Beasts of a Little Land(31)
Her most recent project was rearing her three young charges. They had come into her life unbidden, as a favor to her dearest cousin. But she had accepted them partly because she was at an age when wealthy, childless courtesans started to think of adopting foster daughters to care for them in retirement. She thought it would be amusing to teach everything she knew to worthy successors, the same way men of higher status tried to leave their legacies through bequests, writings, and descendants in general. Why not her?
But this project was turning out to be more complicated than she’d imagined. While the children, even Jade, were growing on her, she still didn’t feel like a mother. This lack of instinct probably originated from an emptiness in her womb, she thought. Dani had never become pregnant, and now she wondered if she just wasn’t meant for the job. All through her twenties, she had been terrified of falling prey to this malady, stuffing herself with silk cocoons beforehand and afterward taking the tea that would bring on her cycle earlier and more heavily than usual. But she couldn’t always know when an encounter would take place; and sometimes when, in the middle of the act, she would whisper to her client that she wasn’t properly protected, he would nonetheless go inside her. On such occasions, she lay very still, horrified by the stickiness between her legs, while the man rolled off, sighing contentedly and closing his eyes, as though he’d just accomplished a great deal. Though a grand courtesan, admired in vast circles of cultured and important men, all she could do in those situations was wait until he felt well enough to leave, wash off as thoroughly as possible with scalding hot water, and never see him again.
These events had happened often enough over the years that now, at an age when most married women had at least three or four children, Dani suspected that she was never able to conceive in the first place. On one hand, it mystified her to see Luna fall pregnant after just one unfortunate incident and endure such prolonged agony; on the other hand, she felt relieved that she’d never had to suffer that way.
Despite this lack of an inner compass for parenting, Dani was finally beginning to feel that she was prodding the girls in the right direction. Every day they were acting less like empty-headed little children; she’d once even caught Lotus with a book. But just as Dani was observing how all three girls were improving in looks, mind, and attitude, her commitment to the mothering project was shaken by a highly distracting incident. It was a letter addressed in a familiar hand, delivered at breakfast a few days after the parade.
Leaving her porridge barely touched, she went to her room to read its contents in peace. In it, SungSoo talked of how he’d obtained her address by inquiring at MyungWol, and that he’d been absorbed by the demands of his businesses and his family since returning from abroad. In such a life there was no room for romance, and indeed he had long given up hope of love beyond comfort; he had had no feelings in that regard for many years. (He did not say “since you,” but that was the intended effect.) But seeing her again at the parade woke in him the blissful yearning he had always felt for her. “You looked as beautiful as when I first met you,” he wrote. He had left her alone and gone to Japan, thinking they were both young and would eventually heal. (He didn’t mention the part about his marrying his wife.) Only now that he was older, he saw how wrong it was to have gone away without her. He wished to offer her his penitence—in person.
Dani read and reread this letter, tossed it on her little desk, asked Hesoon to bring her some coffee, and clutched it back again with a cup in her other hand. The warm drink had the familiar effect of calming her emotions and at the same time, sharpening her mind, bringing back images that had been long buried. As painful as the memories were, the act of recollection was bittersweet and delicious. She saw herself watching clear-eyed over her life as from the ether, even as her body was huddled over her writing table. The letter proved that the love she once had for him wasn’t just an illusion, a false memory. She had truly lived.
“All the same, I don’t have any feelings left for him, only for his memories,” she thought. Unconsciously, she unfolded her vanity mirror. When she saw her reflection, she admitted to herself that she was curious how she’d looked to him that day; she was hoping she didn’t appear too old or changed. Satisfied with her appearance, she closed the mirror with a triumphant smile.
“No, I won’t see him,” she thought. “Or even write back to him. He doesn’t even deserve a response. Ignoring him is the only dignified choice I have.”
Though Dani believed she had made the right decision by not responding, in the days that followed, she suffered from an unexplained and relentless headache. She struggled to hide her irritability at parties and snapped at the children over the littlest things, even at Luna. At night, lying on her silk bedspread, she felt more alone than she’d been in years. “I will never fall in love again,” she moaned, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. She was thirty-three, no one new was going to court her, and she had blown off the one man she’d passionately loved. When these thoughts kept her awake, Dani downed some glasses of soju alone and in her nightclothes—a practice she normally despised as untidy, but deemed medicinal under the present circumstances.
Just after the first snowfall, another letter came for Dani which, in spite of her pounding heart at seeing the envelope in the maid’s hand, was not from SungSoo. It was from an activist who had recently returned from working in Shanghai, and though she did not know him, she had heard of his reputation. In addition, he’d been recommended to write to her by General ____, based in Vladivostok, who was being supported by her cousin Silver in PyongYang. He did not write either the general’s name or her cousin’s in fear of interception, but Dani immediately agreed to see him at an unassuming little teahouse where no one of any importance would ever go.