Dust and Other Stories

by T'aejun Yi

  After the arrival of the rabbits Hyŏn did not have a moment’s rest. Once he had fed them and finished all the preparations for the next meal as well, he tended not to quickly wash his hands and go inside. The next mealtime would arrive while he wandered about in front of the cages, and then it would be time to prepare the following meal again, and once that was done he would have to clean their cages. It was evening before he had any time to himself.

  Slowly the long autumn nights began to draw in. Their house was out of the way, and few friends visited in the evening. Hyŏn enjoyed quietly turning on the lamp and breathing in his own world in solitude, even if that was only possible in the evenings. He reread the Western classics, which he had begun reading as a single man in a boarding house ten years earlier. Shining a lamp upon his bookshelves, he would feel his way through the various trends of thought in culture, literature, and the human race more broadly, he would observe the layered waves of modernity, and flush with pleasure as he continued to map out his novel, which he had barely been able to broach as each new trend had first hit and then passed through.

  His library was not large, but Hyŏn could not help but feel awe whenever he leisurely perused his bookshelves. He could appreciate the saying, “To see a thousand years at one glance.” Every day new books appear. Every day new books turn into old books. What had once seemed the pinnacle of human thought, making even the Buddhist canon and the Bible appear colorless, had now faded faster than a book cover. There was the new thing that had followed, and then the new new things that had followed thereafter; two or three ages in thought were neatly arranged on just one bookshelf.

  Relics of old ways of thinking that have passed by! But are those books the only victims? And those authors? If only those books and authors had been sacrificed, then the human race might have lived as harmonious neighbors, but man had always felt the need to roam with the desire for some new and better order.

  Whether for the sake of old things or for what was new, each new current of thought had always produced victims—sometimes many, sometimes few. The greater the significance of the trend, the larger the footprint left behind as it trampled upon part of the population. When he thought about it, material civilization was also the civilization of thought. The rapid dissemination of one thought had brought the rapid termination of another. In the past people might have suffered the chaos caused by a new trend of thought perhaps once in their lifetime, but how many times do we moderns have to live through this? More than once Hyŏn had smiled bitterly as he perused his bookshelves and remembered the words of the Qing poet Erjiao: “In his one life he suffers many lives and deaths.” This was truly appropriate for modern times.

  “In his one life he suffers many lives and deaths … thought is short and life is long …”

  The rabbits increased rapidly, just as everyone had warned. By the time the acacia leaves had turned color, the initial twenty numbered more than forty bustling animals. Hyŏn envisaged this rising to fifty and had bought the timber to build more cages. And then a snag arose. Food. They had not been able to store enough grass and acacia leaves and had ended up relying largely on bean curd residue and dried food, but lately the bean curd maker sometimes skipped their delivery. Today he had again brought only about half the promised amount. And though they were sure to pay in advance for everything, including the delivery fee, the dried food hadn’t arrived either. It was getting harder to procure soybeans, so bean curd production was down; consequently the number of people eating the residue instead of the actual curd had risen, making the residue even more precious than the curd. As for the dried food, that was made up of the husks of mixed grains, but certain grains were now being pounded until they lost 5 or even 7 percent of their weight, so there was no way any husks would be left over. They learned that they had actually been buying last year’s product until recently. Hyŏn’s wife ran about here and there, but even people raising chickens, let alone rabbits, were selling up and taking down their chicken runs.

  His wife walked around with an angry red face, as she did whenever she’d been wronged, but finally she had to relinquish the idea of making a living from rabbit breeding. She set about trying to get rid of the rabbits, even at discount prices. There was no limit to the amount of rabbit skins that could be dispatched in one go, but when it came to live rabbits, the problem of food blocked every path. If they were to kill all forty at once, their home would be turned into a slaughterhouse. Not only did they not have enough boards to dry more than forty skins, but neither of them had it in their nature to pick up a knife and skin even one animal. Hyŏn might well be the man of the house, but he had never even cut a chicken’s throat, and the only time his wife had bought a whole chicken that had just been scalded in hot water, back when they were still living in the shack, she had been so afraid of its glaring, dead eyes that she had to cover them with newspaper before she could wield her knife. As long as the rabbits didn’t increase still further, they would have to dispose of them alive, even if it took more time. This decision meant they had to somehow prevent the rabbits from starving until they could be sold. By this time any kind of soft grass had almost completely disappeared. There were only radish leaves left over in the kitchen and clover to be found outside. A few days before the heavy frosts were due to fall, Hyŏn’s wife suddenly remembered that the sports field at her old school, M Girls’ High School, had always been covered with clover. She walked over the hill to the school, where they told her to come and pick the rampant clover by all means: the lawn was in danger of being swallowed up, even though someone was paid to take care of it. “If you don’t want to go, I’ll do it. How can we let such tiny creatures starve to death when we’re all safe and sound?” Hyŏn looked unconvinced, but his wife’s threat provoked the unbearably pitiable thought of her, heavily pregnant and picking rabbit food in her old school sports field, of all places. He put on his summer wood-stripping hat and rubber shoes, handed a basket to his eldest child, who was just returning from school, and set off over the hill to M Girls’ School in his everyday clothes.

  At the sports field grass and clover were indeed confronting each other in equal numbers all over the place.

  “No one will recognize me with this hat and no jacket … and even if they do, they’ll just wonder what that Hyŏn guy is up to …”

  Classes must have finished because the older girls were showing off their slender legs playing volleyball and riding bicycles around the field. Hyŏn felt as though he had ventured into somebody’s garden and made a point of keeping his head down while he sat off to one side picking clover.

  “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  His son was still standing, distracted by the girls riding their bicycles in front of the majestic school building, which towered up into the sky on the hill.

  “Did mummy go to school here?”

  “Yes … come on, pick this dark grass too …”

  Two students appeared to have heard the conversation between father and son and walked over to them.

  “Who’s your mummy, little boy?”

  His son sniffed and turned away. Hyŏn looked at him. It was the same look he would throw him at home, as if to say “Do not cause a scene.” The boy quietly picked up his basket and began to pick clover.

  “What are you picking this for?”

  “It’s for our bunny rabbits.”

  “Bunny rabbits! You have bunnies at home?”

  “Yes.”

  The students also began to pull at the clover and fill up his son’s basket.

  “Hey, what are you two doing?”

  Another group of students emerged from behind Hyŏn and crowded around. Hyŏn blushed, as if he was also part of the “you two.”

  “We’re looking for four-leaved clover.”

  It turned out they were not gathering rabbit food at all but searching for their own good fortune.

  “Me too, me too.”

  They plunged down into the clover like a flock of birds t
hat had caught sight of something to eat. His head bent, Hyŏn went on picking in the opposite direction, all the while thinking of how his wife, too, must have once walked around the perimeter of this field with a copy of Browning’s poems under her arm, yearning just as thirstily for the happiness promised by a four-leaved clover. The hero whom she had imagined appearing over a blue horizon, along with the fortune brought by four leaves, was surely not the man in a wood-stripping hat picking rabbit food here today. Just as he suppressed a bitter smile, something hit him on the buttocks. Laughter sounded out from across the broad field. A volleyball player standing at an angle from Hyŏn had missed the ball.

  The next afternoon Hyŏn brought his eldest son to the sports field once more. The clover could probably be picked for five more days or so. But a harsh frost that night brought the clover to an early end. It was kimchi-making season, however, and Hyŏn’s wife went from house to house collecting the discarded outer leaves of cabbage and radish. This could not continue for long. With no better idea other than trying to get rid of the rabbits one or two at a time, Hyŏn visited a doctor at the university hospital with whom he was not even particularly close. The man had been keeping rabbits for more than ten years, but these days taking on even just a couple more rabbits seemed to be a worry. On the way home Hyŏn stopped off at a bookstore. Books on rearing rabbits also contained information on how to kill them. They had only read the sections on how to rear rabbits in the book his wife had once borrowed.

  Altogether there were six different ways to kill a rabbit: strangling, stabbing in the heart and bleeding to death, drowning, death by holding the ears and pulling one leg in a certain way, slicing the arteries and bleeding to death, and, finally, striking the skull between the ears three or four times with a hammer so that the whole body would tremble and the rabbit would die.

  Hyŏn returned the dusty book to its place and quickly left the shop, casting a furtive glance at the owner on his way.

  Back home he quickly changed and took out a rabbit. Heavy, soft and warm, with bright eyes and back legs kicking … now that they were old enough to breed, they no longer gave off the sense of being some kind of chemical concoction or delicate gourd flowers. They were beasts: slacken the grip momentarily, or even just pick one up a little awkwardly, and off it would leap into the hills.

  Hyŏn gripped the chest and back legs firmly and walked over to the veranda. His daughter came outside shouting.

  “Hey, daddy’s got a bunny out!”

  His two boys came running out.

  “What are you doing, daddy?”

  “Is he sick?”

  “Can we play with him on the deck?”

  “Isn’t he pretty, daddy?”

  His daughter pushed a piece of bread she had in her hands toward the rabbit’s mouth. The rabbit twitched his whiskers and munched. Hyŏn thought of the six methods of killing a rabbit that he’d read about in the bookstore.

  “What are you doing, daddy?”

  “Go away, all of you.”

  Finally Hyŏn shouted at them. His wife came out of the kitchen. He thought of how she would soon give birth. A chill crept down his spine and he took the rabbit out the back. She followed and asked him what he was doing.

  “Why are you following me around like one of the kids?”

  She did not back off easily. Hyŏn put the rabbit back in its cage. No matter how he thought about it, he couldn’t muster the confidence to strangle it: to tighten his hands on its throat as it struggled, and to keep the pressure up as he looked down at its rolling eyeballs and waited for its breath to stop. But for Hyŏn, who couldn’t bear to watch someone being injected with a needle, it felt even more impossible to feel through the soft fur toward the heart in which to plunge a gimlet; or to plunge it into water when it hadn’t even been caught first in a trap like a mouse; or to hold onto its ears and legs and pull them apart until its spine broke; or to cut the arteries in that throat, which reminded him of his children’s, warm and bouncing up and down; or to sit behind it and beat its brains out with a hammer as it tried to look back. Each thought sent a shiver down Hyŏn’s spine, and for the sake of the fetus now curled up inside his wife’s stomach in the exact shape of a rabbit, he felt he must be punished for even contemplating such acts.

  Once kimchi-making season was over, rabbit food grew even more precious, and they were paying out one won forty or fifty chon every day to buy bean curd and cabbage. Even people were struggling to eat like that. If this continued for just three or four months, they wouldn’t be able to recuperate any more than the money they had spent on food, even if they managed to sell all fifty rabbits at once. And three or four months later the rabbits wouldn’t be their only problem. What with the four or five hundred won they had gone through on account of the rabbits, and then the kimchi making and two cartloads of firewood, there would only be three or four ten-won notes left in his severance envelope.

  “What will we live on?”

  A while earlier, Hyŏn had received a request to write a short story for some magazine. Three or four reminders had already arrived. A measly ten won was not that important, but as he had found it impossible to find the peace of mind to write even a short story, it would be good to just sit somewhere in front of a piece of paper and write. One day he decided to write the story of those “damn rabbits” and stoked up a fire to warm the floor with the firewood. He was hesitating over how to begin, when he heard his wife call out to him.

  “Where are you?”

  He looked out to see her face as white as paper and her two hands covered in blood.

  “What!”

  “Could you fetch some water for me?”

  “What’s all this blood?”

  She forced a smile onto her expressionless face. Her blood-drenched hands were trembling. She had taken a knife and somehow caught and skinned two rabbits. His hair stood on end.

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “We’ve got to do something, haven’t we? There’s another baby coming, isn’t there? Please, fetch me some water to wash my hands.”

  She held out two hands covered in rabbit fur and fresh blood. Hyŏn suddenly recalled an old image of her, placing newspaper over a dead chicken’s eyes before she could wield the knife. A sharp pain hit between his eyes and everything went dark.

  Those ten bloody fingers were asking him for more than just water. He sat down, staring at the distant mountain ridge. White clouds hovered overhead.

  —Shōwa 16 January 11

  Translated from Munjang, February 1941

  THE HUNT

  Han felt anxious. It wasn’t any kind of identifiable illness, nor was it anything a dose of boar’s blood might help. Back in the days when he used to be busy, there was a phrase that he had repeated like a mantra: “If only I could get away from work and quietly write what I want to write, read what I want to read.” Now that there was nothing left for him to take care of, suddenly he yearned for those editorial rooms and classrooms, as if they had amounted to more than mere busyness.

  Feeling at peace was not a matter of resting the body. For a while, he had closed the door and attempted to relax. Sitting beside the sliding panel doors, he would gaze upon the mountain birds perched on the bare branches of the cherry tree outside and try to enjoy the sound of icy snow falling upon the dead leaves, which rolled around his shaded yard. But instead of reaching a state of calm, his nerves had taken a turn for the worse, and now he felt more on edge than ever. This hunting trip had been arranged for a walk in the mountains, designed to soften those taunt nerves.

  He was full of excitement. He was glad to be meeting his old school friend Yun, whom he hadn’t seen in a while. He was grateful for the warmth apparent in Yun’s letter of invitation, which explained that all was set for the lunar new year. Just the thought of the scenes to come brought forth the pleasurable wild passions that lay deep within him: he would walk a country path once again, run across a rugged peak, and gaze up at tall trees whose branches stretche
d out powerfully according to the will of the gods; pheasants would drop from the sky, rushing deer and wild boar would fall, and blood would gush over the white snow like a hot spring; and then afterward, legs would roast in their skin over an open log fire. It seemed that no matter how cultured man had become, a savage yearning always lurked somewhere in a corner of his heart.

  When he disembarked from the train at Wŏlchŏngni, he found Yun waiting with two gunmen, as promised. Yun grasped Han’s hand and eyed him with suspicion, “How would I ever have recognized you?”

  Han, too, had to look his friend in the face for a while.

  “I suppose fifteen years is a long time!”

  They walked out of the waiting room to smoke a cigarette while Han met the gunmen, and then they all crossed over the railway tracks into a fairly wide country road heading to the northwest. The older gunman said that he wouldn’t bother even loading his gun for pheasant season, but the younger one countered that they should at least prepare something for dinner and loaded up his gun before heading off after the dog, Tomu, who was already running down the side of the road, wagging his tail. What used to be wasteland had been developed by the Irrigation Association with the result that the road was fairly wide and even for at least ten ri, and not so much as a quail flew up into the air. During this while, Yun entertained Han with impressionistic yet sincere stories of what might be called a scribe’s view of life and the world. The bottom line was that the common people were foolish, and those who might guide them with moral principles were far away, while those who would do otherwise were far too close and numerous. As a result, it was not easy for people to find happiness. When Yun had first graduated, he had felt a sort of righteous indignation on their behalf, but that had melted away like a snowflake in a red-hot brazier. At some point, he confessed, after living amongst the profiteers in the area for a couple of years, he had grown wise to reality, and because of this he could still feed his family even if he closed his office and took a trip like this for three or four days. He repeatedly sighed while complaining that the townspeople were too superficially clever and the villagers too ignorant and blind.