The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  … It was after midnight when at last he stood before the well-remembered gate, Sasha at his side. There was no moon and in the darkness he felt the path under his feet for a rock and with it he pounded the barred gate. After a long few minutes he heard the gatesman’s cracked and drowsy voice.

  “Who is here at this hour?”

  “It is I, your master’s son,” Yul-chun replied.

  The gateman would not open at such easy answer. He mumbled while he lit a lantern and then he opened the wicket and peered through. Yul-chun put his face close to the opening and smiled. “It is I,” he said, “older by many years, but your master’s elder son, nevertheless.”

  The gateman gave a shout then and opened the gate, the same gateman, young when Yul-chun was a child, and now old.

  “Come in, young master,” he cried. “Welcome home, young master! But I must wake your father slowly, or he will die of joy.”

  “Do not wake him,” Yul-chun said, stepping into the courtyard. “Let him sleep until morning. Are my parents well?”

  “Well except for the ills of old age, which we all have,” the gateman replied, “but who is with you, young master?”

  “My son,” Yul-chun said proudly.

  “Your son,” the old man echoed and lifting his lantern he let the light fall on Sasha’s dark and handsome face.

  The old man gazed at him for a lingering moment. Then he let the light fall. “Now there are two of them in the house,” he muttered.

  “How two?” Yul-chun demanded.

  Before the gateman could answer, the lattice of the house slid back and a young man stood there, slim and tall and naked except for a towel about his middle and in spite of the winter night, in which a few snowflakes were already falling.

  “Who is there?” he called.

  “In the name of the gods,” the gateman cried, “do you come straight from your bath into the snowy night?”

  “A minute,” the young man cried, and in an instant was back again, wrapped in a quilted robe.

  The gateman beckoned with his left hand, the lantern held high in his right. In the path of light the young man came toward them and the gateman turned his head to Yul-chun.

  “Behold your brother’s son,” he said to Yul-chun. And to the young man he said, “Behold your uncle who we thought was lost. He has come home. And here is his son. Now there are two of you.”

  Yul-chun could not take his eyes from the young man. Yes, this was Liang. Yul-chun knew him. The glorious child had grown into this young man. Glorious? Yes, the eyes were the same, larger, luminous, benign, the mouth smiling, the head nobly shaped and held high.

  “Do you recognize me as once you did?” Yul-chun asked.

  He felt his heart beat, inexplicably quickened as Liang gazed at him intently.

  “I do recognize you,” Liang said and his voice was deep and kind.

  “Is it possible that you remember? You were very young,” Yul-chun said.

  “I cannot remember, but I recognize you,” Liang said.

  He spoke with calm confidence in the largeness of his soul, understanding and expecting understanding, and Yul-chun felt the same reverence now that he had felt when he held the remarkable child in his arms. There were indeed two of them, as the gateman had said, two of this new generation, two young men to take the place of the dead and the old, two for the struggle ahead, two for the victory that must be won.

  He reached for his son’s right hand and for his nephew’s right hand and he bound them together in his own hands.

  “You two,” he said, “you must be more than cousins. You must be brothers.”

  He left them then and went into the house alone, the gateman leading the way with the lantern. At the inner door an old servingwoman stood and the gateman told her who Yul-chun was. She knelt then and took off Yul-chun’s worn leather shoes and put slippers on his feet.

  “Sir, I am Ippun,” she said when this was done. “I have served your honored brother and his lady.” She hesitated and then she said proudly, “It is I who have cared for their son.”

  He inclined his head. “How can I thank you?”

  He said no more but went to the room where he had slept as a child, and she took the mattresses from the wall closet and laid them on the floor and spread the coverlets. Then she went away and he undressed and prepared for rest. Yet weary as he was, he paused to look from the window into the main room of the house. There he saw the two young men sitting on opposite sides of the table, the candle flickering between them. They were talking, talking, and they had forgotten the hour. He gave a great sigh as though a burden fell from his shoulders, and then he laid himself down to sleep.

  … He was wakened in the morning by Ippun coming in with a basin of water for washing and fresh garments.

  “Our old master sends these for you. He asks you not to make haste after your long journey. He has waited a long time, he says, and it is nothing to wait until you have washed and eaten.” She bowed and went out.

  He lay for a moment, collecting himself out of deep sleep, realizing that he was in his old room. Nothing had changed. Only he! He rose at last and washed and put on the fresh garments. Ippun returned with a tray of tea and small sweet cakes. She set them on the low table.

  “Eat a little, drink a swallow or two,” she coaxed.

  While he ate and drank she put away the mattresses and the silken quilts into the wall cupboards, and when he was finished she handed him a cloth wrung out of hot water to wipe his hands, bowed and took the tray away.

  He stood a moment, preparing his spirit, then went into the main room. His old parents were standing side by side waiting for him, and behind them stood Liang and Sasha. His parents stretched out their arms to him as he entered and he fell to his knees as their son. They lifted him up then, tears on their cheeks, and he felt their arms around him, he put his arms around them, first his father and then his mother. How thin and small their bodies were, how piteously shrunken to the very bones!

  “Have you not had enough to eat?” he kept saying. “No, you have not had enough to eat! While I have been wandering you have grown so thin—I shall never leave you again!”

  They tried to laugh, his mother sobbed and his father held his hand. “We are only old,” Il-han said, “we are very old, and it is time for us to die, but we had to live until you came home again.”

  “And you bring us this fine grandson,” Sunia sobbed, pointing to where Sasha stood at one side. “Thanks be to all the gods—and we must all have something to celebrate—I made some special—where is Ippun? I told Ippun—”

  She hurried away, tottering slightly as she walked, but the two young men pressed forward.

  “Grandfather,” Liang said. “Sasha and I, we must go to the city immediately. There may be more news.”

  Il-han stretched his head. “Must you go? The police will be savage today, puffed up with pride for what was done yesterday. When they find that your uncle is here—do you think the Living Reed can be hidden?”

  Sunia heard and came running back as fast as her old feet could carry her. “Not both of you,” she wailed. “One of you must stay, lest an evil come about and—if we lose one—”

  Il-han made apology for her to Yul-chun. “So used has this poor soul become to the loss of one or another of our family and clan—”

  The two young men spoke together.

  “I will not stay—”

  “Nor I—”

  “Safer for two—”

  “Go,” Yul-chun said. “I will stay. And do not think of me. Whatever your duty is, do it.”

  As he spoke he noticed that Sasha no longer wore his old garments. Instead he wore Korean robes that Liang, doubtless, had lent him. Strangely they did not suit him. His dark face and black eyes and hair, his bold profile and arrogant bearing, made him look foreign in the long white robes, somewhat too large for him at that, for Liang was the taller.

  “Go,” he said again, “and if there is time, buy yourself some cloth
es. You cannot always wear those. Here is enough money.”

  The two young men went away then and while they were gone, Yul-chun stayed with his parents and he told them of all that had befallen him, even of Hanya and of how Sasha was born, and he heard the long story of their lives here in the grass roof house. They ate of the dishes that Ippun brought in on trays and set before them, but Sunia did not eat with the men. She had never eaten with menfolk and she did not now, whatever young women did. She bade Ippun set her tray to one side so that the two men could talk. She listened, nevertheless, and she put in her part from time to time, and while they waited for the return of the young men, Yul-chun, from one parent and the other, was able to discover much that he had not known before of all that had happened and was happening in the lives of their people.

  “And now,” Il-han said at last, “we can only wait until the Americans win this war. Then we will ride in on the wave of victory.”

  “Father,” Yul-chun exclaimed. “I hope you do not mean what you say. There will be no easy riding on any wave. We must be ready with the machinery to take over the government and administer it in modern and efficient ways. Without delay we must study Western government and choose from each those elements which best suit our people. The President must choose the cabinet, the whole structure to offset the Communist structure—”

  He saw that his father was listening without comprehending, his eyes fixed on Yul-chun’s face, as he leaned forward to hear.

  “Why do I trouble you with such matters, my father?” he said in love and pity. “You have done your share. Tell me about Liang.”

  Here was a subject upon which his parents could not say enough, his father carrying the tale and his mother putting in such bits as his father forgot.

  “After the fire died down from the burning of that church,” Il-han said, “all who had lost relatives went to find relics and bones for burial. Of Induk and the little girl we could find nothing, for who could sort out such bones as were mingled with the hot ashes?”

  Sunia broke in. “I always did say that scrap of blue cloth was a bit of Induk’s skirt. Ippun said she wore a blue skirt that day—”

  Il-han continued without pause. “Your brother’s body was not burned—not altogether. I was able to—”

  Here Il-han’s chin trembled under his thin white beard, but he put up his hand when Yul-chun tried to urge him not to say more.

  “No, no—I must tell you. It is your right to know. The police stood by while we searched, and they allowed me to—to—see—we had taken a—a coffin with us, the servant and I, and we were able to—we gathered the parts—a beam had fallen across his back, but the face—it was he, I—I couldn’t mistake him. Yes, it was he—and we—we had—a funeral—”

  Sunia was sobbing softly. “We buried him beside his grandfather. Such a rainy day—the rain falling like waterspouts, though the fortuneteller said it was a lucky day—and a yellow frog hopped out of the grave and I thought of your old tutor and the story of Golden Frog, do you remember, my son?”

  “I remember,” Yul-chun said.

  “And whatever became of that tutor’s wife?” Sunia mused in the easy diversion of the old. “Not his wife altogether she was, for he went away somewhere before the wedding day and never came back, and they sent his distant cousin here to ask where he was, but how could we know? He had left us, too, and the poor young woman went into a nunnery since she had no husband and was too virtuous to marry another.”

  Il-han waited with some impatience while she talked on and now he could wait no longer. “It was of Liang that we were speaking, I believe! A god watched over him that day the church was set on fire by the police. He—”

  “No god but his mother,” Sunia put in. “She knew the child loved you, his grandfather, and she sent him to us.”

  “Well, well,” Il-han said, “at least he was here. Let us agree on that. And he has been here ever since, our hope and our comfort, for we feared you dead, too, my son!”

  “As good as dead,” Yul-chun agreed. “I dared not write letters to you. A price has been on my head, as you know, since the day I escaped from prison, after the Mansei—”

  Sunia broke in. “And was it true that a bamboo shoot sprang up between the stones of the cell after you escaped?”

  Yul-chun smiled. “Is there such a legend?”

  “No legend,” his father retorted. “There were many who saw it, and the police, discovering the reason why they came to the jail as though on a pilgrimage, dug the bamboo up by the roots.”

  “Did they do so?” Yul-chun said and fell into musing. “So the green bamboo was gone, root and all!”

  “But,” Il-han went on in triumph, “they could never get all the root. Up the green shoot came in some other corner! And at last to stop the people’s joy when they saw it, the police poured cement over the floor.”

  “There is bamboo everywhere,” Sunia said.

  Yul-chun turned to her. “True, my mother, and so let us talk of Liang.”

  Il-han leaned against the back rest of his floor cushion and prepared to enjoy himself again.

  “This grandson of mine, before he was three he knew his letters. At five he could write very well. At seven he was beyond my teaching him anything except the old classics, and I sent him to an American school, although privately I taught him, too. He speaks English well and reads English books. He speaks French and German and he studied Latin for his medicine.”

  “Medicine?”

  “He is learning to be a physician in both foreign and Korean medicine. He is also a surgeon, for he says no one can be only one in such times as we suffer.”

  “But why a physician?” Yul-chun inquired.

  “He says that he can at least heal the people’s bodies,” Il-han replied. “It comforts him, he says.”

  “Is he Christian?” Yul-chun asked.

  “No, and yet yes,” Il-han said.

  “How no and yes?” Sunia demanded. “No, he is not Christian.” She had left her corner and now sat with them, her eyes still lively in her withered face.

  Il-han yielded. “He is not Christian, true, yet he behaves as though he were. He is not Buddhist, but he is like a Buddhist. As for Confucius, Liang reads the classics and he observes correctness.”

  “You have taught him well,” Yul-chun told his father.

  “I have taught him nothing,” Il-han insisted. “He learns without being taught.”

  “I wonder,” Yul-chun said, reflecting. “I wonder how he will like Sasha.”

  “Sasha—Sasha—what name is this?” Sunia demanded.

  “His mother gave it to him,” Yul-chun said shortly. He saw weariness on his father’s face and he rose. “Rest now, Father. I have tired you.”

  “You have only blessed me,” Il-han replied, and his eyes followed Yul-chun out of the room.

  “It is better than Moscow,” Sasha said. He stood on a low hill above the city and gazed down upon the palaces and parks, the wide streets, the massive buildings of universities and new department stores. Liang had brought him to show him the city before they entered it.

  “You have been in Moscow?” Liang asked.

  “Once,” Sasha replied. “Our school sent us there at our graduation. Moscow is also very fine, but—” He swept his right hand over the vista. “Still I do not know whether I go or stay.”

  “Stay,” Liang said. “At least stay until you know us well.”

  A western wind had cleared the sky in the night and his face, open and benign in the clear sunlight, expressed an inner radiance. Sasha felt an unwilling admiration.

  “You are very busy with your work.”

  “Yes, I am busy,” Liang said. “I finish my internship at the American hospital next summer. But I have time when I am off duty.”

  “Is it a Christian hospital?”

  “Yes—a missionary hospital.”

  “‘Are you Christian?” Sasha’s question was curt.

  “No,” Liang’s voice was amiable,
“I am not Christian.”

  “All religion is bad,” Sasha declared. “It is an opiate for the people.”

  “I believe in God,” Liang said quietly. “Where there is law as there is in the natural world, there must be a law-giver. Yet I do not believe, as Christians do, that we can be saved by a passive acceptance of God. We must save ourselves by doing what is godlike and we will become godlike.”

  Sasha protested. “I see no sense in what you say. How do you know what is good? How do you know there is a god? I say there is none.”

  Liang did not reply at once. When he did it was with a firm gentle authority.

  “In the beginning, Sasha, our people were sun-worshipers. History tells us so, and it is reasonable, for our ancestors came from the cold and windy lands of Central Asia. The winters were long, and in the deep valleys between high mountains the sun shone for only a few hours a day. It is natural that our ancestors loved the sun and went eastward to find the sun. This is how they arrived at our country. But their longing for warmth and brightness, their heavenward yearning, persisted. They dreamed of a kind and powerful friend, a father-being, who lived far beyond their reach and because they could not reach him, they dreamed that he reached them, and he sent his son to become a man. Everywhere in the whole world there is such a dream. The Christians thought they brought it here—but we had it already. True, the manner of his birth varies. The Christians say he was born miraculously of a virgin. We have a legend that he was born of a union between bear and tiger—”

  “Bear and tiger?” Sasha had sat down on a rock, brushing away the light snow, but now he suddenly stood up.

  “Yes,” Liang said, “and so we Koreans have kept the mountain tiger as our national symbol.”

  “Bear is the symbol of Russia,” Sasha exclaimed.

  Liang laughed. “Let us not stretch symbols too far! Some of our patients say the tiger has nothing to do with gods, that it is our national animal because the map of our country looks like a sitting tiger. Some say it is because we tell the other peoples to leave us in our lair and we will not disturb them, even as the mountain tiger will not attack unless he is attacked.”