“We were the ones who were ripped off! How dare you—”
But her raised voice was countered by an even louder attack reinforced by harsh curses. When the woman told her to watch her tone, the caller gave out a contemptuous laugh.
—Look at her standing by her man. Do you still want to stand by him when he’s screwing some other woman? He hired some whore calling herself an interior designer when he was remodeling. Stealing other people’s money, and having an affair right under your nose. What a pathetic household you run.
“What!”
The woman’s agitated tone seemed to bring satisfaction to the caller, who began speaking in a more leisurely tone.
—I’ve got your husband’s texts and calls as evidence, he’s not going anywhere. Did you think I was going to pretend like nothing had happened?
The woman wanted to ask her what the evidence was for. But the caller seemed to have gone past the anger and cursing stage and entered the lamenting-her-fate stage.
—My husband is the real idiot for associating with such filth like you two, quitting his good job so he can go into business with his college buddies … You two were probably fake students, right? Pretending to be college kids? A couple of grifters!
The moment the caller began to get all riled up again, she heard someone punching in the code to the main door downstairs.
Her husband. This surprised her so much that, for reasons she couldn’t understand, she quickly hung up the phone.
She heard him come up the stairs. Swiftly, she put the phone back where it was and went to the fridge. She began rifling through its contents. It had been cleaned after her husband’s friend had disappeared, but the fresher berries they had saved were starting to rot as well.
More keypad noises. It came from the second floor; it wasn’t her husband but the tenants coming back from lunch.
She sighed in relief.
The phone lay mute on the desk.
The words “texts and calls” refused to leave her mind.
As did the passcode to her husband’s phone.
She couldn’t decide whether it was a good or bad thing that the blood-sausage place on the first floor chose that moment to raise the issue of the premium.
First, the old man came alone. Since it was the woman who mostly dealt with the renters, he had probably thought it would be easy for him, a man who had experienced the world, to get a young woman to do whatever he told her to. But the woman’s husband, unusually for him, decided to lend his masculine presence to this meeting for reasons unknown.
When the old man mentioned the premium, the woman’s husband countered with his understanding of the relevant legal facts. The old man reminded him that they had signed a modified contract to avoid transaction fees and threatened to report him to the tax offices. Undaunted, her husband continued to call the man “sir” and repeatedly explained the situation to him. “That contract was signed by both parties, and if you follow through with that threat, you will also be prosecuted by the tax offices. Also, your rent is actually not that high, nor have you paid it for a long time, which means whatever money we owe isn’t going to be that high, either. Don’t you think that it would be cheaper for us to just pay the back taxes than pay the thirty million won difference in a premium that has nothing to do with the landlord anyway? Don’t you think so, sir?”
This set off the old man, who kept repeating “Young people don’t know what’s what these days” and “Let’s see what happens when you stay on your high horse” before getting up and leaving. And it wasn’t long after that when the old man came in with an “assistant” who was dressed entirely in black. A veiled threat that if the woman and her husband did not hand over the thirty million won, they would be inflicting a lot more than just monetary damage.
“We’ll record them next time and have the lot arrested,” said the woman’s husband, unfazed as usual.
Whether there would be a “next time” to record and report was the question on the woman’s mind. And the word “record” brought on a flood of memories of when she answered his phone and the things she discovered. This frustrated her so much that she could no longer speak, and her husband mistook her silence for acquiescence and was satisfied. That was the end of their conversation.
In the basement, as she played with the child, the woman suddenly burst into tears.
When the child asked her what was wrong, the first thing that came to the woman’s mind was the face of the old man from the blood-sausage stew restaurant. They simply did not have thirty million won on hand to pay them off—nor were they even legally obliged to. But they couldn’t afford the back taxes, either. Her husband had already spent the twenty million won he had borrowed, the third floor was still vacant, and the first floor, declaring their intent to move out soon, had been refusing to pay rent since the previous month.