The Trespasser
It startled me badly, but I took a deep breath first and began rummaging through the pockets of my skirt with my fingers. Hui-yeong asked, "Looking for a gun?"
"I turned my pistol in at the Government-General entrance—the government building, I mean—and never got it back. It was one I bought with my own money, so I wanted to ask for it back, but that hardly seemed like the moment to be asking for favors."
"I'll track it down for you later. Actually, forget it—I'll just buy you a new one. The Type 26 is a cheap piece of junk anyway. I'll get you a Mauser, so don't give it another thought, Unni. Though if not a gun, what on earth were you looking for?"
Just then, my fingers closed around the thing I'd been searching for. I pulled out a matchbox and drew a single match from inside it. With a quick rasp of the striker, Hui-yeong struck it alight for me, then watched in silence as I lit the oil lamp sitting in the corner. I gave an awkward smile. "You drew the curtains, so it got too dark in here. And sitting face to face in the gloom like that felt a bit unnerving."
"So you always carry matches with you."
"Fire comes in handy wherever you go."
"Do you smoke, perhaps? I didn't see any cigarettes at your house. Or are you the type who keeps a pipe and tobacco on hand at all times?"
I couldn't tell whether she was genuinely curious or simply wanted to make a point—that she already knew the layout of my home. But surely a woman radiating this kind of menace wasn't unaware that I didn't touch the stuff?
"Which would you guess?"
"Well... I have never once seen you smoke, Unni."
"Then you already know the answer. Since you've clearly been watching me for more than a day or two."
When I said it in a tone of grudging acceptance—that I had, in fact, been under surveillance all this time—Hui-yeong looked rather pleased with herself. Come to think of it, from the position of a woman like Choi Hui-yeong, her surveillance might not have been driven purely by personal desire.
There was almost nothing I actually knew about this woman. Everything she herself had revealed amounted to this: she had spent two years in Japan, learned a great deal there, and hurried back to Korea the moment Tojo Hideki died. For some reason, upon returning she had drifted around the city like a vagrant, met me briefly, then joined Lyuh Woon-hyung's Committee for the Preparation of Statehood, gone off to Wuhan, and won over Kim Hong-il.
No—wasn't that the résumé of somebody enormous? It read like the record of a heavyweight independence activist whose name I would certainly know if such a figure had existed in the real history I remembered. Then again, if a person named Ajisai Mizuko had existed in the actual history books, I'd probably have heard the name once or twice myself. A celebrated policewoman of the colonial era—if such a woman had really existed in modern times, not some Joseon-dynasty antiquity, her name would have come down to us.
After all, even the forgettable street thugs of Jongno—the so-called Nine-Tailed Fox bandits or Demon bandits—became characters in television dramas and lived on in people's memories. This world was already far too different from the one I knew. Holding my preconceptions loosely was the correct posture.
"Why don't you smoke? The chief does, and plenty of the patrolmen smoke the cheap brands."
"My line of work is hard on the body. Ruining my lungs would do me no favors at all. Physical condition stays as close to perfect as possible—that's the rule. Which is why I barely touch alcohol, either."
"Cigarettes ruin your lungs? Says who?" Hui-yeong narrowed her eyes. "It's not as if they're opium."
I tilted my head. "I couldn't say whether opium has anything to do with the lungs... but cigarettes are definitely bad for them."
"Is that so? How interesting. But coming from you, Unni, I imagine there's something behind it."
Had the link between smoking and lung cancer simply not been proven yet in this era? Come to think of it, I'd heard that establishing the direct causal connection hadn't happened all that long ago. In the 1940s... even if someone was researching that field, they'd be a tiny minority, and it was an age when no one blinked at doctors puffing away on cigarettes.
Had I carelessly let slip some 'knowledge of the future'? Hui-yeong seemed quietly interested in what I'd said, and I felt the need to change the subject.
"And what about you, Deputy Minister of Military Affairs? Do you enjoy smoking?"
"No. I've never touched it either."
"Why not?"
"Because if I got addicted and smoked constantly, my breath would stink. Hardly ideal for kissing. Besides, I got the feeling the person I wanted to kiss might be a heavy smoker."
At my words, Hui-yeong's face soured. "Not to be a fussing old woman about it, but if you intend to do that sort of thing, you should ask permission first."
"Ah, that matter... I'll have to think it over..."
"I don't think it's something that requires thinking over."
Arguing further would get me nowhere, I was sure. I'd known her only a short while, but I could already sense as much. That reminded me—there was one thread I hadn't followed to its end. I walked over to the window opposite the one Honda was bawling through and examined the frame.
There were no marks of it being forced open. I'd never been the type to be diligent about latching my windows, so it had almost certainly been open to begin with.
"How did you get into my house faster than I did? I took a rickshaw too—my pace can't have been that slow."
"Because I worried you might run, Unni. Your guess is exactly right. The moment I saw you leave, I hailed a different rickshaw and had it drop me on the far side of the block, on the back street. The original plan was simply to confirm you'd entered your room and then go home. But you walked right up to your door with the key in the lock—and then didn't go inside."
"So you tried the window, and it opened."
"I'm sorry. Breaking in was never part of the plan."
"This really is your first time inside my place?"
"That's... hm. Haha."
Hui-yeong showed a rare flicker of flusteredness. The answer, of course, was obvious.
"Granted, I stalled a bit while sparring with Honda back there. But even a house this small—you couldn't have confirmed the absence of cigarettes in the time you actually had."
I crossed to the desk and pulled open the drawers. They were stuffed with miscellaneous junk, but nothing showed signs of having been rummaged through haphazardly.
"And this place is dim as a cave. However bright the day, if you wanted to search every corner, you'd have needed to light the lamp. But the lamp stayed unlit until I lit it just now. So how did you know there were no cigarettes here?"
"Officer Ajisai! Please, hear my heart out!"
The patrolman's racket outside was grating on my nerves. I shouted sharply, loud enough to carry through the glass.
"Shut your mouth and get lost, Honda!"
"Waaah! How could you! I will never give up!"
From the sound of his feet scrambling away, the man had at least retreated for now. Hui-yeong must have decided she'd found a fine opening to steer the conversation, because she shrugged and said, "Was that a rejection, then? Or were you shielding him in front of me?"
"Neither, no. Let's pick up where we left off. How did you know there were no cigarettes inside my house?"
Hui-yeong gave a faint smile, as if to say so that tack didn't work after all. Then she flopped down onto the wooden chair in surrender and spoke. "I came here last year."
"Last year when?"
"Not long after I first met you."
Now that she mentioned it, the house had stood empty for long stretches that winter. It was empty during working hours as a matter of course, but around the time of Tojo's death, the entire Police Bureau had been on high alert. By now Yamamoto's seizure of the cabinet looked smooth and inevitable, but back then it was still an era when no one could be certain the Navy faction would win its bitter political war against the Army and take full control of the government.
It was a season of emergency nationwide, Korea included, and I was forever working late. Infiltrating my house would have been simple at any hour.
But why? She'd been craving bread? Returning my coat? Hunger seemed too flimsy a reason, and the coat never came back, so that couldn't be it either. And if my memory served, nothing else had gone missing around that time.
"Why?"
"In Japan, I saw far too many people who were trash. Human beings who put on refined airs in public and hid their desires at home. I fell for you the moment I saw you, but I wanted to be sure. So I came. Determined to find you out—to dig you up and expose you."
"And what did you find?"
"Nothing."
Her eyes gleamed black. "Truly, absolutely nothing. In this hollow, empty house of yours."
"Nothing in what sense? Nothing worth money? Or nothing that could prove my guilt—or my wickedness?"
"Something that would show me the desires of a person called Ajisai Mizuko. A person's room... it's very difficult for a room to reveal nothing at all, and yet this one..."
Maybe it was only natural. After all, I had never really thought of this room as mine, never truly lived in it as my own. If Ajisai herself was a hollow human being, then it followed naturally that no one could break in, look around, and come away knowing anything about me.
"And so I thought, Unni—if there was no hypocrisy mixed into that aloof gaze of yours, the one looking down from above the words of this world... then whatever desire gets poured into that gaze, it will become mine. Because in my whole life, I had never once seen a person like you."
"Is that why you joined the statehood committee?"
"Yes. It was the only way I could ever beat you."
I walked to the door, took hold of the handle, and swung it open. Pointing at the street outside, I said, "You can see yourself out now."
"...You're asking me to leave?"
"I never invited you. Go home. I have no coffee to offer you, no food either—hardly the circumstances for entertaining a rude guest for long. And I won't be running away, so don't come sneaking in to 'check' on me again. From tonight on, I'm latching the windows every single day."
"I know how to open that style of window even when it's latched from the inside."
"Then I suppose I'll have to nail them shut. Surely you wouldn't break them."
"It'll be sweltering in summer when you can't open them."
It was clear I couldn't win an argument with this woman. I seized Hui-yeong with all my strength, threw her out the door, and slammed it shut behind her. When I lifted the curtain a little, I was relieved to see the Deputy Minister of Military Affairs turning on her heel and walking away from my house.
I found myself thinking it might be time to consider moving.