The metal door was half open and Aoife stood outside it for longer than was reasonable, rehearsing a sentence she didn't have the words for.
Excuse me. I'm lost. Could you point me toward Euljiro 3-ga station, please.
In English it was nothing. In Korean it was a wall. She had downloaded a translation app on her second day in Seoul and used it exactly twice, both times in the same convenience store, both times with the same exhausted clerk who had read her phone screen, sighed, and pointed at the shelf behind her without looking up.
She took a breath that smelled of sawdust and wet concrete and ducked under the door.
The man in the grey apron didn't look up at first. He was bent over the arm of a chair, drawing the flat of his palm along the wood the way a doctor checks a pulse. The shop was small enough that Aoife could see all of it from the doorway — a workbench under a single bright bulb, shelves of clamps and chisels arranged with a tidiness that felt almost rude, a kettle on a hot plate in the corner, and behind him three more chairs waiting their turn, each one missing something. A leg. A back slat. A century of varnish.
He looked up.
He had the kind of face that didn't perform surprise. His eyebrows lifted maybe a millimeter. He set the sandpaper down on the bench, wiped his hands on the front of his apron, and waited.
"Hi," Aoife said. Brilliant start. "Sorry. Hello. Um — annyeonghaseyo." She had practiced this word in the mirror of her apartment for an embarrassing length of time and it still came out sounding like an apology for itself.
"Annyeonghaseyo," he said back. Quiet. Even. No smile, but no impatience either.
She held up her phone, screen toward him, the blue dot floating in its grey void. "I'm — I'm lost? Gil-eul ireosseoyo, I think? I don't know if I'm saying that right." She laughed, and it came out too loud for the room. "Subway. Station. Euljiro sam-ga? I've been walking for —" She glanced at her phone. "About an hour. I'm meant to be meeting someone in Myeongdong and I think I'm going to be the kind of late where you just don't go anymore."
He listened to all of it. He didn't understand most of it — she could tell from the small, polite stillness of his face — but he listened the way some people listen to music in a language they don't speak, waiting to see what the shape of it will be.
When she finally stopped, he said, carefully, "A little English. Sorry."
"Oh god, no, I'm sorry," she said. "I'm the one in your country."
He almost smiled at that. The corner of his mouth moved about two degrees. He held out his hand for her phone.
She gave it to him.
He looked at the map for a long moment, scrolling, pinching, scrolling again. Then he walked past her to the doorway and stepped halfway into the alley, glancing left, glancing right, orienting himself the way her father used to orient himself by the position of the sun on the kitchen wall in Cobh. He came back inside and set the phone face-down on the workbench.
"Wait, please," he said.
He went to a shelf, took down a small notebook with a soft, much-handled cover, and tore out a clean page. He picked up a pencil — a proper carpenter's pencil, flat and thick — and began to draw.
Aoife watched him draw a map.
It was the most beautiful map she had ever seen, and she was an honest enough person to admit, even in that moment, that her standards for beauty had recently become very strange. He drew the alley they were in. He drew the corner where the printing press was. He drew a small square and labeled it, in English, light shop. He drew an arrow. He drew another arrow. He drew a tiny set of stairs and wrote station and underlined it twice.
Then he hesitated, and at the bottom of the page he drew, very small and very precise, a single chair.
He turned the page around so she could read it.
"Here," he said, tapping the chair. "My shop. If — lost — come back."
She looked at the chair. She looked at him. Something in her chest did a small, dangerous thing.
"Thank you," she said. "Gamsahamnida. Really. Thank you."
"Mm."
She folded the map twice and put it in her coat pocket like it was a passport. At the door she turned back. "I'm Aoife, by the way. Aoife. It's Irish. Nobody says it right the first time, don't worry."
"Ee-fuh."
"Yes." She beamed at him before she could remember not to. "Yeah. That's it. Spot on."
"Junho," he said, and tapped his apron. "Kang Junho."
"Junho," she repeated. "I'll get it wrong tomorrow but I'll try."
She didn't know why she said tomorrow. It just fell out of her, the way some sentences do.
He nodded, once, like it was a thing they had agreed on.
She made the dinner in Myeongdong. She was forty minutes late and her friend Minji rolled her eyes and ordered her a beer and called her a disaster expat, and Aoife laughed in the right places and ate the right amount of pork belly and when Minji asked why she was smiling at her phone, she said, "Nothing. The map app finally started working."
The map in her pocket, on the soft notebook paper, with its single chair at the bottom — she did not mention that.
That night in her apartment she took it out and laid it flat on her kitchen counter and looked at it under the cheap kitchen light. The chair was no bigger than her thumbnail. He had drawn the four legs and the curve of the back in maybe six lines. It looked like a chair the way a haiku looks like a season.
She didn't journal that night. She didn't open her laptop. She lay on her back on the wooden floor of her apartment in a country where nobody knew her middle name, and she listened to the building hum, and she thought, very clearly and without any of her usual disclaimers: I want to see him again.
It scared her enough that she said it out loud, in Irish, into the empty room, just to make it small.
"Tá mé i dtrioblóid."
I'm in trouble.
The next morning she woke up at six, which was unlike her. The light through her thin curtains was the colour of a peeled apple. She made coffee in the little moka pot her landlady had left behind and she stood at her window and watched a delivery scooter weave through the still-empty street, and she thought about the map.
She had a whole day. It was Saturday. Her plan, her actual responsible adult plan, was to go to the big bookshop in Gwanghwamun and buy a Korean phrasebook and sit in a cafe and finally start the language learning she had been promising herself she'd start since the plane.
Instead she put on her coat at half past nine and walked to the subway and rode three stops to Euljiro 3-ga.
She got off at the station he had drawn the little stairs for. She climbed up into the cold bright morning and she stood at the top of the stairs and took the folded notebook page out of her pocket and held it the way you hold a recipe in a kitchen that isn't yours.
She walked the route in reverse.
It took her twelve minutes. The alleys looked completely different in daylight — less like a maze, more like a museum nobody had bothered to label. She passed the printing press. She passed the lighting shop with its cataract of bare bulbs in the window. She passed an old man on a stool eating a tangerine.
Then she was standing in front of the half-open metal door, and her stomach was doing the thing it had done in her first year of university the night before exams, and she had not, in any meaningful sense, planned what she was going to say.
She knocked on the metal of the door, because there was nothing else to knock on.
There was a pause inside, and then the slow scrape of a stool being pushed back, and then Junho appeared in the doorway in the same grey apron, holding a small chisel in one hand, and his eyebrows did the millimeter thing again, and this time the corner of his mouth moved a little further than two degrees.
"Hi," Aoife said, and held up the folded map between them like a flag of surrender. "I think — I think I'm lost again."
He looked at the map. He looked at her. He looked at the chisel in his hand as if he had forgotten he was holding it, and then he set it down very carefully on the bench just inside the door.
"Come in," he said. Four whole words. "Tea. Please."
She came in.
Behind her, the alley went on with its quiet Saturday business — the printing press starting up two doors down, a pigeon arguing with another pigeon on a ledge, the city of Seoul doing what it had been doing for sixty years in this particular three-block radius — and none of it had any idea that something had just begun.
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