The Hole Read online

  If those were the only two categories, then Oghi was closer to the first. Whether he was aware of it or not, he had gradually come to have more than others, and had blatantly resorted to underhanded means because he wanted to have even more, and felt no scruples about it. But there were also times when his life felt so perfect that he didn’t wish to change a single thing. He did not want to lose a single possession. He was critical of his father’s relentless drive for achievement, and yet he was already living by those same values.

  Now and then Oghi would catch himself clenching his fists. Sometimes he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it, even after they’d been clenched for so long that his palms had turned stiff and red. As he opened and closed his hands to release the tension, he would wonder just what it was he was holding on to so tightly. He never had to think on it long.

  Though Oghi had never once thought of his wife as a failure, he worried that she might think of herself that way. Every goal she’d set out to accomplish had ended in failure, and she rarely got to feel what it was like to live up to her own abilities. It would have been better for her if she could have seen life as joyful despite that, but at some point she changed. She stopped seeing her friends. She stopped taking classes to learn new things, and she no longer mentioned any role models. She did not walk around with photos in her wallet or talk about wanting to write. She didn’t even read as much as she used to, and would only flip through Kinfolk or gardening magazines from time to time. Sometimes Oghi would come into the living room and she would be looking around at their house and garden with a look in her eyes that said, Where am I? When he recalled that look, he started to wonder if she’d immersed herself in plants as a way of satisfying her hunger for life.

  Of course, she could have had another reason entirely: to take the yard away from Oghi. Considering when she’d started gardening, that was the likeliest reason.

  She had claimed the yard for herself after their last barbecue, when Oghi and his guests had stayed up late out in the yard, drinking and chatting and laughing and planning the next one.

  Oghi and his guests had all gone to the same grad school, albeit at different times. M, who taught in the same department as Oghi, was the first of the group to graduate. K and Oghi finished the same year and interviewed for the same teaching position: Oghi got the job; K didn’t. J graduated after them and started up the research team with Oghi. And S was Oghi’s student and first teaching assistant.

  There was a time when they had all felt the same uncertainty about their futures and harbored similar curiosities. Together they’d regretted choosing grad school, gracefully resigned themselves to their choices, and got drunk often. It was a time when their friendship had flourished for lack of hope. In fact, that was how they’d become friends in the first place. Then things changed. Their close-knit days waned, though Oghi still got along with them.

  His wife had known them for a long time too. Whenever she joined them, she fit right in without any awkwardness. She was even the one who’d planned that night’s party. She had sat at the large teak picnic table under the umbrella, conversing comfortably with everyone, helping Oghi to grill the meat, and quickly spiriting away empty dishes to refill them in the kitchen with something new.

  Oghi had been very concerned, above all, to not look like they’d invited them there to show off. But in his eagerness to avoid doing that, he bragged instead about how big their bank loan was and how high their monthly interest payments were. He immediately regretted opening his mouth.

  It was still early, but J got drunk and started nodding off. Since M and K’s conversation showed no signs of tapering, Oghi helped J to the living room sofa before grabbing another bottle of wine from the kitchen. A few days earlier while at the department store, Oghi had found a very tannic French wine that M was fond of, and he’d bought several bottles.

  No one else was drunk. Not his wife, and not any of their other guests. The hours had passed with quiet conversation over slow sips of wine about nothing in particular but plenty of laughter and no arguments. It was a satisfying get-together and a proper party.

  His wife hadn’t seen it that way. The next day she was indignant and lashed out at Oghi. He tried to appease her. To convince her that what she thought had happened absolutely had not.

  This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. She had a habit of finding fault with some little thing and then blowing it all out of proportion and imagining the worst. She would become very sharp and high-strung and believe only what was in her own head, dead certain that she knew the truth. She’d reject everything Oghi tried to tell her and insist that he was lying, he had to be, as if intent on cornering him until he confessed. After she was done lashing out and venting her anger, she would eventually get around to apologizing. Then blaming it on her tendency to exaggerate and promising him again that she would try to think only positive thoughts from then on.

  Oghi didn’t mind so much. It was annoying, but he didn’t get angry. After all, she wasn’t always like that.

  The very next day, she plowed up their yard. She wasn’t satisfied with merely pulling up the dead roots and tilling the earth but instead seemed intent on turning over every last bit of soil that she set foot on. After she finished plowing, she went to a nursery, bought some seedlings, and planted them. They all died.

  Then she got a little more serious. She bought gardening books, read them, spent the entire day outside, and consulted professional gardening manuals while drafting several maps of a garden. Each morning when Oghi left for work, his wife put on a sun hat with a wide brim that covered most of her face, regardless of whether the sun was out or not, pulled on a pair of rugged gardening gloves, wrapped a towel around her neck, slipped on black arm guards meant to protect her skin from UV rays, pulled on a pair of rubber boots, and went outside to tamp the soil flat. When he returned home in the evening, she was invariably sitting in the garden, still in the same getup but scruffier and more soiled than when he’d left. She only left the house to go to the nursery or to the Yangjae Flower Market. In addition to a trowel and hoe, she also bought a rake, a pick, pruning shears, wooden stakes, and burlap sacks, and explained the purpose of each item to Oghi.

  Oghi suggested they hire a gardener instead. His wife was not so inclined. Oghi stood by and watched. Only when she announced that she was going to buy enough soil to cover the entire yard did he shake his head no and make his displeasure clear.

  “We bought a house, not a flower garden.”

  “But we don’t have any worms.”

  “Worms?”

  “The soil here is dead. Who ever heard of soil without worms? It has to have worms. That’s the only way anything will grow. Not only that, but the ground outside the house…”

  She stopped there and laughed. Oghi had a feeling that what she was about to say next was not going to be funny, and he was right.

  “It smells like ammonia. I think that old couple pissed in the yard.”

  Oghi frowned. If his wife was passionate about something, then he wanted to support her no matter what. He was fond of his wife who was gifted but failed at everything she set out to do, and who only grew more talented at sarcasm and derision without ever acquiring a sense of accomplishment. If Oghi had spent the last years expanding his domain, then his wife had been left further and further behind as time went on. When he thought about what she was like in her younger days, her current state was indeed unfortunate.

  Nevertheless, the thought of her squatting in the yard and digging endlessly in the dirt so she could sniff someone else’s piss or hunt for earthworms left him with a bad taste in his mouth. Of course he knew she was just trying to figure out whether or not the soil was healthy, but the bizarre look on her face when she told him the soil had no worms and the way she cackled as she pictured the old people pissing in the yard made the house—which he’d barely been able to afford—suddenly seem revolting.

  His wife bought soil anyway and plowed the front
yard again. She mixed the top and bottom layers of soil together to get the oxygen moving through them. Each shovelful of dirt was used to fill the space that had been dug before it.

  To the right of their front door, she planted shrubs and berries, and to the left she planted flowers and herbs and other plants that required frequent tending. At the innermost part of the yard, she made a raised bed for vegetables. On both sides of the house, she planted trees. Right next to the front door went crape-myrtle, and to the right of the building she moved the two magnolias that were there when they bought the house and planted a camphor tree to the left.

  To the right and left of the paving stones that extended from the front door to the front gate, she planted perennials: crocus, anemone, caladium, dahlia, ranunculus. Oghi called all of them flowers and could not tell them apart. His wife placed tiny placards beneath them. Sometimes she would cover one of the placards and ask Oghi to name the plant. Even though Oghi knew the right answer would have made her happy, he responded gruffly. She sounded genuinely puzzled as she asked, “How come you can’t remember?” Each time Oghi inwardly retorted, What’s the point of remembering? But the truth was that Oghi wasn’t confident he could tell the difference between lily turf and lavender. Anemone and crocus were likewise hard to tell apart, as they were practically identical in size and color. Even when his wife explained to him that the crocuses had yellow stamens while the anemones’ stamens were a darker purple than the leaves, it made no difference.

  He especially hated it when she tried to tell him about the language of flowers. No matter what anyone claimed about the significance of flowers, they held no more meaning than the horoscopes printed in the daily paper. But she never tired of telling him about it. Things like, the language of anemones is fading desire or short-lived love. Though he nodded indifferently, he could not erase the thought that his wife was becoming insufferably immature.

  The garden failed the first year. His wife was not as disappointed as he had expected her to be. She said it would take several years for the garden to flourish, and sat back down at her desk for hours on end amending her garden plan. At some point she said she was going to turn it into an English-style garden. What on earth was an English garden? Was it one of those gardens with all the flashy colors and irregular jumble of trees that somehow still made sense together? She started bringing him cups of imported British tea whenever he was in his study. On one of those occasions he caught a glimpse of her hands. They were covered in nicks and cuts from her gardening shears, and there was dirt under every fingernail. She said she couldn’t feel the plants with gloves on, and so she worked barehanded as much as possible. When he pictured her washing and cooking rice and making soup from soybean paste and mallow leaves or boiling up a tofu stew with those hands, he lost his appetite.

  Whenever he couldn’t understand his wife’s obsession with gardening, he thought back to how she used to carry a photo of Oriana Fallachi in her wallet and talked about wanting to become a journalist, and then he understood. Maybe her new goal was to be like Tasha Tudor. Maybe she wanted to write a gardening book of her own. Of course, like all of her other projects, that book would never get written. As far as he could tell, that was his wife’s problem. Always wanting to be like someone else. And always giving up before she reached the end.

  On weekends, Oghi had no choice but to help in the garden. His wife enjoyed setting him to different tasks. He quickly tired of scratching his forearms on stalks and stems and watching the skin swell and redden. He was forced to put up with his wife’s scolding that he was deliberately doing a bad job in order to get out of helping her. But he actually enjoyed squatting side by side with her and exchanging pleasantries with neighbors who peeked over their fence as they walked past. He’d never exactly longed for that kind of domestic joy, but he couldn’t deny that he’d pictured it now and then over the years. And of course, included in that cozy picture were geraniums on a windowsill, herbs planted in a large reddish-brown pot.

  One day, Oghi asked his wife, “Why don’t you hire a professional gardener and do something else with your time?”

  She stared at him for a moment, her face unchanging, and quietly said, “Something else?”

  “Something besides this, you know, something that will help you grow.”

  “I stopped growing a long time ago. Only plants keep growing, not people. We stop after a certain age.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of growth. I mean find something that you want—”

  “There is one thing that keeps growing,” she said, cutting him off.

  “What’s that?”

  “Cancer. Cancer grows in people even after they’ve stopped growing.”

  She giggled.

  “I mean that you should find something you really want to do.”

  “This is what I really want to do.”

  Oghi realized he’d made a mistake. There was nothing stupider than telling someone to grow or to find themselves, but that’s precisely what he’d just done. And to his wife, who knew better than anyone what a hack he was.

  Oghi decided to leave his wife alone. It didn’t matter to him what she did to the garden. No matter how much money she spent, he would consent to her wishes. She had the skills, and he had the means. His plan was to respect his wife’s life, her preferences, her choices. In fact, he made that decision because he didn’t want to care. But he did make one request. That she not cover the walls of the house with vines or other climbing plants.

  Though he had no particular affection for plants, he did sometimes marvel at how trees grew so straight and tall against gravity. But he did not feel the same about climbing plants. They gave him the creeps, the way they would wrap around a fence or a pillar, growing in spirals, the stem circling and circling until it found something to climb, coiling itself around an object the moment the barest tip of the stem made the slightest contact, inching its way up. The stems were covered in suckers, and the idea that they generated enough suction to climb walls and fences and cover entire buildings frightened him. It looked dreadful when they clung to things, planting their roots wherever, willfully burrowing, gorging themselves.

  His wife tried several times to teach Oghi. She explained that it wasn’t strength or force that enabled plants to climb but rather a hormone within the plant that moved in the opposite direction of whatever part of it came in contact with another object. This kept the stem coiling inward and moving up and around the object the longer it grew. It was simply a different form of growth. He found her explanation convincing, but it still turned his stomach to imagine a plant with that much ferocity.

  It was not long before the accident that Oghi discovered something creeping up the back wall of the house. He had no reason to be back there, but on that particular day, his phone rang while he was out in the garden, and he’d slunk behind the house to answer it.

  Because he was in the middle of a call, he could not react as loudly as he would’ve liked to when he discovered the plants. Vines that looked like honeysuckle had encroached over nearly the entire back wall of the house. His wife had been growing them there, letting the vines grow thick and dense, where Oghi wouldn’t notice them. It seemed she had erected supports some distance from the windows, and the stems climbing the walls were not visible from the front of the house. Considering how fast they grew, they must have crept around the side of the house at some point, but his nimble-fingered wife had cut them back in time. Oghi was horrified and raked his wife over the coals for it.

  Now that she had been rendered incapable of tending the garden, the trees, grass, and flowers had all died, but the vines on the back wall had grown all the more lush, and their grip was so powerful that they were stretching and spreading around to the front of the house at an alarming pace. Each time the wind blew, Oghi saw enormous ivy leaves shaking outside his bedroom window. He gazed up uneasily at those dark green leaves. It would not be long now before they’d encroached over the entire window and blocked out his view. />
  7

  OGHI WAS WOKEN BY NOISE coming from the living room. It sounded like people singing in a low murmur. Wondering what was going on, Oghi tried to summon the caregiver by giving two long blows on his whistle.

  “Are you up?”

  His mother-in-law came through the door instead. Her voice was loud and cheery. The complete opposite of her usual quiet way of talking or the indecipherable muttering she did when it was just the two of them.

  Each time she mumbled, Oghi assumed she was talking to him and tried to catch her eyes, to ask her to speak up. But she never once responded. It didn’t even embarrass her to be caught talking to herself. Compared to that, it was much better seeing her as she was today, looking and sounding perky.

  She was excited about something. He’d never seen her like this before. He realized for the first time that there were many sides to his mother-in-law that he hadn’t yet seen, and that he’d probably continue to discover them as time went on.

  “You’ll never guess who’s come to visit!”

  Oghi remained silent.

  “Hold on to your hat!”

  The only thing that would’ve sent Oghi’s hat flying was if his dead wife had come back to life.

  His mother-in-law opened the door and a group of people trooped in and circled Oghi’s bed. It was early morning, but they were dressed in black suits like they were on their way to a funeral, and in their hands they carried leather-bound Bibles. They greeted Oghi with smiles. They remarked on how great he looked, on how his eyes shined. It would have made more sense for them to frown or make pitying looks the moment they saw him, but instead their smiles grew wider. Oghi stared at his mother-in-law, asking for her help.