At nine o’clock the next evening I visited the ward. Yeong-ho greeted me with a smile.
“You must be tired, no?” he said.
“How are the children?”
“Ji-woo’s dad’s staying with them today.”
If only my colleagues had decided to go for drinks after work, I would have had the perfect excuse to avoid the ward for another two hours. But it was Monday, so there was no chance of any such reprieve.
“How’s my wife been?”
“She’s just been sleeping. You can see that without having to ask. She ate what they gave her…it seems she’s going to be okay.”
Yeong-ho was clearly trying to be considerate, and he did manage to soothe my sharp mood a little. A short while after he left, and just as I was thinking to myself that I ought to loosen my tie and freshen up, someone knocked on the door of the ward.
To my surprise, it was my mother-in-law.
“I’m so ashamed to face you,” she began babbling as soon as she came near me.
“There’s no need for that. How are you?”
She took a deep breath.
“Well, you see how it is with old age, the slightest shock…” She’d brought a shopping bag with her, which she now thrust at me.
“What’s this?”
“Something I prepared before we came up to Seoul. You waste away after months without meat, it seems, so…eat this together, the two of you. It’s black goat. I was afraid that if In-hye and her husband found out they might try and stop me from coming. Try feeding it to Yeong-hye, just tell her it’s herbal medicine. I put a load of medicinal stuff in to mask the smell. She’s become such a scrawny thing, just a ghost, and now what with losing all that blood…”
I was beginning to get sick and tired of this stubborn “maternal affection.”
“There’s no stovetop here, is there? I’ll go and see if they have one in the nurses’ room.” She took one of the packets out of her bag and left. Repeatedly winding my tie around my hand and clenching it into a ball, I felt myself get more and more worked up, as the irritation returned that Yeong-ho had briefly appeased. Luckily, a short while later my wife woke up. Only then, when I realized how much better this was than if she’d woken up when I was there alone, did my mother-in-law’s arrival come to seem like a good thing.
My mother-in-law came back, and was the first thing my wife’s eyes fixed on. The older woman’s face was wreathed in smiles from the moment she opened the door, whereas my wife’s expression was difficult to decipher. She’d spent all day lying in bed and now, whether because of the drip or simply due to swelling, her face was practically bloodless, almost as white as milk.
Holding a steaming paper cup in one hand, my mother-in-law grasped my wife’s hand in the other.
“This…” Her eyes welled with tears. “Take this. Ah, look at your face.” My wife obediently took the paper cup. “It’s herbal medicine. They say it strengthens the body. Why, in the old days, back before your marriage, we had the very same medicine made up for you, remember?”
My wife sniffed it and shook her head. “This isn’t herbal medicine.” Her expression cheerless and indifferent, and her eyes filled with something strangely like pity, my wife handed the cup back to her mother.
“It is herbal medicine. Just hold your nose and drink it down quickly.”
“I’m not drinking it.”
“Drink it. This is your mother’s wish. Even the dead get their wishes obeyed, but you’d ignore your own mother’s?”
She held the cup to my wife’s lips.
“Is it really herbal medicine?”
“Of course, I just said so.”
My wife held her nose and took a sip of the black liquid. My mother-in-law was all smiles, exclaiming, “More, drink more!” Her eyes flashed below their wrinkled lids.
“I’ll keep it here and drink it a little later.”
My wife lay back down again.
“What would you like to eat? Shall I buy something sweet to take away the aftertaste?”
“I’m all right.”
All the same, the old woman kept on pestering me to go and find a shop. I refused to be harried into going, and eventually she left the room to find the shop herself. Then my wife pushed her blanket aside and got up.
“Where are you going?”
“The bathroom.”
I picked up the IV bag and followed after her. She hung the bag up inside the toilet and locked the door. And then, accompanied by several groans, vomited up everything in her stomach.
She staggered out of the toilet, trailing the faint smell of gastric juices and the sour tang of semi-digested food. As I hadn’t done it for her, she was forced to pick up her IV bag with her bandaged left hand, but she didn’t hold it high enough and a small amount of blood began to flow back down the tube. Tottering forward, she picked up the bag of black goat her mother had set down by the bed. Her right hand, which clutched the heavy bag, still had the IV needle embedded in it, but she didn’t pay this the slightest bit of notice. Then she left the ward—and I had absolutely no desire to go and find out what she was up to.
After a little while, the door banged loudly enough to make the schoolgirl and her mother frown in disapproval, and my mother-in-law burst in. She had a packet of cookies in one hand, and the paper shopping bag in the other—I could see even at a glance that the black liquid had burst out.
“Mr. Cheong, what on earth were you thinking of, just sitting there like that? Didn’t you guess what that child might have been planning?”
More than anything else, I was strongly tempted just to walk out of the ward and go home.
“You, Yeong-hye, do you know how much this is worth? Would you throw it away? Money scraped together with your own parents’ sweat and blood! How can you call yourself my daughter?”
The moment I saw my wife, bent at the waist, I noticed her red blood trickling backward into the IV bag.
“Look at yourself, now! Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole. Take a look in a mirror, go on, tell me what you look like!”
Finally, her high-pitched screeching subsided into low sobs. But my wife merely gazed at the sobbing woman as though she were a complete stranger, and eventually, as if having decided that this performance had gone on quite long enough, got back up onto the bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chest and closed her eyes. Only then did I raise the IV bag, now half full of crimson blood.
—
I don’t know why that woman is crying. I don’t know why she keeps staring at my face, either, as though she wants to swallow it. Or why she strokes the bandage on my wrist with her trembling hands.
My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away.
Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.