The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  He smiled at her. “Were you watching?”

  It was one of the joys of their life that he found surprises in her, thoughts, feelings, acts, which she never finished telling him.

  “Yes,” she said joyously. “Did I never tell you! I was watching and the moment when I saw you laugh—I—I—was glad.”

  He reached for her hand. “Glad of what?”

  “Because I knew I must love you.”

  Their hands clasped. “What if the duck had flown away?” This he said to tease her, since it is a bad omen for a marriage if the wedding duck escapes.

  “I would not have cared,” she said. “I had seen you and I would have followed you anywhere.”

  “Now—now.” He pretended to scold her to hide the excess of his persisting tenderness, after all these years. “Is this the way to speak to a man? You are too bold—you have not been well brought up!”

  “I am very well brought up, and you know that,” she retorted, pretending to pout. “All Pak women are well brought up. Do we not belong to the truebone? We have royal blood, too—as well as you Kims!”

  “Truebone to truebone,” he said and put her hand to his cheek.

  She smoothed the cheek, and then, allowing this to go no further, she withdrew her hand.

  “All the same,” she said, “on our wedding day you bowed too carelessly at the table before the gate. Three times, I think, instead of four! You were still trying not to laugh at the duck.”

  “The duck would not stay on the table, as you very well know,” he reminded her, “and I saw myself coming to meet my princess with a duck flapping after me. As it was, your father looked shocked when he led you out of the house!”

  “You had not seen me until that moment and yet you thought of ducks!” Her words were mock reproach but her dark eyes rested on his face with such a look that he bit his lip.

  “Shall I ever forget—” he murmured.

  He rose impetuously and lifted her in his right arm and buried his face in her hair. For a moment they embraced and then she pushed him gently away.

  “We are not behaving well, father of my son—This is not our wedding night.”

  “A month yet before we are free to—” he muttered the words restlessly, and broke off.

  She fluttered her eyelashes at him and looked down at the satin bed quilt and pretended to pull a thread.

  “You have not told me what you think of our second son.”

  He drew a deep breath. “Wait,” he besought her. “Let me cool my heart for a moment.” He got up and walked about the room, paused before a painting of the sacred mountain of Omei in faraway China. Then he returned to his seat

  “This second son,” he said, “is not respectful to his father. He slept the whole time he was in my presence. Otherwise, I think well of him, although he is not so beautiful as the first one. He looks like me. Though I will not grant that the Paks, in general, are more handsome than the Kims, you being the exception to all women.”

  She shook her head. “I did my best to make him perfect but—”

  “But what?”

  “He is not quite perfect.”

  “No?”

  “This—” She touched the lobe of her own perfect left ear. “It is pinched. It is not like the other one.”

  He heard this and clapped his hands. A woman servant entered.

  “Bring me my second son,” he commanded.

  “What can this mean?” he inquired then of his wife.

  She shook her head again and tears came welling into her eyes.

  “Ah now,” he cried and impetuously reached for her folded hands and held them in his. “It is not your fault, my bird.”

  “It is the evil of some spirit on him before he was shaped,” she sighed. “A touch on the lobe of the ear—I must ask the soothsayer what it means.”

  “Where were our samsin spirits?” he asked, half scornfully.

  It was an old quarrel between them, never ended, a small battle in which neither yielded and neither won. The samsin were the three spirits whose duty it is to guard the conception and growth and development of children in the house. He did not believe in samsin, and she did not believe, she said when he teased her, and yet she had prepared the symbols.

  “The threads, the papers, the streamers of cloth, they were hanging yonder on the wall the night that we—”

  He put her hands down gently and walked to the wall at the far end of the room. Yes, they were still there, the material evident presence of the samsin, looking now somewhat dusty and torn. How could these poor relics have influence on the birth of a child? Gazing at them with contempt, he felt the old disbelief well into his mind and heart. Folk tales, the fumbling efforts of peasant peoples and ignorant priests to explain the miracles of life, even his sister-in-law wanting to be a Buddhist nun! He longed to know and understand in new ways, to find other paths than in the books of the dead. His father, sitting day after day in his study, poring over the ancestral history of the Kim family, proud of the dead and censorious toward the living—this was the curse of Korea, this slow dying while men were still alive, begetting sons for the future, but dreaming of the past. He put out his hand and tore down the dusty symbols.

  “Il-han!”

  He heard his wife’s cry and he turned to her. “How many years I have been longing to tear down those rags! And now I have done it!”

  “But, Il-han,” she breathed, “what will happen to us?”

  “Something new and something good,” he said.

  At this moment the servant entered with his second son. He took the child from her and dismissed her with a nod and he carried the child to the bed and laid him beside the mother.

  “Show me,” he commanded.

  She turned the sleeping child tenderly and pushed back the soft straight black hair that fell against his left ear.

  “There,” she said, “see what happened to him, even before his birth.”

  He leaned to see closely. The deformity was slight. For a girl, who must wear jewels in her ears, it might have been a defect more grave. Nevertheless it was a defect, and he did not like to think that a son of his could be less than perfect. Yet what could be done now? The shape was made, the flesh confirmed by life. No use to see a doctor—herbs could not change this permanence. And the thing was so small, the lobe of the ear tucked in as though a thread had drawn it up, and could be released again. A quick sharp knife could do it, if one had the skill.

  He touched the child’s soft ear, and then covered it with the dark hair. “I have heard that the western physicians know how to correct by the knife,” he said.

  She gathered the child in her arms. “Never! A western doctor? You do not love your son!”

  “I do love him,” he said gravely. “I love him enough to wish he were perfect.”

  Tears brimmed her eyes. “You blame me!”

  “I blame no one, but I wish he were perfect,” he replied.

  “And I,” she cried, the tears streaming down her cheeks, “I will not allow a foreign doctor to touch him! As he was born, let him remain. I love him. He is my son, if you will not have him for yours.”

  “Be quiet, Sunia,” he commanded. “Do you accuse me of being less a parent than you? It is simply that if the child can be made perfect, he should be perfect.”

  She cried out at him again. “You think only of yourself! You are ashamed of your child! Oh, you must always have everything—so—so perfect!”

  He was amazed. Never had he seen her in such anger as this. She could pout and be petulant but her tempers ended in laughter. There was no laughter in her now. Her cheeks were scarlet and her eyes black fire, blazing at him.

  “Sunia!”

  His voice was sharp but she would not allow him to speak. She held the child clutched to her breast and went on talking and sobbing at the same time.

  “Are you truebone? I think not! Whoever heard of a tangban who because his son has a small, small, small blemish, at the edge of his ear lobe—no, y
ou are soban—soban—soban!”

  He reached for her and seizing her head in the curve of his right elbow he held his hand over her mouth. She struggled against him, the child in her arms, but he held her. Suddenly he felt her sharp teeth bite into his palm.

  “Ah-h!”

  He uttered a cry and pulled back his hand. The palm was bleeding. He stared at it, and then at her and the blood dripped on the satin quilt.

  She was aghast. “What have I done?” she whispered, and putting down the child she took the end of her wide sleeve and wrapped it around his hand and held it.

  “Forgive me,” she pleaded, and fondled his hand in her breast, her eyes wet with tears.

  He smiled, enjoying the power of forgiving her. “It is true,” he said calmly, “quite true that Korean women are stubborn and independent. I should have married a gentle woman of China, or a submissive woman of Japan—”

  “Ah, don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t—don’t reproach me—”

  “Then what am I?” he demanded.

  “You are truebone, tangban of the yangban class,” she said heartbroken.

  “What else?”

  “A scholar who has passed the imperial examinations.”

  “What else—what else?”

  “My lord.”

  “True—and what else?”

  He took his hand from her breast and with it lifted her face to his.

  “My love,” she said at last.

  “Ah ha,” he said softly. “Now I know all that I am—yangban, tangban and your lord and your love. It is enough for any man.”

  He laid his cheek against hers for a long moment, and then released her, but she clung to him.

  “Your hand is still bleeding?”

  He showed her his hand, palm up. The bleeding had stopped but the marks of her teeth were there, four small red dents. She cried out in remorse, and seizing his hand again in both hers, she pressed her lips against the marks.

  At this moment the child, who had slept through all this, began suddenly to cry. She dropped the hand she held and took the child into her arms and put him to her breast and he suckled immediately and strongly.

  She lifted her eyes to Il-han. He had stepped back from the bed and now stood looking at them.

  “See him,” she said proudly. “He is already hungry.”

  “I see him,” Il-han replied. He was silent for an instant, his eyes on the child at the full smooth breast. “If I can foretell,” he said, “I would foretell that this son of ours will never be hungry. He will always find his way to the source of satisfaction.”

  With this he left the room and returned to his library, looking neither to left nor right at the servants who paused in whatever they were doing to stand, heads downcast in respect, as he passed. Once in his library however he felt no mood for books. Unwittingly Sunia had touched upon an uneasy point in his own thinking. These times into which he had brought his sons to life were repeating in strange ways the age in which his own grandfather had lived. Now why should Sunia at this moment hark back to the age when civilian nobles had held power and the military nobles were subdued to them? Yangban they both were in the dual aristocracy of the ancient Koryo era, and in theory the two divisions of the nobility, civilian and military, tangban and soban, were equal, although in practice the civilian tangban, to which his family had always belonged, were in ascendancy, since the soban could not rise beyond the third level in government service. Yet whenever the ruling house became corrupt the soban, the military, took power by force to end corruption. Thus it had been with the decadent king, Uijong, the eighteenth ruler in the age of Koryo. That king, aided and applauded by his civilian associates, had devoted his life to pleasure and foolish living, and on a certain night, while he was surrounded by women and drunken companions, the soban military leaders seized power and only after fierce struggle had the civilian tangban regained the throne. Now the times had circled again to the ancient struggle between civilian and soldier.

  How had such confusion come about? Suddenly and to his own surprise he was angry with himself that he had not studied more faithfully the history of the past. Perhaps now, when he was a grown man and father of sons, he might begin to believe what his father had so often told him.

  “My son, the past must be known before the present can be understood and the future faced with calm.”

  He had listened without hearing, weary of the past, sick of the adoration bestowed upon ancestors. Even now when his father met with his old friends they discussed nothing but the past.

  “Do you remember—do you remember—” every sentence began with the worn phrase. “Do you remember the golden age of the Koryo? Do you remember how we fought off that Japanese devil, Hideyoshi, who invaded our shores—”

  “Ah yes, but consider the Yi dynasty—”

  Well, it was not too late to mend his ignorance. He would go to his father and listen to him now, and hear.

  … “Sir, surely you will not walk?”

  The servant, holding his black silk outer garment, put the question with mild anxiety.

  “I will walk,” Il-han said.

  The man tied the wide bands of a black silk outer coat at his master’s right shoulder.

  “Shall I not follow you, sir?”

  “It is not necessary,” Il-han replied. “The day is fine, and I will tell my father of my second son’s birth.”

  The man persisted. “Sir, it has already been announced by the red cards. We sent them yesterday.”

  “Be silent,” Il-han commanded.

  He spoke with unusual impatience and the servant, feeling his master’s mood, bowed and followed behind him to the door. There he bowed again, and waiting for a few minutes, he followed at a distance without making himself known, while Il-han walked briskly through the cool spring air, warmed now by the sunshine.

  The stone-paved main street was busy with white-robed men and women, the women moving freely among the men. Once in his youth he had visited Peking. His father had been appointed emissary that year to present tribute to the Chinese Emperor and he, a lad of fifteen, had begged to go with him. Roaming the broad and dusty streets of Peking, he had been surprised to see no women except a few beggars and marketwomen.

  “Have the Chinese no women?” he had asked his father, one day.

  “They have, of course,” his father replied. “But their women are kept in the house where they belong. In our country”—he had paused here to laugh and shake his head ruefully—“the women are too much for us. Do you remember the old story of the henpecked husband?”

  They had been seated at their meal in an inn, he and his father, he remembered, and his father told him the story of that magistrate in Korea of ancient times who suffered because his wife was master in the house. The magistrate called together all the men of his district and explained his predicament Then he asked those men who also were pan-kwan, or henpecked, to move to the right side of the hall. All moved except one man, and he moved to the left. The others were surprised to see even one man at the left and the magistrate praised the man, declaring that he was the symbol of what men should be.

  “Tell us,” the magistrate commanded him, “how it is you have achieved such independence.”

  The man was a small timid fellow and, surprised, he could only stammer a few words, explaining that he did not know what all this was about and he was obeying his wife, who bade him always to avoid crowds.

  His father finished this tale and he looked at Il-han with roguish eyes. “I,” he declared, “have of course always been at your mother’s command. When worse comes to worst, I remind myself that women still cannot do without men, since it is we who hold the secret of creating children for them.”

  He had blushed at such frankness and his father had laughed at him. He smiled now, remembering, and a tall country wife, carrying a jar of bean oil on her head, shouted at him.

  “Look where you walk, lord of creation!”

  He stepped aside hastily to let her
pass, and caught a sidewise glance of her dark eyes flashing at him with warning and laughter, and he admired her profile. A handsome people, these his people! He had seen Japanese merchants as well as Chinese. The Japanese men were less tall than his countrymen, and the Chinese men were less fair of skin, their hair blacker and more wiry stiff. A noble people, these his people, and what ill fortune that they were contained within this narrow strip of mountainous land coveted by others! If they could but be left alone in peace, he and his people, to dream their dreams, make their music, write their poems, paint their picture scrolls! Impossible, now that the surrounding hungry nations were licking their chops, impossible now that the civilian tangban had grown decadent and the rebellious soban again were threatening from beneath!

  He paused at the south gate, whose name was the Gate of High Ceremony, and inquired of the guard to say at what hour the sun would set, for then the gate would be locked and no one, except on official business, could come in or go out

  The guard, a tall man with a cast in his right eye, squinted at the western sky and made a guess.

  “Where do you go, master?” he asked.

  “I go to see my father,” Il-han replied.

  The guard recognized him for a Kim, as who did not, and he lowered his spear and spoke with respect. “You will have time to drink two bowls of tea with your honored one.”

  “My thanks,” Il-han said.

  When he had passed through the vast gate he paused, as he always did, to look back. This gate was one of eight gates to the city, any of which the people might use for coming and going except for the north gate, which was kept locked, for it was the way of escape for the King if there were war, and the southwest gate, which was for criminals on their way to execution outside the city wall. The southwest gate was known also as the Water Mouth Gate because the river flowed through there. It was also the gate used for the dead on their way to burial. All dead must pass through the gate, except dead kings, who could pass through other gates. The gate was built of wood and painted with colors of red and blue and green and gold. It sat high on the great stone wall and there were two stories, the first one wider than the second, and in the wooden wall of the second story were holes through which arrows could be shot. The roof was tile and the corners were lifted as are the palace roofs and gates of Peking—the better, Il-han had been told as a child, to catch the devils who slide down roofs in play and then falling to the ground are mischievous and enter houses to annoy good folk and bring trouble to them.