The Underground Village

by Kang Kyeong-ae

  The rain mixed with the wind whips him mercilessly. The sound of the trees shaking and water roaring through the irrigation canals assaults his ears. Leaves shaped like blue birds float and spin along with clumps of straw on the waters of the canal.

  His drenched clothes are plastered to his skin, and he can barely breathe because of the wind. He looks about for shelter, but every house has its door firmly closed with only morning smoke coming out of their chimneys. He looks for an empty house or rice mill, but none are in sight. He keeps thinking that the dog is running up behind him. His trouser leg is tattered from the dog’s attack, his yellow leg clearly visible, and the rainwater gathering on his straw hat is dripping down to his lips like teardrops. The sudden thought of Big Girl’s fabric getting soaked makes him want to bawl.

  He stops in his tracks. The rain is so thick he cannot tell mountains from falling water, and through the dancing crops, he hears a deep, loud sound like that of a growling beast.

  His heart wants to go forward more than anything, but his feet refuse to move.

  He is two or three houses away from leaving the hamlet altogether. He turns around but keeps looking back at the fields beyond, reluctant.

  This is not the first time he has been chased by a dog, and often enough he had to bear the abuse and insults of people, but for some reason this time he is enraged.

  ‘Hello, friend. What are you doing over there?’

  Surprised, Chilsung looks towards the little shed that he is standing next to and discovers it is actually a millstone hut. The man looking out at him seems about forty or fifty. He’s a cripple like me, thinks Chilsung. The man smiles. Chilsung has searched for shelter for a long time, but the sight of the man makes him hesitate. In the end, he goes in. It smells of rice husks and horse manure.

  ‘Hurry in, your clothes are wet.’

  The man gets up with the help of a walking stick, straightens out the mat he is sitting on, and sits on the edge, bidding Chilsung to take his place. Chilsung stares at the white strands in the man’s beard and hair. He is scared that the man wants to steal what he has begged.

  ‘You’re going to catch a cold. I can lend you my old clothes so you can let yours dry.’ The man digs through the bag at his side. ‘Here we go. Come here.’

  Chilsung stays where he is. It is a black suit, worn in places. What luck he must’ve had, getting that suit, I wish I had a suit like that. Chilsung feels strange, and he looks into the eyes of the man. He does not look like the kind of person who would steal his begging sack. Chilsung bows his head and looks at the raindrops dripping from his sleeve. The man gets up again and moves closer to him with the help of his walking stick.

  ‘Why are you standing there? Here, put this on. You don’t want it?’

  Chilsung takes a step back and eyes the suit jacket. He does not know why, but his heart beats fast at the sight of this thing he has never worn in his life.

  ‘My! Such stubbornness, my friend. Then sit down, at least.’

  The man takes him by the hand and sits him down on the mat by the millstone. Chilsung takes care not to stare at the man’s lame leg.

  ‘Did you have breakfast?’

  Chilsung wonders if the man thinks he has just begged food from somewhere. He looks at his sack, which is soaked and dripping.

  ‘No?’ The man is silent for a moment. ‘Poor thing. You ought to eat something.’

  He seems to think for a while before rummaging through his bag again. ‘Here. It’s not much but take it.’

  The man opens a small package wrapped in newspaper and holds it out to Chilsung. It is a few mouthfuls of stale rice and millet.

  At the sight of the food, Chilsung’s appetite comes back in a wave. He reaches out for it, but his hands do not listen to him. They shake uncontrollably in the air. The man understands and holds up the package nearer to his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s not much.’

  The man’s kind apology makes Chilsung feel ashamed of himself. He lowers his gaze, tries to breathe in his snot, and places the package on his knees. He licks off the rice. He can smell the newsprint and the savoury taste of the old rice, more savoury the more he chews. The more he eats, the more he cannot help thinking it is not enough. He feels the gaze of the man on him and looks up.

  ‘Slow down!’

  Chilsung detaches his mouth from the paper and gives an open-mouthed smile. The man smiles back, but then he notices Chilsung’s leg.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’

  He bends to take a closer look. Chilsung is made aware of the pain and looks himself. The end of his trouser leg is drenched in blood. Bright red flows from a wound near his ankle. He suddenly feels unwell. He curls his leg and lifts his head. There’s a faint smell of wet dog.

  ‘A dog did that, right? You must’ve gone to that house with the black roof tiles ... Those bastards keep a horrible dog! Huh! Those rich bastards are all alike. Come on, give it here, it looks bad.’

  The man pulls Chilsung’s leg towards him. Chilsung quickly retracts his leg, but even as he does so, a vague anger runs up his back and makes him tear up. The man sighs and pats his back. ‘Friend, don’t cry. Come on, no tears. Look at my leg. Whole when I entered the factory; now bitten in half by a machine.’

  Chilsung stares at the man, his eyes full of rage. He looks down at his wound, and it makes him feel a tightening in his chest. He lowers his head again and grabs a fistful of soft dust and smears it on his wound.

  ‘Oh! You mustn’t do that!’ The man grabs Chilsung’s hand. Chilsung smiles like a child and speaks.

  ‘W-will this help?’

  ‘No, it won’t! Don’t ever do that again. If you have no medicine, it’s better to do without. It can get worse, and you can get sicker.’

  Chilsung, somewhat rebuffed, curls his leg towards him and looks out. The man is also lost in thought.

  The rain blows into the hut and the countless broken spider webs dance in the rafters like smoke. The branches of a willow tree sway, and a stream of red, muddy water babbles by. Chilsung glances over his shoulder to see the large wooden handle of the millstone, silent and solid amidst the cacophony around them.

  ‘Were you born a cripple?’

  Chilsung lowers his head at the man’s question and hesitates before answering. ‘N-no.’

  ‘Then it must’ve been a sickness. Did you try any medicine?’

  Chilsung hesitates again as if finding it difficult to speak. ‘N-no, I d-didn’t.’

  ‘My! I suppose they’re breaking healthy legs now, much less giving medicine for babies …’ The man laughs at nothing in particular. Chilsung shivers at the sound of his laughter and secretly gives him a look. The man’s eyes are wide open and scary, and a blue vein stands out on his forehead.

  ‘Damn it all. Why was I so foolish? If I had the chance again, I’d do it even if it killed me. Why was I such a fool? Damn!’

  Chilsung pays close attention to what the man is mumbling, but he has no idea what the words mean. The man turns to Chilsung. The bags under his eyes remind Chilsung of his dead father.

  ‘Look, friend, I used to have a family of my own. I was a master mechanic in a factory. Yes, a master mechanic ... Since that machine bit my leg and I was fired from the factory without any compensation, my wife ran away, my children are hungry and crying, and my parents have passed away ... My, but what use is there in talking about it? Who do you think is responsible for our suffering? The heavens? Or ourselves?’

  The man gives Chilsung a hard look. Chilsung doesn’t know why his heart is suddenly beating faster and why he can’t look him in the eye. He looks down at the man’s broken leg instead and the silent earth beneath it.

  ‘It isn’t our fault. We have to know who did this to us ... The bastard who broke my leg, the bastard that made you a cripple, who do you think it is? Do you understand me? Friend, do you un
derstand?’

  His words are like jolts of pain at the ends of Chilsung’s bones. Chilsung has only blamed himself his whole life, but now the man’s words seem to flicker in that darkness of his self-loathing. It is too much, and he feels dizzy. He raises his head to ask a question, but no words come forth from his mouth. Dispirited, he looks up at the sky.

  The mountains in the distance seem to be holding back tears, their peaks soaring jaggedly in the distance, and the cries of frogs that had been drowned out by the sound of rain remind Chilsung of home. He can almost see Big Girl’s silhouette underneath the locust tree. He gets up.

  ‘I-I’m going home.’

  The man gets up, too. ‘You have a home? You must go then.’

  Chilsung raises his head, and the man firmly readjusts Chilsung’s hat. The man smiles. Chilsung feels like he has met someone he could lean on somehow, like his mother.

  ‘Good luck. If fate is in our favour, we’ll meet again.’

  Chilsung answers with a smile and begins to walk. He looks back after a while; the man is standing there. Chilsung rubs his eyes with his fist and looks back again.

  The millet and sorghum fields are flooded with water, half their stalks fallen and submerged. The frogs’ noisy cry is indifferent to the destruction. Their calls have the weight of human voices.

  Light rain continues to fall. Chilsung’s clothes are soaked once more, and the raindrops lingering on the ends of his eyebrows seem to blot his very soul with unanswerable questions.

  When he reaches his village, the rain grows heavy again, and the wind begins to blow. The locust tree, usually looking cool underneath the sun, seems gloomy beneath the grimacing sky, and the low hills that surround the village are also veiled in rain. But the thought of Big Girl going down to the well near the hill carrying her water jar on her head makes his own steps lighter, as he sees the fences around the houses and the longer fences around the garden plots.

  His mother greets him tearfully at their home.

  ‘You naughty boy! Didn’t you think about how worried I would be!’

  His mother takes his begging sack from him and sobs loudly. Chilsung goes into the room, where half the floor is taken up by bowls collecting rainwater leaking through the roof, the drops plinking in rhythm. Chilsung stands at the door, not knowing what to do. He feels colder than he was before.

  Chilwoon and the baby are lying on the warmest spot of the floor, and the baby’s head is wrapped in cloth. Raindrops occasionally fall on their little bodies, too.

  ‘Just sit anywhere, there’s nothing to be done … I went to town last night and searched everywhere for you. I even knocked on the doors of the drinking houses! Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?’

  She is crying more loudly now. Having long lost her husband, she loves her poor son and relies on him to keep her grounded. Her crying wakes Chilwoon.

  ‘Big Brother is here!’

  He rubs his eyes and jumps to his feet, making the crowd of flies about him jump too. The baby starts to cry. Chilwoon keeps rubbing his eyes and looking at his brother.

  ‘Stop it, you little brat. You’re making yourself sicker. See, this is what has happened to your siblings since you left. They keep getting sick. And now his eye is sick. The whole village has this eye disease. Adults, children, none of them can keep their eyes open!’

  Chilsung isn’t listening to a word she is saying. He only wants to lie down where there is no rain leaking and take a long nap. Chilwoon seems to think of something and goes to the back door and urinates out of it. He rubs some of the urine in his eye.

  ‘Get it right in there. Not just your eyelids but the inside of your eye … Your little brother is so happy to see you, he’s trying to open his eyes for you. He kept calling for you yesterday.’

  His mother begins to cry again. Chilsung tries to shift away from a dripping spot that wets his back, but instead a different drip hits his nose and goes down his lips. He slaps at his own nose and grunts in rage.

  Chilsung’s mother pleads to the sky with both arms raised, ‘And why is it raining so? The wind shouldn’t blow, that wind! All the millet we grew will fall and rot. What’s going to happen to us? Dear God!’

  Her soaked hair is plastered to her skull, and the corners of her bloodshot eyes are crusty. The water from the roof drips down on her dirty clothes.

  Chilsung sits down on the threshold and closes his eyes. He is tired, and some of his eyelashes pierce his eye like thorns. He rolls his eyes twice and thinks of the millhouse.

  ‘Dog Poo’s dyke burst yesterday – their crops were washed away. What a wind! I’m so frightened. What about our field?’

  His mother runs outside. Chilwoon cries as he follows but trips on the threshold and screams. Chilsung opens his eyes.

  ‘Y-you stupid bastard, I’ll k-kill you!’

  His mother picks Chilwoon up and carries him on her back as she paces in and out of the room. Chilwoon cries for a while before drifting off to sleep.

  Chilsung cannot stand it. He closes his eyes to it all. When he opens them again, he sees the baby lying on the warm spot, sobbing silently. She rubs her head against the bedding, but finding this inadequate, reaches up and scratches at the cloth wrapped around her head. The sound alone makes his stomach turn.

  Chilsung tries not to look, but he keeps opening his eyes and seeing the baby’s yellow fingers ripping at her hair. Why can’t that stupid girl just die, he thinks as he closes his eyes again. He hears the branches of the apricot tree snap off and the pillars of the house creak as they lean in the wind. Chilwoon comes back into the room and lies down.

  ‘Big Brother, tomorrow get me some eye medicine. Dog Poo’s father went into town and got him eye medicine, and that made him better. Will you?’

  Chilsung does not say anything but thinks of the fabric hidden near his chest. He briefly regrets getting it instead of eye medicine, but then thinks of ways to get the gift to Big Girl.

  He hears the scratch of a match being struch in the kitchen. His mother enters the room.

  ‘The furnace is filled with water, what am I to do …? Those poor things haven’t eaten anything … You must be hungry, too …’

  She leaves the room but soon rushes back in.

  ‘Big Girl’s field has also flooded! Their strong dykes, useless!’

  Chilsung’s eyes grow wide.

  ‘Go to sleep, you wretched girl, why do you keep ripping out your hair? She hasn’t slept for days. Dog Poo’s mother told me rat skin was just the thing, so I caught a rat and put it on her, but she keeps picking at it. It must be itchy.’

  Chilsung agrees with her, just to calm her down. Chilsung had opened his eyes at the news of Big Girl, but he didn’t want to hear his mother’s lamentations about anything else. He swallows his irritation and speaks.

  ‘S-so. Big Girl’s field…?’

  ‘It’s ruined! Oh, why won’t my milk come?’

  His mother stares at the child, massaging her breasts. They sag like old silk pouches.

  The baby’s breathing quickens, and she does not seem to have the strength to reach for the bandage anymore. Her arm falls by her side. His mother listens to the wind for a while before speaking again.

  ‘Our millet is useless now! If Big Girl’s field is ruined, so is ours … How lucky that Big Girl is getting married now, and she can get away from this!’

  ‘Big Girl!’ Chilsung screams. The roll of fabric he has for her feels as heavy as a rock. His mother is surprised at his reaction.

  Chilwoon jumps up and starts crying. ‘Mother! Look!’

  Chilsung and his mother are so surprised they look round in unison.

  The baby has somehow torn off her bandage, and white maggots like rice grains are crawling out of it.

  ‘Oh, what has happened, what has happened!’

  The mother jumps to her b
aby and turns the bandage over. The rat skin falls off, and bloody maggots spill out everywhere.

  ‘Baby, open your eyes! Open your eyes, my baby!’

  Chilsung lets out a short scream at his mother’s wailing and stumbles outside.

  The rain pours down, and the wind blows mercilessly, and now the sky is being torn in half by the sound of thunder.

  Chilsung wordlessly gazes at the sky.

  March–April 1936

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  I was told this story about my mother by one of my aunts:

  When my aunt was in the sixth grade and my mother was in second, my aunt came home crying after being bullied by a group of girls in her class.

  My mother, furious, stormed out of the house, found this gang, and beat the crap out of them.

  ‘They were older girls,’ explained my aunt, ‘and they were a group. Your mother was alone. But it didn’t matter to her. And when she came home, she was still angry. She was angry at me. She said, “Why do you let other people push you around!”’

  *

  I came to translate Kang Kyeong-ae partly because she reminded me of my mother: fierce, independent, empathic, and descended from people in what is now North Korea (my maternal grandparents fled from the communists to the South just before the Korean War). Kang’s stories, like my mother, have a remarkable lack of self-consciousness; they are all about the story’s characters and their inner lives and struggles. They don’t say much about the author herself. When a character is a writer, she’s either an object of light satire (‘The Authoress’) or a simple framing device (‘Real and Unreal’).

  The closest thing we get to a glimpse of the writer herself is perhaps ‘Manuscript Money,’ but the character’s profession as a writer is ultimately inconsequential to the story. The point of her conflict isn’t the fact that she’s a writer, it’s the fact that she has material desires. In fact, the point of that story is the parasols.

  Those goddamn parasols! I don’t find communism particularly relatable even after translating all these stories, and I can safely say I still deplore every seminar-eating Marxist windbag I met in graduate school, but I completely, utterly understood the obsession with parasols. In fact, my familial connections to North Korean cadence aside, the parasols in ‘Manuscript Money’ were what really made me want to translate Kang Kyeong-ae in the first place.