The Hole Read online

  Oghi went to their apartment, which they’d just moved into. It was in an older-style building, where the apartment doors faced out onto long outdoor corridors, in the Mapo district of Seoul. An oversized couch upholstered in water buffalo, the leather worn thin in places, sat in the living room. It made the long, narrow room even narrower. A flat-screen television hanging on the opposite wall was so big that it seemed to press right up against the couch. Oghi’s father-in-law looked very much at home, sitting with both arms spread on the back of the couch and watching the golf channel with the volume turned all the way down. The people on the screen in their brightly colored clothes, tightening their buttocks and swinging their clubs, looked ridiculous, but the expression on his father-in-law’s face was overly solemn.

  His mother-in-law was wearing a housedress, the hem of which dragged on the floor. When she floated out in the dress to serve them tea on a shining silver tray, the effect was unsettling. The tea was scalding and must have been brewed from old leaves because it had no flavor whatsoever. Oghi blew on it to cool it down and drank every drop. Each time his mother-in-law walked back and forth through the cramped living room, her hem trailing, his father-in-law loudly clucked his tongue.

  And yet for some reason, aside from the tongue clucking, his father-in-law, who’d had so much to say before, kept his mouth shut this time. While his wife went into her room to change clothes, his mother-in-law pretended to read and did not look at Oghi or his father-in-law at all. Oghi had no idea where to rest his eyes so he slowly looked around at the interior of the apartment.

  It was apparent that they’d come down in the world: the foreign electronics that didn’t quite make sense there, the Kim Ki-chang painting of a red bird that was probably a reproduction but still a rare piece, the designer shoe boxes that didn’t all fit into the shoe cabinet and were stacked next to the front door instead. Adding to the impression was the fact that everything was too big for the apartment. The side-by-side Sub-Zero fridge stuck out into the living room, and small kitchen appliances—a toaster oven, a coffee machine, an electric kettle—were lined up on top of the heavy wooden dining table, making the living room feel even more cramped. He assumed the appliances had been placed there because it was the only space available; there wasn’t enough room to consider anything like traffic flow while cooking.

  Inside a glass display cabinet was a small lidded porcelain vase. Oghi stared at it for a long time. It was the only item that showed no marks of daily use in the cabinet, which was crammed with pots and pans, bowls and dishes, mugs and teacups, and other necessities.

  Perhaps his father-in-law’s unplanned early retirement and the need to reduce their lifestyle for whatever reason meant they’d had to sell off everything that was worth anything, and all that was left was that porcelain vase. Considering its unremarkable shape and its unusual blue tint, it couldn’t have been very expensive and must have therefore survived the selling off of the family’s possessions.

  Oghi’s wife came out to the living room and tapped him on the shoulder. Just then he realized that his mother-in-law was staring hard at him. His father-in-law likewise looked displeased.

  “What a lovely jagi vase,” Oghi said pointlessly, suddenly embarrassed.

  His father-in-law clucked his tongue and slumped deeper into the sofa. His mother-in-law was speechless. The sound of children playing outside drifted in through the window, and she abruptly went out to the balcony and screeched at them, “Hey, hey, keep it down! Go play over there instead!”

  His father-in-law clucked his tongue again and openly glared at her. Oghi was shocked. His father-in-law’s odd demeanor and his mother-in-law’s shrill yell had put him on edge.

  His wife made up an excuse to get them out the door and led Oghi out of the apartment. In the elevator on the way down, she told him why her father had resigned. She seemed to think it was explanation enough for her parents’ strange behavior. Before he could say anything in response, she burst into laughter.

  “And the other thing, jagi, that’s not jagi.”

  Oghi looked puzzled, which made her laugh even harder at her own pun on the words for “darling” and “porcelain.”

  “What’s so lovely about that ugly thing, anyway? You have a terrible eye for jagi.”

  “Is it a fake?”

  “Fake what? It’s not a vase, I tell you. It’s an urn.”

  “Why do they keep it at home?”

  “It holds my grandmother’s ashes.”

  Oghi tried not to act surprised. He was just being polite, but she seemed to find it more odd that he took the news so calmly.

  “Did you know?”

  “How could I?”

  “The thing about my mom is, she’s Japanese.”

  “Huh?”

  “To be precise, she’s half-Japanese. On her mother’s side. My mother grew up in Japan until middle school, and when my grandparents divorced, she came to Korea with my grandfather. He remarried to a Korean, and since that meant she had a stepmother to look after her, there was no reason for her to return to her mother in Japan. Not that my grandfather would have allowed it. A few years ago, one of her Japanese relatives managed to track her down and brought that urn over. But can you guess why they decided to come to Korea after all these years?”

  “To give her the urn,” Oghi said, as if the answer were obvious.

  “To go to Nami Island to see where that one TV show was shot. Because they’re fans of the actor Bae Yong-jun. ‘Yon-sama,’ as they call him, was the only reason my mother was finally reunited with her mother.”

  They both had a good laugh over that.

  “Why doesn’t she have it placed in a mausoleum?”

  “I think she meant to do so eventually, but it ended up staying in the house. She says the house she grew up in had a butsudan. You’ve seen one before, right? It’s an ancestral shrine that’s kept inside traditional Japanese homes. I guess since my mother grew up seeing urns in the butsudan, it doesn’t seem strange to her.”

  “I saw one in a book once. It said the urns are only kept in the butsudan for forty-nine days.”

  “I wish she’d only kept it there for forty-nine days… I thought it was creepy at first. Whenever I pictured my grandmother’s powdered bones in there, I couldn’t look at it.”

  “What about now?”

  “Now I don’t even think about it. Every now and then someone will mistake it for a vase, like you did, and I’ll have a good laugh about it… But I’m still afraid of it sometimes.”

  “Why? Do you hear voices coming from it or something?”

  “My mother talks to it.” She lowered her voice like she was telling him a secret. “She strokes it and mumbles under her breath. In this really babyish voice, like she’s talking to her mother. That’s when I feel creeped out.”

  “What does she say to it?”

  “How would I know? It’s all in Japanese.”

  “Wow, so she never lost the language?”

  “Not all of it. She said her father didn’t allow her to speak Japanese. That he got really angry whenever her mother spoke it. He was worried people would mistake her for Japanese. She told me that because she’d lived in Japan up until middle school, she spoke Korean with an accent and so she didn’t talk much. I think she must’ve been teased by other kids or got funny looks from people.”

  It was the first time she’d told Oghi about her family. She might’ve not said anything before because she didn’t think there was anything special about them, but to Oghi it was extremely interesting. He felt like he’d solved a riddle. It especially helped him to understand his mother-in-law. When he overlaid the image he had of Japanese people onto his mother-in-law, who was refined and elegant but difficult to get to know, certain things began to make sense. Though it wasn’t a very nice method, whenever he felt like he didn’t understand his wife’s family, he simply told himself he was dealing with foreigners.

  6

  THE GARDEN WAS A WRECK. Oghi wondere
d how anything could fall apart so completely in just eight months. The plants stood, long-dead and withered, their roots still planted in the soil. The sight of those dead stalks standing straight and tall terrified him. It looked like the same garden he’d seen when the realtor first showed them the place. The same garden where the senile old woman and the feeble old man had watched Oghi and his wife from under the shade.

  The garden that his wife had cared for was gone. He couldn’t remember which flowers had bloomed there. That was partly the fault of Oghi’s indifference, but also testimony to her design, so organic and harmonious that no single plant had outshone the others.

  People walking past had often stopped to take a longer look at the garden after catching a glimpse over the low iron fence. Some had even asked permission to come in for a closer look. Oghi and his wife were happy to let them. His wife was proud of the garden, and Oghi was proud of her. Compared to the other houses on the block, the owners of which had either planted a more modest garden of similarly sized pines and shrubs or gotten rid of their high-maintenance gardens altogether and went for a modern look with only the house and bare yard, Oghi’s was a sight to behold.

  His wife had labored for years to bring the garden to that point. She’d failed the first year. She had planted a similar variety of shrub as the house next door, but they were all dead before two seasons had passed. The following year was not much better. The garden didn’t begin to take shape until the third year. That was the year before last.

  Oghi wasn’t exactly sure why his wife had been so keen on gardening. But he knew when her enthusiasm for it had started. That is, when she started putting their yard to a different use.

  They had originally used the yard for barbecuing. They’d furnished the yard with a large picnic table right in the middle, a sun umbrella, and two barbecue grills side by side, on which they grilled high-quality tenderloin and sirloin, sausages and potatoes, mushrooms and other fixings. Now and then they invited others and hosted cozy get-togethers. His wife’s family and Oghi’s old school friends came over. His colleagues also came.

  It was after his old grad school friends came for a party that his wife changed the purpose of the yard. She sold the picnic table and shoved the barbecue grills and tools into the garage. Then she began overturning the soil. Though it was impossible to miss what she was doing, Oghi didn’t realize just how determined she was until several days later.

  Oghi was very busy at the time. He’d taken an interest in other work outside of his department that was worth adding to his resume, and was going all out with it. He put together a research team with funding from a foundation, was on several academic committees, and never turned down an opportunity to do consulting work. Books he’d published were being selected as recommended reads by different organizations and he even received the occasional lecture request. He accepted at first out of novelty, but later he kept accepting because he could reuse the same material. Some of his lectures took him as far away as Daegu, Gunsan, Busan.

  Oghi had always had a hard time explaining what field he was in. Even when he said he did geography, people assumed he meant history. He’d taken pains in the beginning to explain that geography was the study of drawing the world whereas history was a form of literature in which you wrote about the world, but later he stopped feeling the need to explain. At any rate, experts knew the difference, and non-experts didn’t care.

  Now and then he’d get a comment from someone about how being a geographer must make him a whiz at real estate and that he must’ve bought some nice land for himself, and Oghi, no longer caught off guard by this sort of thing, would joke that that was why he’d bought a townhouse.

  He chose cartography for his dissertation topic because of his new advisor. The advisor, who was retired and busy writing his memoirs, had told Oghi it was pointless to spend his life studying topology in such a tiny country and urged him to switch to cartography instead. Oghi did as suggested. He felt compelled to follow this advice, since he’d been unable to complete his PhD before his former advisor had stepped down.

  His former advisor got angry at Oghi. He warned him it was dangerous to specialize in cartography because the field had only recently gained acceptance in Korea. The only reputable cartographers were mostly from Europe or the US, which meant that unless you’d studied abroad, there wasn’t much point. He gave Oghi some convincing advice: research on maps and mapmaking was still so new that the future of those scholars was harder to read than the maps they were trying to study. Oghi took it all to heart but did not change his dissertation.

  His upper classmates gave him hell for it. They hadn’t been like that at first. It started as reluctant praise. Gradually that changed to them saying Oghi was crafty. One said Oghi was the type who would abandon his wife and children to ensure his own success. They masked their disdain as self-criticism. Oghi had quite the sharp eye, they said, they should’ve been more like him. What was wrong with them, why were they so inflexible? Later they were open with their hostility: Thought he was just bitching about his dissertation, who knew he was deliberately stalling for time? Son of a bitch was strategic. Just you wait, they said, assholes like him always succeed.

  In order to prove how wrong they were about him, Oghi poured himself into researching map projections and spent considerable time staring at old rectangular maps. He studied as many as he could, from ancient Babylonian to contemporary. The more he did so, the more forlorn he felt. No matter how hard you tried to draw the world, you could never be exact. That was what Oghi learned from his research. It was impossible to capture the trajectory of life in a map. Without one, there was no way of wrapping your brain around it all, and yet he was skeptical as to whether you could ever represent the world through maps alone.

  But it was meaningful. Someone had taken these invisible trajectories that could not be studied with any sort of accuracy and had tried anyway to turn them into a tangible space. He found it boring sometimes for the same reason. A world that could not be understood perfectly, could not be explained unambiguously, and was interpreted differently based on political purposes and conveniences was no different from the world he was already living in. And yet, the one way in which maps were clearly better than life was that they improved with failure. Life itself was merely an accumulation of failures, and those failures never made life better.

  Oghi wracked his brain for ways to put his studies to practical use. He noted the proliferation of mapping services like Google Earth and began researching the implications of online maps. This in turn led to writing a column and giving lectures. Ancient maps didn’t profit Oghi at all, but when he combined them with Google Earth, it opened the door to opportunities outside of his department.

  In his lectures, Oghi quoted the American geographer Waldo Tobler: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” But he departed from Tobler’s original intent by using it as the setup to a punch line: “And that’s why you better be nice to your kids and never cheat on your spouse.” He closed his lectures with the cynical declaration that, “Maps do not show the world as it truly is. That would be impossible. There is no such thing as a perfect map and there never will be.”

  After his first lecture, Oghi was ashamed of himself for having prattled off a bunch of simple and obvious information in a voice obnoxious with certainty, but he soon realized that audiences found that sort of preachiness trustworthy.

  When his colleagues regarded his focus on extra-departmental work and lecture circuits with displeasure, Oghi reminded himself that he was well into his late forties and fell back on his advancing age as an excuse.

  Whenever he thought about being in his forties, the first thing that came to mind was his mother. Forty was the age at which she’d taken her own life. Forty was also the age at which his father solidified his position at work, began looking into opening up his own business, and stopped coming home at night. The forties were a turning point, as it were, t
he decade of your life in which you either learned to fit in or dropped out completely. Oghi, naturally, wanted to fit in.

  To overcome his tendency to feel ashamed of himself, he took to recalling a poem by Heo Yeon that his wife had once read to him. The poem contained a line that read, The forties are well suited to all manner of sin. Thinking about that put him at relative ease. It reassured him to think that it wasn’t just him, that it came with the decade.

  Not long ago, Oghi had looked the poem up again. He’d been planning to write a column on the snobbishness of men in their forties, and he wanted to quote the first stanza. He pulled down every copy of Heo Yeon’s poetry collections from his wife’s bookshelf and studied the tables of content, but he couldn’t find a single poem with the word forty or forties in the title.

  He wasn’t mistaken about who the poet was. He vividly remembered reading the poem with his wife and discussing it. They had talked about how the thirties were to Choi Seungja as the forties were to Heo Yeon. If Choi was the poet who gave voice to the cluelessness of one’s thirties, then Heo Yeon was the one who captured the corrupt forties. Who speaks for the fifties? his wife had asked, but neither of them could come up with a poet and went back and forth suggesting different possibilities only to joke that the fifties were when you understood everything and so what was the point of poetry.

  Oghi read through every collection of Heo Yeon’s poetry and finally tracked down the poem. It made no mention of the forties at all, not in the body of the poem, and of course not in the title. His best guess was that they had assumed from the poet’s own age that he was talking about that decade. Oghi was flummoxed. The first time he’d heard the poem, he was so certain that it was about one’s forties.

  As far as Oghi was concerned, there was no better definition than the phrase “well suited to all manner of sin.” The forties were ripe for sin. And there were two basic reasons: either you had too much, or you didn’t have enough. In other words, the forties were when you found it easy to do bad things out of power, out of anger, or out of feeling left behind. People with too much power got arrogant and easily committed evil deeds. Anger and the sense that life had passed you by messed with your self-esteem, made you feel low, took away your patience, and made it easy to package your acts as being about justice. If you abused power, you were a snob; if you lashed out in anger, you were a loser. Therefore, the forties were the decade that showed you what your life had amounted to thus far. Not only that, they were also the decade in which you could guess at what lay ahead. Would you remain a snob? Or be left a loser?