‘Goodbye!’
‘Farewell!’
Through the window of the train flashed past a dozing man, a traveller eating something, another reading the paper, and someone looking out the station window, each scene accompanied by a whiff of something rotten puffing under Hyoungchul’s nose.
Hyegyoung had gone after the train but then stood still. Hyoungchul’s face disappeared into the dark, and soon, so did the rear lights of the last carriage. She felt all the blood in her body flow to her head. Her knees felt so weak she thought she would faint. Barely managing to stay on her feet, she only then realized that her face was red and that tears were blurring her vision. The streetlights had long tails and everyone that passed her looked like large, shapeless lumps … Seoul without Hyoungchul was a meaningless city to her.
Into her life, once golden with the summer of youth, now fell the first snow of winter.
*
Hyoungchul’s family of four left for Manchuria. The snow that fell the night before blanketed the whole world white. Clumps of snow dropped from bare branches. Sunlight reflected on the white snow with an intensity that pierced the eye. A pair of crows living in the distant hills flew over their heads, looking for food.
It was 130 li from Songcheon to Sugyo Station, where their train departed. Ox-drawn barrows would take them there. They were too ashamed to leave in broad daylight, so they prepared to disappear in the night. There were two barrows, with one to carry some of their furniture and the other carrying the family with the rest of their luggage arranged into the shape of a house. Hyoungchul stared at the two barrows with bitterness in his heart. The image of Hyegyeong’s face flitted past his mind’s eye. Would he ever see the beautiful sight of his beloved homeland again? Hyoungchul played the mandolin as he looked towards the red sunset over the western mountains. Black smoke crept up from the chimneys of the nearby huts covered in white snow.
Hyoungchul’s family got on the barrow and left two wheel tracks behind them, as well as Songcheon. The wind whipped up the fallen snow. Darkness surrounded them. The only thing they could see was the occasional lit window of a house, the cold stars that shone in the dark sky … One of the stars disappeared, dragging a long train. The distant barking of a dog made it all the more bleak.
Hyoungchul lay sideways, trying to calm his complicated thoughts. His father smoked one cigarette after another. His mother and Eunsook sat in silence. They could only hear the clunky sound of the wheels turning, their bodies swaying left and right to the rhythm.
The roosters began crowing by the time the barrow rolled by Jangyeon Village. The houses along the road were deathly quiet. Not a soul was about. They say the world is wide, but there is no place in it for my family to rest. Hyoungchul’s heart sank. They passed the village and went down another quiet road.
Hyoungchul, without realizing it, had taken out his mandolin. He turned to Eunsook.
‘Eunsook, dear! Would you sing for us? A happy song. No sad songs … Do sing us a happy tune!’
Eunsook, innocent and pure, opened her lovely mouth and began to sing. Hyoungchul’s fingers danced across the mandolin strings.
Oh, my brother! Mother is crying
She pats my head as she cries
The money we gathered until our fingers bled
The suited man stole it from us
Oh, my brother! Mother is crying
She pats my head as she cries
The harvest we gathered eating bean paste and millet-rice
The bearded old man stole it from us
Before Eunsook could even finish singing, Hyoungchul threw his mandolin aside. It smashed to pieces. Eunsook, surprised, opened her eyes wide and huddled close to her mother.
‘Why did I bring that damn thing with me!’ he shouted as he shook his fist. ‘What good can it do me now? This isn’t the time for my hands to be dancing. All I have left is to go forward!’
The cold dawn wind sank into his bones. The red sun began rising in the east.
*
(Last summer, Hyoungchul was shot dead in XX and Hyegyoung, due to her involvement in the XX Incident, is currently serving time at XX Prison.)
January–February 1931
The Firing
The master flung open the door to the main room.
‘Can’t you hear me calling for you? Come!’
Kim jumped, almost dropping the rope he was twisting from millet stalks.
‘Hurry!’
Kim scrambled to his feet. He wondered what the master was going to scold him for this time. His heart pounded as he anxiously made his way to his master’s side of the courtyard. The lights in the main room were so bright that they stung his eyes.
‘Sit there.’
Kim crouched down where he was told. His master stared for a moment at the bits of millet stalk in his hair and said, ‘I summoned you to tell you that I’ve sold the field out front.’
The only words Kim understood immediately were ‘the field out front.’ He quickly looked up. The master did not look like he was joking.
‘Don’t go thinking that I really want to sell,’ said the master, ‘but we need the money, and I had no choice.’
Four years ago, the master had run for village mayor and used that land as collateral to raise campaign funds. He thought he would easily get his land back once he won, but there were further expenses as mayor that he had not foreseen. The interest became too much, and he decided to sell the land before he fell in danger of losing it outright.
The explanation made sense, but Kim felt dizzy nonetheless, as if he were falling down a ravine that was a thousand li deep. He lowered his head.
*
Kim had lost his parents at an early age and gone begging from one village to the next until the master’s father, the old master Park, had brought him into the house as a servant. He was put to work in the fields. Each harvest was better than the last, and Kim had cultivated the ever-expanding fields with more dedication and fervour, forgetting that the land did not belong to him. Soon, Park became the richest man in Shinhwa Village.
‘You aren’t my servant, you are my son. You are a foundation stone of my house. What would become of me without you? Once I have enough money, I’ll get you a wife, a house, and a living.’
The old master Park would say this to him time and again, moving Kim to tears. Kim worked tirelessly for Park and now his son, never taking a day off the whole time he lived under their roof.
‘I know you’re disappointed,’ said the young master in the present, his voice becoming thinner and thinner, ‘but this is the situation, and there’s nothing to be done.’
He hated having to take this pleading tone, hated Kim’s dazed expression. He pretended he had not seen anything and brought his pipe to his lips, striking a pose that he fancied as dignified and mayoral.
‘We can’t farm like we used to,’ he said, ‘so you need to find other means of employment, I should think.’
Never let Kim go. If you do, our house will go to ruin.
His father’s words, uttered on his deathbed, brought on a prickling of guilt in his heart. He glanced at Kim. A skull for a face! He would be nothing more than a corpse soon enough. Kim’s coughs sounded like that of a dying man’s. His hacking was so loud that it made the walls of the house shudder, much to his master’s distaste. This abhorrent coughing was acutely embarrassing when he had visitors over from the larger district. It made him want to banish Kim on the spot.
For a moment, Kim was silent from the shock of this wholly unexpected news. There was a burnt spot on the woven cushion he sat on, perhaps from fallen pipe ash, and he rubbed it absently with his thumb. He had a pile of straw in his room that he needed to weave into cushions like this one. His head and hands were acting as if they were of different minds; he forced himself back into the present.
‘Master!’ he blurted out.
&nbs
p; The master raised his head. Tears dropped from Kim’s eyes.
‘Well … say something!’ urged the master after a long pause.
Kim realized that the man who sat before him was not the master of old he had called out to. This was only that master’s son, the one who was pushing him out. Kim lowered his head again and rubbed the burnt spot. The hardened, cracked skin of his thumb showed clearly in the brightness of the oil lamp.
The master took out a five won bill from his wallet and pushed it before Kim.
‘Look. Here is some money for your troubles. There’s lots of work this time of year so you’d better hurry and find a good position before it’s too late. That’s all – I have guests coming.’ The master, not wanting to sit with Kim for another minute, got to his feet. He was ecstatic at the thought of being freed from Kim’s hacking cough.
Kim left the room in a daze and returned to his chamber. He fell upon the pile of straw.
A while later, he was surprised when the master’s daughter, Okseon, slid open the door to his room.
‘Kim! Mother wants you to come and light the fire. Hurry up!’ She jumped up and down like a little bird and skipped into the room. ‘Oh! Good heavens, you’re slow. Come on, Kim, come on. What is this smell? Did you go to the bathroom in here?’ She laughed and dramatically sniffed air a few times more before running out of the room.
Kim wearily got to his feet, took a handful of kindling from the firewood pile, and went into the kitchen. It was dimly lit, and the brass tableware piled up on a shelf gleamed and blinked like starlight. The smell of garlic wafted from every movement of the master’s wife’s apron as she moved busily about.
‘Light the fire for me.’
Her head gave off a whiff of camellia oil. He crouched down before the furnace to light the fire and thought about what his master had just told him. Everything was too dream-like, too unreal. His thoughts were too quick, much like the sparks that grew into a fire in the mouth of a furnace.
‘Kim, what’s wrong with you?’ asked the master’s wife. ‘Are you ill?’
Kim realized the furnace was still dark and he had not put in any of the kindling.
‘If you’re sick, go lie down. The district errand boy will come soon, I’ll ask him for help. Come on, get up.’
Kim got up and went out. The frosty wind cooled his head a little. He sank down in the corner of the yard. He had to leave? Could this really be happening? Or was the master drunk?
He heard the frantic clucking of hens. Which hen were they sacrificing for that night’s party?
He knew each and every chicken they owned. In the morning, he brought out their meal in a gourd and sprinkled it on the flagstones as hens, roosters, and chicks came running towards him, necks stretched out. His heart would swell with pride to see them flock around him as they pecked at the feed. Were any of them hurt? Had any of them been snatched into the air by a black kite in the night? When he saw any were missing, he called out, ‘Gururu, gururu,’ to summon the stragglers. But lately, the district errand boy kept having to kill hens for the master’s frequent parties, and whenever Kim realized this had happened, he would break off his call and feel a jolt of sadness through him that settled into his very bones. The trusting eyes of the hens, his gururu sound that only they seemed to understand! The more the master killed for his parties, the more Kim hated him in a corner of his heart.
Kim got to eat chicken on special occasions when his old master was alive, but ever since his son had taken over, he had not received so much as a drumstick despite the large flock they owned. The new master was more than willing to kill two or three whenever there were guests, not to mention sending some off to people placed higher in the administration, and now the perch in the chicken coop was almost bare.
He began to shiver from the cold. He looked up and saw he had walked up to the shed while lost in his thoughts. There was a hoe in there that was dull, it needed to be sharpened or replaced before it could be used again. Sharpened or replaced. He had thought of asking the master for some money to replace it but had not quite got around to it.
But if he were really being dismissed, then this past summer would be the last time he would ever use the hoe.
‘Sell the field?’ he muttered. ‘Who are you to sell the field?’
There was nowhere for him to plead his case despite his heart being ripped from his body. He could not stand still anymore. He paced. He heard a voice coming from the master bedroom.
‘Heavenly Father, you who knows all and sees all, please bring good fortune on to the mayor’s house. Please let the mayor see the error of his ways and be a true worker for God and let the whole household unite as one family under your name …’
He surmised that the pastor was in the master bedroom with the master’s wife, separate from the party. The master’s wife was crazy with Jesus lately and frequently invited the pastor for large meals, whereupon the pastor would bestow prayers like this one. Kim hated the tone of the pastor’s fervent pleading. He walked away.
This house will fall. The old master would have seen that. He missed the old master, who at least would have understood a tenth of what he felt.
He passed the kitchen and came to his room but did not feel like going in. He went out into the clearing outside the gate. The shadows of bare branches crisscrossed the clearing. Insects sang duets, the songs starting and stopping in pairs. He stood by a tree and crossed his arms.
Where am I supposed to go? Jiandao, where Dog Poo’s father went? This master is a bastard. He thinks nothing of his father!
As if the master was in front of him, he shouted out, ‘You bastard!’
The field! The stacks of straw from the rice and millet! The sight of the bound stacks was enough to make him cry, he could barely look at them. How difficult the crops had been that year!
‘You bastard, this isn’t right, I was the one who kept your household fed. You have lived to this day on the crops I raised with my own hands! The heavens will deal with you!’
He felt weighed down as if there were sacks of water around his neck. He paced the field and kicked over the stacks of straw. The savoury scent that rose from the overturned stacks! When he was gone, they would throw these stacks away or sell them as roof thatching. And what care he had taken to select only the good stalks to bind into stacks. He could have spent that winter weaving good sandals and cushions from them, soaking the straw in water so it would be soft and pliant in his hands.
His throat constricted as he called out, ‘Master!’
The only answer was the rustling of the stacks. He grabbed a fistful of the straw and stood up. The field that spread before him, the field that seemed to embrace the moonlight in its sleep! He wanted to run to it. He had thought the field would always be waiting for him. The sound of the stream flowing by it, the two large rocks at the border … His old master and he had sat many times on those rocks, talking of this and that, building trust and affection. How many times had they sat there eating lunch, how many times had they smoked as his master encouraged him in his work?
But looking back on it now, his old master had been lying to him the whole time. How many of his promises had he really kept?
This question was like a bolt of lightning in his head. He realized he had lived the past fifty years drunk on the old master’s lies. What a waste of his own life!
‘Fine, if you tell me to leave, I’ll leave. I’ll find some other place to live. Bastards!’
He thought of the words the old master had babbled from that hateful mouth. If he were right next to him, he would have slapped him and shouted, ‘You worthless rubbish!’
And what had the old master said when Kim was exhausted from clearing the field of rocks? He had lain next to the stream as the old master had encouraged him with false hopes of helping him make a family and giving him a house of his own. He had been so moved by what his m
aster had promised that he had raised himself up again on his tired knees and continued to haul those rocks. He had run a fever that night and his knee had hurt so much he could hardly sleep, but he got up again the next morning and continued on with clearing that field. All day long, no less. Was that field not cleared by him and him alone?
He shouted into the night, ‘You bastard, you talked and talked but you didn’t give me so much as a handful of that land when you died! You rotten bastard, you’re even worse than your son!’
He shook with rage. There was still a party going on in the main room. He could see by the shadows thrown against the paper screen of the doors that they were dancing inside. He could not stand to be in that house for another minute. He went to his room to pack his things. It was dark and filled with the scent of the dried straw scattered about the floor. He grabbed a box in the corner of the room, tied a bundle of his clothes with rope, tossed it in, and fastened the box to himself with the rope so that he could carry it on his back. He prodded around for his pipe and walked out of the house.
‘Who is that!’
Kim turned around in the dark. He could just make out that the speaker was the errand boy, urinating by the field.
‘Who is that! Show yourself, bastard!’ the boy shouted again.
The cheek of him! Kim was fired up with all the rage in the world, which overwhelmed whatever sense he had left. ‘How dare that bastard sell my field!’
He ran to the errand boy and slapped him hard across the face.
‘Look at this bastard!’ The errand boy jumped on him.
The merry party of drink and dancing continued in the main hall.
March 1935
Vegetable Patch
Subang woke up to the sound of murmurs. She listened closely; her father and mother seemed to be worrying about the household finances. Her eyes slowly closed again, but they opened suddenly at the sound of the wind. She stared at the door.
The Underground Village Page 19