A Beautiful Prison

In truth, his question wasn't an unreasonable one. Anyone would have been at least a little curious.

Who she was.

Where she had come from.

Whenever she'd been asked something similar while at Granny Yoon-hwa's side, the old woman would always cut in first — she's my granddaughter — raising a breakwater against the question before it could reach her.

It meant there had been very few occasions on which she herself had ever been expected to explain what she was to her grandmother.

But now her grandmother was gone.

A question like this, landing so abruptly, left her genuinely at a loss for how to answer. After a brief hesitation, Lee-seol replied in a voice as level as she could manage.

"……I'm not her blood granddaughter, you see."

It had only been a matter of time before someone in this old house learned that she was not Granny Yoon-hwa's granddaughter by blood. It was hardly some extraordinary secret. And if that was the case, it was far better to tell him herself than to have it filtered through someone else's mouth.

"Ahh."

"……"

"And so?"

His follow-up was perfectly composed. Outside the window, leaves cried out in the wind with a desolate rustle. Lee-seol's brow creased faintly.

"……Why do you want to know?"

"Can't have any mistakes."

Mistakes — what on earth was he planning to do, and how, that a mistake was even possible?

He had framed the question as a matter of caution, so refusing to answer felt awkward — and even if she refused, reading her circumstances would no doubt be child's play for him anyway.

No help for it. Lee-seol let out a long sigh.

"……Granny Yoon-hwa took me in, they say. An abandoned two-year-old."

Her voice grew smaller and smaller. Spouting the secrets of her birth to his face felt awkward enough to grate on her.

Every servant in this old house had treated her as the granddaughter of their mistress — as their 'Agassi.' It meant she had never lived so poorly as to feel want or absence.

Lee-seol had grown up believing that the people here, and the scenery of Mt. Hyeonak itself, were both her mother and her father. She had never once been ashamed of having been abandoned by her parents and raised alone, nor had she ever gone looking for that absence and mourned it anew.

And yet, strangely, she felt ashamed now. Laying her circumstances bare before this man.

"I see."

He brushed the whole topic aside as though it were nothing. What's more, his terse reply seemed almost indifferent, as if the matter had never been of much consequence to begin with.

That attitude sat badly with Lee-seol. The man who had made something utterly ordinary feel suddenly, unbearably shameful — she found him more and more displeasing.

What a nuisance. She was toying with a loose strand of her long hair, about to step out of the room entirely, when—

"Honestly, I was a little surprised."

"……Because the place is so old-fashioned?"

"No. Just that. It's beautiful."

Her hand, still gripping the door handle, stopped dead.

She stole a glance back and caught the figure of the impure stranger standing in the middle of the room.

His gaze was fixed entirely on her, standing there before the guest room door. It was a gaze that would not easily let go, tenacious enough to feel venomous. Lee-seol gave a faint shudder and met those eyes steadily.

For an instant, something uncanny flickered across them. Arrogant and unhurried, and at the same time so world-weary they seemed bored to death with everything existence had to offer.

Perhaps that flash was closer to his true nature than anything else she'd glimpsed. The pleasantly smiling face he'd worn before her grandmother — nothing more than a finely carved mask.

Gooseflesh prickled over her skin. Tae-shin spoke again.

"It seems you don't much care for me, Shin Lee-seol-ssi."

"……Why do you think that?"

"You just look like you don't."

His firm, level voice carried a force that was difficult to defy. In the blink of an eye, the entire atmosphere seemed to turn against her.

Lee-seol fluttered her eyelids and let her gaze slide away. She'd done nothing wrong, and yet guilt pricked at her heart all the same.

"In any case, it seems we'll be seeing a good deal of each other from now on."

"……"

"Let's get along well, then, you and I."

His voice softened, the way one praises a child for a job well done. Seeing a good deal of each other from now on. At those words, she felt a sudden, jarring sensation — like a string snapping taut mid-performance on a hyeon, the zither's note severed before the melody could ripen.

"Executive Director Woo Tae-shin."

She called his title and summarily severed the flow of conversation. Drawing her chest slowly full of air and releasing it in a long breath, she poured out everything she had to say in a rush.

"If you're hoping Granny Yoon-hwa will perform the rite herself, you're wasting your time. It would be best for you to simply go home."

"Is that advice?"

"Yes. You're clearly a very busy man, so I'm telling you not to waste your effort on nothing."

"……"

"Then, if you'll excuse me—"

Lee-seol dipped her head in a polite bow, wrapped up the exchange, and was slipping quietly toward the door when his final words poured against her back.

"Shin Lee-seol-ssi."

Her steps stopped dead. There was something indescribable in the force of his voice, saying her name.

"From now on, you may call me Woo Tae-shin-ssi."

"……"

"And if some other title comes to mind instead of Executive Director, feel free to use that instead."

His timbre was so low, so deep it raised the hair on her arms. She couldn't bring herself to turn around.

With her shoulders drawn slightly in, Lee-seol stepped out of the room and shut the door behind her in haste.

Glancing back once at the firmly closed door, she quickened her pace. No one was chasing her, yet her stride kept growing wider as she moved down the corridor.

She hadn't told a single lie.

Her grandmother no longer performed rites. She no longer could.

Even if the nameless chaebol chairman who had so magnanimously gifted her this beautiful old house came crawling on his knees to beg, there would be nothing she could grant him.

So her advice had not been wrong in the least.

Woo Tae-shin, who would one day shoulder the fate of a vast conglomerate — surely he was hardly a man with leisure to squander his time in this worthless little place.

And so it was right for him to leave here quickly.

……No. Honestly, Granny Yoon-hwa's health had only been the pretext.

Executive Director Woo Tae-shin. I just want you out of Sehwawon as soon as possible.

That ferocious gaze that had fastened onto her. Lee-seol called it back to mind and shivered. She hated it — hated it so much. It felt wrong in a way that defied explanation.

Had anyone ever made her feel something this intense before?

It was as if a sharp crack had split through the peace she'd kept so precariously, like a walk across thin ice.

No. Absolutely not. Lee-seol bit lightly at her lower lip.

[This place, Sehwawon, is like a still life. A beautiful still life — peaceful, quiet, utterly still.

Anyone who sees it calls this place beautiful. But sometimes doubt creeps over me. Could this place be nothing more than a prison prepared for Granny Yoon-hwa, who burned so fiercely through her youth, so that she might grow old in silence……]

Oh no. Lee-seol sighed softly and clicked the pencil's mechanism several times. Nothing emerged — only a hollow click, click, click. The lead had run out entirely.

She reached for her cloth pencil case, its zipper hanging open to expose the contents, and rummaged for spare lead. Having refilled the pencil and erased the stray mark, she set the pencil gently down instead of going back to her writing.

Something kept churning in her stomach. She leaned back against her chair and let out a long exhale.

At an age she could not even remember — two years old — Lee-seol had been left behind in this beautiful prison.

Twenty-one years had passed since then.

Through all that time, Lee-seol had grown up docile and compliant.

It was right around adolescence that she first began to feel a faint wrongness in the strange air that hung over Sehwawon.

In Eulju-ri, the modest village at the foot of Mt. Hyeonak, there was a small branch school. Lee-seol spent her entire school years there.

The students of the branch school saw the same faces from elementary through middle and high school. Fifteen in all — that had been the total enrollment the year she started, and three of them left Eulju-ri for Seoul partway through.

The children left behind at the branch school seemed, if anything, a little envious of the backs of those friends as they drove away after their goodbyes, riding off in their parents' cars.

I want to leave too, they thought.

By the age when a child could begin to sense how small and narrow Eulju-ri was, those friends' desires to leave had grown more concrete.

Coming of age breeds grievance against the world.

Everything around you suddenly becomes unbearable; the things you've never had grow tantalizing; some other world — any world but the one you belong to — seems infinitely grander and finer than your own.

No one was exempt. All of them, without exception, felt it.

And all the more so when Eulju-ri's last remaining high school was shuttered for failing to meet its enrollment quota, and they were bussed instead to a school somewhat closer to the city.

'The moment I graduate, I'm going to Seoul. This place is way too cramped. There's nothing fun here, not one thing.'

'……'

'Lee-seol, have you seriously never thought about that? Not even once?'

Her friends, every last one of them, spoke with a single voice of their longing for an outside world they had never once laid eyes on — of how tiny and stifling and dull Eulju-ri and Mt. Hyeonak both were.

In Sehwawon, unchanging, unwavering stillness was counted a virtue. But everyone beyond its walls loved change and motion. Tranquility was dismissed as laziness, as tedium. It could not be pinned down — something vast, like a current that would not be held.

Twelve in all. The friends who had shared faces from elementary school through graduation at a high school two hours away by bus scattered to distant towns the moment their diplomas touched their hands, as if by prior agreement.

Her brief school years behind her, Lee-seol remained in Sehwawon once more.

No — she remained confined there.