Chapter Text
Many symptoms follow the muscle aches. More than either of them will be able to successfully recount in the months and year to come. Se-Ri weeps during the worst of it, not certain whether her tears are for her own suffering or Ri’s.
Their local cleaner lady proves invaluable in bringing supplies—left for them in the outdoor potting shed—they would have otherwise struggled in their illness to acquire. Se-Ri’s mom orders an embarrassing number of herbal potions and Korean remedies to be shipped to them, things they neither have the strength to open, much less to work to concoct.
News comes to them in telephone calls their foggy minds only half-understand that the NK students, either through contact with him, or vice versa, have likewise tested positive, the hostel now under strict quarantine.
In the earliest hours of discovering she is ill, Se-Ri battles through her abrupt on-set of symptoms to establish staff into positions at Se-Ri’s Choice that will be able to manage the workload and make necessary decisions in her coming day-to-day absence. It is she who calls the School of Music to inform them he will be missing his lectures, as he lays in the other room, hardly able to string together three words without collapsing into deep, throat-scalding coughs.
He struggles--even past the two weeks symptoms were expected to last--labors to endure through the cloud of Covid like a man submerged, uncertain he has the strength to resurface. He thinks of his childhood home—dreams and thinks and ponders on it, though doing so is against his will. He passes in and out of sleep often, and NK appears to him at both his nodding off and waking.
What is this like there for them? he wonders—as he has so diligently prevented himself from wondering during this pandemic. So many of his nation’s people already hungry, living roughly. Will they survive it? Will those—even the political elite like his mother and the Vice Marshal—will they endure? There is such an unexpected weight to the malaise he finds himself in, a weight that seems to call for surrender, that more than threatens to rob him of any care or investment he has in his life, his existence, his future.
He is very ill. At times he hears Se-Ri speaking to him; perhaps he responds, perhaps he only moans, the sound of his voice robbed of familiarity even to him. One night—though of course he does not even feel confident of the time of day in their bedroom—he believes she is praying over him. He is not certain. Without interest he realizes that she has receded from the brief snaps of his consciousness, like an angel he once was very certain of having visited him in his life; but that now, through his marsh-like mind’s cognizance, through Covid’s beckoning him to surrender, seems to have retreated to heaven, to look over him distantly, benevolently, but separate. There is no immediacy for him to her presence.
In the exhaustion of breath that comes only through labor, ideas that connect painstakingly if at all, he finds himself feeling unexpected irritation born not of his bodily woes, and for the briefest moment his brows draw together in a pout.
An instant arrives of waking where his thoughts do not immediately present NK to him. Rather, he now finds himself curious for Se-Ri, and he reaches out for the first time in nearly three weeks. It feels like months since he has heard her voice, longer still since he has eaten a meal with her. His mind assures him that it is no marvel that his taste and smell have left him: it is Se-Ri who brings the spice and fragrance to his life. He wills himself, with the tenacity-through-tribulation of a newly enlisted soldier during the first brutal week of basic training, up off the mattress and into his slippers, and stepping delicately in his weakened state goes to seek her.
He finds her downstairs, asleep in the afternoon sun, blazing across her bare face in a way she would never allow if she were not ill herself. She is in a shirt of his, her uncovered legs mostly drawn up under a blanket. Piled on her on each side are Jingnyeo and Gyeonu, like children desperate to be close to their mother.
His strength gone, lost in the search for her, he falls to his knees and lets his head fall softly forward onto her lap. No, he cannot leave this world, cannot submit to the spirit-dampening call of this disease. Here is Se-Ri, in the sunlight, in their home.
Here is where he wants to be.
Ri does not know she has been terrified for the last twenty-four hours. How could he? He has hardly seemed to know even who she was for several days. He had perhaps not seen her handphone clutched tightly in her fist as she fell—reluctantly--into sleep as she sat in the sun, trying to will herself to heal so that she might better heal him. She held it so not out of anticipation it might ring, nor the need to see her SNS updates—rather, she clasped it like a totem: if nothing changed in the next hour she would call an ambulance. It would be her last resort, born of hysteria and uncertainty, particularly knowing that if she did so, she would herself be denied accompanying him.
She awoke 45 minutes after making herself just that promise: that she would call on his behalf, that the situation dictated she take just such an action for his own good—for his very survival. The weight of his head on her lap did not immediately register as she awoke, the dogs’ weight seemed everywhere a hedge about her, but when she went to shift her knees under the blanket, there he was, pale as a lily, even his lips without pink.
He was knelt on the floor, and she had no understanding of what had brought him down the stairs and away from the bed he had haunted for so long, but for the first time in those weeks, he felt alive to her, a particular electricity returning to him, and her hand began to relax around her phone. There was no longer any sweat to his brow, no delirium threatening his breath. He would eat porridge today, she knew, he would come back to her, his eyes would open, and he would be well again.
Her own eyes, swollen from sickness, pinked and bleary, released tears to run alongside her nose, and puzzle the dogs that loved her so well.
When he found his own way to his phone, days later, he sees the newest headlines: a vaccine will soon become available, and he has 14 missed calls—all from Eliaz.
“I had given up thinking I would see your Swiss homeplace,” Eliaz confides in him two months later, standing on their hillside garden, “those days you were sick and didn’t receive my calls.”
Ri is able to smile (if reservedly) over those rough days now. “I was far too out of my head to remember my invitation to you to come and see us, or pay any mind to my handphone.”
“Absolutely understandable,” Eliaz agrees. “The department head at the School of Music let us know what your situation was.”
“I have trouble believing that I was so close to being willing to miss a day like this—” Ri says, in uncharacteristic candor. “But that virus works on your mind—”
“How will Yoon Se-Ri take this, do you suppose?” Eliaz asks, surveying the rented tables and seating that has been delivered overnight to their hillside, the event canopy awaiting a caterer’s arrival before too long.
“It’s time to find out,” Ri answers, going to get Se-Ri, whom he has let sleep in upstairs, and who has been getting ready for the day, as it is only around seven in the morning of this weekend.
He and Eliaz, together in the planning, had come out to claim the best spot on the property for what came next.
She is not yet dressed in her chosen clothing when Ri Jeong-Hyeok comes back upstairs—surprising her, as he had said he was off for a morning walk with his visiting friend, the minister Eliaz.
“Wear something very pretty that you like the most,” he tells her, and she isn’t sure what she sees in his eye in that moment, but he has never (or perhaps, rarely) ever made such a request in the past, so that she finds herself back to combing through her closet for the one thing she had wanted very much to have an excuse to wear for the past two years, but in the climate of pandemic had never gotten to: a new designer gown she had selected specifically for what had been planned to be his solo recital of 2019. It is chic and statement at the same time.
“Are we going far,” she asks him, innately understanding that whatever is about to happen doesn’t need her to puzzle it all out and spoil its magic.
“Not very, no,” he says. “Not far.”
She gets herself into it, not bothering to worry as its considerable skirt overflows the chalet’s modest staircase.
He watches on from the kitchen island as she descends, and makes no moves to conceal the pleasure in his eyes at the sight of her, and the anachronistically opulent gown.
“Which heels,” she asks, dangling a pair of Louboutins in one hand, Manolo Blahniks in the other.
He shakes his head and makes a tsking noise. “No heels,” he admonishes her, “they’ll sink into the soft earth.”
The heels are tossed aside, and she slides into her waiting-by-the-door Literide Crocs, and follows him out.
The morning is perfect, just enough cool to the air to let it be known a lovely, mild early summer day is coming, the breeze light, the sky on the cusp of brilliant. He leads her out to where Eliaz is standing—no altar or arch of any kind to designate the place, only the mountains before them, and the chalet and the village behind.
The sight of Eliaz in his clerical collar, hands clasping a small book causes her to catch her breath, and hold Ri’s hand a bit more tightly.
When they arrive at the minister’s location, Ri turns himself to face her. “I have a lot of things I want to say to you,” he says, and her eyebrows raise.
She is willing to listen to every one of them, has been willing to understand for some time that these things he will speak of now have been inside of him, forming and shifting until now—until he declares them ready to be spoken.
“You know that as a citizen of NK I am not permitted to marry a citizen of a foreign state without government approval, and you know that even though I’m here, we cannot in reality petition them for that. We also cannot seek my family’s approval.”
She slow nods her understanding.
“But this is Eliaz, who’s been visiting with us. He’s my friend, and he understands our position, and if you say ‘yes’ to me, he can solemnize us as married—in his faith, if not legally.”
She smiled, her eyes bright with happiness and love. As if he has any reason to doubt she will say, ‘yes’.
He goes on. “Forgive me, Yoon Se-Ri,” he says. “I’m sorry that this is as much as I have the right to offer to you, you who deserve everything good and right. I’m sorry that the guests coming to our party can’t know that we made these promises—only that we are celebrating the good weather of the day. I’m sorry that we can’t tell your family—your mother.”
She squeezes the hand that still holds hers. “We don’t know what Destiny holds for us,” she tells him, watching a few tears slide down his cheeks. “We could not have foreseen this, this time we have been given—”
“I love you,” he says, as intimately as if the minister Eliaz were not present. “I want to love you and I will love you. My promise to you right now is this: I am not going back to stay. When the day comes they will call me back, I will go, but I will not stay. I will return to you, and when I do, it will be forever.”
She understands his promise: he has filial responsibilities in NK, he has his mother—even, his father.
“It will be forever,” he says, “it will be a time for our family,” and with this, he withdraws something from his coat’s pocket; it is plastic, a yellow baby’s rattle toy with an attached teething ring at the end of the handle. ‘My Hunny’ says the shaker’s top ball in English, written as though in a child’s hand, Winnie-the-Pooh smiling with a paw full of honey beneath, his tummy peeping as always out from under his too-small shirt. She does not even need to look directly at it to know exactly what it is.
Something like a gasp or peep gets caught in the back of her throat at the sight of it. This token of love, of hope for the child that never was—this thing she bought to have shown them they had been wanted. No diamond or jewel in the world could mean more to her, nor set her heart more a-flutter.
“This is the promise I want you to hear from me today,” he says, taking her hand and placing the baby rattle into it like the wedding ring in most ceremonies.
She accepts the rattle from him, unaware, even in her own robust self-confidence how beautifully perfect she looked to him. “Saranghae,” she says, her eyes for a moment tracking over to the minister Eliaz, witness to their very personal words to each other. “Saranghae,” and she throws herself into Ri Jeong-Hyeok, so used to her embrace, but never tiring of it--though they are not yet arrived at the point in the order of service for physical expressions.
“We’d best get started with the vows,” Eliaz says, smiling himself at the two of them. “Your party guests will be arriving before very long.”
By now, the breeze has nearly blown away the morning’s coolness, and the last cloud scudded out of the perfect sky. As Yoon Se-Ri stood incongruously among a hillside of alpine wildflowers out front of her marital home, wearing an haute couture gown, wrapped and in the embrace of Ri Jeong-Hyeok, her need for another countdown melted away like the last of the spring snow.
As she repositioned her Croc-covered feet ever so slightly, the beads in the Hunny rattle shifted and sounded lightly as a wind chime, as they might in the fist of a tiny dark-eyed baby with a jaw matching that of his perfect—always by his side--father’s.
This day, this was how forever began.