The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The streetcars were shaped like buses, complete with rubber tires, and were connected to a system of electric wires that hung suspended in the air. They passed by every now and then. Each streetcar was made up of two compartments connected together by something like an oversized accordion. Citizens were lined up at every stop. A truck sped by carrying men and women in work clothes, not one of them standing or sitting, all just squatting there in neat rows, staring straight ahead. A young female traffic officer whizzed by on a streetcar, brandishing her baton. For one fleeting instant, her green uniform and the white face underneath her cap were frozen in the windowpane. She disappeared.

  The city was like a cinema screen; a flat square of life lay out there. Watching it made Yosŏp himself feel as if he were no longer quite three-dimensional. The multitude of people who had created this movie for themselves had singled out Ryu Yosŏp, and they had no intention of ever letting him in, no matter how desperately he tried to climb into the screen.

  That night Yosŏp went with the group to the Kyoye Theater, where they watched a performance that involved all kinds of acrobatics, not to mention somersaults and seesaws, tightropes, balls, horses, and even magic tricks—and yet he remained decidedly unexcited. The buildings, the monuments, the milky light of the streetlamps and all those passersby—they were still all too vivid. He felt as if he had walked into some sort of surrealistic painting.

  A cylindrical aquarium slowly rose up over the round stage, followed by a translucent veil of artificial fog. Inside the cylinder were a number of dancers clad in bathing suits; their undulating movements made the red, white, and blue sashes tied around their waists billow out like fish fins. With the colorful lighting that was projected on them from above, the dancers appeared to be fluttering in midair. As the lights were gradually dimmed and the fog floated further upward, the dancers, too, slowly ascended. Right as they were about to disappear completely behind the curtains that hung above the stage, the lights all went out at once. Immediately, the room was filled with thunderous applause. Then, in that very instant, the hazy figure of a man rose from that darkness. By and by, the figure became distinct, its mouth spreading sideways into a grin. What on earth . . . who is that? Is that the Mole? Uncle Sunnam? The moment passed and Yosŏp found that he wasn’t even that startled. Doubtless he had simply imagined it.

  When Yosŏp, fumbling in the darkness, came out of the aisle between the seats, the female volunteer who’d been standing at the rear of the theater approached him.

  “Where are you going, sir?”

  “Ah, I . . . don’t feel too good.”

  The attendant led him to an emergency exit at the left corner of the theater and cracked it open.

  “There’s an infirmary that way, at the end of the corridor. When you return, come in through this door,” she whispered.

  Out in the corridor, Yosŏp loitered aimlessly for a while before turning in the opposite direction, away from the hall with the bathroom. He ended up in the theater’s spacious lobby. The room was completely empty: nothing but unoccupied sofas and mirrored pillars. He couldn’t quite tell which pillar it was, but someone emerged from behind one of them and weaving his way in and out between the other pillars, cast a quick glance back in Yosŏp’s direction. Without realizing what he was doing, Yosŏp followed the shadow’s trail. Passing the mirrors, Yosŏp ran into countless reflections of his own torso, stopping him in his tracks over and over again.

  Pushing through the big glass doors at the front of the theater I walked out onto the street; a cool breeze enveloped me for a moment before it moved on. I began to stumble down the slope of the cement sidewalk. In the darkness, someone approached me.

  Where are you going? Come with me.

  I turned and saw the white figure of Uncle Sunnam, looking the same as he had so long ago, the year he returned to his hometown. He’d been in his early forties then, and he always wore the people’s uniform with all the buttons and his hair cut short. He was younger than me now, it seemed, but despite my seniority I couldn’t help but feel like a child.

  How come you keep showing up by yourself? What happened to Big Brother?

  I came to see you ’cause Yohan asked me to. There’s something I want to show you.

  He led me past an apartment complex speckled here and there with lit windows and took me out to the riverbank. I went over to sit on a wooden bench underneath the thick willow trees that lined the bank. I could feel Sunnam standing right behind me.

  Now, look. You see? It’s my hometown.

  There appeared a scene of rice paddies and fields stretching out before a ravine where thatched huts sprouted up like tiny mushrooms amid the forests along a mountain ridge.

  That’s the village I used to live in. My real hometown is Changjaeibŏl. It was only after Father lost our land to the Oriental Development Company that we moved to Mŏbaugol as a family of tenants.

  Three oxcarts stand under a ginkgo tree in a vacant lot in the village. A man holding a ledger is shouting—he’s a Japanese officer. Beside him is a Korean agent, one who specializes in dealing with tenant farmers. Big, tough-looking men are emptying one of the houses. The pile of rice that sat in the front yard is carried out in sheaves. They take the dresser and the trilevel chest that Sunnam’s mother brought with her as part of her dowry—everything: the clothes hanging on the wall, the bedsheets and covers. The cast-iron pot cemented to the kitchen floor and even the water jar are emptied of their contents and rolled out. One of the brutes has taken down all the china neatly stacked up in the kitchen cabinet and carries it out in a huge wicker basket. Father tries to snatch back the bedcovers, but then he’s kicked down by the men. Mother is clutching at the basket full of dishes. The agent tears it away from her and pushes her away. Sunnam is ten years old. His eight-year-old brother and four-year-old sister have long since plopped themselves down on the ground, crying their eyes out. Sunnam picks up a stone and throws it at one of the big men. It bounces off his back and falls to the ground. The man turns around with an angry frown on his face and glaring. Sunnam jumps to hide behind the earthen wall.

  Sunnam turned to Yosŏp, Your father managed to secure himself quite a bit of land, but he started out as an agent for the Oriental Development Company, too. You know what an agent does? He raises the taxes that tenants have to pay and he makes them pay for his own tax, and if the tenants don’t obey, he just terminates the contract and transfers their tenant rights to another farmer. The Oriental Development Company and the Financial Union, not to mention the landowners—they liked the go-getters, you know. They’d trade their best agents with each other, so after being transferred to a different area, these new agents could simply refuse to acknowledge the tenants’ claims to taxes they paid the previous year. Sometimes they’d raise the taxes for new tenants, or fix an arbitrary quota for the coming harvest and collect money in advance. Our family had to deal with it all—depending on the season, we would take them the bass, catfish, or carp we caught in our nets, pheasants or a roe deer we’d been able to trap—we even made them rice cakes and presented them with bolts of cotton and muslin. None of it mattered, though. If the harvest was under quota because of cold weather or a typhoon, our tenant contracts would be taken away on the spot. Some of the villagers just filled their stomachs one last time and fled to Manchuria in the dead of night. You can’t blame them, really. The price of rice was about as good as the price of shit, and after you paid off the expense of your irrigation system and fertilizer, what with the fees for Financial Union, you could have sold every last thing you owned and you’d still be in debt.

  In a ravine along the mountain ridge in Mŏnbaugol, dugouts built by tenants who have lost their tenant rights begin to appear, one by one, until one day there are scores of families living there. Sunnam’s family moves in, too. They eat bark off the pine trees, wild berries, and arrowroot. Sometimes they make cakes, mixing millet with the sticky part of the red and white soil they dig out of the earth. Other times, they have so
up with millet powder, mixing it with radishes and greens they find in the fields after the harvest is over. How sweet and tasty the cabbage roots are! They eat anything—bean leaves, bellflower roots, bonnet bellflowers, buckwheat hulls, acorn liquor lees—and when there’s nothing else to be had, they grub up wild greens from the mountains and mix them with water that’s been used to wash rice hulls—it makes a sort of gruel.

  Sunnam continued, One night, my younger brother and I—he’s dead now—snuck out into some bastard’s field. We stole a bunch of sesame seeds that had been covered in night soil. We ate them all. We were sick for three, four days with constant diarrhea. That was actually what sent my brother up to the heavens. We all moved to a construction site along the Chaeryŏng River, and my older sister was sent away to work as a nanny. Within a few years our family was scattered all over the place. I was already twenty years old by the time I ended up working for your folks.

  I was born the year after Uncle Sunnam came to work for my family, so that would mean that he was our handyman for about five years. By then, Yohan was already about ten years old. Sunnam disappeared later, some six years or so before liberation. I can still remember Sunnam carrying me piggyback on the path we took home from the marketplace. His back was solid, firm as a wooden plank, and his sweat-soaked cotton top smelled something like burnt pine needles, or maybe the kind of moss that gathers on rocks. The moon had risen early, hanging a span or two above the village hill, and his song floated out amidst the white reed blossoms and eulalias as they swung gently with the breeze along the stream:Bellflowers, bellflowers, bellflowers,

  In Kŭmsanp’o, Ŭnnyul, white bellflowers—

  Just one root and the basket’s overflowing,

  Ehe ehee heya eya,I say—diyarah

  The sight of you melts my heart.

  If Sunnam hadn’t returned after liberation, he might have remained a total stranger to me. Yohan, though, would have remembered him. He was already nearly grown, old enough to follow the field hands around and frequent the village sarang.

  It was all thanks to Mr. Kang that I was finally able to leave Presbyter Ryu’s house. Mr. Kang was one of those intellectuals, and he’d come home a few years earlier from Manchuria—his health was terrible. His family was pretty well-off. They used to run a Chinese medicine shop in town, but then they all turned Catholic. The whole family kind of fell apart when the brothers left for China to work for the Independence Movement. Some say that Mr. Kang himself went to Manchuria to join the Independence Army, but the point is that the man practically had one foot in the grave when he finally came home. He had tuberculosis. He was just about to keel over, really, but his father and his wife—they’d stayed home to raise the children—they took real good care of him. They gave him Chinese medicine and brought him back to life. When he finally got better and could leave the house again, he turned the old Union warehouse into a night school. Young men who’d never even seen a school and little kids—they were the first ones to attend. They learned han’gŭl27 there, and hearing them all read out loud made me so jealous I actually got myself a seat in the back row. He never specifically said we should strike down the Japanese beasts, not in so many words, but I learned phrases like “the world of the proletariat,” “equality,” and “capitalists and landowners.” I’ll tell you, though—I didn’t quite know what those phrases really meant at the time.

  Come to think of it, Kwangmyŏng Church, the church my master’s family went to, was a place someone like me wouldn’t dare go near, not once. Those who had families, even if they were tenants, invited or persuaded each other to attend, and some of them became regular churchgoers. A hand like me, though, and the other servants—we just worked all year round, filling up our spare time with chopping wood, feeding cattle, or baling hay. All we could do was listen to the hymns or the bells tolling in the distance.

  I left Ch’ansaemgol and moved out to Ŭnnyul because of a fight with the Union. All the big landowners in the county had gotten together and formed this so-called Union, and their agents would handle the tenant contracts any old way they pleased. They had full control of all the farming expenses and tenant fees, and the landowners just managed the Union to their own advantage, taking a heavy commission. In Ŭnnyul they had to form a Farmers’ Mutual Aid Association because it was so bad—and since all the land was owned by the Company, all the tenants could unite without any internal conflicts. In our village, led by the people who’d gone to Mr. Kang’s night school, we set up our own mutual aid association, modeling it after the one in Ŭnnyul—but the Union bribed and threatened our members, one or two at a time, and pretty soon everyone left. It all came to nothing. I was sick and tired of living in that kind of place anyway and planned to move to Ŭnnyul to find some work, but then their Mutual Aid Association got rounded up. All the members were dragged all the way up to Haeju and . . . punished. Severely, for two months. They were all crippled and maimed when they finally came home.

  Anyway, the comrades I’d befriended in Ŭnnyul introduced me to a subcontractor in the mining industry, and the whole lot of us ended up going to work at Kŭmsanp’o. The work was hard but living with friends, eating, and sleeping together in the barracks—it was ten times better than living alone in somebody else’s house as a servant. Right before liberation, all of us, not just the miners but the Japanese foremen, too—we were all having a hell of a time. Everybody was so tense that we’d frighten ourselves with the sound of our own breathing. Still, those first three years I spent there—those were the days. The blood in our veins boiled back then, hot and wild. Once every ten days the Workers’ Bulletin would circulate through the barracks, and a kid would come by to explain what was in it. Just like the weekly church bulletins, they were printed on cheap, coarse paper with a mimeograph machine. Through those bulletins I learned words like “socialism” and “class.”

  On Liberation Day, I was coming out of the mine shaft with my fellow workers to have lunch—we were riding in the cart. The bell started tolling like crazy, and the Japanese foreman came out to stand in the yard, waiting for us in front of the office. The bastard mumbled, suddenly all humble, not at all like he used to be, and said that the mine was closing, that Japan had lost the war. Some of the men jumped up and down, shouting hurrah, hurrah, but most of us just stood there, bewildered, then slowly wandered back to the barracks. The subcontractor was there, handing out chits and telling us to go to the office to exchange them for money. He said that he, too, was leaving for good. I turned to a comrade who used to read the Bulletin with me, and said, “This mine, the rice paddies, the fields—all of it—it belongs to us now.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Startled, Reverend Ryu Yosŏp recoiled and looked around. He had been sitting on a bench by the riverside. The owner of the abrupt voice had come up from behind, but now he was coming around the side. He sat down next to Yosŏp. It was the guide, Mr. All Back.

  “Ah, well, you see . . . I wasn’t feeling very good, so I came out for some fresh air.”

  “You’ve come quite a distance to get your fresh air, haven’t you?”

  Yosŏp didn’t respond, turning instead to gaze quietly in the direction of the river. The hill beyond the far bank was thick with willow trees and covered in darkness, but the walkway along the water’s edge was bright enough thanks to the intermittent streetlamps. A man and a woman walked by, discussing something with their heads hanging low.

  “Let’s go. Everyone’s been waiting.”

  Pressured by the guide, Yosŏp got up from the bench. As they walked up onto the sidewalk, he could see a car waiting, its headlights on. Yosŏp got in the back seat—All Back had opened the back door and held it for him—and the guide took the passenger seat. As soon as Yosŏp got inside, Fatty, who’d been waiting in the car, spoke up.

  “We’ve been very worried about you.”

  “But why?”

  Fatty’s good-natured face looked even more bloated as he laughed, his eyes looking pretty mu
ch closed.

  “Reverend, you must try to understand our society. I guess this is what they call liberalism. You are a tourist, and you came here with a group.”

  All Back turned around in the front seat and added, “We’ve been circling round and round this whole area looking for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Yosŏp.

  He meant it.

  4

  From One Generation to Another

  THE SURVIVORS

  YOSŎP GOT UP LATE the next morning.

  He’d spent the whole night tossing and turning.