What threw him was the way that his brother-in-law seemed to consider it perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or household appliance.

“Now don’t go making me out to be some kind of villain. Anyone can see that I’m the real victim here.”

Unable to deny that there was at least a measure of truth in this, he, unlike his wife, kept a neutral position on the matter. She, on the other hand, begged Mr. Cheong to hold off on the formal divorce proceedings and wait to see how things would pan out, but he remained unmoved.

He made an effort to push Mr. Cheong’s face out of his mind, that narrow forehead, pointed jaw and general look of stubbornness which he’d always found unpleasant. He tried speaking Yeong-hye’s name again.

“Answer me, sister-in-law. Whatever you say, just answer.” Just as he thought there was nothing else for it but to hang up, she spoke.

“The water’s boiling.” Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absentminded, as might be expected of someone who was ill. But it wasn’t bright or light-hearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being.

“I’ll have to go and turn it off.”

“Sister-in-law, I…” He spoke hurriedly, panicking that she might put the phone down and cut him off. “Is it okay if I come over now? You aren’t going out anywhere today?”

After a brief silence, he heard a click and the tone which signaled that the call had been ended. He put down the phone, his hand slick with sweat.

—

It was clearly only after hearing about her Mongolian mark from his wife that he’d started to see his sister-in-law in a new light. Before that, he’d never had any kind of ulterior motive when it came to his dealings with her. When he recalled how she’d looked and acted during the time she’d spent living with them, the sexual desire that flooded through him was a product of his mental re-enactment of these past experiences, not something he’d actually felt at the time. He felt his skin grow heated every time he called to mind her absentminded expression as she sat on the veranda throwing out shadows with her hand, the flash of white ankle that her baggy tracksuit bottoms had revealed while she was helping his son to wash, the nonchalant line of her body as she’d sat sprawled in front of the television, her half-naked legs, her disheveled hair. And stamped over all these memories was the blue Mongolian mark—that mark which appeared on the buttocks or backs of children, usually fading away long before adulthood.