The Kinship of Secrets by Eugenia Kim

Author:Eugenia Kim [Kim, Eugenia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

* * *

Halmeoni

On a Monday morning in mid-April 1962, Inja woke early for school, looking forward to another afternoon with Hyo at his piano. She climbed out of bed, and when Grandmother didn’t stir, she knew. A glance showed the outline of Grandmother’s body, tinier in its stillness, and the dawn glossed her features with the colors of the moon. Inja ran down the hall yelling for Uncle, horrified by the thought of having slept soundly beside her grandmother while she’d taken her last breath, that no one had witnessed it, which was the last act of supreme respect to give an elder, and that she had possibly slept beside her dead body for hours.

Uncle hurried to their room, took one look, and collapsed to his knees. Then Inja really understood she was gone, and this pure finality plunged her into tears. She crouched beside him, and though they both wept, she felt very alone until Aunt and Ara came and cried out, and Uncle put his arm around her.

She dressed in a plain white blouse and black skirt and went outside to tell Hyo, who was waiting to walk to school with her. He touched her elbow, and when she asked if he’d tell Yuna to tell the principal, he said he’d tell her but would stop by the school himself.

In the main sitting room, after the undertaker left, Uncle prepared a low table in front of a screen that mostly hid Grandmother’s sealed coffin covered with hemp cloth. Inja brought in three branches of blooming forsythia, which reminded her of something similarly laden with sadness she couldn’t quite remember from her childhood. Uncle lit candles and opened Grandmother’s Bible to Psalm 23. On the back of the makeshift altar, he set up a colored portrait he’d painted that matched the one he’d made of Grandfather. Tomorrow he would drape the portrait with black ribbons. Then, leaving Aunt and Seonil to keep vigil over her body, Inja and Uncle went out to alert the minister and to telephone the family in America.

Unlike the night Grandfather had died, their walk to the telephone office seemed too bright and clear, as if a kind of lens had fallen on her eyes that made the colors more saturated, the edges of shapes sharper. She couldn’t understand how people on the street could go about as usual, how the trams could rattle in their tracks, their wires crackling as if nothing had happened.

The telephone process was the same as when Grandfather had died. Calvin answered and Uncle told him the news, then he repeated it when Najin came on the line. He discussed the plan for the funeral with her and said many tearful times that he, too, felt sorry she couldn’t be here, but it couldn’t be helped, and that Inja would gladly stand in for her. When it was Inja’s turn at last, her handkerchief was sodden and the tears wouldn’t stop.

“Umma-nim,” she said, bursting upon saying, “Mother.”

Through the static Inja could hear her grief.

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