The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Yeong-shik and I accompanied each other to school and went fishing in the streams together. He was a frail child, perhaps from being the youngest, but he would end up taller and stronger than me. We once played at an empty lot that had a stack of railway supports that I lightly jumped over, but when he followed me, his foot caught and he fell, breaking a few ribs. He always tried to keep up with me despite his fragility. Later, I taught him how to swim. After school we used to play in the water under the railway bridge that crossed Siheung River, beside which our temporary school building was located.

  Much later on, when my family had long left the neighborhood, I ran into Yeong-shik as a college student and spent the night at his house. This was because Yeong-shik made an earnest request: he said his house was haunted. His second brother-in-law had been the first to spot the ghost.

  The second floor of Yeong-shik’s house had been assigned to the surveillance division of the police station. On the first was a spare room above the basement, a big room with a built-in closet by a hallway, and a large living room at the front. The second brother-in-law had been sleeping in the spare room when he woke to the feeling that someone was standing over him. When he half-opened his eyes, he saw a woman with an emotionless expression looking down at him. He was too surprised to do anything but stare back. She slowly opened the room door and left. The brother-in-law followed her into the hallway, shouting, but there was no one there.

  Yeong-shik’s mother was the next to see the ghost. The living room was wide enough to have been covered in tatami mats, but it was not heated, so they curtained off a section of it to use as a storage space. One day his mother noticed that the curtain wasn’t fully drawn, so she went to check behind it and saw a woman standing there. His family saw this woman several times.

  By the time I spent the night at his place, the surveillance division had moved out and the second floor was empty. Yeong-shik’s family was also about to move out. He was using that wide second floor all by himself.

  When we were little (around the time of the second recapturing of Seoul), Yeong-shik used to brag about watching the surveillance detectives interrogate prisoners. They would tie their hands and feet, hang them on a pole, put a handkerchief over their faces, and pour water over that. Or they would handcuff a prisoner, sink their hands in a water bucket, connect telephone wires to their thumbs, and pedal the generator. Or twist their fingers with wrenches. I was more curious than afraid, so I kept getting him to tell me about it.

  After I looked around the empty rooms on the second floor, I asked Yeong-shik: “Do you think it’s the ghost of one of the people who were tortured?”

  He nodded, serious. “Probably.”

  We were just beginning the summer vacation of our first year in college, and Yeong-shik would have a few more ghost sightings before the summer was over. He used an old spring bed from a military hospital. He woke up on his side one night to the faint sound of cackling laughter, and right before him was a white hand shaking the bed. Another time, he opened the door to the stairway leading downstairs and saw the woman staring up at him from the bottom step.

  In the wake of the war, the adults’ remorse continued to hurt them, like an open wound. The children felt its impact, too. I remember Yeong-shik’s pale mother who, upon sitting down to any table, even at our house for a cup of tea, would bow her head in prayer. Then there was his brother-in-law, whose face peered out from a window when I went to their house and called his name. With a curt “Yeong-shik is not here,” he glared at me with a cold hostility that somehow stayed in my memory for a long time.

  Tae-gyun was a boy who lived across from the cabbage patch, to the left of our house, in a hanok that shared a wall with the Twin Star Pagoda. The hanok roof was tiled like ours, but the main gate was topped with beautifully curved eaves made of galvanized iron. His grandfather’s workshop was right next to the gate. His father had gone missing during the war; I don’t recall if he was conscripted by the Japanese or kidnapped by the North Koreans. Tae-gyun’s mother was an extraordinary woman, much admired by my mother, who remarked on her demureness and dignity—so different from the Southern women who didn’t hesitate to remarry when they lost their husbands. Her hair was always combed back and secured with a long hairpin. She wore an apron over her black skirt and white top, cooked three meals a day for her widowed father-in-law, and grew her own vegetables to save money. The immature children that we were would complain about her whenever we fell into the pits where she’d buried the compost. Tae-gyun’s grandfather wore his hair in a traditional topknot and horsehair headband, and he carved water buffalo horns. I had been inside his workshop a few times and admired the strange, beautiful crafts on display.

  Tae-gyun was a couple of years older than me, so I called him hyeong, “older brother.” Normally I never dared to question him or pick a fight, but he was the rough type and teased and bullied the younger children when he was with the neighborhood captain’s son, a boy about his age. Once, I was so angry at his teasing, I threw a stone and it hit him bang on the forehead. He came running after me with one hand on his bleeding forehead. I’d just managed to reach the house when I happened to slam into my father who was coming out. “Watch where you’re going, you rascal,” he said, giving me a light rap on the head, and that’s when I saw something odd. Tae-gyun stopped in his tracks, looked up at my father, and his mouth began to tremble. My father gave him a nonchalant glance and went on his way. Tae-gyun started to cry and went back to his own house. At that time, the rules of engagement were that whoever gets a nosebleed or cries first loses, so while I was perplexed by this development, I felt proud of myself, too.

  That afternoon, my mother summoned me outside. I saw Tae-gyun, his eyes swollen and his forehead bandaged, standing in front of our house with his mother. This was unexpected. He was a little too old to be escorted by his mother over something like this. Mother told me to apologize, and I awkwardly said I was sorry. A few years later, my own father passed away when I had just entered middle school, and I began to comprehend why Tae-gyun had burst into tears.

  What I remember best about Tae-gyun was what a passionate cinema nut he was, like the main character from Cinema Paradiso, and I followed in his footsteps. When his grandfather died, his mother opened a clothing shop in Yeongdeungpo Market, and Tae-gyun, an only child, was left to spend all day alone.

  Yeongbo Theater had stood near the market since the Japanese occupation. Another cinema, named the Disabled Veterans Hall, appeared near the railway works after the war, and yet another, the Namdo, opened near the industrial zone. In other words, three movie theaters had appeared within blocks of each other, each changing their movies once a week. Tae-gyun’s mother’s shop was right at the corner of two streets, perfect for movie posters. His mother was given free cinema vouchers whenever a poster was put up, which you could redeem around the end of a run when empty seats became more readily available. Cigarette shops and snack shops that doubled as manhwa comic book outlets also took posters, and often sold their vouchers half-price. Tae-gyun and I saw plenty of movies. I used my occasional allowance to buy poster vouchers from him.

  Once, I had managed to save for a voucher ticket toward Gunga Din, a movie about colonial India that I had much looked forward to seeing, but my mother tasked me with watching my brother until my older sister got home. That was the last day I could use my voucher, and all my careful planning was about to go down the drain. I decided to take my brother with me to the cinema. He was a toddler, about four years old. We had sat down and the lights had gone out for the movie to begin when, scared of the dark perhaps, my brother started to snivel. A man sitting next to me gave him some soda pop to soothe him, but after sucking on it like a milk bottle for a bit, he began crying again. I had no choice but to take him out to the lobby, but I really wanted to see the film. I let go his hand outside the theater, stared fiercely at him and growled, “Go home on your own!” Then I went back to my seat until the end of the movie.

 
; Once it was over, dusk had begun to fall. Only then did I begin to worry whether the little one had managed to find his way home. The path past the busy market and around the rotary would have been complicated for a child. Oh no, what if I’d lost him? I have thought of this many times over, even into adulthood, and the regret still breaks my heart.

  I ran home. Thankfully, my brother had made it, and the sight of the little one asleep with his face toward the wall and his feet blackened by dirt was so pitiful it brought tears to my eyes. Even when my mother hit my legs with a stick and I was sent outside to the yard without my dinner and I was staring up at the stars, all I could feel was relief at the thought of my brother returning safely and the sight of him sleeping soundly.

  I’m not exactly sure when my mother started to be very strict with me, but it was probably after Father moved his shop from Chuncheon to Yeongdeungpo and was consequently home less and less. Before that, I’d taken a month off of school here and there to go spend time with him in Chuncheon, and despite my being a good student, my grades inevitably suffered. There were also students returning from the countryside who were a few years older or had been schooled with relative stability throughout the war, and they got better grades than I did. Sometimes I even fell to the bottom ten of the class. That was when my mother began using the rod. I was still more interested in reading or doing other things than studying. Around that time, I was also caught stealing money from her purse. I was given a thrashing and sent outside the house in the middle of the night. She didn’t let me in until it was almost curfew-lifting time.

  One day I decided to run away from home, like Guk-weon. Unlike Yeong-shik, who went to school with me, Guk-weon had gone to an elementary school near his house before dropping out. He lived with an older brother and his widower father until a stepmother entered the picture. She wasn’t wicked, like in fairytales. If anything, when the children were being beaten she would try to intervene and get hurt herself. Guk-weon’s father would mercilessly punish his sons whenever he got drunk. I’ve been hit by my mother wielding a rubber shoe in her angriest moments, but Guk-weon was beaten with a belt on his back, legs, head, and every other part of his body.

  After running away from his odious father, Guk-weon spent about a year and a half at an orphanage. There, he was assigned to play a bugle to signal wake-up and sleep times. He brought the mouthpiece of this bugle back with him when he returned home and sometimes blew on it, making a thin, sad sound like a baby’s cry. Having read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by then, I thought Guk-weon was just like Huckleberry Finn.

  I planned it all out. White acacia was blooming in the warm May air, but the nights were still chilly, so I found a serge jacket among our winter clothes. At the time only orphanage children wore colorful secondhand clothing; children raised at home wore the black national school uniforms once they reached fifth grade. Mother used her sewing machine to convert American uniforms into good jackets for Father and me. Thanks to her skill, I once had a beautiful pea coat made from one of my older sisters’ long coats. I packed socks and clothes and, in case of rain, a raincoat and a towel. If rucksacks had been the fashion before, now duffel bags had taken over, carried by every adult and child on trips and picnics, later to be replaced in turn by messenger bags. I packed my things in a dark blue weekender, ran home on Saturday afternoon before my sisters came back, and took off.

  I knew my eldest sister was saving up pocket money, so I dug through her bag. It contained a booklet of train times and a red vinyl wallet. Inside the wallet were the stiff bills she had squirreled away.

  I had heard you could see the ocean in Incheon. I didn’t do anything foolish, like try to buy a ticket at Yeongdeungpo Station. Instead I headed for Seoul Station, as I knew from my sisters, who took the tram or used train passes into downtown Seoul, that there were student commuter trains from there to Incheon four times a day.

  In those days the passenger trains were modified freight cars. There were corridors connecting the cars, but otherwise passengers had to get on and off using the wide doors. As there were no windows, the passengers tended to cluster around the doors. I had heard from other children that if you wanted to ride the train for free you needed to stand near the connecting corridors, so that’s what I did. I heard the endless rhythm of the steel wheels going over the seams of the tracks. I avoided the conductors by staying ahead of them and getting off on the platform and moving to a rear car whenever the train stopped.

  As we approached Incheon, I could smell the salt air. Then, when we passed Ju-an, I saw wide tidelands and salt fields. We reached East Incheon Station, the train’s final destination. I followed some other kids my age through the freight exit at the opposite end of the platform. A flock of birds sitting on a grim cement wall took flight. Seagulls!

  I could guess what was beyond that wall. As soon as I passed it, I could see mudflats and the sea beyond. Later, visiting Mallipo Beach in middle school, I looked at the white sands and blue ocean and realized how bleak and dull my first glimpse of the ocean had been; but in that earlier moment, the faint line of water in the distance foreshadowed a new world. Even the cargo ships on the horizon seemed to mock the fact that I was standing still on land.

  How long did I sit there, staring at the ocean? The western sky started to turn orange, and the layers of clouds shifted into different shades and colors. As twilight fell, I instinctively thought of my mother.

  I wandered around the darkening town. I suddenly felt tense and scared. I bought some red bean pastries from a street vendor, went into a market where the sellers had gone home, and found a panel leaned up against a wall in an alley. There were only occasional pedestrians, and the stalls were empty. It stank of fish, but I crawled into the dark, cozy spot behind the panel and curled up. With my weekender as a pillow and my zipper up to my neck, I tried to fall asleep. I could hear the voices of people nearby, the blare of a locomotive in the distance, and the chugging of a ferry engine. I must’ve fallen deep asleep.

  “Ah! What’s this?”

  I heard a woman’s surprised voice; the panel was moved aside and someone was staring down at me. I rubbed my eyes to show I had been awakened from sleep and clumsily sat up.

  The woman, wearing loose trousers and long rubber gloves, crouched down. “Child, who are you? Why are you sleeping here?” She smelled of fish.

  I didn’t say anything but felt her slowly looking me up and down.

  “Where do you live?” When I kept silent, the woman grabbed my hand and tried to lead me out of there. “Fine, I’m taking you to the police.”

  I blurted out: “I have a home. I live in Yeongdeungpo.”

  Later she would explain that she’d guessed straight away that I was not an orphan and that I’d run away from a nice, middle-class home after being scolded. He had a student buzz cut and a beautiful serge jacket and even a duffel bag.

  She asked me if I’d eaten, and when I shook my head, she clucked her tongue as if she’d suspected as much. She had been on her way home after salting some fish she hadn’t managed to sell and storing it under the panel. The fish peddler took one more look at me and, her groceries in one hand and my wrist in the other, pulled me along, saying, “All right then, it’s late, so you’re coming home with me for now.”

  She brought me to a new neighborhood filled with refugees. The shacks built on the hillside were practically stuck together, and the alleys were all twists and turns. Particleboards and boxes from the American army bases had been repurposed for walls, and the roofs were painted with black tar. Large stones sat on the roofs so they wouldn’t fly away in the strong winds coming off the water. There was of course no plumbing or electricity in the whole neighborhood. Many similar dwellings had been built right after the war in my own neighborhood, and, having visited school friends who lived in them, they weren’t unfamiliar to me.

  Somewhere I could smell pike being cooked. Hunger made me more melancholy, and this in turn made me want to go home. Ever sin
ce then, I always think of home when I pass the gladly familiar scent of a fruit shop while traveling in a faraway land, or smell fish cooking over a charcoal fire in the back streets of a poor neighborhood where children run and play.

  The fish peddler had a husband and three children. Her husband was a good carpenter, and he had no shortage of work because there were so many people building houses at the time. But, like many other manual laborers, he suffered from a bad back. Later, when she and my mother became friends and called each other sisters, we came to learn more about their family history. Her husband had hurt his back when he fell off a scaffold at a construction site, and she blamed “that damned drink” for it all.

  The eldest daughter made a stew from the fish her mother brought home. Everyone sat around the tiny table, rubbing shoulders, the stew in the middle accompanied by fresh kimchi that still had green in the cabbage. The lamp on the wall was bright but gave off quite a smell. The fish peddler complained about it to her husband. “I told you to snip the wick! It won’t stop smoking.”

  How delicious the food was! My forehead and neck were sweating. The fish peddler ripped the kimchi cabbage into strips and deposited a coil of it on each of the children’s spoons, and we opened our mouths extra wide to shovel it in. The fish stew was sprinkled with red pepper powder and just one spoonful made the mouth hum with heat.