Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

Mr. Fermin calls out for her from the living room. He calls her name, and then in a voice drunk with sadness he calls for his sons, his daughters, he doesn’t want to be left alone.

“I go now,” she says to me politely.

She leads me out. Mr. Fermin is stretched out on the sofa. His slack arm covers his face. She says to him in Spanish, The man is leaving .

He grumbles. She repeats herself.

And so he answers, trying hard, “Goodbye, Mr. Kwang.”

Sherrie and Janice have called the entire office in, all the volunteers, the part-time canvassers, even the high school kids who station the sidewalk kiosks. His large row house is trafficked by us rushing in and out, depositing papers, carrying file cabinets, computers, lamps, makeshift desks. Sherrie says he wants everybody together today. This is important. He wants everyone near. He doesn’t need to see us or hear us. Just have us close.

When something bad happens, you gather the family and count heads.

He hasn’t slept, Sherrie tells us. He’s hurting badly. He has been weeping all night for his friend Eduardo, and then Helda Brandeis, praying for them with old Reverend Cho from the Flushing Korean Church. He hasn’t come down from his office on the third floor of the house since he returned from D.C., now a few days. His wife and his boys go up and visit with him for a while and then leave him alone, and only the minister has been allowed up. Every hour Mrs. Kwang gives Sherrie a new message of what he wants said or done.

For the last few hours the communiques have ceased coming down. It’s nearing five o’clock and the stations need something new for their first evening broadcasts. The reporters have begun clamoring for him, shouting their questions up to the third-floor window. There are enough reporters and cameramen on the narrow sidewalk that the police have set up barricades to keep them from flowing out into the street and obstructing traffic. The neighbors have been complaining about some of them, who want to use their upstairs to look in on Kwang’s house, some even asking if the basements might be connected. His immediate neighbors, though, are loyal, the whole block stays vigilant over Kwang, and they have started hurling garbage and buckets of water at those trying to sneak up the sides and back of the property. Sherrie and Janice instruct us again and again not to speak to the press as we move things inside.

But as we work all the talk is about who did this to us. Everyone is exchanging rumors, theories.

It’s the Black Muslims. They can’t accept Yellow Power. No , someone else says, they’d never do something like this. Who is it, then? The Man, stupid, it’s always the Man. No shit, but who’s that? De Roos. Who else?

I hear the talk from all his people. They offer each other the spectrum of notions; the bombers are North Korean terrorists, or the growing white-separatist cell based on eastern Long Island, or even the worldwide agents of the Mossad — you can always lay blame on them — who will never forget Kwang’s verbal support of the children of the Intifada. The late money says it’s the Indians, who so despise Korean competition, it’s the Jews envious of new Korean money, Chinese hateful of Korean communality, blacks who want something, anything of justice, it’s the uneasy coalition of our colors, that oldest strife of city and alley and schoolyard.

If you beat your brother with his stick , I heard Kwang once say to a crowd, he’ll come back around and beat you with yours .

The customary lessons, the historical formulas.

But now I hear a low whisper: It was Eduardo they wanted.

I look toward the stair but there are too many bodies trundling through the house, too many unknown faces to pick one out. And the idea is one I’ve been turning over in my mind. Aside from his family and blood, if you wanted to take someone away from John Kwang, if you simply desired to hurt him, exercise true malice, Eduardo would figure near the top of the list. But how did they know he’d be working that late? Or were he and the cleaning woman just caught in the smoke and the flames?

Near the kitchen Sherrie spots me and eyes me to come over. She’s talking with May. Sherrie towers over her. They’re holding each other’s hands like schoolgirls. May is glassy-eyed. They’ve been talking about Helda.

Besides the office, Helda also cleaned the Kwangs’ house once a week since she started about a year ago. She left her family back in what was the old East Germany to make enough money to send for her husband and three grown children. She was planning to bring them over one at a time. Helda was living with another German family in the Bronx, sharing a bedroom with two other boarders five nights a week. The other nights the boarders had to stay elsewhere because of an after-hours club the owners ran on the weekends. For the first month or so, Helda would shuttle back and forth between all-night diners, drinking coffee to stay awake. Jenkins found her asleep one night during her cleaning shift at the office and wanted to fire her, but John learned what was going on — Eduardo, who often worked at night, told him — and he invited Helda to sleep in his family’s guest bedroom on the weekends. She could look after the boys if he and May went out. If guests came, she chose to sleep on the floor in the boys’ room.

“The boys liked it,” May says. “They said she was nice and pretty and old.”

“They’re good boys,” Sherrie tells her.

“They’ve been crying with their father. I don’t think they really understand but they see him and do the same.”

“Did you go and see the Fermins, Henry?” asks Sherrie.

I tell her yes and look at May, her face as yet wrinkleless, so round, her full cheek pinching her narrow eyes, the color and curve so durably Korean. I now notice, too, the faintest patch of redness high on her cheek, between her left eye and ear, like she’d been sunburned just there, or was slapped once, very hard.

“They accepted your gift,” I say to her.

“It’s from all of us,” May answers. “I hope you told her that. John wanted to present something on all of our behalf. My family as well as our office.”

“I think Mrs. Fermin understood.” Then I say, “She seemed a little overwhelmed by the amount.”

“Funerals are expensive,” Sherrie says.

May lowers her eyes. She’s from yangban stock, her people are the Korean landed gentry, and she finds this open talk of figures awkward, unnecessary. The money, her eyes tell me, is simply an acknowledgment of our dead. I understand this. Even a poor cabbage farmer’s son like my father knows the custom. But I wonder who in our office delivered Helda’s honor, if there was one at all, whether it was air-posted to Germany in a handsomely twined bundle of vellum and silk.

May says, “My husband wants to speak with you, actually. Not today. Tomorrow, maybe. He wanted to ask you about how Eduardo’s family is doing. He said he hasn’t seen you in a few weeks.”

After May goes upstairs Sherrie pulls me aside. We stand in the arch of a small powder room beneath the riser.

“I might not be around tomorrow so I’ll tell you right now. Don’t take too much of his time.”

“Sure,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s just not responding well to this and we’ve got to come out and make an appearance. He’s got to come out strong. We’re starting to suffer, people are starting to think he doesn’t care. The damn papers aren’t helping either.”

This is true; the late edition headline of one of the tabloids reads, Wherrrre’s Johnny?

“I don’t want you to slow the process,” she warns me. “He’s vulnerable. You’ll see that. Help him get his act together so he can get his face out there. He’s looking like a coward.”