Old Woman With the Knife

Byeong-Mo Gu

Description

Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female contract killer who is considering retirement. A fighter who has experienced loss and grief early on in life, she lives in a state of self-imposed isolation, with just her dog, Deadweight, for company. While on an assassination job for the 'disease control' company she works for, Hornclaw makes an uncharacteristic error, causing a sequence of events that brings her past well and truly into the present. Threatened with sabotage by a young male upstart and battling new desires and urges when she least expects them, Hornclaw steels her resolve, demonstrating that no matter their age, the female of the species is always more deadly than the male.

Sujets

• South Korea
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 03 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838856441
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
First published in the United States of America by Hanover Square Press
First published as Pagwa in 2013 by Jamobook
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Gu Byeong-Mo, 2013 English translation © Chi-Young Kim, 2022
The right of Gu Byeong-Mo to be identified as the author of this work and Chi-Young Kim as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 643 4 eISBN 978 1 83885 644 1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
So this is what it’s like on the subway on Friday nights. You feel grateful to discover space just wide enough to slide a sheet of paper between bodies stuck together like mollusks. You’re bathed in the stench of meat and garlic and alcohol anytime anyone opens their mouth, but you’re relieved because those scents signify the end of your workweek. You momentarily set aside the existential anxiety over whether you would still be taking the subway home at rush hour next year, next month, or even next week. When the doors open at the next station and a river of workers gushes out, she steps in—into their exhaustion, into their visible anguish, into their longing to race home where they can fling their sodden selves onto their beds.
The woman, whose gray hair is covered by an ivory-colored felt hat, is wearing a subdued flower-print shirt, a classic khaki linen coat and black straight-leg pants, and is carrying a brown medium-sized bag on her arm. She is actually sixty-five years old, but the number and depth of the grooves in her face make her look closer to eighty. The way she carries herself and the way she dresses won’t leave a strong impression on anyone. The only time anyone pays attention to senior citizens on the subway is when they bump into people as they carry a bundle of discarded newspapers scavenged from one end of the train to the other, or because they’re decked out in baggy, purple polka-dot pants, and lugging a pungent bundle of ginger and sesame oil, loudly announcing, “Ouch, my back!” until someone offers them a seat. Sometimes it’s for the opposite reason—an older woman forgoing the short, permed style common among the elderly and instead boasting straight white hair to her waist, sun spots inexpertly concealed with powder and eyeliner drawn with a wavering hand, or, even worse, wearing bright red lipstick or a miniskirt suit in pastel colors. The former type of elderly citizen evokes disgust while the latter is so incongruous that onlookers are mortified; regardless, both are one and the same, as people don’t want to think about them.
In that sense, she is a model senior citizen, wholesome and refined and respectable. Rather than making a show of how deserving she is of a seat, she stands by the full senior section at the end of the car and doesn’t complain. Her clothing is appropriate for a middle-class senior citizen, perfectly aligned with the standard of old age: off-brand but decent clothes, down to her hat and shoes, purchased at Dongdaemun Market or on sale at a department store. Unlike some, she doesn’t bellow songs, her face ruddy with drink, taking up space with various kinds of sporting equipment. She exists like an extra in a movie, woven seamlessly into a scene, behaving as if she had always been there, a retiree thrilled to take care of her grandchildren in her golden years, living the rest of her days with a frugality baked into her bones. People stare at their phones, headphones in their ears, shrinking from and swaying with the unending wave of humanity, quickly forgetting that an old person has entered their midst. They excise her from their consciousness as if she’s unimportant, recyclable. Or they never even saw her to begin with.
At the next stop, an old man with a cane gets up, hacking up phlegm hard enough to dislodge his internal organs, and she sits down in the vacated seat. She pushes down the brim of her hat and takes a zippered, pocket-sized Bible bound in fake leather out of her bag. An older person opening a Bible on her lap and reading one word at a time, tracing the lines with a loupe, isn’t odd or novel in a subway car. Nobody pays any mind as long as she doesn’t grab strangers by the arm, ranting about Jesus and heaven and nonbelievers and hell. It’s common for the elderly to turn to God late in life, and read Biblical or Buddhist scriptures once death starts bombarding them from all directions—more unusual would be if they were reading Analects of Confucius or Mencius , a book selection that would reveal intellectual curiosity and an elegance of thought. Even more shocking, especially for an elderly woman, would be to read something by Plato or Hegel or Kant or Spinoza, or Das Kapital , which would draw surprised gazes and perhaps doubts as to whether she really understands what she’s reading.
With her normal appearance, and behavior that meets societal expectations, she skates under the radar, sitting with her head bowed, reading the enlarged words through her loupe. At some point she raises only her eyes, peering diagonally over her glasses.
She sees a man in his late fifties, standing. He appears to be dozing, holding on to the strap above. His graying hair is tipped in black—perhaps he was too busy to dye his hair again—and he’s wearing a leather jacket and black slacks and scuffed black Ferragamo shoes. Looped around his wrist is the sort of clutch bag that is typically stuffed with documents and bills, and carried by debt collectors working for loan sharks. She doesn’t take her eyes off him as he sways with the movement of the train.
The man startles awake. Perhaps embarrassed, he suddenly drills his finger into the forehead of a young woman sitting in the seat right in front of him; she looks up, aghast, then looks back to her cell phone, and the man jabs her in the forehead again, a little harder this time. At first, people around them assume she’s his daughter, but soon realize they are strangers. “What are you doing, mister?” asks the young woman in a clipped tone, and the man’s voice rises, outraged. “Mister? How dare you talk to me like that when you’re just sitting there staring at your phone, ignoring the senior citizen in front of you?” People begin murmuring. “I’m pregnant,” the young woman says calmly. Hearing that, everyone, including the old woman reading the Bible, casts their eyes reflexively at her belly, but as she’s wearing a baby-doll top it’s hard to tell if she’s showing, though she does look tired and her face is puffy. The man gets louder. “You young girls these days, you don’t do your duty. You don’t get married or have babies. Instead, you only talk about being pregnant when it’s convenient for you. You think I can’t tell the difference between pregnancy and being fat from stuffing your face with fried chicken and pigs’ feet? And even if you are, are you the only one who’s ever been pregnant? Do you think you’re the only one to ever have a baby?” He jabs her head after each sentence, not stopping even as the woman swats his finger away a few times. She looks around for help, but all the middle-aged and elderly men sitting around her are avoiding her gaze or faking sleep. She shouts, “Stop picking on me, why don’t you pick on these men? I said I’m pregnant!”
The man glances around, and when it seems clear that nobody will come to her aid, he raps her on the head and says, “How dare you lie about being pregnant and talk back to your elder?” The young woman’s head smacks into the window behind her and she begins to sniffle, though she is likely not hurt. Finally, a woman in her early fifties, who’s sitting across the aisle next to a seat reserved for mothers and pregnant women, gets up and taps the man on the shoulder. “Sir, there’s a seat over here.” The man grouses and acts as if he’s being magnanimous, then sits down, crosses his arms over his bag and closes his eyes.
The older woman approaches the young woman and pats her on the shoulder. “Miss, I mean, mama, don’t cry. You can’t cry over these things, especially since you’ll be a mom soon.” She lowers her voice a little. “Don’t be upset, not all old people are like him. That man isn’t even that old and he just wanted—” Right then there’s an announcement that the train will slow in preparation to stop at the next station, and the young woman stands up and screams, “But that’s who I had to deal with! So what if not everyone’s like him?”
The man in question couldn’t have fallen asleep that quickly, but his eyes are closed as if he can’t hear the commotion, and the young woman shakes off the other woman’s consoling words and steps out onto the platform, although it’s unclear whether this is her stop or if she is fleeing the situation. The doors close and the woman in her fifties wavers before sitting down in the now-empty seat, and people around them eye the man disdainfully before letting the incident go. The old woman also drops her gaze back to her Bible. As her work is based on not being noticed, from her behavior to her jewelry, she feels no guilt about her lack of involvement in the altercation.
She wouldn’t have involved herself even if nobody had jumped in; she would have placidly observed the young woman’s tears and dismay.
Five stops later, with the announcement of the next station and transfer informa