Chapter 5
In the Sea View Café even the tables by the window were filthy.
The tabletop was sticky and the floor and chairs were covered with a white film of dust, as though the owner had opened without bothering to clean.
For three years now, the place had been run with a self-service system.
The owner shut himself in the kitchen, behind a small window like a ticket booth.
Order slips went in, food and drink came out.
The café was in a great location, but the scenery visible through the large windows was nothing but rotting fish and heaps of plastic now.
The lemonade I ordered gave off a sour smell, and there were fingerprints and lip marks on both glasses.
Feeling embarrassed, I wet a napkin and wiped at the glasses and tabletop in vain.
Ha Woojin showed up at the door, turning his head this way and that. Discovering me, he gave an enthusiastic wave. The dreary interior of the café seemed to brighten as this man set foot inside.
“Did you find the guesthouse OK?”
Woojin answered yes, yes, and noisily pulled up a chair. He plunked into the seat, fanning his face with his hand, then gulped down half of his lemonade in one go. It occurred to me that he was the kind of person who made every place they stepped into noisy.
“I had to walk along the main road for ages, since there are no buses or taxis to be seen. The place is worse than I imagined. The wallpaper is damp and blistering off the walls, spiders crawling across the floor, and the water in the toilet comes out black. The doorhandle is out of order, so you have to double-fasten the door with a bolt, but even that pops out of the doorframe if you give it a pull. If someone made up their mind to get into the room, well, they’d have no trouble at all. ”
He spoke with such energy. Now that I could examine him thoroughly, he was even better looking than I’d thought earlier.
His gut didn’t stick out, his height was just handsomely tall, and he had well-defined features.
For so long, all I’d seen were the infected or people rippled with wrinkles from the wear and tear of the salty wind.
Sitting across from someone all sleek and smooth with city water in their veins was dazzling.
Does he have a family? I wondered. A wife or kids?
Such thoughts flitted through my mind out of nowhere.
“The owner of the guesthouse is seriously depressed. She said I was the first person they’d seen all year.
Not even first customer, but the first person!
Would you believe it? Well, if that was the case, you’d think she would treat me well, but in the ten minutes it took for me to get set up with a room, four times over I heard the refrain ‘Looking out at that swarthy sea I feel so suffocated I could die.’ When it came time to pay, she slurred, ‘Fiddy thousand won,’ so I handed over fifty thousand.
She said, ‘Uh, siddy thousand.’ Well, you won’t see me putting my life on the line for pocket change. ”
He probably has a retirement account. And three or four different insurance policies.
He must be doing some investment trading.
He’ll go around on days off checking out real estate.
He lives with the firm belief that tomorrow will continue on like today, and next year will flow on like this year, never doubting for a moment that the whole of society is working flat-out to ensure the peace and comfort of his lifestyle.
I changed the topic. “Did you carry out any interviews?”
“The owner of the guesthouse seemed as though she couldn’t understand me, but I was able to have a short conversation with an elderly man who was sitting outside the fire station like a faithful wife who turned to stone while waiting for her husband.
Aside from his rants about divine punishment from the wrathful sea god, it was worth listening to.
Ah, don’t get me wrong. It was interesting, but not useful in any way.
He seemed to believe that his friends and family and other villagers had been replaced by gilled monsters that came up out of the sea.
I can see how an elderly person spending their days in such surroundings could get to feeling that way.
And then I got your phone call and rushed right here. ”
Done with his speech, Woojin looked me over.
“How long have you been in the village?” Having thoroughly examined my skin and features, Woojin gestured at the baton and army knife hung clipped to my belt.
“Were you sent here on a work assignment, or as a volunteer? You know, something like that?” He used broad motions, as if I would struggle to understand him.
“I’m one of the unlucky tourists who got trapped here. I didn’t have any other way to make a living, so I got special authorization from the police, a bit like a neighborhood watch.”
“Ah! Catching thieves and that kind of stuff?”
“Everyone in the village knows everyone else, so it isn’t really like that. I mainly track down villagers who break their quarantine orders and put them back in their homes.”
“I see.” Woojin shrugged, no interest in his expression. “The reason I ask is just, your face, uh…”
“Looks normal, right?” I cut in. “They thought I might have some kind of antibody and took a whole barrel of my blood for testing. They must have taken samples of every part of me, everything I was wearing, everything I touched. But nothing’s come to light yet.
I’m just one of the lucky ones. None of us know how long that will last, trapped in here with the infected. We can’t hold out forever.”
“Shouldn’t the uninfected be allowed to leave?”
“They say that’s not possible because the means of infection are still unknown. We might be asymptomatic carriers. I understand it. If the infection starts spreading outside the village, the whole country will come to a standstill.”
A shadow came over Woojin’s face. As though a thought had just occurred to him, he tapped anxiously on his glass. He kept checking the surroundings, like what he was about to say was something that no one else must hear.
Woojin hunched over and lowered his voice. “As I was on my way here just now, I happened to see an infected person’s face…”
It was like he had learned a terrible secret, and that keeping it to himself was too much to bear. His breathing sped up, hot on my face.
“After getting your call, I saw two of them that looked like mother and child walking along the coastal road hand in hand. I gave a big wave and went up to greet them. You see, I had some strawberry chocolate in my pocket. I wanted to win them over and get an interview. But when the girl saw me, she stumbled and fell. As the mother struggled to help the girl up, a gust of wind snatched off the cloths that had been wrapped over their faces.”
With an expression of pure horror, Woojin clutched the glass of lemonade and chugged it down like beer. As he worked at calming his breathing, he loosened his tie a little.
“The moment I saw them I lost all my words. I felt as if the blood in my body had dried up. My hunch that no one has been doing research in the village was certainly right. The little thing had no hair at all, not even the trace of hair follicles that you often see when someone has shaved their head. Just smooth skin. It was catching the sun and glistening. Abnormal growth in their neck bones forced their necks out forward, and I could see bumps protruding from their spines. I knew that elevated eye pressure was a symptom, but both of them had serious facial deformities. Their jawbones were protruding like those of a fish or a frog. Their lips were stuck pouting and open, and a layer of pus had formed beneath the exposed oral mucosa. Their skin was like that of a dead fish, and had all these splotchy markings…”
Woojin’s voice had been rising bit by bit, but when he saw my expression he went quiet.
“Forgive me. I was just so startled. I’d seen pictures, but in real life, well, it was a whole different thing.”
“It’s OK, it’s hardly surprising. Seeing them for the first time is a lot to take in.”
“Is it alright for the diseased to be walking around with such severe symptoms? What happened to the isolation orders?”
“It’s the weekend,” I said. “They’re allowed to go to church.”
“I suppose the bacteria must check their calendars and say, ‘Ah, this is a day of rest.’”
The isolation requirements were being gradually relaxed anyway, starting with those with mild symptoms. With everyone stuck at home, they would die of poverty before the disease killed them. For people to keep on living, someone somewhere has to work, bring in necessities, and get things done.
“… they looked as though all the evil of the world had been concentrated into their ghastly forms.”
The moment I heard this, a heavy stone settled into place on my heart. The goodwill I had felt toward this person, the flutter of nervous excitement I had felt wondering if I should ask if he had a partner, a family, it went cold in an instant.
“I couldn’t describe them as anything but devilish. As though they’d come up from the depths of hell…”
“Ugly, aren’t they?” I cut him off. “The residents of this village became ugly. But there is no correspondence between ugliness and evil. One is no indication of the other.”
Woojin abruptly disengaged and crossed his arms, staring out the window with a defensive expression. He looked offended.
“I suppose that’s true.”
At last, I clearly saw the wall around this sleek-looking man’s heart.
I got wise to the fact that he was the type who knew nothing of the world except what was inside his own head.
That he was the kind of person most accustomed to speaking for an audience who nodded along to everything he said.
I folded up my slight attraction and set it aside.
But it had been so long since I had chatted with someone who wasn’t depressed or despairing.
I decided to put up with the predictable arrogance of a well-off man for a while.
Woojin got out his smartphone and tapped away. Judging by how he used two fingers to zoom in and out on the screen and kept ogling out the window, he must have been studying a map.
“Oh, you’ve got the same model as me,” I said, holding up my phone.
“Ah. I don’t upgrade mine often either.” Indifferent, Woojin continued, “They send all the East Sea Disease patients who need treatment to Sarang Hospital, don’t they?”
“Only because that’s where they sent them in the beginning. No one wants to contaminate a second hospital. It’s not a big hospital, but there’s no other way.”
There’s no cure for East Sea Disease, but there are treatments for the symptoms. In unlucky cases skeletal deformation can put pressure on internal organs or even cause rupture and internal bleeding.
Facial deformity can cause breathing problems too.
Although only a small provincial hospital, Sarang was designated an East Sea Disease specialist center, but this wasn’t exactly a case of selecting the best option, it was that all the patients were already there.
The inpatients who had been at the hospital before the disease were forcibly discharged, and the people living close by held protests for a long time afterward, demanding compensation for their loss of healthcare and livelihood.
“Are the facilities and medical staff up to standard?”
“We have to hope they are. It’s totally off limits to anyone who doesn’t work there.”
“Yesterday the news was full of reports about a corruption scandal involving the elder brother of the hospital director. Did you see them?”
“I heard.”
“Apparently there was misappropriation of funds, and even just the cash they found in his home was a formidable sum. Everyone knows that doctors are rich, but where could he have gotten all that money? And so there are rumors going around that the hospital director must have taken all the government funding without providing proper treatment to the patients.”
It was only then that Nurse Jeong came to mind.
The desolation that had descended on her face, something more than just the stress of overwork.
By now the hospital director may have destroyed all the records, got a plane ticket, and made a break for it.
What would happen to all the patients in the hospital?
As an anxious feeling swept over me, a Kakao Talk alert rang out from my pocket. It was Sergeant Hyunjun.
About the body I mentioned this morning. Something’s off. I’m sending over the documents now.
“When I was on the bus coming here, I was looking through a book on the history of the leper colony at Sorok Island.” While I was scanning through the files in Kakao, Woojin began babbling.
“The hospital directors in the early days were highly respected, and patients were gathered together with the best intentions. But they say that as Japanese imperial rule persisted, subsequent directors carried out horrific abuse. Eventually, one of the patients killed the hospital director. It was murder, but since the victim was a Japanese colonial official, it could also be considered an act of resistance. When liberation came three years later, the patients protested, demanding their autonomous rights. Do you know what happened?”
I looked up at him.
“The Korean workers at the facility killed eighty-four of the patients. They buried them in a mass grave. The lepers were buried alive and set on fire. They didn’t think of them as human. They were just people who got sick, with a disease that happened to make them ugly, that’s all.”
I assumed at first that he was deploring how people could commit such atrocity, but I could feel an oddly different intention lurking in his words. As though he was saying that this was the way humans naturally are, trying to justify his fear as instinct.
I looked down again, and no more of what Woojin said reached me. The identity verification document Sergeant Hyunjun had sent over contained a name that couldn’t possibly be there. I hurriedly typed a response.
Are they sure it’s him?
That’s what the paperwork says.
But that can’t be true.
Strange, isn’t it? If it’s true, who’s the person that always comes to church? Who have we been meeting, and greeting, and talking to all this time?