What Lingers in the Heart
"Thus have I heard: at one time, the Buddha dwelt in the city of Biyadalma, upon its lofty terrace of jade."
Gazing down at the man, Kang Hyeong-seok chanted the Cheonji Palyang Sinju-gyeong—the Sutra of Heaven and Earth's Eight Divine Incantations.
Jingle-jangle! Jingle-jangle!
The shaman bells rang out, and Lee Geum-kyeong's serene gaze came to rest on Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Rising at once from his seat, he joined his palms in homage and lit the incense, and twice did he speak to the World-Honored One: 'O World-Honored One—'"
Chanting scripture and shaking the shaman bells—strictly speaking, none of it was what anyone would call a proper gut.
There was no beopsa to assist the rite, and no one to play the music for the sacred dance.
And yet, as though every god of heaven and earth and all creation besides were lending him their strength, he carried the gut through alone.
"All the souls of this Jambudvipa, begotten one from another through the ages, their line unbroken since before all beginning—"
It was the first time Lee Geum-kyeong had ever watched Kang Hyeong-seok chant a scripture as a mudang, and a faint smile touched her lips.
She had lived a great many years, and her time as a mudang was nearly as long. Even so, she could count on one hand the people she had ever seen pour their whole heart into a scripture chanted for another's sake.
"Long-lived are few among them, and brief-lived are many."
As the long scripture raced toward its close, the man's complexion gradually eased into peace.
Eeeeaaaagh!
Then he wailed out a grotesque scream—but Kang Hyeong-seok only pressed on, silent and unmoved.
"Without knowledge and without sight—to grasp not one dharma is itself the bliss of Nirvana."
And when at last every verse had run its course, Kang Hyeong-seok lowered the shaman bells. In the same breath, the man's eyes—rolled back toward the ceiling until now—returned to their own.
"Huh? Wha—?"
The man sat up as though waking from deep sleep, blinking around the room in a daze.
"Wh-what... where, where is this?"
Intimidated by the air the place carried, he forced out the question in flustered politeness, and Lee Geum-kyeong's lips twisted into something close to a smile. She clicked her tongue at him.
"Behave yourself, for your wife's sake."
"…Pardon?"
"It was your wife who brought you here."
Perhaps the memory of the moments just before his possession had come back to him. The man's face flamed scarlet on the spot, and Lee Geum-kyeong raised her voice toward the door.
"Cheong-geum!"
"Yes, Teacher."
Cheong-geum answered from just outside it, and Lee Geum-kyeong waved a hand as she went on.
"It's all finished. Open the door."
Bang.
Cheong-geum pulled it open with her head bowed, and the first thing to enter their view was the man's wife, waiting in the front yard.
The sun had set and the sky stood black—and hers was a heart that had burned every bit as black.
"H-honey."
At the sight of his wife, the man buried his head in shame.
"Go on home. If not for your own sake, then for hers—no more of these fool's stunts."
Looking for all the world like a man who, were there a mousehole at hand, would gladly evict the homeowner and crawl inside in his place, he clambered hurriedly to his feet. Then he bowed his head deep to Lee Geum-kyeong, and his wife bent at the waist in silent thanks.
"It wasn't me who did it. It was this young man—so thank him properly before you go in."
The moment she finished, the man—plainly desperate to be anywhere else—ducked his head toward Kang Hyeong-seok.
Kang Hyeong-seok did not accept the bow. Instead, mirroring the wife as she inclined her head to him, he returned only a light nod.
"The, the offering money…"
As the man fumbled for his wallet, half-crouched and frozen, Lee Geum-kyeong's decree came crashing down.
"None of that! Go home to your family! Bring your thanks another time, when your head is back on straight!"
"Y-yes, ma'am!"
The man bolted for the front yard as though fleeing for his life and planted himself beside his wife.
Thwack! Thwack!
With Lee Geum-kyeong watching, the wife could hardly curse him out loud—but the blows kept coming all the same.
All the way until they were in the car. Perhaps, for all anyone knew, until the very moment the engine caught.
Vrrrm.
Judging by the way the car rocked back and forth, she might well still be swinging at him even now.
Kang Hyeong-seok watched the car dwindle into the distance with a bittersweet smile—then abruptly remembered something and rose from his seat.
"I picked up some refreshments on the way. Let me go bring them in."
"Cheong-geum, some tea, if you would."
"Yes, Teacher."
Kang Hyeong-seok fetched the paper bag of fine yanggaeng—sweet red-bean jelly—he had stowed on the passenger seat, and Cheong-geum brought in the tea.
A low wooden table. A teapot. Three cups.
The three of them moved into Lee Geum-kyeong's quarters, and there they talked, wrapped in a tranquility that seemed to have settled over them out of nowhere.
"You've been through a lot."
"It was nothing."
"So. Did you find your answer?"
Kang Hyeong-seok had been raising his teacup to his lips with a smile; the smile drained from the corners of his mouth as he looked at her.
For the person who had tossed the question out in the first place, she looked remarkably at ease, spearing a piece of yanggaeng with her fork.
"My… answer?"
"You came here carrying a worry, and by Heaven's will you were made to live through all this. Which means you ought to have your answer by now."
An earnest soul is a desperate one, and desperation begs for an answer. At times Heaven offers it in a dozen different ways—in forms one might ordinarily have let drift right past. But when the heart is desperate, they become forms worth turning over one more time.
Clink.
Cup lowered, Kang Hyeong-seok sat a while in silence, his face composed, before he finally spoke.
"I've had a lot on my mind lately."
Cheong-geum's brow knit. Lee Geum-kyeong nodded as though she understood completely.
"What, in the end, is punishment?"
"That which lingers in the heart."
"The husband just now committed a grave sin against his wife. And yet she was the one who brought him here—and he received help."
The wife had saved her husband. She had not forsaken the man who had betrayed her.
Was that truly, genuinely right?
And the lovesick spirit's heart toward Lee Jang-woo—was that right as well?
"It is a matter between the two of them. What is there to trouble yourself over?"
"But still…"
"Think on it."
Having swallowed her neatly sliced piece of yanggaeng, Lee Geum-kyeong opened her mouth again.
"How did the husband behave?"
He had taken his wife's flying fists without a sound. Not one act of resistance, not one word of complaint.
"If he were the sort of man who would turn his rage on his wife without a shred of shame, do you think she would have brought him all this way?"
"Sometimes there are, you know. Men like that—"
"And would it be forever?"
His reply jammed in his throat.
No. It would not.
People change—not easily, perhaps, but change they do.
That was why, even while living on and swallowing the grievances that made their teeth chatter, people took their vengeance—within bounds, along the line where they could one day cut the other person loose from their lives for good.
"It always goes that way. Sooner or later, misfortune comes calling—and that is punishment."
"…I see."
"I hear that in my absence, you helped the victims of ghost marriages."
Buyong. And the shaman mother and daughter who had been binding the living to the dead.
The memory of them drew Kang Hyeong-seok's brows together as he looked to Lee Geum-kyeong, and Cheong-geum turned her gaze to the elder as well.
"What do you suppose became of them?"
"…I couldn't say."
All he knew was that Lee Ha-yoon was helping the victims with everything the law would allow. Of what had become of that mother and daughter, he had never learned the details.
"The mother's spirit-line has been severed. All she does now is wait for the day her fine is paid in full."
"Ah…"
An image flashed through his mind: the mudang sitting hollow-eyed in that pitch-dark shrine hall. The instant every last victim was compensated, some fearsome divine reckoning would no doubt escort her straight to the world beyond.
"The daughter's end is a pitiable one. But karma is karma—who is there for her to blame?"
The grudges of every spirit that mother and daughter had fastened to the living—she now shouldered them, all of them, entire. With every night an agony and a hell, her sanity would not hold.
"…She must have been committed by now."
Lee Geum-kyeong nodded, grave.
The image blooming in Kang Hyeong-seok's head was surely no mere fancy: the shaman's daughter, bound from head to toe, shrieking into each new night as she fought off the spirits pawing at her body. It was horrifying to imagine—and knowing that the hell would go on waiting for her past death made it more horrifying still.
"She brought harm to a great many people, and her punishment has found her in equal measure."
…
"You, on the other hand—you helped people."
Kang Hyeong-seok's smile was as bitter as the taste in his mouth.
"The punishment belongs to those who must carry it. Keep none of it in your heart. You committed no sin—so why should your chest grow heavy?"
She was right, and before he knew it, Kang Hyeong-seok was nodding along.
And in the same breath, his heart at last grew light. He smiled faintly and bowed his head deep to Lee Geum-kyeong.
"Thank you, Teacher. My heart is at ease now, thanks to you."
"Think nothing of it. Those were thoughts I, too, once chewed on, long ago."
Long ago indeed, it must have been—Lee Geum-kyeong's brow creased faintly.
A brief silence passed, and then she spoke, her face bearing something like sorrow.
"All things are threads of fate. There is nothing to regret, and no attachment worth keeping."
"I understand."
Kang Hyeong-seok rubbed at his lips, his expression a tangle.
He had seen too much of it of late. People fouler than any evil spirit. These days, the old saying that people were more frightening than ghosts would not leave his head.
"What I am here to do was never the agonizing. It was the helping."
Lee Geum-kyeong smiled as though he had pleased her, and looked at him with eyes gone soft and crinkled at the corners.
"It will be hard on you."
"I believe it is my destiny."
"It is no easy road—enough that an ordinary man would have crumbled long ago."
"Even so. It is my destiny."
"Then those words of yours will become a great strength to those who need your help most desperately."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, slow and heavy.
The heart that had wavered found its bearing again, and his mind felt as though it were clearing, layer by layer.
And just as that peace settled over him, Lee Geum-kyeong's low voice followed.
"Hyeong-seok."
"Yes."
"I told you—punishment is what lingers in the heart."
"Yes."
"And the one who must overcome that punishment may someday stand in need of your help."
Even if that was exactly the kind of person who came to him, Kang Hyeong-seok would have to reach out his hand all the same. Repentance, and the overcoming that follows—those, too, were part of being human.
"When the time comes, you will understand what I mean."
Lee Geum-kyeong smiled with only the corners of her mouth and held out her hand.
A hand ridged with wrinkles—the rough hand of a mudang who had spent her whole life helping others.
When Kang Hyeong-seok took it in both of his own, her lips parted.
"I will keep it close."
Kang Hyeong-seok bowed his head to Lee Geum-kyeong.
Spirit son and spirit mother—that bond, formally, the two of them had never made. And yet theirs was a relationship that could only be called master and disciple.