“Well, you see how it is with old age, the slightest shock…” She’d brought a shopping bag with her, which she now thrust at me.

“What’s this?”

“Something I prepared before we came up to Seoul. You waste away after months without meat, it seems, so…eat this together, the two of you. It’s black goat. I was afraid that if In-hye and her husband found out they might try and stop me from coming. Try feeding it to Yeong-hye, just tell her it’s herbal medicine. I put a load of medicinal stuff in to mask the smell. She’s become such a scrawny thing, just a ghost, and now what with losing all that blood…”

I was beginning to get sick and tired of this stubborn “maternal affection.”

“There’s no stovetop here, is there? I’ll go and see if they have one in the nurses’ room.” She took one of the packets out of her bag and left. Repeatedly winding my tie around my hand and clenching it into a ball, I felt myself get more and more worked up, as the irritation returned that Yeong-ho had briefly appeased. Luckily, a short while later my wife woke up. Only then, when I realized how much better this was than if she’d woken up when I was there alone, did my mother-in-law’s arrival come to seem like a good thing.

My mother-in-law came back, and was the first thing my wife’s eyes fixed on. The older woman’s face was wreathed in smiles from the moment she opened the door, whereas my wife’s expression was difficult to decipher. She’d spent all day lying in bed and now, whether because of the drip or simply due to swelling, her face was practically bloodless, almost as white as milk.

Holding a steaming paper cup in one hand, my mother-in-law grasped my wife’s hand in the other.

“This…” Her eyes welled with tears. “Take this. Ah, look at your face.” My wife obediently took the paper cup. “It’s herbal medicine. They say it strengthens the body. Why, in the old days, back before your marriage, we had the very same medicine made up for you, remember?”

My wife sniffed it and shook her head. “This isn’t herbal medicine.” Her expression cheerless and indifferent, and her eyes filled with something strangely like pity, my wife handed the cup back to her mother.

“It is herbal medicine. Just hold your nose and drink it down quickly.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“Drink it. This is your mother’s wish. Even the dead get their wishes obeyed, but you’d ignore your own mother’s?”

She held the cup to my wife’s lips.

“Is it really herbal medicine?”

“Of course, I just said so.”