Her grandmother was sitting up.
She had done it without help, or with so little that nobody would admit to having given it. The bed had been cranked to its highest angle, and the three pillows built into a throne behind her, and the clear tube had been moved from beneath her nose to the side of her cheek, where it lay along the line of her jaw like a thin transparent ribbon. Her hair was brushed. Min had not done it, because Min was asleep in a corridor. It had been done, Ahreum saw, by the old woman's own right hand, with the small tortoiseshell comb from her bag, in a series of long slow strokes that had ended, at the left temple, a little crookedly.
The window behind her had begun to go pale. It was a plain rectangle of cold grey sky over the roofs of the hospital annexe, with a thin line of gold at the bottom of it, and the light came across the blanket in a long bar and touched the clip on her finger and the steel lunch box on the table at her side. The box was empty. It had been washed, and its navy cloth folded on top.
On the wall above the head of the bed the clock said nineteen minutes past six. It said so correctly. Ahreum looked at it, and her grandmother, who missed nothing, said dryly, "I have stopped looking at it. It is very tiring to be right."
They stood inside the door.
She had not decided how to enter. They had walked the length of the passage side by side, with the whole of a chair between them, and at the door of 903 he had stopped to let her go first, and she had stopped to let him, and Nurse Baek had given the pair of them a small sharp push in the middle of the back with the flat of her clipboard. Now they stood at the foot of the bed, a hand's breadth apart, with their arms at their sides and the paper bag of tangerines held awkwardly in his left hand like something that he had been given to carry and not told where to put.
Madam Seol regarded them.
It was a long look, level, bright and a little clouded at the edges, and it went from the one to the other and back, and rested for a moment on the space between. "You stand," she said, "like two lamp-posts that have quarrelled. Sit."
There were two chairs by the bed, the vinyl one and a metal stool that somebody had put beside it in the night. Ahreum took the vinyl. Hajin took the stool. They sat, and found that the chairs had been placed, by an agency that she did not care to examine, exactly a hand's breadth apart.
"A hand's breadth," said Madam Seol, to the ceiling. "I am told that it was a hand's breadth in Jeju, as well. Min tells my housekeeper, and my housekeeper tells me. It was a very small stove, I understand, and a great deal of wind." She did not smile. The corner of her mouth, which had spent seventy years being governed, did something complicated. "I shall not ask. I am a convalescent. I merely wish to say that it is a good distance, and that you will both be sitting nearer by the end of the week."
"Mr. Yoon," said Madam Seol.
"Madam."
"I should like to talk to you about fruit."
He looked at the bag in his hand. He looked at it as one looks at a thing that has been named in a language one almost knows.
"On the thirty-first of last month," she said, "you sent me four persimmons. Through a nurse. They were soft, and ripe, and the flat kind, with no seed, and each of them had been wrapped in a twist of newspaper, as they used to be wrapped in the old markets. I ate one. I had not enjoyed anything since Tuesday." The thin hand moved on the sheet. "I should like to know how you knew."
"I did not know," said Hajin. "I bought them in the lobby. They were the kind that my mother sends me."
"Ah."
"She goes back to Cheongdo in the autumn. She has a little house there now, with a tree. I bought it for her in the spring of my third year. She grows them herself." He turned the bag over in his hands. "Every November a crate comes to my flat. I give most of it to the office. It is the only fruit that I have ever bought for anyone. I think that I did not choose it. I think that my hand did."
"Every November," said Madam Seol, "for ten years, a crate arrives at the Fund's address on the twenty-second floor of Seol Tower."
He went quite still.
"There is no card. It comes by the carrier from a village near Cheongdo. Flat persimmons, the seedless kind, forty of them, each in its twist of newspaper. The first year the clerk in the post-room telephoned Min and asked whether it was a mistake, and Min said that it must be, and brought one to me, to see." Her voice was thin and dry and very steady. "The slip was on the box. It was a carrier's slip, a flimsy pink thing, with the sender's name filled in in a hand that has worked with its hands all its life. It said, *Yoon.* It said, *Cheongdo.* And in the space where one writes the contents, it said, in a different pen, six words."
Hajin's lips had parted.
"*For whoever it was. Thank you.*"
The clock ticked on the wall. Ahreum, a hand's breadth from him, saw his face go through something that she had never seen it go through, and had no name for. It was not grief. It was nearer to the look of a man who has been told, in a quiet room, that the door he has been knocking at for ten years was open the whole time, and that someone had been standing behind it.
"I knew the surname," said Madam Seol. "I had it in a file. A scholarship boy, Class 2-C, whose eligibility had been reviewed in October and closed on a Tuesday morning at my granddaughter's request. I never replied. I could not. A reply would have told her where the kindness had come from. I put the slip in the drawer of my desk in the sitting room, and each November I ate one, and I gave the rest to the cleaners." She turned her head on the pillow. "I have eaten every persimmon that your mother has sent me, Mr. Yoon. It is the only gift in my life that I have received from a person who did not know what I had done to deserve it. I did not."
"She never told me," said Hajin.
It came out hoarse.
"She would not. I believe that she has never forgiven herself for not knowing whom to thank."
He put his hand over his eyes.
He sat on the metal stool with the paper bag between his knees and his palm pressed against his face, and Ahreum watched his shoulders. They did not shake. They only went down, a little, by a few centimetres, as the shoulders of a man go down who has been carrying a tray at belly height for ten years and has just discovered that someone, a very long way off, in a village with a persimmon tree, had been holding the other end.
*He has been grateful in the wrong direction for ten years,* she thought. She had said as much, in a sense, in a basement. And she saw now with a small, clear, astonished tenderness that his mother, who had not been told anything at all, had been grateful in the right one.
"Halmoni," said Ahreum.
She had not meant to say it yet. It had come up out of her as the other had, at ten past two in the morning, on a telephone in the amber light, without any order. She sat very straight on the vinyl chair with her hands folded on her knee and her heart going hard and slow.
The bright eyes turned.
"I am asking."
The room went quiet. Even the machine seemed to hold its tick. On the stool beside her Hajin lowered his hand from his face, slowly, and she felt rather than saw him become still.
"Mr. Yoon's colleague has found something. The Samil Heritage Trust, which you and Grandfather settled in 1987, holds a beneficiary schedule that is sealed. The trustee is a firm called Seongjin Partners. It has acted, I believe, for the same company that sold Mr. Yoon his first nine percent, two years ago, by way of a shell in Luxembourg. The deed says that either settlor may, in writing, direct the trustee to disclose the schedule to any person." She stopped. She heard her voice, very level, and went on regardless. "I am asking you to sign that direction. I am asking that it be disclosed on the ninth, in front of the Board, to Attorney Cha and to the Commission. And I am asking that you come."
She heard it hang in the quiet. It was a request with an object. It had a name and a date and an action in it, and a person at the end of it who might refuse. It was nearly the longest thing that she had ever asked anyone for, and when she came to the last word she found that her hands, folded in her lap, were not shaking at all.
Madam Seol said nothing.
She lay against the pillows with the grey light on her face and looked at her granddaughter for a very long time. Her eyes were very bright. In the corner of the left one something had gathered, a small bead of water, that she did not trouble to wipe. She seemed, for a moment, to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room.
"That," she said at last, in a voice scarcely above a breath, "is the first asking of yours that I find worthy."
Ahreum's eyes stung.
"The others were reports. You have given me a great many reports, child. They were excellent. I read every one." The dry hand lifted an inch from the sheet. "This one has a person in it. Ring for Nurse Baek. I shall want the Fund's paper and a pen, and two witnesses who are not you."
It took twenty minutes, and it was done in the way that Madam Seol did everything, as if for the record of a court that she did not intend to respect.
Nurse Baek brought the paper. It was the Fund's plain pad, which Ahreum had in her bag, and the steel pen from beside it, and a clipboard to write on. Min was woken. She came into the room with her handbag held against her chest like a shield, and her cardigan creased from the chair, and her round face arranged in a blankness so profound that it almost sang. She had heard nothing. She had been asleep. She said so twice. She was told by Madam Seol to stand at the foot of the bed with her hands folded, and to look at what was written, and not at her employer's face.
The old woman wrote it with her right hand, which was the free one. She wrote slowly, with the clipboard propped against her knees and her glasses on the tip of her nose and the drip trailing from her left in its thin line, and the nib made a small dry scratching in the quiet. She did not hand the pen to anyone. She did not ask what the words should be. She set them down in her own tall old-fashioned script, a little shaky at the tails of the letters, and Ahreum, who knew that hand as she knew her own, read them upside down from where she sat.
*I, Seol Sunhee, a settlor of the Samil Heritage Trust, hereby direct Seongjin Partners, as trustee, to disclose the full beneficiary schedule of the said trust, and all accounts rendered under it since 1 January 2000, to Attorney Cha Minho and to the Personal Information Protection Commission, in the presence of the Board of Seol Education Holdings, on the ninth day of January. I give this direction of my own will, in full possession of my faculties, and I should like it to be known that it is long overdue.*
She signed it. She signed her whole name, the three syllables of it, with the long flourish at the end that she had made at the foot of every cheque of her life. Then she held it out, at arm's length, to the nurse and to Min.
"Witness," she said.
They did. Min's hand shook. When she had done, she did not look up. She said, to the paper, in a voice that cracked on the second word, "Madam, I have worked for this family for thirty years."
"I know, Min."
"I should have said something sooner."
"Everyone should have said something sooner," said Madam Seol. "Go and have your breakfast. It is the first of January, and you have been asleep in a corridor."
She folded the paper in three. She did it with great care, and slid it into a plain white envelope of the Fund's, and licked the flap, and pressed it down with the heel of her thin hand. She held it for a moment against her chest.
"Now," she said, "I owe you something."
"Halmoni, you do not"
"I owe you three things, and I intend to pay them in order, because I am not at all certain that I shall be given another morning on which I feel so well." She set the envelope on the blanket. "The first is a sentence. I said it to you on the stair of my house on a night in March, twenty-one years ago, and I believed that it was a kindness. I should like to take it back."
Ahreum could not move.
"*We do not wait.* I said it gently. That was the cruelty of it. I have been told so, by a woman who did me the great honour of telling me, and I have found that I am unable to disagree." The bright eyes did not leave her face. "I was afraid that you would follow her. I was afraid that you would sit on that stair for the rest of your life with your shoes on and your bag on your shoulder, and I could not bear it, and so I made a rule so that you should never be found waiting. I did not know that I had taught you to wait in secret."
"Halmoni"
"I should like to hear what it was like. I never asked." The thin voice cracked, and she let it. "I should like you to tell me. Aloud. In front of Mr. Yoon, if you will permit it, because I think that he is a man who will know what to do with it."
She looked at Hajin. He did not move. He sat on his stool with his hands open on his knees, and he did not say *you do not have to*, and she saw that he had understood. He had said, in a corridor, that he wished to hear it from a person. He was giving her the same.
Ahreum took a breath.
"I was six," she said.
It was a very plain sentence. It did not seem to have anything behind it at all, and then it did.
"It was a Thursday in March. I came home from school at four. She was in the hall. She had a suitcase, a small one, a brown one with a strap, and she was wearing her good coat. She knelt down and she did up the top button of my cardigan, and she said, *Be good for Halmoni.* That was all. Then she went out of the front door. She did not shut it. I stood in the hall and watched it swing."
The grey light lay along the blanket.
"I thought that she had gone to buy something. I put my bag back on. I do not know why. I went upstairs and I sat on the top stair, in my school shoes, with my bag on my shoulder, because I thought that when the car came back up the drive I should like to be ready." Her voice was quite steady. She marvelled at it. "I sat for a long time. It got dark. Min brought me a blanket and sat three steps below me and did not say anything. At midnight you came out of the study, Halmoni, and you stood at the bottom, and you said, *Come to bed, Ahreum-ah. We do not wait.*"
"I did."
"I took off my shoes. I put them side by side. I came to bed." She looked at her hands. "And I decided, lying there, that the thing that had been wrong with me was the waiting. That if I had not been a person who waited, she should not have gone. I had a very clear idea about it. I was six years old and I thought that it was a flaw in my character, like a crooked tooth." She swallowed. "I have been trying to straighten it for twenty-one years."
Nobody spoke.
She did not look at Hajin. She did not need to. She could feel him, a hand's breadth away on a metal stool, not touching her, with the whole of his attention laid against her like a warm hand against a cold wall. After a time, very quietly, he moved. He put the paper bag of tangerines down on the floor beside his foot. He laid his right hand on his knee with the palm turned up. And he left it there, open, in the light, in case.
"Your mother," said Madam Seol, "did not leave because of you."
Ahreum raised her head.
"I have never said that to you in plain words. I said a great many other things. I said that she was unwell, and that she was far away, and that she was not to be spoken of." The old voice was flat with effort. "She did not leave because of anything that you were or did. She was a frightened young woman in a house that was too large, and I did not make it easy for her to stay. That is the whole of it. It is mine. It was never yours."
The tears came. She did not stop them. They ran down her face in the pale light and dropped on her folded hands, and she heard a small sound come out of her, high and cracked, a sound that she had last made on the top of a stair. It was not loud. It did not embarrass her. She sat in the vinyl chair with her face wet and her back straight, and for the first time in her life she did not mind who saw.
"The second," said Madam Seol, after a long time, "is a debt that is not yours. I should like it to be paid in this room, because I do not think that I shall manage it in another."
She turned her head toward the window.
"*Somewhere safe.* That is what I said to you, when you came to me in that sitting room with your school bag and asked where the girl had gone. Forty-one million won, a one-way flight to Singapore, a flat in Toa Payoh with a leaking roof, a visa signed by a man I had never met. I had it done in a week. I did not follow them. I did not ask what became of them. I told myself that not looking was a mercy." Her hand moved on the sheet. "Her father drove a taxi for nine years in a country where he did not speak the language. He did not raise his voice. He died, and so did her mother, and I did not know until September, when I wrote to her, and found that I could not ask her to forgive me, and wrote anyway."
"She told me," said Ahreum.
"Then she is braver than any of us, and she will come." The bright eyes closed. "I should like to look at her when I say it. I do not wish to say it in a letter, and I do not wish to say it by telephone. I should like to say it to a face. If she will let me."
"She is coming on the third."
"Then I shall be well enough on the third." Madam Seol opened her eyes. "The third is for Yurim."
The name dropped into the room like a stone.
"My brother's girl," said Madam Seol. "She has called me Halmoni since she was five years old. It was a thing that she said once, in the garden, to see what would happen, and I did not correct her. I should have. She is my niece, not my granddaughter, and I let a child call me by a name that was not hers, because I liked the sound of it, and because she wished so badly to belong. I did not make it true. I did not make it untrue." The thin mouth moved. "It is a kindness that has been done to me, in a sense, a great many times. I find that I do not like being on the other end of it."
"Halmoni."
"I shall not speak of her until I am well enough to do it standing." It was said with a flat, tired finality. "I shall say only that I have not turned my face to the wall because I was told lies about her. I turned it because I had begun to guess the truth, and I was a coward."
He was looking at the floor. She could see only the line of his cheek, and the faint clench of the jaw, and she knew that he was seeing a packet of tissues with a rabbit on it and thinking of a girl in a pale ribbon on a back stair.
Nobody said anything. The light had grown. It lay in a long warm rectangle across the blanket, and the steel lunch box on the table gave back a small bright point of it, like a star.
"Mr. Yoon," said Madam Seol.
He looked up.
"Do not let her stand alone on the ninth."
He was silent for the space of a breath. Then he said, in the voice that he had used at a sink in a lit kitchen, low and rough and without ornament:
"I shall stand beside her. I shall not stand in front."
The bright eyes rested on him. "Good," said Madam Seol. "In front is the other mistake."
She held out the envelope.
It was a very small thing. A plain white rectangle, with a smudge of ink at one corner, and a flap that had been licked and pressed down with the heel of her hand. But she held it between her finger and thumb at the full length of her arm, with the drip trailing from her wrist and the clip glinting on her finger, and the whole of her face was fixed on the girl on the vinyl chair.
"Give it to Cha," she said. "He will pretend that he is not delighted."
Ahreum took it.
It weighed nothing at all. She laid it flat on her knee, under both her hands, and looked at it, and thought of eleven kilos on a pavement, and a man who had said that he had been told that such cases were heavy. The thing in her hands was lighter than a lunch box and a great deal harder to carry. She did not put it in her bag. She held it against her coat, over her heart, in the place where he kept a square of paper, and found that she could feel it there like a second pulse.
"Thank you, Halmoni," she said. And then, because it was the third thing, and she had been told to pay her debts in order, she said it again, in a smaller voice. "I should like to ask you for another thing."
"Ah," said Madam Seol, softly. "There she is."
"I should like you to eat something."
The old face did something that Ahreum had not seen it do in twenty years. It broke. It broke slowly, from the corners of the mouth, into a smile so wide and so unguarded and so startlingly young that for a moment she looked like a girl in a photograph, a girl of seventeen in a long dress at the edge of a garden, with her chin up and her eyes bright.
"Give me the tangerine," said Madam Seol.
The telephone buzzed on Ahreum's knee at ten minutes to seven.
She had turned it over at last, in the passage, and put it in her pocket, and forgotten it. She took it out now, with her left hand, because her right was holding a tangerine that she had been told to peel. The screen lit, small and white, with a number that began with a country code.
*Booked this morning. Singapore to Incheon, the 3rd. Lands 14:20. I will need someone at arrivals who knows what I look like. N.K.*
She read it once. She read it a second time, one word at a time, and something moved in her chest that was not fear.
The tangerine had been peeled in a single strip. It lay in her palm with its pale segments open, bright and cold and smelling of every winter in the world, and she thought of a boy in Jeju with a gap in his teeth and a scarf wound three times round his throat. She broke it in two. She put half of it into her grandmother's outstretched hand, where it lay, small and orange and dewy, against the thin brown fingers.
Then she turned to the man on the metal stool.
"Hajin," she said. "I should like to ask you something."
He looked at her.
"Will you come to the airport?"
It was the first question she had ever put to him that had no clause in it and no ledger. She watched it go across the hand's breadth, and watched him hear what it was.
"Yes," said Hajin.
She typed, with her thumb, in the plain light of the first morning of the year, with a half of a tangerine in her other hand and her grandmother's bright eyes on her face. She wrote four words, and she did not delete them.
*I will come myself.*
The clock on the wall said seven minutes to seven. It was entirely correct.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Her grandmother was sitting up.
She had done it without help, or with so little that nobody would admit to having given it. The bed had been cranked to its highest angle, and the three pillows built into a throne behind her, and the clear tube had been moved from beneath her nose to the side of her cheek, where it lay along the line of her jaw like a thin transparent ribbon. Her hair was brushed. Min had not done it, because Min was asleep in a corridor. It had been done, Ahreum saw, by the old woman's own right hand, with the small tortoiseshell comb from her bag, in a series of long slow strokes that had ended, at the left temple, a little crookedly.
The window behind her had begun to go pale. It was a plain rectangle of cold grey sky over the roofs of the hospital annexe, with a thin line of gold at the bottom of it, and the light came across the blanket in a long bar and touched the clip on her finger and the steel lunch box on the table at her side. The box was empty. It had been washed, and its navy cloth folded on top.
On the wall above the head of the bed the clock said nineteen minutes past six. It said so correctly. Ahreum looked at it, and her grandmother, who missed nothing, said dryly, "I have stopped looking at it. It is very tiring to be right."
They stood inside the door.
She had not decided how to enter. They had walked the length of the passage side by side, with the whole of a chair between them, and at the door of 903 he had stopped to let her go first, and she had stopped to let him, and Nurse Baek had given the pair of them a small sharp push in the middle of the back with the flat of her clipboard. Now they stood at the foot of the bed, a hand's breadth apart, with their arms at their sides and the paper bag of tangerines held awkwardly in his left hand like something that he had been given to carry and not told where to put.
Madam Seol regarded them.
It was a long look, level, bright and a little clouded at the edges, and it went from the one to the other and back, and rested for a moment on the space between. "You stand," she said, "like two lamp-posts that have quarrelled. Sit."
There were two chairs by the bed, the vinyl one and a metal stool that somebody had put beside it in the night. Ahreum took the vinyl. Hajin took the stool. They sat, and found that the chairs had been placed, by an agency that she did not care to examine, exactly a hand's breadth apart.
"A hand's breadth," said Madam Seol, to the ceiling. "I am told that it was a hand's breadth in Jeju, as well. Min tells my housekeeper, and my housekeeper tells me. It was a very small stove, I understand, and a great deal of wind." She did not smile. The corner of her mouth, which had spent seventy years being governed, did something complicated. "I shall not ask. I am a convalescent. I merely wish to say that it is a good distance, and that you will both be sitting nearer by the end of the week."
"Mr. Yoon," said Madam Seol.
"Madam."
"I should like to talk to you about fruit."
He looked at the bag in his hand. He looked at it as one looks at a thing that has been named in a language one almost knows.
"On the thirty-first of last month," she said, "you sent me four persimmons. Through a nurse. They were soft, and ripe, and the flat kind, with no seed, and each of them had been wrapped in a twist of newspaper, as they used to be wrapped in the old markets. I ate one. I had not enjoyed anything since Tuesday." The thin hand moved on the sheet. "I should like to know how you knew."
"I did not know," said Hajin. "I bought them in the lobby. They were the kind that my mother sends me."
"Ah."
"She goes back to Cheongdo in the autumn. She has a little house there now, with a tree. I bought it for her in the spring of my third year. She grows them herself." He turned the bag over in his hands. "Every November a crate comes to my flat. I give most of it to the office. It is the only fruit that I have ever bought for anyone. I think that I did not choose it. I think that my hand did."
"Every November," said Madam Seol, "for ten years, a crate arrives at the Fund's address on the twenty-second floor of Seol Tower."
He went quite still.
"There is no card. It comes by the carrier from a village near Cheongdo. Flat persimmons, the seedless kind, forty of them, each in its twist of newspaper. The first year the clerk in the post-room telephoned Min and asked whether it was a mistake, and Min said that it must be, and brought one to me, to see." Her voice was thin and dry and very steady. "The slip was on the box. It was a carrier's slip, a flimsy pink thing, with the sender's name filled in in a hand that has worked with its hands all its life. It said, *Yoon.* It said, *Cheongdo.* And in the space where one writes the contents, it said, in a different pen, six words."
Hajin's lips had parted.
"*For whoever it was. Thank you.*"
The clock ticked on the wall. Ahreum, a hand's breadth from him, saw his face go through something that she had never seen it go through, and had no name for. It was not grief. It was nearer to the look of a man who has been told, in a quiet room, that the door he has been knocking at for ten years was open the whole time, and that someone had been standing behind it.
"I knew the surname," said Madam Seol. "I had it in a file. A scholarship boy, Class 2-C, whose eligibility had been reviewed in October and closed on a Tuesday morning at my granddaughter's request. I never replied. I could not. A reply would have told her where the kindness had come from. I put the slip in the drawer of my desk in the sitting room, and each November I ate one, and I gave the rest to the cleaners." She turned her head on the pillow. "I have eaten every persimmon that your mother has sent me, Mr. Yoon. It is the only gift in my life that I have received from a person who did not know what I had done to deserve it. I did not."
"She never told me," said Hajin.
It came out hoarse.
"She would not. I believe that she has never forgiven herself for not knowing whom to thank."
He put his hand over his eyes.
He sat on the metal stool with the paper bag between his knees and his palm pressed against his face, and Ahreum watched his shoulders. They did not shake. They only went down, a little, by a few centimetres, as the shoulders of a man go down who has been carrying a tray at belly height for ten years and has just discovered that someone, a very long way off, in a village with a persimmon tree, had been holding the other end.
*He has been grateful in the wrong direction for ten years,* she thought. She had said as much, in a sense, in a basement. And she saw now with a small, clear, astonished tenderness that his mother, who had not been told anything at all, had been grateful in the right one.
"Halmoni," said Ahreum.
She had not meant to say it yet. It had come up out of her as the other had, at ten past two in the morning, on a telephone in the amber light, without any order. She sat very straight on the vinyl chair with her hands folded on her knee and her heart going hard and slow.
The bright eyes turned.
"I am asking."
The room went quiet. Even the machine seemed to hold its tick. On the stool beside her Hajin lowered his hand from his face, slowly, and she felt rather than saw him become still.
"Mr. Yoon's colleague has found something. The Samil Heritage Trust, which you and Grandfather settled in 1987, holds a beneficiary schedule that is sealed. The trustee is a firm called Seongjin Partners. It has acted, I believe, for the same company that sold Mr. Yoon his first nine percent, two years ago, by way of a shell in Luxembourg. The deed says that either settlor may, in writing, direct the trustee to disclose the schedule to any person." She stopped. She heard her voice, very level, and went on regardless. "I am asking you to sign that direction. I am asking that it be disclosed on the ninth, in front of the Board, to Attorney Cha and to the Commission. And I am asking that you come."
She heard it hang in the quiet. It was a request with an object. It had a name and a date and an action in it, and a person at the end of it who might refuse. It was nearly the longest thing that she had ever asked anyone for, and when she came to the last word she found that her hands, folded in her lap, were not shaking at all.
Madam Seol said nothing.
She lay against the pillows with the grey light on her face and looked at her granddaughter for a very long time. Her eyes were very bright. In the corner of the left one something had gathered, a small bead of water, that she did not trouble to wipe. She seemed, for a moment, to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room.
"That," she said at last, in a voice scarcely above a breath, "is the first asking of yours that I find worthy."
Ahreum's eyes stung.
"The others were reports. You have given me a great many reports, child. They were excellent. I read every one." The dry hand lifted an inch from the sheet. "This one has a person in it. Ring for Nurse Baek. I shall want the Fund's paper and a pen, and two witnesses who are not you."
It took twenty minutes, and it was done in the way that Madam Seol did everything, as if for the record of a court that she did not intend to respect.
Nurse Baek brought the paper. It was the Fund's plain pad, which Ahreum had in her bag, and the steel pen from beside it, and a clipboard to write on. Min was woken. She came into the room with her handbag held against her chest like a shield, and her cardigan creased from the chair, and her round face arranged in a blankness so profound that it almost sang. She had heard nothing. She had been asleep. She said so twice. She was told by Madam Seol to stand at the foot of the bed with her hands folded, and to look at what was written, and not at her employer's face.
The old woman wrote it with her right hand, which was the free one. She wrote slowly, with the clipboard propped against her knees and her glasses on the tip of her nose and the drip trailing from her left in its thin line, and the nib made a small dry scratching in the quiet. She did not hand the pen to anyone. She did not ask what the words should be. She set them down in her own tall old-fashioned script, a little shaky at the tails of the letters, and Ahreum, who knew that hand as she knew her own, read them upside down from where she sat.
*I, Seol Sunhee, a settlor of the Samil Heritage Trust, hereby direct Seongjin Partners, as trustee, to disclose the full beneficiary schedule of the said trust, and all accounts rendered under it since 1 January 2000, to Attorney Cha Minho and to the Personal Information Protection Commission, in the presence of the Board of Seol Education Holdings, on the ninth day of January. I give this direction of my own will, in full possession of my faculties, and I should like it to be known that it is long overdue.*
She signed it. She signed her whole name, the three syllables of it, with the long flourish at the end that she had made at the foot of every cheque of her life. Then she held it out, at arm's length, to the nurse and to Min.
"Witness," she said.
They did. Min's hand shook. When she had done, she did not look up. She said, to the paper, in a voice that cracked on the second word, "Madam, I have worked for this family for thirty years."
"I know, Min."
"I should have said something sooner."
"Everyone should have said something sooner," said Madam Seol. "Go and have your breakfast. It is the first of January, and you have been asleep in a corridor."
She folded the paper in three. She did it with great care, and slid it into a plain white envelope of the Fund's, and licked the flap, and pressed it down with the heel of her thin hand. She held it for a moment against her chest.
"Now," she said, "I owe you something."
"Halmoni, you do not"
"I owe you three things, and I intend to pay them in order, because I am not at all certain that I shall be given another morning on which I feel so well." She set the envelope on the blanket. "The first is a sentence. I said it to you on the stair of my house on a night in March, twenty-one years ago, and I believed that it was a kindness. I should like to take it back."
Ahreum could not move.
"*We do not wait.* I said it gently. That was the cruelty of it. I have been told so, by a woman who did me the great honour of telling me, and I have found that I am unable to disagree." The bright eyes did not leave her face. "I was afraid that you would follow her. I was afraid that you would sit on that stair for the rest of your life with your shoes on and your bag on your shoulder, and I could not bear it, and so I made a rule so that you should never be found waiting. I did not know that I had taught you to wait in secret."
"Halmoni"
"I should like to hear what it was like. I never asked." The thin voice cracked, and she let it. "I should like you to tell me. Aloud. In front of Mr. Yoon, if you will permit it, because I think that he is a man who will know what to do with it."
She looked at Hajin. He did not move. He sat on his stool with his hands open on his knees, and he did not say *you do not have to*, and she saw that he had understood. He had said, in a corridor, that he wished to hear it from a person. He was giving her the same.
Ahreum took a breath.
"I was six," she said.
It was a very plain sentence. It did not seem to have anything behind it at all, and then it did.
"It was a Thursday in March. I came home from school at four. She was in the hall. She had a suitcase, a small one, a brown one with a strap, and she was wearing her good coat. She knelt down and she did up the top button of my cardigan, and she said, *Be good for Halmoni.* That was all. Then she went out of the front door. She did not shut it. I stood in the hall and watched it swing."
The grey light lay along the blanket.
"I thought that she had gone to buy something. I put my bag back on. I do not know why. I went upstairs and I sat on the top stair, in my school shoes, with my bag on my shoulder, because I thought that when the car came back up the drive I should like to be ready." Her voice was quite steady. She marvelled at it. "I sat for a long time. It got dark. Min brought me a blanket and sat three steps below me and did not say anything. At midnight you came out of the study, Halmoni, and you stood at the bottom, and you said, *Come to bed, Ahreum-ah. We do not wait.*"
"I did."
"I took off my shoes. I put them side by side. I came to bed." She looked at her hands. "And I decided, lying there, that the thing that had been wrong with me was the waiting. That if I had not been a person who waited, she should not have gone. I had a very clear idea about it. I was six years old and I thought that it was a flaw in my character, like a crooked tooth." She swallowed. "I have been trying to straighten it for twenty-one years."
Nobody spoke.
She did not look at Hajin. She did not need to. She could feel him, a hand's breadth away on a metal stool, not touching her, with the whole of his attention laid against her like a warm hand against a cold wall. After a time, very quietly, he moved. He put the paper bag of tangerines down on the floor beside his foot. He laid his right hand on his knee with the palm turned up. And he left it there, open, in the light, in case.
"Your mother," said Madam Seol, "did not leave because of you."
Ahreum raised her head.
"I have never said that to you in plain words. I said a great many other things. I said that she was unwell, and that she was far away, and that she was not to be spoken of." The old voice was flat with effort. "She did not leave because of anything that you were or did. She was a frightened young woman in a house that was too large, and I did not make it easy for her to stay. That is the whole of it. It is mine. It was never yours."
The tears came. She did not stop them. They ran down her face in the pale light and dropped on her folded hands, and she heard a small sound come out of her, high and cracked, a sound that she had last made on the top of a stair. It was not loud. It did not embarrass her. She sat in the vinyl chair with her face wet and her back straight, and for the first time in her life she did not mind who saw.
"The second," said Madam Seol, after a long time, "is a debt that is not yours. I should like it to be paid in this room, because I do not think that I shall manage it in another."
She turned her head toward the window.
"*Somewhere safe.* That is what I said to you, when you came to me in that sitting room with your school bag and asked where the girl had gone. Forty-one million won, a one-way flight to Singapore, a flat in Toa Payoh with a leaking roof, a visa signed by a man I had never met. I had it done in a week. I did not follow them. I did not ask what became of them. I told myself that not looking was a mercy." Her hand moved on the sheet. "Her father drove a taxi for nine years in a country where he did not speak the language. He did not raise his voice. He died, and so did her mother, and I did not know until September, when I wrote to her, and found that I could not ask her to forgive me, and wrote anyway."
"She told me," said Ahreum.
"Then she is braver than any of us, and she will come." The bright eyes closed. "I should like to look at her when I say it. I do not wish to say it in a letter, and I do not wish to say it by telephone. I should like to say it to a face. If she will let me."
"She is coming on the third."
"Then I shall be well enough on the third." Madam Seol opened her eyes. "The third is for Yurim."
The name dropped into the room like a stone.
"My brother's girl," said Madam Seol. "She has called me Halmoni since she was five years old. It was a thing that she said once, in the garden, to see what would happen, and I did not correct her. I should have. She is my niece, not my granddaughter, and I let a child call me by a name that was not hers, because I liked the sound of it, and because she wished so badly to belong. I did not make it true. I did not make it untrue." The thin mouth moved. "It is a kindness that has been done to me, in a sense, a great many times. I find that I do not like being on the other end of it."
"Halmoni."
"I shall not speak of her until I am well enough to do it standing." It was said with a flat, tired finality. "I shall say only that I have not turned my face to the wall because I was told lies about her. I turned it because I had begun to guess the truth, and I was a coward."
He was looking at the floor. She could see only the line of his cheek, and the faint clench of the jaw, and she knew that he was seeing a packet of tissues with a rabbit on it and thinking of a girl in a pale ribbon on a back stair.
Nobody said anything. The light had grown. It lay in a long warm rectangle across the blanket, and the steel lunch box on the table gave back a small bright point of it, like a star.
"Mr. Yoon," said Madam Seol.
He looked up.
"Do not let her stand alone on the ninth."
He was silent for the space of a breath. Then he said, in the voice that he had used at a sink in a lit kitchen, low and rough and without ornament:
"I shall stand beside her. I shall not stand in front."
The bright eyes rested on him. "Good," said Madam Seol. "In front is the other mistake."
She held out the envelope.
It was a very small thing. A plain white rectangle, with a smudge of ink at one corner, and a flap that had been licked and pressed down with the heel of her hand. But she held it between her finger and thumb at the full length of her arm, with the drip trailing from her wrist and the clip glinting on her finger, and the whole of her face was fixed on the girl on the vinyl chair.
"Give it to Cha," she said. "He will pretend that he is not delighted."
Ahreum took it.
It weighed nothing at all. She laid it flat on her knee, under both her hands, and looked at it, and thought of eleven kilos on a pavement, and a man who had said that he had been told that such cases were heavy. The thing in her hands was lighter than a lunch box and a great deal harder to carry. She did not put it in her bag. She held it against her coat, over her heart, in the place where he kept a square of paper, and found that she could feel it there like a second pulse.
"Thank you, Halmoni," she said. And then, because it was the third thing, and she had been told to pay her debts in order, she said it again, in a smaller voice. "I should like to ask you for another thing."
"Ah," said Madam Seol, softly. "There she is."
"I should like you to eat something."
The old face did something that Ahreum had not seen it do in twenty years. It broke. It broke slowly, from the corners of the mouth, into a smile so wide and so unguarded and so startlingly young that for a moment she looked like a girl in a photograph, a girl of seventeen in a long dress at the edge of a garden, with her chin up and her eyes bright.
"Give me the tangerine," said Madam Seol.
The telephone buzzed on Ahreum's knee at ten minutes to seven.
She had turned it over at last, in the passage, and put it in her pocket, and forgotten it. She took it out now, with her left hand, because her right was holding a tangerine that she had been told to peel. The screen lit, small and white, with a number that began with a country code.
*Booked this morning. Singapore to Incheon, the 3rd. Lands 14:20. I will need someone at arrivals who knows what I look like. N.K.*
She read it once. She read it a second time, one word at a time, and something moved in her chest that was not fear.
The tangerine had been peeled in a single strip. It lay in her palm with its pale segments open, bright and cold and smelling of every winter in the world, and she thought of a boy in Jeju with a gap in his teeth and a scarf wound three times round his throat. She broke it in two. She put half of it into her grandmother's outstretched hand, where it lay, small and orange and dewy, against the thin brown fingers.
Then she turned to the man on the metal stool.
"Hajin," she said. "I should like to ask you something."
He looked at her.
"Will you come to the airport?"
It was the first question she had ever put to him that had no clause in it and no ledger. She watched it go across the hand's breadth, and watched him hear what it was.
"Yes," said Hajin.
She typed, with her thumb, in the plain light of the first morning of the year, with a half of a tangerine in her other hand and her grandmother's bright eyes on her face. She wrote four words, and she did not delete them.
*I will come myself.*
The clock on the wall said seven minutes to seven. It was entirely correct.
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