The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [156]
“Najin-ah, there is no blame. Blaming is pointless. God’s will is not comprehensible at times. We are given the greater gift of faith.”
The words passed through me like a splinter, a meaningless prick in the heart of a terrible wound. I was responsible. Father would cast blame and he would be justified. I had escaped torture and my husband’s letters had doomed my family. Somehow I had failed the test of prison. I had never once considered taking my life, but perhaps I should have.
Mother touched my hand. “We have much to do.”
“Yes,” I said. This was my true punishment. I would suffer more from a lifetime of guilt than I had suffered the ninety days in my cell.
She talked about what we’d move and where the servants would go. With the exception of a handful of history books, Father had decided to keep his library buried, and would seal the secret pantry. “Who knows?” said Mother. “Perhaps one day …”
“I should see him now,” I said, and Mother nodded.
I combed and knotted my hair, put on a quilted top and went to his study. My father was packing books and scrolls, hand tools and art materials in a shipping crate. I saw a brushstroke of relief wash over his face when our eyes met. He deliberately picked up a planer and wrapped it in a cloth. “Are you well?” His voice trembled, and I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or enraged.
“Yes, thank you, Abbuh-nim. This person is home.” I bowed fully. There was a long silence. I listened to the cloth being rubbed against the planer.
“Your mother,” he began, then silence. I remained low in my bow and smelled sawdust and pine tar in the old floor mat. He cleared his throat. “You’re whole and home.” His tone said I should rise. I saw his hands shake as he set the planer down.
“I’m grateful, Abbuh-nim, and ashamed. Forgive your worthless daughter.”
“You do realize what has happened.” He spoke slowly, intensity belying his softened tone. “Your father, your brother, your ancestors—all— can see only loss.” He laid his hands carefully on his knees. He continued, his voice husky. “The dust in this room is the same dust breathed by my father, my father’s father and his father. By all your ancestors. Numberless generations …”
In the silence that followed I could only breathe with him.
“Almost five and a half centuries of men buried in the Han mountain graves,” he said. “And now, a single daughter …”
In the ensuing silence, I thought about the two things my father had done over which I had often harbored resentment: he hadn’t named me and had wanted me married at fourteen. Yet he had come to accept my desire to learn and work, and had even allowed the thwarted dream of America. I had brought into his household contrariness, unwanted change, and now, immeasurable loss. “I am to blame, Abbuh-nim.”
He seemed to want to say something but instead turned aside, his face lined with pain. “Go. Your mother needs you.”
I bowed and left. It seemed too easy to get up and walk away, down the familiar hallway with its gleaming dark wood, and past the screen, now folded and tied, the winter air seeping through the walls. The screams of the tortured men surfaced in my ears and I shivered with the cold of the blackest nights in prison. I thought about how I had looked forward to seeing Major Yoshida, though I’d couched it in terms of being grateful for the warmth of the interrogation room. His clean orderliness and cool demeanor were reassuringly civilized and seemed admirable in such a place. I had felt pride in describing Bible stories to him, in God’s choice of me to deliver his Word, and in God’s watchfulness that had kept me whole. It was because of me that Major Yoshida had noticed our estate. Because of me, Major Yoshida would take from my father, from all of my family, the markers of our ancestry, tradition and history that creaked in the ancient beams, lived in the mortar, the stones and soil, and sang in the trees and stream. And then I thought that man was small, so easily overcome by demons of pride and hatred, but I was less than small, and should have been among those who screamed in the