by Junghyo Ahn
“It must be here somewhere,” Chandol persisted. “You heard what the Castle villagers said.”
“I don’t give a hoot. Have you forgotten what we went through because of their lie last year? We searched the woods for nine days, remember, nine days, because somebody from Castle village said he had seen a boar’s den in the mountain behind Hyonam village. But we didn’t even catch a weasel. And my father almost killed me one night when I was late.”
“I said you could go home if you want to.’
“I don’t want to go home alone.'''’
“Then shut up and keep walking, Toad.”
Kijun, who had earned the nickname of “Toad” because of his squat build and bulging eyes, grumbled, but in a very restrained whisper so that Chandol would not hear him. Chandol was the undisputed leader of the Kumsan boys, and Kijun could not afford to get on his nerves, for he wanted and needed to be in Chandol’s favor all the time. Kijun tried to stay by the captain of the village boys’ gang as long as he could, afraid that otherwise Mansik or Kangho would be selected as his second-in-command, if Chandol were to name one. He knew that if he went home now, alone, they would scoff at him, belittle him, and call him a fat ugly toad. But he was infuriated by the prospect of crawling up and stumbling down hills and ridges all afternoon with these dumb kids who were not bright enough to know by now that the cave had never been here in the first place and the Castle village boys had made fools out of them. Exasperated, the stocky boy whipped a wilted fir branch with the stick he carried for beating the grass to scare away hidden snakes. Dead brown needles popped off the branch and landed gently on the undergrowth. A startled quail flapped out of a nearby grove and flew away to vanish down the slope beyond a millet patch.
Mansik trailed a few paces behind Kijun, playing with his bowlegged white puppy. Behind Mansik were Kangho, a lanky, quiet boy who rarely argued with anybody about anything, and Bong, a child with long hair who had to do chores for each of them because he was the youngest of them all. Three weeks ago Bong had finally turned six, qualifying him to participate in the adventures of the older boys.
Mansik had also begun to doubt that they would be able to find the general’s cave in this gulch. Not today, anyway. They had searched thoroughly but found no trace of the concealed pit or the white rock. “Maybe somebody buried it,” he mumbled to himself.
“What did you say?” asked Chandol, glaring at Mansik over his shoulder. Chandol had been annoyed already by Kijun’s challenge. “You said something to me, Mansik?”
“Never mind. I was talking to myself.”
“About what?”
“Well, you know, the cave.”
“What about it?”
Mansik did not answer. He was not sure if it was all right for him to be honest.
“What about it?” urged Chandol, stopping.
The other boys also stopped because the path was very narrow and Chandol was in the lead.
Mansik realized he did not have much choice. He said, “I wonder if the cave entrance is really here. We’ve searched every inch of this gulch. We couldn’t have missed it. Perhaps somebody buried it.”
“Why would anybody want to do such a foolish thing?” said Chandol with a sneer. “Do you want to go home, too? Sure, you can go, if you really want to. Toad’ll be glad to have your company.”
Mansik decided it would be wise for him to shut up. He had a lot more to lose than to gain by aggravating the angry boy who was their leader.
As Mansik did not reply, Chandol gave him another hard reproachful glare and then turned back. The five boys and the dog trudged down the narrow winding path in silence.
There was no breeze to cool the sultry air as the five boys and the dog rested beside a tobacco patch. Kijun breathed heavily through his mouth, his eyelids drooping from exhaustion. Chandol took off his sweat-soaked shirt and fanned his face with a broad tobacco leaf. Leaning against a pine stump, Mansik absent-mindedly gazed at a black butterfly with a torn wing fluttering feebly, entangled by a cobweb netted in the bramble bush on the other side of the trail. Kangho was lying on the grass beside him, sweating profusely. The fluffy dog stretched at its full length on the rocky path a little distance away from the boys.
Nothing seemed to move around them and the boys did not want to move either. Then, suddenly, the dog bristled and started to bark fretfully. Bong, who had been picking wild damson fruit further down the trail, froze. As his frightened eyes searched, he screamed, “A snake! I hear it but I can’t see it. There’s a snake here! Come and help me!” The dog barked frantically at the sky, jumping this way and that.
The other boys also heard the hissing sound. But it was not a snake. The sound came from the sky, somewhere beyond the mountains in the south. It sounded something like a whistle. The shrill tinny sound grew more and more distinct, coming closer and closer, fast, very fast, and the dog barked, and the sound came so fast and close that Mansik thought it must explode any moment, and it did explode. A deafening noise shattered the still silence of the mountains as if the whole earth had split into a million pieces, and Mansik momentarily thought, here it comes, the general is coming back on his silver stallion.
The five boys saw four shiny objects in a diamond formation screech into the open sky from beyond the southern peaks. The thundering birds blasted across the sky over their heads, their metallic white wings shining in the sun, and then swished away towards the town.
“Hit the dirt!” Chandol shouted, throwing himself flat within a bush-clover grove. “Take cover!” he yelled again, crawling on his belly deeper into the grove. “They’re airplanes!”
Now the boys understood what was going on. They scattered, yelling and blubbering in fear, to hide themselves from the fiery flying machines.
Four more airplanes, and then another four, spurted out from beyond the southern peaks and whizzed off to the town, trailing white tracks of vapor behind them.
Mansik grabbed Fluffy and hurled himself into a sunken furrow in the tobacco patch; Kijun rolled into a thorny bramble bush, whining in a terrified voice; Kangho remained lying flat on the trail, covering his head with his hands; Bong, whimpering, crawled back down the trail the way they had come like a stunned fish swimming the wrong way, its sense of direction lost.
When the airplanes vanished, silence suddenly returned. In the eerie quiet, the bewildered boys scrambled to their feet one by one. They heard the faint rumble of distant explosions—whum—whum—whum—beyond General’s Hill.
“Do you hear that? Do you hear that?” Kijun gasped, rolling his terror-stricken wide eyes. “It’s an air raid. They’re bombing again. Maybe they’re bombing Kumsan.”
“Why should they bomb our village?” asked Kangho, his eyes flashing. He did not seem to be too sure of his own words. “Nobody is fighting any war at our village, you know.”
“They must be bombing the town again,” Chandol said wisely, dusting his pants. “There’re Reds in town and it’s them that the planes are after.”
“We’d better go home now,” said Mansik, putting his dog down.
Nobody objected to Mansik’s suggestion.
The bombing continued even at night. The villagers of Kumsan and Hyonam flocked to the riverbank early in the evening, many of them skipping supper, to watch scarlet and black pillars of flame and smoke belch up from the town. Several searchlights streaking up from the provincial capital building at the foot of Phoenix Hill swept the night sky, crisscross, to ferret out the invisible planes that droned and whizzed around in the dark space, spitting out fire again and again. Orange flames gushed up anew from the darkened town following each explosion blast, while the ground artillery burped and shrieked in a frenzy.
“How can they see the buildings in the dark from high up there?” said Yom, the stumpy ferryman, sitting in front of his cabin astride the plank bench for waiting passengers. “I guess someone is giving signals to them with a torch from the ground.”
“What will we do if they drop the bombs at
our village by mistake?” said Han, the mill owner, sitting next to the boatman on the bench, resting his chin on the long handle of his hoe.
“But all the bombs do fall in the town,” the boatman said with apparent admiration. “Maybe the bombs have some sort of eyes that can see in the dark.”
“I’ve never heard of bombs that have eyes,” the miller said.
“Anyway this war will be over in a few days,” said Kijun’s uncle, standing under the willow tree beside the bench with his hands folded on his chest. “Nobody can survive such a bombing very long.”
Flames flashed up suddenly near the railroad station, subsided for a moment as if to take a breath, and then spurted in all directions with renewed ferocity, reddening the sky. “There it goes again,” said the boatman, rising, and some twenty Kumsan villagers, who had gathered around the ferry, silently watched.
The villagers who had been to the town that morning said the police station and many other big buildings occupied by the People’s Army, as well as half the stalls at Central Market, had been completely destroyed. And dead bodies were scattered everywhere on the downtown streets. There was urgency in their voices as the farmers discussed what they had seen or heard about the bombardment, because now they knew the same thing might happen to them.
When the bombing started the previous evening, Kijun’s uncle had been playing flower cards with three carpenters at the town brewery. At first, he said, they heard that strange hissing sound, the eerie distant shu-shu whistle, and then an earthquake-like noise at a deafeningly close range, and everybody in the room instinctively threw themselves to the floor. “It kept coming and coming, explosions, in all directions. Wham! Wham! WHAM!” he went on. “We could not stay in the house any longer because the ceiling fell down on us, with broken tiles and dust and everything. So we ran out to the street. Many houses were engulfed by smoke and clouds of dust, and people were running away, helter-skelter, stumbling and screaming. They were running, running, running with their children in their arms, shrieking and whimpering and calling, their hair all in tangles and their clothes torn to flying shreds. They did not know where they were going, where they should go, or what they were supposed to do. They ran back and forth going nowhere. And I saw a woman whose arm had been just blown off,” he said. “Blood was gushing out of the ragged stump of what was left of her arm. She was digging in a pile of dirt on the curb, sobbing, ‘Where’s my arm? Where’s my arm?'”
The villagers did not believe everything Kijun’s uncle said because he was such a blowhard, but those who found it absolutely necessary to go to town that day planned to leave as soon as possible so that they would not have to risk the dangers of a nocturnal air raid.
The Kumsan farmers were the most nervous among the West County villagers about the continual bombing and what might happen next, because their village was located nearest to town. When the villagers discussed what they had watched from the riverbank or heard in the town, their voices grew shaky from anxiety. Some believers in folk religion said nothing would remain of this earth but piles of dirt and ashes if so many planes kept coming and pouring down so many bombs; they worried that the world was about to end in flames and explosions, before the creation of a new universe, fulfilling the ancient prophecy.
“We have to do something before the war crosses the river and destroys us,” Kangho’s father, the miller, said to Young Hwang, watching the burning town from the ferry. “We have to stop such a terrible thing from happening.”
“But what can we do?” said Kijun’s uncle. “Shoot down the planes with slingshots?”
Young Hwang said nothing, for he was not supposed to have any answers. Only his father, the county chief, was authorized to have opinions and make important decisions about serious matters involving the whole community. When they faced a big problem like this, it was always Old Hwang who gave them helpful instructions and valuable advice, and the farmers always respected and followed the old man’s judgments. But the county chief did not seem to have any ideas as to how to stop fire pouring down from the sky either. Without any guidance, the only thing the villagers could think of was to hide underground. After the air raids continued the second night the Kumsan villagers began to dig bomb shelters in or around their houses. Then they thronged the riverbank at dusk once again to watch the burning town.
When the planes did not come in the daytime nor at night on the third day, the farmers found themselves strangely restless. The lull only increased their anxiety because it might be nothing but a momentary reprieve before a more astonishing event—something totally destructive, fatal. The villagers felt inexplicably relieved when the bombing was resumed.
The five boys and Fluffy met in the afternoon under the tall aspen tree on the hillock behind the ferry and sat down on the grass to watch the town burning again. The planes swooped, flipping their shiny wings, to strafe or drop bombs, and then soared again like hunting kites after snatching their prey, through the patches of white flak smoke. To the boys, the flying machines looked like tiny specks acrobatically scuttling around among kernels of popcorn floating in the air.
“I didn’t know there were so many airplanes in the world,” said Chandol with a stupefied expression, pressing his cheek to the aspen bark. “Maybe more than fifty planes have bombed the town in the last several days.”
“Seems they’re really coming,” said Kangho, his hand patting Mansik’s dog but his eyes attentively following the planes.
“Who is coming?” Mansik asked.
“The United Nations Army, of course, who else?” Chandol said with a slight sneer. “Haven’t you heard anything about General Megado and his U.N. warriors coming to liberate us?
“You must have heard something about the army of many countries, Mansik. People talk about them all the time.”
“Soldiers from sixteen countries are coming to save us, they say,” Kangho explained.
“Really?” said Kijun, who had been standing on his knees to look over the tops of the potato plants at the town. Then he added, disbelieving, “I didn’t know there were so many countries in the world. What countries are they, anyway?”
“America, Pillipin, Toiki, Belgi …” Kangho said. “I don’t know all the names.”
“Belgi? That’s a very funny name,” said Bong, who had been squatting like a partridge a little distance off from the other older boys. “Belgi means fleas, doesn’t it? Are they sending flea soldiers to liberate us?”
“But that’s the name,” Kangho said, somewhat dubious himself. “And all those foreign soldiers have bengko, they say.”
“Bengko? What’s bengko?” Bong asked again.
“Bengko means ‘big nose,'” Chandol explained. “Bengko are foreign soldiers with their noses this big.” He pressed his right cheek to his shoulder and stretched out his arm at its full length to imitate an elephant’s trunk.
“That big?” said Bong, frightened. “How can people have such big noses:
“I don’t know because I’ve never seen them,” said Chandol. “But there’s no doubt they do have huge noses, because that’s what all the town folks say.”
“Did you hear it yourself?” Bong asked.
“No. But Jun’s uncle did. Right, Toad?”
“Yes, that’s what my uncle told me,” Kijun said.
“They must be a mighty army, anyway. The U.N. Forces, I mean,” Mansik said. “Look at all those planes. The Reds certainly don’t have a chance against them.”
“The town will be very crowded when all sixteen countries of them arrive,” said Bong, blinking his eyes, puzzled.
“I guess the Reds will start running away soon,” Mansik said, wetting his dry lips with his tongue tip.
Then, frowning with sudden fear, Chandol said, “If all of them run away to the north and the war ends today or tomorrow, we may never have a chance to see a Red.”
As if on cue, the four boys stared tensely at Chandol. They knew what their captain meant. Ever since the first days of the war, the b
oys had been wondering what kind of persons the People’s Army soldiers were; they had never seen a Red because they had not been permitted to go to the town after their school had closed down. The villagers said red flags flew on the roofs and at the gates of all important buildings in the town and the Communist soldiers armed with Chinese rifles and Russian submachine guns drove around in splendid automobiles magnificently decorated with vines and leaves. Chandol had been hoping that some day they could go to town and watch all the exciting war stuff going on there. And now the National Army was coming back with all the armies in the world to drive away the Reds! There would be a great battle on Phoenix Hill or somewhere by the river between the Reds and the bengko army, no doubt. Chandol was determined to see that fight.
Two airplanes zipped down to the river upstream, red smoke and fire mushroomed up near the Soyang Bridge. The boys could hear a distant boom a moment later. Chandol, biting his lips, narrowed his eyes to scan the remote world beyond the rivers.
“We must go there,” Chandol murmured as if to himself. “We must. If we don’t go there now, we will never see a war.”
“My parents won’t let me go to the town. But I really want to see the Reds,” Kijun said, obviously frightened but trying to convince the others that he was the second bravest boy of them all. “Don’t you want to see what the real Reds are like, Bong?”
Bong winced. “Not really,” he said. “They must look like a sorcerer’s monster. Red all over, you know.”
“My father says they aren’t actually any redder than we are,” Kangho said, swatting a fly on his sweaty neck with his palm. “My father saw several of them when he went to town.”
“Why do they call them Reds, then?” Mansik asked.