Reunification

The first thing Sook-ja did when she received the letter from Seoul was the math. Her hands, wrinkled and as translucent as tracing paper, picked up an oil pencil from the easel in the front window and did the numbers. For three years, she and Jong-soo were together. For one of those years, they were married. For eight years, she waited, hoped. For fifty-four years, she mourned. That was sixty-two years they had been apart, 22,645 days. Now, for one month, she had lived with the knowledge that Jong-soo was alive and that he wanted to see her. And not only this, but that they would see each other, that they had been granted permission for a reunification. For three days, they would be in the same place, though together for only twelve of those hours, six sessions of two hours each. That was 720 minutes, 43,200 seconds. Not even two seconds for each day.

Sook-ja began to collect the things she wanted to take with her, the things she hoped could explain all that had happened in those sixty-two years. First, she gathered the letters she had written him during the first eight years, eight being their shared lucky number, eight being far longer than everyone else had thought she should dare hope. None of the letters had been posted or even addressed, Jong-soo's name the only thing on the envelope, written fastidiously in the script she had perfected in secretary school. The smell of the perfume she had spritzed on each letter before sealing the envelopes had long since faded. She hadn't worn perfume now in twenty years. She couldn't remember what scent she'd worn then, though she imagined it to be something light, like that of forsythia chasing away winter with its bright yellow flowers. She carefully wrote down her recipe for yaksik, the sweet rice balls he had loved, swearing no one could make them as well as she could. From the tree outside the bedroom window she picked some cherry blossoms and pressed them between the pages of her sketchbook. This was not the tree they had planted together, just before he'd left for what was supposed to be a short visit to see his parents, his father dying of lung cancer after decades spent in the mines, but one she had propagated when she realized the first tree would not live much longer. She paged through the photo albums, decades she'd expected to spend with him but through which she'd been alone, choosing not to marry again, though not for lack of opportunity. She wasn't sure if it was loyalty or just fear of further loss. And though alone, she'd learned, with time, how not to be lonely, how to fill her hours and days and years with painting and sketching and cooking and long walks outside and friends, a few dear ones, enough.

Later, Sook-ja walked through their village, her old film camera heavy in her hand. With both hands to steady her shot, she photographed places that seemed the same as they had been six decades ago, though she wondered if maybe she was misremembering, if maybe Jong-soo would look at these photos and see places unknown, that he wouldn't recognize the small temple on the far side of the lake where they had swum in the sweet early evenings of summer, the light pink and yellow and blue on the water, or the tea shop, the old woman who ran it then replaced now by her granddaughter, though you couldn't fault someone for thinking they were the same woman, right down to the wandering left eye that was a shade lighter than the right one. Outside the village doctor's office, Sook-ja positioned her shot so as to cut out the sign with the doctor's name on it. This was supposed to have been her husband's practice; an apprenticeship with the village's aging doctor had first brought Jong-soo to this village, and to her. Sook...