Cursed Bunny(48)

In addition to the red, ornate robes on the mannequins and the shoes with toes so pointy they seemed impossible to put on, the child was good at finding all sorts of odd metal boxes in the basement. These boxes occasionally had locks or sealing mechanisms with keys attached to them, but even with the keys, it was difficult to figure out how to open them. The child handed over one box. The woman awkwardly played around with it, and when the box double-locked itself in her hands with a loud clunk, she nearly jumped out of her skin. The child laughed brightly. At first, the woman found it unsettling when the cold lump of iron suddenly went clunk in her hands apparently on its own accord. But watching the child laugh as she locked the odd-looking boxes one by one, she forgot that strange feeling and laughed along with her.

The seemingly endless remodeling efforts finally came to an end and her husband’s friend moved into the office. Despite the great lengths they’d gone to redo the third floor and how spacious the office was, the friend seemed to have no employees; it all struck the woman as peculiar. Her husband explained that it was because his business was just starting out and he praised the friend for being cautious with his overheads. Her husband, as if he were an employee himself, was always in the office. Whenever she peeped in, he was always sitting across from the friend with a narrow desk between them, both talking urgently into their phones. Occasionally, the husband’s friend would call her down to the office and offer her a dark-colored drink. The drink was so sour and tart that she could only manage two sips the first time in the name of good manners before giving up. Her husband’s friend claimed the drink was made from some government-subsidized crop in Europe and had cancer-fighting, antioxidant, and anti-aging properties, going on a long rant using terms she couldn’t understand. Her husband nodded along to the friend’s spiel until his phone rang and he immediately answered it.

Before even three months had passed, her husband’s friend vanished with their seed capital. In the office, aside from the small desk and the plush “CEO’s chair,” were crates upon crates of juice containers. She assumed they were the drink the friend had kept pushing on her. Emblazoned on the containers’ packaging was a picture of tiny blue berries. The same berries that were rotting away in a fridge in the corner of a room.

“We still have his security deposit, so we haven’t lost that much money,” said her husband nonchalantly. “And he left all this product behind. It’s 200,000 won a box … Think of all the money we can make selling them.”

Vowing to minimize their losses as much as possible, he called up everyone he knew and spewed the same information about the blue fruit’s anti-cancer properties, marketing them as best he could. But the thought of all the boxes stacked on the third floor made the woman despair that he would ever sell them all.

Then, the phone calls began.

If only they hadn’t tried to remodel, if only they hadn’t rented it out to her husband’s friend … These regrets crossed her mind again and again.

She knew there was no use in agonizing over the past. But the regrets revisited her anyway. It would’ve been the same for anyone else in her position.

He told her he had taken out a loan of twenty million won. At least he had only “invested” it in his friend’s business and did not put his own name on the business or be a guarantor to his friend’s debts.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to shout. Seven years of her life had been put into repaying her debt, working late into the night and saving her meagre salary, living a humble life—and now, here she was right back where she started. No matter the amount, the word “loan” made her eyes go dark.

Her husband had pursued an “alternative lifestyle” that was “free of the fetters of capitalism.” The woman herself, when she was in college, had considered the conformist pressures of getting good grades, building a resume, and landing a job in some big corporation to be tedious and distasteful and had thought the life her husband wanted dovetailed with hers. They got married as soon as she graduated, and she got a job right after. She learned quickly that an “alternative lifestyle” meant nothing without a detailed, concrete plan, and living “free of the fetters of capitalism” meant working for places that didn’t pay their workers on time. As she worried about realizing this alternative lifestyle in the real world, she crumbled away under the pressures of working at a company in the non-profit sector that was run not by the normal labor of workers, but through their unrequited sacrifices. Meanwhile, her husband, who was her upperclassman in college but graduated later than she did, fiddled around in search of his ideal “alternative lifestyle” without ever settling down on any particular profession—the result being the twenty-million-won loan he had taken out and used up without her knowledge.

Saying he would pay it back, her husband promised he would do whatever it took. She knew he was being sincere. But she also knew that the world was not such an easy place as to hand over twenty million won to anyone based on their sincerity alone.

So she looked into whether her husband could use their mutual assets as collateral to take out any more money without her knowledge. She considered dropping his name from the deed somehow, but the taxes were simply too complicated. Still, it seemed like it was legally impossible for him to put up any shared property as collateral without her consent. But in the worst-case scenario, she would only be able to hold on to half of her property; this frightened her.