Face to Face with Regret (1)
20.
Face to face with regret? That struck me as odd.
The myeonmok in “to have no face” uses the character for face,, and the character for eye, .
But this one used the character for forgive, , and the character for tree, . Forgive a tree? The forgiveness of a tree? “I’ll read it first.”
“Go ahead.” Team Leader Lee left me alone in the conference room. Creaaak. I pulled out a chair and sat down. “A manuscript in this day and age, and on manuscript paper, no less.” Stubborn man. They also called it heopyeon—handwritten prose.
It meant writing done by hand.
My father had always insisted on writing even his full-length novels by hand.
He said that was the only way to make the prose taste right. The smudges left on the manuscript paper. The traces of having erased and written the same line over and over again. Judging by it, this novel had been written a very long time ago. Whisper, whisper... I turned the manuscript pages one by one. Face to Face with Regret was a little different from my father’s usual novels.
My father usually wrote large, forceful works.
Epic sagas, modern and contemporary historical novels, and the like. Critics often said that Mok Pilhyun’s novels were “heavy and masculine.” But Face to Face with Regret was different.
How should I put it? It was like a fairy tale. There was a powerless old man.
He sees a bird land on the old tree in his yard.
At first, he thinks nothing of it.
But the bird comes to that tree every day.
The old man, who had never once raised even a blade of grass in his life,
begins to look after the bird in his own clumsy way.
Spending an entire season like that, the old man regains some vitality. One day, he realizes the bird is dying.
He tends to it for days, but in the end the bird dies.
It happened while the old man had dozed off for a moment.
He knows it is the way of nature, but that does not comfort him. The old man goes out into the yard with a hollow feeling in his chest.
That was when the dead tree caught his eye.
The moment he looked at that tree, already dying at the roots.
The old man felt an inexpressible regret and remorse.
[(...) Only then does he realize that the reason he is so sad is not because the bird died. It is the shame of having cared for something only now, at such an advanced age. And that the time he was allowed to care for something was no more than a few short days. That, too, was unbearably sorrowful.
The tree in the yard had dried up completely. That, too, was because the old man had never watered it once. The old man tried to embrace the tree. Just as when the bird had perched there, just like that moment, he wanted warmth to return to the dead trunk, but that was greed. Only then did the old man ask the tree for forgiveness.]
“...Face to face with regret.” The forgiveness sought from a tree. This was a fable, a story built as an allegory for our family.
The old man was my father.
The bird was my mother.
And that dead tree... it could mean many things. Our family, my father’s inner self, perhaps even his son, Mok Hyunsun. I already knew from Kim Dan-woo.
That my father had cared for my mother with everything he had.
Only on that one crucial deadline.
Only on that day had he left her side because she had urged him to do so. When he left the hospital, my mother probably wasn’t in critical condition yet.
But as if by some cruel trick of fate, her condition worsened.
That was how serious illnesses worked.
And, as the title itself said, I knew he had no face left before me and could offer no excuse.
Wasn’t that already in the novel?
It wasn’t some neglect that a few days of nursing could make up for. But this novel was not written to win my forgiveness.
Nor was it written as an excuse.
So this was a story about regret.
About willingly exposing the shabby bottom of one’s heart.
I could feel that my father regretted things.
But simply sensing it and receiving it in visible words were on completely different levels. To be honest...
It felt like I was seeing my father’s true feelings for the first time.
Just as I was sinking into those complicated thoughts, Team Leader Lee came back in. “Done reading? Well?” I didn’t want to look lost in sentiment. Objective feedback first.
“It’s an outstanding novel. The style, using the tree as a metaphor for an old man’s regret, is excellent. And although it’s fundamentally a sad story, the restraint keeps it from becoming overly emotional. That’s skillful too.”
“Then... would you like to write the review? The one that’ll run in the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul along with this novel?”
“Me? I’m already supposed to be writing the review for Park Jeong-shin’s Moving Dream.”
Whether writer or editor, no one could have more than one piece published in the same quarterly magazine.
That was practically an unspoken rule in the industry. “Mm... then there’s also the option of handing the Moving Dream review to Kim Ji-woon and having you write this one.” Team Leader Lee seemed to have noticed.
That the mood between me and my father at the book concert wasn’t exactly frosty.
And, in his adult way, he probably hoped I’d mend things with my father. Unfortunately, I had to refuse that kindness. “That would be nice, too, but I’ve actually already finished the Moving Dream review this morning. It’d be better to give this one to Senior Editor Kim.”
“Ah... is that so? All right. If that’s what you want, there’s nothing I can do.” Embarrassed, Team Leader Lee cleared his throat and left the conference room.
A little later, I said to Senior Kim, “You’re taking care of the Face to Face with Regret review, right? Please look after it.” He shot me a thumbs-up.
It meant I could count on him.
On the manuscript paper for Face to Face with Regret on his desk, dozens of little Post-its were already stuck like feathers.
─┼
“I’m heading out-.”
“See you tomorrow-.”
“Ugh, I’m going home to watch baseball.”
One by one, the people who’d finished work left the office.
I pretended to pack my bag while stalling for time.
And when the office was finally empty.
I took Face to Face with Regret from Senior Kim’s desk. It was 6:00 p.m.
The final deadline for the New Spring Literary Contest was today.
And since on-site submission was still possible... “Six hours.” Yes. I wanted to write criticism, not a review.
I felt like two pages wouldn’t be enough to say everything I had in my head. I laid a hand on the manuscript for Face to Face with Regret.
For some reason, it felt warm.
“...”
Actually, the content was already fully formed in my head, but I wanted to keep it right where I could touch it while I wrote. I looked at the blank white screen of the word processor. Language began stacking up in layers inside my head.
Fable, old age, regret, family, and so on.
Any one of those could have served as the keyword.
That was how excellent my father’s novel was.
It was something I had always acknowledged. Still, I decided to find the keyword buried deepest of all.
The one keyword that could connect my father and me.
The essence of this novel, of my father, of us two as father and son...
I dug through the language.
The single root from which all these words had grown.
It might be so delicate it could snap, but it was also the root I had to tend.
I had to find it. And then, almost immediately, I came face to face with one word.
Heart.
I knew what sentence to begin with.
“Hoo...”
I took a deep breath and put my hands on the keyboard.
For some reason, I felt tense.
How powerless is the heart?
The heart that cares for a bird,
the heart that embraces a tree and regrets.
Even if you gather every last bit of that heart, the bird will not come back to life, and the dead tree will remain cold. And so I wrote about the helplessness of the heart.
It might seem cold, but that was reality.
To a tree, the hand that gives it water would be more precious than a heart that loves and regrets.
Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak...
[(...) The heart may be nothing more than an intangible romantic fantasy—something neither visible nor tangible.]
I stopped my hands for a moment.
...This was where it really began.
But fiction is different.
My fingers tightened.
Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak!
The fact that the heart exists. The form of the heart. In the end, it is through language that it appears before us and reaches us. The ultimate value of the novel that Face to Face with Regret shows us is precisely that: making that heart exist.
I briefly summarized the story of Face to Face with Regret and inserted it.
But I didn’t dwell on the plot for too long.
The focus of this criticism was the novel itself.
Novelistic art is powerless. A novel is something that cannot beat a politician’s one-line remark even if it is twelve volumes long. And yet when we read a single heart within a novel, we come to know that we have hearts of our own. That is what empathy is, what understanding is. How astonishing, a novel. Even in its powerlessness, it remains so beautiful.
In that sense, I would like to call Face to Face with Regret the most novelistic novel of all. It tells us how powerless the heart is. And yet by telling us that, it proves the heart exists and leaves behind a single kind of beauty. (...)
It was also a lavish compliment to the novelist Mok Pilhyun.
If Face to Face with Regret was the most novelistic novel,
then Mok Pilhyun was also the most novelist-like novelist.
Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak...
The piece was nearing its end.
I decided to be a little greedy.
I wanted to include the words I wished to say to my father.
Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak...
“...”
All at once, a thought came to me.
Would there ever be a day when I showed this final paragraph to my father?
So this, too, was a gamble for me.
If I debuted as a writer, he would naturally know.
Then, as though by fate, I would be sending my true feelings to my father.
Yes.
No matter how cool I tried to act, even I still wanted to attach a meaning like that to making my debut.
Clack.
I pressed the final Enter key.
There was no language left in my head.
I had poured everything out, shaped it perfectly, and I liked the style too. If it had been any other day, I would have felt relieved.
I would have printed it out at once and left the office to hail a taxi. But instead I sat there for a while,
staring at the blinking cursor.
It was the first time I’d ever felt this way.
I had finished everything I needed to do, and yet for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to leave my seat.
Ah.
I see. So this was what lingering feeling meant.
Lingering feeling wasn’t something that existed only in novels.
It existed in criticism, too.
How should I put it?
In that very moment, I sincerely liked criticism.
Setting aside success or dreams as a literature graduate, it felt as though I had met something I could love for the rest of my life.
Whirr— whirr— whirr— whirr—.
I printed the criticism.
Then I put it into a document envelope,
and wrote this on the front:
Contest Entry — Criticism Division
A small laugh escaped me. “So I ended up collecting all the Dragon Balls after all.”
─┼
“Today’s the last day for New Spring submissions, right?” Dongwol Ilbo’s security guard, Mr. Lee, asked security guard Mr. Kang.
The darkness of late night lay silently outside the window. They were keeping watch to receive on-site submissions for the New Spring Literary Contest. “That’s right. They say there are a ton of applicants this year. Must be because our paper has the latest deadline.”
“Looks like the competition’s brutal this time around.”
“No kidding. Look at this.” Mr. Lee pointed to the reception desk set up by the door.
The submissions collected today were already piled high.
“Most people probably sent theirs by mail, and this is just today’s on-site intake, but it’s already stacked up this much. And there are a lot of criticism entries this time, too.”
“Really? The judges are going to have their work cut out for them. Ah, it’s 11:58. Better close up soon.”
“Yeah. Guess that’s it for this year’s entries.”
Just as they were lazily about to lock the building door, a taxi pulled up from far away and stopped in front of Dongwol Ilbo’s headquarters.
The young man who got out of the taxi came running over in a hurry. “Are you still accepting New Spring submissions?” Mr. Kang looked at his watch. “It’s 11:59. Barely safe. Go on, hand it over.”
“Haha, thank you. I had no idea it would take this long from Paju to here.” The young man smiled and handed over a document envelope.
Mr. Kang plopped the envelope on top of the stack at the reception desk.
“Then good night.”
“All right. Take care, young man. Good luck.”
The young man gave them one last smile and turned away.
His steps were light as he left Dongwol Ilbo behind. And so this year’s New Spring Literary Contest submissions came to an end.