Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [59]
Your wife was acting so strangely that you started for your house, a knot in your stomach.
“Hurry! Hurry!” your wife shouted, leading the way. It was the first time she had gone ahead of you, running. Kyun was lying on the spot where the apricot tree had stood. He was writhing, frothing at the mouth, and his tongue was hanging out.
“What’s wrong with him?” You looked at your wife, but she was already overcome with grief.
It was your wife, who had found Kyun in that condition, who was called to the police station several times. Before they determined the cause of death, a rumor that she’d poisoned her brother-in-law with pesticide spread to the neighboring village. Your sister screamed at your wife, her eyes reddened, “You killed my baby brother!”
Your wife was calm as she was being questioned by the detectives. “If you think I killed him, then just put me away.”
Once, the detective had to bring your wife home; she’d refused to leave the station, asking to be locked up in jail. Your wife would rip out her hair and grab at her chest in grief. She would bang open the door and run to the well and gulp down cold water. Meanwhile, you ran around in the hills and in the fields, crazed, calling the dead boy’s name: Kyun! Kyun! The burning in your chest spread and you couldn’t stand the heat in your body. Kyun! There was a time when the dead didn’t speak and the ones left behind went crazy like that.
Now you realize how cowardly you were. You lived your entire life heaping all of your pain onto your wife. Kyun was your brother, yet your wife was the one who needed to be consoled. But because you refused to speak about it, you’d driven her into a corner.
Even though she was out of her mind with grief, it was your wife who managed to hire someone to bury Kyun. Years passed, but you never asked for the details.
“Don’t you want to know where he’s buried?” she would sometimes ask.
You wouldn’t say a word. You didn’t want to know.
“Don’t resent him because he went like that.… You’re his brother. And he doesn’t have parents. So you have to visit him. I wish we could rebury him in a good spot in the ancestral graveyard.”
You would yell, “Why do I need to know where that bastard is buried?”
Once, when the two of you were walking along some road, your wife stopped. She asked, “Kyun’s burial spot is nearby; don’t you want to go?” You pretended that you didn’t hear her. Why had you hurt her like that? Until two years ago, on the anniversary of Kyun’s death your wife would make food and take it to his grave. Coming down from the hills, she would smell like soju, her eyes red.
Your wife changed after that happened to Kyun. A formerly happy person, she stopped smiling. When she did smile, the smile quickly disappeared. She used to fall asleep as soon as she lay down, tired from her work in the fields, but now she would spend nights unable to sleep. She was never again able to sleep soundly until your younger daughter became a pharmacist and prescribed her some sleeping pills. Your poor wife, who couldn’t even sleep. Maybe your missing wife still has undissolved sleeping pills stacked in her brain. The old house has been rebuilt twice since Kyun’s death. Each time you rebuilt it, you threw away old things that had been stacked in a corner somewhere. But your wife took care of the nickel basin herself, worried that someone would lay hands on it. Perhaps she feared that, if it was mixed in with all the other items, she might never be able to find it. The nickel basin was the first thing she brought into the tent you lived in while the house was being rebuilt. When the house was done, before she did anything else, she would bring in the nickel basin and place it on a shelf of the new house.
Until your wife went missing, it didn’t cross your mind that your silence about Kyun must have pained her. You thought, What is the point of talking about the past? When your daughter mentioned, “The doctor asked if there was anything