The Fortune-Teller
The morning after they had drunk themselves senseless at the cabaret, the five men lay dead to the world in the one-room shack in the yard behind the office.
Around ten, a voice came to drag them out of sleep.
"Everybody up! Aigoo, the reek of liquor! How much did you drink!"
Ma-ryang's eyes opened first. The voice was entirely too familiar.
"How'd you turn up here..."
Blank-faced, he slid the door open and found Soon-young on the other side, still scolding.
"Ugh... what... my sister-in-law's here...?"
Kijo opened his eyes as well and peered at her, his focus refusing to settle.
"Brother-in-law! Are you throwing drinking parties with the staff every single day?"
"No, it's not like that..."
"Come on, all of you, out! So we can clean!"
The five of them lurched up, still half in their dreams, and stumbled out of the shack. There in the yard stood the Madam. The four department heads bent low to Sunrye, and Kijo went over to her.
"Honey, what brings you here?"
"We came to clean the place up for you. I'm sorry for dropping in unannounced. Soon-young was dead set on coming, and there was no talking her out of it..."
"Don't be sorry. I'm glad you came."
"I've already tidied the office. Go on in and rest. We'll finish out here and put on some hangover soup."
"All right. Thank you, honey."
While Kijo and Sunrye spoke with quiet courtesy, Ma-ryang and Soon-young were already at it off to one side. She smacked him square across the back.
"Aigoo, you sorry man. Just because you're a house full of men, you think you can live like this?"
Ma-ryang offered no answer at all. He only tipped his face up to the sky, and the look on it was pure defeat—trust the one day they had drunk themselves to the dregs to be the day Soon-young came calling. The five men slipped in by the office's back door and collapsed in the side room.
Kijo lay on the sofa there for a little while, then slipped back out to the rear yard. In the kitchen, Soon-young dipped a ladle into the soup Hansu had made, tasted it, and wrinkled her nose.
"Aigoo, brother-in-law, who cooked this?"
"Ah, that... that was our Hansu..."
"You and Ma-ryang have been living on this for over a month?"
Soon-young only grumbled. We'd been eating it just fine, Kijo thought. He couldn't see what was so terrible about Hansu's cooking. For a man's hands, that was as good as it got.
She came back in from the kitchen and let the complaints pour out.
"Brother-in-law! I knew it. I just knew it would be like this. Unni, aren't I right? Men living on their own always end up this way."
"Even so, it's cleaner than I expected."
"Clean? What's clean about any of this? It's a pigsty."
"That's going a bit far..."
Even as she said it, Sunrye couldn't quite smooth the worry from her face. She came out of the room and turned to Kijo.
"You ought to stay in the office. I think that's best. Linger out here and you won't hear a kind word from Soon-young."
"All right. But there's something I wanted to ask..."
He scratched at his hair, dried into a magpie's nest.
"Go on."
"By any chance... Won-chul's mother. Back in Busan..."
"Oh! You mean Seong-ryong unni?"
Sunrye's eyes went round.
"Yes. Lee Seong-ryong."
"How do you know her?"
"Well..."
Kijo left every mention of the gisaeng out of it, and told her only that he had stopped by Myeongwolgwan for a meeting of the association and happened to meet the woman there.
"Seong-ryong unni is running a high-class restaurant?"
Sunrye looked as if she could not believe it.
"I didn't recognize her at all, but she recognized me. I can't figure out how that's possible..."
When he grumbled on, Sunrye laughed as if the whole thing amused her.
"Of course you wouldn't remember. You left for work before dawn and didn't come home until after the sun was down."
"But she knew me..."
"She lived next door to us."
"Next door?"
Kijo felt as if someone had struck him on the back of the head. To think the family of Lee Hwa-ryong, the Count of Myeongdong, had lived next door—and in a plank shack, no less.
"They moved on in less than a month. That unni used to say it like a refrain. 'We're not people meant to live in a place like this. We'll make money soon and go somewhere better. Sunrye, if you want to make money too, come with me.' That's what she always said."
Kijo nodded.
The Seoul toughs who had come scrambling down to Busan as refugees during the war had floundered at first, then found their openings and begun making money almost at once. As the flood of refugees swelled Nampo-dong Market and Bupyeong Market, the shops from which protection money could be squeezed multiplied with them.
They bought gold trinkets off the people who had fled, sold them dear, changed dollars, and ran U.S. Army goods on the black market, and the cash piled up fast. Dance halls and drinking houses multiplied as well, and the trade those men knew best came easily to hand.
"Did the two of you talk much? About me, and about our Yeongsu?"
"We talked about all sorts of things. About you, about Yeongsu..."
A distant look came over Sunrye, as if she had gone back to those hard days in Busan.
Knowing at last how Lee Seong-ryong, proprietress of Myeongwolgwan, had recognized him, Kijo felt lighter.
"Honey, is Seong-ryong unni's place close to here?"
"Do you want to see her?"
"Yes, I do. She kept me company back when I still hadn't found my feet in Busan... Her spirits were so high that just being with her lifted mine too."
"All right. I'll get in touch."
Kijo went to the office and rang Myeongwolgwan. When Lee Seong-ryong heard that Sunrye wanted to see her, she said she would send a car.
An hour later, a gray sedan drew up in front of the office.
Sunrye and Soon-young, finished with the cleaning and the cooking, climbed into the car Myeongwolgwan had sent.
"Brother-in-law, you and Ma-ryang enjoy that dried-pollack soup. We'll go have a fine time at Myeongwolgwan."
Soon-young, who had nearly fainted at the state of the Seoul office, was suddenly bright with excitement at the prospect of going out with her sister.
"All right, sister-in-law. Have a good time with your unni."
After the women had gone, the men went into the freshly cleaned room and sprawled flat, arms and legs flung wide. The place was bright now, and the stale, musty smell was gone. How long the cleanliness would last, none of them could say, but for the moment the room was in order, and that alone was enough to lift their spirits. In the comfort of it, they were soon snoring again.
"Sunrye! How long has it been? Your face is as pretty as ever!"
The moment Lee Seong-ryong saw her, she pulled Sunrye into an embrace, delighted.
"And you must be Soon-young. The heedless little thing who up and married at eighteen. Am I right?"
Seong-ryong remembered every story Sunrye had ever told her.
"I got married again at nineteen. To a handsome man."
"Aigoo, good for you. You only get the one life, and if you're going to wear a skirt, wear it crimson. Live with a man who does justice to that face of yours, or where's the pleasure in living at all."
With that particular charisma of hers, Lee Seong-ryong claimed the place of reigning unni in a single stroke. Soon-young, full of fire herself, took to a woman like that at once.
"Perfect timing. A very gifted monk came by today. Let's go see him."
"Monks come to a gisaeng house?"
Sunrye asked, startled.
"Why wouldn't they? A monk's a man too. Every last creature with a pair of balls on him has one great wish in this life—to come here and play, at least the once."
At Seong-ryong's shameless joke, Sunrye and Soon-young burst out laughing and followed their unni to the room where the monk was waiting.
"Let me see... Your husband was an orphan and does not know his own date of birth, so I cannot cast his four pillars. And since he is not here, his face cannot be read either... Then I shall look at you, madam. Husband and wife are sun and moon. Study one with care, and the other may be known."
Sunrye, more curious about her husband's fortune than her own, nodded at Monk Beopjin's words.
The Beopjin whom Lee Seong-ryong had made sound like some fallen monk was, in fact, a thoroughly upright priest. He was not a man for women, or drink, or meat. Alone in the room, he was taking a spare vegetarian meal, everything set in neat order. Old as he was, his eyes were clear, and a light seemed to rest on his face.
He worked through Sunrye's four pillars, studied her face with care, and tilted his head.
"Your husband—he is alive, is he not?"
At that, Sunrye went pale with shock.
"What? Whether my husband is alive...?"
"Well, now... a strange hexagram, this. He is no Maudgalyayana, and yet how should a husband come to such a thing..."
"M-Maudgalyayana?"
Kneeling before Beopjin, Sunrye's voice trembled thin.
"Ha ha. Maudgalyayana was one of the Buddha's ten great disciples—the one who saved his mother from hell..."
He explained that Maudgalyayana had gone all the way to the underworld to save his dead mother, and in the end had saved her, a being out of Buddhist lore, and Sunrye could only stare, dumbfounded.
"Have you been married more than once?"
"No. Only the once..."
"Yours is a face meant to meet a rightful husband only after eleven men have died... and yet this does not fit, and that does not fit either... Heh. Has this old monk's power finally run its course? Keh keh."
Beopjin was thrown into confusion by the tangled reading.
Sunrye closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her chest.
"Oh my, Sunrye, he's saying you married well. Maudgalyayana, of all things. What's Maudgalyayana doing in this? Ho ho ho."
Beside her, Lee Seong-ryong was even more delighted.
"Please read me too, Monk."
Soon-young stepped forward.
Beopjin worked through her fortune at length, then smiled.
"Your second man is your true husband."
"That's right! My second husband is the real man!"
"Your fortune is one in which great luck is always at your back, so you should be able to live without much worry."
"And my husband?"
"Hmm... let me see... An imsul year, high summer, the eighth month... born at the hour of the Rat..."
"Omma!"
Soon-young, who had been kneeling, sat down hard in her astonishment.
"How did you know? My husband is from Hamgyeong!"
"Is he? I only meant that such is the shape of his fortune. Another meaning lies hidden in what I said."
"Another meaning...?"
"To say a tiger has come down from the mountain is to say he will meet many people who will not leave a tiger in peace. And if he came down alone—how lonely must he be...?"
At Beopjin's explanation, tears spilled from Soon-young's eyes.
"You're right, Monk. My husband is a pitiful man. He left a wife and children and his father behind in the North, and suffered for more than ten years in China..."
"Everyone has a fate of their own. And there is such a thing as a bond between lives."
Beopjin looked at the weeping Soon-young with a warm gaze.
"Let me offer you one piece of counsel, for your husband's sake."
"Yes! Please, Monk!"
Soon-young said it through her tears, wiping them away.
"A great river? Then the Han would be perfect, wouldn't it?"
"Yes. Settle beside the Han, and you must keep people from doing harm to that lonely tiger. See that your husband takes up work connected with water."
"Work connected with water? Should I make him peddle water, like old Mulbak?"
When she said it, Beopjin laughed.
"There is no need for anything so hasty. And one need not lay hands on the water itself to do work connected with it. Let him own a single boat, and that too is a matter of water..."
Before he had even finished, Soon-young cried out.
"A boat! A boat! Unni, what do I do—I already asked Hee-ja unni's husband to buy us a boat! What a relief!"
She fussed and rejoiced, and Sunrye, just as relieved, pulled her into an embrace. Lee Seong-ryong, every inch the formidable woman, looked at the sisters and laughed out loud.
Then she took out the offering she had prepared and held it toward the monk who had read for them.
"You need not give it."
When Beopjin declined, Seong-ryong said,
"It isn't for you, Monk. It's an offering to the Buddha. If I put this money in your hands, you'll only spend it on living beings anyway."
"Ha ha. Very well. I will gratefully receive the alms you, bodhisattva, have given for the deliverance of sentient beings."
Beopjin accepted the fee.
The three women left the room where the monk was staying, got into the car, and went looking for a place where Soon-young might put down roots.
They came to Hannam-dong, in Yongsan-gu.
It happened to be the very spot where Lee Seong-ryong had been planning to start a business of building villas. There, with the Han River spread bright and open below them, she spoke.
"Sunrye. I was just about to suggest to your husband that we build a house here. And since a place like this suits Soon-young as well, the two of you should build and live here too."
"Then that's what we'll do! Seong-ryong unni, you're the best!"
Soon-young bounced where she stood, delighted.
"All right, unni. I'll speak to Yeongsu's father."
Sunrye gazed down at the Han flowing quietly on and thought of her husband, Kijo. She wanted to see him—this man who, like Maudgalyayana, would follow her all the way to the underworld if that was what it took to save her. And she had seen him only a few hours ago.