The reason I saw my grandmother in my dream last night was probably because of what Sangwoo told me. The day our entire family gathered and went to visit her grave ahead of the fourth anniversary of her death, I heard a shocking story about her from Sangwoo, my younger brother.

“Nuna, remember that old man?”

It was a Saturday afternoon awash in autumn light, and dragonflies flitted leisurely throughout the cemetery park. My young nieces and nephews were shouting and running around, and the tombstones gleamed in the sun. In so many ways, it was the perfect day to pay a visit to Grandma for the first time in a while.

“What old man?” I asked.

“You know. Back in France, there was that old man who lived on the first floor. The tall one who wore a hearing aid.”

While the other adults and my sister-in-law sat around on the grass chatting once we had finished tending the grave, Sangwoo and I had walked down to the lakeside, which was where he brought up the old man.

“Ah, Monsieur Brunier? That was his name, right?”

“Was it? I can’t remember.”

“I’m pretty sure. Or was it Monsieur Bruno? Anyway, why are you suddenly asking about him?”

Our family had lived in France from the time I was thirteen until I was sixteen, already nearly twenty years ago.

“Grandma was dating that old man, wasn’t she? I just thought of that.”

I turned to him, eyes wide. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“You didn’t know?” Sangwoo laughed, amused.

“Of course not—that’s why I’m asking what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Actually, there was this one time,” he said, “when I saw them at a park near our house in France, sitting on a bench and holding hands.”

That night after we all parted ways, I went back to the house where I lived alone and took out the large boxes of my grandmother’s belongings from the depths of my wardrobe. The overwhelming majority of the space inside one box that held things like her norigae ornaments and gold rings was taken up by dozens of volumes of her diaries. There were notebooks of all different shapes and sizes, each labeled with the year according to both the Dangun and Gregorian calendars: D. 4283 and G. 1950, D. 4293 and G. 1960, and so on. I couldn’t bear to throw them out when I’d gone through her things, so I decided to take them all, even the ones where she had recorded in minute detail things like “nylon socks” and “a 500-hwan bill” she was gifted at her children’s doljanchi celebrations. But until then, out of respect for her privacy, I had refrained from reading through a single one. My grandmother, who used old-fashioned spellings, writing today as to-day, tomorrow as to-morrow. Among her many diaries, I found the one where she had recorded her day-to-day life during the time our family had spent in France.

*

I was five and Sangwoo was three when Grandma started living with us. When our grandfather died after a prolonged illness, our two aunts—Grandma’s daughters—thought she might get lonely living on her own and proposed that she move in with their eldest brother’s—our uncle’s—family. Grandma immediately shot down the idea, snapping, “Now that I’m finally free, you want me to go and spend the rest of my life walking on eggshells around my son and daughter-in-law?” But what ultimately made her decide to come and live with her younger son’s—our father’s—family was the fact that in July the year I turned five, our mother suddenly passed away in a car accident. “Your father came all the way to my house and got down on his knees.” A long time ago, when I asked Grandma why she had decided to raise us, that was her answer. I couldn’t picture my father, a big man built like a mountain, kneeling in front of her. In any case, that fall, she packed her things and came to live with us. I can’t quite say that she “moved in,” because Grandma, thinking she would stay with us only until Sangwoo started elementary school, brought most of her belongings to our place but didn’t sell her house. Several times a month, she went back to the 20-pyeong apartment where she’d lived with our grandfather to sweep and mop, and it wasn’t until I was nine and Sangwoo was seven that she finally sold the house and took up full-time residence with us. What was it that had made our grandmother, who’d held that house close to her heart for so long, suddenly change her mind? Now that I think about it, I never once asked. Maybe it was my own way of protecting myself. I knew that at any moment, she could pack her things and go, and there was always this fear huddling in some corner of my heart that she might leave us behind and disappear. It wasn’t that I thought she didn’t love us, my little brother and me. The affection she showed us was special, and I firmly believed she had decided to live with us because she didn’t want to be apart from us for even a moment. I thought that was undeniable. But now I also know that, more than anything, the single most crucial reason for her deciding to do away with her own home and come to live with us was because we needed her.

Grandma was born in a port city during the Japanese occupation to parents who ran a large Western-style dressmaking shop. She was the eldest daughter, with three brothers born before her and two sisters born after. A long time ago, I saw a photo of her as a little girl in a sailor-style school uniform standing in front of a wall somewhere. The face of the little girl in the photo, who looked to be only eight or nine years old at most, already showed glimmers of her outlook on life, things like her unwavering confidence and curiosity. All six children in her family were able to receive a modern education thanks to their cultured and financially well-off parents, but the fact that—unlike her siblings, who were content just to finish high school—Grandma was the only one who convinced her parents to let her enroll in college reveals a key aspect of her personality. When my grandmother passed away, the people who came to the funeral mostly remembered her for being “that type”—some said “stubborn,” others even used the word “vain.” “Aigo, that woman sure did whatever she wanted in life.” Every time one of those people sitting in front of their bowls of yukgaejang that had gone cold and dried-out slices of pyeonyuk spoke about Grandma as if they knew everything about her, I felt myself growing more and more upset, but I didn’t know why. I must have taken offense to the notion of “a woman who did whatever she wanted in life,” which seemed innocuous on the one hand but also seemed to hide something pointed and sharp within. The fact that Grandma was the only one of her siblings to go to college became a huge talking point, but no one seemed to remember that even before the war broke out, she’d had to drop out of the university she so badly wanted to attend. To me, Grandma was the sort of person who had to have known the rules for attending a women’s college at the time—students were required to withdraw once they were married—yet, less than a year into her studies, still allowed her parents to set her up with a man who would bore her for the rest of her life.

My grandmother, who maintained a height of 5’2 and a weight of 108 pounds for decades, who kept her white hair in a neat bob. It always made me proud when I was younger, the fact that she was so different from other grandmothers. She was fluent in Japanese, made her rolled omelets and steamed eggs a little sweet the Japanese way, and could sing “Edelweiss” in English. Because Grandma was highly educated, unlike most grandmothers, my brother and I felt the absence of our mother relatively less growing up. Until we graduated from elementary school, she looked over the notices in our notebooks and packed the supplies we needed, made boxed lunches for us with consideration for nutritional balance, and taught us things like addition and subtraction and our times tables, the way other children’s mothers did for them. Grandma, who had dreamed of being a pianist and was briefly enrolled in the music department, even taught me and my brother to play using Beyer’s instruction books. Her straight back and the curve of her arms as she showed us how to play songs like “Daddy and Crayons” or “The Orchard Trail.” While other grandmothers had barely finished elementary school, ours had always been a vision of sophistication and elegance. I looked up to her with wistful eyes.

When we were little, Grandma was the one who tucked us into bed instead of our father, who was constantly busy with his architecture work. At night, we lay side by side on three separate blankets on the floor. Grandma was always in the middle, with me on her right and my brother on her left. While my brother was fast asleep almost as soon as he lay down, I struggled to drift off, so Grandma would tell me all these once-upon-a-time stories. She had a real talent for taking familiar tales and shaping them into something new whenever she ran out of material. Of the countless stories she told me, the one I remember to this day was about Little Red Riding Hood being eaten by a tiger. In Grandma’s story, Little Red Riding Hood had an errand to run. She was to cross several hills to bring a basket of rice cakes to the neighboring village, but on every hill she crossed, she encountered a tiger. “Little girl, little girl, give me your rice cakes,” the tiger said. Little Red honored each of his requests—first for the rice cakes, then the basket, then her red cape, then her shoes, until finally the tiger swallowed up the girl herself.

“Grandma, this story is too scary,” I insisted the first time I heard the tale, burrowing into her chest. Imagine, a little girl devoured whole after giving up everything she has. It made for a truly terrifying story.

Grandma smiled, brushing down my bangs with the back of her hand and whispering so as not to wake my brother. “No. This isn’t a scary story,” she said. “It’s a story about a very brave child who survives even in the belly of a tiger.”

Unbeknownst to anyone, the girl in Grandma’s story had been clutching a tiny shard of obsidian in her fist when the tiger swallowed her, and with it, she slit the tiger’s stomach open from the inside and escaped.

Wouldn’t Grandma’s last chance to live apart from our family have been around the time our father’s transfer to France was finalized? The evening our father gathered the whole family to tell us that he was being sent to Paris on an assignment, the first thing Grandma said was that she wanted to stay in Korea. “The church I go to for worship every week is here, and so is the community college where I take classes twice a week, and my high school reunion every month,” she said. But in the end, she boarded the flight bound for France with the rest of us. “It’s not right for the kids to be without me.” Whenever she told people that she was leaving, rather than mention the anxieties and fears she had about life in a foreign country, Grandma simply said, “Thanks to my devoted son, I get to live abroad.” She didn’t know how to share her weaknesses or woes and openly declared that she would rather die than seek sympathy from others. She had a terrible relationship with our grandfather until the day he died, yet she still accompanied him to gatherings where she would put on a smile and use honorifics to address him.

Of course, none of this meant that Grandma was entirely opposed to the idea of going to France. Until then, she had never been to a Western country, and France was the birthplace of many of the artists she had long aspired to emulate. She was ready to take in sights like the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre whenever she pleased. For the first two weeks after we arrived in Paris, while my brother and I were still in the process of transferring into our new school and our father’s work assignment hadn’t yet begun in earnest, it wasn’t me or my brother—both too young to harbor any fantasies about France—but Grandma who was utterly enraptured as she placed flowers on Chopin’s grave and asked to have her picture taken at the Mirabeau Bridge on the family outings led by our father.

Truth be told, France was nothing more to me at the time than the country that had snatched me away from my peaceful life. I was ready to be disappointed by everything Paris had to offer, and the Seine which seemed so drab compared to the Han River, the elevators as narrow as coffins, and the foul-smelling passageways in the metro stations did little to change my mind. That was why, in every photo taken during those first few months—most of the photos of me, my brother, and Grandma standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Palace of Versailles, taken by our father—I was sulking as I stood next to my beaming grandmother in a wide-brimmed cap and ever-cheerful little brother. Back then, I felt a strong urge to punch people right in the nose when they said that living abroad at a young age was a privilege, and I couldn’t hide my frustration with my father for completely uprooting my life. The humiliation I felt sitting in classes where I didn’t understand a word that was said. The mortification I endured every time I was teased for not being able to express myself, all while hoping this time in my life would soon be over. The innocent pranks of children who had not yet learned that racism was wrong could be so cruel.

After classes, I always rushed home as if I were fleeing something. To me, our house—where Grandma was waiting, boiling potatoes or making snacks like syrupy deep-fried sweet potatoes—was the safest place in the world. I bet it was the same for her. She couldn’t go anywhere on the metro aside from the Japanese grocery store that sold East Asian ingredients, and she spent most of her time in the house cleaning and doing laundry while waiting for me and my brother to get home. When we got back from school, we would eat the snacks that Grandma had set out for us before taking our seats beside her on the sofa to watch TV. There were times we watched incomprehensible French dubs of Japanese animated movies or American movies whose plots we roughly knew since they had also been broadcast in Korea—and lots of the ads on French TV featured nude women, so whenever one came on, we would gasp in shock and change the channel—but most times we watched Korean dramas recorded on videotapes that Grandma rented in bulk every Sunday when she went to the Japanese grocery store. Miniseries and weekend dramas that we watched over and over until we had memorized the lines, to the point where our father would come from work and ask, “Did you at least do your homework first?” The three of us shared a certain something at that time. If I had to put it into words, maybe it was like the sweet, cozy camaraderie that formed among castaways on an island isolated from the world. But time went by, and after about a year, my brother and I had moved beyond the stage of rejecting our unfamiliar surroundings and had entered an era of trying whatever we could to adapt to our new lives.

How did Grandma fill her ever-increasing alone time? In the beginning, if she still had time to spare after finishing all the house chores, she would brew herself a mug of green tea, sit at the kitchen table, and read the Bible she had brought with her from Korea. Once she grew bored with being at home all day, she started going for walks nearby. She was afraid of getting lost if she tried taking the subway on her own, but she seemed fine wandering the neighborhood on foot. She would pack the dark blue pocket map our father had bought her in her small purse and set off for somewhere a little farther from the house each day. When one of her walks led her to a park that she loved, she marked it with a little circle on the map so she could find it again. Unlike my brother and me, who eventually became quite fluent in French, Grandma’s language skills didn’t improve in the slightest. Now and then, she would take out one of the basic French textbooks from our bookcase and leaf through it, but the only French she seemed to remember were a few greetings and rudimentary phrases like I’m from Korea and I don’t speak French. Considering how easily she had mastered Japanese and English during her school days, the fact that her French wasn’t getting any better made Grandma feel helpless.

Not being able to converse in French meant that she had almost no one to talk to when she left the house. I don’t know whose fault it was, but that was around the time my brother and I, who once got along so well, started yelling and arguing constantly over petty things like who got to pick the TV channel. So we were too busy crying and screaming to have a proper conversation with our grandmother, and even in France our father was often away at company dinners or on business trips. In those days, cyber communication was already starting to catch on in Korea, but in France, there were still tons of people who didn’t know about even the concept of the Internet. Grandma sometimes called our aunts or her friends back home, but she was so worried about the cost of making international calls that she would hurry off the phone before she got to say everything she wanted. One time, our father even looked into a social gathering for expat wives to recommend to Grandma, who was clearly feeling bored. All the young wives in that group, who took turns hosting each other at their homes, were friendly but overly polite, and Grandma realized she was nothing more to them than an old woman who was difficult to manage.

As time went on, her loneliness heaped up inside her, soundlessly, like snow. At first, it was a thin layer that seemed like it might soon melt away. But before long, it became a mound thick and solid enough to reach up to her waist. I was so busy trying hard not to seem like a typical Asian girl, overly serious with no sense of humor, in the eyes of the few friends I had managed to make in France that I didn’t realize Grandma had gone to the supermarket to buy pads for me because I’d just started my period only to wind up standing dumbstruck in front of a display case lined with nothing but tampons, not knowing what they were, or that she’d started visiting the Japanese grocery store hoping to find someone to talk to after a long and tedious day at home only to end up feeling both proud and humiliated every time she spoke fluently to the store’s Japanese owner. 

Grandma became acquainted with Monsieur Brunier at some point in our second year of living in France, after many more such days. M. Brunier lived on the first floor of our apartment building, but we’d hardly ever run into him. The building manager told me that was because M. Brunier had been spending most of his time in a villa in Bordeaux since his wife passed away, leaving their Paris home empty. The building manager was an immigrant from Portugal, and she was kind to us as we were the only other foreigners in the building aside from her family. Once I could speak a bit of French, whenever I went to pick up parcels sent from my friends in Korea, I would end up listening with rapt attention as she told me stories about the people in our neighborhood. I would bring a little note that said a package had arrived when I went to the building manager’s apartment. Then I would ring the doorbell and wait for the door to open slowly and Madame Selina’s face to appear in the gap. Her resting face looked quite stern, but the moment she opened her mouth, her gaze softened. Whenever we blew a fuse or the power went out in the house, she would listen to my ridiculously long-winded and inarticulate explanations all the way through, then teach me the French word for whatever I’d been trying to explain. Why can I still remember things like that, and her voice as she gently pointed out, “You can say ‘short-circuit,’” after all this time?

Now I suppose I should explain the layout of the apartment complex where we lived. It consisted of four buildings surrounding a rectangular yard. Our building was the farthest from the main road, which meant that when we wanted to go out, we had to cross that yard and leave through the main building, which was opposite ours. The building manager’s apartment was on the first floor of the main building. And M. Brunier lived on the first floor of one of the buildings that connected directly to ours.

All this is to say it was inevitable that our grandmother would pass by M. Brunier’s apartment at the start of spring that year. She had long grown stifled from staying at home all day and was headed across the central yard to embark on one of her walks when she stopped in her tracks. She heard someone playing a piano. The pianist had clear talent, and the sound was coming from somewhere incredibly close by. The source of the piano melody was M. Brunier’s house. Grandma could see him, a gray-haired man hunched over at his piano, through his wide-open window. Liebestraum No. 3 in A♭ major. Ah, it’s Liszt. As soon as the title of the nocturne came to mind, Grandma suddenly remembered the day she had played this song for the first time. On the black Yamaha in her high school music room. And in an instant, the feeling of the keys under her fingers came back to her in time with M. Brunier’s playing. It was surprising and unexpected, like an electric shock. That was why Grandma stood there outside M. Brunier’s drawing room window, the sill of which was lined with three flowerpots of geraniums, until the performance ended. Until M. Brunier noticed her, approached the window, and greeted her, “Bonjour.”

That night, Grandma knocked on my bedroom door.

“Yeah?” I said, sticking just my head out. At some point, I had started shutting and locking my door, believing privacy to be of the utmost importance.

“If you’re not using your radio, let me borrow it,” she said.

While I searched for the Walkman I had left neglected in one of my desk drawers, the door opened a little wider.

“What’s a school-aged girl doing with all this nail polish?” Grandma tutted, spotting the many colors—a pearlescent pink, a shade of sky blue—sitting on my desk next to a bottle of nail polish remover.

“Everyone wears it here,” I snapped irritably, handing her the Walkman and shutting the door again. Everyone is like that here had become something of a magic spell that rendered my grandmother weak, and at some point, I had started to enjoy using the phrase.

Grandma went back to her room, sat on the edge of the bed, and turned on the radio function on the Walkman. With much patience and after a long time spent adjusting the dial just so, she managed to find a station that played nothing but classical music. She couldn’t understand a word of the DJ’s comments between one song and the next, but she had no problem at all listening to the music itself. Keeping the volume at the lowest it could go so as not to wake up anyone else in the house, Grandma pressed the radio to her ear, and as she willed herself to sleep, forgotten memories washed over her in bed like a flood tide. The creaking of the old wooden floor in the music room where she stayed behind to practice after school, the copper kettle on the wood-burning stove, the rattle of the kettle lid as water boiled inside, and the endless silence outside the music room window, the golden light of the sunset pouring over the evergreen trees.

The next day, Grandma was on her way home from a walk when she spotted M. Brunier from a distance, seemingly on his way back from buying baguettes, and a few days later she saw him from behind at a newspaper stand. Seems like every old person with time to spare ends up in the same places, she thought. She likely could have run into M. Brunier in the past, but there had never been any reason for her to notice his existence until then. Now, though, he stood out wherever they were. Every time she saw him, Grandma thought of his side profile as he sat at his piano, and every time she crossed that yard, she stopped outside his window, hoping to hear a melody. As the days grew balmier, M. Brunier spent more time playing with the window open. Did he know Grandma was listening? He must have. Sometimes when she was standing out in the courtyard, he would stop playing, head over to the window and strike up a conversation with her out of the blue, startling her. “I can’t speak French,” she blurted out whenever it happened, one of the few French sentences she knew. Then she scurried off, shyly, vowing never to stand by his window again. But the sound of the piano stopped her in her tracks every time without fail, and she was overcome with the desire to play.

Flowers were in full bloom all around, and Grandma and M. Brunier began to take notice of each other. On days when they ran into each other on the street by chance and ended up walking back together, M. Brunier would walk more slowly, matching his strides to hers, then hold the main door open for her until she was inside. He was always the first to greet her initially, but Grandma soon started to think it was rude of her never to greet him first, and one day when she ran into him by the mailboxes, she mustered the courage to say hello before he did. Once, on the way back from grocery shopping, Grandma ran into M. Brunier, who took the handle of her wheeled shopping basket and brought it from the main entrance all the way to the elevator for her. Sometimes when Grandma and I were coming home from an outing or else leaving to go somewhere together, we would run into M. Brunier at the entrance. When that happened, he would ask us all sorts of questions or tell us stories about himself, having picked up on the fact that I knew French. Now that I think about it, he probably wanted Grandma, not me, to hear everything he was saying. But I had no way of knowing that then, and I couldn’t even begin to guess why every time we parted ways with M. Brunier, Grandma would ask me, “What’d he say?” I summarized it all as concisely as I could—“He asked if we were Vietnamese”—or else omitted much of it—“I don’t know. He was just rambling”—before returning to my own little world.

It rained for ten days. We had been living in France for three years, but Grandma still hadn’t gotten used to the springs there, fickle and gloomy as they were. Because of the lack of postnatal care she had received, her wrists and knees ached terribly when it rained, so for ten days, she refrained from going outside and stayed in the house. At the first sight of sunlight, she went out to the park and sat on a bench looking up at the trees, wishing that the blindingly bright summer would come soon. In summer, stark naked children splashed around in the park fountain, laughing out loud. What a beautiful sight that was. Children’s bodies, soft and sweet-smelling. Grandma unclenched her fists and studied her hands. Her skin had lost so much of its elasticity that when she pinched the back of her hands, it took a long time for the flesh to return to its original state.

Grandma spotted M. Brunier entering the park as she was sitting on that bench, listening to music on the Walkman and crocheting. He was wearing beige corduroy pants and a brick-red shirt. How old might he be? Grandma had a hard time telling white men’s ages. It was probably the same for him when it came to her. M. Brunier was strappingly tall, but he had a slight stoop, as was natural at his age, and his gait was a little crooked.

Oh, he couldn’t possibly be coming toward me, could he?

When their eyes met, M. Brunier gave Grandma a slight smile and started walking toward her, which set off her nerves. She thought he would continue on after just exchanging greetings, but he gestured to the space beside her on the bench and asked if he could sit with her, which made Grandma’s heart pound and dulled her senses. He said something else to her. Helplessly, she repeated her usual “I don’t speak French.” M. Brunier pointed to the Walkman and enunciated one word, slowly: “Beethoven.” Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor was playing on the radio.

“Ah, Beethoven.” Grandma nodded in understanding.

After that, whenever they met in the park by chance, they would sit side by side on that bench. Because they couldn’t communicate in words, they simply sat there. Sitting with M. Brunier and listening to music together made Grandma’s heart flutter, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because she was with a man she barely knew or because she felt such a strong urge to play the piano in those moments. Every night before she went to sleep, she would listen to the classical music station on the radio and think, Tomorrow, I should ask him if he’d let me play. But to do that, she would have had to ask me or my brother or even our father to translate and write out the question in French for her. For some reason, she didn’t want to tell anyone about M. Brunier and the piano. What on earth would I do that for? she thought, pressing the Walkman to her ear. What a strange idea. 

“Can I play your piano?”

About two weeks had gone by before Grandma gathered the courage to ask M. Brunier the question in English. At one end of the grass field in the park, children were having some kind of birthday party, and someone had strung up several pastel balloons in a tree. The balloons were swaying in the wind. Each time a breeze kicked up, the gust grazed the hem of Grandma’s favorite floral-patterned skirt as well as her bare calves. M. Brunier, who didn’t speak a word of English, stared at Grandma as if to ask what she was saying. As if she’d expected as much, she reached into her purse with a slightly proud look on her face and took out the thick Korean-French dictionary she had made sure to pack for the occasion. Then, with M. Brunier watching her with wide and curious eyes, she searched for each word one by one and showed them to him as she found them. “I,” je. “Want,” vouloir. “To play,” jouer. “Your,” vous. “Piano,” piano. M. Brunier patiently read each word, and at last he seemed to understand what she was asking. His blue eyes gleamed behind the lenses of his reading glasses. He smiled and said, “Ah, piano!”

That was how Grandma ended up in M. Brunier’s home that afternoon for the first time. Visiting the home of a man who lived alone—a French man, at that—was a definite first for her, and as M. Brunier turned his house key in the lock, she briefly wondered if she was doing something incredibly foolish. She was about to remove her shoes at the entrance, but seeing M. Brunier step onto the carpet with his shoes on, she paused in shock. He’d left all the storm windows closed while he’d been out, so the house was dim, but the moment he opened the windows and curtains, the shapes of the various objects that had been crouching in the dark came into view, one by one. Antique furniture in the Louis XV style. Wallpaper patterned with illustrations of birds and flowers. An armchair covered in fabric and a grandfather clock. Several large ceramic flowerpots sat atop the marble fireplace. They were empty now but had probably been filled to bursting with flowers when his wife was still alive.

As Grandma stood in a daze in the drawing room, M. Brunier took her coat and hung it up for her. “Puis-je vous offrir une tasse de thé?” he asked, but Grandma didn’t understand. She took out the dictionary from her purse again. M. Brunier found the entry for “thé,” tea, and showed it to her. She realized that he was asking if she wanted some tea. “No, thank you,” she said, shaking her head. She had her sights set only on M. Brunier’s grand piano—a 1930 Pleyel—sitting elegantly and ostentatiously by the drawing room window. 

Grandma sat on the piano bench. It had been adjusted to the perfect height for her, and even her foot’s distance from the pedal was ideal. Feeling the firmness of the bench underneath her, Grandma opened the lid and gently rested her thumbs and forefingers on the ivory keys. Do, re. The keys were cold and sleek. All she’d done was press her fingers to them, but immediately the sense of wonder and rapture she had felt the first time she laid eyes on a Christmas tree at church as a girl burst out from somewhere deep within her. Grandma used to teach me simple pieces on the piano until I was ten, so it had only been about five years since the last time she had played. But that day, playing M. Brunier’s piano, she was consumed by the feeling that it had been a long time, that she was touching the keys again after an eternity. She leafed through her memory and started playing the second movement in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, a composition she had loved. At first, she was a bit rusty and couldn’t will her hands to move the way she wanted them to, but soon, to her surprise, her body remembered the familiar motions that had once been habit, and her fingers slowly began to glide over the keys. As she played, M. Brunier sat beside her, watching with a slightly dumbstruck expression. He had probably never seen an Asian woman playing the piano before. 

As Grandma’s recital went on, M. Brunier’s gaze shifted from a blend of surprise and confusion to one of gentle warmth and anticipation, but Grandma had, for a moment, forgotten he was there at all. That was because, in the flurry of her excitement, the person who came to mind was her music teacher from her high school days, a married man she’d had an unrequited crush on. “Nansil, you have a special talent for music, so you have to listen to lots of it,” he’d told her. He taught young Nansil to play the piano after school at a time when record players and pianos themselves were rare. One day, just so that she could listen to the music she always yearned to hear, he secretly slipped her the key to the music room that had a record player inside. Those were the days when none of her friends could even dream about something like love, all girls who averted their eyes and whose faces burned red if they ran into the boys from the nearby school at the bakery they stopped by on the way home after classes for mochi bread. But Nansil was different. What had she longed for? Something special, something edifying, something that would transport her to another world. The letters she exchanged with her music teacher. The ones they secretly stashed and retrieved from inside the instruments. What kept her up at night were the stories of lovers like Yun Sim-deok and Kim U-jin, or Clara and Robert Schumman. She had no doubt that the life that lay ahead of her would be one full of surprises, and she believed she had an obligation to make hers into an extraordinary narrative.

After that day, Grandma would regularly visit M. Brunier and play his piano. She would show up bearing fruit and juice as a sign of gratitude. Unaware that people in France didn’t bring such things when visiting others’ homes, when she filled a bowl with apples or melons and presented them along with bottled orange juice to M. Brunier, she couldn’t understand why he would regard her offering with a bewildered look before bursting out laughing. In the beginning, she would simply play for a while before getting up to leave, but slowly over time, she began having tea with M. Brunier in the drawing room. At first, when he asked her if she would like some sugar or milk or perhaps a slice of lemon in her tea, she hadn’t understood. She found his tastes so bizarre—who put milk in their tea! But soon she came to accept the tea he served with a splash of milk and two sugar cubes. They didn’t share a language, but as they sipped, they made plodding attempts to converse through the dictionary. They did away with things like articles and adverbs, stringing together a conversation with verbs and nouns and, later on, one or two adjectives. Because these conversations centered around a dictionary, no matter what they said, the verbs they used were tenseless, only ever in their base forms. But one day while looking up a verb, Grandma suddenly realized that most of the omitted tenses were past tenses, and that there was almost nothing she could express using future tense verbs. That was how she came to learn that M. Brunier’s wife—her name was Éliane—had died four years earlier from cancer; that he himself had been wealthy for most of his life and had never held a proper job; that he’d once lived in Vietnam, a former French colony; and that his given name was Jean Paul. In turn, M. Brunier came to learn that Grandma’s name was Park Nansil, that she was Korean, and that her day-to-day life was incredibly lonely.

They conversed in the drawing room, sometimes going out for walks together on nice and sunny days, but most often when she went to M. Brunier’s house, Grandma listened to Bach or Mozart on his CD player. Whenever he put on a CD and steeped some tea, he and Grandma would sit a certain distance apart in the drawing room chairs, listening to the music and carrying out their respective tasks until the song ended. As that went on, old memories would crop up out of the blue, and Grandma entrusted her body to the music, allowing it to guide her as she set off on a journey somewhere far away. The evacuation route taken by refugees during the Korean War as they listened to the faint sound of shelling in the background, the flames visible in the distance from where she stood in a field somewhere and the black smoke blocking out the sky overhead, what looked like a parade of people walking like ghosts with bundles on their backs—she thought of these scenes that, even in the moment she first saw them, she knew would be imprinted on her mind forever. But even trivial memories from the past, ones she didn’t even know she had stored somewhere, suddenly unfolded before her eyes. Things like the feel of the white jeogori on her bare skin and the pale foam-like patterning on her lace veil on her wedding day—at the time, Grandma didn’t know what she stood to lose or gain from being unable to deny her parents’ wishes until the very end—or the raindrops she had seen on a day long ago, back when every restaurant had to thin out its rice with at least 20 percent mixed grains. One day in the midst of her suffocating life, where every day was exactly the same as the one before, Grandma had asked her neighbors to look after her still-young children and raced downtown to see a movie, either The Last Days of Pompeii or Miracle in the Rain, at the Jungbu Theater. She wasn’t sure which movie it had been, but the memory of the sensations she had felt that day was still uncannily clear. She had left the theater and set off on her own, ducking underneath an awning to wait for the downpour to pass, when the smell of grilled fish wafted toward her from some restaurant or other. The feel of the humidity on her cheeks and the roar of the pouring rain. The sensation of being alive and, at the same time, the feeling that she had already grown so old. Ah, how can one’s memories remain this vivid when so much time has passed?

Looking back, Grandma was stunningly beautiful then. She started wearing the makeup she had abandoned since coming to France again, and I even caught her sometimes sneaking spritzes of the perfume in my room—a Calvin Klein fragrance I had begged my father to buy me for my birthday—but that wasn’t all.

“Grandma, has something been going on with you lately?”

It must have been one of those days when I paused as my brother and I had been doing our homework peacefully side by side at the dining table to ask Grandma a question. But she simply scoffed, “What would be going on with me?” and didn’t say anything else, so I turned back to the dictionary open on the table in front of me to finish my assignment.

It happened one afternoon in winter. Grandma was sitting in M. Brunier’s drawing room, and Brahms was flowing from the CD player. The afternoon sunlight danced over her hands as she crocheted, and Grandma looked up at M. Brunier sitting beside her. He had been so quiet, she thought he might have dozed off, but to her surprise, he had his sleeves rolled up and was stacking sugar cubes like a tower. He looked serious, intently focused, like someone carrying out an extremely important task. What on earth was he doing? This inscrutable man who constantly spilled food in his lap whenever he ate and occasionally took part in completely baffling behavior. Grandma studied M. Brunier’s arms as he stacked the sugar cubes; like hers, his were mottled with liver spots, but also covered with silver hairs, unlike a Korean man’s. As she watched him, it dawned on her that she would never understand M. Brunier, and that he would never know certain things about her. To her surprise, she felt a pain inside her chest at the thought.

Ages ago, when she felt she was too old but was still in fact quite young, Grandma thought that aging meant the body and the mind degenerating at the same rate. Desire and yearning atrophying at the same pace as the body was stiffening. But now she knew. That it was only the body that deteriorated. Whenever such thoughts occurred to her, she invariably wondered if God had made humans age to punish them for the sins they had committed over the course of their lives. Was there any punishment more terrifying than having a heart filled with pulsating desire while the body refuses to cooperate? What a terrible kind of retribution—being confined to a body that could not move an inch. As she grew older, the thing that scared Grandma the most wasn’t dementia or the catheter bags she might someday end up wearing and filling with piss. No, the fear that haunted even her nightmares was the thought of what would happen if she were to spend the rest of her life like the stroke patient she had once seen at the nursing home where her husband had been hospitalized—fully conscious and wailing in anguish even as her entire body was paralyzed.

But on that winter afternoon, as she gazed at the gentle sunlight dancing on the crown of that old man’s head while he concentrated wholly on the useless, silly task of stacking his sugar cube tower like a child as she sucked on one of the cubes as if it were candy, Grandma was once again overcome with a yearning for life and an anticipation for the future, and she had no way at all of stopping the flood.

What was there to anticipate in life? Was that an incredibly foolish thing to do? Spending your whole life being betrayed. Even though she had given up her youth to raise her children, her daughters would take turns accusing her of hurting them, saying she doted only on her sons all their lives, and the sons would scream at her whenever they’d had a bit to drink, saying they had been made to feel cowed all their lives in the presence of their mother, who looked down on them for not turning out as well as their older sisters had. “You take issue with everything the men in this house do, down to the way we breathe!” No doubt her grandchildren, too, would come to hound her like creditors someday. She was lost in such thoughts until she realized that M. Brunier was there now, and while Grandma believed that there was something between them—whether empathy, understanding, or the tenuous solidarity and friendship forged between people who had been pushed to the margins in life—it occurred to her that M. Brunier might not attach any meaning at all to the time he spent with her. Who knows? Maybe he had other friends with whom he could communicate. Maybe he even had a lover.

“Nansil!”

Grandma had been so consumed by these thoughts that she didn’t notice the music had stopped playing and was startled when M. Brunier suddenly called her name. When she opened her eyes, she found a tremendously tall tower of sugar cubes on the table. A high sugar cube tower stacked painstakingly layer by layer.

“Wah!” Grandma exclaimed. Like someone witnessing such a marvel for the first time in her life.

Excited by her reaction, M. Brunier took the sugar box he had brought from the kitchen at some point and very carefully poured the remaining sugar cubes onto the table. Little brown sugar blocks spilling across the tabletop. Looking at the sugar cubes, Grandma picked up the one nearest to her and placed it in her mouth.

Aiee, that’s sweet.

What a pure sweetness, too. She decided to roll the sugar cube around with her tongue, slowly spreading the sweetness, and memories from when she was very young sprang up in her mind.

That day in early spring when she sat on the dirt path outside the tailor’s shop and wept after being scolded for something or other, and the elegant purple cloche hat that one of the women customers had worn. The woman had gotten down from a rickshaw and pressed a brown sugar candy into the palm of Grandma’s hand. The splendid sweetness which she was tasting for the first time ever. It occurred to her then that this was another memory she would never be able to tell M. Brunier about. Grandma’s life had been one where even when she was with someone, she felt as if she had washed ashore on a strange island all alone. One where, as the days dragged on, she begged God to just kill her, yet where she would never be able to speak of the immense fear that inevitably followed trying to imagine what would come after death. But what could she do? Funnily enough, she suddenly felt as though it didn’t matter, either way. The delight that came from the unexpected. The particular joy that could be found only in the moment when the best-laid plans gave way. The moments of happiness that suddenly fell from the sky like shooting stars in midsummer when she thought she had lost everything. Grandma stood up then and placed one more sugar cube on top of the tower with M. Brunier. Then another one. And another. They did that until the tower collapsed. Until the sugar cubes scattered in all directions, and Grandma and M. Brunier clapped their hands, howling with laughter.

This relationship with M. Brunier lasted nearly a year. Until our family unexpectedly ended up returning to Korea earlier than planned due to sudden financial troubles at our father’s company.

“So they were dating.” If I’d said as much to Grandma after listening to the whole story, she would have waved my words away, tutting, “Dating, my foot.” But Grandma never once told me anything about M. Brunier. Not only throughout my teenage years, during which time she consoled me and kept me on the straight and narrow while I was so consumed with resentment toward my father for not giving us any say at all in coming back, asking him if he knew how painful it was to be separated from my friends yet again when I was just beginning to adjust to our new lives. And not only throughout my brother’s struggle with depression due to the other kids bullying him whenever he failed to conform to Korean middle school culture and accusing him of showing off that he’d had a taste of life abroad thanks to his rich parents. But all throughout my adulthood and my brother’s, throughout our relationships and heartbreaks, she never said a word. Which is why the story I’ve been telling up until now is one I merely imagined while reading through her diaries.

In my mind, the farewell scene between Grandma and M. Brunier goes like this. They’re in the park on a spring day when gladiolus flowers are abloom in all sorts of colors, and they’re holding hands. In silence. All around them is the smell of fresh grass, and as she’s holding this man’s warm and wrinkled hand for the first time only when they are about to part ways forever, Grandma thinks. About what an arrogant thought that was. About how the life of an elderly person is not much different than that of a stroke patient with paralyzed limbs. Grandma lives this way, and her body lives this way, feeling everything vividly. According to her diaries, on that last day, M. Brunier searched in the dictionary and said his final words of farewell to her. Regarding what exactly he said, Grandma wrote only that the phrase consisted of two pronouns and one verb, so I don’t know what the words hidden therein might be. They could have been “Je vous attendrai,” I’ll wait for you, or “Vous me manquerez,” I’ll miss you. They could have even been the words I was imagining, “Je vous aime,” I love you. But now I have no way of ever knowing the truth of what was said.

All I know is this. It has to do with the dream I had last night, where Grandma visited me. She didn’t appear to be suffering the way she had been right before her death but instead appeared as the healthy woman she had been in her seventies, wearing gorgeous clothes and enveloped in the faint light of early dawn. I was probably a little girl in that dream world, so happy to see my grandmother after all these years that I ran to her in a single bound and embraced her. But then—what was that smell? As soon as I hugged Grandma, I caught a whiff of a strong, sweet aroma coming from somewhere. But I couldn’t find the source of the scent, not in Grandma’s hat or skirt or anywhere, and I got anxious. “Grandma, Grandma, look at me.” At the sound of my urgent pleas, she turned to me, and I suddenly noticed that she had her fist clenched tight. “Grandma, open your hand,” I nagged. Over and over again. I knew that if I started crying, she would give me whatever it was that I wanted. I was sure of it. But in the dream, Grandma said in a gentle yet firm tone, “No.” She looked slightly pained and, at the same time, as if she weren’t in any pain at all. Clenching her fist even tighter, she added, with the same resolve in her voice, “This is mine.”