Hyeong-sik ate breakfast at that house and stepped out through the front gate. The old woman, his mother, and Gyehyang had taken turns pressing him to eat, so he had eaten more than usual. What's more, the rice, soup, and stew—everything was exceptionally delicious to Hyeong-sik, who had spent his entire life eating only inn food. Beyond that, he had never once sat at a table being urged so earnestly by so many people. Especially never by a beautiful girl like Gyehyang, who insisted with genuine warmth, "Please eat some more." She stayed close to his table, tearing apart the grilled croaker she had cooked herself. The burn mark from earlier—from the match—was still visible on her finger, a yellowish blister. She took his spoon and mixed rice into his bowl herself.
"I really can't eat that much," Hyeong-sik said, but he finished every bit.
Seeing him clean his bowl, Gyehyang broke into a delighted smile. Her eyebrows still glistened with traces of tears. The three of them had urged him with absolute sincerity—as if he were their own son, their own brother—truly wanting him to eat as much as possible of that warm rice and those tasty side dishes. And Hyeong-sik likewise felt affection for them, as if they were his mother or his sisters. When they apologized for having "nothing to eat," it didn't sound like the usual hollow courtesy; it sounded like genuine regret that the delicious food wasn't enough.
As he stepped outside the gate, Hyeong-sik felt an indescribable joy. He had almost entirely forgotten the anxiety, sorrow, and suffocation that had consumed him over Yeongchae's matter. A new happiness filled him. The drizzly fog that had been falling earlier had lifted, and the hazy sky blazed with sunlight so fierce that just looking made you want to sweat.
When Hyeong-sik had taken a few steps, a voice called from behind: "Let's go together."
He recognized Gyehyang's voice. He stopped and turned his head. She ran up to him and, for a moment, almost took his hand—then stopped, looking at him.
"Let's go together," she said.
Hyeong-sik had been planning to walk past Chilseongmun, to the graves of criminals, then beyond Gijamyo, over Bukmangsan and Moranbong, and out to Cheongnyu Cliff.
"If you follow me, your legs might get sore," he said, looking down at her eyes—thinking, I wish she would come, yet trying to dissuade her.
But Gyehyang twisted her body.
"No. My legs won't get sore," she said, showing every intention of following.
"And it's hot," Hyeong-sik said, letting her fall in behind him as he headed toward Jongno. Steam rose gently from the thatched roofs along the roadside. People were already shading themselves with fans as they walked. At a shaved-ice shop with no customers, the bamboo blinds hung motionless, heavy-looking. They must rustle when the wind blows, Hyeong-sik thought idly.
Gyehyang peeked sideways into the shops along the way, holding her skirt hem with one hand as she followed. She looked at his yellowed summer coat and wondered what kind of man he was, what he did for a living. She thought about the various people she met every day and compared them to him in her mind. But Gyehyang still didn't know how to judge what kind of person she was meeting. She only thought, He must be poor, judging by how badly he's dressed. She looked at his crumpled overcoat. It must have gotten wrinkled on the train last night. Why didn't he take it off and hang it? She looked at his feet. New shoes. She thought about earlier, when she had lit his cigarette, and looked at her burnt finger. It still seems to hurt. She thought about how he had said "Give it to me" when the match caught fire, and realized she had never met anyone who said "Give it to me" to her before.
They stopped to avoid an oxcart, then quickly followed Hyeong-sik, and she took his hand. Hyeong-sik briefly turned his head, smiled at Gyehyang, and didn't swing the arm she held.
The two turned the corner at the Palgak noodle shop and climbed a sloping hill. Drops of sweat beaded on Gyehyang's forehead. Hyeong-sik saw this and paused his steps.
"Sweat is running on your forehead," he said.
Gyehyang wiped her forehead with the hand that had been holding his.
"It's not hot," she said, then took his hand again.
Hyeong-sik deliberately slowed his pace. Naked, grimy children stood scratching their heads and stared at them. A woman in just a jacket—wearing no skirt—rushed out of a smoky kitchen, tears streaming from her eyes, and whacked the head of a boy who had been scratching himself. The boy, struck, cried "Waa!" and threw a fistful of dirt from the road into the woman's face.
Hyeong-sik remembered how Yeongchae, when being carried off to some inn in Sukcheon, had thrown dirt into that man's face.
Gyehyang stopped, looked back at the crying child, then gripped Hyeong-sik's hand tightly with both hands.
They walked on.
Gyehyang put aside the thought of the beaten child and turned her mind to the relationship between Hyeong-sik and Wolhyang. When did 'big sister' get to know this man? If they knew each other in Pyongyang, I would definitely know about it. But then: Why did this man abandon big sister and cause her to die? Feeling resentment toward Hyeong-sik, she secretly looked up at his face. Then, seeing his worried expression, she thought, He's sad, thinking about big sister.
At that moment, a young man on a bicycle passed in front of them. He whipped his head around, got off, and came toward Hyeong-sik. Gyehyang let go of Hyeong-sik's hand and stepped back a pace, studying the newcomer.
The man leaned against his bicycle casually.
"Well, what's this? When did you get here?" He took out a cigarette, offered one to Hyeong-sik, and lit one himself.
Hyeong-sik blew smoke from his nose and mouth.
"I came on this morning's train," he said, looking at the shiny bell on the bicycle as if he didn't want to talk.
The man glanced sharply at Gyehyang, who had stepped aside, and wondered what gisaeng Hyeong-sik was taking around.
"So where's your lodging? Why didn't you come straight to my house?" he asked, studying Hyeong-sik's face. There must be a reason.
"I have some business. I only came for a quick stop," Hyeong-sik said, lifting his head to look at the Daedong River, white in the distance.
The man looked at Gyehyang once more.
"So who's that woman?"
Hyeong-sik's face flushed briefly. He didn't know how to answer. Gyehyang also bowed her head in embarrassment. The man tilted his head, as if Hyeong-sik's hesitation made him suspicious.
Hyeong-sik smiled faintly.
"She's my little sister," he said. I answered well, he thought with satisfaction. He gained new courage and looked the man straight in the face.
The man didn't understand the meaning of Hyeong-sik's answer—my little sister—and stood there dumbly, cigarette in his mouth. He knew Hyeong-sik had only one sister, and that she was already another man's wife. He stood still for a long moment, then crushed his cigarette butt under his foot.
"So where are you going?" he asked.
Hyeong-sik answered simply: "To see Gijamyo."
The man thought Hyeong-sik's circumstances seemed suspicious. "Then come to my house this evening. Let's have a night of conversation." He got on his bicycle and rode off. After going some distance, he turned his head on the bicycle to look at the two people slowly walking, then disappeared around a curve in the road. The top of his white-covered Napoleon hat glimmered for a moment, then vanished.
Gyehyang seemed relieved. She took Hyeong-sik's hand.
"Who is that gentleman?" she asked.
"My friend. A friend from the same school when I was in Tokyo."
Hearing this, Gyehyang thought, So he's a student who studied in Tokyo. But she also remembered that several Tokyo students visited her house. One of them was good at drawing. She thought about how that one—when drunk—would try to embrace her, his breath reeking of alcohol, and how once he said he would paint her portrait and told her to sit naked, and she had said, "I don't want to!" and run to the opposite room.
The two reached Chilseongmun and paused briefly. A cool breeze blew through the gate tunnel. Hyeong-sik loosened the ties of his overcoat, looked at his sweat-soaked undershirt, and spread his coat open as if to welcome the breeze. Gyehyang blew out air—hoo, hoo—and fanned her temples with both hands.
Hyeong-sik looked at her face. It was roundish. Her cheeks were flushed, as if drunk from the heat. Though she hadn't applied powder this morning, a little from yesterday still clung around her temples. Sweat had soaked through the back of her jacket. Hyeong-sik remembered Seon-hyeong's jacket, the wet spot sometimes big, sometimes small, and smiled faintly.
"Yes, why are you smiling?" Gyehyang said, smiling herself.
Hyeong-sik touched her shoulder.
"The back of your jacket is soaked," he said.
Gyehyang quickly turned and touched his back. She hesitated, then said, "Here too, it's soaked."
Gyehyang didn't know what to call him. Her mother called the Tokyo students who visited her house "Secretary So-and-so" or simply "Master," and the tall man from the district office she called "Kim Haksa." But Gyehyang didn't know what to call Hyeong-sik. So when she saw the sweat on his back, she hesitated for a moment—Should I say 'Master'? Or 'Mr. Lee'?—and finally settled on "Here too, it's soaked."
Hyeong-sik understood. He wanted to see what she would call him, so he smiled again.
"Gyehyang-ssi's face is red as if you're drunk," he said.
Gyehyang, perhaps realizing that he knew she had hesitated over what to call him, blushed even more.
"Oppa's face too..." She bowed her head in embarrassment, unable to finish.
Gyehyang remembered how Hyeong-sik had said "my little sister" earlier. The word Hyeong-sik had wanted to hear from her was that very "oppa." But hearing her say "Oppa's face too..." he felt embarrassed himself. Hyeong-sik had one biological sister and two or three female cousins. His sister lived in Hamgyeong Province with her husband's family, so he hadn't seen her in four or five years. Whenever he went home for vacation, he visited his three cousins before anyone else. Those cousins loved their older cousin dearly after long separations. Especially the two younger ones often cried when they met him and when they parted. In front of their in-laws, they couldn't freely express their joy, but the way they said "oppa" when they first met, and the way they put lots of chicken meat in the soup on his table—that was enough to show their affection. The real reason Hyeong-sik went home for vacation was to hear those two cousins call him "oppa." Gyehyang's simple words "Oppa's face too..." gave him boundless joy.
They walked again. But Gyehyang did not take his hand.
The two passed through Chilseongmun. Dilapidated houses stood along the road. Before the railroad came, there had been travelers passing through, and people sold liquor and rice cakes. Now, except on market days, you could barely see a soul. Outside the gate, they had placed so-called "flat benches" made like door panels, covered with tattered straw mats. An old man in a very worn-out horsehair hat and dirty cotton clothes sat on the bench in this heat, as if he had nothing to do, swaying his body back and forth as he watched them pass. His face was red, his eyes bright, and his bearing remarkably dignified.
Hyeong-sik knew that decades ago, when Joseon was still the old Joseon, this man had once enjoyed himself inside Seonhwadang. And he thought of his own hometown, where there was an old man who, since the Gabo year, had lost his place in the world and lived in obscurity—once a prominent figure in that neighborhood. He stopped and looked at the old man again. The old man also looked at them.
When his power was at its peak before Gabo, that old man must have thought the entire Pyongyang landscape existed for him, and all the beauties of the world existed for him. But with a single cannon shot at Ulmil Pavilion in the Gabo year, the peaceful era he had dreamed of shattered, and a new age arrived like lightning flashing in a dark night. So he became a man abandoned by the world, and the world passed into the hands of young people he neither knew nor had ever seen. He didn't know about railroads, or telegraphs, or telephones—certainly not about submarines or torpedo boats. He lived outside Chilseongmun, less than five ri from Daedongmun Street, and didn't know what happened inside the Pyongyang fortress day after day, night after night. In his head, there was only Seonhwadang; he didn't know what a Provincial Office was. He would never understand what this world was—he lived in this world but was outside it. Hyeong-sik and that old man were like people from different countries, completely unable to communicate, either in speech or writing.
The thought—a straggler, a man of the past—came to Hyeong-sik, and he remembered his own granduncle, who had abandoned the world and could never understand no matter how much Hyeong-sik talked about the new age. And Hyeong-sik felt an indescribable sadness for that old man.
Gyehyang, seeing Hyeong-sik standing there lost in thought, tugged his sleeve.
"Let's go quickly," she said.
Hyeong-sik looked back at the old man. A man made of stone, he thought. Then: No, a fossilized man.
The old man looked at Hyeong-sik for a long time, then, as if struck by some thought, closed his eyes and continued swaying back and forth.
Gyehyang spoke softly: "Is he an old man you know?"
Hyeong-sik put his hand on her shoulder and started walking.
"Yes, he was an old man I knew before. But now he's become an old man I don't know," he said, smiling at her.
He thought: Gyehyang, you will never know that old man.
He remembered the first time he came to Pyongyang, passing this way. He remembered the boy with a white ribbon in his hair and leg wrappings, toddling along this road. That boy knew that old man, he thought. That boy had been amazed by the large glass windows on Daedongmun Street, and by the steamship that went "whoosh" on the Daedong River—that boy had known the old man. But that boy was already dead. He had died when he saw the "whoosh" steamship. And a completely different person—this Lee Hyeong-sik—had taken residence in that boy's shell. Just as Seonhwadang had become the Provincial Office, and the governor had become the provincial chief.
He looked at Gyehyang walking beside him. He thought about the distance between Gyehyang and that old man. That distance was infinite.
As Hyeong-sik was about to turn a corner, he looked back at the old man again. But the old man was still swaying back and forth. Gyehyang also looked at him.
"What old man?" she asked.
"An old man you wouldn't know, Gyehyang-ssi," he said, and smiled. Gyehyang looked at his face suspiciously. She quietly took his hand.
The two walked south along a sloping path at the foot of the fortress wall. The short grass blades, under the direct sunlight, had wilted slightly and hung their heads quietly. Hyeong-sik looked at the crumbling fortress wall and thought about the spirit of the ancestors who built it, about the rise and fall of those ancestors that this wall had witnessed, about how many times it had been hit by bullets and cannonballs over the years. The ancient wall, standing tall on the slope, seemed to have feelings and tears, like a person—as if it had much to say but no one to listen, a painful expression visible on its face.
Gyehyang sweated profusely as she followed behind Hyeong-sik, thinking about how she had called him "oppa" earlier. She had never called anyone "oppa" before. She was her mother's only daughter, and she didn't even know who her father was, so she had no known relatives. Though she had two or three people she called "big sister," she had no one to call "oppa." Not just Gyehyang—the people around her hardly ever called anyone "oppa" or "noona." The society she lived in was mostly women, and the men she encountered were mostly customers who came to a gisaeng house for entertainment. Gyehyang was very happy to have called someone "oppa" for the first time. Hyeong-sik seemed even more dear to her now than when she had lit his cigarette. She wanted to call him "oppa" once more.
The two arrived at the place where the criminals' graves were.