The first woman is pulled from the water by a fisherman. She is so perfectly preserved and lifelike, as if merely asleep, that at first he thinks she must be a divine being, a thing that belongs to the sea, all coral and water and light that will warm to flesh in the belly of his boat.
The second woman is found in the field by farmers, her hair thrown across her face, arms outstretched toward them as if she has fallen from the sky. A third woman is found at the edge of the woods, her arm cast serenely around the root of a rotted tree as though embracing a sleeping lover. And Im Ae-Cha, the woodcutter’s daughter, discovers a fourth beside the stone lip of the village well, a bucket cradled in the woman’s hands as if at any moment she might rouse and draw water.
There is room enough, in the beginning, to store the dead women in the icehouse while the villagers wait for someone to claim them. The men gather the village elders and send word to the nobleman on the hill. While sons light their fathers’ pipes and begin to discuss politely the matter of who is to pay for the mourners and gravediggers should no family come forward, the wives, mothers, and daughters of the village steal into the icehouse to see the dead for themselves.
The light from the women’s torches flickers in the low-domed room as they shake their heads and exchange distressed glances. Their shadows stretch against the walls, shiver across the curve of the stone ceiling.
In the broken, sputtering light, each of the women recognises something of her own in the dead. On the first woman, Paek Min-Ju recognises her sister’s chin, the same small dimple she envied as a child. On another’s face, Ae-Cha sees the shape of her late mother’s lips. And there, on the knee of one of the corpses is a birthmark identical to the one on Yun Eun-Ji’s firstborn daughter: the same scattering of brown shaped like spilled Job’s tears, hulls cracked open.
The temptation for some of the village grandmothers is too much. They see their own beloved sisters and daughters in the faces of the women, the babies delivered stillborn, the precious ones they fed from their breasts, the infants whose perfect hands once curled around their thumbs for comfort. They see the girls they once were, before they were sent away, married, divided and subsumed into other households.
They begin keeping vigil over the women at night, sneaking out of their homes in the dark while the men meet over squat, petty gambling tables and worry work-swollen hands through their beards. The grandmothers brush the dirt out of the dead women’s hair, wipe clean their faces, bathe and dress them in patchwork hanbok beaten and starched white.
*
Some nights Ae-Cha slips silently into the icehouse alone. She sits for hours in the dark, fights off sleep and the cold ache in her hips as she tries to catch the women out. Each time before she leaves, she presses the pads of her fingers firmly into the flesh of their arms, rests her knuckles against their foreheads as if checking for fever, tugs childishly on their earlobes. She tells them if they move, if they send her a sign, she promises not to tell a soul. Only send her a sign; tell her what it is exactly they want, and she will do it, complete what unfinished business keeps them here, so they can leave.
One night when she slips out of the icehouse, she sees a fox slinking off into the tall grass, her teats swollen, her belly a bright vermillion. Ae-Cha leaves the animal small offerings. She sets bowls of milk-white bone broth by the entrance. Sweet rice cakes and strings of dried red jujubes. Fresh eggs, the flattened halves of dried, salted fish, bottles of grain alcohol and cups of makgeolli.
One morning, as she scoops barley into a large bowl, Ae-Cha notices a soft mound of grey fur in the corner of the kitchen. When she walks closer, she realises they are the decapitated bodies of granary rats. Scattered among the hard velvet of their pelts are wiry hairs the length of Ae-Cha’s palm. She twists these between her fingers in front of the cooking fire, and they flash orange, gold, vermillion, like bronze filaments of flame.
Ae-Cha says nothing when the first woman disappears from the icehouse. Though she has her suspicions, when her father confronts her, she feigns ignorance.
‘Father, you told me I was not to enter the icehouse,’ she says each time a woman disappears. She lowers her eyes, rests her hands demurely in her lap. ‘You forbade me,’ she says before she continues whatever task is at hand—she stokes the flame in the sweltering kitchen, salts the pale green heads of long-leafed cabbage until her fingers pucker and sting with brine, beats and scrubs his shirts clean on the washing stones.
*
The grandmothers braid the stolen women’s hair. They crush balsam flowers to stain the ends of their fingers and nails, make beauties of the corpses and set places for them at their tables as favoured daughters.
At night they lay the women gently on pallets, fan their faces and whisper the important stories to them. The one about the obedient daughter wedded to the sea. The one about the stepsisters, Kongjwi and Patjwi. How virtue and patience are always rewarded. How to be a prize is its own kind of reward.
The grandmothers beseech their lovely girls to eat. They labour over dishes, husk grain with swollen, crooked fingers, pick needle-thin bones from silver-skinned mackerel, arrange the perfect bite on steaming mouthfuls of rice as if the lifeless dolls are little children.
In return, the dead women spin stories of their own while the old mothers sleep. In their dreams, the grandmothers return to their ancestral homes, climb landscapes they have not seen since childhood, embrace their own dead mothers, kiss their hands and feet, sit together in the courtyard. The dead women, their new, restored, bright-eyed daughters, cut and core heaps of red-cheeked winter apples.
But it is early summer, and the stink of the dead gives them away. The corpses leave their perfume of longing everywhere. The women scent the woodgrain with their sickly-sweet decay. The cushions and linen pallets upon which they are laid at night weep with foetid moisture. Flies hammer against the rice paper windows, frenzy the air with yearning. The scent gathers over every exterior wall like sugar crystallising on the skin of a drying plum.
When the men come and take them, the old women beat their breasts and wail.
And yet, more bodies appear.
The dead women are uncovered in the soft tumble of hay carts. They are found in pairs, holding hands at the edge of the forest, on the doorsteps of houses, propped up dreamily against the trunks of persimmon trees as if pausing briefly to rest before resuming work in the field.
Each one bears some uncanny resemblance to a daughter, a niece, a sister. But the men do not, cannot, or will not see it.
*
When the fox litter comes, Ae-cha counts nine kits. She spots them bounding through the tall grass behind the icehouse as they whip and tumble around the vixen’s legs. Like fistfuls of earth tossed around the field, catching ablaze.
The kits are guileless, quick, unafraid to sniff at her hand when she leaves them boiled stew bones heavy with marrow, bowls of kelp broth, soft early grapes.
*
In the heart of the village, the air grows thick and heavy with flies. They swarm and blanket themselves over bodies, bite indiscriminately at the dead and the living. And each day more dead appear, more than can possibly be given proper burial rites, more than can be tucked out of sight in the icehouse, too many to ignore.
While the soil in their fields grows loamy with maggots, the village elders argue and squabble over what to do. There is so much work to be done already, and there are rumours circling in the province about their unnatural plague. A few have even been refused trade by merchants.
The women must be buried or cremated. The village elders have been sending word throughout the region for months and have waited long enough. Their dead are unknown, nameless. And something must be done before it worsens. Before, like cholera, it decimates, outnumbers the living with the dead and lays waste to the village.
The nobleman, in his home overlooking the low-lying village, forbids his wife, his concubines and their children to go outside. They are not to be distressed by such ugliness, not to be exposed or tainted in any way. They are to live the hottest part of the year behind shuttered windows.
His dutiful wife, his first and second and third mistresses pace back and forth in isolation. Their socked feet pad restlessly against the polished floors and beat the rhythmic, enduring pace of caged animals.
Midsummer brings three weeks of steady rain. The oversaturated earth will admit nothing. Each time the men pierce the dirt with their shovels, water steadily fills back into the furrows.
And yet, gradually, a tenuous calm settles over the village. The relentless insects, the clouds of bluebottles, are assuaged by the damp. The villagers, when they venture out into the steaming wet, do not find any new bodies.
Above, on the hill, the nobleman’s wives and children are permitted, for a few hours each day, to open the windows, to sit on the covered platforms overlooking the muddy courtyard.
*
A few days before the end of the rainy season, Ae-Cha’s father catches her setting a freshly cooked pancake outside for the fox. She is just stepping through the kitchen entryway, placing the steaming plate under the eaves, when he slaps her.
She is so shocked, she cannot remember lifting her hand to her face at all, only feels her cheek burning against the side of her palm, the rain on her face, sees where it has dripped onto the front of her blouse. She promises him, the empty dish still in her hand, the pancake ruined at their feet, that she will not waste their food again.
Fed by the onslaught of rain, oyster grey mushrooms tunnel and bloom across the fields, in the vegetable gardens, by the cesspits and animal pens. The fungus resembles gentlewomen’s hands, indolent, plump and soft. They are hands that have never known a day’s work, have never cut through a frozen river in winter, have never slaughtered animals.
When Ae-Cha attempts to dig one of the grey masses out of the corner of the animal pen, she has to scrape and scrape at the root of it with a trowel. Each time she tries to break it near the ground, the mass slips through her fingers. She pushes deeper into the soil to try to feel where the soft plug of it ends and screams. What she has pulled up is a severed hand, blunted past the wrist.
In the village fields, the oxen turn over soil rife with fingers and toes.
The men have no choice but to dig a large pit. They mark out a place at the far end of the village, by the edge of the woods. They work in shifts with rags over their faces. Flesh flies feast on the exposed skin of their arms and backs, their pale and tender bellies. Sons run along the road with noisemakers, throw stones and bang pots to scare away carrion birds as their fathers cart the women’s bodies away.
*
Nothing grows as it should. Sorghum, corn, barley, beans. Nearly everything rots before it ripens.
Desperate, the villagers harvest the persimmon trees earlier than usual, pluck the branches raw, leave nothing, not even for the magpies, fearing they will have nothing to spare.
When the fishermen haul up their nets from the water, dismembered limbs nestle in among skeletal fish.
Autumn makes hoarders of the villagers. The neighbouring villages will no longer trade with them. They are being closed off from the rest of the province, left either to survive the plague of bodies or starve.
The pit at the edge of the woods fills itself with corpses, severed hands and feet. Dogs descend upon the village at night, and above, the sky swells and groans under the weight of every carrion bird man has named.
Yet, still they come.
The dead women pollute the reservoir with themselves. They stuff the mouths of rivers and irrigation trenches with lace nets of clotted caul fat. They strip the flesh from their bodies to adorn the branches of trees. They fill the animal troughs with blood, and the fall rain smells of their sweat.
*
Ae-Cha’s father poisons the vixen and her brood in November. He brings the pelts to the nobleman in exchange for a few bags of rice. The vixen is made into a muff for the nobleman’s favourite mistress, her paws divided among the other women. Her tail is sewn onto the brim of a fine winter hat for his wife. Her pups trim the sleeves and collars of his first concubine’s winter jackets and skirts, line gloves for the nobleman’s children.
When her father returns home, he finds Ae-Cha collapsed and feverish on the floor of the main room. Sores explode onto her skin, and she cannot eat or drink without retching. For days, she slips in and out of sleep, too weak to rise from her pallet.
What her father dares not tell her, what he did not tell the nobleman, is that after he tracked the vixen back to her burrow, he looked into the mouth of the tunnel. And when he placed his ear at the entrance, there came a low, unholy sound.
He does not tell anyone about the push and pull of air against his cheek. He does not tell anyone that when the wind rattled through the brush above, it sounded like his late wife sighing, his mother sucking her teeth in displeasure as the wind turned. That for a moment, when he rose to look out at the field, and the receding wind snapped the rotted stalks back in waves, he heard a woman’s voice tenderly calling out his daughter’s name.
He does not tell a soul that even now, as he lifts a spoon to Ae-Cha’s mouth and begs her to eat, as he scorches his fingers against the pot and boils more barley water for her to drink in small, painful sips, that he can still hear it: the deep, empty wound in the earth breathing in his ear.
*
In the winter, the villagers bring the persimmons up from their cellars only to find the skins, paper thin, have burst open, their sweet, jellied meat rancid with blood.
The rest of the village stores are eaten through with rot. Honey harvested years ago is now dotted with blackened teeth, rice with fingernails curled inward like desiccated maggots.
Yun Eun-Ji helps her husband deliver a new calf. The beast slips from its mother stillborn. He is as pale and cold as the first snow. His eyes are the cloudy milk-white of bone.
She tears open the membrane encasing the calf, rubs its limbs and puts her mouth over its nose and lips and exhales, but it is no use.
Goats and cattle sicken and die. They are opened up, split from anus to throat in the field, their ribs steaming like braziers against the frozen earth. When the villagers look expectantly inside the carcasses, they recoil in horror. The intestines are strung through with tangled cords of hair, and the meat withers and spoils before they can divide it amongst themselves.
The hens lay yolkless eggs, the shells so thin and translucent they look nearly unformed. When they are cracked into cooking pans, the albumen blisters and explodes into nests of white threads like cobwebs.
On her son’s first birthday, Nam Hee-Jun slaughters a spent hen, and when she moves to cast the head onto the waste heap, its eyes blink once, twice. She drops the knife and stumbles backward, falls on her side. The bird’s headless body rises from the block, shakes out its feathers then walks over and lays itself in her lap.
There are times that the great stinking mass of bodies seems to swell with breath. Each night the principal gravediggers return to the village afraid. As they beg for their supper and enough spirits to numb their aching joints, they tell the villagers about the noises they have heard, like a great snake slithering in the folds and tunnels of flesh, a great gurgling and chewing as if the earth itself is waking beneath their feet.
The village elders say they must burn the great pile or die.
But each time the men light a torch, the weather turns against them. Only the women’s cooking fires stay lit.
*
Ae-Cha stands before the pit, unsteady on her feet. The torch has been lit for her. Her arm shakes under its weight as she stretches it over the great, stinking mouth.
She has tried to distract herself from this moment ever since her father and the elders decided it was to be this way. With the rice he carried down from the nobleman’s house, she has made fresh rice cakes for the new year. She has rolled and shaped and sliced them, dusted them with enough flour so they will not stick, and placed a linen cloth over them.
All she has to do is let go of the torch, and she can go home with her father, set the pot of soup to boil and drop the cakes in.
She casts a final look back at her father. The villagers around him clutch emptied bottles and casks in their hands.
All she has to do is let go without looking down. For if she looks down, as the other women have before her who tried and failed, she will see her mother’s lips, her childhood friend’s eyes, the woman her baby sister might one day have been.
The bodies begin to speak and sing at once. Their voices twine into an unearthly howl. They sing of brutality, of longing, of grief and dismemberment. They speak of love only in the vocabulary of suffering.
Do you not recognise me? a woman calls out to Ae-Cha.
Here I am, your Mi-Sun-ie, your beloved, whose only shame was to be caught alone in the field when he took her, says another.
Here I am, Ha-Joon’s sweet sister Min-ah, whose only shame was to love a gentleman who would not love her when the baby came.
One unnamed voice repeats into the dark, over and over, an incomplete catalogue of herself. Here are my hands. And here, my liver. Here, a kidney, my eyes, my lungs, my heart.
Forgive me, my beloved, another whispers. Look at me, father, brother, uncle.
The wind whips Ae-Cha’s hair against her face as it changes direction. The women’s voices turn indignant, pitched high above the villagers’ yells. They are loud enough to rattle the roof tiles of the houses, the walls, make the earth itself pulse and shriek beneath her feet.
Have we not been faithful? the women ask. Have we not been born from the very same soil? Have we not salted the earth with ourselves, sown and reaped and harvested as you have asked?
Are we not your own dear, obedient ones come home?
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