The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [161]
It was a shame that Unsook couldn’t tolerate milk, which might help to strengthen her. I hurried to replenish the firepit that heated the sickroom. At the doorstep I looked to the sky and saw through departing snow clouds the far night blackness speckled with stars. I said to the darkness, to the wonderment of stars, “Thank you for this coal, and please help her gain strength.” I lamented that my obstetrics training had done little to prepare me for the slow devastation of consumption. When I first learned about Unsook’s baby, something forgotten within me had stirred, and I felt Calvin’s absence in a vivid physical way I hadn’t ever before. But it quickly dissipated in the crisis of Unsook’s illness and the fear of what could only become a tragic pregnancy. I had put thoughts of my husband far behind me, as far away as Gaeseong. I never spoke of him and thought less and less about our reunion. And now the war had spread. There seemed to be no end to Japan’s oppressive power and growing strength.
Thoughts of Calvin, of Unsook’s baby, of any future at all, were always accompanied by the echoes of my mother’s and Calvin’s faithful declaration to trust God. In prison, I thought simplistically that God’s wisdom would feel unquestionable to me, that my faith would grow resolute. But the refrain that now persisted was the reductive question: how could all of my family’s loss be the price for one Japanese major’s spotty education about Jesus? And I couldn’t reconcile martyrdom and human suffering as models for redemption. Here was Unsook, so lovely that her every movement said beauty. Her body had once held great promise—still held promise—and her faith was so sincere that she accepted illness without complaint, yet she faced a slow and painful death. The price for her was high, too high, and unfair.
The Calligrapher’s Design
END OF FEBRUARY 1940
AMONG THE SCORES OF LOSSES THAT HAD MADE HIM ILL FOR A YEAR, Han felt the privation of partitioning most frequently. The sole compensation was his wife sitting by him more frequently, always with some task in hand like the needlework she now held. He nodded to welcome her and saw a modest smile reshape her features with beauty. True, when she had an opinion she could be persistent, but that was a minor complaint. He still acted coolly toward her, as was proper, but he knew she understood his approval, for even through the worst of it, she had been consistently soft-spoken and deferential.
It surprised him how adaptable she’d been in the transition, their lives so suddenly grafted to subservience and—with the house, inadequate as it was—obligation to his wife’s cousin. He took her resilience to be a measure of her faith. He stretched his legs and took in the now-familiar smells of this room: sawdust, scratched lacquer flooring, the steam of soup and boiled cabbage sealed in its beams. A recurring thought irked him. Was it not a mark of personal failure that so much had been lost during his generation? He wasn’t prone to sin, though pride was a struggle, and he had acted rightly and responsibly all his life. Still, the stain was there and he prayed it was contained in him alone. Others had suffered much more than he. He readily blamed politics and subjugation, but doubt had damaged this assertion and he wondered if his ancestors, or God, measured his accountability.
His wife sewed quietly by the lantern,