"I didn’t mind," I said, speaking the truth.
"Do you remember…"
"I remember," I answered her and got up from the cushioned seat. "Let’s go," I said, watching her still large eyes grow with surprise, "to the house."
In the cab, too busy with memory, she didn’t speak a word, but I surprised myself by remembering the address of the house. We couldn’t find it, even though we were sure we were at the right street corner. Unfamiliar, modern brick buildings were clustered where the old house had once been sprawled out, and children ran in the alleyway with the twilight on their backs, shouting once familiar names of other children that resonated weakly in my brain, "Insu-ya! Dongchul-a!" Everything had been uprooted and paved over; we couldn’t even find the chestnut tree that used to shade the house. We stood at the curve of the road where the bean-curd vendor used to rest his rickshaw and wipe off the sweat from his forehead with the towel looped around his neck. We stared together at the ground as if to trace the footprint buried under the cement. She turned around and started walking away, and I closed my eyes to the sky bleeding red with the approaching night and heard in the harsh click of her cheap high heels on the cement, an echo of her footsteps from long ago. But opening my eyes cautiously, I saw her thick waist wrapped in a gaudy suit, the age that had settled on her figure, the unnatural ahjooma curls of her short hair. I closed my eyes again and saw the house where I had once foolishly loved rise up before me, resurrecting itself by degrees, the forsythias first.
Afterwards, she led the way. We went to a small street-side restaurant where a thick-set woman with a generously stained apron served us chicken gizzards with a bottle of soju. I lit the cigarette she held out to me. Suddenly becoming voluble, with memories I never knew I had loosening in my mouth, I talked of America and the years that separated me now from that image in my brain. The radio from the kitchen spilled out old melodies with pathetic lyrics; through the weeping voice of the female singer, I made out a verse about men always leaving women. Namja-neun, namja-neun da, moduga geurukye da, ah-aaa, aaaah-a. She started singing along, crying. I told her the banal truths about my wife that embarrassed me as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Both of us were drunk on something more than the bottle of soju.
"When I first met my wife, something about her reminded me of you," I said.
"You don’t know anything about me," she said.
I thought how strange it was to sit here and watch her nostrils breathe out long plumes of coupling smoke from her cigarette, to compare her to my wife and find the original lacking.
"If you knew anything about me, you couldn’t say that your wife reminds you of me. Do you know that I never miscarried? My mother made me get an abortion when the guy who lived in the room next to yours got me pregnant and refused to marry me. " She looked at me flatly, expecting surprise. I remembered his thick and mobi
※本文作者：佚名※