The Dwarf (Modern Korean Fiction)

by Cho Se-hui

  The dwarf’s older son lifted his head. “It wasn’t misguided,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the defense lawyer. “Would you please repeat what you just said?”

  “I said it wasn’t a misguided mission to kill.”

  An awkward expression crossed the lawyer’s face. “In that case, could you briefly describe for us your state of mind at that time?”

  “I was standing right there when the mill workers, who ought to know better, who have gone through hardship after hardship, all at once burst into tears and started sobbing. Those fifteen hundred people, who should have been immune by then to a full dose of hardship, did that, all of them, together. I’ve had occasion to tell this story to people outside the mill, people with a good education and deep understanding of matters, but they have trouble believing such a thing is possible. People just don’t believe me.”

  “No, I believe you.”

  “That gentleman did not think about human beings.”

  “This was the motive behind the homicide?”

  “Son of a bitch!” I shouted. But no one paid attention, not even my cousin sitting beside me. Why would Father have had to think about such stuff? This vicious little creature didn’t know that Father was a busy man with countless better things to do—planning, making decisions, giving instructions, following up. I was well aware that there lived this ilk—retarded development, smaller and weaker than us, but a small body stuffed with cruel thoughts. They denounced the life we enjoyed as a result of our distinctive efforts—our capital, entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and monopolies—and concluded that they were slowly being poisoned by lethal toxicants. Suppose they were to say that this poisonous substance was poverty and it was Father’s plant where they all worked; even so, they shouldn’t hold Father responsible. Just as they had chosen to go to work at the Ŭngang plant out of their own free will, so they could quit and leave anytime they wanted. In fact their livelihood actually improved while they worked at the plant. But never had they tried to remove the scowls from their faces. In their minds they inhabited a “meaningful” world, a society where everyone laughed together—a society that could never exist. And so they always suppressed their desires, were always criticizing, always held fast to their denial of pleasure and happiness.

  I was fed up just thinking about this brand of stoic who was always comparing the ideal with the real. And now one of them had gone so far as to kill. And his defense lawyer, in order to save him, was calling as a witness the same brand of human being. This was Han Chi-sŏp. He went up to the witness stand, and when he swore to tell nothing but the truth, straightforwardly and without exaggeration, as dictated by his conscience, and to accept punishment for perjury if he should lie, I began to suspect that he was a master criminal. Supposedly he had come up from a southern plant, and he had only eight fingers. He must have lost the other two at Father’s plant. His nose was squashed down and disfigured and below his eyes there were scars. I decided from the beginning not to listen to him. A person with only eight fingers appearing as a witness—that didn’t sit right with me. Those two fingers, I thought, had warped his understanding of things. But he had lost something more—his objectivity. I closed my eyes. The color of a lake, hot sun, trees and grass, a breeze blowing through them, a motorboat cleaving the lake, skiing on a lawn, a girl with strange proclivities, a delicious nap—these were the things I called to mind in order to block out what those two were saying. Beehives and deer farms. And after the nap a meal waiting for me. I decided to read. The books I should read were about engineering the future and about economic history. Father liked his sons to read such books. Already I had read considerable portions of the latter. I had to laugh at the places where Walter Scott was quoted. After looking around a mill district where poor laborers were exploited, he worried that this was a country chock full of explosives and might some day blow up. It appeared that blowhard moralists were alive and well during that period too. Imagine the mill owners’ expressions after they heard his words. In the eyes of this moralist, this first stage of development at Manchester and Bradford could only be seen as some insane thing careering toward a nationwide explosion. In the end, though, I lost out to my curiosity. I couldn’t help but listen to that pair sitting in the courtroom. As far as he could see, Chi-sŏp was saying, the defendant had been forced into the act. The defense lawyer jumped on those words and asked who had forced him—would the witness be more specific? As proof that he had been forced into the act by violence and by threats to his life and person and those of his loved ones, Chi-sŏp cited the worn-out budget book filled out by the dwarf’s wife and the primitive life his family led on the earnings from their three children’s employment at the Ŭngang mill. I got so angry I could hardly listen. He read off the price of everything from bean sprouts, salt, and shrimp relish to pain relievers for headaches and toothaches, then rambled on incoherently about the minimum cost of living for urban laborers, about their pay that didn’t reflect the contribution they made to production, about living conditions that made it hard for the labor force to regenerate its productive energy. Of course, I had to hear about the enormous financial power of the Ŭngang Group with Father at its head, about the continuous support and protection it received as a conglomerate, about the highly educated management team formed of outstanding minds, about the policy of low wages and high profits they pursued. By this point, anyone could see that this was a clear case of human degradation, environmental damage—and even an insult to God, Chi-sŏp went so far as to say. Therefore, what the dwarf’s older son had said about Father was sad but indeed true. And what he had borne in mind for Father was something unavoidable, because Father was at the very heart of the repression. The defense lawyer asked Chi-sŏp to explain what he meant by repression. To this Chi-sŏp replied that the repression Father wielded against the employees of subsidiary companies was always connected with subsistence expenses—that is, living expenses—and accordingly, it meant the thing that everyone was inevitably most afraid of: financial straits. There could be no one, he said, who was not continually frightened by such repression. If anyone was directly vulnerable to such repression but had never thought of acting on his right to resist, then that person was either an idiot or had given up on his life. The more I heard, the angrier I grew. To listen to him, you’d think that the most evil people in this world were not them but us. Not only had we destroyed human dignity and worth, but we recognized a special class that on the basis of social position discriminated among people who were equal before the law—and, moreover, had stripped many people of their right to live as human beings. I sat there suppressing my anger. The defense lawyer asked Chi-sŏp if he knew that a wage increase and the firing of people without just cause were the initial problems between labor and management. Of course, he replied. If you considered the wage increase in terms of the company’s increased profits, the rise in the price of goods, and the laborers’ cost of living, then it was entirely justified. And the demand to reinstate workers fired without just cause on trumped-up charges—alleging that these union members took classes offered by the union and they prayed and sang in a church other than the company church—was also completely justified. Because in terms of paid work, they had learned only one sort of work during their time in the factory. And because firing without just cause was a violation of article 1, section 27, of the Labor Standards Act, which was meant to ensure balance in the nation’s economic development.

  “And I understand there was concern about the upcoming election of the General Council and union staff, since there was no dialogue with management,” said Chi-sŏp. “So I advised the union members to postpone it. But apparently that was impossible.”

  “And why was that?” the defense lawyer asked.

  “Supposedly the company was thinking about getting it over with quickly. They even formed their own election committee.”

  “And where is this supposed to take place?”

  “The election committ
ee is supposed to be elected at a meeting of the General Council.”

  “And the company committee was therefore illegal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened next?”

  “The company people put forth their own candidates, then shortened the deadline for people to declare their candidacy. And so the steward of the local called a general meeting, but the company wouldn’t permit it. I went to Ŭngang just after the defendant here, Kim Yŏng-su, and some union staffers were beaten by a band of unidentified thugs.”

  “While being treated they left intending to go to Seoul—were you aware of that?”

  “I was.”

  “Why do you suppose they wanted to go to Seoul?”

  “My understanding is that they intended to meet with the top people at headquarters. Yŏng-su had come to the conclusion that the management people being sent down to the mill were no longer acting rationally. But they were spotted at the bus terminal by that same band of thugs and couldn’t carry out their plan. I learned from Yŏng-su that all of them were taken to the building where raw cotton is stored, and attacked once again.”

  “And it was the following day that all the employees stopped work and gathered outside on the mill grounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you briefly describe to us what you witnessed at that time?”

  “The steward of the local chose to report to the union members what had happened to that point. When the report was finished, many of the members embraced the union staffers in tears. Those who had become upset shouted and started running outside the mill, and off to one side they began singing the union anthem. Yŏng-su calmed them down, then told them they had to protect their union from those who wanted to take it away—because it was the workers’ one and only organization; it was their life. He suggested that to show their determination they should stop seeing, listening, speaking, or eating for a certain period. And that’s what they did.”

  “Did Kim Yŏng-su destroy machinery along with agitated workers?”

  “Destruction of anything is bad. And to destroy expensive machinery would be out of the question. I have never heard Yŏng-su talk about destroying anything in this world.”

  “If you’ll forgive me for moving quickly to the end of the story, what became of the union after that?”

  On and on it went, this ridiculous behavior that showed their true colors. The union was of course broken up, Chi-sŏp replied. This was incorrect. At his monthly meeting with the company presidents Father had said that obviously a trade union, even if led by people who cooperated with us, no matter how restricted its activities, would be of no benefit to our enterprise. One day, he warned, the people who discovered embers in the ashes of a charcoal brazier would ignite those embers, rise up, and harm the enterprise and all of us. And so any manager with wisdom would resolve the matter now, at the cost of a bit of noisy resistance, and not entrust the workers with the company. I saw this in a memo in Father’s office. That was all he had said—not one word more. Father must have had his own position in mind. He had always said that the labor union was a devil’s cauldron that weakened our entire structure, but he hadn’t put that down in the memo. Let’s suppose Father had to reprimand the executives at one of our affiliates for allowing a trade union to be established at a company plant. Or let’s say that during a period of worker unrest in one of our companies a union was formed and Father had to be the one to dismantle it. You can imagine the damage this would do to his position. Then the defense lawyer asked if there was anything Chi-sŏp wished to add in conclusion. Anything indeed! He knew the dwarf’s older son well, Chi-sŏp said. They enjoyed a close relationship and had continued to exchange thoughts while working in the labor movement. Ultimately the dwarf’s son had suffered hardship on account of his ideals, and the reason he now stood in the defendant’s box was that he had reacted to the shattering of those ideals. At this point I was confirmed in my beliefs. Chi-sŏp continued. What the dwarf’s son dealt with was not a certain class, he said, but humanity itself. From the beginning, he explained, he and the dwarf’s son had understood clearly that the worker and the employer were both producers, not two classes with different interests, and that this was common knowledge. He tried to speak in measured tones with precise pronunciation. By then the two hands resting on the witness stand were trembling. All together the fingers on those two hands were no more than eight. The dwarf’s son kept his head up. Directly behind him in the gallery his mother was managing to stifle the weeping that had risen to her throat. I had no doubt about my suspicions. The person who had awakened the dwarf’s eldest son like a ray of light was Chi-sŏp. They held the same ideal—one based on love. They did not cause human beings to suffer. We did. They were the victims. He curled up his eight fingers and withdrew them from sight, then produced a dirty handkerchief from the pocket of his dirty pants. With that dirty handkerchief he dabbed at the sweat around his eyes.

  We waited some more.

  “I’ve decided to leave the day after tomorrow,” my cousin said.

  “Good idea,” I said. “And I think I’ll go to Germany pretty soon.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s where Krupp and Thyssen are located. I need to see how they do things. Father’s dream now is to have an ironworks. When my brothers return, I’ll have to go to Germany to study.”

  We sat waiting with the secretariat people and the executive directors from group headquarters. The court clerk entered, went to his place in the center of the area below the bar, and sat. At every session of this trial, I saw him sitting there in the center below the bar. The courtroom grew hotter. Because all the windows were closed, the air was stale. From the bodies of the dense throng of workers issued a nearly unbearable odor. The cold air spewing from the air conditioner could not subdue their body heat. If only they could have kept their body odor to themselves, I could easily have endured being there. My cousin turned toward the gallery, as if something had occurred to him. Chi-sŏp couldn’t be seen, he said. I looked back as well. It was true. I had no idea why he hadn’t presented himself here at court for the actual verdict. Like us, the dwarf’s younger son looked back. The dwarf’s wife pulled him down. So he’d gotten scared, had he? Han Chi-sŏp was a coward!

  People were dragging their lengthening shadows along the street as I returned home from the trial. Though the shadows were lengthening, the fiery heat remained. The fresh young women didn’t mind the heat. There remained, guardians of frantic, desperate Seoul, only the languid bodies of the girls who hadn’t left yet. When those girls were ready to leave, I told myself, the girls before them who had let themselves turn copper would return and guard Seoul. The girls wore thin clothing. What we thought about in summer was the pleasure hidden beneath those thin clothes. The summer pleasures I had tried to recall the previous winter—hot sun, salt water, a kiss that held the salt taste of seawater—were unchanging abstractions. As I entered our neighborhood I lowered the window of my small car and let in some air. The smell of flowers and grass rode the breeze in. That smell was something utterly different from the body odor of the workers packed into the courtroom gallery. They gave off a smell that was simply filthy. I got home and the first thing I did was shower. Mother said they gave off a sweaty smell because they didn’t wash thoroughly after their sweaty work. And if we were to provide all the factories with sufficient shower facilities, we would have to make a breakthrough in cutting production expenses or else slow down the rate of pay increases. I laughed. If there really was such a thing as an eternal soul that left the flesh, I said, then I wondered how Uncle’s soul felt today.

  “Yes. And so what happened to that man?” Mother asked.

  “I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “He was sentenced to death.”

  Well, well, oh God—Mother mouthed the words. The dwarf’s older son had entered, escorted by prison guards, the prosecutor had entered, then the judge had entered, and the last stage of
the trial proceeded very quickly. And when the judge found the defendant guilty of all charges and sentenced him to death, as sought by the prosecution, the workers waiting in the gallery, who earlier had reacted in disbelief to the prosecutor’s request for the death sentence—“no, no, it can’t be”—gave themselves up to a short gasp of surprise. Their tongues, once so supple, became stiff and hard. For once they had regained their senses, they finally realized the enormity of the crime and the enormity of the punishment. The head of the dwarf’s older son, once held high, dropped, and his brother and sister embraced their mother, who had sprung to her feet then collapsed with a visceral shriek. The defense lawyer, who had painted us all with the same brush intending to save the dwarf’s elder son, merely looked up at the ceiling. During the course of the trial he had provided the workers, whose powers of judgment were never very strong, with much confusion and misunderstanding. The prosecutor, who appeared to be a good-hearted man, sat with a benign expression. I had learned something very important from these events, I told Mother. At that, she looked at my face and said it was because they were related to people’s lives and their suffering.

  “Of course,” I said. “But that’s not what I want to tell you now. I’ve discovered a way for the workers at our plants to be happy while they do their work.”