In her third year of working as a maid, Shim Hyungnam's days in Pyeongchangdong were monotonous.
Before dawn, she would wake and head straight to the kitchen. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she filled a silver kettle with spring water and set it to boil with medicinal mushrooms for the chairman.
As she crouched in a corner of the kitchen, breathing in the almost mystical aroma of the steam puffing from the kettle's spout, the sky would gradually turn a hazy gray.
The chairman, who was never one to sleep late, returned from tennis around seven. After showering, he sat down to breakfast at half past seven. He polished off every last bite of the seven-dish meal Hyungnam had carefully prepared, including rice and soup, without uttering a word.
Once the chairman had rinsed his mouth vigorously with warm toasted-rice water and left the table, Hyungnam's work was practically done. He usually came home late and, with so many engagements, often ate dinner out. There was seldom anything else she needed to prepare.
“They say there's a mansion with a garden that employs just one maid. Sounds a little suspicious, I'll admit. But apparently only one person lives there, and the pay's supposed to be excellent.”
Hyungnam's father had sent his eighteen-year-old daughter to work as a maid in a house whose owner he knew nothing about, while he himself practically lived in gambling dens. He couldn't even spare the time to go home and change his underwear. One night, he fell asleep beneath a blanket of fallen leaves near a gambling den and froze to death.
It was only during his funeral that Hyungnam learned the true identity of the chairman she served.
Chairman Park Shineok was the creditor of the creditor of the owner of the gambling den her father had frequented so often he had practically worn down its threshold. In that sense, it would not have been entirely wrong to say that her father had a certain stake in Hyungnam's wages.
The merciful chairman agreed to forgive the remaining debt in exchange for her silence about the gambling den and the circumstances of her father's death. Despite such an unpleasant incident, he even asked whether she would continue working for him and offered her a slight raise.
Freed from a debt that had threatened to strike like a thunderbolt, Hyungnam willingly signed a contract promising to keep her mouth shut for the rest of her life. She also pledged her loyalty to the chairman, who had provided her with food and shelter when she had lost everything and had nowhere else to go.
With her father dead, there was no one left to wring money out of her, no one left to work her to the bone. Hyungnam's life had become easier than before. With little education and no particular skills, she was quite content with her position as a maid in the mansion.
A vast mansion with only one resident. So few servants that she could run the household however she pleased. A chairman nearing old age who, despite the terrifying rumors surrounding him, was remarkably generous.
For Shim Hyungnam, an orphan with no one left in the world, life had become unnaturally smooth and monotonous.
Perhaps, then, those peaceful days had merely been a prelude.
Wrapped in a blanket over her naked body, Hyungnam found herself vaguely thinking that she had known all along a day like this would come. In the end, it was hardly surprising.
“Here. Good work.”
Pulling up his boxer shorts, Park Shineok jerked his chin toward the floor.
A crisp new ten-thousand-won note fluttered down onto her stretched-out panties, patterned with tiny, delicate flowers, and settled just above the little white ribbon at the center of the waistband.
“Other folks can't even get a look at one of these. Had to line up outside the Commercial Bank at the crack of dawn to get it.”
Park Shineok boasted with oily self-satisfaction, as though that miserable banknote, which he had surely sent one of his lackeys to obtain, were some kind of golden treasure.
It had been a day no different from any other. Yet before the weary evening arrived, Hyungnam had been damaged beyond repair. She would never be as she had been before.
Several drops of blood, each the size of a fingernail, and what looked like dirty water stains lay scattered haphazardly across the worn bedsheet.
“See you now and then.”
That was what Park Shineok said before leaving, though they already saw each other morning and evening under the same roof.
In the air still warm from screams and ragged breathing, amid a dizzying silence that seemed to tear at her ears, Hyungnam murmured like a woman possessed who had lost her senses.
See me. He wants to see me.
She was so absorbed in wondering whether those words concealed some other, perfectly obvious meaning she did not understand that she had no time even to wipe away her tears.
He was as good as his word.
Sometimes, now and again, and occasionally quite often, he would fling open the maid's door. She was usually given ten or twenty thousand won in payment. Sometimes he came sober, sometimes drunk. On nights when he was thoroughly intoxicated, he would still try to assert his pride with something he could barely get hard.
And so Shim Hyungnam's days were no longer monotonous.
Before dawn, she would wake and spend an entire hour in the shower. The wound on the inside of her arm, where she had timidly scraped herself with a razor blade, itched unbearably, so she submerged it in ice-cold water.
Once the itching had eased somewhat, she washed the rest of her body, then spent a good ten minutes washing herself down below. Only after scrubbing until she felt raw, as though she might wear herself away entirely, did she enter the kitchen.
Then she boiled the medicinal mushroom infusion for Park Shineok to swill down.
Crouching in a corner, staring blankly at the steam puffing from the kettle, she barely managed to suppress the urge to empty all the rat poison from the cupboard into it.
Park Shineok returned from tennis and ate his breakfast. Once he had thoroughly rinsed his mouth with warm toasted-rice water, he would beckon her over. Hyungnam would hesitate for a long while, then helplessly lift her skirt under his furious scolding.
If she held on to the dining table and endured for three minutes or so, she received another ten thousand won.
“Hey, have you heard about Jinok?”
Whenever she met her friends on her days off, such stories inevitably came up.
Stories about maids who had been defiled by their masters and thrown out by the mistresses of the house. About the stigma of such rumors clinging to young girls like a foul stench, and how, in the end, they wound up working as hostesses at cafés where customers paid to take the women out, almost as though it were their inevitable fate.
Whenever such talk arose, the sweet, crumbly bun melting in her mouth would suddenly feel as gritty as sand. Unable to bring herself to swallow, she could only hold it in her mouth until it dissolved into mush.
Suppressing the urge to scratch furiously at the itching skin on the inside of her arm, Hyungnam merely nodded.
She made a point of visiting a pharmacy in a distant neighborhood, keeping her head bowed as she bought contraceptive pills. She could never get used to the knowing expression on the pharmacist's face as he cast a sidelong glance at her youthful features.
Even so, on the long, winding way home, Hyungnam would clench her jaw and hold back her tears to the very end.
At least I'm not being thrown out. There's no mistress glaring daggers at me and raising hell. And I get a fair amount of money every time.
I saw on television that Queen Jeongsun was fifteen when she married a man of sixty-six. I'm twenty, and Park Shineok is sixty-one.
Every day, as she swallowed a pill no bigger than a red bean, Hyungnam consoled herself with the thought that her lot was better than that of a queen.
The fact that the queen's husband had been the supreme ruler of a nation, while the gangster Park Shineok could not even qualify as a neighborhood representative, was something she had to push far beyond the reach of reason.
Thinking that way made it a little easier to breathe.