Now, the fact that she didn’t eat meat, only vegetables and cereal grains, seemed to fit with the image of that blue petal-like mark, so much so that the one could not be disentangled from the other, and the fact that the blood that had gushed out of her artery had soaked his white shirt, drying into the dark, matte burgundy of red bean soup, felt like a shocking, indecipherable premonition of his own eventual fate.

Her room was in a fairly quiet alley near to a women’s university. He stood in front of the multistory building, laden down with two big bags of fruit that his wife had insisted he bring with him—tangerines, pears and apples from Jeju Island, and even some out-of-season strawberries. The knotted muscles in his hands and arms ached, but still he stood there wavering, realizing as he did that the thought of going up to her apartment, of encountering her in person, was making him afraid.

At last he set the fruit down, flipped open his mobile and dialed her number. When she still hadn’t answered after the tenth ring, he picked the fruit up again and began to climb the stairs. When he reached the third floor he went over to the corner apartment and pressed the doorbell, which had a picture of a semiquaver. Just as he’d thought: no answer. He tried turning the handle. To his surprise, the door opened. He readjusted his baseball cap, only then realizing that his hair was soaked with sweat, tidied himself up a bit, took a deep breath, and pushed the door.

—

The south-facing studio apartment was bathed in the early-October sunlight as far in as the kitchen area, and felt still. Some of his wife’s clothes, which she’d passed on to her sister, were lying scattered across the floor, and there were tiny dust balls rolling about, but somehow the place managed not to seem untidy. Perhaps that was because of the almost complete lack of furniture.

After putting the fruit down next to the door, he took off his shoes and went in. There was no sign of her anywhere. Perhaps she’d gone out. Perhaps she’d gone out deliberately because he’d told her he was coming. There was no television, and there was something unseemly about the way the two wall sockets, next to the hole for an antenna, lay exposed in the middle of the wall. At the far end of the living room–cum–bedroom, where his wife had installed a solitary telephone, there was a mattress, on top of which the quilt was rumpled up into a cave-like mound, as though someone had just slid out from under it.

The air felt stale, and he was on the point of opening the door to the veranda when he heard a noise and whipped around. The breath caught in his throat.