Princess Bari by Sok-yong Hwang Page A

country.
    *
    Five days passed, and then months passed, and still Father had not returned. Grandmother had told me a few days after he left: “He’s gone to Puryong to bring back the family.” But I’d already known. It was dangerous enough for him to have escaped when he was being punished for our uncle’s crimes, but it went without saying that going back there for the rest of the family was just plain stupid. Yet what could we do? Had I been in his shoes, I would’ve done the same.
    When summer began, Grandmother and I started foraging for mushrooms and medicinal herbs deep in the mountains for us to eat with the grain we received from the farmer’s family. We would each fill a sack with bellflower and bracken, which grew in abundance, and lingzhi mushrooms, which were called the “mushroom of immortality” and earned us the most money when sold. We also collected chaga and neungi mushrooms, and a type of medicinal rhubarb, and peonies.
    Grandmother knew everything there was to know about the mountains. She taught me how to avoid poisonous mushrooms and plants. If we’d sold the patch of lingzhi mushrooms we’d discovered one day in a thicket on the slope of a hill amidst a tangle of oaks and alder, we could have made a fortune. But instead we limited ourselves to a few handfuls now and then, mixed in with the bracken and bellflower roots, in exchange for a steady supply of rice and sundry food items. One day, we filled our sacks with bracken and headed for our treasure trove to collect a few mushrooms. I worked at the top of the slope while Grandmother, who said her legs were bothering her, rested and warmed herself in the sun in a flat clearing at the bottom of the hill. I spotted some astragalus root growing from the stump of a tree, and remembered that Grandmother had told me it was good for restoring energy in the elderly.
    â€œGrandma!” I yelled. “I’ve found astragalus!”
    I’d called out to where she was sitting with her back turned at the bottom of the hill, but she remained squatting and didn’t budge. She had the hoe, so I hopped and slid down the hill to her.
    â€œGrandma, I need the hoe,” I said, and tapped her on the arm. She slumped over to one side. Her arm and shoulder were stiff. When I looked down at her face, her eyes were closed. A single line of blood had trickled out of her nose and pooled in the wrinkles around the sides of her mouth. I placed my head against her chest and listened for a heartbeat, and I even tried placing one finger under her nose to feel for any breath, but there was no question that she was dead.
    I sat there for a long while and wept openly. After much time had passed, I felt like my crying had echoed out across the empty forest and was making its way back to me, so I stopped. I sat there blankly for a little longer, and then started to dig away the earth with the hoe. I didn’t have the strength to dig very deep; I think I only made it far enough to cover up her body and no more. I dragged her body into the hole and covered her with a thick layer of soil. I couldn’t bear to watch her face disappear beneath the dirt, so I took the empty fertilizer sack that we always had with us and used it to cover her face.
    â€œWhen Father returns,” I told her, “we’ll give you a proper burial in a nice, sunny spot.”
    I trudged back down the mountain. Now I was the only one left in our empty hut.
    How many days did I lie there alone? One night, I awoke with a start. An owl was hooting somewhere far off, deep in the woods. I didn’t know what it was, but something was calling me. It wasn’t a voice or anything with form, and yet something like an invisible thread seemed to be tied to one of the hairs on my head and was tugging very gently. The annoying sensation reminded me of walking into a spider web in the dark, but instead of waving my hands around to try to shake it off, I