Five Portraits
“Honey, art school is still out of the question. The more she draws, the more her mind seems to come unhinged. Look at this.”
Mom yanked a sketchbook thick with dust down from the top of the wardrobe and flung it open in front of Dad. Woo-yeon just sat there blinking blankly.
……Why is that still here?
It was the sketchbook she had believed Mom threw away years ago. Inside were page after page of drawings that twisted and tore her parents into grotesque shapes. Woo-yeon could not understand why Mom had kept it.
Sure enough, as Dad flipped through the pictures one by one, his face crumpled into something uglier and uglier.
“Fuck, is that girl actually insane? She wanted us to pour all that money into her so she could draw this shit? You think money grows on trees in this house?”
The sketchbook came flying at her face and slapped onto the floor. Dad stomped on it hard with the tip of his shoe.
……It’s over.
Tears slid slowly down her cheek. So this really was the end. It could all fall apart this emptily, this absurdly.
Mom’s soft, measured voice continued.
“When is that girl ever going to grow up? She has no idea how she’s rotting her parents’ insides, just itching to run off and do whatever she wants. The money coming into this house barely keeps food on the table, and every idiot with shit for brains starts talking about art school or whatever…….”
“What the hell did you just say?”
In an instant the table still set with dinner flipped over. Crash, clatter. Scarlet kimchi broth sprayed across the walls and ceiling; the sharp rattle of shattered dishes exploded through the room. Mom’s face went deathly pale as she stumbled backward.
“What’s wrong with you, honey! Why the table——ah!”
“Barely keeps food on the table? You fucking bitch, when you sprawl around the house collecting your three million won every month like clockwork, what then? Shit for brains? Fine, I’ll crack your skull open first and see whether it’s shit or piss that’s packed in there, huh! Let’s see!”
Dad seized Mom by the hair.
When he was in a good mood he could be endlessly tender; around the neighborhood he was known as a henpecked husband, a devoted wife-lover, a doting father. But the moment he heard anything that sounded like disrespect, he detonated. And whenever Mom’s nerves frayed past the breaking point, she had a habit of stomping right on that detonator. Every time her head whipped from side to side, a crow’s cry tore out of her mouth.
Woo-yeon had expected the blows to land on her; instead the sparks flew at Mom. In moments like this she never knew what she was supposed to do. She couldn’t intervene, couldn’t run and risk setting Dad off further, and calling the police was completely out of the question. Thought collapsed at high speed; her mind began to bleach white. She could no longer string ideas together in any normal way.
What am I supposed to do right now? R-registration? Sh-should I go talk to a teacher at least? Mom? If I try to stop him I’ll get hit too, right? M-maybe just pretend I don’t notice and keep doing what I was doing? First, s-school? Right, it’s graduation day, so go to school, and then, f-food first…….
Woo-yeon pulled the rice bowl that had rolled in front of her into her arms and began shoveling plain rice into her mouth. It felt as if thinking itself had simply stopped. Please, anyone, just tell me what you’re supposed to do at a time like this. Even if the answer was to slit my stomach open with a kitchen knife, just say something. Tears dripped steadily into the bowl, so the rice tasted salty even without side dishes.
“Forget the whole thing! I won’t give you a single ten-won coin. If you want to go that badly, earn the money yourself and go wherever the hell you like!”
After Dad stormed into his room and slammed the door, Mom collapsed among the broken side-dish plates like a discarded rag and began to cry in a high, scraping chalkboard screech.
Woo-yeon crawled on all fours into the bathroom and threw up the rice she had just eaten. The vomiting had become habitual; it came easily. Because she had forced down plain rice with nothing else, no red stains of vomit remained in the toilet. Even though nothing was left in her stomach, bitter fluid kept rising, and she retched dryly again and again.
“Open the door. How can a daughter sit there stuffing her face while her mother’s getting beaten? Your mother’s getting hit because of you and the food still goes down? Are you even human? Crazy bitch, you’re a real psychopath! And they call that a child. Come out, I said come out…….”
Scrape, drag, screech. Mom clawed at the bathroom door, sobbing under her breath.
Suddenly Woo-yeon thought of a certain bridge over the Han River that had earned the nickname Bridge of Life.
#4. Five Portraits
Throughout the long story the man had looked somehow in pain. When she spoke about painting his eyes widened a fraction or his brows twitched; when she spoke about her parents and friends his breathing roughened for a moment or the fingertips gripping his coffee cup turned bone-white. But he never interrupted.
When Woo-yeon’s story ended, the man finally closed his eyes and let out a thin sigh.
“Jin Woo-yeon.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever filed a police report, or asked a teacher for help?”
“……No.”
“I see.”
He did not ask why. He only nodded quietly. Then he reached out and carefully patted her shoulder. Tap. Tap-tap. Woo-yeon felt more grateful that he did not press her on why she hadn’t reported it than for the comfort in the touch itself. If she had to explain, like a criminal, that she simply hadn’t had the courage to risk her life, it would have felt too wretched.
Reporting truly meant staking your life. The police always prioritized restoring a family over acknowledging its collapse. Friends in situations like hers didn’t fail to call 112 or 1366 because they didn’t know the numbers or because their fingers were broken. Even if you reported it, you still had to face the parents who had been released with a warning that same evening at home. Woo-yeon had never once heard a heartwarming happy ending in which those parents returned home, wept in repentance, and lived happily ever after.
“Mister…… but maybe Mom’s right and I really am a psychopath.”
The man met her gaze quietly. Why do you think that? he asked without a sound.
At some point Woo-yeon had found it hard to feel her mother’s pain. She could neither stop her father from hitting nor comfort her mother in her suffering. When she was little she used to cling to Mom and cry with her, or hang onto Dad’s legs begging him not to hit Mom and get beaten herself; now she simply hid as thoroughly as possible and waited for the storm to pass. Looking at Mom’s face mottled with color, or at her own body, she would think, It’s as bright as a Chagall, and each time she was certain she couldn’t be in her right mind. But if she didn’t think that way she had no way to smother the terror and the choking sensation of those moments.
Your mother’s getting beaten like this and what were you doing! You won’t be satisfied until I drop dead right in front of you!
Woo-yeon had sometimes thought, I wish Dad were dead, and at other times, I wish Mom and Dad were both dead. But the average Korean lifespan was eighty-three, and her parents were still young and both disgustingly healthy. As unfair as it felt, dying herself seemed the easiest and simplest solution.
She had even imagined a burglar breaking in and killing Mom or Dad. Even picturing the house wrecked with bloodstains, even imagining the two of them sprawled out after being stabbed, she felt nothing.
If that really happened, would I be scared, relieved, or just…… clear?
She folded the thought away before she could reach a conclusion. She was afraid of what the answer might be. The sweet fantasy that the burglar might be herself was even more terrifying.
So whenever Mom muttered under her breath, “Look at those eyes. You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?”, “Be honest…… You want to kill me right now, don’t you? Don’t you? You psychopath,” Woo-yeon had never once been able to deny it.
“Your mother’s quite the quack…… You should’ve fought back and said it wasn’t true.”
The man who had been listening frowned and stated it flatly.
“What? How would you know that, Mister?”
“Someone who gets terrified just from imagining killing someone else, who instead of carefully planning revenge comes crying and jumps into the Han River—how could that person be a psychopath? Your mother isn’t a neuroscientist or a doctor, yet you believed her quack diagnosis way too hard.”
“But…… M-Mister, you’re not a doctor either. Are you a doctor?”
“Ah, I’m not a doctor. Of course I’m a bit of a quack myself, but I picked this up from a professor who researched psychopathic criminals, so I’m a little less of a quack.”
Woo-yeon blinked at him with a blank face. Being told she wasn’t a psychopath was welcome, yet something still felt suspicious. What kind of person was this man that he would hear such things from a “professor who researched psychopathic criminals”? Come to think of it, the way he stayed so calm through stories of family murder and bloody knife fights was strange in itself.
“Are you a cop, Mister?”
“No.”
“A gangster?”
“……No.”
The man furrowed his brows and gave a short laugh. It didn’t sound like he was laughing because it was funny.
“Then what do you do?”
“Just…… I work at a construction company nearby.”
Woo-yeon blinked and turned her gaze out the window. Until a moment ago the forest of buildings had looked cold and menacing; the moment she heard he worked there, the structures suddenly seemed to flush with a faint, living warmth. Which building around here? What kind of work did he do? Idle curiosity tugged at her, but she kept her mouth politely shut. Ever since she was little she had been full of wild, four-dimensional curiosity, yet every time she let it out of her mouth the reaction had never been good.
The man’s careful voice reached her.
“So when your mother said you had schizophrenia—or rather, schizophrenia—that wasn’t an official diagnosis from a doctor either, right?”
“Yes.”
“Schizophrenia is a serious illness. Why didn’t she take you to a hospital?”
“She said if it went on your medical record you’d never get a job or get married later. That if I just stopped drawing I’d get a lot better.”
“Ah, I see. Getting married is that important?”
The man let out a hollow laugh. Even in that brief sound Woo-yeon could feel exactly how absurd he found her mother’s words.