IT’S BEEN NINE MONTHS since Mom went missing.
You’re in Italy now. Sitting on the marble stairs overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, you’re looking at the obelisk from Egypt. The guide, sweat beaded on his forehead, shouts, “Come this way,” and directs people in your tour group to the bottom of the stairs, where there is shade, near the large pinecones. “We are not allowed to speak in the museums or the basilica, so I’ll tell you about the important things in the museum before we go in. I’ll distribute earphones, so please listen.”
You take the earphones, but you don’t put them in your ears. The guide continues: “If you don’t hear anything in the earphones, it means you’re too far away from me. There will be so many people that I won’t be able to look out for each and every one of you. I can guide you properly only when you’re near me, where you can hear my voice.”
You head for the bathroom with the earphones dangling around your neck. People in your group stare at you as you stride into the bathroom. You wash your hands at the sink, and when you open your purse to take out your handkerchief to wipe your hands, your gaze stops at your sister’s letter crumpled inside. It’s the letter you took out of your mailbox at your apartment three days ago, as you were leaving Seoul with Yu-bin. Holding your suitcase in one hand, standing outside your door, you read your sister’s name written on the envelope. It was the first time you’d received a letter from your sister. And it was a handwritten letter, not just an e-mail. You wondered if you should open it, but you just stuffed it into your purse. Perhaps you thought that if you read it you would not be able to get on the plane with Yu-bin.
You come out of the bathroom and sit down with the group. Instead of putting the earphones in your ears, however, you take out your sister’s letter, hold it for a moment, then rip the envelope open.
Sister.
When I went to Mom’s soon after coming back from America, she gave me a young persimmon tree that came up to my knees. It was when I went to get the things I’d left there. Mom was crumpled in the storage area next to the shed, where my cooktop stove and fridge and table were stored. She was lying there, her limbs limp. The neighborhood cats that Mom fed were sitting around her. When I shook her, she managed to open her eyes, as if she were waking up, and looked at me and smiled. She said, “You’re here, my baby daughter!” Mom told me she was fine. Now I see that she had lost consciousness, but sheinsisted that she was fine, that she was in the storage shed to feed the cats. Mom had kept everything I left there when I went to America. Even the rubber gloves I told her to use as I was leaving. She said that she almost used the portable gas range during one ancestral rite but then didn’t. “Why not?” I asked, and she said, “So I could give everything back to you the way you left it when you came home.”
When I finished loading all the things onto the truck, Mom came over with the persimmon tree from behind the house, where she kept all the condiment jars. She looked embarrassed. The roots of the tree were wrapped in dirt and plastic. She had bought it for the yard at our new place. It was so small that I wondered when it would start bearing fruit. Honestly, I didn’t want to bring it back. We were going to live in a house with a yard, but we didn’t own it, and I wondered who would take care of the tree. Mom, seeing through me, said, “You’ll find persimmons on this tree very soon; even seventy years go by quick.”
I still didn’t want to take it, but Mom said, “It’s so when I die you can pick persimmons and think about me.”
Mom started saying “When I die…” more frequently. You know, that was her weapon for a long time. Her only weapon when it came to kids who didn’t do things the way she wanted them to. I don’t know when it started, but when she didn’t approve of something, Mom would say, “Do that after I die.” I brought the little persimmon tree to Seoul on the truck, although I didn’t know if it would survive, and buried the roots in the ground, as deep as Mom had marked on the tree. Later, when Mom came to Seoul, she said I’d planted it too close to the wall and that I should move it to another spot. She asked me often if I’d moved it. I said yes, even though I hadn’t. Mom wanted me to move the tree to an empty spot in the yard where I thought I could plant a big tree if I had enough money to buy this house. I didn’t really think I would move the little tree, which only had a couple of branches and now barely came up to my waist, but I answered yes. Before she wentmissing, she suddenly started calling every other day, asking, “Did you move the persimmon tree?” I just said, “I’ll do it later.”
Sister. Not until yesterday, with the baby on my back, did I take a cab to So-orung and buy powdered chicken droppings, dig a hole on the spot Mom had pointed out, and move the persimmon tree there. I hadn’t felt at all bad when I didn’t listen to her and failed to move that tiny persimmon tree away from the wall, but now I was surprised. When I first brought the tree here, the roots were so scrawny that I kept looking at it, doubting that it could even grow in the ground, but when I dug it up to move it, its roots had already spread far underground, tangled. I was impressed with its grit for life, its determination to survive somehow in the barren earth. Did she mean to give me the tree so that I could watch its branches multiply and its trunk thicken? Was it to tell me that if I wanted to see fruit I had to take good care of it? Or maybe she just didn’t have money to buy a big tree. For the first time, I felt attached to that persimmon tree. My doubts that it could ever have fruit disappeared.
Do you remember asking me a while ago to tell you something that only I knew about Mom? I told you I didn’t know Mom. All I knew was that Mom was missing. It’s the same now. I especially don’t know where her strength came from. Think about it. Mom did things that one person couldn’t do by herself. I think that’s why she became emptier and emptier. Finally, she became someone who couldn’t find any of her kids’ houses. I don’t recognize myself, feeding my kids and brushing their hair and sending them to school, unable to go look for Mom even though she’s missing. You said I was different, unlike other young moms these days, that there was a small part of me that’s a little bit like her, but, sister, no matter what, I don’t think I can be like Mom. Since she went missing, I often think: Was I a good daughter? Could I do the kind of things for my kids she did for me?
I know one thing. I can’t do it like she did. Even if I wanted to. When I’m feeding my kids, I often feel annoyed, burdened, as if they’re holding on to my ankles. I love my kids, and I am moved-wondering, did I really give birth to them? But I can’t give them my entire life like Mom did. Depending on the situation, I act as if I would give them my eyes if they need them, but I’m not Mom. I keep wishing the baby would hurry and grow up. I feel that my life has stalled because of the kids. Once the baby’s a little older, I’m going to send him to day care, or find someone to sit with him, and go to work. That’s what I’m going to do. Because I have my life, too. When I realized this about myself, I wondered how Mom did it the way she did, and discovered that I didn’t really know her. Even if we say her situation made her think only about us, how could we have thought of Mom as Mom her entire life? Even though I’m a mother, I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn’t have the opportunity to pursue her dreams and, all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn’t do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom’s dreams?
Sister.
I wanted to shove my face into the hole I dug for the persimmon tree. If I can’t live like Mom, how could she have wanted to live like that? Why did this thought never occur to me when she was with us? Even though I’m her daughter, I had no idea, so how alone must she have felt with other people? How unfair is it that all she did was sacrifice everything for us, and she wasn’t understood by anyone?
Sister. Do you think we’ll be able to be with her again, even if it’s just for one day? Do you think I’ll be given the time to understandMom and hear her stories and console her for her old dreams that are buried somewhere in the pages of time? If I’m given even a few hours, I’m going to tell her that I love all the things she did, that I love Mom, who was able to do all of that, that I love Mom’s life, which nobody remembers. That I respect her.
Sister, please don’t give up on Mom, please find Mom.
Your sister must not have been able to write the date or a goodbye. The letter has round blotches on it, as if she’d been crying as she wrote it. Your eyes linger over the yellowed spots; then you fold the letter and put it back in your purse. As your sister was writing the letter, her youngest, who had probably been eating something off the floor under the table, may have come to her and clumsily started to sing the children’s song that starts, “Mommy Bear…,” hanging on to her. Your sister may have looked at her baby, although with a dark expression, and sung for him, “… is slim!” The baby, who would not have understood his mom’s emotions, may have grinned broadly, and said “Daddy Bear…,” waiting for your sister to finish the verse. Your sister may have finished it, “is fat!” Your sister may not have been able to write the end to her letter. The baby, trying to climb up your sister’s leg, may have fallen down, bumping his head on the floor. And the baby would have burst into desperate-sounding sobs. Your sister, seeing the bluish bruise spreading on the baby’s soft skin, may have then spilled the tears she had been holding back.
You fold the letter and put it in your purse, and the guide’s passionate voice echoes in your ears. “The highlight of this museum is the Creation of Adam, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which we will see at the end. Michelangelo hung from a beam on the ceiling for four years as he worked on the fresco, and later in life, his eyesight became so weak that he couldn’t read or see pictures unless he went outside. Frescoes are made with lime plaster, so they had to finish before the plaster set. If they couldn’t do the work, which would normally take about a month, in one day, the plaster set and they had to do it again. Because he had to hang from the ceiling like that for four years, it’s understandable that he had problems with his neck and back for the rest of his life.”
The last thing you did at the airport before you boarded the plane was to call your father. After Mom disappeared, your father went back and forth between his house and Seoul, but he went home for good in the spring. You called him every day, in the morning or sometimes at night. Father picked up the phone after one ring, as if he was waiting by it. He would say your name before you told him it was you. This was something Mom always did. She would be pulling weeds in the flower garden, and when the phone rang, she would say to Father, “Answer the phone, it’s Chi-hon!” When you asked how she could tell who was calling, Mom shrugged and would say, “I just… I just know.” Living in the empty house by himself, without Mom, Father could now tell it was you, from the first ring. You told Father that you might not be able to call for a while, since you would have to think about when he would be awake to call from Rome. Father suddenly said, as if he wasn’t listening to you carefully, that he should have let Mom get surgery for sinus empyema.
“Mom had pain in her nose, too?” you asked, your voice dull, and Father said that Mom couldn’t sleep when the seasons changed because she would be coughing. He said, “It’s my fault. It was because of me that your mom didn’t have time to look after herself.” On any other day, you would have said, “Father, it’s nobody’s fault,” but on that day, the words “Yes, it’s your fault” jumped out of your mouth. Father drew in his breath sharply on the other end of the phone. He didn’t know you were calling from the airport.
“Chi-hon,” Father said after a long pause.
“Yes.”
“Your mom isn’t even in my dreams anymore.”
You didn’t say anything.
Father was quiet for a moment, then started speaking of the old days. He said that one day they cooked a scabbard fish that Hyong-chol had sent down. Mom dug up a radish topped with green leaves from the hillside garden, brushed off the dirt, peeled it with a knife, cut it into big chunks, spread it on the bottom of a pot, and steamed the scabbard fish, which turned red from all the seasonings she added. Mom plucked a plump piece of fish and set it on Father’s bowl of rice. Father wept as he recalled that one spring day, when they shared for lunch the scabbard fish that Mom had cooked in the morning and, stomachs full, napped together, stretched out. He said that back then he didn’t know that this was happiness. “I feel bad for your mom. I complained I was sick all the time.” It was true. Father was either away from home or, when he was home, sick. He seemed to be remorseful about that now.
“When I started getting sick, the same thing must have been happening to your mom.”
Was Mom unable to say that she was in pain, pushed aside by Father’s illnesses? Because she took care of everyone in the family, Mom was someone who couldn’t be sick. When he turned fifty, Father started taking blood-pressure medication, and his joints ached, and he developed cataracts. Right before Mom went missing, Father had a series of surgical procedures done on his knee, over a year, and because it was difficult for him to urinate, he had an operation on his prostate. He collapsed from a stroke and went to the hospital three times in one year, and each time he was released fifteen days or a month later, and the cycle was repeated. Every time this happened, Mom slept at the hospital. The family hired an aide for Father, but at night Mom had to sleep there. On the first night the aide slept over at the hospital, Father went into the bathroom, locked the door, and refused to come out. Mom, who was staying with Hyong-chol, got a phone call from the aide, who didn’t know what to do about Father’s sudden rebellion. Mom went to the hospital at once, even though it was in the middle of the night, and soothed Father, who was still locked inside the bathroom.
“It’s me. Open the door, it’s me.”
Father, who had refused to open the door no matter what anyone said, opened the door when he heard Mom’s voice. He was crouching next to the toilet. Mom helped him out to his bed; Father gazed at her for a while and finally fell asleep. He said he didn’t remember any of this. The next day, you asked him why he had done that, and he asked you, “You mean I did that?” And, worried you would continue to question him, he quickly closed his eyes.
“Mom has to rest, too, Father.”
Father had turned away. You knew that he was pretending to sleep but listening to you and Mom. Mom said she thought he had done it because he was afraid. He woke up, and he wasn’t at home but at the hospital, where there were only strangers and no family, and he must have hidden himself, wondering where he was, frightened.
“What’s so scary about this?” your father must have heard you muttering.
“Haven’t you ever been scared?” Mom glanced at Father and continued in a low voice: “Your father says that I do that sometimes, too. He says when he wakes up in the middle of the night and I’m not there and he looks for me, I’m hiding in the shed, or behind the well, waving my hands in front of me, and saying, ‘Don’t do that to me.’ He says he finds me shivering.”
“You, Mom?”
“I don’t remember doing that. Your father says he had to take me in and lay me down and give me some water, and finally I’d fall asleep. If I’m like that, I’m sure your Father’s afraid, too.”
“Afraid of what?”
Mom mumbled faintly, “I think it was scary just to live day by day. The scariest thing was when there was nothing left in the rice jar. When I thought I had to let you children go hungry… my lips were dry with dread. There were days like that.”
Father never told you or anyone else in the family that Mom acted that way sometimes. When you called him after Mom went missing, he brought up random old stories to delay the end of your conversation, but he never told you that Mom had gone to hide somewhere in the middle of the night, while she was sleeping.
You look at your watch. It’s ten in the morning. Is Yu-bin up? Has he had breakfast?
Today you woke up at six in the morning in an old hotel facing Termini Station. After Mom went missing, a heavy despair weighed down your body and your heart, as if you were sinking in water. You made to rise from the bed, and Yu-bin, who was sleeping with his back to you, turned around and tried to embrace you. You took his arm and rested it gently on the bed. Rejected, he put his arm on his forehead and said, “You should sleep a little more.”
“I can’t sleep.”
He moved his arm and turned over. You gazed at his stubborn back, then reached out and stroked it-your boyfriend’s back, which you haven’t been able to embrace warmly since Mom went missing.
Your family, who were all exhausted from looking for Mom, would often sink into silence when you were together. And then you would all act out. One of you would kick the door open to leave, or pour soju into a large beer mug and gulp it down. Pushing away the memories of Mom that were sprouting up all around you, you all thought one thing: If only Mom were here. If only Mom would say one more time from the other end of the phone, “It’s me!” Mom always said, “It’s me!” After she went missing, your family couldn’t maintain any sort of conversation for more than ten minutes. The question Where is Mom now? trickled in between whatever thoughts you had, making you anxious.
“I think I want to be by myself today,” you ventured.
“What are you going to do by yourself?” he asked, still facing the other way.
“I want to go to St. Peter’s Basilica. Yesterday, while I was waiting for you in the lobby, I signed up for the Vatican tour. I have to get ready and go. They said we were leaving at seven-twenty from the lobby. They said that the line gets so long that if we don’t get there by nine, it will take more than two hours to get inside.”
“You can go with me tomorrow.”
“We’re in Rome. There are so many other places I can go with you.”
You washed your face quietly, so as to not disturb him. You wanted to wash your hair, but you thought the sound of the water would be too loud, so you just tied your hair back, looking at your reflection in the mirror. When you emerged from the bathroom after getting dressed, you said, as if you just remembered, “Thanks for bringing me here.”
He pulled the sheet over his face. You knew that he was being as patient as he could possibly be. He introduced you as his wife to people you met here. You would probably be his wife by now, if Mom had been found. After his morning seminar, you two were supposed to have lunch with a few other couples. If he went to lunch by himself, the others would ask him where his wife was. You glanced at your boyfriend, the sheet still pulled over his head, and left the room.
After your mom went missing, you developed impulsive behaviors. You drank impulsively, and you would impulsively take a train down to your parents’ home in the country. You stared at the ceiling of your studio, unable to sleep, then got up and ran around the streets of Seoul, pasting flyers, whether it was in the middle of the night or at dawn. You once burst into the police station and screamed at them to find your mom. Hyong-chol came to the police station after receiving a call, and just stared at you. “Find Mom!” you screamed at your brother, who at a certain point had started to accept Mom’s absence, sometimes even going golfing.
Your scream was both a protest against people who knew Mom and hatred for yourself, who hadn’t been able to find her. Your brother calmly listened to your shrieking attacks: “How can you be like this? Why aren’t you finding Mom? Why? Why!”
All your brother could do was to walk the city with you at night. You would search underground concourses, wearing the mink coat that you took from Mom’s closet and brought with you last winter, or with the coat slung over your arm-so that you could drape it on Mom, who was last seen wearing summer clothes, when you found her. Your shadow holding the mink coat would be cast on the marble buildings as you walked among the sleeping homeless who were using newspaper or ramen crates as blankets. You kept your phone on all the time, but now nobody called to say they had seen someone who looked like Mom.
One day, you went to Seoul Station, to the spot where Mom was left behind, and bumped into your eldest brother, who was standing there aimlessly. You sat together, watching the subway trains come and go, until service ended for the night. He said that at first when he sat there like that he thought Mom would appear and tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hyong-chol!” But now he didn’t think that was going to happen. He mentioned that he didn’t think anymore, that the inside of his head was blank. That when he doesn’t want to go home right away after work, he finds himself coming to the station.
One holiday, you went to his house. You saw your brother get out of the car with his golf clubs and screamed, “You asshole!” and made a scene. If even your brother accepts Mom’s disappearance, who in the world is going to find her? You grabbed his clubs and threw them on the ground. Everyone was slowly becoming the son, daughter, and husband whose mom and wife was missing. Even without Mom, daily life continued.
Another time, you went back in the early morning to the spot where Mom had gone missing, and you again bumped into your brother. From behind, you grabbed him in a hug as he stood in the dawn light. He said that maybe it was only her children who thought of Mom’s life as being filled with pain and sacrifice, because of our guilt. We might actually be diminishing her life as something useless. To his credit, he remembered something Mom always said, even when the smallest positive thing happened: “I’m thankful! It’s something we should be grateful for!” Mom expressed gratitude for the small moments of happiness that everyone experienced. Your brother said that Mom’s gratitude came from the heart, that she was thankful about everything, that someone who was so grateful couldn’t have led an unhappy life. When you said goodbye, your brother said he was afraid that Mom wouldn’t recognize him even if she came back. You told him that, for Mom, he was the most precious person in the world, that Mom would always recognize him, no matter where he was or how he changed. When he was drafted into the army and entered training camp, there was a day when parents were invited to visit. Mom made rice cakes and carried them on her head to see Hyong-chol, with you in tow. Even though hundreds of soldiers were wearing the same clothes and demonstrating the same taekwondo moves, she was able to pick out your brother. To you, they all looked the same, but Mom smiled a great big smile and pointed: “There’s your brother!”
For once, you were peacefully talking about Mom with your brother, but then you raised your voice, asking why he wasn’t doing more to look for her. “Why are you talking about Mom as if she won’t be able to come back?” you yelled. He said, “Tell me, how am I supposed to find her?” In his frustration, he ripped open the top few buttons of his white shirt under his suit jacket, and ended up showing you his tears. After that, he stopped answering your calls.
Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom’s everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn’t think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves. You realized that her position in life hadn’t changed even after the war was over, and even when the family could afford to feed itself. When the family got together for the first time in a long while, sat around the table with Father, and talked about the presidential elections, Mom would cook and bring out the food and wash the dishes and clean and hang damp dishrags to dry. Mom took care of fixing the gate and the roof and the porch. Instead of helping her do the work that she did nonstop, even you thought of it as natural, and took it for granted that this was her job. Sometimes, as your brother pointed out, you thought of her life as disappointing-even though Mom, despite never having been well off, tried so hard to give you the best of everything, even though it was Mom who patted your back soothingly when you were lonely.
Around the time tiny new leaves started to sprout on the ginkgo trees in front of City Hall, you were squatting under a large tree on a main road that led to Samchong-dong. It was unbelievable that spring was coming without Mom here. That the frozen ground was thawing and the trees were starting to wake up. Your heart, which had sustained you throughout this ordeal with the belief that you would be able to find Mom, was crushed. Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom. You could imagine a desolate road. And the missing woman plodding down that road, wearing blue plastic sandals.
Without telling anyone in the family, you left with Yu-bin for Rome, where he was going to attend a seminar. He’d asked you to come with him but didn’t expect you to say yes. When you actually decided to go with him, he was a little taken aback, though he patiently made a few changes in his schedule. The day before you were to leave, he even called to ask, “Nothing’s changed, right?” As you got on the Rome-bound plane with him, you wondered for the first time whether Mom’s dream was to travel. Mom would always worry and tell you not to get on planes, but when you came back from somewhere, she would ask you detailed questions about the place you’d visited: “What kind of clothes do Chinese people wear?” “How do the Indians carry their children?” “What was the most delicious food you had in Japan?” Mom’s questions would spill out onto you. You would always reply curtly, “Chinese men take off their shirts in the summer and walk around like that.” “The Indian woman I saw in Peru carried her child wrapped in a sack on her hip.” “Japanese food is too sweet.” When Mom asked more questions, you got annoyed and said, “I’ll tell you later, Mom!” But you had no opportunity for these conversations later, because you always had something else to do. You leaned back in your airplane seat and heaved a deep sigh. It was Mom who’d told you to live someplace far away. It was also Mom who’d sent you at a young age to live in a city far from your birthplace. Mom back in those days-you realized, painfully, that Mom was the same age as you are now when she brought you to the city and left, taking the night train back home. One woman. That woman disappeared, bit by bit, having forgotten the joy of being born and her childhood and dreams, marrying before her first period and having five children and raising them. The woman who, at least when it came to her children, wasn’t surprised or thrown off by anything. The woman whose life was marred with sacrifice until the day she went missing. You compare yourself with Mom, but Mom was an entire world unto herself. If you were Mom, you wouldn’t be running away like this, running away from fear.
The entire city of Rome is literally a historical site. All the negative things you heard about Rome-there’s a transit strike every other day, and they don’t even apologize to the passengers; people will grab your arm and steal your watch right under your nose; the streets are blighted with graffiti and garbage-you didn’t care about. You just observed everything passively, although you were ripped off by a cab driver, and someone grabbed the sunglasses that you had just placed next to you at a café. You went to various ruins by yourself, during the three days when Yu-bin was at his conference. To the Foro Romano, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Catacombs. You stood listlessly in the spacious ruins of the large city. Everything about Rome symbolized civilization. But although traces of the past were spread out in front of you wherever you went, you didn’t keep anything in your heart.
Now you are looking at the statues of saints in the round piazza, but your eyes do not pause anywhere. The guide explains that Vatican City is not only a country in the secular world, but also God’s country; that the territory is only forty-four hectares but an independent state with its own currency and stamps. You aren’t listening to the guide’s explanations. Your eyes jump from person to person. Even if there are only a few people around, your eyes leap among them, unsettled, as you wonder, Is Mom here somewhere? There’s no way Mom would be among Western tourists, but even now your eyes don’t know how to settle on a single object. Your eyes meet the eyes of the guide, who’d said that he came here seven years ago to study choral music. Embarrassed that you’re not even wearing the earphones, you pull them up and plug them into your ears. “Vatican City is the world’s smallest country. But thirty thousand people visit it in a single day.” As you hear the guide’s commentary transmitted to your ears, you bite the inside of your lip. Mom’s words come to you in a flash. When was that? Mom asked you what the smallest country in the world was. She asked you to get her a rosary made of rosewood if you ever went to that country. The smallest country in the world. You suddenly pay attention. This country? This Vatican City?
With your earphones still on, you wander away from your group seated at the foot of the marble stairs, away from the sun, and go inside the museum alone. A rosary made of rosewood. You walk by the majestic ceiling art and a row of sculptures whose end you can’t see. There has to be a gift shop somewhere, which might have a rosewood rosary for sale. As you weave quickly between people in your quest to find this rosewood rosary, you pause at the entrance to the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo hung from the beams of that high ceiling every day for four years to work on the fresco? The sheer size of the fresco overwhelms you, so different from the way it looks in books. Yes, it would have been strange if he didn’t experience physical problems after finishing this project. The artist’s pain and passion gush down like water onto your face as you stand under the Creation of Adam. Your instincts are right; when you leave the Sistine Chapel, you immediately see a gift shop and bookstore. Nuns in white are standing behind display cases. Your eyes meet those of one particular nun.
“Are you Korean?” Korean comes out of the Sister’s mouth.
“Yes.”
“I came from Korea, too. You’re the first Korean I’ve met since I was sent here. I arrived four days ago.” The Sister smiles.
“Do you have rose rosaries?”
“Rose rosaries?”
“Rosaries made of rosewood?”
“Ah.” The Sister takes you to one part of the display case. “Do you mean this?”
You open the rosary case the Sister hands you. The scent of roses bursts out of the airtight rosary case. Did Mom know this smell?
“It was blessed by a priest this morning.”
Is this the rosewood rosary Mom talked about?
“Is this the only place you can get this rosary?”
“No, you can get it anywhere. But since it’s the Vatican, there is more meaning to it if it comes from here.”
You gaze at the sticker on the rosary case: fifteen euros. Your hands shake as they give the money to the nun. Still holding the rosary case, the nun asks if it’s a gift. Gift? Could I give this to Mom? Could I? When you nod, the nun takes from the inside of the display case a white envelope with the image of the Pietà printed on it, puts the case inside, and seals it with a sticker.
Holding the rosewood rosary in your hand, you start walking toward St. Peter’s Basilica. From the entrance, you look inside. Light cascades from the dome above the majestic bronze ciborium. Angels float among the white clouds in the ceiling fresco. You set one foot in the basilica and look beyond the large, lacquered halo. As you walk down the center aisle toward it, your feet pause. Something pulls at you, intensely. What is it? You wade through the crowd, toward the thing that is pulling at you like a magnet. You look up to see what people are looking at. The Pietà. The Holy Mother holding her dead son is ensconced behind bulletproof glass. As if you are being dragged forward, you push through the crowd to the front. As soon as you see the graceful image of the Holy Mother holding the body of her son, who had just breathed his last breath, you feel as though you are frozen in that spot. Is that marble? It seems that her dead son still has some heat in his body. The Holy Mother’s eyes are filled with pain, as her head tilts down at her son’s body laid across her lap. Even though death has already touched them, their bodies seem real-as if a poking finger would dent their flesh. The woman who was denied her motherhood still gave her lap to her son’s body. They are vivid, as if alive. You feel someone brushing against your back, so you look swiftly behind you. It’s as if Mom is standing behind you.
You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized. You still had the habit of calling Mom on the phone even after she went missing. So many days, you were about to call Mom but then stood there, numbly. You place the rosewood rosary in front of the Pietà and kneel. It’s as if the Holy Mother’s hand, cradling her dead son under his armpit, is moving. It’s hard for you to look at the Holy Mother’s anguish as she holds her son, who has reached death after enduring pain. You don’t hear anything, and the light from the ceiling has disappeared. The cathedral of the smallest country in the world falls into deep silence. The cut in the tender skin on the inside of your lip keeps bleeding. You swallow the blood that pools in your mouth and manage to raise your head to look up at the Holy Mother. Your palms reach out automatically to touch the bulletproof glass. If you can, you want to close the Holy Mother’s sorrowful eyes for her. You can sense Mom’s scent vividly, as if you two had fallen asleep under the same blanket last night and you embraced her when you woke up this morning.
One winter, Mom wrapped her rough hands around your young, cold ones and took you to the furnace in the kitchen. “Oh my, your hands are sheets of ice!” You smelled the unique fragrance of Mom, who huddled around you before the fire, rubbing and rubbing your hands to warm them.
You feel the Holy Mother’s fingers, which are wrapped around her dead son’s body, stretching out and stroking your cheek. You remain on your knees in front of the Holy Mother, who barely manages to raise her son’s hands, clearly marked by nail-inflicted wounds, until you can no longer hear footsteps in the basilica. At one point you open your eyes. You stare at the Holy Mother’s lips, beneath her eyes, which are immersed in sorrow. Her lips are closed firmly, with a grace that nobody could disturb. Deep sighs escape your lips. The Holy Mother’s dainty lips have moved beyond the sorrow in her eyes toward compassion. You look at her dead son again. The son’s arms and legs are splayed peacefully across his mother’s knees. She is soothing him even in death. If you’d told anyone in the family that you were going on a trip, they would have taken that to mean that you had given up on finding Mom. Since you had no way to convince them otherwise, you came to Rome without telling anyone. Did you come here to see the Pietà? When Yu-bin suggested that you join him in Italy, you might have unconsciously thought of this sculpture. Perhaps you wanted to pray in this place, pray that you could see for one last time the woman who lived in a small country attached to the edge of the vast Asian continent, to find her, and this is why you came here. Then again, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe you already understood that Mom didn’t exist in this world anymore. Maybe you came here because you wanted to plead: Please don’t forget Mom, please take pity on Mom. But now that you see the statue on the other side of the glass, sitting on a pedestal, embracing with her frail arms all of mankind’s sorrow since the Creation, you can’t say anything. You stare at the Holy Mother’s lips intently. You close your eyes, back away, and leave that place. A line of priests passes, probably on their way to celebrate mass. You walk out to the entrance of the basilica and look down, dazed, at the piazza surrounded by long cloisters and enshrined in brilliant light. And only then do the words you couldn’t say in front of the statue leak out from between your lips.
“Please, please look after Mom.”