Chapter 5 — Woman of Autumn Days - 1 (5)

Sang-soo Park led the way, guiding us into a shop. We hadn't walked far when the building appeared, and we stepped inside. It seemed to be a small general store catering to fishermen, selling odds and ends.

An older woman, likely the youth's mother, greeted us warmly.

“Oh my, look at you soaked! You'll catch a cold… It's already past summer—what kind of storm was this? Hurry inside, dry your clothes.”

We stood awkwardly, unsure what to do. We didn't know which room we were meant to enter, and even if we did, we weren't sure whether we should go into the same one.

“Aren't you married?” the woman asked. “Then miss, you go into the inner room, and mister, you take the front room.”

I felt immediate relief. Had I ended up sharing a room with her, I wasn't sure I could have controlled the lust boiling inside me—lust that might have driven me to do something unforgivable.

We spent about two hours drying our clothes. Then the sky cleared, as if it had never poured down rain at all. A brilliant blue stretched overhead. We had nothing to sell at the shop, so I handed money to the old woman.

“Don't think of it as room fee,” I said. “Just keep it. A token of thanks.”

“Oh no… I couldn't possibly…”

When we boarded the ferry, the western sky blazed with a magnificent sunset. Flocks of unnamed migratory birds danced across the crimson glow. She sat at the edge of the boat, communicating silently with the elderly boatman through hand gestures.

“What are you talking about?”

“I asked him… why he didn't come pick us up earlier, even though I waved.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said our figures in the rain looked too beautiful—he didn't want to disturb us.”

“No wonder Mom called him a romantic old man.”

That autumn had ripened fully. On a day unseasonably drenched in drizzle, we found ourselves at the 'Riverside Tea House,' intoxicated by the autumn rain. We spoke at length about autumn, about rain.

“When it rains… I remember a song I used to hear at a café near school. But I've never heard it since.”

“What kind of song is it?”

“I don't know the title… But whenever it rained, that café always played it.”

“Then sing it for me.”

“Oh… I don't even know the title…”

“… hum it then.”

Softly, she began to hum. The melody was unmistakable—Rain and Tears by Aphrodite's Child, the Greek trio.

“Oh… that's Aphrodite's Child, 'Rain and Tears.'”

“You know it?”

“Of course… It's one of my favorite songs.”

“Oh my… If the English title is 'Rain and Tears,' then in Korean it would be 'Rain and Tears,' right?”

“At first, yes. But later, it changed to 'Tears Falling Like Rain.'”

I told her everything about Rain and Tears—from the birth of Aphrodite's Child to how they composed the song.

“In those days, Korea was a pirate market for pop music. We weren't part of any international copyright organization, so foreign pop songs were copied and distributed freely, without permission from the original labels. These unauthorized records were called 'pirate editions,' or 'baek-pan,' because the disc jackets were often blank white paper.

And when labeling these bootlegs, mistakes happened all the time. They once titled Vangelis's 'Obradi Obrada' as 'Flea Market,' for heaven's sake.”

“So that's how 'Rain and Tears' got its first Korean title. But how did it become 'Tears Falling Like Rain'?”

“That was renamed by a radio DJ named Choi Dong-wook.”

She desperately wanted that song.

That evening, I turned on every pop cassette tape I owned, obsessively searching for it. Even if I couldn't give her an original disc, I wanted to give her a recording.

After two hours of effort, I finally found it and copied the track onto a blank cassette. By the time I finished, it was nearly ten o'clock.

I wanted to deliver the tape to her immediately, but it was too late to visit the Riverside Tea House. Still, I slipped the cassette into my pocket and left my lodging. I couldn't wait to see her joy, to watch her face light up as she listened.

The tea house was wrapped in midnight stillness—but light spilled from within.

I crept close, peering through the glass door. Two people were inside. One was her. The other was Melbbang.

Melbbang stood leaning against the table, his buttocks resting on its edge. She knelt before him. His pants were pulled down below his knees. Her skirt was bunched up above her thighs.

A pipe hung from Melbbang's mouth. From hers protruded his penis.

One of his hands gripped her hair tightly. One of her hands was shoved into her panties, frantically rubbing her own sex.

Smoke curled from Melbbang's lips. From hers, a slick fluid dripped—whether saliva or semen, I couldn't tell. His eyes gleamed with lewd pleasure. Hers burned with a wild, feverish lust.

I couldn't stay. I turned away. I ran, cutting through the darkness, desperate to escape that place as fast as I could.

As I ran, I muttered under my breath:

“This is betrayal! Betrayal of my soul! A double-faced woman! Disgusting…”

Before I left the path, I pulled the cassette from my pocket and hurled it deep into the woods.

Back at my room, I steadied myself and called Emma Lee. When she picked up the phone, I blurted out without preamble:

“You're the greatest woman in my life. I love you. Madly… completely…”

She listened quietly to my incoherent rambling. When I finally fell silent, she replied in a calm, gentle voice:

“You've been hurt again, haven't you? Come back to Seoul soon. I'll hold you…”

After that night, I floundered in the swamp of betrayal for over a year. It took passing through two more autumns before I finally found peace.

More than a dozen years later, I returned to that place. But I found no trace—no path, no forest where I'd thrown the tape, no noodle shop, no riverside tea house, no ferry landing.

Only rows of concrete apartment buildings stood there now. Cold, towering structures filling in the swamp of betrayal.