The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “What do you think about ghosts?”

  The question had neither head nor tail. A presbyter asking a minister’s opinion on ghosts, of all things! Of course, Yosŏp knew that his older brother was asking him about phantoms, not demons.

  “They appear in the Bible many times. That is, the possessed do.”

  Yohan lowered his voice, as if someone listened nearby.

  “I’ve seen ghosts. Many, many times.”

  “This is talk I haven’t heard before.”

  “I just never told you. Even in Seoul I saw them every now and then. Then, all these years in America, they didn’t show—not once—but now they’re back again. Ever since Ansŏng-daek1 died.”

  Ansŏng-daek had been Yosŏp’s sister-in-law. She was Yohan’s second wife, the woman he married after he crossed down into the South by himself, the woman with whom he had lived in America until three short years ago. Not once had Yohan ever referred to her as “your sister-in-law” or “my wife.”

  “You don’t go to church these days, Big Brother, do you?”

  “Look, just drop it. The festive mood rubs me the wrong way. Those people just muddle through the church services—their hearts aren’t in it. All they really want is an excuse to use the chapel to drink tea, eat food, and brag.”

  “That’s just the way they do things here. Do you still pray?”

  “Sure. I pray and read the Bible everyday.”

  “That’s good. It so happens that I’ve been visiting with church members today. Why don’t we hold today’s service here in the house, Big Brother?”

  “Did you bring your Bible and hymnbook?”

  “I’ll go get them from the car.”

  “Don’t bother. We’ve got mine, Ansŏng-daek’s and even the kids’—we have sets to spare.”

  They began. Yosŏp opened the Bible and began with a passage from 2 Corinthians:Now I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance; for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us; For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point you have proved yourselves guiltless in the matter.

  Trying his best to ignore his brother’s presence, Yosŏp began his sermon.

  “We left our home forty years ago. Despite the unhappy events we faced there, we left because our faith allowed it, because our belief in the Lord taught us that we would find a new place, a place to build a heaven on earth. War was waged in our home as we left. Many, many innocents died. To live, people killed and were killed. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds his people of the promise made to their ancestors regarding the land of Canaan. He delivers the law, teaching them how to win a life of victory in the land of promise. They said, Jehovah, let all the enemies of the Lord face this same end. Do not pity them or offer them promises, only annihilate them all. And yet, Jesus taught love and peace. I say again—those left behind in our hometown had souls, just as we do. It is we who must repent first.”

  His reading glasses on, his Bible open, and his head down, Yohan seemed to be making a valiant effort to sit through the service. Yosŏp went on to speak of the peace that came with old age and what one must do to endure loneliness.

  Unable to bear it any longer, Yohan cut short Yosŏp’s mumbling.

  “Well now, how about a . . . why don’t we sing a hymn?”

  His voice, piercing and powerful as he sang, hadn’t changed a bit.

  A mighty fortress is our God,

  A bulwark never failing;

  Our helper He, amid the flood

  Of mortal ills prevailing.

  For still our ancient foe

  Doth seek to work us woe;

  His craft and power are great,

  And armed with cruel hate,

  On earth is not his equal.

  Did we in our own strength confide,

  Our striving would be losing;

  Were not the right man on our side,

  The man of God’s own choosing.

  Dost ask who that may be?

  Christ Jesus, it is He;

  Lord Sabaoth His Name,

  From age to age the same,

  And He must win the battle.

  The hymn complete, Yohan took charge and began the final prayer that would bring their little service to a close. He didn’t mention a word about his younger brother’s upcoming journey. He did pray, however, for the health of his children and of Yosŏp—even that of his sister-in-law. He then added abruptly, “Please protect the souls of my wife, of Daniel, and of my daughters, and help me to join them in the Kingdom of Heaven. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.”

  With that, the two brothers finished their family service.

  It is around supper time so the air hanging low above the thatched roofs of the village and out over the alder forest on the hill is thick with the smell and smoke of fresh pine twigs set ablaze. Bluish tints still cling to the sky, but darkness has already begun settling in all around, hugging the earth. I’ve just finished up my business in the outhouse next to the hedge-gate and am about to pull up my pants. I can see the itsy-bitsy apples dangling from trees in the orchard and can just make out a cabbage field straight ahead of me. A boy is running towards the orchard, leaping over furrows in the field. He jumps over another. If he keeps it up, he’ll squash all the cabbages for this winter’s kimchi.

  Hey you! What do you think you’re doing!

  Uh . . .

  Oh, it’s you, Yosŏp. Get on over here.

  Realizing it was my younger brother, I slowly make my way towards him.

  Turn around. Let me see. What have you got there?

  I snatch up the bundle he has hidden behind his back and open it up. Out comes a gourd containing some cooked rice and a little china bowl filled with pickled radish and bean paste.

  I just brought it out to eat with my friends while we play.

  You little brat—tell me the truth! Where are you taking that food?

  Big Brother . . . this is a secret just between us, okay? Promise you won’t tell.

  I didn’t think much of it at first when Yosŏp came by and started talking about Ch’ansaemgol. Let me see, I wondered. Where was Ch’ansaemgol again? But then he started in with the let’s-have-a-service, let-us-repent, Commies-have-souls-too spiel, and so on and so forth, and later, after he finally left, I suddenly remembered the dead villagers. Out of all of them, Illang’s face was clearest—and he looked exactly the way he did back then. He’d been approaching forty. If he were still alive, he’d be over eighty by now. I had that bastard’s nose pierced with an electric wire, and we dragged him all the way to town.

  The TVwas off. Slowly, stealthily, the face of that son of a bitch, Ichiro, began floating up out of the black blankness of the screen. It was the same face that had gradually come back to life so long ago, the one that slowly regained consciousness after I cracked his skull with a pick handle and knocked him out. The wretch must have been strong as an ox, no doubt about it—I hit him on the temple, right above the ear, and it didn’t even take him that long to wake up.

  Eyes out of focus, he sat back on the ground and swayed his upper body back and forth, as if his head felt too heavy.

  Get up, you stupid piece of shit!

  I struck him again, this time on the back, again with the pick, but Illang just kept on swaying. He wouldn’t fall flat. Ready to burst with rage, I put a bullet in my pistol, cocked it, and placed the muzzle against his blood-drenched head.

  You son of a bitch, you took our land—thought you’d be Party chairman for a thousand, ten thousand years, didn’t you?

  I was right about to pull the trigger when the boys stopped me and said we should really take him to town for investigation. So I ordered them to pull him up by the armpits to get him to h
is feet, but the bastard suddenly rose by himself, mumbling, Believe in the God of Chosŏn2 . . . .

  Goddamn bastard. Still have breath to spare, eh? An illiterate fool, but now that you’ve listened to a couple of lectures you talk ready and smooth, is that it?

  That very face from that very day—that was the face reflected in the blank TV screen. Not that I found it particularly frightening. Faces I could recognize never did scare me as much. I asked Yosŏp what he though about ghosts, but his answer wasn’t good enough.

  A long time ago in Chinatown, I saw a shadow play at a Chinese pub. It was built along the same lines as the revolving lanterns we had back in the old days, but this device involved the addition of a painted scroll that slid back and forth in front of the light. At night, when I lay in the upstairs bedroom, the window facing the street lets in a faint light, and the headlights of the cars that speed by shine in, touching the ceiling in a flash before they fly away. Depending on the speed of the car and the size of the headlights, the shape of the reflection on the ceiling varies. Even with my eyes shut, I can feel the movement. That night, dozing off and on, in that strange place between wakefulness and sleep, I was awakened by the sirens and red blinking emergency lights of a passing ambulance. Clustered around the foot of my bed, I saw them, a group of people looking down on me. They came in every shape and size: Chungson’s wife, always out and about with one breast hanging low under her chŏgori,3 constantly jiggling the baby on her back as it slipped down her hip; the female elementary school teacher who used to live above that store at the mouth of the village; a fiddler with bobbed hair in a People’s Army uniform; the six little daughters of Myŏngsŏn’s family; and so on. Anyway, they were all women and they all just stood there. They stood with their backs to the window, and because of the darkness I shouldn’t have been able to recognize their faces—but somehow I did. I recognized them at once. I caught myself mumbling aloud in spite of myself.

  “I speak in the name of the God Jehovah! Away with you, Satan!”

  And with that, I was wide awake. The mattress was soaked in sweat where my back had touched the bed. It was a pain, but I was so thirsty that I went downstairs to the kitchen. I turned on the light above the steps, but the living room remained completely dark. Whenever I climbed up or down the stairs, I was struck by the thought that no one should ever live in a two-story house in their old age. Meanwhile, I’d developed a habit of stretching my stooped back and pounding it a couple of times every time I reached the first floor. While stretching at the bottom of the stairs that night, I thought I saw someone sitting on the sofa in the darkened living room that faced me. I let it be and went to the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator. The light came on. I was gripping the plastic water bottle and taking it out of the door rack, when I was so startled that I almost dropped it entirely. An eye was staring up at me. Hey, you, what are you looking at? A fish head left over from lunch. The croaker’s gills were a little blackened from being fried, and only the sockets were left—no eyeballs. Slowly, deliberately, I closed the refrigerator door and turned to walk back toward the living room. That’s when I saw the thing still sitting on the sofa.

  Who are you?

  The black thing answered, its speech thick, hoarse, It’s me. Don’t you know me?

  Who are you, I say.

  In a voice that sounded caked with charcoal, it said, I’m the mole that used to hang about Ŭnnyul.

  “Uncle Sunnam?”

  Forgetting everything for the moment, excited and delighted, I quickly flipped on the light. The cat was out enjoying its nightly excursions, and there was nothing in the living room except for the furniture and TVset. In a corner near the hallway stood the wooden coat stand carved in the shape of deer antlers. Only then did my legs go limp. Sunnam had been about ten years older than myself, which would have put him somewhere in his mid-thirties back then. He worked in Ŭnnyul as an excavator in the Kŭmsanpo mines until he returned home after Korea’s liberation from Japan. He was good at singing and gambling, and when it came to drinking he’d always been one to do it by the barrel. In the winter of that year, I finished him off. In those days, there was a utility pole that stood at the crossroads where the thoroughfare leading into town from Ch’ansaemgol met with the farm road. It was to that same pole that I eventually had Uncle Sunnam’s neck hanging by a wire.

  Word came that the list of names had been announced by the Office of Representatives. The Reverend Ryu Yosŏp met Mr. Kim at a shabby diner in Manhattan. The junky old air conditioner was making a huge racket, but the table directly underneath it was the only one available. Mr. Kim, like Yosŏp’s older brother, was an elderly man approaching seventy. He’d been a journalist in Korea, he said, before he immigrated to America, but for someone with that kind of occupation he didn’t seem quick enough. He took an envelope from his wrinkled briefcase and placed it on the table. Rummaging through it, he produced several pieces of paper.

  “Let’s see, this one here is your invitation, Reverend Ryu Yosŏp—and now, take a look at this.”

  Yosŏp glanced down at the document he’d been handed. The title printed along the top, “Homeland Visitors Group: Approved Applicants,” caught his attention.

  “I see that it’s no longer the ‘Reunions for Separated Families’ program.”

  “Oh, yes. You see—well, they had some problems with the ‘Reunions for Separated Families’ project, so they no longer call it by that name. They now use names like “Homeland Visitors” and “Tour Group” instead. In any event, Reverend, I seem to remember that you never did submit a list of family members you hope to find.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, it’s not too late. As long as you make the request here, there’s always a way to get around the red tape once you get there . . . and you also need to fill in the name of your hometown.”

  Yosŏp hesitated a moment. He was in a difficult spot. Identifying his hometown as he set off to visit the North would hardly be advisable, and yet without doing so it would be impossible to find out what had happened to his relatives.

  “So, where is your hometown again?”

  Ballpoint in hand, Mr. Kim peered at Yosŏp over his reading glasses.

  “Pyongyang . . . it’s Pyongyang.”

  “Where in Pyongyang?”

  Yosŏp blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

  “Sŏn’gyori in Pyongyang city.”

  “And the address . . . ?”

  “Well . . . the address I can’t remember, but once I’m there I’m sure I’ll be able to recognize the place.”

  “Yes, of course, of course. It’s been over half a century, after all. Leaving the street address blank shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Collecting the various papers and his plane ticket, Yosŏp paid Mr. Kim a lump sum to cover the airfare, travel expenses, and service charge.

  Yosŏp called his older brother as soon as he got home. The phone rang for a long time before Yohan finally picked up. His voice was calm and rather subdued.

  “It’s me, Big Brother. What took you so long to answer?”

  “Um, I was sleeping.”

  “What are you doing at night that you should be sleeping now?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get to sleep at night these days.”

  “You should read the Bible, pray, and go to sleep.”

  “Why did you call?”

  “Ah, yes. How was Daniel’s name recorded in the family registry?”

  “Well, I imagine it would have worked the same way as yours—we called you Joseph when you were young, but changed it to Yosŏp in Chinese characters for the official records. Likewise, Daniel’s name should just be Tanyŏl. Ryu Tanyŏl.”

  Yosŏp told his brother that he understood and was about to hang up when he was seized by the urge to add one last thing.

  “Big Brother, do pray to God for forgiveness. Then the dead, too, will be able to close their eyes in peace.”

  “What did you say!”


  Yohan began to shriek. Considering how poor his health had been of late, it was a wonder where so much energy could possibly have come from.

  “Why should I beg for forgiveness? We were the Crusaders—the Reds were the sons of Lucifer! The hordes of Satan! I was on the side of Michael the archangel, and those bastards were the beasts of the Apocalypse! Even now, if our Lord were to command it, I would fight those devils!”

  “Brother, disputes between the powers that be are different from those among men in this world.”

  “Nonsense! The Holy Spirit was upon us back then!”

  With the resounding crash of a receiver being slammed into its cradle, the line went dead.

  Three days before he set out for the land of his birth, Yosŏp had an odd encounter.

  It started raining in the afternoon. Judging from the fierce way the raindrops were slamming against the windowpane, it didn’t look like the kind of rain that planned to stop any time soon. The sheets of rain thinned out a bit as night fell but showed no real sign of letting up.

  A call came from New Jersey. It was the minister of the church that Presbyter Ryu Yohan attended. He was young, the graduate of a first-rate seminary, and because his family had immigrated when he was still a child, his English was fluent and his sermons sophisticated. He was named successor and brought to the church when the previous minister retired and moved to Boston to be with his children. Ryu Yohan had served with the old minister for decades as a presbyter and continued to be revered for his long-standing service. For some reason, however, he and the new minister were simply not compatible. Gradually, Yohan lost heart with the whole institution and, as Yosŏp had been told during his last visit, became fed up with the Western way in which the church was run. Yosŏp, on the other hand, had studied for a second degree in the States. So despite the fact that he had actually been ordained in Seoul, he understood the young minister and had a favorable opinion of him and his ways.

  “Something . . . something awful has happened to Presbyter Ryu.”

  Anticipating what might be wrong, Yosŏp made an effort to calm his voice.