He walked in the dark, wrapped in the familiar feeling of loneliness. It was late at night, bitter cold. No people out in the streets—only cars roared by, cutting through the dim light of the street lamps. That evening, the radio had reported the coldest weather in decades had hit the Korean Peninsula, and hearing that news, he’d decided it would be a good time to end it all.

He planned to kill himself that night. He was nineteen: prematurely tired of the cruelty and injustice of life, but still too young to use that as a reason for suicide. All evening, he’d gone into every drugstore he could find and bought sleeping pills. None of the pharmacists would sell him a lethal dose, so he’d had to walk from one store to another, buying a little at a time. With every step, he felt the bulging bag of pills in his pants pocket with his fingertips, like a gambler checking his stake.

He was looking for a yeogwan, a traditional inn. While he was at it, he wanted to put his thoughts in order, write a will, and then at least end his life in a room with a warm ondol floor. But all the inns along the road that night were closed and the signs had their lights shut off. He was slowly becoming impatient. It wasn’t long until midnight, and from midnight to 4 a.m. was the curfew set by the military regime.  

He could see a police box ahead in the darkness. It was the only thing brightly lit on the deserted street. A policeman was just now dragging a barricade into the middle of the road to block traffic. Then a loud wailing sound began to fill the cold night sky—the curfew siren. He froze where he stood. The slightest slip-up, and he could be arrested for violating the curfew before he could kill himself.

At that moment, a seductive voice came into his head. How about tossing the dice to see if I’ll die tonight? If I get caught for violating curfew, wouldn’t it be fate that’s stopping me?

Perhaps he was just looking for an excuse to avoid death until the last moment. While the siren continued, he walked up toward the police box and stood in front of it, rolling the dice of fate for one last time. The desperate, unending scream of the siren suddenly stopped. Its echoes trailed off and disappeared until it seemed as if it had never happened. He started walking back and forth in front of the police box so the policemen could see him, but they paid him no attention whatsoever. He even deliberately peered in through the window, but no one gave him even a glance. His behavior was so conspicuous they must have taken him for a local. Only the familiar face of the dictator—in a frame hung on the front wall of the police box—was watching him with a grim expression.

Then he heard trumpet music from the radio inside. It was the signal music of To You Who Forgot the Night, a local program he’d often listen to, a sound so very different from the siren that had filled the world just a moment ago. If the siren was the sound of hell, the music seemed to come from heaven. Later he would learn that the music was Jean-Claude Borelly’s “Dolannes Melodie.” Even until now—after such a long passage of time—he would never hear music more beautiful than the trumpet he heard that night.

“Hey! What are you doing?” A policeman came out of the police box. “Go home—quick!” he shouted, as if he were yelling at a misbehaving younger brother. 

He had no choice but to leave that place. The dice of fate were of no use, and now he had no option but to search for an inn once again. He walked up the alley by the police box for a while until—at the end of a narrow alleyway at the top of the hill—he finally found a sign with a light on. But when he entered the shabby little inn, the proprietor peeked out through the small, grimy counter window and said that all the rooms had been taken.

“But you must have room for just one person,” he said.

The innkeeper regarded his frozen face with pity. The sound of birds was audible from behind him—birdcages, large and small, filled the narrow room visible beyond the counter.

“You think you could manage to sleep in there?”

That small, shabby room, where the innkeeper raised birds as a side job, was the only place on earth he could lay his body that night. He sat in the room the man had just vacated, and looked around. There were so many birdcages that there was barely space enough for him to lie down. The only other thing in the room was the mess of crunchy bird seed strewn everywhere on the linoleum flooring. Because of the fluorescent lights, the birds weren’t even sleeping—they were quietly twittering to each other, cocking their heads, looking down at the unfamiliar lodger with curious expressions. He leaned his tired body against the wall. Looking up in bewilderment at the countless, nameless birds, he sadly accepted that this was the fateful place where he would end his short life. At that moment, he felt some inexplicable solace, comforted by the birds’ gaze and attention, however indifferent they might be. All this time—even up to the moment he’d entered this unfamiliar room with a lethal dose of pills in his pocket, determined to die—perhaps what he’d really wanted was just some affection and attention.