City of Ash and Red Read online

  The reason he’d kept a dog that he hated was entirely the fault of his ex-wife. She loved the dog and had promised to take it after the divorce, but he stubbornly insisted on keeping the dog simply to prevent her from having it.

  “Why do you keep asking for the dog?” he asked. “Don’t you know how much I care about it?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  He felt a little guilty but didn’t let that stop him.

  “Well, now you know.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she hissed and hung up.

  They repeated this routine at least seven times. Then, just when he had figured he’d gone far enough and decided to give her back the dog, she told him she could no longer look after it. He found out later that his ex-wife was already hot and heavy with Yujin by then, and Yujin hated dogs, too.

  The man could no longer stand the dog and was impatient to return it to her, but she stubbornly refused. He threatened to abandon the dog, but she was undaunted and told him to go ahead. She was so intent on making the most of her second marriage that she refused him even the slightest consideration. It was only natural, but it made him nearly crazy with hurt. He felt like he was the one abandoned, not the dog.

  But leaving the dog behind wasn’t that big of a deal. At first it had him so flustered that he could barely think straight, but really all he had to do was call someone back home and ask them to get the dog—once he figured out who to call. Since his apartment had keyless locks, anyone could get in as long as he told them the passcode. He was hoping that whoever he managed to talk into getting the dog would also look after it for him, but if they couldn’t, since looking after someone else’s dog nowadays was no easy task, they could board the dog at a kennel instead or contact his ex-wife so she could take it. The dog would only have to go without food for one or two more days at the most until he could get in touch with someone. A couple more days wouldn’t kill it.

  He took the sandwich from the fallen bag and chewed it slowly, then suddenly remembered something else. The day he left the country, the dog had not followed him to the door. Usually the dog was so insistent, getting fur all over his pants every single time he left for work, that he had to kick the dog away just to squeeze through the door. But why, on that day, was it not by his side?

  He had not packed until the morning of his departure. He should have started packing several days in advance or, at the very least, the day before, but the notice of his start date came as a surprise, and the closer the date came, the more he had to do, the more people he had to meet, and the more official and personal business he had to take care of. That was why he had not boarded the dog.

  His old college friends had held a going-away party for him the night before he left. Or rather, they’d slapped that label on it at the last minute, but it was really just one of their regular get-togethers. Considering that he was leaving the next morning and hadn’t even packed yet, he should have skipped it. But the friend in charge of organizing it pressured him to at least drop by, if only for a moment. The man knew the real reason his friend was so insistent was that it was his first time organizing one of their get-togethers, and having everyone there would be a big coup, but the man went anyway, intending only to eat dinner and leave. His transfer—everything about which, except for the start date, was now up in the air—had been intended to last a minimum of six months, but the transfer letter specified that if his work did not see results in that time, it could take as long as five years. For him as a single man, there was no difference between six months and five years spent abroad, so he didn’t mind that his return date was unspecified. In fact, if he could have, he would have left sooner and stayed that much longer.

  In the end, he did not leave the party early. Just as he was about to get up and go, Yujin walked in. Yujin was the real reason he’d joined them in the first place. Yujin exchanged a noisy round of greetings with everyone and took a seat near the door. Soyo, who was seated next to the man, started whispering to him.

  “Did you hear? He got a divorce.”

  The man was shocked to hear this. Yujin had been married for less than two years, and to none other than the man’s own ex-wife. If Yujin was divorced, then that meant his ex-wife was also a divorcée again. But she hadn’t said a word about it to him.

  Yujin, who was seated far away from the man, looked glum all throughout the party. But according to Soyo, it was not because of the divorce. Yujin was already involved with another woman. The man was amazed that anyone could go from marriage and divorce to a new love affair so quickly. He pitied Yujin’s poor judgment and lack of success. That pity filled him with a pleasant sense of security.

  As the rounds of drinks kept coming, some of the guys changed seats, some went home early, and others wound up slumped in corners, too drunk to move, and the man found himself seated next to Yujin. He affected a voice excited with drink and asked Yujin, who had so far pretended to ignore him, what secret power he had that enabled him to fall so tenaciously in love. Yujin could tell he was being sarcastic and said firmly that if he was talking about their ex-wife then he had nothing to say to him. The man wasn’t interested in talking to Yujin about their ex-wife either. Especially not in a place like this, where their friends were paying close attention, eyeing the two of them seated side by side while pretending to stuff grilled meat in their mouths or tip back glasses of alcohol, like eyewitnesses to a scandal. But he could do nothing to prevent their curiosity.

  “Zees woman, she ees terribly attractive, no?” one of their friends asked in a fake foreign accent, pretending to be drunker than he really was.

  The man did not respond, but Yujin glared at the friend.

  “Shut up.”

  “If she’s not attractive, then what is she? Easy? Because otherwise, divorced twice—”

  The friend didn’t get the chance to finish. His mouth was closed for him by Yujin’s fist. The man felt grateful to Yujin. It had been a long time since he had been able to take that sort of thing as a joke. The fun was instantly ruined, but in an effort to prevent a bigger fight from breaking out, everyone acted as if the friend had had it coming. The friend wrapped his hand around his throbbing chin and cussed at Yujin in a low voice while several other men held him back.

  Yujin shook off the men who were trying to stop him and stood up. The friend looked like he was debating whether it would be better to hit Yujin back and recover some of his dignity, or to just take it and pretend to be the good guy. Nobody wanted the fight to escalate—not even the one who got punched wanted the evening to end in a pointless bar brawl—but he continued to glare stubbornly at Yujin, as if not doing anything would mean acknowledging that he was in the wrong and thus risking a wound to his pride.

  Soyo, who had been nervously watching the two of them, jumped in and said, “The world is full of available women and everybody cheats, so why make such a big deal over divorce? Besides, it’s not unusual for two men to love the same woman or for one woman to be in love with two different men, so why is it so scandalous for a woman to love two different men in a row?”

  Soyo spoke eloquently on their behalf. But he and Yujin were offended all the same. They felt more deeply insulted than when their ex-wife was thoughtlessly called “easy,” since Soyo seemed to imply that they were both fools who’d been played by the same woman. But to put a finer point on it, Soyo was not exactly right when he said that she’d loved them “in a row.” Granted, their marriage was already on the rocks by then, but it was apparent that she had started seeing Yujin while she was still married to him. And she had continued to see him every now and then after she was married to Yujin.

  No sooner had Soyo finished his long speech than the man’s fist and Yujin’s body both came flying at him. Soyo ducked the punch but was knocked backward onto the table with Yujin wrapped around him. Soyo grabbed Yujin’s necktie and pulled. Yujin spluttered and choked. The others were barely able to pull them apart. When Soyo righted himself, blood was pouring down his face from
a broken nose or a busted head or a split lip, or possibly all three at once. The man reached out to try to help clean up the blood, but Soyo shoved his hand away angrily.

  “You’re the bigger asshole. You two are exactly alike.”

  The man took Soyo’s verbal abuse and then got up and followed Yujin, who’d already left to go to another bar.

  To him, his ex-wife was not easy, she was incomprehensible. The manager of a piano school, she used to close up early and go out drinking with friends, and would call him at the last minute, no advance warning whatsoever, to inform him that she was spending the night at her friend’s house. She would disappear for days at a time to take trips with friends, all of whom he knew only by their first names and nothing else. More than once he’d come home early from work and was resting when students’ parents rang their home number to complain that the school doors were locked and the teacher wasn’t answering their calls. Sometimes, just to get them off the phone, he lied and told them he was only a tenant. It was the same with family events that he absolutely had to attend. She would refuse to go if her feelings had been hurt or if she was simply not in the mood, and he would be hard-pressed to come up with excuses for her absence.

  He overlooked her drinking and her frequent outings, her staying out overnight and taking off on trips, her neglecting the housework. He never felt he could express his anger by shouting at her, but she mistook his silence for understanding. Sometimes, out of the blue, she would give him an apologetic look and thank him, and each time she did this, his feelings were hurt and he had to admit to himself that he did not understand his wife in the slightest. He wanted other people to think he was a generous and thoughtful husband, and he did not want to scream and yell, so he did his best to tolerate the unacceptable. But, for the usual old-fashioned and conservative reasons, he secretly branded all of his wife’s friends as trash and was deeply suspicious of whether she was faithful to him.

  Whenever his wife was out of the house, he went through her desk drawers, examined one by one everything she wrote in her journal, and memorized all of the names that he found there. He painstakingly pondered the trivial contents of the notes she had written, interpreting lines of poetry that she had clearly jotted down for no reason, like “I’ll have to pay for myself / with myself, / give up my life for my life,” as metaphors for her infidelity, which left him simultaneously elated at thinking he’d found evidence and clutching at his aching heart as if he had caught her in the very act, only to wonder the next moment what on earth giving up your life for your life meant and concluding that his wife must have decided to live life a little more fully and nothing more. With that thought, he would feel relieved that his wife had not in fact cheated on him, while still despairing over the lingering suspicion that she had erased the evidence of some regretted indiscretion.

  She was the first to suggest divorce. He raped her late one night, after she arrived home drunk from one of her outings. They’d already been headed for a split, but after that there was no going back. He had rolled off of her like trash succumbing to gravity, and she, still fully cognizant despite being drunk, got up from the bed, pulled her clothes back on, and in a cold voice told him that while adultery was forgivable, rape was not. Then she took her suitcase out of the closet and started to pack. Without bothering to pull his pants back up, he looked down at his flaccid penis and turned to lie facedown on the bed, stretching his limbs in an attempt to mimic the way their dog would stretch at their feet. Only then did he realize that he had done something he could never take back, and he lost the confidence to look his wife in the face. She sat with her back stubbornly turned to him as she packed her clothes. Bent over, her back with its prominent vertebrae looked thin and frail. He was overcome by an ill-timed urge to stroke the gentle curve of her spine (he reached his hand through the air toward her in vain) and wondered, if she really was walking out on him, where on earth was she planning to go, when would she be back to get her belongings that didn’t fit in the suitcase, and was she only pretending to pack in order to give him time to apologize? When he observed how calmly she was packing, he began to suspect that she had anticipated this would happen and had been plotting all along to trick him into raping her so she could turn him into the guilty partner and divorce him. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that her emotional and psychological freedom, to say nothing of her sexual freedom, was more than he could handle. His only evidence of this was the unhappiness he felt over his wife’s infidelity and the suspicion that had given rise to that unhappiness. He had questions, but she would refuse him any answers, and because he could not answer his questions himself, he kept his mouth shut. Even as he held back his words, he got the feeling it was not him but his wife who was holding back, and as he watched his wife’s back bob up and down calmly, with no regard for his agitation or his suspicions, he realized that their marriage was well and truly over, even without his resorting to rape or the suitcase packed tight with clothes.

  One night after the divorce, when he was alone in bed and masturbating, unable to ignore the urge, he tried to recall the sounds his ex-wife used to make in bed. It wasn’t so much that he lusted for her as that she was the one he had slept with regularly, and though their sex life had not been all that great, he knew where she liked to be touched. He started imagining his ex-wife’s stifled gasps only to burst out laughing and lose his erection. He realized he had confused her with an actress in a porn video he’d watched late one night when he had no other way of relieving the tension that flooded his hips. The only sound he clearly remembered his wife making in bed, if by that he meant any sound in bed at all, were the words, “You son of a bitch, we’re through.” Those were the words he heard the moment he violently shoved his erect self into her dry vagina. He’d heard those words and fucked her even harder, as though he really were a dog, but he had derived no pleasure from the deed, and he was left afterward with a deeper grief than he had first anticipated.

  A few days later, as he was signing every page of the divorce papers his wife sent him, he felt lighthearted. Mere papers could not contain everything he had put up with, all of his suspicions, the things he’d thought he understood but didn’t, and the things he might have actually understood to some extent but, by the time the ink was dry, he no longer cared about. The divorce went according to form, succinct and perfunctory, and required only their time.

  From that point on, his suspicions regarding his wife’s infidelity were left as neurotic misgivings. It was better for him to drop it, both for her sake and his. It was a good thing that he hadn’t taken his suspicions any further. Who knew what he would have done if he had confirmed her infidelity? He had even seen a psychiatrist about it but still found it difficult to admit that unjustified doubts had taken over his mind. He wanted proof, and was willing to hire a detective if it came to that. For his sake, his wife had to have been cheating. He could not accept the idea that his marriage had fallen apart and that he had caused pain to the person he loved—in other words, that he alone had ruined everything—because of a mistaken idea. What drove him to that failure had to be something outside of himself, if not his wife’s infidelity then a society that had driven him to suspicion.

  Perhaps because he did not try very hard to hide the fact of his divorce, word got out on its own. Concerned that keeping silent in the face of people’s curiosity would only inspire more lurid imaginings, he told people that his ex-wife had never once served him a home-cooked meal. It was too simple a reason for a relationship to end, and yet the people he talked to acted as if they now understood what kind of a wife she had been. His lazy excuse became proof that she had never loved him from the start. But he remembered that his ex-wife, who had neither an interest in nor a talent for cooking, had made stew for him several times, stew that came out tasting different each time she made it, and she had also on several other occasions served him some simple dishes. Had he eaten at home more often, she no doubt would have cooked more. Though
her efforts were inconsistent, she did try to keep him healthy by grating mountain yam and mixing it with milk or boiling down red ginseng for him, and whenever he had a cough, instead of cough medicine, she gave him an herbal tonic made with balloon flower. He hated all of it and refused it each time, but secretly, it made him happy, and the idea of growing old together and putting each other’s health first gave him a supremely warm feeling.

  Truth be told, he had never had any real complaints about his wife’s lack of interest in housekeeping, whether while they were legally married or after their marital relations were severed. He’d never actually bothered to sit down for a proper meal at home. Before and after he was married, he ate his breakfasts every morning in the company cafeteria. It was an old habit. The company started its workday earlier than others, and the only way he could have eaten at home and still made it to work on time was if he slept less. He always chose more sleep.

  He was far from the only employee who ate breakfast in the company cafeteria. The facilities were nice, the cost was low, and the food tasted good. At lunchtime as well, he alternated between eating in the cafeteria and eating out at one of the restaurants near the office. On afternoons when he worked away from his office, he had dinner wherever he happened to be. Since he went into work most Saturdays as well, his meals followed the same pattern as on weekdays. The only time his wife could have served him a warm meal was on Sundays. But they usually spent their Sunday afternoons relaxing at home together or going out to the movies or for a walk in a nearby park. Sunday nights, then, found them preferring to eat out.

  It was childish of him to blame her for the divorce, and it left him feeling more ashamed than when he had realized that he’d raped her. And yet, he blamed her anyway because he could not understand how things had reached that point. The worst had come to pass, but he understood none of it. It was hard enough to grasp how two people could start off as distant strangers to each other only to grow close enough to marry, so of course he could not explain why his marriage had ended. He had heard once that the farther away a galaxy is, the farther and faster it is moving from you. Perhaps it was the same with relationships. But there had to be some reason other than growing apart. He knew that much, anyway.