The hospital director asked Lee Sun-il if she was aware that they were hiring Korean nurses in Germany. I know a Catholic priest who helps people get there. I’ll arrange for you to meet him if you study English and become a proficient nurse’s aide here, he said.

Germany.

Where on earth was that?

Lee Sun-il had gotten a glimpse of Germany through the pictures Han Se-jin showed her after her trip there: the angels of Berlin with their wings spread out, holding weapons in their hands; the bullet-marked Victory Column; the wheat fields of Bochum and yacht riders in the Ruhr River; the black steeples and iron bridge of Cologne; the arched ceiling of the Frankfurt station; the red roofs and attic windows of Munich. Listening to Han Se-jin talk about the places and things she had seen, Lee Sun-il thought about how different they were from what she had pictured in her mind, and in what ways. Germany. What kind of a place was it? It was a place where all—educated and uneducated alike—could start over from the beginning; a place where no one asked or cared whether or not you were married, whether or not you were a virgin; a place you reached by going higher than the clouds and faster than the wind; the place that, in Lee Sun-il’s dreams, rose high like a cliff, then sank low like a mire.

After about a half a year, Lee Sun-il saw her uncle standing in the hospital yard as she came out carrying a bucket of lye. Spotting her, he immediately seized her and dragged her back to his and his wife’s place. Her aunt punched her on her back and shoulder as she stood there looking pale, going on and on about the fragility of her grandfather’s health. Your grandfather was worried sick about you! The poor old man, he was so worried because you disappeared! Lee Sun-il sat cooped up in a room starving herself, tearing her aunt, uncle, and grandfather to pieces over and over again in her mind; then she wondered, Who told them I was there? Who knew I was there?

Two weeks went by before she saw Sun-ja again. She came in while Lee Sun-il was sitting by the well, peeling a potato she had scooped out of a pail of water. Sun-ja said she couldn’t draw water from the well anymore. That’s what Aunt said, actually. What did she say exactly? ‘That girl isn’t allowed here anymore. That nasty girl will no longer be coming to see you,’ she’d said. Sun-ja just stood there. She just stood there without talking to me, not asking what I was doing there or saying she was sorry or telling me what had happened. I didn’t want to see her standing there like that and wished she would leave, but she just kept standing there. I didn’t know what to do so I slapped her on the cheek, hoping she’d go away. I slapped her on the cheek. She didn’t even cry.

*

Fires often broke out in those days because houses stood side by side with no space in between; houses whose walls were made of oiled strawboard and wood, and whose roofs were made of fabric; and oil lamps still served as night lights in many homes. Back then, a lamp knocked to the floor would bring down with it all the shacks in the area, turning them, as well as the people, to ashes. Once waterproof paper and fabric caught fire, the fire spread instantly, not leaving a second for anyone to throw a bucket of water over it. Fire! someone would cry, and everyone in the neighborhood would wake up at once like magic and come running out of their houses. That’s exactly what happened that night.

Fire!

No one was seriously injured or died, but several houses vanished in that fire. So did the house that belonged to Lee Sun-il’s aunt. Lee Sun-il sat for a while in the small square with others who had evacuated, waiting for the day to break; then she went to the plot of ground where the house had been, only to find that there was nothing left except a well surrounded by debris. Lee Sun-il saw Sun-ja lift an ash-covered board and pull out something that looked like a sweater from underneath. Next to her, Sun-ja’s mother was trying with all her might to scrape off a tiny bit of gold stuck to the remains of a burnt drawer. Most of the people who had lost their homes and possessions in the fire were market vendors, who generally managed somehow to continue their businesses after the fire. That wasn’t the case with Sun-ja’s mother. She sat at her market stall looking tired and ill, then one day, she went off and disappeared with her daughter without telling anyone where she was going.

Lee Sun-il’s aunt and uncle set up a tent where their house had once stood and lived there for a while, then made plans to leave for Busan where the uncle’s family ran a business. Shrinking at the thought of continuing on with her aunt and uncle, Lee Sun-il became determined to get married. She met Han Jung-eon through a market vendor and made a snap decision to marry him. Like her, Han Jung-eon had grown up as a war orphan without a family or possessions; but he was literate and even knew some Chinese characters, had an easy smile, and was hardworking. That was enough, Lee Sun-il thought. Hardworking, that was quite enough. Her aunt and uncle opposed the marriage, but Lee Sun-il was in her twenties now and they couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason for their opposition. They declared that they wouldn’t be attending the wedding since she was set on going through with it despite their disapproval, but then they invited people to the wedding and took all the cash gifts for themselves. Lee Sun-il went on working at the market. Her aunt contacted her once in a blue moon, but there wasn’t much of an exchange between them. It had been many years since her aunt died. Lee Sun-il heard that she died while going around everywhere trying to find a way to fix her second or third daughter’s wrecked marriage; it was something she ate, which led to a sudden death away from home. The news reached Lee Sun-il’s ears long after she had died.

In the process of confirming her domicile to transfer it to that of her husband, she learned that her name was recorded on the original domicile certificate as “Lee Sun-il,” and that the name of her younger sister, born in 1948, was Eun-il. Lee Eun-il. On the records, her sister was alive; she hadn’t died. Her father, mother, and sister—none of them had died. Names that no one knew existed, neglected like a little plot of ground deep in the woods, were still on that piece of paper. After crossing out her name for marriage registration and the names of her family for death reports, Lee Sun-il had forgotten that she had ever seen the paper. She forgot about the X marks drawn neatly over the names, and the Chinese character meaning “naught (媜)” written on the paper. The forgotten names would indeed become things of naught when Lee Sun-il’s life came to an end. Lee Sun-il was the one who put away the paper. She had no intention of revealing to anyone the things those names had been through. She told no one about them. She knew that people could leave something behind in the world, through spoken or written words, and that some had succeeded in doing so; but she didn’t want to. All those awful stories . . . do I have to think back on them and talk about them? she wondered. She hoped her children, Han Yeong-jin and Han Se-jin and Han Man-su, would never have to experience those things even as stories.

Lee Sun-il’s grandfather died in the late 1970s. When she received the call, the elders of the village had already buried him on the mountain. Lee Sun-il was enraged when she heard the news. She thought it was rage that she felt. What else would you call it?

Dead? She thought. That old man is tormenting me to the end.

Nevertheless, she placed a bowl of cooked rice and a bowl of water on the wood-burning stove for half a day so he could eat and drink before he made his final departure. She hadn’t thought much of him during her life, but she never forgot the yellow envelope of money he’d brought on her wedding day and thought of it from time to time. I kept it in my hanbok sleeve and then lost it. Well, you must’ve had a hard life too, Grandfather. So rest now, rest in peace where you are, she prayed. It was after the mid-1980s when she began to tend to his grave. In 1986 . . . when the Asian Games in Seoul were in full swing, she received an international call. A woman called out her childhood name in a somewhat rough, high-pitched voice.

Sun-ja?

Excuse me?

Sun-ja!

Who is this?

Isn’t this Sun-ja, the daughter of Yun Ok-yeong who used to live in Cheorwon?

Who is this? Lee Sun-il asked repeatedly, feeling anger and fear toward the woman who was addressing her by her childhood name without even identifying herself; the woman then said that she was her aunt. It’s me, Bu-gyeong, your mom’s younger sister—Ok-yeong’s little sister.

Yun Bu-gyeong said she had left her home in the countryside, fed up with poverty and ignorance, and lived in Seoul for a while under the US military government; then she evacuated to Geoje Island right after the war broke out, and married a US soldier she’d met there. I came to America with him after the war. Her hometown was Baengmagoji, she said, which was close to the bloodiest fighting, so she had assumed that everyone had probably died anyway. Not speaking a word of English, she had a hard time adjusting to living in her husband’s country and just had to live each and every day the best she could. Her children were all grown up now and she had been thinking more and more of home when she happened to run into someone from home, who told her that there was only one left now.

There’s only one left.

One who’s still alive.

That aunt, too, was dead now. She passed away in June 2003, from the worsening of a liver disease. She'd visited Korea five times during the seventeen years since that first phone call until she passed away. In the meantime, her American husband died of a stroke while on a solitary fishing trip out to the lake on a holiday, and her son now had a daughter of his own. Her son accompanied her every time she visited Korea; he took more after his father than his mother, was a soldier like his father, and didn’t speak Korean. He made a telephone call to Korea to inform Lee Sun-il of his mother’s death. Sun-ja? He asked. Then he said in Korean, Mom, died.

Died?

Died.

Translated by Jung Yewon