If You Leave Me Read online

  She stared at me with the sharp, discerning look that had lured me to her from the start. She touched my eyebrows, temples, arm, the ruined shoulder. She touched me freely. “I saw it right away.”

  “I was hurt.”

  She frowned. “Not one of your letters—”

  “I didn’t know what you would say.”

  “So?” She raised her chin and crossed her arms. “Tell me.”

  Watching her, I understood. Haemi was no longer the girl I had met in Busan. She was already a wife.

  Kyunghwan

  1954

  Two lines hugged the library’s exterior, with the women and men separated by the width of the sidewalk. I was late, and I couldn’t find the Whimoon boys. They’d probably claimed their usual table already.

  A high school girl with clipped hair nodded at me. “They’re over there.” She pointed. In their dark caps with serious faces, the four boys compared notes near the entrance. “You’re always studying here. What’s your name?” The girl wore an ankle-length coat, even though it was May and too warm. She threaded the top buttonhole with her pinkie. “I see you watching them every Sunday.”

  “I’m no one, really. Thanks.” I snuck my way through the line as best I could.

  The National Library was three stories high and rested on a block of land large enough to fit ten hanoks. It no longer astonished me the way it had my first day in Seoul, but it was still my favorite building. The rounded dormers gazed down upon the hundreds who retreated inside. If I could have chosen where to study, I would have crept up to the highest floor and sat by one of those eyebrow-shaped windows.

  Instead, I filed into the main reading room on the first floor, where the rows of tables cramped with students leached the splendor from the space. I sat at a table behind the Whimoon boys. Kyungho asked mathematics questions and the others took turns explaining their answers. Namil, with the fish mouth, snuck a look at me across his shoulder before he responded. I copied down everything they said. When they switched from group studying to their individual writing sections, I did, too. I didn’t care if they knew. I had been studying off them every Sunday for weeks.

  Even so, I was surprised when Kyungho approached and nodded at my notebooks. “You’re preparing for the entrance exams?” He whirled a pencil with his pale, clean hands. A boy who hadn’t ever worked, fought, or tackled fear.

  “Studying like you are,” I said.

  “What school do you go to?”

  Namil swung around. He tucked his chin against the chair’s high back. The wood flattened his face and made his mouth seem even larger. “You know about the National Unified Test? They added it this year.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “It’s to make it harder for guys like you to get in.”

  Kyungho rubbed the back of his head. “Guys like who, Namil?”

  “Unqualified guys, ex-military guys, refugees-who-missed-a-year-or-two-and-are-trying-to-make-up-for-it-too-late type of guys. So, which kind are you?”

  All of them, I should have said—a one-day officer who somehow survived the war. In a secondhand U.S. Army uniform, I’d fought to gain land for an armistice while these kids ate oranges at home and worried about their fathers’ factories. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. We had only two days before the exam and I couldn’t afford to waste any time.

  “I’m not trying to be rude, but you’re obviously not in high school.” Namil looked at the others in their group. “Why else would he be listening to our lessons?”

  “I’m only nineteen,” I said.

  “So I’m right.” Namil shrugged and turned to face the others. “I don’t care. You’re not the competition.”

  “Ignore him.” Kyungho gestured to a stack of books on their table. “Our teachers told us to review these the week before the test.”

  I copied down the titles and thanked him. “I can study off other groups, but you guys are the most focused.”

  “We don’t mind. I’m Park Kyungho.”

  “I know. I’m Yun Kyunghwan.”

  “Of course.” He smiled. “We’re here tomorrow, if you want to join us.”

  I went to search for the books he’d recommended. I didn’t want to tell him what I did on Mondays.

  Cheonggyecheon was a river of waste, squatters, disease. Huts on stilts stood rickety and fragile like flock-lost birds along the river’s edge. Women in stained shirts poured buckets of laundry water from their windows. Others threw out their shit and urine, their vegetable ends, their children’s vomit. Everyone’s noses and mouths and asses leaked from sickness and no one could escape it.

  My life was consumed by filth. Four days a week, I dredged trash out of Cheonggyecheon. Two days, I wheeled a garbage wagon through Seoul. One day was mine. Always, the test lodged itself in my head, distracting me. If work ended early, I would walk past Whimoon High School. I couldn’t hear anything, but being close to the studying inside made me feel better somehow, smarter.

  Byungwoo was my dredging partner. Bald, with joints that swelled without reason, he steadied the boat while I maneuvered the hoist. Sometimes we found items worth keeping—an undamaged celadon-glazed plate, a waterlogged lantern, a knife with a chipped hilt. Mostly we picked up refuse and weeds.

  “On the left. That sheet,” Byungwoo said, steering toward a crumpled piece of tarpaulin wrapped around a hut’s half-submerged leg. I dropped the hoist and the attached bucket into the water.

  As we approached, a woman with a slim, horselike face leaned out the open window. She wore a blue tee shirt showing a cartoon mouse holding its own tail. “What do you men want?”

  “What do you think?” Byungwoo asked. “Look at this junk. We’re cleaning up.”

  “You’ll knock down my house with that thing! Government assholes!”

  “What else are we supposed to do?” He nodded to me. “Go on, Kyunghwan.”

  I tried to rake the bucket against the tarp, but it was too slippery. Sloshing with the river’s waves, the tarp only twisted further around the hut’s leg. I adjusted the hoist, and as it butted the canvas, a smell hit us—rancid, putrid, almost sweet at the edges of its noxious weight. I stopped. Instead of knocking me over, the scent had an uneasy familiarity.

  Byungwoo sniffed. “Lady, you have something to tell us?”

  She dusted her windowsill with her fingertips. Thick splinters of wood fell into the water. “I have three kids here and they’re sicker than before the war. If you take that plastic, you take what’s underneath it, too.” There wasn’t a papered window for her to slide shut, so she walked away with loud, angry calls to her children inside.

  I knocked the hoist against the hut. Again the smell circled the air and seeped into our clothes. It seemed to coat us, not with its scent, but with its power to recall memories we no longer wanted.

  “You know what I think?” Byungwoo asked.

  I nodded. We both knew—the scent reminded us of war. As I’d waited in the trenches for nightfall, I’d breathed in the stench of decomposing bodies, those not yet burned. Afraid the pungent odor would poison my insides. Afraid the Reds would smell it, too, and find me.

  Byungwoo stepped back to the rudder. “They don’t pay us enough for that.”

  “Dead husband?” I asked.

  “The tarp’s too small. Dead kid?”

  “It can’t be that bad, right?”

  We stood on our tiny boat in our shit river. Slow waves from the other dredging vessels rippled the water. A cluster of children downstream jumped on a narrow bridge.

  “Someone else will come around,” Byungwoo said.

  “Not today.” I covered my nose with my shirtsleeve. “Get closer. I’ll do it.”

  I tried to use the bucket’s weight to drag the sheet to our boat. The bulky stretch of tarpaulin didn’t provide any grip. When we were almost under the woman’s hut, I sank my arms in and pulled.

  The sheet came off easily.

  A mountain of rats. A reeking c
loud of decaying bodies on a rotting wooden raft.

  Byungwoo raised his arms. “I quit.”

  “They’re just a few rats.”

  “A few?”

  Some were more skeleton than animal, others were tinged with green muck. Dimpled eyeballs and knotted fur. It was disgusting, but at least they weren’t human.

  “This is why her kids are sick. They’re all savage country idiots.” Byungwoo kicked a piece of trash into the water. “I hate this job.”

  “Am I a country idiot, too?” I asked.

  “Yeah, take them all with you and leave.”

  Sludge dripped from my arms, and the stink made my stomach clench. I grabbed our largest pail. “Let’s get this done.”

  We tried to use the tarp as a barrier as we carried the rats to the hold. They slid around the slick canvas, jostling against one another and falling over the edges of the sheet. Eventually, we used our hands. We doubled our gloves, but still, we felt them—delicate and thin boned, teeth larger than expected, feet gaunt.

  “It’s the cats.” The woman leaned out her window again, this time with a baby against her hip. It looked sick, too yellow. “They keep bringing them into the house. My other boy’s four. He feeds the strays and they repay him. Don’t get me in trouble.”

  “You’re going to have to vacate sooner or later,” Byungwoo said.

  I hefted the raft onto our boat. “Whoever you’re waiting for, he’s not coming back.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said.

  “Look around you.” I lifted my arms at the sludge, at the trash I was shoveling for her and all the other beggars who lived along the river. Here in Seoul, the city of dreams and opportunity, I’d been reduced to this. I thought of the Whimoon boys, their pristine minds and bodies. “Look at where you are. It’s pathetic. No one will save you.”

  The woman cursed. The baby started to cry. It, too, had a horse face.

  Byungwoo turned the boat downriver, and we floated away. After a long silence, he grunted. “You were a little mean there.”

  I shrugged.

  We both knew I was right. The widows of Cheonggyecheon were delusional.

  After discarding the rats and the rest of the waste, Byungwoo checked the dock line. We changed out of our gloves and our work uniforms. “Let’s get something to eat,” he said. “How about some sea squirts? We deserve a treat after that mess.”

  Three dredgers whose names I hadn’t bothered to remember waited for him on the street. “Come on, little hick.” Byungwoo smiled. “Join us.”

  “I can’t.” I opened my empty wallet. We weren’t friendly enough for any of them to offer me food.

  “Walk with us to the main intersection, at least.”

  “Let’s go,” the tallest dredger called.

  “I have to tell you what happened,” Byungwoo said as we joined them. “Kyunghwan and I got the lousiest luck today.”

  “You always say that.”

  “I mean it—not like today.”

  Byungwoo was elaborate, detailed. The men spat as he described the rats. One snorted. They laughed and cursed in sympathy. I watched pedestrians shuffle around us. I didn’t want to end up like these old men, pathetic and crass and hopeless. As we walked toward the city center, a fat woman in a pink dress rode by on a rickshaw.

  “I’d rather pull her than shovel any more crap,” Byungwoo said.

  “She’d crush you with her huge ass!” the tallest one replied.

  The dredger who walked next to him nearly tripped over a girl washing pants in the gutter. He yelped. “Country bastards coming here with nowhere to go.”

  Byungwoo agreed. It was a common, easy topic.

  “Let them take our useless jobs,” the one beside me said. A purple birthmark covered one of his hands. He pulled his cuff low. “Know what my brother thinks?” He gazed at the others and then me. “He said the money’s in the factories. Cotton, paper, sugar, flour. The whiter, the better. What do you think?”

  “The whiter, the better? That’s funnier than Byungwoo’s rat story.”

  “We have rice. Why would we need flour?”

  The men went on like that, bouncing from one topic to another. When they looked at me, I said the first thing that came to mind. “I’m going to take the college entrance exam tomorrow.”

  They all stopped to stare at me with fresh interest.

  The birthmarked one nudged. “You think you’ll pass?”

  “These hicks and their dreams.”

  “What’re you doing that for, anyway?”

  “You didn’t tell me that.” Byungwoo tugged at himself. “Is that why you’re such a dog at doing your job? Your head in the books?”

  I didn’t know why I’d said anything. They were older and set in their ways. They wouldn’t understand. “This is where I turn.” I pointed to a side path that shot off from the main road. “Enjoy dinner.”

  I didn’t watch them continue on, but I heard them. Byungwoo’s thick, nasal voice chafed against the birthmarked one’s insistence on the future of factories. The angry one railed at the beggars on the streets again. The tall one: “Rats and cotton and roads and all that. What does it matter to us? All we can do is eat and live.”

  I walked half an hour before I reached my real home. My shack was one of hundreds jutting up against the side of Namsan. There was no order to these shelters flanking the mountain. They sprouted around shared outhouses and any available space. A little boy handed me a pebble as I passed. I’d killed a cockroach for him once. “The rock looks clear in the sun,” he said. His sullen older sister, nursing their youngest sibling, bowed hello. Inside my shack, I turned on my battery lamp. Across from my sleeping mat, I rolled up my canvas curtain to let the breeze in. The evening sky was bruising already. That meant the library would close soon. The Whimoon boys in their crisp black uniforms and caps, with their new books and their tiled hanok homes—they would take the test tomorrow, just as I would.

  I opened my notebooks. From a tin can, I took out a fresh pepper and held it on my tongue until the heat burned me awake.

  The test took place in an open amphitheater where leveled rows of grass ringed a circular field. I felt my inadequacy as I found my seat in one of the upper tiers. The other students seemed like a different breed—ease an essential part of their being. Boys wearing jackets with band collars joked as they found their spots. Their shirts underneath were probably stiff and clean. Mine was loose, stained. A rope cinched my pants. A grandmother who lived in the hut beside mine had sewn on the flapping soles of my shoes with gray thread.

  A boy with thick black glasses bragged about his girlfriend taking the women’s entrance exam less than a kilometer away. He didn’t say wife or match or even engaged. He chose that particular word and looked around to catch his friends’ reactions. I tried to spot Kyungho or even Namil.

  A proctor approached my seat and scanned my papers. “Yun Kyunghwan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He inspected my identification, checked off my name. “No high school certificate?”

  “I lost it in the war transition, sir.”

  He handed me a packet. “Don’t start until you’re told.” He continued climbing, marking the students in my column until he reached the top. The kid in front of me smelled of garlic and sweat. He was already balding. I concentrated on the skin peeking through his whorl of hair and felt better.

  A sharp laugh kicked through the air. It was the boy with the glasses. He whispered something, probably about his girlfriend, to the student next to him. I imagined her. A smart, educated girl with her hair cut short in the high school style, her shoulders bent over test papers, wearing a crisp white blouse and a neat navy skirt. It could have been Haemi. No, not her, with her long, wavy hair subdued in a braid and her penchant for traditional hanboks. Her fierce intelligence. How she used to sit on her knees in class, the right answers perched and ready for our grade-school teacher. Her loose, listing handwriting. No, Haemi would have been like me�
��determined despite the odds, hoping to keep up with the others once the world quieted to pencils on sheets of paper.

  As I thought of her for the first time in months, a man below yelled through a bullhorn, “You may start!” I picked up my pencil and began.

  Afterward, I wandered. The tests had been as hard as I’d expected. I had stayed until the absolute end when the proctors yelled to stop, and then I’d rushed outside. I didn’t want to hear the stragglers compare their answers. A few blocks away, on a street occupied by secondhand stores and food stalls, I ran into Kyungho and Namil.

  Namil looked at his watch. “Did you just finish?”

  “I’ve been walking around,” I said.

  “Come join us. We’re about to eat.” Kyungho gestured to one of the noodle stands.

  “I didn’t bring any money.” I waved at a secondhand bookstore farther down the street. “I was heading that way.”

  “To buy something with your imaginary cash?” Namil grinned.

  I wanted to tell him we didn’t know each other enough for him to joke. Instead, I responded, “To browse,” and tried to move past them.

  “I’ve got it tonight.” Kyungho clapped my back the way Jisoo used to when his privilege cloaked his pity. “We should celebrate.”

  We sat on wooden pallets and ate braised chicken stew that had simmered for hours over a small fire. I ate one starch noodle at a time. They avoided all the obvious questions about me. Instead, they discussed specific test problems with the same intensity they had in the library.

  “This”—Kyungho wrote in his notebook—“was how I solved it.”

  “It’s faster this way.” Namil presented both calculations. “What do you think?”

  They erased all the pleasure of eating. I hadn’t done it either way and was sure I was wrong. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “What, the election?” Kyungho asked.

  “How about the war?” Namil nudged. “Were you part of the ROK?”

  “Forget the 6-2-5. Do either of you have girlfriends?” I asked.