“You hurt yourself?”
“Yeah…. I fell.”
It was embarrassing, but the guest had asked, so Nunbi answered honestly. He hadn’t wanted to be difficult about it, but now that the words were out they sounded no different from announcing I’m an idiot, and the back of his neck flushed hot. Nunbi looked away and added, as casually as he could manage:
“…The rain made it slippery. It’s not usually like that.”
The guest let out a small laugh and shrugged.
“Where are you going to pick greens?”
He didn’t seem interested in pressing the leg issue, and instead asked where Nunbi was headed with what seemed like genuine curiosity. And the air that Nunbi had sensed in him before — that faint undercurrent of something sharp — turned out to have been nothing but Nunbi’s imagination, because the face that had seemed to carry some edge behind it was simply handsome, and the way he spoke was calm and unhurried. Nunbi had half expected some remark along the lines of well of course you fell, but this was different. What’s this. Strange. He kept thinking that even as he lifted his hand and pointed, without argument, in the direction of the waterfall.
“Up that way, where the waterfall is.”
Then, half hoping the conversation wouldn’t go any further, he turned back around quickly. More talking would just be awkward, and since there was nothing more to say, Nunbi intended to get on with picking his greens. He started walking carefully, minding his limp — so when the guest fell into step beside him without any particular fuss, it caught him entirely off guard.
“I’ll come along.”
Unexpected. Nunbi blinked and asked, Why?
“Bored, I guess? There’s nothing to do around here.”
And with that, the guest simply began to walk alongside him. Nunbi hesitated at the unexpected development, then quickly resigned himself to it. The man hadn’t actually done anything, so he couldn’t exactly snap at him to go away…. In the end, going together was the only real option. That there was barely anything to do at the temple and it got dull — that much Nunbi agreed with. He couldn’t very well tell the guest to go take a nap.
Nunbi had no patience for being prickly for no reason, and when it came down to it, smooth was better than rough in most situations, so getting along peacefully wherever possible was always the right call. That being the case, there was no harm in going to pick greens with the guest. Two pairs of hands — if anything, that was a better deal. Even if the guest had gotten off on a rough foot at first, once the monks knew he’d come along and helped Nunbi gather greens, they’d probably think differently of him. And if the monks warmed up to the guest, that might take a little of the weight off Nunbi’s conscience when it came to Assemblyman Go. If you squinted, this could even be called repaying a debt.
“Go straight down this way and then turn.”
So Nunbi led the way as they walked side by side.
It wasn’t a difficult path. The weather was nice for the first time in a while, and the beauty of it came out of him before he could stop it. The nameless annex guest walked slowly, taking in the path broadly ahead of him — and for some reason, it was a pace Nunbi could actually match. Whether the guest was deliberately walking slowly to account for Nunbi’s limp, or simply taking his time on a path with no need to hurry, Nunbi couldn’t tell — but either way, walking in quiet alongside someone whose face had felt difficult to look at, without any friction between them, wasn’t a bad feeling. If it just passes like this, that would actually be nice….
Nunbi kept stealing glances at the guest while also making sure to keep his eyes on the ground, lest he go and fall again.
“So why do you live here?”
After a while, the guest asked out of nowhere.
“You’re not a monk. And you don’t look like you were dragged here the way I was.”
They’d both been walking in silence long enough that the quiet was starting to feel natural. The voice breaking into it made Nunbi turn his head without thinking and look at the guest. He was still walking forward, eyes ahead, even as he kept asking questions. There was a slight difference in their heights, and the angle gave Nunbi a clear, unobstructed view of the guest’s neck and the back of his head. The line of it — clean white skin curving smoothly upward — was pleasant to look at. The boy scratched absently at his own cheek.
“Just….”
Hmm. Nunbi was an orphan. Abandoned at the temple gates by parents whose faces he’d never seen, he had lived here for as long as he had any memory of the world at all — since the time he first opened his eyes, learned to walk, started knowing things. But was it alright to tell all of this to the guest? He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and told him the truth.
“The monks here took me in.”
“Ahhh.”
The guest nodded with a sound like he’d been waiting for exactly that answer.
“Sounds like you’re just as pitiful as me, then.”
And then he said that. Nunbi let out a snort before he could stop himself. So that’s why he asked. He caught the crooked little motive in it immediately — but even so, the boy shook his head without making anything of it.
“Not really. I like living here. It suits me.”
It wasn’t something to brag about, of course. But Nunbi hadn’t done anything wrong, either. So what if his parents had abandoned him. He didn’t think of himself as pitiable. And besides — quietly settled days at the temple with kind-hearted monks around him, that was clearly the better life. Whether his parents hadn’t been able to feed one more mouth or simply hadn’t wanted to raise him, at the end of the day they must have found his existence inconvenient enough to leave him behind, so if Nunbi had stayed with them, things would have been harder. He would have been unhappy. Looking at it that way, he’d long since stopped feeling like he was missing anything.
“I like it here. Genuinely.”
He didn’t want the guest — who knew nothing of the full story — to hear this and leap straight to the wrong conclusion. He wasn’t interested in being laughed at for being an orphan and a beggar, the way kids at school sometimes did. So Nunbi made a point of sounding like none of it bothered him. Whether the guest picked up on that or not, he tilted his head slightly on his own.
“Alright. I won’t say you’re pitiful.”
The guest glanced at Nunbi for a moment, then looked away. The brief eye contact dissolved without any weight to it. The words about not feeling sorry for him sounded genuine. Was he mocking him? No — it didn’t seem like that at all.
“….”
Nunbi studied the guest from the corner of his eye, feeling something oddly hard to place. As he’d thought when they first met, the guest looked a year or two older than him. Probably a university student, he figured — but anyway, they were close in age, so calling them peers wouldn’t be wrong. Nunbi had never had a friend his own age. Not exactly. Sure, the first time he’d met this particular guest, and the second time too, the impression had been…. hard to call pleasant, to say the least. But maybe from here on out it didn’t have to be so bad. Nunbi let his gaze drift around for a moment. That was to say — just briefly — maybe something like a friendship could happen.
“…So what’s your name?”
Thinking that, the boy went and asked this unnecessary question out of nowhere, and —
“Me? Go Woonjeong.”
The guest answered straight away, unexpectedly. It was a simple enough exchange of names, but inwardly Nunbi was surprised. He’d heard that Nunbi had been abandoned at a temple and hadn’t used it as an opening to take a jab. He’d been asked his name and had given it immediately. Nunbi had thought the man was out of his mind — but he was perfectly ordinary, wasn’t he? Then why was he like that the other time — the thought drifted up that perhaps he’d been suspecting the guest for no good reason. Well, maybe he’d just been that way….
“I see….”
The guest was being so agreeable that Nunbi had nothing else to say, and he just let it trail into I see. Go Woonjeong. He rolled the name around in his mouth — it was a round sort of name. He briefly and absently thought of the expression miwun jeong gowun jeong — the love-hate closeness that grows between people — and caught himself making a wordplay of someone else’s name, so he stopped. The cicadas cried out. The waterfall was drawing closer.
“Almost there. Just down that way.”
When Nunbi pointed to the path that sloped down through the bushes, Woonjeong ducked easily and went down ahead through the undergrowth. Watching his back, Nunbi considered telling him to be careful since the path got a bit rough — but thought it might come across as too familiar, and let it go. Given Woonjeong’s height and the length of his legs, this probably barely registered as a slope at all. Nunbi decided he’d better worry about himself.
He was especially careful on the stretch where he’d fallen yesterday as he made his way down toward the water’s edge. He gripped the branches around him, but relying on two bad legs felt precarious. In the end Nunbi gave up on his trousers and just sat down on the ground. He slid down over the slippery mud the way a child goes down a slide — and midway through, he caught a gaze from the other side.
“….”
“….”
Woonjeong, who had already made it down, was looking over at him. But why was he staring like that? What was there to look at…. Nunbi faltered under the gaze, felt suddenly awkward, and quickly got to his feet and shook out his trousers. Sadly, the soil was damp enough that his trousers and the soft skin of his thighs and below his seat had all gone thoroughly dirty.
“What are you looking at.”
Nunbi said it for no particular reason, and Woonjeong lifted just the corners of his mouth with a blank expression.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Nunbi turned away from Woonjeong and shook out the back of his dirty shorts, vigorously. While he did, Woonjeong drifted over toward the water. He seemed to be looking around at the surroundings. Nunbi forgot he’d even started an argument with what are you looking at and deliberately took his time, sneaking glances at Woonjeong’s reaction from the side while pretending not to notice.
Hmm. Looking at him now, Woonjeong seemed to like the spot by the waterfall just as much as Nunbi did. Well, how about that — turns out this dull temple isn’t so bad after all, is it. Nunbi felt a small, pointless swell of pride as he finished dusting himself off and clapped his palms together. Then he thought about what to do next. Should he point out the good swimming spots? Show him the wildflower meadow? And then he realized he was acting like he owned the place, making a show of himself. That wouldn’t do at all. He had water parsley to pick, and quickly — so Nunbi carefully made his way toward the bank.
