Completely incoherent, totally disordered, and yet each scene was somehow familiar to Yosŏp. It was a mystery to the Reverend — his life was in America, but the dream fragments that greeted him every morning upon waking were invariably about Korea. A full twenty years since he’d immigrated, over ten years since he first became pastor of an American church, but the big, foreign noses had yet to show up in a single dream.
Despite the twenty years, however, Yosŏp still lived in a humble Brooklyn apartment. His brother Yohan, on the other hand, had long since moved to a white residential area in New Jersey, as befitted a true immigrant of the sixties. It was an unremarkable place — a small, wooden house of the kind commonly found in the suburbs of New York: it had a garage, a deep basement, a living room, and bedrooms of indifferent size, a backyard just spacious enough to hold a barbecue, and a white wooden fence out front.
The heat was stifling. Yosŏp drove to his brother’s in the old minivan he usually used to shuttle around the members of his church. On this day, of all days, the air-conditioning in the tired van had finally failed, so he was driving with all the windows down. He made a point, however, of rolling up both windows whenever he hit a red light on a secluded street. He knew better than to ignore the advice of his faithful churchgoers. If you simply stood at an intersection with your windows open, they’d say, a black man would be sure to materialize, gun in hand, and hop in. One church member, on his way home from work, had been subjected to just such an ordeal. He and the black man had driven all the way home together, and he’d ended up simply leading the burglar up to his apartment, opening the door, and obediently inviting him in. By the time Yosŏp finally arrived at his brother’s house, the back of his dress shirt was drenched in sweat, and he was ready to collapse from exhaustion.
Every visit to his brother involved something of a production. There were a number of motions one had to go through before one could be admitted into the house itself, the inside of which was always dark. Such darkness might have been considered routine in the dead of winter, but in this, the height of summer, Yohan actually had to employ wooden pincers on either end of the heavy curtains to keep them tightly closed.
Yosŏp pressed the doorbell. No sign of life. A home-security company sticker was plastered on the front door, advertising to all that this home was, electronically speaking, decidedly secure. Most likely his brother was examining the security monitor that would now be displaying the upper half of Yosŏp’s body. He heard a clicking rattle and then, “What brings you here?”
Yohan’s voice was always the same. He was getting on in years but he still spoke as if he were in a great hurry, biting off each word. Under it all lay the constant suggestion of cold irritation.
“I just came by to see you.”
“Alone?”
Never mind the fact that they both knew he was watching the monitor. The whole exchange was so ingrained in Yosŏp that he answered automatically, his “Yes” obedient. For quite a while, as was customary, he was left standing on the landing to stare at the unresponsive front door. At this point, his brother would be peering out of the French window in the living room, the one situated to the left of the door where he could check the front yard and street. Yosŏp saw the curtains move. Then, only then, did he hear the sound of the inner door being opened, followed by the turning of each lock in the outer door, one by one, and lastly the removal of the iron chain. The door opened a tiny sliver.
Ryu Yohan, a presbyter of his church and Yosŏp’s older brother, lived alone. Well, to be more precise, he shared his house with a cat. No one knew how old the cat was exactly, but it had already been getting on in years when one of the churchgoers had given it to Yohan’s wife half a decade ago. It was probably safe to assume that the cat was older than its current master, at least in cat-years. Yosŏp always found it sleeping on an old blanket spread out by the fireplace in the living room. It was black and white: white belly and legs, coal black everything else. Only its eyes were visible when it crouched down in the dark. Yosŏp’s sister-in-law, dead these past three years, had loved the cat intensely — so much so that she had always insisted on keeping it in the bedroom itself. When she died, Yohan gave the animal to the owner of a hardware store several blocks away. Less than three days passed before it found its way back home. After attempting to return the cat to its new owner on multiple occasions, only to have it come back time and time again, Yohan washed his hands of the matter. Now, each completely indifferent to the other, they simply shared the house. The only light in the darkened living room came from the cable TV. A cartoon flitted across the screen — one of those involving a coyote that continually got itself in hot water for chasing after some sort of wild hen — and the volume was too loud. Yosŏp immediately reached for the remote and unceremoniously turned it down.
“Big Brother, it’s such a fine day. Why not go for a walk or something instead of just watching TV day in and day out?”
“With the ache in my legs, even walking is a pain. What did you come for today?”
Instead of answering, Yosŏp simply lowered his head and began to pray. Being a presbyter himself and so unable to protest, Yohan pretended to lower his head along with his younger brother. Yosŏp prayed in the name of God for the good health of his brother, living all alone, and for the safety and prosperity of his two nephews now working and living in different cities.
“Actually, the truth is. I’m going home.”
“To Seoul? Why?”
“No, not Seoul. I’m talking about our hometown in the North.”
“The North. you mean Hwanghae Province?”
“Yes, exactly. I’ve been given a chance to go to Ch’ansaemgol — to Sinch’ŏn.”
The moment he uttered Ch’ansaemgol, Yosŏp realized that some forty years had passed since he’d last mentioned the name of his hometown. Ch’ansaemgol. The word started out with the scent of a mountain berry, lingering at the tip of one’s tongue — but then the fragrance suddenly turned into the stench of rotting fish. It was as if a blob of black paint had been dumped on a watercolor filled with tender, pale-green leaves, the darkness slowly seeping outward towards the edges.
“You’re. so. I guess you’re involved with the Commies now.”
Big Brother was anything but delighted. The glance he shot his younger brother was full of suspicion, the kind of look one might expect from an old man who lived alone.
“There’s an association called the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Reunions for Separated Families.’ If you pay a small fee for service and travel expenses, they help you get permission from the North Korean government to visit your hometown. They have such businesses now in Canada and L.A.”
“Do you think it likely that God will allow you to go back to North Korea?”
“It is through the grace of God that things have worked out as they have. But never mind that — Big Brother, don’t you ever think of your wife? Of Daniel?”
Yohan betrayed no sign of emotion and continued to stare blankly at the television. He wiped his two palms over his face in one smooth motion.
“All dead, probably. If Uncle is still alive, he may at least know where they’ve been buried. Don’t you think so?”
Presbyter Ryu Yohan had certainly changed a great deal since the old days; even his legendary stubbornness was beginning to lose its edge. These days, at best, he simply fell silent or began to digress.