Sauna Rules

Twelve thousand won got you in. Three thousand more and you could stay till morning, which made Haeun Spa Land on the fourth floor above a Paris Baguette in Seomyeon the cheapest bed in Busan, cheaper than any goshiwon, and you got a sauna thrown in.

Hana had worked this out on her phone on the subway, with her suitcase between her knees, the night her landlord stopped answering. Forty million won of jeonse deposit, three years of her savings and a loan from her uncle in Gimhae, gone into a man who had, it turned out, done the same thing to eleven other tenants and was now, according to the detective, possibly in Cebu. The building was being repossessed. She had until Friday. She left on Wednesday because she couldn’t stand the stairwell any more, the notices on every door.

“One week,” she told her mother on the phone. “Maybe two. Till the insurance pays.”

“In a sauna?”

“It’s clean, Umma. It’s fine. People do it all the time.”

People did. That was the thing she noticed on the first night. The sleeping hall on the women’s floor was a long warm room with a heated floor and the lights dimmed to orange, and there were twenty or thirty women in it at midnight, lying in rows in the same orange T-shirts and shorts, on thin foam mats, with the hard little wooden blocks under their necks that were meant to be pillows and that nobody under sixty used. A grandmother snoring. Two university students sharing earphones. A woman in her forties with her makeup still on, sleeping on her back with her hands folded on her stomach like a body in a drama. Most of them, Hana thought, were not here for the sauna.

She got a mat by the wall. She folded her towel into a lamb’s-head roll the way her grandmother had taught her when she was small, two rolled ears and a band round the forehead, and put it on. She was just lying down when the cleaning woman came past with her mop.

Small, sixties, a perm like a cauliflower, a pink plastic apron, yellow rubber gloves turned down at the cuffs. The name stitched on the apron said 공 in red thread. She stopped beside Hana’s mat and looked at her for a while, mopping the same patch of floor, very slowly.

“First night?”

“Ne.”

“Staying long?”

“Maybe a week.”

Mrs. Gong nodded. She leaned on the mop. She spoke in thick Gyeongsang, the real old kind, and quietly, so as not to wake anyone.

“Two things, agassi. You sleep here, in the hall, or in the TV room. Not in the salt room. Never in the salt room, I don’t care how cold you are. And if someone asks to share your towel, you don’t say anything. Not yes, not no. Don’t open your eyes. Just let her ask.”

Hana laughed, a small embarrassed breath through her nose, because the woman so clearly meant it.

“Who would ask?”

Mrs. Gong was already mopping away down the row. Over her shoulder she said, “Nobody. Sleep well.”

* * *

The salt room was the best room on the floor and on the first night Hana didn’t understand why anyone would forbid it. It was at the end of the corridor past the charcoal kiln and the ice room, a low cave of a room with walls built out of pink Himalayan salt bricks, lit from behind so they glowed like slices of grapefruit. The floor was covered in loose warm salt crystals the size of rice grains. You lay down in them and they shifted under you and held you. It was sixty degrees. She lay there for twenty minutes before bed with her eyes closed and felt something in her shoulders let go for the first time since the detective had said Cebu.

At eleven forty a staff member came and turned the lights off in there, and put a little chain across the door. Hana went back to the hall.

She woke at three. She knew it was three because there was a digital clock over the door of the sleeping hall, red numbers, and it said 03:02.

Someone was crouched beside her mat.

She couldn’t see her clearly. Hana was lying on her side facing the wall and the woman was behind her, and what she was aware of first was the wet. A smell like the hot pools, minerals and old water, and a coldness coming off the woman the way coldness comes off an open fridge. Something touched the back of Hana’s neck. It was hair. Long, soaked hair, hanging down from the woman’s head and lying across Hana’s neck and shoulder, and it was dripping. She could feel the drips running down inside the collar of the orange T-shirt.

“Eonni,” the woman said. A soft voice, young, apologetic. The voice of someone asking to borrow a pen. “I’m so cold. Can I share your towel?”

Hana’s brain, half asleep, did what it had been trained to do for twenty-nine years. Be polite. Don’t make a scene. Say no nicely.

“Ah, sorry,” she mumbled into the wall. “I’m using it.”

The hair lifted off her neck. The cold went. When she rolled over, there was nobody there, only the long dim hall and the rows of sleeping women and a dark wet patch on her mat the shape of two knees.

* * *

“You answered,” said Mrs. Gong in the morning. She didn’t say it angrily. She said it the way a doctor would say you’ve broken it, looking at an X-ray.

“I said no.”

“No is an answer.”

Hana was eating a baked egg in the snack corner, peeling the brown shell off in bits. Mrs. Gong had sat down across from her with a can of sikhye, which she didn’t open. Her yellow gloves were on the table.

“Who is she?”

Mrs. Gong turned the can around. “Before this was Haeun Spa Land, it was a different spa, and before that a different spa. There’s always been hot water in this building. Since the seventies. Long time.” She shrugged. “A girl came to sleep here once, a long time ago. Couldn’t go home, for some reason. That’s all I know. She fell asleep in the salt room, and they didn’t check, and they turned the heat down at night, back then they turned it right down to save money. In the morning they found her.”

“She froze? In a sauna?”

“She was wet,” said Mrs. Gong. “Her hair was wet. Nobody gave her a towel.”

She opened the sikhye finally and drank half of it in one go.

“She asks. Every night, somebody. Mostly they’re asleep, they don’t hear, they don’t answer, she goes away. But if you answer, she knows your voice. She’ll come back to you.”

“And if I’d said yes?”

Mrs. Gong looked at her, and didn’t say anything, and put her gloves back on.

* * *

The second night Hana slept in the TV room, on a recliner, with a drama about a chaebol family playing with the sound off. At 03:00 the cold came and the drip began on her forearm, and the woman was crouched in front of the recliner this time, not behind her. Hana kept her eyes shut. She could see the shape anyway through her eyelids, against the blue light of the TV, a dark bowed head with the hair hanging all the way down to the floor and pooling there.

“Eonni. I’m cold. Can I share your towel?”

Hana said nothing. She did everything right. She breathed slowly. She counted.

The woman asked again. And again. Patiently. The way you’d ask a stranger on the subway to move her bag. She asked eleven times. Then the cold went.

The third night, Hana felt the drip on her face.

The fourth night, the woman was lying down. Next to her, on the mat, so close that Hana could feel the cold of her all along her back, and the wet of the hair was in Hana’s own hair, and the question came from right against her ear in a whisper she could feel as cold breath. She didn’t sleep after that. She sat in the snack corner till six with a can of coffee, shaking, while the morning women came in with their gym bags.

She stopped sleeping altogether, more or less. She went to her temp job at the shipping office in Jung-gu and sat at her monitor and her eyes kept closing, and twice her team leader tapped her shoulder. At night she stayed awake. She sat in the ice room, which was five degrees, until her teeth chattered, because you couldn’t sleep in there, it was impossible. She drank Hot Six and Bacchus. She watched the clock over the door: 02:58, 02:59.

Mrs. Gong saw her at four in the morning on the sixth night, in the corridor, walking up and down outside the ice room in her socks, and said, “Go home, agassi.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Go to your mother’s.”

“She’s in Gimhae. She’ll make me stay. She’ll say I told you so.”

Mrs. Gong looked at her for a long moment. “Insurance comes Friday?”

“Friday.”

“Two more nights. Stay awake two more nights. Then go and never come back here. Don’t even come in for a bath.”

* * *

On the seventh night, the insurance company emailed at 10:40 p.m. to say there would be a delay of four to six weeks for further document review.

Hana read it in the corridor outside the salt room, standing with her phone in her hand, and then read it again, and then sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. She hadn’t slept properly in five days. Her body felt like a coat that someone had hung on her.

It was warm on that bit of floor, because the heat came through the salt bricks. Only for a minute, she thought. The staff would be along at eleven forty to put the chain up, they’d see her, they’d move her on. She just needed to put her head back for a minute. She leaned against the warm wall and smelled the salt.

She woke up lying in it.

She was inside the salt room, on her back in the crystals, and it was dark, and the little chain was across the door behind her, and she didn’t know how she’d got in. She was so cold. That was the first thing, the only thing. A cold she’d never felt in her life, deep in the bones of her face and the backs of her hands, the kind of cold that hurts, and she was soaking wet, her T-shirt stuck to her, salt clinging to her arms in wet clumps. She sat up and something heavy came with her, pulled at her scalp, slapped wet against her back.

Her hair. She put her hand up to it. It went down past her shoulders, past her waist. She could feel the ends of it lying in the salt behind her.

She was crying, she thought, but she couldn’t feel her face well enough to be sure. She stepped over the chain. Her bare feet left wet prints on the corridor tiles.

The clock over the sleeping hall said 03:01.

In the orange dark the women lay in their rows. The grandmother. The students. A girl Hana hadn’t seen before, very young, maybe nineteen, by the wall where Hana had slept on her first night. A cheap suitcase beside her mat with an airline tag on it. A towel rolled into a lamb’s head, its little ears flopped over. A dry towel. Thick and dry and warm.

Hana knelt down beside her. Her hair slid forward over her own shoulder and lay across the girl’s neck, and the girl shifted in her sleep and pulled the towel tighter.

There was a sentence in Hana’s mouth. It was very polite. She had heard it so many times now that she knew exactly how it went, the soft rise at the end, the apology in it. She only wanted to be dry. She only wanted to be warm for one minute. It wasn’t much to ask.

Behind her, down at the end of the hall, she heard the slow wet slap of Mrs. Gong’s mop stop.

“Eonni,” Hana said. “I’m so cold.”