When it was all over, she was crying. He couldn’t tell what these tears meant—pain, pleasure, passion, disgust, or some inscrutable loneliness that she would have been no more able to explain than he would have been to understand. He didn’t know.

I’m scared, she’d muttered, turned away from him. No, it wasn’t that. You’re scaring me. At that point he was already slipping into a death-like sleep, so he couldn’t be sure if those words had really passed his wife’s lips. She might have lain there sobbing for hours in the darkness. He didn’t know.

But the next morning she hadn’t acted any different from usual. On the phone just now, there’d been no trace in her voice of what had happened between them, no particular sense of hostility toward him. It was just that her way of speaking—that almost inhuman patience, those trademark sighs of hers—made him feel incredibly uncomfortable. He walked a little faster, trying to shake that feeling off.

Surprisingly, his sister-in-law was already waiting at the station exit, slumped on the steps as if she’d been there a long time. Wearing a fairly chunky brown sweater over shabby jeans, she seemed to have stepped straight out of another season. He stared at her face, which was shiny with sweat, and ran his eyes over the contours of her body. He stood there for a while without calling out to her, wanting to keep her there in freeze-frame. Passersby flicked uneasy glances toward this man who looked possessed.

—

“Take off your clothes,” he said in a low voice.

She was standing staring blankly at the white poplars outside the window. The afternoon sunlight shone desolate on the white sheet. She didn’t turn around. Thinking she hadn’t heard him, he was on the point of repeating himself when she raised her arms and pulled her sweater up over her head. The white T-shirt she had on underneath came off next, exposing her naked back; she wasn’t wearing a bra. She slipped off her old jeans and revealed her two white buttocks.

He held his breath and examined them. Above were the pair of dimpled hollows commonly called “the angel’s smile.” The birthmark was thumb sized, imprinted on the upper left buttock. How could such a thing still be there after all these years? It didn’t make any sense. Its pale blue-green resembled that of a faint bruise, but it was clearly a Mongolian mark. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.