We must have sat like that across the varnished table in the coffeeshop of the fanciest hotel in Seoul, miserable strangers.
"Do you have any children?" she asked me after a very small sip from her coffee cup. She held her coffee cup with both of her hands as if it were a hot cup of tea, even though the coffee must have gone cold with all her stirring. I felt the unpleasantness of the lukewarm liquid down my throat.
"No, but you?" I asked, meeting her effort to break the embarrassed silence. Please don’t, I said to myself, please don’t tell me of your daughters and sons grown to adults even before you’ve had time to say good-bye to their baby clothes. Don’t tell me how fast saewol is, and touch the no longer firm skin of your throat with just that look in your eyes. The one you gave me when you came here into the lounge and saw me sitting here in a fancy, Western hotel that didn’t exist when I was a poor college student living in your mother’s boarding house, expecting, after a quarter of a century, for you to be what I thought you would always be—a fever in my brain.
"No," she said. "I miscarried my first and couldn’t after."
She wore a two-piece summer suit of gaudy color that I had noticed was in vogue. On the streets of Seoul that afternoon, I had seen many wearing suits just like that: slightly fluted shoulders hiding the shoulder pads, beady buttons down the front, and a skirt just above the knees. She patted the front of her dress as if to iron out any wrinkles.
"I don’t have any children."
I felt that I ought to change the subject. "And your mother?" I asked.
"She passed away years ago. Stroke."
I motioned to a smiling waitress and ordered a gin and tonic. "What about the house? Do you still keep boarders?"
"No, we had to sell it to pay the hospital bills. I live far away now. I haven’t been back to the house in ten years."
Then all of a sudden, the awkwardness of the years spent living separate lives broke between us, and we talked of the "house" as if it had been, was still, ours. We talked of the forsythias blooming by the gates in the spring and the clay jars of kimchi buried in the backyard. I remember turning at the curve of the road, and arriving at the large, old-fashioned house with its slated roof and a huge chestnut tree rising up from behind it to cover parts of the roof. Entering through the gate, my eyes had been blinded by the sudden burst of sunlight until a dreamy image of a girl by the water pump in the middle of the front yard emerged slowly out of the sun, rotating around my suddenly feverish head and trembling like a mirage. The sleeves of her white shirt rolled up, a slender neck, black hair braided down her back in a simple plait, arms under the water falling from the mouth of the pump, glistening with the prismatic layering of light on wet skin. How could I let myself forget that image, even if I could?
"I felt sorry for you," she said, smiling now. "Your room was the last one on the hallway and next to the kitchen; mother and I made so much noise in the early mornings, the water, soups simmering, pots and pans clanging even though we tried to be quiet."
※本文作者：佚名※