Though he spoke with conviction, he lowered his head and smiled after he said it. Watching the long, firm column of his throat as he swallowed his beer, I too took a couple of sips of mine.
He wasn’t the only one who lacked confidence in the face of a separation of just a few days. I don’t want to be apart, I want to be near you… It wasn’t just because of that desire, like a childish complaint, but to the point that I even felt a vague terror, to the point that I tried my best not to be conscious of his upcoming business trip. I was feeling an instinctive anxiety about his impending absence.
I never knew that even if I came to like someone and started dating them, I would come to desire such a close-knit relationship. Because he had said it first, I was, in fact, relieved.
“That time before, after we went to the exhibition, I said that, didn’t I?”
His gaze turned to me.
“That lies were better than silence.”
I set the beer can on the edge of the bathtub and scooped up some water with my hands, splashing it on my face. I wiped away the trickling water with my palm.
“That was probably because I’m a person who stays silent.”
“……”
I pressed my lips together once, then continued.
“Because I hated that silent self of mine.”
His eyes, looking at me, seemed to already know what I was about to talk about. The story he had probably been curious about since that time I had suddenly started hyperventilating in his living room. And yet, his consideration in waiting without asking.
His calm, blue eyes, gazing at me steadily, were telling me he was ready to listen.
I felt that I didn’t need to steel myself or plan for the right timing to talk about the past. I just hoped that the story I was about to tell would become an expression of my feelings for him. Because I could now be certain that he and I were in the kind of relationship where even the most trivial stories about each other become precious secrets.
“It was a collision… caused by a brake failure in the perpetrator’s truck. It wasn’t that someone broke the law, nor was it a case involving a criminal with cruel intentions….”
He, who had been resting his arm on the edge of the tub, put down the beer can he was holding and drew his arm back.
“My mother was sacrificed… and though there was someone who caused the accident, the fact that there was no perpetrator who had intentionally orchestrated it with a terrible motive… someone to blame and hate and despise… that was actually harder… I don’t think I knew what to do with the sudden situation, with my emotions.”
My father, who had heard the news of the accident over the phone at the Thai restaurant where he was waiting for my mother, had run out like a madman without giving any detailed explanation, and my maternal grandparents had made inquiries here and there to confirm my mother’s accident themselves.
And I had returned home alone in a taxi, trembling in anxiety and confusion until my father, who had refused to attend my mother’s funeral, returned at dawn the next day looking like a ghost.
To spend the night repeatedly searching for articles… about what kind of accident had happened to my mother, how she had died instantly at the scene, and whether there might be a correction article saying the previous report was false, that my mother was alive… it was a horror, like waiting for another death sentence in the grave after already being dead, like the damp shadow of death slowly creeping over my skin.
The news of the accident was reported not only in online articles but also on the TV news. In this day and age, a traffic accident wasn’t exactly big news that would draw attention, but it was a different story for a major collision in the middle of downtown Seoul that left five people seriously injured and three dead.
At the end of the news segment, the anchor added, ‘This is a truly unfortunate incident,’ and put on a rather regretful expression, but it was soon replaced by a related news story emphasizing how important meticulous vehicle inspections were, and his regret vanished from his clean-cut face.
They said the core of the case was whether the cause was the perpetrator’s negligent vehicle maintenance or a defect in the car’s body, but that was only an interpretation from the perpetrator’s perspective. His life depended on what the cause of the brake failure was determined to be.
As soon as my mother’s death was confirmed, my maternal grandparents immediately prepared for the funeral, and a simple three-day funeral was held. Leaving my father, who had holed up in his studio and shut his mouth, they had me attend the funeral. My maternal grandfather was the chief mourner. No word was sent to my uncle’s family.
Even when I returned home still in my mourning clothes after the funeral was all over, my father refused to come out of his studio, so I, at a loss for what to do on my own, had contacted Han-i hyung.
My mother died in a car accident. My father won’t come out of his room, he won’t eat anything, and he won’t say a word no matter what I ask. I don’t know what to do. I’m so scared. I’m so scared….
As I spoke to Hyung, my words became more and more of an emotional, incoherent ramble, and sitting on my bed with my knees drawn up, dressed in an ill-fitting, awkward black suit, I had cried uncontrollably. It was probably the first time I had cried after clearly recognizing that my mother had died.
Until then, because of the suddenness of the accident and the surrounding circumstances that only demanded I perform the role given to me without detailed explanation, I hadn’t been able to grasp the reality of my mother’s death at all.
My maternal grandparents, who came to our house two days later, told my unresponsive father that they were cutting ties completely and left. They said that with things having come to this, they had no lingering attachment to life in Korea and would go to Europe to spend the rest of their lives working on their art. They would handle all the legal and paperwork issues related to the accident, as well as the settlement with the perpetrator. Before leaving through the front door, their eyes, as they looked at me, briefly held a complex light, but they turned their backs even more coldly.
It was a sudden death from an accident, and no one had been prepared. Everyone was in chaos, and everyone was desperately trying to find some sense of practical balance in their own way.
Everyone except my father.
Even after several days, my father showed no signs of getting better at all. He would eat a little plain rice if I clumsily prepared a meal and brought it to him, but he still wouldn’t say a single word. With worry and fear for my father, even the emotion to grieve my mother’s death was blocked.
“Back then… I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, but if I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d get up and open the studio door. It was scary to sleep next to a father who had become a completely different person… but I was also afraid that maybe my father… might… take his own life…. What if he was suffering as he was dying… and I didn’t know….”
I tried to be calm, but my voice trembled unavoidably. I rubbed my face with my wet hands to hide the moisture welling in my eyes.
“A world without my mother… was as good as worthless to my father… I thought he could easily make that kind of decision, so… when my uncle came and I was able to move to my grandfather’s house, I was actually relieved…. At the thought that I no longer had to bear all that weight by myself….”
As my father’s condition showed no improvement, my uncle had no choice but to leave his work and come to our house. Because my father adamantly refused to go to the hospital, my uncle had to pull non-existent strings here and there and spend more money to have a doctor come to the house.
The doctor’s diagnosis for my father’s symptoms was psychogenic aphonia.
A phenomenon where a person’s hearing becomes paralyzed after experiencing an event that inflicts a great emotional shock, even though there is no physical defect. An unconscious activity where the subconscious mind preemptively blocks the response to a given external stimulus… that was the gist of what I found when I researched psychogenic aphonia online after hearing the diagnosis from my uncle.
I took it to mean that the subconscious blocking the conscious response was probably a kind of defensive act to protect oneself.
In other words, for my father, ceasing to hear and speak felt safer than hearing and speaking and communicating with the world.
Even if that world included me, his son.
“He said there’s nothing wrong, that your father might just be keeping his mouth shut on his own. That he can hear everything and can speak just fine, but he might have just decided not to.”
That night, after the doctor had visited, my uncle had said that while tilting a soju glass in our kitchen.
I thought I understood.
Unlike the many people who couldn’t even bring themselves to look at their deceased spouse’s belongings because they couldn’t accept their sudden death, watching my father’s stubbornness in refusing to leave the studio where traces of my mother remained… I came to understand. That to my father, I was merely a byproduct of his love for my mother.
When his love for my mother was whole and unthreatened, my existence was also precious to him as a part of that love, but in a state where my mother was absent, my value had faded.
It’s not that my father didn’t love me at all. It was just that it wasn’t the kind of love that could heal the sorrow of losing his wife with the love for his remaining son. The sorrow of losing his wife had engulfed my father’s world, and I, too, was simply included in that world.
After that whole series of events passed, I stopped drawing. There was nothing more I wanted to draw, which was the same as having nothing I wanted to say or express.
And I came to fear love.
If love was something that could turn one person into a monster by the disappearance of the other, it seemed like a risk one should prepare for, even by taking out insurance. But through my mother’s accident, it had been carved into my bones that insurance only lessens the trouble of dealing with the aftermath of an accident, it cannot be a preventative measure against the accident itself.
Before that winter ended, my father and I moved to my grandfather’s house. Not only was I unable to handle my father on my own, but it was also because my father, who had stubbornly resisted any suggestion, had shown a reaction to my uncle’s words about returning to that village by the sea.
And so, without even being able to attend my middle school graduation, I left the house where the three of us had lived together for a long time, and my father, for more than six years after that, still maintained his silence.
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