Chapter 9

Myeong-joo had not taken his sisters back to their ancestral village for the winter solstice[1].

There was little point. The elders from the upper village would only start haranguing him about marriage again. Being shouted at for turning into an old bachelor felt profoundly unfair. Granted, thirty was an age when most men already had two or three children, but his older cousin had only recently established a separate household and still had none. Whenever Myeong-joo tried to joke that there was no need for him to hurry either, everyone from his older male relatives to his great-aunts descended on him at once. Whatever excuses he made, they said, Cha Myeong-joo was still the eldest son of the head family.

When they demanded to know who would write the memorial papers for the ancestral rites if he was not there, Myeong-joo suggested that his great-aunt could write them herself and was promptly cursed out for his insolence. So he had no choice but to return for the New Year after all. Hoping to spare Myeong-in from being drafted into endless dumpling-making, he arrived at dawn on the very day of the holiday—and was scolded for coming late. Apparently he had grown a year older not by eating rice-cake soup, but by swallowing enough abuse to age him on the spot.

The few elders left in the family were as tireless with their nagging as ever. On his way to the storehouse in search of New Year nuts to crack, his cousins invited him along for jwibulnori, and Myeong-joo tagged after them, thinking he might at least steal a quiet smoke. Demonic fiends almost never appeared in these parts, and with a U.S. military base nearby, wandering outside after dark was not especially dangerous.

—I’m truly sorry about this. When I contacted the laboratory, they told me every position had already been filled. I’ll get in touch the moment a place opens up.

That day, after his brief conversation with Lee Yi-tan, Myeong-joo had returned to Section Chief Kim only to hear an excuse he could not begin to understand. With a few apologetic sentences, Kim had swept away everything they had discussed as though it had never happened. Myeong-joo, who had been counting on that money for Myeong-in’s tuition, felt as if he had become penniless overnight. Nothing had been formally promised, true, but he had been so certain the arrangement would go through that the disappointment was almost physically bitter.

“Damn it…”

While the children played, Myeong-joo spent a moment checking the dark shade beneath the jujube trees along the paddy embankment, just in case some small demonic fiend had crept close, then looked away. The shadows beneath his eyes were dark enough to make a man who was still young look seriously ill. The New Year weather had softened and was not especially cold, yet his constant coughing made him look consumptive.

Now that the one thing I was counting on is gone, where am I supposed to find the money? If I die first and leave the two girls behind, will I even be able to close my eyes in peace? He could do little but sigh. Children from the middle hamlet had wandered over in the meantime and were milling around his cousin’s rice field.

He flew a kite to coax them over to play, only to find himself panting from that little bit of running. Irritated at his own lungs and heart, Myeong-joo said nothing. He punched holes into rusted milk-powder tins and old cans instead. Scrap metal fetched a decent price, so after the fire-spinning he meant to let the children trade the cans for taffy. Once he had tucked glowing charcoal inside, he swung the tins in fiery circles and ran with the children through the harvested paddies, where the rice stalks had been cut down to stubble.

One child nearly toppled onto the sharp cut stalks, and Myeong-joo barely caught him in time. Startled, the boy burst into a piercing wail. A ride on Myeong-joo’s shoulders finally calmed him. Then another child—the one who had been staring and asking whether the young master was sick—came closer and gazed up at him.

Myeong-joo smiled down at him. “What is it? You want a shoulder ride too?”

“…No.” The boy shook his head.

The child’s ears were red and his cheeks looked ready to split from the cold. Deciding he must be freezing, Myeong-joo unwound his own scarf and wrapped it around the little neck. The adult-sized scarf swallowed the boy almost to the eyes, but even with only those eyes peeking out, his delight was impossible to miss.

Finding him rather Endearing, Myeong-joo ruffled his hair again. The boy must have had his head shaved because of lice and only recently grown it back; the short hair, barely a centimeter long, brushed Myeong-joo’s palm with a softness beneath its prickly texture.

Lee Yi-tan’s hair had been just as short when he first enlisted as a boy soldier. With that youthful face, trailing after Myeong-joo and calling, Instructor, Instructor, he had been terribly endearing.

Myeong-joo wiped the useless thought clean away. He had tied those memories to kites and sent them into the sky; he had stuck them between New Year nuts and crushed them beneath his teeth. After making such a production of throwing them away, he could hardly welcome them back whenever they pleased. If they returned, he would simply forget them again. That was what he told himself.

When he first returned to the past, Myeong-joo had soothed the nausea from his newly acquired Harmonization Saturation while sitting beside a tall-antenna radio, turning the dial back and forth until he could catch even the faintest scrap of news about Lee Yi-tan.

When he finally heard that Yi-tan, newly promoted to Second Lieutenant, had attended a charity party hosted by the Seoksan Lee clan association, Myeong-joo could have sworn his ears physically perked up. Myeong-hui, who had spent the evening plastered against her brother’s side listening with him, had long since fallen asleep.

Perhaps the news had made him relax too much. Myeong-in, relieved that her unconscious brother had finally awakened, nearly lost her mind with fright that night when she found Cha Myeong-joo staggering toward the bathroom, gripping the doorframe and vomiting blood.

In her panic, she dragged their landlord into the crisis. The man loaded them into the Peugeot 604 he cherished more than his own life and drove them to the emergency room. The moment Myeong-in stepped away, Myeong-joo begged the physician not to tell anyone else his true diagnosis. With enough pleading, he just barely managed to turn Harmonization Saturation into a “gastric ulcer” as far as his sister was concerned.

Even daily harmonization could not make Harmonization Saturation stop hurting. It only postponed the day of death; the patient remained chronically sick all the same. It was too early an end to call a blessed death after a long life, yet not quite young enough to be spoken of as a child cut down before his time. The doctors could only say he might die earlier than most.

Myeong-in’s extraordinary strength as a Harmonizer had likely made her own disease progress all the faster. Myeong-joo’s harmonization grade was nothing remarkable by comparison, so his life would probably not gutter out as quickly as hers had. The suffering, however, would be the same.

Cha Myeong-joo nevertheless regarded the incurable disease as a stroke of fortune. Myeong-in had been taking little Myeong-hui by the hand and going to the temple every other day to pray that her fool of an older brother would finally come to his senses. Apparently the prayers had worked after all. His own life might now be little more than borrowed time, but Myeong-in would be healthy. She was only twenty-two, still in the flower of youth. Whatever she dreamed of, she could achieve it. Your brother will make sure of it, whatever it takes. This time, our Myeong-in will live exactly as she wishes. He repeated the vow inwardly, over and over, as though carving it into his soul.

Myeong-in, of course, knew none of this. From her perspective there was no reason to trust an older brother who used the New Year as an excuse to drink himself stupid. Myeong-joo’s reasoning was that he would be dead soon enough and might as well drink his fill before then. Unfortunately, after gagging the doctor and passing his illness off as a stomach ulcer, obtaining his sister’s understanding was more or less impossible.

He had even told her to stay home, warning that the elders would only put her to work if she came. Yet Myeong-in had taken Myeong-hui’s tiny hand and followed him back to the village anyway. Seen one way or another, that too was entirely Myeong-joo’s fault.

Tugging at the leg of his jeans, the child asked, “Young Master, what about Lady Myeong-hui?”

“Listen, you. I may not be any young master, but Myeong-hui certainly is a very precious young lady, so mind your own business, rascal.”

The boy seemed to have forgotten his earlier shyness, coming right up to tug at Myeong-joo’s jeans. Myeong-joo could not tell whether those flushed cheeks came from the cold or from a little boy’s precocious devotion, so he chose to threaten him playfully first. With a disgruntled cheh, the child released his trouser leg.

After that, Myeong-joo dug several potatoes out of the fire burning in a large steel drum and ate them. This was not Seowon, full of fastidious city people. No one cared if his hands turned black with soot.

His cousins complained that the drum fire was not warm enough and set a pile of straw alight to thaw their frozen hands. Myeong-joo left them to it and spent a long while swinging fire cans with the children instead. Then the front of his hair caught a spark and singed slightly. Myeong-in, who had come to watch the jwibulnori, immediately seized on the incident as grounds to cut his hair off altogether, and Myeong-joo recoiled in horror.

“That hair would fail an inspection on sight! Cut it while you have the chance!”

Myeong-joo laughed. “Hair inspections disappeared ages ago. What are you talking about? This is your brother’s charm. How could I cut it off? Don’t you want a sister-in-law?”

“You’d have to grow up first before any sister-in-law—new, old, or otherwise—would agree to marry you.”

Better to endure a little nagging himself than make some innocent woman miserable by marrying her to a man who would soon die. Myeong-joo only gave an ambiguous smile, and Myeong-in sighed as though surrendering all hope for her hopeless older brother. The sound was so vivid. It reminded him all over again that she was here, alive and breathing before him, and a smile rose naturally to his lips. Unfortunately, that smile seemed to reignite the resolve of a sister who had been just about exhausted from scolding a grown man. She demanded to know what he was smiling at and launched into another lecture.

After pouring it on him for a while, Myeong-in announced that she had left a pot of corn on the stove for Myeong-hui, who had just woken from a deep nap, and headed back.

Soon afterward, Myeong-joo’s older cousin approached while he was surrounded by children and handing out the empty cans.

“Why is Myeong-in angry again?” Cha Sangju asked.

Myeong-joo merely nodded, still smiling. He had no desire to recount every trivial quarrel between siblings, and no matter how fiercely Myeong-in scolded him, he was simply happy to hear it.

His cousin fished around in his pocket for a pack of foreign cigarettes, then crushed the few remaining sticks. Myeong-joo told him that if he was going to ruin them anyway, he could at least hand them over, but his cousin ignored him and spoke with the expression of a man tasting something bitter.

“…Myeong-joo. Do you really have to do it? I just…”

So that was the solemn subject. Again. Myeong-joo had never explained the details to his older cousin; he had only said that he might be entering a new-drug trial and asked Sangju to look after the girls if anything happened. At the time, Myeong-joo had been certain he would be accepted as a military research subject. After what Section Chief Kim told him, that now seemed impossible. The reminder poured oil straight onto an already aching wound, so Myeong-joo merely gave a perfunctory nod instead of answering.

“They say the military has gathered researchers with master’s and doctoral degrees to run the drug trials,” Sangju continued, “but you still don’t know what could happen. Think it over one more time, will you?”

Myeong-joo frowned. “Oh, I’m not going to die from it. Why are you making such a fuss?”

Sangju kept trying to dissuade him. The opportunity was already all but gone, but if it somehow became available again, Myeong-joo still believed it was the right road to take. This wretched household was worth nothing beside Myeong-in and Myeong-hui, and the filthy feelings he had once harbored for his brother-in-law were not even worth mentioning. All that mattered was selling himself to whoever was willing to pay the highest price.