If You Leave Me Read online

  “No, sir.”

  “Jisoo’s an unsung hero.” Jongyul cleared his throat. He loved this story. He told it as if he’d been there fighting beside me. I let him. I wondered if Haemi would think me heroic, too—and if I could mimic Jongyul’s gusto when I returned to her with one working arm.

  * * *

  When I had first arrived at the hospital, I wanted medications they didn’t have or refused to give me. “What kind of place is this?” I yelled. The doctor ripped off my right sleeve and cleaned my wound with a metal rod, a cotton swab stuck on one end. The rod swiped up and down below my skin, like a foot kicking under a blanket. I passed out. When I woke up again, I was in a different room with a nurse.

  She cut off the rest of my shirt with a pair of scissors. Her lips were a tight, closed line as she ignored my screams. “Breathe,” she said. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the feel of the metal edge sliding against my chest. The scissors’ cool, sleek snaking. “You’ll have to wear buttoned shirts from now on.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked when she pulled off my pants.

  “You need a wash.”

  I tried to stop her. She was stronger than she looked. “You have an arm that’s probably crippled. Don’t make this so difficult.”

  “I can do it myself,” I said.

  “No, you can’t, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Yuri. She moved with assurance and it made me want to hurt her. “When do I get to bathe myself?” I asked.

  “When you can manage.” She softened as she swept a wet cloth across my chest. “You’ll be all right. I can tell from how annoying you are already.”

  When she brought me to my cot, a disfigured man lay in the one next to it. He was crying and I couldn’t understand his face. Seeing Jongyul for the first time, I felt spineless for my earlier yelling.

  I offered him a cigarette later that night. He tried to grab it and missed. “My thumb, my thumb,” he said, as if that were the worst of his injuries. He hadn’t stopped crying.

  Yuri came over as soon as we lit our cigarettes. “You can’t smoke here. Give me your pack.”

  I didn’t care. They weren’t mine. She threw them in the garbage and turned to dress Jongyul’s face. I couldn’t stop watching. The skin that was no longer skin but not nothing either and the blasted shape of the eyehole and how he whimpered.

  “Damn.” The wrapping stuck to the wound. “I need to clean this before it gets infected.” She grimaced. “It’ll hurt, all right?”

  He screamed as she pulled at the stuck gauze. Yellow and red oozed out. I couldn’t look away. “Distract him,” she said to me. “Tell him a story.”

  Jongyul held on to the cot’s metal rim. “Tell me how you got hurt. Tell me something bloody.”

  A fight in a small village with wrecked trees and ruined homes. A surprise attack from the Chinese PLA. My commander shot in the leg. A little boy and a girl, separated from their family. The girl hit in front of us, clean through the cheek. A sharp spray of blood. Her brother’s cries cutting through the air. As I scrambled to reach him and the commander, a Red had pounced on me.

  “Did you kill that Chinese Commie dog?” Jongyul asked.

  “I killed him.”

  “Describe it,” he said.

  I told him about the soldier’s gun against my neck, and how we’d rolled over the girl’s body, her eyes still open, by accident. The boy’s shrill and endless bawling, my commander’s panting. How the soldier’s shots missed me, but the shards ricocheted and bored through my arm. I described the rage of pain and how I’d killed him with his own gun, without remorse or thought or pity.

  Yuri didn’t look up until she finished. Jongyul had sweated through his shirt. She stared at me as she changed him into a new one. I hadn’t looked at her before, directly. A small, blunt nose. Disarming eyes. They seemed too tender for a nurse. The diamond cut of her face tilted away, and I wondered if she knew that I’d lied.

  * * *

  Jongyul, Taeil, and I strolled through Daegu’s streets that evening, still celebrating Jongyul’s news. We passed civilians talking about their preparations for winter in loud voices. Families had been shorn and lost in the halving of our country, and yet these villagers continued on, as if the years of stalemate had lulled them into dullness. Or perhaps they were too frightened to speak about anything but the commonplace.

  It disgusted me, how easily people accepted the armistice. They seemed to confuse the end of fighting with the end of war. To see the continued presence of the United Nations as a comfort rather than the violation I knew it to be. But for one night, I tried to act like them, mindless and content.

  We went to Little House. It was a wooden hut fit for twenty people and had the best naengmyeon in Daegu. “Come in, boys.” Auntie Kang waved from the back counter.

  “Three naengmyeons and a bottle of whatever you have hidden away,” Jongyul called as we claimed a table in the front.

  A man in the corner yelled, “They’re delicious. Exactly like the Northerners make them.”

  Taeil turned to reply, and that’s when I saw him—the bastard from my platoon. The real reason I was a cripple. Lee Mansik.

  He sat across from the yeller. Too tall and thickly built, with the same crooked nose and small, shapeless chin. The same dumb look in his eyes. Hunched over his bowl, he slurped noodles into his fat mouth.

  Auntie brought a bottle to our table, obscuring Mansik from my view. “What are we celebrating, boys?”

  Taeil poured corn whiskey into tiny cups. “Jisoo, give us a speech.”

  I forced my thoughts back to the group. I raised my drink, winked at Auntie. “To lucky Jongyul finally getting out. He’s going home!”

  We cheered and joked and when our food arrived, we ate in noisy gulps. I wavered between caring and not. What would happen if he revealed the truth about my injury? I decided that I did care, that I would go to him. He would notice me anyway on his way out, and I wanted to confront him on my own terms.

  I stood from the table and yelled. “Lee Mansik!”

  He froze when he recognized my voice. And then he was moving—excusing himself from his group, looking toward the back door, wiping his mouth with his wrist.

  I crossed the room quick and caught him by the back of his shirt before he’d reached the kitchen. “You say hello to me now,” I said.

  He followed the command, turned and bowed. “Corporal. I didn’t know you were in Daegu.”

  I stood close. His chest rose with his heavy panting. It was true. He was fine. I gripped him by the neck. “I’m here with my good arm and my injured arm,” I said.

  “The commander—”

  “You lied.”

  “I couldn’t remember. When they asked me—”

  “You’re lying now.”

  A knife lay on the kitchen counter. Auntie pretended not to see us. I was close enough to gut him until his insides—shiny, bubbling, and wet—bled through his uniform. I tightened my hold on his neck. I could wrench his arm from its socket, batter it to pieces. Relish the sound of his pathetic squealing. But as his sweating face gazed down at mine, I realized I didn’t want to hear any excuses from him. I didn’t want to look at his giant, whole body. I didn’t want to remember.

  I stepped back. “I wanted to tell you that it’s done. Sit down and enjoy your meal.”

  I left Mansik, stunned and unmoving, and returned to my table.

  Jongyul whistled, eyebrows raised. “What’d he do to you? Was he in your division?”

  “Forget him. He’s a piece of shit on my shoe.” I ordered another bottle. Jongyul distracted us with his jokes, and Taeil again spoke of his wife. We drank until the corn whiskey tasted like water.

  On his way out, Mansik hesitated at our table and bowed. I didn’t watch him leave. I’d meant what I said. I didn’t want anything from him anymore.

  Later that night, Jongyul came to my barracks with two envelopes. “From the hospital,” he said. We both recognized
the handwriting.

  “How’d she know where we were?” He sat on my cot and read his letter aloud. Yuri spoke of his eye and leg, asked about all the women in his life, and hoped that he would be able to go home soon. He folded the paper into thirds with a heedfulness I’d never seen in his movements. “I’d marry her. I really would.” He nodded at my envelope. “So?”

  I didn’t open the note. “I’ll read it later.”

  “You guys having an affair?”

  “Shut it.”

  “I’m joking. Yuri’s going to be mine. I’m going to tell her to find me in my hometown.” He patted my good shoulder. “I’ll come say goodbye in the morning.”

  I read Yuri’s letter once I was alone. She was growing out her hair and didn’t want to be around hurt people any longer. The country would never reunite, and she’d decided to accept this fact. She didn’t want to grieve forever. All that matters are the people who loved us before the war, she wrote. My family in the North are gone. My parents are dying from the waiting. She asked if I’d visited Haemi, if I had told her yet. I miss my brothers, she wrote at the end. No signature or goodbye.

  I threw the letter away. It annoyed me. How she insisted on the truth to someone like me. It made me feel like a liar.

  * * *

  Yuri was the only person who knew the real story—the one where I wasn’t a hero but an idiot. I had promised myself I’d never tell anyone. Then a month into my stay, she and I sat on a bench outside the hospital, watching the patients with intact legs walk around a fifty-meter yard. A barbed-wire fence encircled us, as if the Reds might come for the injured. Yuri held an unlit kerosene lamp between her arms. “I’m restless,” she said. “Let’s walk.”

  Along the way, she told me about her family. “My parents want me to quit. My father wants to head south to his sister’s. He thinks we’ll be safer there.”

  “He’s right,” I said.

  She glared at me. “My grandparents are buried here. And my brothers—they’ll come here to find us.” The last she’d heard, her younger brother was in Japan, and the older one in the Military Police. “He could be anywhere,” she said.

  She walked with a slight lopsidedness I hadn’t noticed before, and I wondered if she was becoming one of us. Yuri was able-bodied while we were not; still she seemed so fragile, as if I could break her wrist with one hard tug.

  “I was an MP, too,” I said. “Your brother will be safe. They keep us away from the front lines.”

  She glanced at my bandaged arm. “Like you were safe?”

  In that moment, I felt as if I’d known Yuri all my life. I woke to her bent frame each day—her thick eyebrows and pale face, her hurt gaze as she checked my stitches. It was as if my pain were hers as well. I couldn’t keep the truth from her.

  When we were far enough from the others, I laid out my story for her to judge.

  I’d been a watcher of my own people. By June, I was anxious. Every day we heard news of the war coming to a close. I wanted to join the fighting before it was too late.

  “Your request is denied.” The major sat at his table carving the skin off an apple. He slid a slice into his mouth. “You’re good at this. Don’t complain again. You should be on patrol right now.” He pointed his knife at the door and watched me leave.

  It was misty and cold for a summer night. I walked the perimeter of our camp, and as I rounded the eastern edge toward the parked trucks and entrance road, I heard mumbling. I aimed my flashlight at the sound. A drunk soldier. I recognized the man’s height. “Mansik?”

  He raised a hand to his eyebrows and squinted. “Who is that?”

  I grabbed his arm and hauled him behind a group of trees that ran along the entrance road. “What happened to you?”

  He crouched to his knees and moaned a long, low bleating. The stench of alcohol spilled from his mouth. “I was due back yesterday.”

  I squatted beside him. “Sober up. I’m on duty.”

  “Don’t turn me in. I’ll be jailed if you do.” He showed me a ring of keys. “I could take a truck and leave.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Wait here until you feel better. You can explain tomorrow.”

  He held on to my sleeves. “I can’t, Jisoo.”

  “I need to make another round.” I sat him behind the trees and walked on. The commander’s office was quiet, the lamp still lit.

  When I circled back ten minutes later, Mansik was smoking. Anyone could have seen the glow. I fought the urge to stub the cigarette out on his face and threw it on the ground instead. “You’re an idiot.” I stuffed his pack into my pocket.

  “I can’t think without smoking,” he whined. “Give it back.”

  “I’ll call you in if you don’t stop.” I pushed him against a tree. “I’m already shoveling myself into shit for you.”

  “You goddamn MP. You think you’re special, monitoring us?” He sniggered, his head lolling against the trunk. “You’re nothing. You hide and send us out to fight. You’re not worth the dead skin falling off my dick.”

  I cuffed him hard. He was pissed and strong. But so was I. He swung back, connected with my cheek, and lost his balance. I punched him again. He lurched toward me, grabbed my neck, and we fell.

  A stupid, useless fight.

  We tumbled onto the entrance road, deaf and blind until suddenly, we weren’t. A truck. Lights. Honking. Metal and rubber and heat coming straight at us. A wheel and my shoulder. Cold dirt in my face, my mouth, up my nose. Everywhere, pain. My voice screaming out a high, strange wailing.

  And Mansik, that ass, running away just in time.

  * * *

  Taeil walked into the office late one cold November morning. He didn’t wear a jacket and stared at me like I was somebody else. His lips, blistered from the sudden frost, opened and closed like a fish’s. He staggered to his chair and pounded its back with his fists.

  “What is it? What happened?” I asked.

  He sat and then stood again. “I can’t believe it.”

  I followed him around the room. “Tell me.”

  He wrung a note in his hands. “Jongyul fell off a train.”

  “What?”

  “He was going to visit some girl.”

  We read his parents’ letter. They said Jongyul had always talked about us, and they wanted us to know about his death. They thanked us for being his friends.

  I wanted to burn their note. Taeil refused. We didn’t stamp papers for the rest of the day. The next morning, I asked the office for a weekend pass.

  “To visit Jongyul’s parents?” Taeil asked.

  “To visit my wife.”

  When I had first joined the war, I’d wanted to send Haemi an envelope with my fingernail and hair clippings as a precautionary memory. I was desperate to act, to understand the significance of honor—this word that Father had disciplined into me when I was a child. I was ready to fight and defend my country. Instead, I watched maggots eat at the sores of prisoners, punished my own for the smallest of infractions, and listened as other men shared their battle stories. I injured my arm in a meaningless argument. Jongyul was dead. I was ready to go home.

  With a weekend bag over my good shoulder, I left Daegu, passing the half-razed buildings and empty fields. I walked until it was dark, and then I found a bus headed northeast toward Haemi’s hometown.

  The village had changed. There were markings of war but of reformation, too. Gravel had replaced some of the dirt paths. Rubble lay beside newly built homes. Some villagers recognized me from my summers visiting Kyunghwan, but most didn’t. I didn’t stop at Uncle’s home. I didn’t ask about my cousin. I thought only of Haemi. I wondered if Yuri was right, if my wife would understand.

  A few days after I’d confessed to Yuri, she’d approached me with a nervous look. She patted her hair and hesitated. “What is it?” I finally asked. She revealed that there was a different version in my hospital entry papers. Not the hero story I’d made up and not the truth I’d hidden. After the fight, as I lay unco
nscious, they’d found Mansik and asked him for an explanation. His warped response blamed me, claimed I had started beating him without reason. This became the official answer. There was no way to erase his words.

  I practiced telling Haemi each version as I followed her directions, unfolding and refolding the first letter I’d received from her in the hospital. We’ve returned home. I never want to see Busan again. Find us soon. Hyunki misses you. At the very least, I could show her what had happened to me, even if I couldn’t manage the truth.

  At an entranceway decorated with flowery yellow bushes, I knocked. A thin boy opened the door. “Hyunki?” I asked.

  “Jisoo-hyung?” He whooped and ran inside, yelling, “He’s here! Jisoo-hyung!”

  He returned with his mother, both of them shouting. Her greeting was high-pitched and happy as she stumbled down the stairs. Tears filmed her eyes. It moved me—how much they cared that I had made it back alive.

  Haemi came last. Slender and sharp, she stood by the door, her hand against the frame, surprise showing on her face.

  Mother guided me to the planked porch beneath the eaves. She bent to remove my shoes as Hyunki brought me water. Haemi hovered, paced from one side of the porch to the other. As they gathered around me, I noticed they looked older, darker. Hazy. Like people I almost didn’t know. It chilled me. They were my only family now.

  “Food! We need to feed you. Look at your bones. Say hello to your wife while we cook you a meal.” Mother hustled Hyunki inside.

  Haemi moved closer. I watched her arched eyes, her mouth. She no longer wore her hair in a braid but piled high in a bun. I could see her slim neck. Her face, still beautiful, had shifted somehow. Weariness had settled over her features and narrowed her gaze. I hesitated, glanced at the door Mother and Hyunki had disappeared through. When I turned back to Haemi, she smiled. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “Me too.”

  “Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep at night, I’d think someone was pretending to be you, writing me, and that you were dead this whole time. A cruel joke.” She laughed. “But you’re here now.”