“Ah. It’s real.”
A murmur, there and gone in an instant. The guest’s palms cupped Nunbi’s cheeks on both sides.
“You’re really not crying. I thought you were.”
Nunbi couldn’t move a muscle. He was so startled that he could only gape like a fish. Even as he felt those hands — hands with no warmth in them at all — pressing into his cheeks, rubbing, kneading, he couldn’t lift a single finger.
“But if you cried….”
Beneath a carelessly placed foot, the barley rice squished and stuck in a slow, glutinous mess.
“….”
In that moment, Nunbi was too flustered to make out what the guest was actually saying. If he had understood those murmured words the instant they left the man’s mouth — if he had kept his distance after that — perhaps Nunbi would have passed that summer without giving it a second thought. The guest in the annex room might have faded into a vague memory, nothing more than a young man who stayed for a little while and then left.
“….”
Just then, the bell rang. Deng — deng — it was the bell signaling the end of the dharma service. Nunbi snapped back to his senses. He shook off the guest’s hands from his cheeks and barely managed to back away. The boy turned away in a limping hurry. He didn’t even think to pick up the umbrella rolling across the ground. He walked as hard as he could across the muddy, squelching earth, his ungainly limp on full display.
Nunbi didn’t stop even as he gasped for breath. A chill wind blew at his back. He startled — a sharp, involuntary hitch of breath escaped him — and without meaning to, he looked back over his shoulder. There was no particular reason. Just — just in case. Just the faint, foolish hope of just in case.
“….”
But there was no one behind him.
“Ha — hah….”
Still, Nunbi floundered under the illusion that a gaze — stubbornly, persistently clinging — had been left hanging in the empty air. It felt as though the guest was somewhere nearby, watching him waddle along with that strange look on his face.
“Nunbi.”
“Did you fall? Be careful, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“What happened to your umbrella?”
The monks who had been coming down after the dharma service spotted him and called out in surprise. Nunbi held his breath for a moment, then let it go and composed his expression. He forced a smile and answered brightly, No, it’s nothing! When they fussed at him to be more careful, he nodded along diligently.
“The ground is slippery, keep your head about you.”
“Yes, Monk.”
He bowed his back at their retreating figures in a proper farewell. His clothes were already soaked through, and with every step, his waterlogged rubber shoes made a ridiculous squelching sound.
Nunbi dragged his feet back to his room. He tossed his rubber shoes carelessly onto the stepping stone and went inside. Only after he had shut the door behind him was he finally able to catch his breath.
“You son of a—….”
Nunbi huffed, scrubbing at his face with his fist. That guest had gone and rubbed his cheeks for no good reason, and now it felt like the smell of cigarettes had seeped into the tip of his nose. He sniffed at himself all over for a moment, then finally shoved the door back open and walked straight into the pouring rain. He washed his hands. He scrubbed his face. After a long while of that, his whole body smelled of damp earth soaked through to the bone. He came back inside looking like a drowned rat, and sank heavily to the floor. Only then did the feeling finally catch up with him — shame, flooding in all at once.
He was mortified enough to die. Why had he run away like that? He’d long since gotten used to being called a cripple. Nunbi was lame — that was a fact. And because it was a fact, even if someone tried to mock him for it, he could just ignore it. He didn’t need to let it get to him. After fuming for a moment, Nunbi pulled a clean, neatly folded towel from the wardrobe and draped it over his wet hair.
“Good grief.”
It seemed like there was an awful lot to sigh about today. Either way, he waited for his breathing to settle and his heart to quiet, then shook his hair dry and took out a rag. After that, the boy wiped up the water that had dripped onto the floor, then changed briskly into dry clothes. He opened the window and stretched out flat in front of it. When the breeze drifted in from outside, his mood finally eased a little.
“…Last night I had to go and peek for no reason.”
Nunbi muttered that to himself and let out a long breath. Right. Maybe this was actually fine. He could take this as a chance to call it even and be done with it. Right. Nunbi had been the one to peek first, and Nunbi had been the one to get his feelings hurt over being called a cripple and pick a fight for nothing. There was no use stewing over it. They said even a dog at a village school picks up poetry after three years — Nunbi wasn’t a Buddhist, but he’d spent his whole life at this temple, so he knew something of that kind of teaching. Right. The guest had said something he shouldn’t have, but he was a guest. As long as the guest was staying here as a guest, there was no telling how many more times they’d have to see each other’s faces, and it was only Nunbi who stood to lose by working himself up and letting his blood boil over something like this.
Don’t hate people. Thinking that to himself, the boy drew in a slow, deep breath. And then let it out. Just like that, it didn’t bother him anymore. But….
‘But if you cried, I think I’d get really turned on.’
What in the world had that meant? All at once, the thigh that the guest’s gaze had swept over felt oddly itchy. It left him with a disagreeable feeling he couldn’t quite name. Nunbi slapped his own skin with his palm for no good reason, then rolled over to face the other side. From outside the window came the sound of a fish-shaped bell swaying in the wind.
“…God, this is annoying.”
Frustratingly, it didn’t seem like his heart would settle down anytime soon.
—
The next morning, his eyes opened in the dead hours before dawn. The early dimness was still pitch dark, and a glance toward the kitchen showed no cooking smoke yet — it wasn’t even four o’clock. Going out to wander around would only disturb the light-sleeping Bosal devotees, so Nunbi instead reached for the bag he kept beside the wardrobe and opened it. Out of the worn, nearly falling-apart bag came notebooks and math textbooks. Nunbi set the tattered book on the narrow low table, sat up straight, and lit a thick candle from the drawer. Then, gripping a worn-down pencil, the boy reviewed what he’d studied at school before the break, and worked ahead on the problems they hadn’t covered yet.
When winter came, he had to sit for the university entrance exam. He had no money for a tutor and no friends to study with, but even so, Nunbi was earning grades good enough to get him into a university in Seoul.
Study hard and get into a good university. That had always been Nunbi’s greatest wish, and the first step toward the wonderful future he’d spent so long dreaming of. If he got into a good university, he could get into a good company after that, right? There was a reason Nunbi wanted all of this. The boy wanted to repay the monks who had taken in an abandoned newborn and raised him all the way to where he was now. From everything he’d seen, the most effective way to repay a temple was to make offerings generously.
As soon as I’ve made something of myself, I’ll drive up to every Sunday dharma service and make offerings too. Just thinking that, Nunbi never felt sorry for his circumstances, never resented his withered leg, and even the dizzying numbers of his studies felt like something worth doing.
He sat cross-legged until his calves went numb, losing all track of time as he worked out the values of x for a continuous function f — and only when his pencil tip wore dull did he finally lift his head. Outside, a pale grey dawn was breaking. It was summer, and the days were long. A wide yawn escaped him. Just then, he heard the sound of footsteps — a few, in step with each other — passing by his room and making their way down the stairs. Nunbi quietly got up and eased the door open.
Coming down the stairs were two Bosal devotees, hoes and baskets tucked under their arms. When Nunbi greeted them, they explained that they were heading out to gather wild mountain vegetables while the rain had let up. Nunbi slipped on his rubber shoes on the spot and followed along.
As they made their way along the lush, thickly green mountain slope toward the waterfall, Nunbi came to learn something new. It was about the guest in the annex room.
“I heard he’s Assemblyman Go’s son?”
“Mm, they say he’s the youngest in the family.”
Nunbi had been walking with his eyes fixed carefully to the ground, but at the words Assemblyman Go and youngest son falling from the Bosal devotees’ lips, he snapped his head up.
“What? Who?”
Without thinking, he cut into the Bosal devotees’ conversation and asked again.
“Don’t tell me — the, the guest in the annex?”
“That’s right, that’s what they’re saying — even we were so surprised when we heard.”
“Good thing you know now. Nunbi, you make sure nothing goes wrong on your end, you hear?”
“Yes….”
Nunbi answered in a daze. This was serious. Only then did the boy understand the head monk’s warning. The guest was the beloved youngest son of a very distinguished family…. Nunbi found himself swallowing a dry lump in his throat as he ran back through everything he’d done up to now. He must have gone pale in the process, because the Bosal devotees asked, Nunbi, is something wrong? He shook his head and said it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing, was it? This was genuinely serious.
Nunbi knew Assemblyman Go well. The man had once saved Nunbi’s life, long ago. He was Nunbi’s benefactor. And of all the people it could have been, the guest in the annex he couldn’t stand turned out to be that man’s son. And without knowing any of that, Nunbi had gone and flipped the dinner table and argued right to his face…. He would have to be twice as careful, three times as careful, going forward. Nunbi knew well enough that there was nothing to gain from making trouble for himself.
“They say he just asked to come and stay for a while, but it all seems very off. Whatever’s going on, really.”
“Truly. How could they send him all the way out here, their precious treasure?”
Nunbi rubbed at his cheek, pretending not to hear the Bosal devotees talking. But even as he feigned indifference, the truth was that Nunbi was curious about exactly the same thing they were. What on earth could have happened for someone from the Go family to be sent away to a remote mountain temple like this — a place buried deep in the mountains with not a single proper house nearby?
