The Scent of Soap
He didn't believe in dongti curses one iota.
But his grandfather was a different matter.
Woo Tae-shin's grandfather, Chairman Woo Kyung-hwan of Haeun Group, was a man who had leaned heavily on shamanic faith since time immemorial. Whenever anything big or small touched the management of the company, he would lay out a boiled pig's head and stage a lavish kut ritual; every New Year, he would seek out a fortune-teller of repute and have his own prospects and the company's fortunes divined. The moment he heard his grandson's plan to build a golf-course resort on Mt. Hyeonak, he had dispatched several respected geomancers to inspect whether the site was fit for business.
And when those geomancers had spoken with one voice—declaring the ground truly auspicious—he had slapped his knee in delight.
That was how seriously Chairman Woo took the shamanic world.
It was the same when Tae-shin's mother and father passed away one after the other…… Tae-shin tossed the towel he'd been drying his hair with irritably into the basket.
Right on cue, the news that a dongti had broken out at the development site his one and only grandson was pouring heart and soul into had cost Chairman Woo Kyung-hwan a proper night's sleep. Then he had summoned Tae-shin and laid down the law himself: You must handle this personally. That is what proves you have the stuff of a chairman.
Mt. Hyeonak, was it? Then go seek out Granny Yoon-hwa who lives there. I've met plenty of fortune-tellers who claim to be gifted, but I've never once seen anyone as capable as that old woman. It gives me chills, I tell you.
You mean Sehwawon?
That's the one. That woman predicted the IMF crisis before it hit, called the inter-Korean summit—she's gotten everything right. It's a shame she won't grace me with so much as a single reading anymore, no matter how much I beg.
Having said his piece, Chairman Woo clicked his tongue in exaggerated regret. But he had closed the account by throwing her one last grand ritual, so there was nothing more to cling to, however much he might lament it—after all, she read the fortunes of other chairmen just as fairly, which was a small mercy in itself. That last point, Tae-shin could concede as well.
That an exalted mansin, a shaman of extraordinary power, lived in an old manor halfway up Mt. Hyeonak was a fact Tae-shin knew all too well.
As was the fact that Sehwawon, the estate where that shaman lived, had been gifted to her by his grandfather himself.
That Chairman Woo had once personally visited the place with his grandson the year he turned eighteen, however, seemed to have been quietly buried. Judging by how he'd refrained from mentioning it now.
Tae-shin turned the old memory over calmly in his mind.
'I will go.'
There was no reason to refuse.
As it happened, there was something—or someone—there he was eager to see again.
Sehwawon, revisited, seemed exactly as it had been, as though everything there had simply stopped. Apart from the fact that the mistress and her servants had gained the wrinkles of the years gone by, the place might as well have been preserved under glass.
Peaceful, and tedious.
Tae-shin felt no particular stir of emotion at coming back. He preferred the city to nature, and here the ennui that ordinarily draped his body like a thin second skin grew heavier and more nakedly visible.
Still, the most interesting thing here remained, as ever, that girl from back then.
'You smell nice, oppa.'
'What smell?'
'A really, really good one……. Like soap.'
And yet she seemed not to remember him at all.
Well—it had been a long time, and his visit hadn't exactly been for happy reasons. She had every excuse. No, that shouldn't be the case, somehow.
The day she kissed him out of nowhere, and the day she told him to marry her. Tae-shin's eyes narrowed.
A knock—tap, tap—cut through his reverie. Was it Chief of Staff Jo coming to his room? He opened the door to his caller and found Tongyeong-daek, who had served his dinner the day before, standing there holding a tray bearing a mid-morning snack.
"Master Woo, sir, ye've skipped breakfast too, haven't ye? Ye must be peckish. Have a bit of this."
On the tray sat a sandwich stuffed to bursting with vegetables and ham, a few slices of apple, and a cup of coffee with a few ice cubes floating on top—arranged with quiet care. It smelled just like the coffee from yesterday.
Her gaze swept over him openly, taking in the fact that he'd thrown a bath robe over himself and little else. Tae-shin simply lifted the mug with a pleasant smile.
"I have to head out soon, so I'll just take the coffee."
"Yes, yes, of course."
"I suppose the elder still refuses to see me?"
Tae-shin raised his cup deliberately and took a leisurely sip, his eyes glinting sharp.
"W-well, about that……"
Tongyeong-daek shuffled and hemmed at the remark, visibly flustered.
His request for a meeting had indeed been flatly turned down that very morning. He had knocked so politely, wanting to pay even a simple morning greeting, but Granny Yoon-hwa had declared she needed no such thing and hadn't even opened the door.
So it seemed she intended to keep stonewalling him.
Until he wore himself out and gave up and left.
It was nothing really, yet somehow it fed his stubbornness. He wanted to press down on it, and bend it, for no good reason. Everyone in this house was like that. Tae-shin smiled faintly.
"Ye see, once the mistress says no, it's absolutely no. She doesn't budge one whit when it comes to her mansin duties or Miss Lee-seol's affairs……"
Tongyeong-daek, groping for his reaction, scratched the back of her head and stammered on.
"Then I'll just have to try harder."
He already had a fairly good idea.
What would be most effective at provoking that stiff-necked old woman.
And it happened to be exactly what he wanted to try—so there was even less reason not to.
……Five minutes late. Lee-seol fumbled her wallet into her bag and hurried out the front gate.
Tae-shin was already waiting outside. The profile of him leaning against the pillar at the entrance, quietly consulting his wristwatch, was rather handsome. His dress shirt, comfortably rolled up to the elbows, caught her eye.
Just when she thought he seemed nothing at all like the prejudice the word chaebol summoned up, the bleak glint in his eyes that surfaced now and then kept nagging at her.
What on earth was this man? She knew curiosity was a poison, yet she couldn't stop the thoughts from welling up.
Scuffing the straps of her loose sandals, she drew near him. He smiled easily, as though a slight delay meant nothing to him at all.
"You look pretty."
"……"
While she was floundering over how to answer, the topic slid along naturally.
"How does one usually get down to the village?"
"……By car, or on foot when it's light out."
Getting from Sehwawon to downtown Eulju-ri took an hour by car, an hour on foot.
Since there was hardly any difference in the time it took, it was far better to take the hiking trail straight down than to summon someone and be driven in a car that had to wind its way back and forth down the mountain. Besides, there was a quiet pleasure in spotting the seasonal wildflowers blooming here and there along the way down.
"I'd like to walk, if that's all right?"
"Yes, of course."
Tae-shin proposed walking down to the village, and Lee-seol agreed readily, without a second thought. She didn't even hold a driver's license, and it felt too burdensome to ask the ever-busy servants for a ride every time—whenever she needed to go down, she usually walked. There was nothing to hesitate over.
Yet not even five minutes in, Lee-seol was already regretting her decision.
……This is unbearably awkward.
Lee-seol fidgeted, kneading the back of her neck. The silent footfalls behind her kept grating on her nerves. Tae-shin, following quietly in her wake, made no particular move to strike up conversation. He simply followed where she led, step for step.
Even if he kept a chauffeur on staff, surely the man would have a license. It might have been better to hand him the keys and ride down in a car he drove. It would have made it easier to pretend to doze off, too…… Just as a small sigh escaped her—
"The book you lent me. I'm enjoying it."
Lee-seol's shoulders jumped at the low voice behind her. Of all the subjects that could fill this excruciating silence, it was the one she'd been most hoping for.
"……Are you finding it interesting?"
"Yes."
Thump, thump. That laconic reply sent her heart hammering tight against her ribs.
Lee-seol—no, Dongbaek—had so many questions for the first reader she'd ever met in person. Which of her works he liked best, and why; of all the books out there, why he had chosen Dongbaek's. She wanted to hear the answers to every single one of them, if only he would give them. She had to work quite hard to keep the excitement out of her voice.
"Which part do you…… like the most?"
She asked the thing she was most curious about first. The answer came faster than she expected.
"Dongbaek's writing is lonely."
"……"
"To me, that comes across as something very pure."
It was a clean answer, given without hesitation. She had heard something similar from Jung-min, her previous editor—that Dongbaek's writing had a desolate, forlorn quality, like a winter wind sweeping past, and that it was in that quality that the electric resonance of a soul rang out.
They say a doctor can't cure her own illness; no matter how she peered into her own writing, she couldn't understand what that meant. Lee-seol had simply nodded and left it at that.
Still, it seemed he really had read her work—if his opinion matched her editor's…… Lee-seol asked her next question in a voice pitched slightly higher.
"Woo Tae-shin-ssi, do you like pure things, then?"
"That depends. Being told you grew up in a sterile room isn't usually a compliment—it's mockery."
A sterile room. Sehwawon, small and cramped, flickered briefly through her mind. A narrow, tiny place where things from the outside rarely intruded. A place where time had pooled and stagnated.
Ever since he arrived here, she'd become strangely conscious of Sehwawon's isolation, its severance from the world. And that was not a good sign at all.