I just got up and looked out the window.
It’s snowing again. It snowed all morning and then stopped until evening, and now it’s coming down in fits and starts. Late snow in March makes me sentimental. Was it Seo Jeong-ju? The poet who said, It’s alright, it’s alright, as the snow came down? I've forgotten the title now, but there was a time I always recited that poem when it snowed. If I said the snow murmured that line as it came down, would you laugh? You might think I’m cynical, but I once believed that in each life there’s a wide, sandy beach, and no one could ever fill that vastness in their lifetime. I possess such a beach, and no one has ever entered it. This is the first time I’ve tried to express myself to someone else. I have a strange feeling whenever it snows and I watch the world disappear into whiteness. It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright . . . I hear that line spoken in my mind as even the vast beach of my loss and failings is covered up in white snow.
Ah, I haven’t introduced myself.
Forgive me, I feel as if I know you so well, although you don’t know me at all. My name is Kim Heesu and I am thirty-one, and I worked at a publishing house before I got married. You don’t know this, but I copyedited a manuscript of yours. It was a short essay called “Things That Couldn’t Be Said,” do you remember it? For our marketing newsletter, quite a long time ago. I decided to send you this letter because I thought perhaps you’ll believe my story. Didn’t you write something about a woman who suddenly loses her husband? Whenever she visits a temple, the wind chime hanging under the eaves of the temple’s roof sounds through the windless air. The woman silently calls her husband’s name whenever that happens. That part brought tears to my eyes. The soul of the woman’s husband is in the sound of the wind chimes, am I right? That’s how I read it. You also said something else. That in everything beautiful, lovely, and sacred that we see, there lies a piece of the soul of someone we have lost. Your work gives me the feeling that you believe there are many things between heaven and earth that we find difficult to speak of. If my reading is correct, then you might believe me when I tell you about what happened to me two months ago. I decided, on my way back from the hospital today, that you would be the one I tell.
My husband might think he woke up before me that night, but I was up before him. It was because of the sound of snow tapping the windowpane. Two years ago, I lost my seven-month-old daughter to chicken pox. I then wandered around the country with only the mountains for company. My daughter had a congenital immune deficiency. That wasn’t all. She was also born with a wing, shaped like an ear, on her right shoulder. They say such births happen on occasion. The doctor said the baby had to grow a bit before they could remove the wing. She worried that her immune system would make such a procedure difficult. I got used to the wing, only hoping that it wouldn’t grow along with her. What might really be fatal for her, the doctor said, was the common cold. We were extremely careful to shield her from colds during the seven months after her birth. We bought two humidifiers to maintain the appropriate levels of humidity at all times. We washed our hands and mouths and changed our clothes whenever we came home after being out. We never opened the windows, installing an air filter to circulate the air instead, the kind you only see in kitchens. What my daughter came down with wasn’t the cold but chicken pox. The sores appeared on every inch of her body. Even on the back of her hands and behind her ears. Most children get better after a simple shot, but my child passed away. I’m glad to be writing this down now. I hated people knowing that I used to have a daughter, that I lost a girl who had ten pink fingers that would squirm, who would say um . . . ma . . . How to describe the sadness that came after losing my child. The pain and the emptiness. My husband never mentioned her in front of me again. Whatever he felt on the inside, he went on living as if nothing had happened. He was good at it. Once every two months he visited my father-in-law, who lived alone in Mulchi Harbor, and on his way back he visited the market to get dried squid or cuttlefish, just like he used to when our child was alive. He attended ancestral rites at his older brother’s in Myeonmok-dong and continued going to his semi-annual alumni parties. The only difference was I was no longer by his side at those meetings. I would go to the mountains whenever my husband left home. I felt like they were calling to me. The mountains seemed to lighten my burden and I’d begin to notice things like the hues of gromwell or primroses. Soon, I was going out with hiking groups even on Sundays when my husband was home. I don’t know if you would understand this, but I couldn’t stand the fact that my husband worked in his office and showed his face at family functions and went drinking with his friends as if nothing had happened. I felt rage well up inside whenever I saw the side of his face lit up by the television screen he’d watch all Sunday. I felt distant from this man who shaved his stubble every morning, accompanied by the whirring of his electric shaver. These feelings built up, and, naturally, I didn’t want to share the same bed with him anymore. We had a few arguments and he stopped reaching for me, and one day we found ourselves sleeping in separate rooms. We began talking less to each other and soon didn’t share a word. I couldn’t bear to face his nonchalance with my worsening depression and this only made things worse. We wouldn’t have sunk into this cold impasse if we’d blamed each other and had it out with the hate and tears from the beginning. The only words we exchanged were when he’d call me from a business trip. Is everything alright? Yes. I’ll be back tomorrow. Fine. And even that petered out when he stopped calling me, despite leaving home for days at a time. All I’d say was fine, yes, or not pick up at all, so who can blame him. But we weren’t exactly acrimonious, either. He would return from his business trips and leave a scarf or a seashell or a watch for me on the table. I haunted the winter mountains like a ghost, so he got me a hat, army gloves, and climbing spikes. Once he asked, Do you want me to go with you? I said no. A year after our daughter died, my husband got a promotion that they gave to only three out of fifty workers. This was when the financial crisis was forcing layoffs on others, but my husband was doing well. He was picked up by a headhunter soon after and moved to a startup dealing with online banking. He knew he could only go so far as a salaryman and the new company was paying six million won a month plus equity. I didn’t do anything as I watched him write up his resignation. I could hardly believe that this man, planning out his future as if nothing had happened, was my husband. He visited his new company before his official first day and declared to me that evening that he needed to completely turn his life around. That he was now in an industry where information goes stale every five hours, that he needed to live on compressed time. I cut him off, saying, That’s none of my business. How could he be so cavalier? I couldn’t be like that. I had even cut off contact with the few friends that I would see from time to time. I was afraid of having to sit there and avoid talking about my daughter over tea with the friends who had visited me in the hospital and postnatal care center when my daughter was born, who brought me baby food and a tub for bathing the baby and shoes that might fit a three-year-old. It was the same reason why I didn’t visit my family. The thought that they pitied me behind their smiles made me feel more and more alone. And so, I took to the mountains. The inner Sorak Mountains, Odaesan, Jogyesan, Maisan, Woonaksan, Mudeungsan, Naejangsan, Gyeryongsan, and even Palgongsan on Sorok Island. I practically lived on the mountains last fall. I would go on one- or two-night trips with hiking clubs, and on the other days prepare a breakfast for my husband at dawn, pack some oranges and a thermos with citrus tea, and go to the mountain. Thirty minutes on an early bus would take me to the beginning of the Bukhansan trail. My, it’s snowing a lot this winter. When the winter came, I climbed Bukhansan on snowy days without fail. Without even taking the climbing spikes my husband got me. It snowed the night when our daughter passed away, too. It came down without any consideration for the small child with the pink, trembling fingers and the rapid, bird-like breathing. I didn’t ask what funeral my husband ended up holding for that slip of flesh that was our dead daughter. Once she died, I went to my older sister’s house and lay down for two weeks. My husband had called my sister and took care of the funeral himself. I never did ask him what he did with her remains. I felt if I asked that and he answered, our relationship would be over. I buried the question in my heart and went to the mountains. Especially the winter mountains. I loved them because they were dangerous. Because whatever the other reasons were, I was a mother who had failed to keep her seven-month-old child alive. My guilt had worsened with time, and the worst was on snowy days. So I set off for the winter mountains determined, every time, that I would never come back. I would stare up at the quince tree in our yard and be on my way, dreaming of being found dead among the snow-covered rocks or in the frozen streams. I carried around the alpinist Reinhold Messner’s book Annapurna: 50 Years of Expeditions in the Death Zone. He says the fragile human being feels no anxieties in the extreme space of the Death Zone. Life, in fact, takes on a new dimension when you’re near such limits. You even feel yourself and the world converge into one. Existence itself expands when you’re in the Death Zone. I suppose that’s why alpinists continue to take their bruised and battered selves up the mountains, crash, recover, and go up again. But I didn’t want to feel my “self” expand at these extreme points of nature. I wanted to fall or be injured on my way up to them. I wanted it to be fatal, so I would never have to go back home. But it was the strangest thing. Whenever I went up the mountains, I felt my entire body encased in warmth, like a tongue inside a mouth. Strangely enough, I never took a misstep or stumbled on the frozen mountains. Slippery ice hides beneath the fallen snow, but I never so much as fell on my behind. When it snows, the paths through the mountains become untouched virgin territory. Making my footsteps in the untrodden path was enough to fill my heart with a strange elation. I could barely breathe from the feeling at times, but I never stumbled. On the contrary, I felt the mountain pushing back at my steps right and left, helping me every bit of the way. When I came to an outcropping wide enough, I lay down to look up at the sky. The first thing I would do when I reached the summit was to write my daughter’s name in the snow. I must’ve written her name more than ten times this winter. Sometimes I would add, I will never forget you, on the peaks of Cheongryangsan, Geumamsan, Moonsusan, and Taebaeksan. I became friends with the mountains this way, and sensitive to the signs of snow falling. Once, I left Gwangdeok Hill when the snow began to fall and had to stop near Gwangdeok Farm to wait it out. It took four days and four nights to go from there past Knife Rock to Bokgyesan. I was with three climbers at the time, otherwise I never would’ve finished the course. The altitude was intimidating. The snow kept falling over those four days, and battling it exhausted me mentally. While the surface of the snow had hardened somewhat by the sun and wind, the inside was all powder. It was like . . . a thin layer of plastic over extremely fine flour. But again, oddly enough, the other climbers kept sinking into waist-deep snow traps while I never did. Even when the snowstorm assaulted us in waves, I never fell into one. Even with the light bouncing off the snow and blinding me, I still managed to walk forward. I kept hearing branches breaking off from the weight of the snow. A deer hid behind a white rock, and we occasionally saw boar tracks. Since finishing that course, caked in snow from head to toe like a polar bear, I became sensitive to the sound of snow. Even when I am slicing green onions in my kitchen or am asleep in my bed, I know when it is snowing, and I automatically go to the window. The minute I feel, It’s going to snow, I remember the snow flowers blooming on the naked branches that stretch west or east, the footprints of wildcats in the snow, and the waves of white that make the mountains look more like an ocean of snow. The footprints of wildcats are different in the snow. They’re adept at snatching up chickens and ducks, so their footprints also seem as if the snow has been snatched from them.
That night, I also woke up to the sound of snow. I opened my eyes and looked out at the soft shadows of the falling white. The wind made the shadows chaotic in their descent. I could hear my husband open his bedroom door and go to the foyer. Where was he going at this time of night? I lay there in the dark watching the shadows of the snow, listening. I could hear the dragging of his slippers but then he froze. There was a silence. It lasted about thirty to forty minutes. I got so tense waiting for him to open the front door or even rifle through the old newspaper stack next to it that I sat up in the dark.
“Dear?”
Maybe ten minutes passed. I could hear my husband calling me. Dear, dear. I hadn’t heard him say that for so long that I briefly wondered if it really was him. What was going on? I stayed where I was despite my curiosity. I heard him go up to the front door, but I heard nothing out of the ordinary, no breakage or anything. Then, my husband did another unusual thing. He came up to my door and knocked on it. I opened the door.
“Did you hear someone knock on the front door?”
I shook my head.
“That’s strange . . . I could’ve sworn . . . not even just once . . . it woke me up . . .” He almost sounded like a sleepwalker.
“You must’ve been hearing things.”
It was past three in the morning. I must’ve sounded a bit irritated. My husband scratched his head, embarrassed. He was disheveled, with two buttons on his white-and-black checkered pajamas loose. Then he gave a start and looked at the door again.
“See! Someone just knocked!”
What was going on? I switched on the light and stared at him. He looked like a deer caught in headlights.
“What on earth are you going on about?”
“You . . . you must’ve heard it, too!”
I was beginning to worry about him. But he looked utterly sincere.
“Then open the door and see for yourself.”
He hesitated, and then called out towards the door. Who’s there? No answer. Of course, I thought. I hadn’t heard anyone knock on it. My husband seemed so agitated that I went out to the foyer and opened the front door myself.
“Hello?”
Only the snowstorm was outside that dawn. The flurries whirled into the house as soon as I opened the door.
“See? There’s no one there.”
I opened the door a bit more. There was only emptiness. We had a tiny yard, and the quince tree was close to being ripped out by the roots by the wind. The snow on its branches rained down in a soft hiss.
“You must’ve mistaken the sound of the wind for it.”
“ . . . ”
When we bought the house three years ago, my mother-in-law, who was alive at the time, planted the quince tree in the yard. Snow had accumulated below it. The snow inside the yard whirled around, unable to settle. When I closed the door again, I saw my husband dragging his slippers back to his room, his head down and his shoulders slumped.
I went back to my room and must’ve fallen asleep watching the shadows of the snow. I thought I heard the sound of water splashing as I dozed off. I thought at first it was the sound of the storm again. But it really did sound like the sound of water dripping into a drawn bath. I wondered if my husband was taking a bath. He prefers showers. Thinking back now, I think I knew deep down who was making that sound. I’m sure of it. Because how could I ever forget that sound? I slid out of my bed and walked to the bathroom. The snowstorm still raged outside. The light reflecting off the snow illuminated the living room. The shadows of the blowing snow played against the window blinds. I kept hearing the sound of the splashing water. My daughter loved to play during her bath. I always tested the water by dunking my arms up to the forearms. I put a floating toy on the water and she’d grab at it and lose it. It made her laugh and laugh. She loved to splash the water with her hands and kick with her little legs. I stood in front of the bathroom door for ten minutes. My favorite moment was when I swept my daughter’s wet hair over her head. Seeing the downy hairs on her clean forehead. Tickling her as I dabbed the moisture off her little nose. She still had the ear-shaped wing on her shoulder. Whenever I touched it, she erupted in happy laughter. So what if she never gets the surgery, I thought. Not everyone gets to have such a tiny, lovely wing. I wrapped her in a towel and held her close to me. I never knew skin could be so fragrant. The sound coming from the bathroom made me call out to my husband. Dear, dear, dear. I called him several times in a loud voice. My husband opened his room door and looked out at me.
“Come over here.”
“ . . . ”
“I hear water.”
“ . . . ”
“She’s bathing in there!”
When my husband approached, the sounds ceased. I was embarrassed. But I stopped my husband from pressing the bathroom light switch by the door. I just got the feeling that he shouldn’t do that. Instead, he opened the bathroom door. There was no one there. Only the dim white light from the snow coming through the tiny bathroom window. There wasn’t a spot of moisture on the toilet, the shower hose, the towel rack, or the tiles. Everything was silent. The basket of shampoo, conditioner, oils, and body cleanser, the toothbrush sterilizer attached to the wall, the container holding the hairdryer . . . all silent. The white towels neatly folded and stacked. My husband’s electric razor. The light of the snow shone on my daughter’s blue floating toy on the shelf next to the bathtub. I glanced at it and abruptly walked back to my room before my husband could close the door. I turned around before I went in and saw my husband staring at me.
“Was it the sound of the snowstorm?”
My husband didn’t answer me. I went back to the living room and raised the blinds. My husband came and stood next to me. We looked out at our yard. A stray cat passed by underneath the quince tree, leaving footprints behind. Whipping the snow with its tail. The snow on the quince tree kept blowing off whenever there was a gust of wind. We stood for about five minutes watching the snowstorm. It was the first time since our daughter’s death that we stood like that, looking in the same direction. My heart kept breaking with every beat. I couldn’t keep standing there.
“You should go back to bed.”
I left my husband at the window. My bed was cold. I curled up underneath the covers and stared at the shadows of the snow again. I heard my husband return to his room. I tried to go to sleep by counting the snow shadows. Fifteen, sixteen . . . It was no use. I got up and felt along the book spines in the dark until I got to my book on Georges Seurat and took it to the window. I didn’t want to turn on the light. Soon my room seemed bright enough from the light of the snow outside. Do you happen to know that Seurat painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte? It was finished in May of 1886, so it’s more than a century old. Oh wait, did I tell you my older sister is a painter? Her work isn’t expensive, but people do buy what she paints and exhibits in galleries, so she’s not famous but not completely unknown, either. She had a book on Seurat. The night I lost my daughter, I went to my sister’s studio and stayed there for two weeks. I happened to look through the Seurat book then. I was listlessly turning the pages when one particular drawing caught my eye. “Child in White. Study for ‘La Grande Jatte,’ 1884~1885. Sketch. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.” A girl with no discernable eyes, nose, or mouth, wearing a white hat and hiding her arms behind a sleeveless dress, standing as if floating in the dim light. It was really just a sketch. A girl with a white hat but no face, wearing a sleeveless dress but no arms of her own, a white skirt over her knees but no legs underneath. When I saw this formless child, a girl wrapped in light, my lips trembled and my heart felt an unbearable loneliness. That’s when I turned back the page to look again at the La Grande Jatte painting, which I had only passed over before. I’d seen the painting countless times. There they were, people who had come to the island of La Grande Jatte on a Sunday afternoon, standing or sitting in their individual poses. They seemed peaceful enough in their forest that overlooked the water nearby. The man with a pipe, the young woman and the exaggerated shape of her bustle skirt, the monkey on a leash out for a walk, the man blowing his horn towards a faraway point . . . I found the “child in white” among them. There she is, I said with a sigh. The girl stood in the very center of La Grande Jatte, holding the hand of her young mother with the parasol. I had never noticed this girl in all those other times I saw this painting. Unlike the separate sketch of Child in White, the girl in the finished painting had a pink face beneath her white hat, long arms flanking the front of her sleeveless dress, and dainty legs under her white skirt. I was reassured by this, but then I realized that the people in the painting did not have real expressions. Despite the peaceful tableau, the faces of the other people seemed either stiff or expressionless. And the girl stood mysteriously among these expressionless people, like a character in a riddle. I couldn’t stop crying as I stared at this little girl, who was barely visible among the other characters despite her central position on the canvas. I took the Seurat book with me when I left my sister’s studio. I’d taken it, but I never opened it again until that other night. Relying only on the light reflecting off the snow outside, I turned the pages until I came to Child in White. I’d missed this little girl so much, this girl I’d only seen that one time. Perhaps it was because of the snowstorm outside. Child in White still stood there as ever, a girl wrapped in light. The wind was so loud. I thought that the quince tree would be uprooted, our front door blown off, the roof flung into the sky, and my husband and I, both guarding our silence in our respective rooms, would go flying out into the night. I think I fell asleep on the book with my face against Child in White. When I woke, the dizzy shadows were gone, along with the chaotic wind. There was calm everywhere. I was about to go back to sleep, my cheek against Child in White once more. It might have been the wind. It sounded like the cat meowing as it shivered beneath the quince tree or the squeaking of the snow underneath hiking boots when I was on Gwangdeok Hill. It sounded like my daughter making baby sounds. I got up unsteadily with the book in my hands. It really, really sounded like my baby. How could I forget the sound that gave me so much joy the first time I heard it from her, coming from behind me as I carried her on my back? I was so surprised at her little attempts to speak that I accidentally cut myself with the knife I was using to cook. How could I ever forget the exquisite sound of those nonsense sounds as she entered the world for the first time? When she crawled to the refrigerator and tapped the door, making those sounds, I would take out some yogurt or a handful of strawberries to mash up for her, a big smile on my face. I had just opened my door when I saw my husband coming out of his room. Neither of us spoke to each other as we both went to the kitchen, our arms brushing, and stood before the fridge. I said, Don’t turn the light on! I was afraid that the sounds would cease if we did. But the sound went away anyway.
“You heard it, too?”
“And you?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t add that it sounded like our daughter’s baby sounds. My husband also seemed to hold back on something. We stood, bathed in the light of the snow outside. My husband opened the fridge and freezer door at the same time. Little containers holding mushrooms, anchovies, and bean sprouts, a large container of cabbage kimchi and another little one of turnip kimchi. In the freezer, some frozen mackerel, pollock, harvest fish, and a piece of salmon, sesame, ginger powder, and rice cakes. We stared at the yogurt, milk, crab strips, apples, half a melon, lettuce, mugwort, half a head of cabbage. A turnip, its top and bottom cut off. There was no sound. Just the yellow light shining down on the bare feet of myself and my husband. Disappointed, I took out the milk and drank from the carton and handed it to my husband. He shook his head. He shut the fridge doors and the kitchen was in darkness again. The fridge just stood there, silent and alone. We stood there like two people who had lost their way in the dark. My husband spoke first.
“I’d forgotten . . . Today is the day.”
“ . . . ”
“Did you know?”
“Yes.”
It was the first time we’d talked about our daughter since her passing. We didn’t say anything more. We were like two trees on a winter mountain, our branches snapping off under the weight of snow. I gazed again at the shadows of the snow outside. The dim reflected light seeped into the kitchen window, rendering the entire kitchen white once more. I could see the outlines of the table and chairs, the little silver containers with the seasoned salt and pepper. Remembering something, I picked up the Seurat book I’d dropped and showed it to my husband. I turned the pages until we came upon Child in White. I showed him the formless girl first and the completed girl after. He crouched down and stared at the girl in white for a long time. I didn’t look at his face as I finally asked my question.
“What did you do with the child?”
“ . . . ”
“Please.”
“I buried her on the mountain.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Which mountain?”
“The mountain.”
“Which mountain?”
“The mountain.”
The mountain. Was that it? Was that why I went to the mountains when it snowed and felt an inexplicable peace there? I had thought I was always being watched over, was it my daughter? Had she been with me all this time? I stared at my husband’s face through the light of the snow. The mountain, he had said . . . He was in tears. The man who went about as if nothing had happened, who had even built a better future for himself since, was in his wrinkled pajamas with two buttons undone, his mouth twisted in a wail. The man who buried his dead daughter on the mountain, who passed his promotion exam and moved to a company with higher pay, buried his face in my chest as he cried out loud, until the front of my nightdress was drenched. The snowstorm died down, and the white light of the snow came through the living room and touched me and my husband in the kitchen. He had worked so hard to hide these tears. Gone to ancestral rites, met with friends . . . I realized that he had done something much more difficult than what I had done. I had just given up. That’s why our guest had come through the harsh snowstorm. To teach me this lesson. I held my husband close to me. This poor man. I unbuttoned the rest of his buttons and put my face on his chest. He had lost so much weight. I could feel the bones of his back and wrist. His hand found my breast and held it, and there in the white light spread before the refrigerator, we made love for the first time in two years. My husband’s thin limbs moved silently in the dimness, occasionally bumping against the fridge. When his warm breath seemed to enter into the empty beach of my soul, I whispered into my husband’s ear. That Child in White was at the Guggenheim in New York, and we must go there and see it someday.
*
We have come to the end of my story. I went to the hospital today because I kept vomiting and felt nauseous for the past few days. The guest that came to me through the snowstorm is to arrive in September. I saw little buds on the forsythia planted along the wall of the hospital. The sky was sprinkling snow, but the forsythia branches were paying it no mind. The buds looked about to burst. Before I went to the hospital, I didn’t notice that the trees were waiting for the spring so ardently. I wonder if the snow on the mountain has melted. Or whether the name of my daughter is still there in the snow on the peaks. I wonder if the line I occasionally added to it, I will never forget you, melted into water by now. I wandered beneath the trees of the avenue, in this city being sprinkled in March snow. It might be the last snow of this winter. It wasn’t just the forsythia but the gingko trees on the avenue that were finding their color again. They’ll soon grow gingko leaves that look like children’s hands. Soon we’ll be seeing azaleas and their petals like baby cheeks. And then the white magnolias and violet magnolias, and just when the dogwood blossoms fall, the squirrels in the mountains will peck at the wild red strawberries in the thistle. Maybe you’ll write something about my story. I just dug up the manuscript I once edited for you. It was about your hopes as a writer. That you wanted to bring back the things that have disappeared, to make us touch what is fundamentally true, to set us awash in the fragrance of nature. That you hope, against all odds, to forever capture that moment impossible to capture. If these are still your hopes, then I know you will understand me. My only wish is for others who have closed their hearts in the face of unbearable loss to know of our guest that came to us through the snowstorm. That’s all. Even this morning when I set off for the hospital, I couldn’t be sure if what we felt that night was a guest or a hallucination. But now I am certain of the guest’s warm presence as I sit here writing this letter. Please be careful of the winter paths in the mountains even in spring, at least until the white roots in the black dirt become thick once more. There’s always a slippery layer of ice underneath the snow. Take care of yourself.
