Stay as We Are
On the morning of May 12, Sunrye was up early, laying out breakfast in the kitchen for her husband and the children.
She was frying eggs in perilla oil and tasting a soybean-paste soup of dried radish greens for salt when Yeongok from next door appeared in the kitchen doorway and called to her.
"Little sister..."
Sunrye turned, her face brightening.
"Sister, come in."
Yeongok stood clutching the doorframe, and she looked so drained that Sunrye went to her at once.
"Sister, are you feeling unwell?"
At the worry on Sunrye's face, Yeongok's tears broke all at once. She sank down where she stood, covered her face, and wept, and Sunrye gathered her up and led her to the storeroom where they kept the provisions. She shut the door so the crying and the voices would not carry, then asked, carefully.
"Sister, what's happened? Why are you crying like this...?"
She put an arm around the shoulders of the woman hunched and sobbing beside her.
Through her tears, Yeongok said, "Little sister... I hate him. I hate Yeri's father so much..."
Sunrye heard that and thought at once that the husband had taken up with another woman. The man next door left the house early and came home late, and there were plenty of nights he did not come home at all. Even on his days off he was often gone. She had heard the neighborhood wives say that when a man like that stopped bringing money for the household as well, nine times out of ten it meant he had a woman somewhere.
"Sister, don't worry. Everyone says it never lasts long. Most men come to their senses and creep quietly back home."
She offered the talk she had picked up from the neighborhood women, meaning to soothe her, but Yeongok only cried harder, the sobs tearing out of her.
"I just want that man to come back safe... If he comes home in one piece, I won't wish for anything else..."
The words hurt Sunrye all the more. Yeongok was a good sister, the kind who pinched every coin and raised her children with care. It was a pity, but Sunrye had heard that at times like these a wife of long standing had to hold the center of the house and endure with composure if her man was ever to return. Fret, and he only ran farther. The settled wisdom among the neighborhood women was to wait in silence, with the feeling that however high you jumped you were still only a flea, and sooner or later he would crawl back of his own accord.
She told the weeping Yeongok to stay where she was for a moment, stepped out of the storeroom, and went into the inner room. From a drawer in the cabinet she took out cosmetics: a rouge Gijo had bought her, which she had worn exactly once, and a spare jar of cream. Her husband, still in the room, gave her a look that asked what on earth was going on, but she decided she would explain later and came out with her arms full.
Back in the storeroom she wrapped the cosmetics in a cloth bundle, then took down a string of dried croaker and a row of eggs. She pressed the bundle and the side dishes meant for a husband into Yeongok's arms.
"Sister, times like these are exactly when you ought to make yourself prettier. Cook him plenty of good things. They say the more you dislike him, the better you should treat him. Feed him well and scold him less, and he'll come to his senses before you know it."
Yeongok only stared at her, blank, as Sunrye kept pressing this and that into her hands. Sunrye's face, so unlike its usual softness, was set and resolute. Then, as if something else had just occurred to her, she brought out four bottles of sesame oil.
"Sister, you take two of these. Let's take the other two over to Aunt's. Once your husband goes out, we'll go to Sindang-dong together and have a good long talk."
Yeongok looked at her and saw that she had gotten the whole thing thoroughly wrong. But she could not tell her the truth. She could only look.
"The sesame oil came in from Yeoncheon anyway, and I'd been wanting to take some over, only my husband simply will not go to Major General Yeong's. So I'll go with you today. We'll have ice cream in Sindang-dong, enjoy ourselves, and look around Myeongdong while we're at it."
Watching Sunrye try so hard to comfort her, Yeongok smiled, and the tears ran straight down her face. Sunrye did not even know why she was crying, and still she was giving her all this care. There was nothing to feel but gratitude, and a rush of fondness.
"Little sister..."
Yeongok pulled her into an embrace, laughing even as she cried. "Thank you. Truly, thank you. I'm lucky to have someone like you beside me. I really do feel so much better, because of you."
The stuffed-up sound of her voice lifted Sunrye's spirits at once.
"Sister, you know, I may look quiet, but when I was little I used to dance with my sister right there in our room."
Yeongok burst out laughing. "So you'll take me to a dance hall, is that it?"
"Of course! We'll bring Aunt too. We'll look around the dance hall and dance together."
"Three women, on our own?"
"Why not? I'll even call my younger sister in Yongsan. She's bold as anything. She wouldn't be nervous there for a second."
"Have you ever actually been to a dance hall?"
"No... So what do you say? Let's go while we're at it, Sister."
Sunrye was so full of fighting spirit that Yeongok could only find her dear.
"Aigoo. I did well to come find you this morning. I feel so much lighter."
"Really? You really feel better?"
"I do. But what's in this bundle? Why did you pack all this for me?"
Yeongok looked at the cosmetics Sunrye had wrapped and started.
"Oh my. Aren't these Japanese and American?"
"They are, Sister. But I never have occasion to use them. You should."
"How could I take something this expensive? No. I won't accept it."
When Yeongok tried to give them back, Sunrye said, "Then use them a few times and return them."
Pressed like that, Yeongok gave in at last.
"Sister, make your husband a good breakfast, and once the men have gone out, let's go."
"Go where...?"
"To Aunt's, in Sindang-dong. It's been quite a while since I saw her."
At those innocent words a faint shadow crossed Yeongok's face.
"No. Little sister, let's not go for the time being..."
Her color had darkened again, and Sunrye asked, "Why? Has something bad happened at Aunt's?"
"No. No, it hasn't. We'll go later. Later..."
It pained her that she could not tell Sunrye the truth. But her husband's life hung on it, and she could not speak a single word. She swallowed the fact that he meant to stake that life alongside his uncle and rise in revolution. The aunt in Sindang-dong was surely passing the same airless days she was—unable to sleep, unable to unburden herself to anyone.
Even so, there was one thing Yeongok felt she had to say.
"Little sister, listen... If someone comes later and asks whether your family and ours were close, just say we were landlord and tenant. Nothing more..."
Sunrye was startled.
"What? What do you mean? Who would come asking...?"
She had asked, and then she understood for herself.
The man next door must have borrowed a great deal of money here and there... He said he sold the house to start a business, and it doesn't seem to be going well... She's afraid the creditors will come. How awful for her...
Sunrye caught Yeongok's hand and held it tight.
"Sister, don't worry about that. If the very worst happens, tell your husband to clear the debts and come to work at Cheongsan. My husband said he could give him an executive post."
It took courage to say it. She had held the words back all this time for fear of wounding Yeongok's husband's pride.
Yeongok looked at her with a warmth that was almost pride. "All right. If he comes to his senses, I'll be sure to tell him. Thank you, little sister. And please tell your husband I'm grateful. Be sure to tell him."
"I will, Sister. My husband and I truly want your family to do well. And you will. You surely will. A few dawns ago my husband got up, took the American cigarettes out of the wardrobe, and went out."
"American cigarettes...?"
"Yes. We had some set aside for gifts. When I asked him later what it had been about, he said he'd given them to the lieutenant colonel next door. I asked why, and he said the man seemed so burdened that he'd wanted to give him something."
"He did...?"
Hearing that Sunrye's husband had seen her own husband pacing the yard at dawn, taken pity, and given him cigarettes, Yeongok felt the tears come again. How worried he must have been. She resented him, and she ached for him.
"Please be sure to tell your husband thank you..."
The American cigarettes her husband loved had vanished from his clothes for a while and then appeared again, and now she knew it was thanks to the house next door. The knowledge hurt. If he were to die—if it came to that—at least he would have smoked his fill of the cigarettes he loved before the end. Perhaps his regret would weigh a little less. The thought came to her unbidden.
Her own father had been shot dead by the police. Because she carried that grief, she feared her wretched fate might pass down to Yeri. But she steadied herself and said to Sunrye, "Little sister, even if something happens that shocks you, don't you dare be shocked. I won't be either. And let's always go on just as we are now."
Sunrye held her hand just as tightly. "Sister, the worst will never happen. Only good things are coming, so wait just a little. It really will turn out well."
"Thank you, little sister."
Yeongok smiled at her.
"Oh! I still have to set breakfast. Look at me. Sister, I should get back to the kitchen."
"Go on. I'm sorry for stealing your morning."
"Don't be, Sister. I'll go now."
Sunrye hurried back to the kitchen. The table she had laid out was gone. She opened the side door that led into the inner room and found Gijo carrying the table in, with Yeongjun settled on his knee, wrapping rice in roasted seaweed and feeding it to the boy.
"Come in. Eat with us."
He grinned as he said it, and Sunrye, smiling wide, stepped into the room. A husband who did not chase other women the way the man next door did, who only worked and looked after his family—she did not think she could love him more than she did in that moment.
At the office, Gijo sat at his desk, turned a page of the desk calendar, and thought of what this day would bring. The story of Yeongok that Sunrye had passed along over breakfast he had simply let go with a smile. The truth of things was far graver than Sunrye imagined.
This was the day the prosecution would get somewhere in its investigation of Park Chung-hee. The moment Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee received Prime Minister Chang Myon's order to investigate him, he set to work at once, unlike Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young. At the Prime Minister's command he assigned Chief Prosecutor Kim Hong-su of the Seoul District Prosecutors' Office the inquiry into rumors that Park Chung-hee was attempting a coup.
Working from the intelligence in hand, Kim Hong-su sent investigators to tail Kim Deok-seung, the man suspected of raising funds for Park's action. Once they had confirmed that Kim Deok-seung was in and out of Park Chung-hee's house, the prosecution arrested him without warning on May 12. They took him to a hotel near Namdaemun, and Chief Prosecutor Kim Hong-su questioned him in person.
A True Record of the May 16 Revolution, published by the revolutionary leadership, would later claim that Kim Deok-seung kept the secret to the end despite the investigators' torture and their attempts to win him over. The testimony of Kim Hong-su, who had questioned him directly, told a different story. Kim Deok-seung had confessed everything, and what he spilled had been enough to astonish even Kim Hong-su. The chief prosecutor had him held not on a charge of conspiracy to commit insurrection but on attempted fraud. He would say afterward that he had feared the uproar if, in the midst of a nation already in confusion, word got out that a man had been indicted for plotting insurrection.
Chief Prosecutor Kim Hong-su went at once to Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee and reported that the rumors of Park Chung-hee's coup conspiracy were true.
And there the matter turned.
The Prosecutor General said to his chief prosecutor, "I've already reported to the Prime Minister that it's nothing."
Having said that, he could not very well go back to the Prime Minister now and admit that his report had been wrong. He telephoned Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young instead. When he told Chang that the prosecution's inquiry showed Major General Park Chung-hee plotting a coup, Chang Do-young said he understood, and hung up.
About fifteen minutes later the call came back, and Chang Do-young said, "I telephoned Major General Park Chung-hee in Daegu and asked him myself. He says he has no such intention whatsoever."
Prosecutor General Lee Tae-hee had confirmed the attempted coup, and still he simply accepted the word of Chang Do-young, the man who answered for the army. And so the blade falling toward Park Chung-hee skimmed past him by a breath.
In that narrow miss stood Chang Do-young, his intentions impossible to read. He opposed the coup, and yet he kept shielding Park Chung-hee, the very man at the center of it. Whether, this time as well, Chang Do-young would act as he had in the original history, Gijo could not know. The knowledge that something grave would unfold today left him ill at ease.
Today of all days he kept breaking off his work to stare into empty air. What Sunrye had said to him, misunderstanding Yeongok's trouble, would not leave his ear.
"Sister Yeongok said so. No matter what happens, let's not change. I want that too. Even if men get themselves into trouble, women are tough—we find a way to live. Mother was like that, wasn't she?"
He could see her face as she said it. But people were bound to change. Power, more than anything, changed them in the easiest and swiftest way. Gijo wished his own world might be as beautiful as the one Sunrye saw.