A Place Close to Heaven
...The current Minister of Foreign Affairs in Saudi Arabia is Prince Bandar Al-Fahd. He is a wise man, but his health has not been good since birth. Because of this, Prince Rashid and Prince Ali have been engaged in a power struggle for diplomatic leadership. Prince Al Faisal, who is Ali's younger brother from the same mother, is very close to him. He withdrew from the power struggle early on and established a business....
It was a dirty story that could be found anywhere.
Where there is power, there are pests. It is worse when money is involved. When those pests multiply, the situation becomes even more filthy and complicated.
There are usually more pests on the inside than on the outside, where others can see them. If others spoke about it like that, it must have a stench that was unimaginable.
"Oh my... there's never a peaceful day in that neighborhood."
Jeong Tae-ui muttered while chewing on a dried prune. The dried fruit, which was soft, was extremely sweet. Fingering the fruit that would taste like honey to those living in the scorching heat, Jeong Tae-ui continued speaking.
"If they want to get involved in that mess, what can I say? But I just wish they wouldn't drag in innocent, unrelated people."
Jeong Tae-ui had been grumbling nonstop for some time.
However, no one answered his grumbling. There was a person sitting right in front of him, but that person was too busy flipping through the pages of a book to listen to Jeong Tae-ui's words — though, if Jeong Tae-ui did say something important, he would probably answer calmly as if he had heard everything. Meanwhile, the veiled girl in white clothes who was passing through the corridor to change the water in a vase was not someone he could communicate with. Even if they did speak the same language, they probably wouldn't have been able to have a conversation. This inner part of the building was not the Serengeti in Tanzania, but an Arab region.
Jeong Tae-ui looked at her with slight regret, remembering how his high school classmate once told him about nearly getting into big trouble when he naively spoke to a woman while lost in Iran for work.
It wasn't that he particularly wanted to talk to her. In fact, recently, Jeong Tae-ui hadn't looked at women in that way for quite some time; perhaps he might have looked at men that way, but not women. Although he could purely admire the "beauty of a woman," women were not objects of desire for him.
...But he didn't think that the Arab man standing with a sword at the corner of the corridor, watching him vigilantly, would understand Jeong Tae-ui's innocent heart.
"If only there was some beer."
Jeong Tae-ui muttered like a sigh, lying down on the ground.
Outside the small courtyard in the middle of the corridor, where the ground was neatly paved with stones, there was a modest garden beyond a small side door. The place, thick with trees and shrubs, looked as if a botanical garden had been shrunken and transported here, with all kinds of beautiful flowers and plants swaying gently.
Jeong Jae-ui was sitting under a rubber tree inside, quietly flipping through the pages of a book. Meanwhile, lying on the grass under the shade before him, Jeong Tae-ui was snacking on the fruit basket that the girl in white had left next to him earlier.
It was a beautiful place. Perhaps this was the closest one could get to heaven.
No chaotic sounds could be heard. There was just an endlessly serene and quiet space, filled with the sound of wind brushing past, leaves rustling, birds occasionally chirping or flapping their wings, and, faintly in the distance, the sound of the girls in white laughing.
