Even your mother-in-law has noticed your husband’s distance. When she doesn’t think you can hear, she has reminded him of his duties, reminded him that more hands are needed on the farm. It is getting harder and harder to live a decent life as a farmer, and many young men are leaving to find work in the city. After the war ended, the Japanese left abruptly, leaving behind the many jobs they had created and monopolized. Now even an uneducated young man from the country could get a job at the telephone company or the electric plant or on the railways as a train conductor or mechanic. There are bank jobs and store openings and restaurant work. You’ve heard your husband begging his mother to let him leave for the city, but she refuses. “I’ve lost one son already,” she says. “It’s your duty to stay with your family.” In response, your husband spends more time at the tavern, drinking makkoli and singing old peasant songs about pretty girls with moon faces.
One early summer evening, while you are getting water at the pump, you see a figure coming up the road. You don’t recognize the face, so you go in and announce to the family that a stranger is approaching.
Only your sister-in-law and your niece come out with you. The light is pink-orange and refreshing like fruit. It feels good just to stand still. As soon as she spots the figure, a smile grows on Sister-in-law’s face and she says, “That’s Jinho. Your husband’s best childhood friend. They were inseparable.” She immediately calls for your husband.
He comes out looking distracted, but when he sees his friend approaching, he acts like a boy and goes sprinting toward him. You see him stop just short of his friend and then they shake hands vigorously. The friend puts an arm around your husband and they walk together slowly back toward where you’re all waiting. Even Father-in-law and Mother-in-law have come outside to see what all the commotion is about.
Your husband says he’ll run out to the tavern and bring back some makkoli, but he just stands there smiling at his friend. He says, “Tell me everything from the beginning.” Normally you would offer to get the makkoli yourself, but there is something you don’t like about this friend of your husband’s. He looks ill for one thing, his face sallow and lined with dark shadows under his eyes. He’s skin and bones like a horse that’s been worked too hard in its life, and his smiles look fixed and don’t reach his eyes.
Your mother-in-law wants to know if he’s married and has children. He shakes his head no and says he hasn’t been so lucky. The women in the city aren’t as pretty as the ones in country villages, he says, staring pointedly at you. You know he doesn’t mean it.
Father-in-law scolds his wife for not setting a table for Jinho, and for once your mother-in-law doesn’t react angrily to her husband but claps her hands and says, “You’re right. Whatam I doing? I’ve lost my head from all this excitement. Come inside, come inside.”
But your husband takes his friend’s arm and says, “We’ll go to the tavern instead. There’ll be other people there who want to see him. There are many people here who still remember Jinho.” Before walking off arm in arm, he turns to you and says, “Don’t wait up.”
While you’re cleaning up after dinner, you ask Sister-in-law what she knows about Jinho.
“Not much,” she says, trying to scrub the burnt rice from the bottom of the pot. “His family moved away a few years after I arrived here to marry. They were tenant farmers and when we had that terrible drought in ’39, they moved to find work in the city. Buddha knows what they found to do in Seoul when the Japanese were still crawling all over the place.” She spat.
“They were the best of friends,” your sister-in-law continues. “They played together, bathed together, went fishing and read books together. They bickered a lot too. We used to joke that they were like a married couple who knew each other too well.” She chuckles to herself.
“It was terrible when Jinho moved away,” she continues. “Your husband was depressed for quite a while. I would even say he never recovered. He got so quiet, we hardly knew he was around. I wonder if Jinho is here to stay. The city has certainly not been good to him. Look at the poor rags he was wearing. It probably shamed him to appear before us like that.”
You feel unsettled all night long, though you can’t say why. A suspicious thought creeps into your mind unwanted but you push it away. It does you no good.
That night you wake when your husband returns. He stumbles around trying to tear off his clothes and falls down almost on top of you. You get up and sigh loudly, whisper to him to sit still so you can take his clothes off. It’s a warm night, so he doesn’t want to wear his night clothes. When you lie back down to sleep, he edges behind you, moving closer until hisbody is flat against yours. You feel his manhood against your back, jumping like a fish. You want to refuse him for all the times he has slighted you, but you don’t have that luxury. You turn and slip your nightdress
