The Sindaebang House Part Four: The End

continued from part three…

The End

할머니’s daughter came into the house, looking troubled.

I greeted her as normally as I could, keeping my voice low so that sound wouldn’t carry up to the second floor.

“What’s happening?” she said, sensing my tension.

“I found a big butcher knife on the top step upstairs when I came home,” I said, holding my hands up to express how large the knife was. “I’ve never seen it before. When I asked Roommate Unnie, she pretended like she couldn’t see it. The Indonesian Roommate is locked in her room because she is afraid.”

Halmoni’s daughter’s eyes flicked towards the stairwell, the sound of the television carrying down to the first floor.

“Do you want me to go up and look or should we call the police now?” She asked me.

Relief flooded me. I was not accustomed to someone taking my side when it came to me versus a native Korean person, regardless of the circumstances. Whether in the office or in a personal dispute, I was rarely believed first.

“I don’t know what her intent is,” I said. “I’ve hidden the knife for now. But I’m afraid of what she’ll do.”

Halmoni’s daughter nodded. “Let me call my mother. Then let’s call the police.”

Halmoni arrived quickly, coming into the door with the usual vague cheerfulness of a kindly Korean grandmother. My heart sank when I saw her. I felt so sorry for what was happening in her home; a home that she had opened to three young women, two of us no doubt more unfamiliar to her than the Roommate Unnie. She had only shown us kindness and she was repaid with trouble.

Halmoni and the daughter agreed to call the police.

“Do not act like anything is strange,” the daughter cautioned me. “We don’t know the full situation. They’ll want to ask questions and we only have your word for it at this time.”

I didn’t know what to say. At that moment, I heard a door open and I glanced up the stairs to see the Indonesian Roommate, dressed in a robe, come hurriedly down towards us. She came to my side, standing close to me as she greeted Halmoni and the daughter.

“The police are coming,” I explained to her. She nodded mutely.

The sound of the television suddenly switched off and we heard the sound of clattering dishes, the snap of a door being shut, and then opening again. Roommate Unnie appeared at the top of the stairs. All four of us looked up at her, feeling her unwelcome presence but she only stared at me, completely ignoring Halmoni and the others.

“Where is it?” She demanded, her face unnaturally white and expressionless.

“Where is what?” I replied cautiously.

“You know. Give it back.”

Halmoni and the daughter looked at me.

“I’ve hidden the knife,” I said bluntly. “I don’t think you should have it.”

She stared at me for another moment, then turned abruptly and vanished. The sounds of her shifting things around in our bedroom hung in the air between the rest of us as we stood anxiously, waiting.

The police came within minutes. Two men dressed in officious blue and police vests stepped in, greeting us. Their straight-forward and clear voices cut through our disquietude, a welcoming sign that someone was here to take charge and make sense of everything. Korean police officers carry themselves with all of the assurance and certainty that only middled-aged men with a badge can - it’s wonderful when you’re scared. It’s frustrating when they decide not to do anything. And it’s horrible when they think you’re the culprit.

The police officers marched upstairs, announcing loudly,

“경찰입니다. 올라가겠습니다.”

We followed closely behind, the Indonesian Roommate clutching my sleeve. Now, I think that she must have been very frightened, unable to understand and wondering what will happen to her living situation. At that time, I had a feeling of foreboding.

The police ushered us brusquely into the living room, telling us to sit on the sofas. The Indonesian Roommate and I sat together on one side.

“Will you join us for a moment?” The first officer asked, craning his neck to look into my bedroom where Roommate Unnie had retreated. The door opened and she came out. She had changed into a blouse and done her make up in the few minutes before the police arrived, looking for all the world as if she had been caught off guard but was oh so luckily still presentable. She smiled prettily at the officers and sat on the sofa beside me. I felt a shiver looking at her - pink lips, a floral blouse and her uncanny, unreal smile.

“So,” one police officer said, looking between me and Roommate Unnie, “what’s going on here?”

Roommate Unnie jumped in immediately, as if eager to clear up a small whole misunderstanding.

“Well, I was cooking in the kitchen when Becky came home. She must not have noticed me at first because she was surprised to see me and I think it alarmed her, for some reason.” She gave a tinkling laugh. “And then - I don’t know why- but she ran into the other roommate’s room and then downstairs. I don’t even know why you are here, officer.” She tilted her head appealingly at the officer, who was nodding as she spoke.

My whole body was flooded with disbelief.

“There was a knife,” I said, staring directly at Roommate Unnie. As was her way, her gaze hovered somewhere over my head, never meeting my eyes. “It was stabbed into the floor. Over there.”

I pointed to the top step. One of the officers went over and knelt down, examining the floor. Among the many scratches and notches in the old house’s wooden floor, the knife’s gash was nothing extraordinary. He looked up and shook his head at his partner.

“I was cooking!” Roommate Unnie laughed lightly, “Of course there was a knife,”

“Where is this knife?” The second office inquired, taking notes.

Roommate Unnie’s smile flickered. Halmoni and the daughter looked at me, watching the investigation unfold. Neither of them had been present and and I knew that they were deciding who to believe - me or Roommate Unnie - and I could not blame them. But I felt as if I sat before a jury.

“I hid it,” I admitted finally.

The officers glanced at each other. “Will you bring it out, please?”

I went to my room, feeling the many eyes heavy on the back of my neck as I went into my room and pulled the knife out from under the mattress. Its handle was cold to my touch.

The officers’ eyebrows raised when I came back out into the living room, holding the big knife in my hands, but they didn’t say anything. I placed it on the table and sat back down. Roommate Unnie turned towards me and placed her hand on mine. My skin crawled at her touch.

“Becky has a habit of taking my things,” she said.

I snatched my hand away, no longer trying to conceal my revulsion. “What about the broken dishes?” I said.

“What dishes?” Roommate Unnie countered.

“In the kitchen! You broke them! Our other roommate heard you.”

Roommate Unnie gave a long-suffering sigh and pointed at the kitchen. The floor was clear. I realized that that had been the clattering sound we had heard before - she had been hiding the broken pieces.

The Indonesian Roommate, hearing her name, had jumped slightly and looked at the officers with her wide eyes.

“Can you tell us what you heard?” The officer said to her loudly, over enunciating his words.

She tried to speak in Korean but in her nervousness the already difficult language came out jumbled, a confused mess of “내가… 그거 들었어… 언니가 그거 뭐 했어…” The officers nodded politely, as they had while Roommate Unnie had spoken, but I could already see the dismissiveness in their eyes.

Roommate Unnie sat beside me, hands clasped neatly in her lap, her head tilted as she watched the Indonesian Roommate. She was the picture of a respectable Korean office worker. The Indonesian Roommate was a dark-skinned, young girl, disheveled in a bathrobe.

The officers may have seen me staring at Roommate Unnie with anger and bewilderment, so they asked her, “was there anything you might have done that would have frightened Becky-ssi?”

Roommate Unnie performed an expression of thinking carefully, her eyes blinking rapidly as she gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then shrugged. “I have had a difficult time at the office lately so I haven’t been as friendly as usual,” she said in an apologetic tone, “when I come home, I just want to rest. The other girls might not understand that since they’re both….” she paused, as if trying to figure out a way to tell us how she felt without hurting our feelings, “…so young.”

Halmoni’s daughter’s face registered no emotion. She listened carefully, her eyes settling onto me as I breathed out in indignant incredulity.

“I see…” one of the officers said. In that moment, I felt everything shift.

“Yes,” the other officer said, closing his notebook and placing his pen in his shirt pocket with finality.

“모르는 사람들이랑 같이 사는게 쉽지않죠,” he said knowingly, “특히 외국인들이랑 더 힘드시겠네요.”

To translate:

“Living with people you don’t know isn’t easy. Especially more so with foreigners.”

I sat in mute anger, watching Roommate Unnie smile and bow as the officers turned to Halmoni and the daughter. The officers apologized for disrupting their evening and suggested having an open conversation between all of the roommates to establish some ground rules. Halmoni, a little disoriented by their officialness and abrupt conclusion, said, ‘yes, yes…’ while the daughter silently led the officers out.

I followed closely behind, loathe to sit beside Roommate Unnie for another second. The Indonesian Roommate came with me. We watched the police officers give a final bow and leave. Halmoni, shaking her head, said good night and disappeared into her room.

The moment her mother’s bedroom door closed, the daughter turned to me and the Indonesian Roommate.

“Tonight, sleep in your room but lock the door,” she instructed the Indonesian Roommate in a low voice. “Tomorrow, we will figure out what to do next.” The Indonesian Roommate nodded and went upstairs. We heard her door close.

“Becky-ssi…” Halmoni’s daughter said, now turning to me, an expression of pity and confusion on her face. “I don’t know why she has something against you, but it’s clear she does. It’s not safe for you to sleep here anymore. There’s an empty room on the first floor where you can sleep tonight. I will tell her that you are spending the night at a friend’s house. So that…. ” We both looked at each other, understanding what she wanted to say, but reluctant to say it out loud.

So that she doesn’t try to find you in the house sometime during the night.

We had waited until Roommate Unnie closed the bedroom door before Halmoni’s daughter pulled out some blankets and laid them out for me in the extra room that was being used as storage. As I lay on the floor, surrounded by boxes and piles of old clothes, I felt so wronged. Tears dripped onto my pillow as I stared into the dark, bitterly envisioning Roommate Unnie’s white-powdered face and her expressionless eyes. I was so relieved that at least one person had chosen to believe me - Halmoni’s daughter had taken my side and I knew it was because she had witnessed how much I had cared for my little home. I had cleaned it every weekend. I had made it livable for all three of us. Halmoni had treated me more lovingly than just a renter.

But Roommate Unnie, so well-dressed, so prettily made-up, so respectable and well-spoken, so Korean, had won. She was Korean. I wasn’t. And that was the only thing that had determined my fate that night. To the police, I was just a foreigner making life difficult for a Korean woman in her own home.

At five am the next morning, after a sleepless night spent playing the previous events again and again my mind, I crept upstairs and slipped into my room, where a lump beneath the blankets on one of the beds told me Roommate Unnie was sound asleep. I grabbed my bag and left.

할머니. 죄송합니다.