She turned her head and opened her eyes. Pop, just like a bird.
“Who are you?” she asked in Korean. She reached out and touched my hair, called me Christina, the name of one of her daughters. Beautiful, beautiful, she said in Korean.
I jumped back a little, but then stumbled through my Korean. “Anyunghaseo. Me, I am . . . the daughter . . . of the Hans’ . . .”
“Are you me?” Mrs. Shin asked wonderingly. “Am I dead?” Then she was suddenly suspicious, her voice growing louder and louder. She struggled to sit up. “Whore!” she called out. “Slut! Crazy mother!”
I was about to repeat my name when the look in Mrs. Shin’s round eyes stopped me. She was terrified. She looked at me as though I were an assassin come to end her days. As though I were facing her with a knife. Looking in her strangely unblinking eyes, I could almost feel the handle in my grip. It stopped us both cold.
My mother came running in. “What—” she said.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah!” Mrs. Shin screamed. Kicking out her legs, she backed away into a corner and started babbling.
“What’s she saying?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” my mother said, still hesitating by the door.
Mrs. Shin began to wail. Then in a flurry of skinny elbows and legs, she kicked the blankets away and crawled toward the door.
“Do something!” I said.
My mother approached Mrs. Shin. When she got close, Mrs. Shin kicked her in the knee. My mother fell but she didn’t look hurt, only stunned. I never saw her stopped by anything before. I walked toward Mrs. Shin and she turned to kick at me. I felt the beatings of a bird until I managed to back away. She screamed, screamed, screamed at us—straining harsh words through her vocal cords but in a language nobody else could understand. Then it turned into pure sound.
She screamed until her face was red, then purple, then a bright, shining white. All the while, she continued kicking at nothing, at air, at her own self. She kicked and jerked until her body gave out. Then abruptly, she went limp and every sound ceased. I saw tears running down into her hairline and heard her ragged breathing whistling in and out through her cracked lips.
My mother rode in the ambulance with Mrs. Shin, who was still disoriented. After everyone left, I put on my coat and locked up the apartment. I was to meet them at the hospital. When I stepped outside, it was dark and cold, and I saw a slip of paper at my feet. Magdalena. I picked it up and tried to put it back, but the tape wouldn’t stick anymore. No matter how many times I tried, it fluttered down again. Magdalena. I shivered as I watched snow drift down in the weak orange glow of the streetlamp, slowly blanketing the empty, littered street. I stood there until my hands and face were numb. Then I reached down for the wet, blurred slip of paper and, stuffing it into my pocket, stepped out into the bitter night.
Picasso’s Blue Period
There is a picture in my daughter’s house of a man wearing a black overcoat and standing against a blue wall. His hair is the same black as his heavy coat and he has a wide forehead, a face that is pale and angular with blue shadows beneath his dark eyes, a smudge of mustache that curves down around his unhappy mouth. It is a sad face. An empty face. Why does my daughter hang a picture of this man in her house?
In the upper left corner in white letters is printed his name PABLO PICASSO and the name of the museum in Paris where the original of this painting hangs. The letters are so small that I have had to nearly press my nose into the glass frame in order to read them.
When I ask my daughter about this painting, she tells me that she acquired it during her honeymoon in Paris, at the very museum where the original now hangs. In fact, she and my son-in-law saw the original for themselves and liked it so much that they wanted a reproduction. She said it cost them twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars seems like a lot of money for apicture of a lonely man staring at you while you are eating dinner. This is the first time I have seen this picture. I have not seen my daughter since her marriage last year.
I do not ask my daughter why she chose to hang this picture in her dining room, because these are not questions she prefers to answer. She is impatient with questions, much like I used to be, my wife tells me. I ask my daughter nothing and let her tell me what she would like me to know, about such things as how old everything in Paris is, how the apartment they stayed in was built during the American Revolution, how the narrow streets around the museum are paved in rough stones. In the cafés, she says, they position all the chairs facing the street so that one can see the flow of life traveling by. People sit with their little cups and watch each other for entertainment, unlike in America, where it is considered rude to look at other people. I tell her that this need for space that Americans have comes from the vast size of the country. In Korea, people stand much closer to one another on the streets, in the subways, in the lines at stores. It comes from necessity. She nods. There is so much I wish to make my daughter understand, but cannot. I am sure she feels much the same way.
I am alone in my daughter’s house, so I can stare at this
