As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the indigenous girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked onto ours with such sorrowful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mary when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And they stared unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous eyes and looked again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they played around they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves.
I had no use whatever for her as a lover. Sana was in love with Jungkook; but at the moment he wriggled like an eel out of her grasp. It was the saddest scene. I felt as if I was with a strange brother and sister in a pitiful dream. Once Busan was almost in view, a complete silence fell over the three of us; where once Sana would have talked her way there, she now fell silent herself, but staring at him, ragged and broken and idiotic. What was she knowing? She tried all in her power to tell Jungkook what she was knowing. Then, too, there was a strange sense of maternal satisfaction in the air, for Sana was really looking at Jungkook the way a mother looks at the dearest and most errant child, and he with his doe eyes and all his revelations knew it well, and that was why she was able to walk out of his head without a word. I looked out the window. He was now alone at the station, skimming through the magazines. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness-- everything was suddenly behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.
