Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [72]
When I discovered your bicycle in front of a run-down house at the foot of a hill between paddies, down the road from the entrance to your village, I ran into your house, screaming, “Ahhhh!” And then I saw it all. Your elderly mother sitting on the old porch, with her sunken eyes. Your three-year-old sucking on his finger. And your wife in the middle of a difficult birth. I’d come to retrieve the basin you’d stolen from me. Instead, I grabbed a pot off the wall in the dark and narrow kitchen. I heated water in it. I pushed you aside, since you didn’t know what to do and were just hovering next to your wife, and I grabbed her hand. I’d never met her before, but I shouted at her, “Push! Push harder!” I don’t know how much time passed until we heard the baby’s cry. Your house didn’t have a single strand of seaweed to make seaweed soup for your wife. Your elderly mother was blind and seemed already to be on her way over to the other world. I delivered the baby and scooped some flour from my basin and made dough for dough-flake soup and ladled it into a few bowls and put some broth into the room where the baby’s mother was. How many decades ago was it when I put the basin back on my head and came home? Is that man next to you the baby who was born that day? He’s sponging your hand. He gets you to turn over and sponges your back. It’s been a long time. Your taut neck is now wrinkly. Your thick eyebrows are no longer, and I don’t recognize your mouth. Instead of the doctor, it is now your son who says, “Father! What’s your name? Do you know what your name is?”
“Park So-nyo.”
No, that’s my name.
“Who’s Park So-nyo, Father?”
I’m curious about that, too. What am I to you? Who am I to you?
Seven or eight days after I met you, your situation weighing on my mind, I took a strand of seaweed and stopped by your house, but only the newborn was there, not your wife. You told me that your wife had suffered from three days of high fever after the birth, and finally left this world; she was so malnourished that she couldn’t make it through childbirth. Your blind mother was sitting on the old porch, and it wasn’t clear whether she knew what was going on. And the three-year-old. I suppose that man by your sickbed could be the three-year-old, not the baby.
I don’t know who I was to you, but you were my lifelong friend. Who would have known that we would be friends all these years? The first time we met, you made me feel so despondent by stealing the basin with the flour I needed to feed my children. Our children wouldn’t understand us. It would be easier for them to understand that hundreds of thousands of people died in the war than to understand you and me.
Even though I knew that your wife was gone, I couldn’t just leave, so I soaked in water the seaweed I’d brought. I made dough from the remaining flour I’d given you the other day and made dough-flake soup with seaweed; I put a bowl for each person on the table and was about to leave, but stopped to put the newborn to my breast. It was a time when I didn’t have enough milk for my own daughter. You were going around the village with the baby and feeding him donated breast milk. Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong. My elder daughter says that when you mow down weeds with a tractor, the weeds cling to the wheels of the tractor and spread seeds, to breed even at the moment they’re being cut. Your baby latched on ferociously. He suckled so hard that I felt I would be sucked in, so I slapped the