by Bandi
Yeong-pyo trembled all over. He had blundered over to the small park, off to one side of the deserted factory buildings. But his immediate surroundings had passed beyond his comprehension. The altar’s brilliant halo filled a vacant gaze, in which the pupils had come unmoored. The intersecting beams from the cars’ headlights resembled theater spotlights. One beam stretched all the way to where Yeong-pyo was standing, illuminating the somber pines and low stone benches.
“These pines are wonderfully drawn—just like the real thing! Wait a minute, whose scene is this? Ah, that’s right, that’s right….”
Passing between the trees, a trainer took the stage. A trainer bearing the indelible stain of a horrifying crime, who must now press the barrel of a gun to his temple and bring this whole matter to a close.
The bang of the gun ripped through the warm night air, but Yeong-pyo was beyond hearing it. Hong Yeong-pyo, a stern director who had demanded the same stage truth no less from himself than from others, had chosen to bring the curtain down, in advance of that of his fellow actors.
29th January, 1995
The Red Mushroom
1
There was a very simple reason that the inhabitants of N Town referred to the municipal government office as “the redbrick house”—its bricks were conspicuously red. Indeed, the government office stood out among the street’s other brick buildings as conspicuously red. It had gone up in the early days after liberation, when the Communist Party was only recently established, and a Party secretary at the time had instructed that specially made bricks be used, into which some kind of red coloring had been mixed.
The secretary in question, a lion-headed man who had the words of Marx’s Communist Manifesto constantly on his lips and a tobacco pipe always in hand, had declared that the building must be red outside as well as in, as it had sprouted from seeds sown by that red specter from Europe. He had the red coloring added not only to the bricks but also to the roof tiles, making the Communist Party office truly a red house. Once you took all this into consideration, the innocuous phrase “the redbrick house” necessarily denoted not some ordinary building, but the color red—startling, conspicuous, almost extravagant.
So if some snotty-nosed kid said to another, “Think you can do what you like ’cause you’re a redbrick-house kid?” that of course meant that the one being addressed was the child of someone who worked at the Party office. And if a woman said, with a roll of her eyes, “Forget it—she’s a redbrick-house wife,” one of two things was certain: Either the woman in question worked at the red house, or her husband did.
Hoe Yunmo, a reporter for the district’s daily newspaper, was sitting at his desk when a gust of wind swept in through the window, whisked his notepad up from in front of him, and tossed it onto the floor. Only this succeeded in shaking him out of his paralysis.
“Damn it!” he grumbled, bending to pick up the pad. But it wasn’t the breeze he was cursing. He’d been told to write an article, yet hadn’t managed to produce so much as a single line; his own wandering thoughts were the cause of his annoyance, as he loitered in the vicinity of the brick house instead of concentrating on the task at hand. Why now of all times, when he should have been acting as though he’d had a fire lit under him, was his mind insisting on dredging up the origins and circumstances of that building, something which could not have been further from his subject? On his pad, which he had now set back on the desk, there was still nothing other than a title: “N Town’s Bean Paste Factory Returns to Normal Production Levels.”
Yunmo flung his fountain pen down onto the notepad and rubbed his face with his hands. His dry mouth produced a croak of dismay quite of its own accord. Over a decade on the job, and he could have sworn he’d never had writer’s block this bad.
It was like a skewer being inserted into his brain: He simply could not ignore the thought that even in cases when the order came from the redbrick house and should therefore be obeyed without hesitation, there were some instances in which it was simply not possible to produce what was required—as impossible as making yourself cry on command. It had been close to three months since the town’s production of soybean paste had slumped from sporadic to nonexistent, yet Yunmo was now expected to write an article on the factory’s return to normal operation—like reporting on the news of a birth before conception had even occurred!
Three days previously, when the lion-headed secretary in charge of the redbrick house had called him up and requested the article, Yunmo had been struck dumb. He could picture the secretary’s childish moon face, which bore an unvarying look of contempt regardless of whom he was addressing.
“What, no comment? Hahaha. Why, there’s as much coming out of your mouth as there is from the factory’s soybean tank….”
This sly joke was made in a voice whose high pitch was all the more conspicuous for having emerged from a veritable tree trunk of a neck, sandwiched between face and shoulders of equal corpulence. “Our town has been receiving a lot of criticism over this issue. Which is, of course, entirely the fault of the irresponsible behavior of certain workers. But now that the factory’s bean paste tank is going to open its mouth and give us all we want, you reporters need to start doing the same. ‘Yes, I will write the article,’ that kind of thing. Ha!” As soon as it seemed the joke had finished, the secretary let his laughter fade away and resumed his customary tone of contempt. “The article should come out before the end of the month. Got it?”
That day, Yunmo dutifully set out on the road which the secretary had laid in front of him and visited the bean paste factory. The manager who greeted him there was so gaunt he looked like a stick of wood in clothes; even his bald head gave the impression of being somehow hollow.
“Yes, yes. It’s all true. We’re back at the fermentation stage now. What are we fermenting? Thanks to the support of the local Party, we’ve been provided with acorns and corn from the farms, thirty tons in all. That will give us enough for a month’s supply of bean paste.”
Not a year’s supply—a month’s. So this was the situation as it really stood: To people who had by now already forgotten the taste of bean paste and who might not even set eyes on such a thing for a long time, Yunmo was expected to trumpet the lie that the factory had returned to normal production levels. Though this would hardly be the first time he’d been creative with the truth. A fair few of the newspaper’s readers had their own name for Yunmo—Mr. Bullshit Reporter. And even he had to admit that this wasn’t exactly groundless.
Yunmo unscrewed the lid of his thermos and tilted the bottle to his lips. It was alcohol. For him, alcohol was the lubricant he needed to produce the bullshit articles he was assigned, a bad habit so long ingrained that he now couldn’t remember a time without it.
“Yunmo, are you there?”
Someone was banging on the door. Before Yunmo even had time to screw the lid of the thermos back on, Song, a consulting doctor at the hospital, burst into the room. The two were friends from childhood, having grown up hopping about on sugarcane stilts together and been lab partners in middle school. They may have been opposites physically—Yunmo was tall and heavyset with somewhat coarse features, while everything about Song was small and neat—the two men were still as close as they’d ever been, and frequently confided in each other.
“What’s the matter?”
Shocked by the sight of Song’s pale, sweating face, Yunmo got quickly up from his seat.
“Yunmo, you have to help me. My uncle’s just been arrested.”
“What? You mean the one who’s an engineer at the bean paste factory?”
“Apparently they came for him while he was working out in the fields, all covered in dust. What are we going to do?”
“Go back to the beginning and explain it for me, step by step. Why has this happened?”
“Dereliction of duty—that’s what they’re calling it; that’s what they’re branding my uncle with. You wrote that article about him, you know him pretty well, no? Please help, in any way you can.�
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The shock looked to have shaken Song quite out of his senses. The white froth flecking his lips, his shuddering legs, painted all too clear a picture of just how serious this business was. Yunmo hastily fetched a bowl of cold water from the kitchen.
“There, drink this, sit down, and let’s talk.”
Yunmo got out his cigarettes and lighter. All the while, he found himself unable to shake the image of Ko Inshik, chief technician at the soybean mill, a man of weak constitution, whose eyes, behind his thick-lensed glasses, had always seemed somewhat swollen.
2
It was three years ago, at almost exactly the same week of August it was now, that Yunmo had first come to hear of Ko Inshik. On that day too, Song had come to call on Yunmo, on Inshik’s behalf. The man he called his uncle was in fact only a distant cousin, but their relationship was far closer than the family tree might have suggested.
During his time attending medical college in Pyongyang, it was Inshik who had ensured that Song was able to give his studies his undivided attention, free from the loneliness often felt by the sons of widows, and also from the straitened circumstances of dormitory life. Whenever there was to be some kind of college outing, Inshik would be sure to prepare a packed lunch for him. Wordlessly, he would pass the string bag to his wife, his eyes crinkled in a smile behind his thick glasses.
That smile was what passed for conversation with him; rarely did he find himself moved to speak. That was the kind of person he was: a man of few words, but possessed of a seemingly bottomless supply of warm human kindness. Not that his wife was unsympathetic when it came to her nephew’s situation, but she wouldn’t have invited Song to live with them if it hadn’t been for her husband’s insistence. But of course, Inshik’s own condition back then had been very different from what it was now.
At college, he had majored in food crop engineering, and was then appointed to a committee for light industry, tasked with overseeing technical service. In other words, he and his family were what you might call comfortably off. Many in a similar situation might have balked at sharing their wealth with others, but not Ko Inshik. When it came to kindness, he wasn’t someone who knew how to do things by half measures, and it was with the deep affection of a real father that he cared for and supported Song, every day for the entire duration of his studies. And when Song graduated, neither could have guessed that in under three years’ time they would find themselves both together in N Town!
When it came to light that Inshik’s brother-in-law, previously assumed to have been killed by a bomb during the turmoil of the Korean War, had in fact crossed over to the South, Inshik became tarred with brush of those who “falsified their history,” and was sent down from Pyongyang in order to “have the proper revolutionary ideals instilled in him” in N Town.
With this inauspicious beginning, Inshik’s life in this place led Song to ponder the truth of the saying “The greater your heart, the greater your sorrows.” Inshik’s preeminent ability in his field of food crop engineering had secured him the position of chief technician at the bean paste factory, which would otherwise have been judged too good for him, but in all other respects his life was a thorny path.
Song had closed his aunt’s eyes for the last time while her head was lying in his own lap. She, whose lips had shrunk to a colorless line, breathed her last less than two years after the trauma of being sent down from Pyongyang, with the doctors having failed to find any medical cause.
“You’ve ended up in this sorry state because of my brother, I know,” she said to Inshik, “but I beg you, work as hard as you can so you can get back your former position.”
Unable to tear her guilt-ridden gaze from her husband, and clutching the wrists of her children, she never spoke another word.
The head of any household that lacks a housewife is undoubtedly in a sorry state, as are any children who find themselves left motherless. It stood to reason that the couple’s young daughter had it hard, forced to run a household and look after her younger siblings as soon as she graduated from middle school, alongside working with her father in the bean paste factory’s lab. But the toll it took on Inshik was even greater, for his work supervising factory technology was burdened with an additional responsibility, on Party orders: clearing an area of land for cultivation.
For the first time in his life, Inshik was forced to try his hand at laundering a work uniform and darning socks while sitting on the threshold of a mountain hut. But it wasn’t as though this preparation of the land for cultivation was devoid of perks; if that were the case, only those saddled with the taint of crime would be willing to live alone in a rough hut on a hostile, uninhabited mountain. No, there were advantages: four hundred pyeong of land for his own personal use, on the condition that the time and effort taken to farm it would not detract from his main tasks.
“Of course, additional perks can also be made available for those in a position of responsibility.” That is what the town’s chief Party secretary had told Inshik back then while notifying him of his new duties. “But bear in mind that the nature of these perks depends very much on how you acquit yourself in this task.”
A weighty hint, then, that Inshik might be set free from the post of the factory’s chief technician with which he had been so magnanimously entrusted—that he might even be restored to his former position. But in fact, even without this heavy hint, Inshik already had a hunch as to what the terms of the deal might be.
Simply by sending him to work in the mountains, an assignment which any laborer in the town would have balked at, the Party secretary had made it perfectly clear that they were expecting him to respond like the cow who, having secretly been eating its master’s soybean leaves, flinches whenever the master moves his hand toward the whip. Whether or not it was as a direct effect of this knowledge, Inshik threw himself into his new work without hesitation. Now and then he came down to the factory to oversee the technical work there, and Song always took these opportunities to encourage him not to neglect his health, to think of his children now that their mother was gone. But Inshik would say that it was precisely the thought of his children’s prospects that was spurring him on now, and go straight back to the mountains.
Three years of toil produced a large area of land reclaimed for cultivation, with soil that was ready to be planted and tilled. At the same time, Inshik’s tireless improvements at the factory had also paid off, and N Town was now blessed with a glut of bean paste. “Even bean paste from Pyongyang has nothing on ours” were the words on people’s lips. But they were ignorant of the secret ingredient, the salt that produced that admirable flavor—Inshik’s sweat and blood.
That day three years ago, when Song sought out Yunmo and told him the story of this man Ko Inshik, he had been frank about his intentions.
“Please, if you can, write some kind of article on him, and publish it in your paper. Anything to give him a bit of a boost.”
The picture which Song had painted of Inshik certainly roused Yunmo’s professional ambition. Boasts about the quality of the town’s bean paste had already been making him wonder whether there mightn’t be a story to be had.
He decided to do some background research, the first step of which would be to visit Inshik’s family. In his fairly lengthy career as a reporter, there had been many instances which cemented the truth that the best way to get an idea of people’s true character is through their home life rather than their workplace.
In this case, Yunmo’s experience turned out to be the best judge. Through his so-called domestic research he came to see Inshik anew, as a man whose true self had been gradually buried in his work, all undertaken in the hope of favorable treatment in the future. Yunmo chose a lunch hour to call at Inshik’s house, judging that this was when someone was most likely to be home. Situated on the hill to the rear of the factory, the house was surrounded by a rather wonky fence, and a plastic tarpaulin weighted down with stones was all the storehouse had for a roof.
Even at firs
t glance, it was clear that the place was being neglected. A boy in school uniform, who looked to be around fourteen years old, was amusing himself by hanging from the small gate which led into the front yard. Upon closer inspection, though, Yunmo saw that the boy was not playing but struggling bravely to detach a rusty chain from the gate’s upper hinge. Just as Yunmo was thinking that this must be Hye-myong, Inshik’s last-born and only son, the boy preempted his question by announcing, “Father’s not at home.” Wanting to put off having to state his business, Yunmo raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, pretending not to know that Inshik was up in the mountains.
“Well, what about your sister, then?”
“She always makes up a lunch to take to work. And I take mine to school.”
“So how come you’re home now?” The boy seemed to quiver. “What, cat got your tongue?”
“Because … my sister cut her hand trying to fix this. She was crying when she went to the factory. This morning.”
“Indeed! So you’ve come home to try to fix it before she gets back this evening. In your school lunch break, am I right?”
The boy gave no answer, only lowered his head and blinked back tears. He’d had such a battle with the chain that the sweat which slicked his small, soft hands was dyed red with rust. Yunmo felt himself pierced to the core. Seeing that the boy was on the verge of tears, he deliberately adopted a brisk, cheerful tone.
“Right, let’s see what we’ve got here. This bastard hinge been giving you a tough time, eh? Hand me that hammer.” He inserted the sharp, pronged end of the hammer between the hinge and jamb of the gate and pumped down on the handle several times, causing the gate to shriek and groan in protest. To keep the boy distracted, he punctuated these actions with some seemingly innocuous questions.
“So how come you kids are in charge of this house, as if you hadn’t got a father?” The hinge popped all the way out. “Ya!”
Seeing the hinge that had obstinately refused to give in now plucked out as smoothly as a thorn by a tweezer, the boy instantly brightened.