Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [52]
She would tell you, “I’m sorry, but what would people say if they saw us? If they saw us, who live together, but one person is all the way up there and the other person is all the way back here, they would say, Those people must hate each other so much that they can’t even walk next to each other. It’s not good to appear that way to other people. I won’t try to hold your hand or anything, so let’s just go slower. What are you going to do if you lose sight of me?”
She must have known what would happen. The thing your wife said to you most frequently, ever since you met her when you were twenty, was to walk more slowly. How could you have not gone slower, when your wife asked you to slow down your entire lives? You’d stopped and waited for her, but you’d never walked next to her, conversing with her, as she wanted—not even once.
Since your wife has gone missing, your heart feels as if it will explode every time you think about your fast gait.
You walked in front of your wife your entire life. Sometimes you would turn a corner without even looking back. When your wife called you from far behind, you would grumble at her, asking her why she was walking so slowly. And so fifty years passed. When you waited for her, she stopped next to you, her cheeks reddened, saying with a smile, “I still wish you’d go a little slower.” You assumed that was how you would live out the rest of your days. But since that day in Seoul Station when you left on the subway train, that day when she was only a few steps behind you, your wife still hasn’t come to you.
You raise your leg, the one that was operated on for arthritis, and prop it on the porch, watching the girls wolf down the undercooked rice with only kimchi as panchan. After the surgery, you no longer felt pain or had circulation problems, but your left leg became impossible to bend.
“Want me to put a hot pad on it?”
You can almost hear your wife say that. Her hands dotted with dark sunspots, her hands that would put a pot of water on the stove and dampen a towel with the hot water and place it on your knee even if you didn’t answer. Every time you saw her unshapely hands pressing down on the towel on your knee, you hoped that she would live at least one day longer than you. You hoped that, after you died, your wife’s hands would close your eyes one last time, wipe down your cooling body in front of your children, and put the shroud on you.
“Where are you?” you, whose wife is missing, who’s left behind, shout, your leg stretched out on the porch of the empty house, the girls having run off after they finished eating. You shout, trying not to succumb to the sobs that have been climbing to the top of your throat since your wife went missing. You couldn’t scream or cry in front of your sons or daughters or daughters-in-law, but now, because of the rage or whatever it is, tears are pouring down your face, unstoppable. Tears that didn’t come when your neighbors buried your parents, who died two days apart when cholera made the rounds in the village. Not yet ten years old, you couldn’t cry, even though you wanted to. After your parents’ burial, you walked down from the mountain, shivering, cold, and scared. Tears that didn’t course down your face during the war. Your family used to own a cow. During the day, when South Korean soldiers were stationed in the village, you plowed the fields with that cow. In those days, North Korean soldiers would come down from the mountains into the village under cover of night and drag away people and cows. When the sun set, you would walk into town with the cow, tie it up next to the police station, and go to sleep leaning on the cow’s stomach. At dawn you would bring the cow back to the village and plow the fields. One night, you didn’t go to the police station, because you thought the North Korean soldiers had left the area, but they swarmed into the village and tried to drag the animal away. You wouldn’t let go of the cow, even though they kicked you, beat you up. You ran after the cow, pushing aside your sister,