“Though after all,” In-hye continued, ignoring him, “Yeong-hye refused to say a single word to him, so he was bound to get upset, you know—I mean, she is his daughter…”

“Force-feeding her meat was certainly taking it too far, but what made her decide to stop eating it in the first place? And then why the knife? I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life. However will she look her husband in the face?” Yeong-ho’s wife looked still half in shock.

While In-hye was examining my wife, I changed into her husband’s T-shirt and went to the sauna upstairs. I washed off the black congealed blood under the shower’s lukewarm stream of water. I looked at myself in the mirror, frowning. The whole affair made my flesh crawl. It just didn’t seem real. Right then, thinking about my wife didn’t cause me shock or confusion so much as an intense feeling of disgust.

After In-hye had gone home, the only people left in the general ward aside from my wife and me were a schoolgirl who’d been admitted with a ruptured intestine, and her parents. They kept on darting sideways glances at me while I stood watch at my wife’s bedside, and I could see perfectly well that they were whispering together. But any minute now this long Sunday would be over and Monday would begin, which meant I would no longer have to look at this woman. I expected that Yeong-ho would take my place, and that the day after tomorrow my wife would be discharged. Discharged—in other words, I would once again have to live with this strange, frightening woman, the two of us in the same house. It was a prospect I found difficult to contemplate.

At nine o’clock the next evening I visited the ward. Yeong-ho greeted me with a smile.

“You must be tired, no?” he said.

“How are the children?”

“Ji-woo’s dad’s staying with them today.”

If only my colleagues had decided to go for drinks after work, I would have had the perfect excuse to avoid the ward for another two hours. But it was Monday, so there was no chance of any such reprieve.

“How’s my wife been?”

“She’s just been sleeping. You can see that without having to ask. She ate what they gave her…it seems she’s going to be okay.”

Yeong-ho was clearly trying to be considerate, and he did manage to soothe my sharp mood a little. A short while after he left, and just as I was thinking to myself that I ought to loosen my tie and freshen up, someone knocked on the door of the ward.

To my surprise, it was my mother-in-law.

“I’m so ashamed to face you,” she began babbling as soon as she came near me.

“There’s no need for that. How are you?”

She took a deep breath.