Notes.

*Sighs*, There's really nothing like an OC in order to put your favorites k-dramas characters in situations they would never have found themselves otherwise.

CHAPTER IX

"Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When

you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place."

(Elizabeth Gilbert, american writer, "Eat, Pray, Love")

a. Apoptosis

In January 1777, a few days away from Seollal, the preparations for the New Year at the House of Spring had reached such a degree of excitement that Gyo Hui Seon, drawn in spite of herself into the whirlwind of nervousness and dreamy frivolity deployed by her gisaengs, finally gave in to Yeo Woon's wish to go out. Min-Su, who had now been living with her mistress for three years, guessed that she reluctantly agreed to such a possibility. The risks were numerous, and not only for their host. A soldier or any other living discovering the presence of a Gwishin in an entertainment house would put them in a very bad position.

Mistress Gyo cherished the secret of their status, and saw it as the source of their survival. She could hardly be proven wrong, and Min-Su was the first to recognize that things had to be like this, otherwise they would end up beheaded and burned by soldiers of Joseon's army, or even by patrols of worried and distrustful citizens. The people had been somewhat calmer for some time, probably as a result of habit and a sense of control brought by the royal repressive measures, and the illegal capture brigades had diminished in number, but all the gwishins living in Hanyang remained particularly cautious. The slightest faux-pas could be a fatal mistake. Mistress Gyo never hesitated to remind it to her dead courtesans, encouraged by old Jae-Ji, who claimed to feel gwishins dying regularly.

- It's one of the effects of "common consciousness", Su-Jin had told her one night while they were working on their gayageum in their room. I saw it, she continued in an almost trembling tone of religious fervor. She went into a trance, and she could tell where our people were or what they were doing. She trains Mistress Gyô to do so.

Min-Su had interrupted the passing of her long white fingers on the strings of her instrument, sincerely intrigued. She came from the third wave of resurrection, while Su-Jin had appeared at the same time as Gyô Hui Seon during the first wave. Although younger, she had joined the Spring House two months after the appointment of Mistress Gyo as its director, and was therefore the oldest Gwishin Gisaeng in the establishment.

When she met her on the day Hui Seon had brought Min-Su back, terrorized and weakened by her awakening, Su-Jin, who had been requisitioned by Mistress Gyô to welcome their visitor (at the time, the possibility of hiring her seemed non-existent) and reassure her, told her her her own story. She had died some fifteen years earlier as a result of a particularly difficult childbirth that had occurred too early. The child, whose name, sex, or even if he/she had survived birth, was that of one of her clients at the time. She had just turned twenty-four.

- I didn't even realize it, she confessed, while brushing Min-Su's hair in a fraternal and reassuring gesture. Not that I was dying, but that I was dead. I don't remember it very well. I closed my eyes because I was in pain, tired and because I wanted to sleep. Then I found myself in the dark, underground, and you know the rest.

If Joseon's scholars and philosophers had taken the time to question a large sample of Gwishins about their experience of rebirth instead of desperately trying to understand why they were here among the living and how they functioned, then they could have found that the resurrection generally involved the same impressions, memories and panic, at least until the extraction of the dead from the earth under which they lay.

There was always the darkness, the earth, the feeling of suffocation, the wood of the coffin when there was one, the struggle to get out of it, and the first hand that burst out of the ground before the rest of the body followed, frightened, lost, torn apart by incomprehension and loneliness. For the Gwishin, life had been interrupted and resumed at the very moment they awoke in the grave. Nothing existed between these two points of existence and non-existence. There was no remembrance in the memory of the dead, no sign of some other reality or place that could have brought them some comfort and lightened the gulf between the time they had lived and the time they had been brought back.

They don't like us because we have no answers for them, Mistress Gyô once confided to her about the living, while the country was vibrating with the massacre of the new-born gwishins a few months after the third resurrection. She had told her that the living were even more desperate than the dead, because death had not yet touched them, and that they were therefore heading towards something unknown about which all their beliefs had been shaken as a result of the gwishin's stories.

They had been lulled by stories about life after death, about the underworld and the rest of the soul: the appearance of the Gwishin shattered all these hopes and implied that death was characterized above all by absolute disappearance, by emptiness and the annihilation of all consciousness. It was both distressingly pessismistic and monstrously realistic, and it was perfectly understandable that most people refused to believe it, rejecting at the same time the return of the dead and all the dreadful conclusions they brought with them.

Min-Su was still struggling to remember the day she died seven years earlier. She was then a young gisaeng in her twenties who had just completed her apprenticeship and had acquired a privileged place in the house of the Red Phoenix, south of Hanyang, from which she drew immense satisfaction. The establishment was located near the Han River, and offered boat touring services to the more wealthy clients. Unlike many of her peers, Min-Su loved water. She was born in Busan to a mother who was also a Gisaeng, and her father, a calligrapher known to have worked on several books for King Yeongjo, had been involved in her upbringing from afar, providing some financial resources for her mother but strictly refusing to visit the child.

He was a man who traveled a lot between Joseon and the Japanese island of Tsushima, where he sometimes met authors of the Tokugawa shogunate in order to have their works published outside the borders. Min-Su highly esteemed him, although he was a distant figure. On more than one occasion, her mother, invited by Min-Su's father for diplomatic dinners, crossed the strait with several of her sisters to provide elegant entertainment for the Japanese delegations, who in turn brought back geishas with impeccable manners and vaguely mocking smiles.

Min-Su was twice taken aboard the boat that linked the shores of Joseon and the island, and each time she conceived a great pleasure from it. She had been able to swim very early, partly because her mother had demanded it, partly because she felt a powerful child's pride in it, and she often went to bathe in the sea, the Nakdong River, or the mountain springs in summer when the gisaengs went for walks. When she was eight years old, she was heartbroken when her mother told her that they were leaving Busan for Hanyang, where she had obtained a place and enrolment in a respectable school for Min-Su. It was during her training that she met Jeong-Suk, and fell madly in love with her.

Jeong-Suk had everything to appeal : a harmonious face, beautiful eyes, a well-proportioned body, and a remarkable mind. She was one of the apprentices belonging to Min-Su's class : being the same age, they had quickly developed an affectionate relationship, which detonated within the usual competitive bonds that were then built between the aspiring gisaengs, before being swept away by life experiences and the need for solicitude. For Min-Su, it was an intellectual and physical love at first sight that she would never experience again.

While she was learning to master dancing, Jeong-Suk received extensive instruction in gayageum. This difference in specialization prevented a rivalry between their two hearts, and helped to bring them closer together through the complementarity of their talents. Jeong-Suk played, and Min-Su danced. They also received some basic training in medicine, which Min-Su supplemented with lessons in foreign diplomacy. They were always together, and even though they were given different assignments, they kept a great tenderness for each other which was envied among their sisters.

It was the reason why Min-Su had jumped. In March 1766, Jeong-Suk received a proposal for emancipation from a wealthy aristocrat who had only daughters of his wife, and who hoped that the youthfulness and fertility of the gisaeng would enable him to quickly obtain a male heir. The news was greeted with great enthusiasm by Jeong-Suk's sisters at the South House, for offers were still rare, and were therefore considered a great honor. The only one who did not join in the general euphoria was the one who was most concerned. Two days after the director of the house had accepted the contract and sealed the terms of the agreement, without asking Jeong-Suk for her opinion, the young woman was discovered hung in her room.

She hadn't left a note, but there was little need for it to guess the cause of her suicide. The death of her beloved companion struck Min-Su with the violence of a sword in her chest. She endured it for three months, at the end of which, tired of everything, both empty and full of a sadness that time seemed never to be able to soothe, she went out for a night walk, while all the gisaengs of the Red Phoenix's house were asleep, and threw herself from the top of Mount Mongmyeok.

Her body was found the next day surrounded by a pool of blood. She would have sworn, as she fell down for a second that stretched indefinitely, that she had heard Jeong-Suk's voice. The scandal of her death and her friend's had turned the reputations of their respective establishments upside down, and caused a great stir in the gisaeng community, which had been much more understanding and empathetic than that of their Yangbang clients.

Min-Su didn't know if Jeong-Suk had woken up as well. Her absence and the uncertainty associated with it weighed on her every moment of her Gwishin existence, and disturbed her nights heavily, constantly bringing her back to her fall, her past and her pain. She had confided in Su-Jin, who had listened to her story with an attentive and tolerant ear. In a sense, her new companion alleviated the grief associated with the memory of the old one, but did not make it disappear altogether. Sometimes she would start thinking about the days she spent with Jeong-Suk at the Gisaengs' school, and hours later she would find herself, without having moved an inch, completely lost in time. We're trapped, she would say to herself at times, looking at Mistress Gyo, So-Ri, Su-Jin and now Yeo Woon, the past chains us down, it doesn't let us go.

Like Yeo Woon, but without knowing it, Min-Su was one of those Gwishin who did not see their return as a blessing or another chance to accomplish what had been taken from them by an early death. There had been nothing left for her when Jeong-Suk died, and the impression persisted even knowing that her friend might have risen from her grave and survived the royal campaigns of annihilation. At the Spring House, Min-Su usually just played the role of a distant spectator, attending dinners, entertaining guests, and smiling with a sweetness that concealed a total indifference to everything that was going on around her.

She was grateful to Mistress Gyô for offering her shelter and protection, but could not help but think that she could have lived in autarky, far from others, without any difficulty. At times, she longed for the nothingness of her death, and the tranquility it had brought to her, a thousand miles away from her suffering and life without Jeong-Suk.

Perhaps this was also the reason why she had let Yeo Woon get close, the day Mistress Gyo took them shopping on Hanyang's main shopping street to give him the air she had promised him. Maybe it was because she understood, better than anyone else, what he could feel, what had happened to him, and why he had wanted so much to see Baek Dong Soo again, when he finally appeared, accompanied by his son, in the middle of the crowd.

b. The ghost

Go Hyang first believed in a joke when Mistress Gyo, meeting her in the corridors of the Spring House as she was on her way to see Yeo Woon as usual, told her that she had agreed to let her young lord go out of the establishment. The information proved to be all the more brutal as Hui Seon was heading to a luncheon with her most illustrious clients, and so she gave her no opportunity to respond and argue against such a possibility, walking away in a rustle of blue and black silk and satin. Go Hyang had gone through her tasks towards Yeo Woon in an indignant silence.

She hadn't been quiet since he had discovered that Baek Dong Soo had been a client of the Spring House, and was getting more and more agitated every day at the thought of the two of them being reunited under the same roof again. The months of December and half of January had however passed gradually without Baek Dong Soo ever appearing at a reception, and the gisaengs in charge of Yeo Woon showed a diligent surveillance whose persistence equaled the one of the best soldiers of the Kingdom's army, and aimed at guaranteeing the safety of their Gwishin host. Although the conditions were right for Go Hyang to enjoy some peace of mind, nothing helped : each time she passed the corner of a corridor, entered a room or walked the cleverly laid out paths of the gardens, she expected to see the silhouette of Baek Dong Soo, and she remained in a constant state of alert, tiring her nerves and exhausting her body.

Her young lord, on the other hand, had returned to his phlegmatic attitude, to the point that his past reaction when he had met one of Baek Dong Soo's apprentices seemed a distant and diffuse memory. His conversation with Go Hyang had not improved, and he seemed to have increased his mistrust of her since that day. One evening when she was walking with him in the gardens, with her mind on watch, she had taken advantage of being alone in his company to approach him and slip in that she had never wanted anything but his happiness.

He stared at her face with his beautiful black eyes, gauged her like a suspect in a sordid murder case, and dryly retorted that he had been perfectly happy until her intervention. Go Hyang felt like she was facing a wall, and one the length and thickness of the Great Wall of China. She had known how to deal with him until Baek Dong Soo entered the equation, and since then, the dice were loaded, the cards rigged, to the point that she didn't know how to get out of it. Maybe he's using me as a safe outlet, she had thought during the times when he wasn't looking at her, when she was brushing his hair, when she was spilling hot water in his bath, maybe he doesn't want to be angry at his friends, maybe he's lying to himself.

Unsurprisingly, she felt a sense of injustice regarding Mistress Gyo's decision. They had discussed it before, when Mistress Gyo had summoned her to her chambers shortly after she had taken up her duties towards Yeo Woon.

- He told me how he died, she said as Go Hyang felt the beating of her heart failing her, as with every mention of Heuksa Chorong's time. He still has trouble remembering it completely, but I got the information I needed. Although he didn't say it openly, I understood that he had committed suicide. (oh that word that horrible atrocious word) To be completely honest with you, he's not very chatty. I was hoping you could tell me more.

Actually, Go Hyang suspected her mistress to have wanted to compare her version with the one of her young lord, but she did not hesitate to tell her how Hong Guk Yeong had fomented the assassination of Yeo Woon with Crown Prince Yi-San, how the latter had informed Baek Dong Soo and how he had not shown any disapproval to this perspective. She reported straightforwardly the account that Bok Joo Bong, who had remained hidden behind, had given her about the troop of soldiers who had appeared in the field where Joseon's supposedly best swordsman (a title that Go Hyang considered inappropriate, for having seen what Yeo Woon was capable of) and the Sky Lord confronted each other.

Baek Dong Soo killed him, he had told her, that terrible and painful evening, he saw Hong Guk Yeong and he didn't wanted to learn more on the subject. Everything in Bok Joo Bong's version had seemed frightfully believable to her : she had witnessed Hong Guk Yeong's growing mistrust of Yeo Woon, Baek Dong Soo's removal and his stubbornness to believe that the Sky Lord was responsible for everything. The dinner she had organized only served to further highlight the antipathy they both felt towards the man who had been their childhood friend. In her eyes, none of them had any excuses, not even the ones that Yeo Woon could make. All they had was their guilt.

Mistress Gyo listened to her without interrupting, simply nodding her head between two segments of stories to make Go Hyang understand that she was recording the information.

- Do you sincerely think that Hong Guk Yeong and Baek Dong Soo were planning to kill Yeo Woon ? Even if he was no longer a danger to the kingdom ?

(She knows about the exile she knows)

- Yes, she answered firmly. Mylord remained a danger no matter what he did, because the future king had decided so. You saw what Yeongjo did to his own family members in order to maintain his power. Why would his grandson have acted otherwise ?

- You have a point, Hui Seon had observed in a calm and appreciative tone. I take note of your warnings. As long as Yeo Woon is here, I will do my best not to let him be confronted with unwanted customers.

Actually, Go Hyang didn't know that Baek Dong Soo had frequented the Spring House for a while. She hadn't heard from him since the death of her young lord and had not wished to receive any news from him, unless she had been told that he was sick and was dying in great and painful suffering. She had heard the news from Yeo Woon himself, when he had gone out of their sight simply because he needed to be alone again.

Since then, she felt like a rope of gayageum strained to the extreme. The slightest mention of Baek Dong Soo's name made her nervous, and she was afraid to leave her young lord alone in his room at night, even though he was asking for it. Following Yeo Woon's meeting with Baek Dong soo's young apprentice, Mistress Gyo had informed her that her two most trusted Gisaeng companions, named Min-Su and Su-Jin, had been given intimate orders to keep an eye on the house and warn them in case the latter appeared. They were thus added to the duo formed by Go Hyang and So-Ri, and their composed manner and closeness to Hui Seon could have brought comfort to the young woman, had she not already been like a bomb about to explode. She was certain that Mistress Gyo had realized it, and therefore understood even less her decision to let Yeo Woon out in public.

She ventured to talk to Su-Jin, who showed a poised and open-minded spirit that she found in traces in both So-Ri and Min-Su, but she did not feel as comfortable as she did with their sister. She looked a lot like Mistress Gyo : she had a superb pale complexion and night-colored eyes, enhanced by silky dark hair. Deep down inside, Go Hyang questioned this similarity with some caution, but she had other more pressing issues to focus on to really give it her full attention.

- Mistress Gyô would never have agreed if she hadn't gotten a compensation, Su-Jin informed her with a mischievous but not malicious smile.

- What do you mean ?

- She negotiated, explained her companion. Our guest will be able to go out as long as he follows her rules. She thinks about the safety of the house all the time, and she doesn't forget Yeo Woon's status. Everything will be fine, don't worry.

But Go Hyang wasn't appeased yet.

- What were her conditions ?

Once again, she got a secretive smile from her sister. They were out in the garden, because the end of the day, although cold, was beautifully sunny. Su-Jin had passed her arm under her own. Her skin was very cold.

- First, we will go out together, you, me, Mistress Gyo, Yeo Woon and So-Ri. She refused to let him be alone. We can protect him in case of danger. Secondly, we will only go for a walk limited in time, space and discussion. We will make a tour of the palace's shopping alley before leaving. We are forbidden to enter stores or talk to anyone.

- I don't see how any of this could be useful to us, Go Hyang objected, increasingly alarmed. People will see that mylord is a Gwishin. His eyes will be enough of a proof.

- Well, only if people can see them, Su-Jin replied with a beaded laughter, a courtly laughter possessed by most of the country's most favored courtesans.

Go Hyang had said that she couldn't understand. Su-Jin laughed again, without restraint.

- Oh, sweetheart, she had cooed, and there was tenderness and pity in her voice. Who can see the eyes of a gisaeng when she wears a winter jeonmo with a veil ?

And (oh) that time, Go Hyang had understood.