Star Other Korean by Tennant

Author:Tennant [Tennant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138982857
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

WHY THE SILKWORM DOES NOT LEAVE ITS COCOON

Yoon Chongmo

ONCE again I walk up to the kitchen window. A flight of stone steps leads down to the back alley. To its right lies a long stretch of mulberry bushes and on its left is the mud-brick house sitting with its back towards us.

It may not be much but I love my house and don't envy those with grander ones. I look down at the mud house squatting there like a chrysalis, of which the part that first catches your eye is the concrete chimney that rises from its mud walls.

Each morning as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked out of this window there was always smoke rising from it, a morning message that all was well there. Now, it's only a black hole like a gaping jaw with no wisp of smoke. Round the corner a group of pots and jars huddle together shivering in the cold like a group of abandoned children. The tallest of them, originally a shrimp-sauce container, would be filled with charcoal collected from the oak-wood fire. Another would contain dried ferns and wild herbs from the previous spring waiting to be taken to the market for the Moon Festival of the first month ….

A dream from last night comes back. The old woman was calling me in the way she used to when she was alive, in her deep voice. I was telling her, ‘she came, granny! She has been!’ I had opened wide the front door and gone out but I was this side of the kitchen window and she was out there on the hill path, disconcerted as she looked down across the road. On the road, a woman was coming nearer. It was her daughter …

When I awoke it was already dawn. I realize now that it is the third day after the old woman's funeral. I remember her daughter saying that she would come back to sort out her belongings on the third day. I see someone coming down the path by the mulberry bushes. I catch a glimpse of a woman flickering behind them … Is it her? A woman in a long padded skirt walks across the hill path. It's only the woman from the rabbit shop.

In a ditch that skirts the mulberry bushes on the right-hand side of the hill path I can see water that had run down from our sewage, frozen thick like the scales of a carp, and where it had spilt over on to the road making it a sheet of ice, there is a layer of sawdust that granny had sprinkled over it.

‘Look here! What do you mean by leaving the path in this state? Do you want to see an old woman fall over on her way to the well?’ How she used to torment me when I first moved in … ‘Wherever she's from, what right does she have to come and settle down just above my house?’ On

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