Kyung-sook Shin - Please Look After Mom

“Such a bad person.”

“I’m sorry?” Hong Tae-hee stares at you, her eyes round, surprised.

If she wanted to read it that badly, she should have asked me to read it to her . You rub your dry, rough face with your hands. If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.

“I’m home,” you mumble to the empty house, after Hong Tae-hee leaves.

All you wanted in life was to leave this house-when you were young, after you were married, and even after you had children. The isolation you felt when it struck you that you would spend your entire life in this house, in this dull town stuck to the south of the country, in the place of your birth-when that happened, you left home without a word and wandered the country. And when ancestral rites came around, you returned home, as if following genetic orders. Then you left again, and only crawled back when you became ill. One day, after you recovered from some illness, you learned to ride a motorcycle. You left home again, with a woman who was not your wife on the back. There were times when you thought you would never return. You wanted to forge a different life and forget about this house and set out on your own. But you couldn’t last more than three seasons away.

When the unfamiliar things away from home became commonplace, the things your wife grew and raised hovered before your eyes. Puppies, chickens, potatoes that kept coming out when they were dug up… and your children.

Before you lost sight of your wife on the Seoul Station subway platform, she was merely your children’s mother to you. She was like a steadfast tree, until you found yourself in a situation where you might not ever see her again-a tree that wouldn’t go away unless it was chopped down or pulled out. After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.

It’s only now that you clearly see the condition your wife was in for the past two or three years. She had sunk into numbness, would find herself not remembering a thing. Sometimes she would be sitting by a very familiar road in town, unable to find her way home. She would look at a pot or a jar she’d used for fifty years, her eyes wondering, What is this for? She became careless with the housekeeping, with strands of hair all over the house, not swept away. There were times when she couldn’t follow the plot of a television drama that she watched every day. She forgot the song she used to sing for decades, the one that started with “If you ask me what love is…” Sometimes your wife seemed not to remember who you were. Maybe even who she was.

But that wasn’t how it was the whole time.

Your wife would remember some tiny detail, as if she’d recovered something from ever-evaporating water. One day she mentioned how you had once wrapped some money in newspaper and stuck the bundle on the doorjamb before you left home. She told you that, even though she hadn’t said it then, she was grateful you’d left those bills for her. She said she didn’t know how she would have survived if she hadn’t discovered that newspaper-wrapped money. Another time, your wife reminded you that you needed to have a new family picture taken, because the most recent portrait didn’t include your younger daughter’s third baby, who was born in America.

Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife’s confusion.

When your wife’s headaches made her unconscious, you thought she was sleeping. You wished she wouldn’t lie down with a cloth wrapped around her head and sleep wherever she wanted to. When she was flustered, unable to open the door, you actually told her to look where she was going. Having never thought that you had to take care of your wife, you couldn’t understand that your wife’s sense of time had become jumbled. When your wife prepared slop and poured it in the trough in the empty pigpen and sat next to it, calling the name of the pig you had raised when you were young, saying, “This time, have three piglets, not just one-that would be so nice,” you thought she was joking. A long time ago, that pig had had a litter of three piglets. Your wife had sold them to buy Hyong-chol a bicycle.

“Are you here? I’m home!” you call to the empty house, and pause to listen.

You expect your wife to shout a greeting-“You’re home!”-but the house is quiet. Whenever you returned home and called, “I’m home!” your wife would, without fail, stick her face out from somewhere in the house.

Your wife wouldn’t stop nagging you. “Why can’t you stop drinking? You could live without me, but you can’t live without alcohol. The children tell me they are worried about you, and you still can’t kick the habit!” She would go on nagging even as she took care of him, handing him a glass of Japanese raisin tea. “If you come home drunk one more time, I’m going to leave you. Didn’t the doctor tell you at the hospital, didn’t he say that drinking was the worst thing for you? If you want to quit seeing this nice world, then keep drinking!”

This was how your wife despaired when you went out for lunch and had some drinks with friends, as if her whole world had turned upside down. You didn’t know that one day you would miss your wife’s nagging, which used to go in one ear and out the other.

But now you can’t hear anything, even though you got off the train and went into a blood-sausage-soup house nearby and had a glass, just so you could hear that nagging when you got home.

You look at the doghouse next to the side-yard gate. Your wife grew lonely when the old dog died, and you had gone into town and brought back another one. The dog would have made some kind of noise, but it’s completely silent in your house. You don’t see the chain; your sister must have taken the dog with her, having tired of coming by to feed it. You don’t close the gate, but leave it wide open and walk into the yard to sit on the porch. When your wife went to Seoul by herself, you often sat on the porch like this. Your wife would call from Seoul to ask, “Have you eaten?” and you would ask, “When are you coming home?”

“Why? Do you miss me?”

You would say, “No, don’t worry about me, just stay as long as you want this time.” No matter what you said, after she heard you say, “When are you coming home?” your wife would return home, regardless of why she had gone to Seoul. When you chided your wife, “Why did you come back so soon? I told you to stay as long as you want!” she would reply, “Do you think I came for you? I came to feed the dog,” and give you a look.

You returned home because of the things your wife grew and raised, even though coming home meant that you had to cast away the things you’d obtained in other places. When you walked in through this gate, your wife would be digging for sweet potatoes, or making yeast with a soiled towel wrapped around her head, watching over Hyong-chol at his desk. Your sister liked to say that your nomadic leanings stemmed from your youthful habit of not sleeping at home, to avoid being drafted into the military. Once, however, you actually went to the police station, because you were tired of hiding. Your uncle, a detective, and only five years older than you, sent you away. He said, “Even though our family is ruined, the eldest son of the eldest son has to survive.” Despite the family’s decline, you had to survive to maintain the family graveyard and oversee the ancestral rites. But that wasn’t a good enough reason for your uncle to stick your forefinger in the straw cutter and slice off a knuckle: it wasn’t you but your wife who looked after the family graveyard and took care of the ancestral rites each season. Was that why? Did you become a vagabond because you were forced to leave home and sleep outside, blanketed in dew? That might have been it. The habit of sleeping on the street could have been why you wandered away from home. When you slept at home, you were overcome by anxiety that someone would rush through the gate to grab you. Once, you even ran out of this house in the middle of the night, as if you were being chased.