Notes

Just to warn you that the next chapter is probably going to be a little late, since I have to write a proposition of communication for my thesis, but I'll do my best to get it done quickly !

CHAPTER LXIV

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."

(Marc Aurèle, "Meditations")

a. The conspiracy of silence

Without going so far as to say that she had lived long enough and seen enough to be surprised by little or nothing, Baek Yun-seo was nevertheless still rather proud to say that she had taken part in enough banquets and more generally in common meals, whether they had been intimate, limited to her presence and that of one or another particular guest, or more populated, to have acclimatized herself to a wide variety of situations and difficulties encountered during these meetings.

At the Spring House, and even before her admission in the establishment as titular courtesan, she had attended feasts sometimes good-natured and cheerful, but also other festivities with a more irritable and sensitive content. In the gisaeng houses of lesser renown than Hanyang's, the payments were usually less demanding, resulting in a clientele from more varied but also more modest backgrounds.

The men who attended the feasts had sometimes paid the personal equivalent of a fortune for the services of a courtesan, for her caressing words and her pretty silhouette wrapped in a shimmering hanbok, for her long slender fingers covered with rings of jade and ivory. As a result, they were usually affable, quiet and more inclined to laughter and joking than to debate and exchange opinions, unlike the yangbans who, because of their more comfortable income, were not afraid of spoiling an evening spent at the gisaengs' house by getting into a fight with another guest, given that they could easily request another meeting.

In the great houses of Hanyang, conceptual disputes around the courtesans' tables about some Confucian notion, some government decision, some style of painting or poetry, had become legion, and there was no banquet, no matter what time or place, that escaped the curse. Invariably, if you were lucky, you could count on less than two guests to argue about one subject or another, whether considered major or not, and turn an initially pleasant moment into a ridiculous brawl, usually ending in spontaneous insults involving a family member of one of the guests.

In case you were unlucky, it was the entire party that was bickering happily while gobbling up with blatant disrespect the delicacies brought from the kitchens, and carefully laid out on the table by the courtesans, or rather their apprentices. Yun-Seo had seen conversations become heated at a prodigious speed back when she was still a gisaeng, mostly over trifles, and escalate to the point of brushing past declarations of war. Courtesans played the role of mediators, arbitrators, of the voice of reason and especially of appeasement.

They were ignored most of the time, but their presence was regularly all it took to calm their guests' spirits and focus their attention back on eating and enjoying their company. Yun-Seo remembered she got her first headache during a loud altercation between a military officer and a bureaucrat, respectively a noron and a soron, and since then most of her headaches had stemmed from these verbal, sometimes physical, clashes, during which guests could throw themselves at each other over the table, causing laughter from some, stupefaction from others, and confusion from the courtesans.

Her marriage to Baek Dong Soo had brought some notable changes in the nature of the meals she attended. They were no longer composed of a multitude of unknown or barely familiar guests, like at the Spring House, but were usually reduced to a few privileged people. She had lunch with the wives of the officials of the Royal Investigation Bureau, and sometimes they were just two, sometimes several.

The task was more of a social chore than an entertainment, for the vast majority of them despised her both for her former occupation and for her marriage, since Baek Dong Soo was before considered a good match, and had been in the line of sight of a significant number of marriageable girls from respectable and wealthy families. Once the mortification of not having been chosen had been over, these girls had been quick to notice the new husband's pronounced taste for alcohol, as well as his unseemly attitude towards the recruits destined to join the army against the gwishins, and to amplify the seriousness of the matter in order to make sure that their presumed humiliation would be avenged by the even more bitter humiliation of the one they held responsible for it.

Later, when they had been fully satisfied with Baek Dong Soo's tarnished reputation, they had taken solace in the wealth of other aristocrats holding positions in the various ministries. Back when her husband was still an instructor and their marriage still new, Yun-seo had not thought wise to approach this assembly of virtuous wives, but since they had returned from the countryside and Dong Soo had taken up his government job, she had taken it to heart to win their sympathy, or at least to cultivate their good graces for the sake of information.

For the model wives, who were confined to their homes to preserve what they liked to call their "honesty," were often the first to hear from their husbands about the major decisions of the government, the latest decrees, the new laws, and they were talkative if they felt comfortable. Yun-seo had deployed her entire arsenal of seduction on them, after having reserved it for the clients of the Spring House, and she was delighted to find that her charms worked on both the bureaucrats as well as on their wives. Where Dong Soo would get information through harmless discussions with the men, Yun-seo would get hers from their wives. They often compared their findings and stories to see if the contents were matching. It was the same with the military.

Overall, Yun-seo had rarely had to endure so much commotion during a meal since her marriage as she did when she was still a gisaeng. The women she broke bread with were not in the habit of raising their voices to express their opinions, and so were always very self-effacing in public, while they were paradoxically capable of infinite violence behind closed doors. Only a few of them were headstrong, and they were also the ones Yun-seo got along with best.

She also had conversations with the other Yeogogoedam members in town, both men and women, but the topics of their exchanges usually involved discreet conversations. With her sisters, whom she would occasionally meet for lunch, the conversations were more animated, but hardly excessive. As for the meals she shared with her husband, they were never particularly aggressive. There had been a few occasions when Dong Soo had drank and Yun-Seo had tried to make him stop, but even in those confrontations, they had never shouted or became cruel and petty with each other.

Her husband, however, had been more hot-headed during dinners and lunches with his friends and family, especially at the Hong's house, when the king's advisor had not yet been exiled to the country. Dong Soo had only taken her to their house twice, and he himself had hardly come back again after their last dinner together, when Hong Guk Yeong had angrily taken his wife to task, railing against her infertility and melancholy without caring about the embarrassment that was being caused to their guests and to Min-So, and which had finally provoked Dong Soo's annoyance.

The two of them had quarreled so loudly that Yun-seo had retreated with Hong Guk Yeong's wife, trembling and with tears in her eyes, to her quarters. Their two husbands had hardly seemed to notice their absence, and they had drunk tea with each other while vaguely listening to the fight take a more personal, more unpleasant, more venomous turn. It's over, we're not coming back, Dong Soo had said on their way home that night, and Yun-seo had seen something in his eyes that had worried her, like a shadow she had never noticed before, a cold, hard, uncompromising darkness.

On December 24, 1781, years after the last meal at the Hong house, Yun-Seo gently put the teapot back on the maru table, and took a moment to look at the faces of the guests they were receiving. The Huk's were sitting next to each other at the end of the table, opposite her and Dong Soo's mother. They had always been kind and warm to her, and had never given her any reason not to like them.

Jang-Mi could talk with her for hours about cooking and her daughter, a feisty and perceptive girl, and with obvious delight about the political intrigues in which her husband and Dong Soo had been involved ("it's partly thanks to them that our good king now occupies his throne," she had once confided to her, a hand placed against her lips to prevent the information from being heard by someone else, although there was no one to listen except their respective husbands – she had added afterwards, even lower, that she had had the privilege to meet the king in his youth, and that he was already at that time a "very beautiful boy").

Sa-Mo asked her questions, was happy to hear her tell stories about her life as a gisaeng, and often asked her advices on Ju-Won's education. During meals, they fell more into the category of the life of the party rather than being the dreary, disruptive guests or hosts, and it was therefore unsettling to see them so petrified, silent, drinking their pine-needle tea while looking like they wanted to disappear into the crack of a wall. It was the first time since Dong Soo's parents had returned and started visiting them that Yun-seo had seen the Huk like this, faded and mute, when they had always tried before to liven up the discussions and lighten the atmosphere of the meetings.

The current seating arrangements for the collation they were having was the consequence of all the previous ones they had experienced, in which the interactions between the different actors had revealed the nature of enough relational dynamics to determine which guest could go next to which one, and which individuals should absolutely avoid being next to each other.

In a way, Yun-seo saw a disturbing parallel with the banquets in entertainment houses, where guests were usually invited to place themselves according to their affinities, meticulously studied and learned beforehand by the courtesans. She was on the right of Dong Soo's mother, and next to the latter stood her amorphous husband, and then Yeo Woon's father, who was determinedly emptying a bottle of Beopju that had been gifted to them by one of Dong Soo's men. Better this than soju, Dong Soo had said to Yun-seo shortly before the arrival of their guests. She had agreed with him.

The invitation to meet had arrived two days earlier, written by Sa-Mo, and Dong Soo had run out of excuses to avoid it. It had originally been scheduled for the day before, but her husband had managed to move it to a day later, using the excuse, true this time, that Yeo Woon had to meet the gwishin who drew the strange maps, Na-Young, in order to discuss the absence all the dead had seemed to have suffered a few nights before. He and Mago had come back with no real satisfactory explanations, but the meeting had at least given them and Dong Soo more time to get used to the idea of seeing their parents once again.

Her husband was next to her around the table, on her right, and next to him sat Yeo Woon, who occasionally glared coldly at his father. The central room was plunged into a dull, unpleasant silence. They had exchanged brief, vaguely icy greetings, and then all had sat down while Yun-Seo was bringingt the teapot and snacks from the kitchen with Dong Soo. She had left some of them behind as a precaution, seeing it as an opportunity to retreat if the situation ever became heated.

Yun-seo could feel the tension, almost smell it, harsh, heavy, encircling the entire table and its occupants. None of them had said a word yet, but she guessed that the first one would be likely to trigger an outburst. Dong Soo had been on edge since the day before, and so had Yeo Woon. Neither of them enjoyed their parents' visits. Yeo Woon hadn't said anything openly on the subject, but the slight twitching of his face and neck, and the hostile glances he gave his father whenever he made a sound or a movement, was enough proofs of his increasing exasperation.

As for Dong Soo, he hadn't hidden anything from Yun-seo about his disappointment with his father and mother, his inability to get along with them, and their criticism about his life choices (and wife). He talked about it almost every morning when they met for breakfast, while they were still alone, but also at bedtime, during the few full nights he had spent at their house during the last weeks.

His nervousness led him to go chase the dragon more than usual. Yun-seo was sometimes tempted to go looking for him, but she always changed her mind at the last moment, thinking that Dong Soo probably didn't want her to see him like this, and that isolating himself that way could also be, as with alcohol, a mean for him to ease his concerns.

Unsurprisingly, Yeo Woon's father quickly finished the wine, and then he began to shake the empty bottle with a disgruntled look, holding its neck in his clenched fist. As no one paid attention to him at first, cautiously keeping their nose in their teacups, he finally demanded another bottle.

Yun-seo turned his head to Dong Soo, and saw Yeo Woon threw a dirty look at his father, while the Huk's exchanged a terribly embarrassed glance.

"There's nothing left," her husband said casually, as if he were giving information about the weather outside.

That's all it took. Immediately, Yeo Cho-Sang started to protest.

"I want some wine!" he exclaimed, brusquely putting the empty bottle back on the table.

Looking at her side, Yun-seo saw Dong Soo's mother pursing her lips while rolling her eyes. Her father, on the other hand, did not react.

"You heard Dong Soo, there's nothing else, Cho-Sang," Sa-Mo interjected, his voice soft but firm. "It's okay. You'll get some at home. You can wait until then, right?"

Yeo Woon's father seemed genuinely outraged by his comrade's proposal, and replied he couldn't wait, that he was thirsty, and that it was intolerable for a wealthy family like the Baek to run out of wine when their guests were asking for it.

"Leave them alone," Yeo Woon said coldly, and Yun-seo saw his fingers tighten around his cup. "It's your fault if there's no more wine."

Until then, he had hardly ever challenged his father so directly, and the latter gave him an spiteful, fulminating look. The air became even heavier. Yun-seo thanked the gods that Mago and Yoo-Jin were not there, the former having decided to stay in Dong Soo's room in yet another attempt to reach other gwishins through their shared mind, and the latter having gone out to play with Iseul and other children their age.

Yeo Woon's father shook his head.

"Don't lecture me, demon."

"I'm not a demon," his son replied, laying one hand flat on the table and folding his fingers into a fist.

"Yes, you are. You're cursed," and he painfully insisted on that last word. "You're even more so since you came back from the dead. You've always brought misfortune and suffering."

"That's enough," Dong Soo ordered. "Woon isn't cursed, and he's not a demon. Please calm down."

Yeo Cho-Sang watched them both, one after the other, staring at them defiantly.

"You know nothing," he mumbled. "You don't know anything. Mind your own business. You've never seen the signs, either."

Beside her, Yun-seo heard Dong Soo's mother sigh with annoyance and whisper "here we go again", which Yeo Woon's father heard anyway.

"You don't know what it's like!" he asserted fiercely. "Your son wasn't born under a bad star!"

"What bad star?" Dong Soo repeated, and his face was expressing a scandalized curiosity while Yeo Woon was still silent, his jaw clenched to the point Yun-seo feared it would break.

"My son," Dong Soo's mother said curtly, "was born after ten months, deformed, after his father was executed for treason and our whole family was wanted for decimation by royal order. Would you call that a lucky star, perhaps? Or would you happen to have adopted the same conception as my husband, who felt that the birth of his son was such a terrible fortune that he preferred to die rather than face it?"

Yun-seo saw Dong Soo's expression crumple, as she herself slowly took the measure of his mother's words and felt the growing desire to end the conversation and throw out their guests before they made any more damage. She felt as if she was watching from afar a forest fire, caused by a lightning bolt that had taken weeks to form and of an unprecedented violence, spread over acres of vegetation, engulfing everything in a blast of heat and lethality.

Dong Soo's father did not open his mouth to defend himself, nor to refute his wife's accusations. He merely looked down at the surface of the table, shying away from the confrontation.

"Father," her husband called him, hesitantly, stunned by the previous statement. "Is that..."

"Your son didn't kill his own mother!"

A new silence ensued, excruciating, twisted, freezing them in a stupor. Yun-seo was starting to have a headache. Jang-Mi had curled up in her seat, holding her cup as a protection against the verbal violence she was witnessing.

"What are you saying, Yeo Cho-Sang?" Sa-Mo articulated

He was looking at his companion with suspicion, but Yun-seo also saw a deep terror in his eyes, filled with incomprehension and doubt. She turned her head towards her husband, reading shock, anger, worry and anxiety on his face. He was staring at Yeo Cho-Sang so sharply that she thought of the picture of the two tigers in his room, of their huge, motionless, terrifying stares, from which predation emerged.

She looked down. And noticed, almost distractedly, Yeo Woon's left hand clutching her husband's knee, and the desperate, compulsive way the latter was squeezing it back.

b. Lyssa's melody

Kim Gwang Taek had once reproached him for being too hot-tempered during the three years Dong Soo had been training under his supervision. On the whole, his teacher had repeatedly told him that he was too spontaneous, too enthusiastic, too sensitive, too eager, "too much" in every sense of the word, and Dong Soo, after initially trying to defend his point of view and his reactions, thereby confirming his mentor's words, had gradually accepted the criticism, integrated the adjectives and done his best to adopt a more measured attitude, more worthy of that of an accomplished martial artist and of the title of best warrior of Joseon that he had coveted so ardently at the time, precisely because he did not possess it, and which had finally lost all its importance the moment he had acquired it, that is to say at the very moment he had heard the blade of his sword being thrust into Woon's chest.

He had dreamed of the sound it had made every night for a month after Woon's death, and he had heard it again in prison, in the wisp of straw rustling on the floor, in the footsteps of the guards who came to bring him his meals, in the speeches of Sa-Mo and Jang-Mi, who had gone back and forth every day to visit him and keep him company, to make sure he was all right, to tell him what was going on.

After Woon's death, they had always looked at him with compassion mixed with guilt and fear, and sometimes Dong Soo had felt as if he had turned into a sick dog, loved but judged too unpredictable, too broken, not to arouse the distrust of his masters. He had distanced himself from them also out of a desire not to have to endure at every encounter the insistent weight of their pity which, although not malicious or expressed to cause him harm, had seemed to him out of place, as well as unnecessary and vaguely insulting.

Both of them had often said they were sorry, but Dong Soo, in anger, partly from alcohol and mostly from the pain that had clung to his back like a leech, had more than once thought of replying that they weren't, not really, that they were simply lamenting that their springboard towards fame and fortune was falling apart like this and wasting all its potential.

You don't see me, he thought he remembered telling them one day that he had drunk outrageously before coming to see them, you don't want to see me, you don't care. He thought he remembered Sa-Mo's distressed expression, the tears that had appeared in Jang-Mi's eyes when he had exclaimed that they didn't understand. You know very well that's not true, Dong-Soo-yah, Sa-Mo had said, but Dong Soo had not believed him, had preferred what his grudge was saying to him back then, and the accusations stated by soju, towards himself, but also towards others. The alcohol understood. The alcohol was Woon.

Dong Soo knew that he was prone to fits of rage and impulsiveness, and had always been so. His master's statements were just an addition to the admonitions of Sa-Mo, of the instructors the latter had brought to the training camp, and to the comments of his former mountain comrades, who were also inclined to aggressiveness and lack of composure, but whose vices were less noticeable because Sa-Mo paid less attention to their backgrounds than to Dong Soo's.

Moreover, while they regularly started conflicts with hurtful remarks or mockery, far fewer of them had directly attacked Dong Soo, who had been the main assailant in too many confrontations with his classmates not to end up with the reputation of a brutish lout, or simply of a guy with an extreme sensitivity. At the camp, upon his fifteenth birthday, all the other boys knew it was safer not to play with his nerves too much, at the risk of ending with a broken nose or other body part in no time.

Generally speaking, the small group of fifteen or so that they were had been very quickly divided naturally between those who could take a lot without saying anything, those who defended themselves without managing to impress anyone and who remained inoffensive, and finally those who were capable of being easily riled up and with whom it was dangerous to insist on anything beyond what was reasonable.

Dong Soo had been classified into that last category. As for Woon, he had, as in many other occurences, been placed in the group of guys who could handle a lot, but who invariably ended up making you pay a hundredfold.

In the ten years before Woon's resurrection, Dong Soo had oscillated between numbness and fits of anger, both amplified in their manifestations by his drinking. He became angry more easily when he was still in the early stages of drunkenness, and as soon as he was confronted with a friend, Sa-Mo, Jang-Mi, his colleagues, the future recruits to whom he could only teach the art of emptying a carafe in record time, Cho-Rip, his own opponents in the government, and especially when all these individuals decided to admonish him about his chaotic behavior.

If they also knew Woon, his anger tended to redouble (if you really loved him). Only when he was fully intoxicated and wrapped in the cottony vapors of alcohol would he fall into an apathetic, bitter quietness, where the violence that had been brewing inside him was drowned and incapacitated, both by the lack of energy caused by his condition and the disordered coordination of his movements.

A little alcohol made him dangerous, but a lot took away his will to harm others, even when he passionately wanted to. A lot of alcohol was better than not enough. The only ones who were relatively unaffected by his impulses were Yun-Seo, Yoo-Jin, and Ji-Seon. Even Jin-Ju had once or twice uttered a word or phrase that had made him want to be cruel to her, and hurt her in return.

He had come out of the house after slamming Woon's father against the wall and holding him there, arm violently pressed against his throat, aware that he was unable to take a dead man's breath away, but still pressing harder, as Sa-Mo and Yun-seo was rushing to pull him back, to grab his arms, all the while shouting at him to stop.

It was the first time he had lost his composure in four years, and as he was looking at the clear, dusty earth of the street where he and his wife lived, he considered the possibility that he had perhaps presumed his ability to contain himself, and had been overly ambitious in believing himself capable of holding two jobs, both at the Royal Investigation Bureau but also as a brigade captain, the nature of which could only lead him to accumulate tension, animosity, violence and fear, without being able to externalize them, at the risk of losing his position when he had never needed so much to stay in the Joseon army, to gather information and to be seen as an obedient and convinced subject of the kingdom, determined to fight against the threat of the dead.

He knew it was only possible for him to keep his position if he was unmoved, if he did not betray himself, if he moved carefully and avoided any faux-pas. The rule was valid everywhere, whether in politics, where everyone hid their true intentions under smiles and fake compliments, or in other more innocuous contexts, such as a family meal where each guest had something to hide from the others.

Dong Soo had learned the maneuver from Cho-Rip, or rather from Hong Guk Yeong, but also, long before him, from Woon. We won't say anything, Woon had stated firmly years before, when dirt had blackened his cheeks and brought out the distressing pallor of his skin and the tired glow in his eyes. Dong Soo had never found him more beautiful, more terrible than that day when they had seen each other, both of them, for real. Woon had been able to hide his affiliation with Heuksa Chorong, but he had also concealed his loyalty to Dong Soo, just as he had never really confided about his moods at the training camp, or his life before joining it.

Woon's father had cast an abominable chill after his denunciation, and Dong Soo had felt Woon's fingernails digging into the skin of his knee. Woon had grabbed him the moment Yeo Cho-Sang had called him a demon, and his touch had been a signal, almost a command, or a plea (he might cause a scandal). When Dong Soo had then clasped his hand over Woon's, the latter had immediately and mercilessly dug his nails into it, and Dong Soo had just barely held back a hiss of pain, while squeezing tighter.

His room, the boxes full of the letters they had exchanged, the golden incense burner, and the coldness of Woon's fingers against his skull, drawing him closer, lower, between his legs, had seemed awfully far away.

"Cho-Sang, what did you say?" Sa-Mo had repeated in a more urgent tone, which Dong Soo hadn't liked, because he had heard a hint of suspicion in it, and he had wondered what Sa-Mo was thinking, what he was hoping to get from Woon's father's confirmation, what he wanted to check (it was an accident).

Yeo Cho-Sang had frowned, shaking his head in a way Dong Soo knew well from his own experience when he drank too much, like a horse shaking off the flies and mosquitoes around it. He had refused to repeat his previous statement. The silence had returned, even denser than before, and Woon's hand in Dong Soo's was tightening, crushing it.

He didn't take his eyes off his father : only on one occasion could Dong remember seeing him look at someone with such open and deep resentment (I know what you two are).

"I think we still have a bottle of wine in the kitchen," Yun-Seo had said in a soft voice. "I can go get it."

Her proposal was only meant to bring some quiet back to the table, to ensure Yeo Cho-Sang's silence and an overall decrease in the tensions that had gathered.

But Dong Soo's mother had turned her head curtly towards her, and he had been forced to admit that it was too late, that the cracks were now too wide to be closed, and that from being localized, the conflict would soon become generalized.

"Have you become stupid?" She had looked at Yun-seo as if she had openly insulted her. "Don't you think he's had enough to drink for the day?"

Yun-seo's eyes had widened in shock, and the harmonious features of her face had contracted in rising anger.

"Mother, she's just trying to help," he had pointed out. "The dead aren't sensitive to alcohol. You don't have to insult her like that."

"No, you're right, of course," his mother had affirmed, looking at him with cold eyes. "She's a gisaeng, after all. She only does what she was taught, which is to intoxicate her guests in order to better enslave them."

"Enough. You're going too far. I want you to apologize to my wife."

Sa-Mo had requested Yeo Cho-Sang to do the same with Woon, seeing it as an opportunity to potentially lighten the atmosphere, but he had only succeeded in triggering a new outburst of fury, for Woon's father had then inveighed against his suggestion, saying that he refused to ask forgiveness from a child who had murdered his own mother, to which Dong Soo's mother had retorted that the logic applied in her own case as well, since her son had ripped her insides apart the day of his birth.

Dong Soo had seen the indignation on both Jang-Mi's and Yun-seo's faces. His father was still mute, still decorative. He had wanted to hit him suddenly, to force a reaction from him. Woon's hand, and his nails in his skin, anchored him, contained him, softened the pounding of his heartbeat against his temples.

Woon's father had started talking again about signs, about bad stars, about black destiny, about the first murder of his mother when the child was barely born. He was pointing at his son, and sputtering. His sunken eyes were looking in every direction except Woon's. Dong Soo had read guilt in them. He was the one who killed Woon's mother, he had thought impulsively, Woon didn't do anything, he was a baby.

His own mother was mocking Yeo Cho-Sang's beliefs, feeding his anger ("If a parent's death is a sign of a bad star, then should I conclude that my son, who caused my death as well as his father's, is more cursed than yours ? " she had asked bluntly, and Dong Soo had felt Yun-seo's hand resting on his thigh, almost succeeding in easing the tension that was rising in him). Sa-Mo had tried to reason with both of them, without success. Jang-Mi had put her head in her hands.

Then, abruptly, Woon's hand had left his, and he had stood up, stiff and silent, and walked towards the door of the hanok.

Dong Soo had rushed after him, had called him, practically begged him to stay, had skirted the table to hold him back just in front of the door, which he had slid open. A chill wind had crept into the large room. Stay, Dong Soo had said, I'll make them leave, you don't have to go.

But Woon had shaken his head, had said no, and Dong Soo had seen in his eyes the immense effort he was making to control himself.

"It's the guilty ones who leave," his father had asserted. "He knows what he did. He knows I'm right. He killed his mother, he has always been a murderer."

He could have stopped there, not twist the knife in the wound, not say the last straw. But he had added something else while giving them a knowing look, an adjective Dong Soo had come to know in his youth, which he had hated more than anything else, and which had earned the most monumental beatings to some of his reckless classmates.

"And a sodomite, with that, from what I can see."

Dong Soo had seen Woon's eyes widen, move from him to his father, had felt him start to move, had seen his fist rise, and had thought, "He musn't do this, he'll become guilty, he can't hit him". He had acted on instinct, as he had done years ago, with the boys in the camp who had called them that way him and Woon, who had been right to some extent, and who had forced them to face something that neither of them had been ready to accept at the time, because it was too early, because things had not been clearly defined, but above all because they had wished to keep them only between themselves, not to see the others play with them.

He had thought of the cold water bag Woon had held against his cheek, of his hands against his chest, of the smiles he sometimes gave him, of his letters, of the desire he had felt to be better than him but also to be better for him, and he had lifted Yeo Cho-Sang from his seat, had smashed him against the wall, held his arm against his neck, ordered him to shut up, and had watched him struggle and whimper with dark pleasure, while Woon was looking at him without joining Sa-Mo and Yun-Seo in calming him down.

He had come out immediately after releasing Yeo Cho-Sang and breaking free from the grip in which his wife and Sa-Mo had held both his arms to prevent him from striking. He had felt like he was seventeen again, back in camp, not having made any progress, both with himself and with Woon, in their relationships to each other and what they were.

He had articulated a meager, shameful apology, noting the shock on Jang-Mi's face, who was holding his hands in front of his mouth, but also on his mother's and father's , though less pronounced. Yun-seo had just looked deeply worried.

"Calm down, Dong Soo-yah," Sa-Mo had demanded gently but firmly, using his "father's voice", the one who understood and didn't judge. "It won't solve anything."

(maybe but it feels good oh it feels so good)

Woo's father was wearing a dazed, dumbfounded expression on his round face when Dong Soo had agreed to let him go. He hadn't say anything else. Dong Soo had fled outside, towards the anaesthesia of the cold, the silence, and the absence of his guests' stunned looks, of their judgments, of anything they might say to him. Woon had once looked at him that way, too. Dong Soo had never been so scared in his life as when he had seen Woon's face express such bewilderment.

He had followed him outside. They were on the street now, both of them. Dong Soo was drumming his fingers against the wall of the house, trying to catch his breath, trying to control himself. Woon, with his arms crossed, was watching him cautiously. He had seen him act like this before, it was nothing new. Dong Soo had attacked one of their comrades at the camp in the same way one night when the latter had pushed him over the edge by claiming he had seen him and Woon in a compromising situation while they were on a mission to explore an old abandoned building in the mountains.

Byeong-Cheol had called them "lovers" and had spew the word out like an insult, and Dong Soo had threw himself on him, while Woon had grabbed one of his arm, Yeong-Geol the other, and Tae Yong had put pressure on his chest to get him away from the boy who was sticking his tongue out at him, mocking him. Woon had told him to calm down, to stop, that it was only provocation. The other had advised Dong Soo to listen to his wife a little.

Only then did Woon's grip had weaken, and Dong Soo had taken advantage of it to break free and attack Byeong-Cheol. He had beaten him until he had fallen unconscious. Sa-Mo had been obligated to call a physician to treat him. Dong Soo had received a severe punishment, including food deprivation and solitary confinement, but Woon had came to see him secretly, overstepping Sa-Mo's orders, and had brought him some meat.

He had pushed back his hair with his long fingers, had contemplated his back eye, had pressed his lips against his painfully swollen eyelid without a word. Dong Soo had wished to be able to hit Byeong-Cheol again, to have another chance to feel the pressure of Woon's lips. He thought that if Woon had asked him for something at that moment, he would have done it without hesitation.

In the deserted street of his home, long after the camp, after Woon's death, after his monstrous, wonderful awakening, Dong Soo saw him slowly approaching.

"I'm sorry," he said, his back pressed against the cold surface of the wall, as his heart was beating a jerky gallop in his chest and panic gradually succeeded rage, as it always did when he lost his temper and became aware of the possible repercussions of his outburst. "I'm sorry, Woon-ah. I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry."

"If you hadn't done it, I would have," Woon replied with a shrug, moving even closer.

He came close to Dong Soo, stood right in front of him, uncrossed his arms. Not a cloud of steam escaped from his mouth or nose. Dong Soo wanted to hug his waist, but he held back and bumped his head against the wall. His back was hurting. It had been getting worse and worse over the past few months, but it had started long before, about four years ago, when Woon had left.

He considered running away, never returning, letting the disapproval of others, their criticism, their horror at the sight of his anger, fade away. He didn't want to talk to anyone, but above all he didn't want to hear anyone point out that his attitude could be problematic. He knew he was quick to anger, had let Kim Gwang-Taek try to muzzle him, had done his best to muzzle himself, and was getting tired of seeing that the efforts he had been making for decades seemed to lead to nothing, except even more violent, more lightning and destructive anger.

"Close your eyes," Woon ordered, suddenly pressed against him. "Breathe, Dong Soo-yah."

Dong Soo obeyed, realizing that he was breathing fast, that his fingers were becoming increasingly agitated, that he wanted to punch something, to break something, to scream. Woon's cheek came to rest against his.

"Quiet, now."

And ten there was just this, the touch of Woon's cheek, his hands taking Dong Soo's, squeezing them, his chest against his, and his whisper in his ear. Dong Soo let out a sigh of relief as he felt the anguish and fury, the guilt and shame, slowly flow back.

Only Woon had ever been able to bring back the quiet like that, the silence, the consistency and order to his mind. Woon understood because he saw him, because he knew, because he was the same kind of person, because he was just as angry as Dong Soo, only he had more control over it. They were both angry, all the time, since they were children. And only Woon was able to calm him down so permanently, so completely, to keep the rage and fear at bay. That had been the case back in the camp, and it was still the case twenty years later.

Woon's cheek caressed his. Dong Soo felt his teeth gently bit his earlobe. Calm down, Woon had said, his hands against his chest, a long time ago, calm down, and listen to me. His words had been a relief, a way out, a sweet and so disastrous lull.

(listen to me)