The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “I don’t know if you know this, but our family has been Christian for generations. You, too, were christened as a baby. Your father was a presbyter, and I’ve become a Protestant minister. A lot of the things we believed in conflicted with the ideology of the People’s Republic.”

  “No, no, it’s not the religion that bothers me—that’s just a relic of the dark days, all that superstition and such. I don’t even care whether you were reactionaries or outright criminals—but, killing people? Why did you kill people?”

  “People hated and killed each other back then. Now even those who survived are dying, leaving this world one by one. Unless we find a way to forgive one another, none of us will ever be able to see each other again.”

  Yosŏp went and sat down in a chair facing his nephew, taking the younger man’s hands in his own. The nephew didn’t pull away, and the uncle continued.

  “Your father thought you were all dead. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you alive and well like this, to know that you’ve made a life for yourself as a part of this society, even joining the Party.”

  His nephew hung his head once more and burst into tears yet again.

  “You have no idea, no idea how much I had to suffer to become a Party member.”

  The next morning, when Yosŏp went down to the dining hall for breakfast, he found All Back waiting to take him back up to the second floor. There, in the same compartment, the supervisor was waiting for them.

  “You met your nephew yesterday—that must have been wonderful.”

  “It was a bit awkward. It would have been better if we’d had a chance to spend the night together and talk more about the rest of our family.”

  The supervisor nodded.

  “We’ve considered that as well. Today we will be arranging an exclusive event for you, Reverend. We’re also looking into the possibility of giving you a chance to see your family again. Perhaps even spend the night with them.”

  Standing beside the supervisor, All Back interjected, “Today, you visit your hometown, Reverend.”

  “My home . . . Sinch’ŏn?” Reverend Ryu Yosŏp found himself stammering.

  All Back went on, “It won’t take more than an hour or so to get there—we now have a highway that runs all the way across Hwanghae Province down to Kaesŏng.”

  “We had a reason for wanting to see you . . . it was decided that we really must tell you something. For the sake of the solidarity of our people, there is one thing you must be sure to keep in mind, one thing you need to understand. The fundamental reason we are divided is the influence of foreign powers. Imperialist Japan and Imperialist America have made us this way.”

  The supervisor held out his hand for a handshake.

  “Go and see for yourself how your hometown has changed, Reverend. We’ll see each other again later.”

  Yosŏp wandered back down into the dining hall and looked around. He spotted the professor between the oval tables that held the morning’s breakfast. Yosŏp went over and sat down across from him.

  “How was yesterday’s family reunion?”

  “I looked for you afterwards, but they said you were meeting your family as well.”

  “Yes, they located my nephew. I heard about my other relatives, too.”

  “That’s wonderful. I feel a little . . . different, now,” said the professor, smiling awkwardly. “Now that I’ve met my mother and my older brother, this whole place is starting to feel rather cozy and comfortable. It’s so much better here than in America—everything there is so different, so alien.”

  Glancing around, the professor lowered his voice. “Reverend, it seems the communists, too, can be quite humane, eh?”

  “Well, of course . . . all men are children of God.”

  As the members of the group finished up their breakfast and began heading back to their rooms, Yosŏp turned to the professor.

  “It looks like I’m going to be visiting my hometown today.”

  “Is that so? My, my, that certainly is special treatment.”

  The two men didn’t discuss it any further. Yosŏp didn’t want to get into any details, particularly concerning his brother, with anyone who wasn’t his flesh and blood.

  They already had a car ready, so Yosŏp simply packed a shirt and some toiletries in a small bag and headed out. September had arrived, but the weather outside, away from the air-conditioning, was still rather hot and humid. The only person waiting in the car was the chauffeur. Yosŏp climbed into the back seat, and All Back got in the front. Once they passed the outskirts of the city, the view consisted of nothing but mile upon mile of vegetable fields, dotted here and there along the edges with clusters of adobe-brick tenement houses. Soon they were entering a four-lane cement highway.

  The highway was practically empty, with only the occasional freight car rattling by. They stopped at a checkpoint on the provincial boundary, and All Back rolled down his window to display some sort of travel permit. Writing something down in his records, the guard let them pass. With no road signs in sight there was no way to know exactly where they were, but after an hour or so of driving the car veered onto a side road. It was a narrow dirt road flanked on either side by fields of sorghum. The car stirred up little dust; the dirt was tightly packed. Not long afterwards a paved road appeared, followed by a street lined with houses and buildings.

  “Can you tell where we are?” the guide asked, turning around to look at Yosŏp. Yosŏp looked out the window and concentrated. The fields went on and on, but as the outline of a mountain off in the distance gradually came into view, he realized it looked quite familiar—it was a shape he recalled, albeit vaguely.

  “Ah, that looks like Kkonme . . . ” he mumbled to himself, remembering the long-forgotten names of the mountains around his hometown—Mount Uryŏng, Mount Hwa. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized that the roads themselves were nearly the same as they had been, too, although the buildings and houses were different. He spotted several men and women standing together on the side of the street. All Back motioned towards them.

  “Stop over there.”

  Following the guide’s instructions, the chauffeur pulled the car over in front of the small group. As they climbed out of the car, one of the men, who had gray hair and wore short-sleeved working clothes, approached Yosŏp. The guide introduced them.

  “Reverend, this is the Party Secretary of Sinch’ŏn County.”

  Assuming the title would be equivalent to that of mayor, Yosŏp made a deep, courteous bow. The man took Yosŏp by the hands, saying, “You’ve had a long, arduous journey.”

  All Back turned towards the old man who stood behind the party secretary.

  “This is the Comrade Director of the museum.”

  The whole company began walking, stepping on each other’s heels as they followed a narrow side path. Eventually they reached a brick wall set with a large gate of vertical bars. Next to the gate was a sign, a square, wooden board that read, “Sinch’ŏn Museum.” Inside the gate, a spacious paved yard was occupied by a couple of parked buses. The museum was a two-story building that looked like a typical Korean school: a front door placed directly in the middle of the façade with straight rows of windows stretching out to the right and left. A pine tree and a tall poplar each shaded a side of the door. Walking into the building, one was presented a view of the staircase that led up to the second floor and a set of hallways on either side that led away to the opposite ends of the building. A quote from Chairman Kim was posted on the wall facing the front door. A woman in hanbok who’d been following quietly behind the director of the museum came forward and bowed to Yosŏp, holding a thin stick with both hands.

  “How do you do? I am the guide who will be helping you with your tour.”

  Reverend Ryu responded with a nod. “Thank you.”

  The female guide held up her pointer, indicating the chairman’s quote, and began to read aloud, “At a certain point in history, Engels identified the British Army as being the ‘mo
st bestial’ of all armies. During World War II, the German fascists surpassed their cruelty. It was said that the human brain could not imagine any atrocity more cruel or more terrifying than those committed by the villain known as Hitler. However, here in Chosŏn, the Yankees actually managed to surpass Hitler and his rogues.”

  With that, the woman turned to the right and employed her pointer once more to explain the nuances of a chart on the wall at the entryway to the exhibition room. The figures she rattled off didn’t really register with Yosŏp but he did hear phrases such as “destruction and burning of private residences,” “destruction of public buildings and irrigation systems,” “destruction of various mechanical instruments and facilities,” “destruction of various means of transportation,” not to mention “looting cattle,” “destruction and looting of farm tools,” and “destruction of farmland.”

  Gradually, the guide’s voice grew louder and higher.

  “During the Motherland Liberation War, the American Imperialist invaders committed the atrocity of manslaughter on a scale so grand as to be unprecedented in the entire history of Chosŏn, thus revealing to the world its bestial nature as a twentieth-century cannibal. The massacre that took place in Sinch’ŏn, as ordered by Harrison the Vampire, then acting commander of the Americans soldiers stationed in Sinch’ŏn, surpassed by far the bloody horrors of Hitler’s World War II concentration camps. The American Imperialist invaders ordered that anything that lived and moved in Sinch’ŏn be buried under ashes, and over a period of fifty-two days they slaughtered 35,383 innocent people—one quarter of Sinch’ŏn’s entire population—in the most cruel and vicious ways. This fiendish atrocity shall never be forgiven, not in a thousand years.”

  Most of the exhibits were made up of photographs, but posters and foreign newspaper clippings from the time period were also pasted up all over the place. A separate group of men and women appeared to be in the middle of their own tour—every now and then a young man could be heard explaining the different exhibits. The strident intonation of Yosŏp’s female guide reached its peak as they reached a box-like display inside a wood-panel compartment on the cement floor. Thinking it was just a heap of miscellaneous objects placed atop a box, Yosŏp moved forward to get a closer look. It was a pile of shoes. The first to catch his eye was a pair of women’s white komusin.28 One of the pair was severed in half, right through the center, and completely discolored—it was now a dirty yellow. A crumpled pair of dress shoes, several shoe heels with rusty nails sticking out of them, tiny children’s black komusin, a single bedraggled black tennis shoe with a broken shoestring, countless telephone lines all tangled into a ring the size of a bracelet, and thick metal wires—their owners no longer existed, and seeing so many empty shoes, shoes that were once worn, made the absence of the dead that much more conspicuous. A cool breeze blew in through the screen in the open window but Yosŏp felt a sudden burst of sweat cover the back of his neck. He fancied that he could hear his heart murmur,I know. . . . They must have dug these things out of the pit. All of a sudden, he thought he heard the faint sound of a violin.

  Endlessly long, hot summer days,

  always you bloomed so gorgeously.

  Beautiful maids, maids pure and true,

  once smiled and played, welcoming you.

  As Yosŏp trailed along behind the female guide, the other tour group was in the process of moving on to the next room. A couple of the stragglers in the group casually glanced back in his direction. In that fleeting instant Yosŏp saw clearly Uncle Sunnam, wearing the shabby, pale green people’s uniform buttoned all the way up to his chin. As if that weren’t enough, the other man turned his head and grinned at Yosŏp over Sunnam’s shoulder—it was Ichiro Illang, his head shaved clean as it had always been. I can’t believe they followed me all the way out here. As soon as the tail of this group disappeared into the next room, Yosŏp began to wonder whether all the tourists in the group might not be dead.

  Trying to catch up to them, Yosŏp quickened his pace, making his way towards the next exhibition room. All Back, who’d been following close behind, pulled him lightly by the sleeve.

  “Reverend, we aren’t through with this room yet.”

  Yosŏp turned back and saw the female guide staring at him blankly, her pointer still held up in midair. The county’s party secretary and the director of the museum both stood quite still, their hands clasped behind their backs. With a foolish look on his face, Reverend Ryu turned again towards the entrance of the room that the other visitors had disappeared into. He asked the museum guide, “Those people in front of us—where did they come from?”

  Bewildered, she asked him back, “Why? Did you see someone you know?”

  “Well, no, it’s not that, just . . . there definitely was a big tour group in front of us, right?”

  Listening to their exchange, the director of the museum cut in.

  “People from all over the country organize group tours to come visit our museum.”

  Only then was Yosŏp convinced that they had actually been real people, visible to others as well as himself. He realized that the war was not yet over in this place. His tongue felt dry. He was thirsty, out of breath, and, above all, anxious. He wanted to find someplace to hide in, to run away to.

  “On October 18, the day that followed the beginning of their occupation, the fiendish American Imperialist murderers enacted the mass slaughter that they had been planning for so long. Locking up approximately nine hundred citizens, including some three hundred women and children, in an air-raid shelter in Sinch’ŏn, they covered the whole area in gasoline and burned them all to death. When we are through here, we will go visit the site of this atrocity. On the nineteenth and the twenty-third, in a trench situated near the air-raid shelter, the Americans killed no less than six hundred people, some of whom were buried alive and others who were, once more, set on fire. In this way, the number of people murdered in the air-raid shelter and in the trench alone amount to approximately 1,530.”

  The exhibits in the next room were largely made up of so-called murder weapons. They had, most likely, been found in the nearby fields and mountains. There were rusty swords, broken M-1 bayonets and pistols, machine guns, M-1 rifles with only the barrels intact, carbines, and helmets full of holes from all the rust. The bayonets were discolored, and the dark red rust on the concave part of the blade made them look stained with blood.

  In yet another room, the female guide showed Yosŏp the bust of a young boy who had refused to disown the Party and paid for it with his own life. There were also photographs of a reservoir where, the guide claimed, people had been drowned en masse, as well as a hot-spring resort where countless women had been raped before they were thrown into a pond and blown up with grenades. Workers at the Sinch’ŏn Rice-processing Factory had been tied to oxcarts and pulled from both sides, tearing their bodies apart. The walls were packed from top to bottom with photographs of dead bodies.

  By the time they came back out the front door where the tour had started, Yosŏp’s shirt was soaked through with sweat. The museum director spoke to Yosŏp: “The air-raid shelter is over there, still exactly the same as it was then. We’ll see that first before we move on to the site of the massacre in Wŏnamni. Then we’ll be done.”

  The blazing sun beat down on the concrete of the museum’s front yard—Reverend Ryu Yosŏp felt as if the heat were sucking up all the moisture in his brain and heart. What different colors he and his brother Yohan must have used as each of them painted their own picture of home, of the carnage. These people have constructed yet a different vision of their own, Yosŏp thought to himself, but it all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together.

  Crossing the street, they walked up to a small mound covered by a flower bed. Facing the building was a green tract of land, somewhat elevated from the rest of the ground, which was topped by a square, chimneylike structure. The guide identified it as an air shaft that connected with the underground air-raid shelter.
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br />   “The beasts poured gasoline through this hole. This air-raid shelter was initially built during the Japanese occupation, but it was also used as Sinch’ŏn’s main shelter during the Korean War. Shall we go in?”

  A single lightbulb hung at the bottom of the steep staircase. The inside of the structure was completely sealed in with concrete. The ceiling was covered in a thick layer of soot and what had once been a latticed wooden pillar in the passageway was now a vertical heap of charcoal. Here and there, the decaying cement wall had crumbled away. “This is the place where nine hundred innocent people were shut up. They all burned to death,” whispered the museum director to Yosŏp from behind. “Look over there, in front of the ventilator. Fingernail traces.”

  Yosŏp saw the marks in the wall. The scratches looked as if they’d been made with a knife or a piece of glass. He spotted clumps of synthetic fibers that looked like clots of burnt hair.

  It grew hotter and hotter outside as noon drew near. Despite the fact that Sinch’ŏn was supposedly quite a large county, not one person was out on the deserted street. It was a busy time of year for farmers—perhaps that was why. As they recrossed the street to return to the car, something fluttered through the air, riding a whisper of a breeze. Trembling, it wavered up and down, finally falling to the ground after sticking for a moment to the side of a building as it slithered its way down. Yosŏp stopped for a moment to take a look. Judging from the big and small letters, it was probably a page out of some newsletter or magazine. That was all, nothing more. The blinding sunlight reached about halfway down the main street of the town; the square cement buildings, the painted blue window frames, and the glass windowpanes, too, were all divided into light and shadow as if pieces had been cut away. In the perfect silence, only certain sections could be seen distinctly, as in a dream, and when a man happened to come into view, walking slowly into an alleyway up ahead, his movements appeared two dimensional, like a figure moving across the monitor of an old video game console.