57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Fiction Commendation Award: 'Bead by Bead'

Written by Jeong Ji-a

Translated by Jude Vandervort

Excerpt from 'Bead by Bead'

I have been with you since the moment I drew my first breath. Yet for the longest time, you never noticed. Did it make me sad to both be there and not be there? Sometimes, yes; sometimes, no. More often than not, I pitied you, as you gradually succumbed to me, completely unaware. At this very moment, I totally control you. You and I have already become one. Last night, you fell asleep before the nine o'clock news. You may think you simply drifted off into an endless sleep, but your dreamless slumber is nothing more than the final leg of the journey that leads to me.

It has been a long time since you dreamed. Do you remember the last? It was on a spring day ten years ago, when you were ninety years old. Along the banks of the Seomjin River, the cherry trees had been shedding their blossoms all day long, scattering them like drowsy fragments of a dream. Even at your window, a mere hundred meters from the tree-lined path, petals floated and fluttered in the breeze. You struggled to remember something, but it couldn’t break through the calloused surface of your unconscious, hardened like a toe ravaged by fungus. On a night when the full moon’s pale glow, soft as a baby's skin, bathed all things under heaven, your younger self would have cast off sleep and wandered wildly through the night, wrapped in the moonlight as though it were a newly woven garment. But neither the moon's radiance nor the melancholy of the falling blossoms could stir your heart any longer. Gently tracing the faint surface of some distant memory, you surrendered all too easily to the temptation of sleep.

That moonlit night, you dreamed your last dream: pacing back and forth beneath a peach tree dropping blossoms like rain, a young girl with neat braids carries a three-year-old boy wrapped tightly to her back in a podaegi. Slowly, the full moon crosses the valley and drifts toward the mountain behind them. A single peach petal, as pale as the child's own skin, comes to rest upon his fair cheek. Whether from its coolness or its damp touch, the boy suddenly bursts into piercing sobs. The girl walks all night long, treading over the child's cries, the moonlight, and the thick carpet of fallen peach blossoms.

That dream was my small gift to you. You couldn’t quite recover that memory—you’d tossed and turned, trying desperately to remember before falling asleep—because I’d swallowed it and absorbed it into myself long ago. Even as you slept, the cherry blossoms continued to fall, and for a fleeting moment, even my steadfast heart was stirred. So, I let a sliver of that memory flow back to you in your dream. You kept fumbling for that evasive memory, even though you could no longer fully remember that night when peach blossoms drifted through the air, for a simple reason: the cherry blossoms fluttering outside your window that day eerily resembled peach blossoms.

Your youngest sibling, whose birth claimed your mother's life, had a delicate sensitivity. The moment the baby was born, your mother gushed torrents of blood. Rescued from that bloody mass, the newborn instinctively latched onto the scent of its mother's blood—the scent of death—with every fiber of its being. In hopes that he might stop crying, you carried the child to the path behind the village where those peach blossoms fluttered down. But to the infant, that flower-lined path was more a hell saturated with the smell of death. He sensed the very essence of death emanating from every falling petal, and when one blossom settled on his cheek, the infant—too young to possess reason—accepted it as death itself brushing against his face.

That autumn, at the age of sixteen, you got married. Just a few months later, your youngest sibling departed a life that had lasted a mere three years. The boy knew nothing of death—or, rather, hadn’t yet fathomed the concept of life—so he accepted death with a naive simplicity. Truthfully, there was not even time to begin to reconcile it. His heart stopped abruptly while he slept, and he passed effortlessly from a death-like sleep into death itself. Such deaths are not uncommon. Was it a blessing, then, to cross from life into death without suffering? Or was it a curse—to meet one’s demise without ever truly experiencing the anguish, regret, and suffering that defines humanity? You believed the latter. For years, you mourned a death so bereft that it didn’t even merit a burial mound. A life born out of the very ashes of your mother's death should at least have been bestowed with a resolve to cling to life, you thought. Standing beside your mother's grave, you wept uncontrollably, beating your chest until it too thudded along with your fists. You turned your back on heaven, on God, and on every power said to govern human life that day—sternly and forever. You remained imprisoned within your little brother's shadow for many years. You resolved to live only after seeing what days remained to you.

It was your son's death that finally released you.

The son you bore later in life was the very image of your dead baby brother. Throughout your son’s childhood, your heart was never free from dread. He looked so uncannily like the uncle he had never met that they might have been twins. Fortunately, he had grown into a healthy man and lived to the age of sixty. He never got seriously ill his whole life. Yet after celebrating his sixtieth birthday, he died quietly in his sleep. A heart attack claimed your son’s life the way it had your baby brother's. You were eighty-five then, and your family, fearing for your health, kept your son's death from you. Only after he failed to visit for more than a year did you realize that you would never see him again.

"How did he go?" you abruptly asked your daughter, who had begun visiting you unusually often. She understood at once what you meant.

"In his sleep,” she answered calmly. “He probably didn’t know he was ill. Probably didn’t know he was dying. He never had to worry about those he was leaving behind."

You nodded, as though that was enough, as though nothing more needed to be said. From that day on, you never spoke of your son again. In your eighty-six years, you had witnessed countless deaths: heartbreaking deaths, deaths that made people think perhaps it was for the best, expected deaths, sudden deaths, deaths at another's hands, and deaths people brought upon themselves. The paths to death differed, but the outcome—death itself—was the same for everyone. The one indisputable truth is that no one can escape death, no matter what. You were eighty-six, closer to death than most. Yet—for someone so near your deathbed—you proved strangely stubborn, clinging to life despite yourself. You longed for the looming death, wishing it would arrive just one day sooner. Yet death, who visited so many with astonishing ease, seemed uninterested in you. Even so, you never once considered ending your own life.