Yom Sang-seop - Three Generations

How dare she enter before us? they all thought, following her in. There was no movement inside, and no one seemed to be on the big veranda. The maidservant was nowhere in sight.

Nervously, like people who are aware that a burglar is sneaking around the house, they exchanged glances.

“Has everyone gone out?” Deok-gi spoke in a full voice, as if he had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and climbed onto the veranda, worried that his mother and wife would sense his uneasiness.

As the women followed him, the Suwon woman entered from the outer quarters nonchalantly, softly scuffing her shoes. She addressed them in a composed tone. “Why have you all returned together?” Stepping onto the veranda, she stared at Deok-gi’s wife, who had stiffened in her tracks. “Weren’t you going to your parents’?”

What’s going on?

Overcome with suspicion, everyone was rendered speechless.

“Is no one in the outer quarters?” asked Deok-gi, coming out of his room.

“No. I went out there to get something, but I couldn’t find it. I wonder where your grandfather left it,” the Suwon woman said calmly.

“What are you looking for?”

“Your grandfather’s fur-lined Korean outer coat. I thought it might be hanging somewhere in the outer quarters, out of sight.”

“Didn’t he wear it to the hospital?” asked Deok-gi’s wife.

“Ah, you’re right! What was I thinking?” The Suwon woman laughed dejectedly.

When the old man was moved to the hospital in an ambulance, she was about to cover him with a blanket but then asked Deok-gi’s wife to fetch the fur-lined coat. She placed it over her husband and spread the blanket on top of it. Had she completely forgotten? Even if they believed the Suwon woman, why had the maidservant rushed in so quickly? And where was she now?

Deok-gi went out to the outer quarters, where the safe was kept, but found no one there. But why was the outer gate pushed shut instead of locked?

When Deok-gi opened the front gate of the outer quarters and called out, the maidservant came through the gate from the inner quarters, answering in a long drawl, as if she were playing hide-and-seek.

“Why didn’t you lock the gate? No one’s around.”

“I opened it just a moment ago to go to my room.”

Deok-gi told her to lock it and went into the larger room of the outer quarters.

He unlocked the door to the loft; the safe came into view. More than a decade ago, when they had moved into this house, the original loft had been torn down and steel bars had been installed underneath the safe. Now, the keeper of the safe was about to take leave of this world. His grandfather had devoted his life to guarding it. Deok-gi remembered how, when he was seven or eight, his grandfather had joked as he jiggled open the safe: “Deok-gi, if you misbehave, I’ll put you in the safe and lock the door.”

Deok-gi’s height had almost doubled since then, so he could never fit in it now, but soon his life as the safe’s new keeper would begin. Why had he grown suspicious of the Suwon woman and the maidservant? Why had he been compelled to take a look at the safe?

The opening and shutting of this safe and the ancestral shrine door are now the two most crucial obligations in my life; I am like a prison guard manning the door to a cell.

Deok-gi didn’t know what sort of shape the safe was in now, but even if someone had disturbed it, it would be in the same place. As long as he had the keys, no one could do much harm. He grew more curious about what was inside, and as it was not a Pandora’s box, he wanted to take a quick peek, even though it meant disobeying his grandfather. In all the family, Deok-gi was the only one to whom his grandfather had entrusted the combination.

As Deok-gi turned the dial on the safe this way and that, shifting through his memory for the numbers, his eyes fell on some ash scattered on the loft’s floor. He took a closer look. Though crushed when the door had been shut, it was clearly cigarette ash. His grandfather had been confined to bed for more than a month. Was the ash a month old? But his grandfather didn’t smoke cigarettes; he preferred a long pipe. Did he open the door with his long pipe between his lips? Was this ash from a pipe?

He didn’t think so. For one thing, the maidservant had behaved oddly. They must have been sneaking people out of the house, for it was strange that the nanny was nowhere in sight and that the gate of the outer quarters had been unlocked. Even if the maidservant’s room were on fire, there was no need to unlock the outer quarters’ gate. The Suwon woman’s excuse was specious, but more than that, why had she, in a surprising show of generosity, encouraged Deok-gi’s wife to visit her parents? Normally, she would have snubbed Deok-gi’s wife if she had even intimated such a wish. The Suwon woman would have said that the young woman’s hands were too full for her to leave the house. Obviously, the Suwon woman was planning something, pretending to keep an eye on the house, after driving everyone away. Deok-gi recalled Uncle Chang-hun’s absence at the hospital a while back. Clerk Choe, who had appeared briefly in the morning, had vanished as well.

Do they think they can get away with something behind my back? They might be able to open the loft door by picking at the keyhole, but how can they open the safe? And even if they had opened it, what could they have done? They could have stolen whatever was inside, but they wouldn’t dare do anything so obvious. If they took the bankbooks, they’d be caught immediately. Did they want to swap the land deeds with falsified ones? Perhaps they wanted to tamper with the will. If so, what would they do if his grandfather recovered his health?

Deok-gi studied the safe’s door, shiny enough to reflect his face; there were fingerprint smudges on it.

Since the door to the outer quarters had remained open, someone might have snuck out, but on the other hand, someone could be watching him at this very moment from the corners of this vast space. If he charged toward Deok-gi from behind and gagged him, only the safe, standing immobile, would witness the attack. Deok-gi realized for the first time that money was frightening and sordid. When the safe door creaked open, Deok-gi began to examine its contents carefully.

The first thing he examined was a will or, rather, a list of names. Almost every family member’s name was on the list. Each name was also written on more than ten well-sealed envelopes. Deok-gi scanned the list and found no one was missing. The Suwon woman’s name was there, as was his own, and there was no indication that the envelopes had been opened. The envelope bearing the word bankbooks was there as well. The big seals belonging to Deok-gi and his grandfather were intact. They hadn’t been able to open the safe.

Deok-gi was a little relieved, though still worried. He carefully went over the list.

Gwi-sun (the Suwon woman’s daughter): fifty bags of rice per year

The Suwon woman: two hundred bags

Deok-hui: fifty bags

Deok-hui’s mother: one hundred bags

Deok-gi’s wife: fifty bags

Sang-hun: three hundred bags

Deok-gi: fifteen hundred bags

Chang-hun: five hundred won in cash

Secretary Ji: five hundred won in cash

Clerk Choe: three hundred won in cash

These are rough figures. The Suwon woman’s two hundred bags were actually three times larger than Sang-hun’s three hundred bags. And Deok-gi’s fifteen hundred bags would reach seventeen or eighteen hundred, if not two thousand, because he was entitled to remainders as well.

Ten thousand won in bank deposits and the house were left to Deok-gi, the Suwon woman would receive a fifteen- gan house in Taepyeong-dong, and the Bungmi Changjeong house would go to Sang-hun in view of his illegitimate child. The old man specified that the money in the bankbook from which he withdrew living expenses was for the maintenance of the two Jo households, after paying for funeral expenses and granting bonuses to Chang-hun and Secretary Ji. Currently, it held almost ten thousand won. Oddly, there was no mention of the rice mill inside Namdaemun. Had the old man completely forgotten about it or did he simply have no intention of handing it down to any one individual? Perhaps he counted on its covering living expenses for the households dependent on him