The Dwarf (Modern Korean Fiction)

by Cho Se-hui

  Shin-ae squatted beside the meter and made conversation.

  “Where do you live, mister?” she asked politely.

  “Over there, below the brick factory,” said the dwarf. “You can see the smokestack from here. There’s a bunch of houses clustered below, all with a big number painted on them. Out front there’s a sewer ditch. Come on down sometime. It’s kind of a mess there, but we manage to have fun. The neighbor children don’t grow right, so they look real small, but they’re cute kids. The wife drives pigs down the bank of the sewer ditch to wash ’em.”

  “You raise pigs too?”

  “People next door do. If our kids hadn’t been fired from the factory, I could have bought a few for us to raise ourselves.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Three.” The dwarf came to a stop. “They aren’t dwarfs.”

  “Now why do you say that?”

  “Well, look at me.”

  “Mister?” said Shin-ae. “I like a person like you. I was just thinking how nice it would be to have you for a next-door neighbor.”

  Shin-ae felt a lump in her throat. The dwarf bent over and returned to work.

  “Once the kids catch on at another factory, the first thing we’re thinking to do is buy a few pigs. Why don’t you come over then?”

  While the dwarf worked, Shin-ae passed her hands over the tools and the sections of cast iron from his bag. These consisted of a pipe cutter, monkey wrench, socket wrench, screwdriver, hammer, faucets, pump valves, a selection of screws, T-joints, U-joints, and hacksaw. Metal and nothing else. All of it resembled the dwarf. These instruments that resemble the dwarf probably rest quietly in the shadow of the brick factory’s smokestack while he sleeps. His family, too, they’ll all be sleeping quietly. On windy nights the rippling of water in the sewer ditch will carry over the wall to the yard of the dwarf’s family, all of them quietly sleeping. On windy days they’ll tremble uneasily, all of them, because the brick factory smokestack looms too high for them to sleep peacefully. For the dwarf, there lies yet another danger just one step outside his neighborhood. That danger takes several forms. This world is not a safe place for the dwarf. Could that be the reason for what happened next?

  The dwarf finished his work, and when he had gathered all of his tools into his toolbag, one by one, the man appeared. The man with the chipped tooth, the man with the arm sporting the tattoo of the naked woman—the man from the pump shop. It was hard to believe, but he kicked open the gate and entered. Slap went his hand against the face of the dwarf, who had turned toward the man in surprise. The dwarf’s face snapped backward. And then forward, from a slap to the opposite side of his face. The dwarf crumpled up, blood streaming from his nose. It was frightening. Shin-ae took the dwarf in her arms. She felt a choking sensation. “What are you doing!” she shouted. “Who do you think you are!” The man yanked Shin-ae by the arm. Helplessly she was dragged clear and thrown to the ground. With one hand the man picked up the dwarf. His fists drove into the dwarf’s chest—thunk! thunk!—and then he lifted the dwarf with both hands and tossed him to the ground. The dwarf fell like a dead stump. He resembled a dead thing. But he wasn’t dead; he was squirming. The man dealt with the dwarf as if he were an insect. He placed a foot on the dwarf’s stomach. “What are you sniffing around here for? You got some kind of magic for making the water run? What do you think you’re doing messing with houses that need wells? I think we need to fix you. How about it? Huh? How about it?” he said, stomping on the dwarf’s stomach. The dwarf’s face was a bloody mess. It had all taken place in the space of a few breaths. He was killing the dwarf, thought Shin-ae. And now he was kicking him in the ribs. The dwarf rolled over twice, then curled up like an inchworm. She had to save him, thought Shin-ae, and she ran. She sprang onto the veranda, then down to the kitchen. She picked up the big knife and the fillet knife. The big knife, tempered numerous times, hammered countless times by the smith while his little boy pumped the bellows, and the sharp fillet knife, thirty-two centimeters long and frightening to hold by the handle—Shin-ae took these knives. Her teeth were chattering together. She was going to kill the man. In one brief instant Shin-ae had sprung back onto the veranda, then down to the yard. “I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!” She stabbed at the man’s side with the fillet knife. The man screamed and fell back from the dwarf. The fillet knife could have pierced the man’s flesh and dealt him a fatal wound to an internal organ. But luck was on the man’s side. Because he had fallen away from the dwarf so quickly, the knife had missed. It had glanced off his side and merely traced a line of crimson down his arm. The man clasped his arm and back pedaled as blood began streaming from the wound. Fear had seized him. When Shin-ae had brandished the knife and shouted “I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!” he realized she had tasted blood. The man shook his fist at Shin-ae, but it was a last, feeble effort that couldn’t have deterred her. He whirled about and ran off. Shin-ae latched the gate and the hands still holding the knives dropped limply to her sides. The dwarf had risen partway and was watching. The two of them were silent. Shin-ae thought of chickens inside a prefab coop. She had seen a photo of breeders using artificial lighting to increase the hens’ production. The terrible ordeal those hens go through in their coop—the dwarf and I are undergoing the same sort of thing. But all she could think of was that she and the dwarf, unlike the egg-laying hens, were being used in an experiment—an experiment to see how well they could adapt to a sharp disruption of their biological rhythms and to what extent they developed pathological symptoms. Across the back wall the neighbor woman looked at the dwarf, a bloody mess, and at Shin-ae, her hands with the knives hanging limply at her sides. And the woman across the alley was looking at them through her window. As soon as their eyes met Shin-ae’s the women flinched and went back inside.

  “Mister?” said Shin-ae. “How are you? Are you all right? Tell me you’re all right.”

  “Yes, I’m all right,” said the dwarf.

  His bloody mess of a face had swollen suddenly. He forced his split lips into a smile. He had a strong grip on life. Shin-ae was startled—where in that weak body had he hidden the strength to weather such an awful ordeal? Thus far he and his family had been more than equal to their filthy neighborhood, filthy living quarters, meager diet, terrible diseases, and physical fatigue, as well as all the other ordeals that had oppressed them in various guises.

  Again the dwarf gathered his tools together in the toolbag. If the two neighbor women hadn’t been peeking out at Shin-ae, she would have burst into tears.

  “Mister?” Shin-ae spoke quietly. “We’re dwarfs too. Maybe we’ve never thought of each other that way, but we’re on the same side.” She put her bloody fillet knife beneath the newly lowered faucet.

  And now her daughter was startled to see the knife. She didn’t know what had taken place that day. Shin-ae could try to explain, but her daughter was too young to understand properly. It was a most complicated thing. More complicated than simultaneous equations and the symbols of the chemical elements—the two most difficult things for her daughter at school. It was on a different scale altogether.

  Shin-ae took the fillet knife from her daughter and set it aside. “Bring me that bucket, will you?”

  “Mom, it’s only eleven o’clock,” said her daughter. “I said I’d fetch the water, so you go to bed.”

  “No, starting tonight we’ll be getting our water early.”

  “Did someone come from the water department?”

  “They don’t come around except to collect the water bill.”

  “Well, then what?”

  “Just wait a bit.”

  Shin-ae took a deep breath. She thought of the dwarf’s face.

  “Mom, what is it?”

  “Actually, I had a new faucet put in. Don’t need that stupid thing sticking way up out of the ground. We’ll be using that one down there.”

  “So we’ll get a good flow now?”

&n
bsp; “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The neighbors didn’t believe him when he said they’d get their water sooner.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Someone.”

  “Someone good?”

  “Yes, someone good.”

  Again Shin-ae knelt and bent over. In that position she took the bucket from her daughter and placed it beneath the new spout. She was afraid she might tumble over. “Dear God, please …” With a trembling hand she turned on the tap.

  A gurgling sound coursed up the pipe. She turned the tap all the way on.

  She could hear it, the gurgle of water.

  And then it was spilling from the pipe into the bucket.

  “He was right! Here it is!”

  The TVs in the two houses front and back were oblivious to the lengthening night. Her daughter bent down next to her and shouted something. But Shin-ae’s ears heard only the sound of water.

  Space Travel

  ONE BY ONE YUN-HO removed the books from the bookshelf. He couldn’t understand it. Why did boys turn into jellyfish at the sight of girls, and why did girls do the same at the sight of boys? When he thought of the girls he had slept with he felt like throwing up. Yun-ho didn’t like those girls. And that’s probably why he had no memories of a happy ending. The ending was always the same: All he wanted to do was cry. Maybe the girls remembered Yun-ho as someone very weak. But the Yun-ho of the present moment cared not at all.

  Every book he opened smelled like mildew. Each volume felt thick and heavy and his arms began to ache. But Yun-ho knew this was only the beginning. The gun might be in the very last of these hundreds of books. Yun-ho moved the ladder and began rummaging through the books on the next shelf. Suddenly Chi-sŏp’s face came to mind. Yun-ho had been going astray ever since Chi-sŏp was dismissed. Yun-ho’s father didn’t realize this.

  Yun-ho had liked Chi-sŏp. Chi-sŏp had absolutely nothing: no home, no parents, no brothers, no organization he belonged to, no school, no friends. You might think such a person was free. But Chi-sŏp was not free. There was a reason for this but Yun-ho didn’t know it at first. It was Yun-ho’s father who had brought such a person home. He had brought home a beggar—or so Yun-ho and his elder sister had thought. The sight Chi-sŏp had presented emerging from the car was laughable. The heat of the June sun was almost palpable, but the person who emerged from the car wore thick winter clothing. All of it was worn-out—clothing you wouldn’t want to be dressed in.

  “Telephone!”

  “I’m not here.”

  “It’s your sister.”

  “Tell her I’m not here.”

  “Come on. She knows you’re home. Why can’t you just pick up in there?”

  There was nothing for Yun-ho to do but come down from the ladder.

  “What do you want?”

  “How was the test?”

  “What do you want to know for?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you did fine—college prep exam, after all. Looks like I’ll be late. Make up a nice excuse for Father.”

  “Where are you?”

  “So long.”

  “Who’s the jerk you’re with?”

  “What did you say?”

  Yun-ho climbed back up the ladder and resumed his search for the gun.

  “Father must be out of his mind,” his sister had said. “Where do you suppose he came up with that beggar? That’s going to be your home tutor. Don’t get too close to him. He probably smells. And watch out for lice. Look at that huge, godawful bag—what do you think is in it?”

  “I’ll go help him with it.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “I think I like him.”

  “What!”

  “I like him. Father finally brought me a good teacher.”

  “You’re out of your mind. You’re both out of your mind.”

  Yun-ho’s sister had had a big say in his father’s decision to dismiss Chi-sŏp. From the very first day she had thought ill of Chi-sŏp. Nothing about him would have appealed to her. He wasn’t a handsome man and he wasn’t physically attractive. His thoughts, moreover, occupied a high plane, and unless he made them accessible to her level she would be oblivious to them. But from the very beginning he ignored her. She was rather pretty. And physically attractive. Sleek legs, white arms, a swelling bosom, large black eyes—and inside her sheer clothing, a suppleness that would set anyone to thinking. Anyone, that is, but Chi-sŏp.

  Not once did Chi-sŏp look at her as a woman. And not once did she look at Chi-sŏp as a man. The important thing was that Yun-ho liked Chi-sŏp. Chi-sŏp never sat at Yun-ho’s desk for the purpose of teaching him anything other than what Yun-ho asked. Chi-sŏp read a book called The World Ten Thousand Years from Now. Every day he read that book, and it alone. Yun-ho showed little interest in it. The shape of the world ten thousand years in the future had nothing to do with him. His problem was the college entrance exam several months ahead. The problems posed on that exam were difficult. All of the subjects were difficult.

  Yun-ho had a reason for needing to get these difficult subjects under control. He had to get himself admitted to one of the social science departments at A University. In the entire country, two hundred fifty thousand students wanted to go to college. The total capacity of all the universities was some sixty thousand. A quick calculation would seem to suggest that the odds were on the order of four to one against you. But the situation, if you looked more closely, was quite different.

  Enrollment in the social science departments at A University was limited to five hundred thirty students. The very best students in the land were burning the midnight oil. Yun-ho had to win against odds of five hundred to one. It was a competition his father had wanted. At first it seemed things would turn out fine. After all, Chi-sŏp was there. While Yun-ho studied, Chi-sŏp read The World Ten Thousand Years from Now. Yun-ho believed in Chi-sŏp. Chi-sŏp had been expelled during his final year at A University’s law school. Yun-ho didn’t know the reason.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Tell you about what?”

  “About what happened to you.”

  “I was giving them my opinion, and someone behind me hit me with a metal pipe, knocked me cold.”

  “What do you mean?”

  At the time, there was too much that Yun-ho didn’t know. The Yun-ho of that time, one year earlier, was no different from a child. Chi-sŏp was the grandson of a friend of Yun-ho’s grandfather. Both of these grandfathers had passed away. Chi-sŏp’s grandfather had lived away from the ancestral home for more than ten years. His life on the outside had been horrible. He had lived on millet gone bad, whatever millet the wind hadn’t stolen, and at night he had endured icy cold. His clothing consisted of an army uniform of single-ply cotton dyed with pounded grass. Every day he saw people die. He had killed Japanese soldiers. And what had he to show for more than ten years of hit-and-run fighting in a cold and windy land? Nothing. He had returned to his ancestral home.

  “Son!” His mother had called to him. “Son, the military police are coming. They’re coming to take you away.”

  “Mother, just let me stay here.”

  “All right. I’m worn out myself.”

  That was the only time he’d been arrested. The first thing they did was force-feed him water. His belly swelled until it looked like a large drum. He felt like he was suffocating. One entire evening they tortured him in all manner of ways. He was a bloody mess. His bones were broken. Water gushed from his mouth when they released him from the torture chamber. They chained his broken legs and put him in a cell. That wasn’t the end of it. The guards ganged up and tortured him. They gathered the vermin inside the cell and heaped them on his naked body.

  The military police had been different. They had kicked open the gate of the ancestral home and sprayed gunfire as they entered. His wanderings away from home had prevented him from properly instructing his son. Chi-sŏp, the son of that son, didn’t know what his gr
andfather had wanted. Yun-ho liked him.

  “I’m a dodo bird,” Chi-sŏp had said.

  Yun-ho had never heard anything so intriguing. “What kind of bird is that, hyŏng?”

  “It’s a bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. It didn’t need to use its wings, so they degenerated. And then it couldn’t fly anymore. Every last one of them was captured, and now it’s extinct.”

  Chi-sŏp was not a person to utter a single meaningless word to Yun-ho. When Yun-ho was at school Chi-sŏp preferred to stay in the slum across the sewer creek. From the third-floor loft in Yun-ho’s house you could see clusters of squatters’ homes above the creek—as well as the smokestack of the brick factory. Later Chi-sŏp had said he’d met beings from outer space over there. Yun-ho had laughed. Chi-sŏp was not the sort to give up easily. He had led Yun-ho outside, saying he would introduce him to these creatures and their families.

  A large moon floated above the bank. In several of the homes small children were crying. The strangest smell issued from that neighborhood. Someone was rowing a wooden boat toward the bank. Half a dozen times Yun-ho had to hop over a drunk sprawled underfoot. The dwarf’s family lived right beside the bank. Small ripples of water slapped against the edge of their cramped yard. The dwarf sat in the yard cleaning his tools. Pipe cutter, monkey wrench, socket wrench, screwdriver, hammer, faucets, pump valves, a selection of screws, T-joints, U-joints, hacksaw—those were the dwarf’s tools. All metal and nothing else.

  In the moonlight those tools resembled the dwarf. Beside him one of his sons was fixing a radio. The radio was broken and the son couldn’t tune in to his high school correspondence lectures. The dwarf’s daughter played a guitar with a broken string next to a flowerbed the size of a pair of outstretched hands. Pansies blossomed there. Everything used by the dwarf and his son and daughter came from the Last Chance Market.

  The dwarf’s wife worked on dolls in a cottage factory. Her job was to put skirts on the little girl dolls. All day long she made skirts and put them on, a hundred skirts for a hundred dolls, before returning home to cook a late supper. She rinsed one and a half cups of barley rice, put it in the pot, boiled it, and served it with six sliced potatoes on top. The dwarf and his family took their supper sitting on their tiny veranda. They ate their barley rice and potatoes and their withered green peppers dipped in dark soybean paste. Chi-sŏp picked up a piece of paper lying at the edge of the veranda. He gave it to Yun-ho. Slowly, one syllable at a time, Yun-ho read the form, entitled “Condemnation of Hillside Structures in Redevelopment Zone.”