d go at my pace. What’s the rush?” If you finally stopped to wait for her, she would smile in embarrassment