“All right then, well, why not give it one more try,” Ch’olsu said, with a smile. “Let’s go out to the wharf together tomorrow morning. The pay is bad, I’m telling you, but the fact is that carrying bricks is the easiest job in town.”
At Ch’olsu’s mention of bricks he shook his head emphatically.
“No way! No more bricks!”
He felt a chill run down his spine and a prickling sensation in his fingers. He’d prepared himself to do any sort of labor, no matter how hard it was—even if his friend had said it was harder than carrying bricks. But he knew he could not handle the bricks. He never wanted to see another brick again.
That night the two of them stayed up late, as Ch’olsu gave Sinch’ol a very detailed explanation of the kinds of work they did on the wharf. The next day at dawn Sinch’ol went there along with Ch’olsu. By the time they passed in front of the customhouse, there were already several dozen workers gathered around a man in nickel-rimmed glasses, all vying for his attention, “Mr. Foreman! Mr. Foreman!” Ch’olsu pushed his way through the crowd.
“Mr. Foreman! One over here, please.”
Nickel-rims glanced at Ch’olsu over his glasses and then stretched out a hand with a red band in it. Ch’olsu immediately took the band and made his way back to Sinch’ol.
“This band is your work tag. Make sure you keep it tied around your wrist.”
Looking down at the band Ch’olsu was tying onto his arm for him, Sinch’ol could feel his heart thumping.
“Okay, I’m going to be unloading freight over at the station . . . You hang in there, okay?”
Ch’olsu dashed off as soon as he’d finished speaking. Even though Ch’olsu had given him a detailed explanation of the work the red-bands did, as he watched Ch’olsu leave, it dawned on him that he didn’t have a clue what he should be doing. He concentrated on what all the men with red bands were doing and tried to follow their every move without attracting any attention.
The harbor works in Inch’on, in the very heartland of Choson, were of such a grand sight and scale that nothing else like it existed in all of Korea. Huge ships weighing thousands of tons were lined up one after another, their broadsides banked up against the wharf. From their thick smokestacks black puffs of smoke billowed high up into the sky. Out on Wolmido, that dark island jutting out of the sea, stood a white light-house. Far beyond that lay the horizon.
The workers swept down onto the wharf in a massive crowd. In no time at all the harbor works were abuzz and swarming with what looked like several thousands of workers. More than half of them carried A-frames on their backs, but there were others, people pushing handcarts, people rushing into cargo holds with rice sacks on their shoulders, people carrying things in pairs with poles resting on their shoulders; young ones, old ones, even children, all brushing up against each other as they wove their way through the masses of people.
Nickel-rims stood up on the deck of one of the ships.
“All right, you morons! Now get over here and put up a ramp!”
At the sound of the man’s thundering voice, the red-bands ran over toward him and started building the ramp. They laid several logs between the ship and the concrete wharf and then laid wide boards across them as they gradually worked their way up to the ship. Then one of the red-bands standing next to the base of the crane pulled a lever which sent a cable whirring down into the cargo hold of the ship. There was a Japanese man they called “the supervisor” standing on deck, watching the cable go down inside and making a continuous gesture with his hand. When he stopped moving his hand, the crane operator took it as a sign to stop the cable. A minute later the supervisor made another gesture, this time raising his hand into the air. The crane operator immediately pulled the lever. The crane began whirring again, but now there was a piece of freight as big as a house attached to the rising cable. When the workers crowded around the ship saw the size of the load, the hue and cry on the wharf grew even louder.
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What must have been several thousand pounds of freight dangling from the crane was lowered onto the wharf with another whir of the crane. Pushing back against each other to make room for it, the workers then rushed up to the cargo and started to take down the separate pieces of the load, handing them off to the red-bands, who circled busily around, first grabbing the packages with their iron hooks and then lifting them up onto the porters’ A-frames. Sinch’ol wanted to make use of the hooks that Ch’olsu had given him, but he didn’t know how. He had no other choice but to fasten his hooks onto the back of his pants and use his bare hands. A new red-band stood facing him with each load, as he lifted up package after package without a moment’s rest.
The freight continued pouring out onto the wharf with each whir of the crane. Sinch’ol lost his breath, and his arms felt like they were about to fall off. He lifted all sorts of things—huge boxes, sheets of iron, cakes of soybeans.
“Alright, you idiots! Get that cargo unloaded fast!” thundered Nickel-rims, his eyeballs practically popping out of their sockets. Sinch’ol had at some point injured his fingers, and blood was streaming down his hand, but there was nothing he could do about it, so he wiped it off on his breeches and continued to stack the packages on the backs of the workers—they kept coming and coming.
“Hey, there! Your hands are going to kill you, if you don’t use those hooks!” shouted a red-band in front of him. Sinch’ol unfastened his hooks and grabbed hold of the package, but the hooks slipped and he ended up whacking one of the porters in the head.
The porter immediately turned around to him.
“You idiot! What do you think you’re doing? Hitting someone in the face like that! You almost poked my eye out, you moron. Pay attention!” The man glared at him ferociously.
Sinch’ol’s eyes brimmed with the tears he’d been trying to hold back. Without a word in reply, he turned away and looked out onto the deep blue water. He felt like diving into that water and escaping from this place forever. The rough talk they used and the way they behaved—it was no different from the nails in the crates and the sheets of iron that mercilessly ripped his aching hands!
“Hey, come on! Load me up?”
His arms shaking uncontrollably, Sinch’ol tried to lift one of the big crates, but he kept having to put it down—he just couldn’t lift it. In the end, he practically fell head first over it.
“Oh, come on . . . I’ve got a job to do here. If you’re going to end up on the ground, just get out of here!”
The red-band standing in front of him would have preferred Sinch’ol to quit. Far from helping the man, Sinch’ol had become but another burden. He was barely able to collect his senses and stand up again. He wished he’d banged himself up a bit when he’d fallen, so that he might at least have an excuse to leave. But when he checked himself, he couldn’t find a single scratch.
The dust coming off the cargo and the dirt swept up by the wind hung heavily in the air. Thousands of toiling workers milling around kept it from settling down to the ground. The fierce rays of the sun, it seemed, were frying people to a crisp, and Sinch’ol could practically feel his skin peeling off him. The air was choking him; his throat was dry; his mouth was filled with dust. Water, water, water! He needed water! But there was no option of slipping away, for even a minute. Of all the people milling around him not a single one of them—not even the children—seemed so incompetent, so feeble as he.
He could hear the screech of a machine sawing wood at a lumber mill in the distance. On the next dock he saw mountains of coal piled up, as it was scooped out of a steamship docked just to the side.
“All right, boys, if you want to fight, just move it on over there,” yelled the red-band standing in front of Sinch’ol.
Sinch’ol turned to look. Two men had been grappling over the same load, and the argument had finally come to blows. Soon the men had pushed the package to the side and began rolling around on the ground. In the meantime, someone else picked up the package they were fighting ove
r and carried it off. The men rose and went to take back the package, bringing yet another into the fight. There were three of them, then four, going after each other.
When Sinch’ol realized that one of them was Double-lid, he felt like running over to stop him. But it was only a fleeting thought, for Sinch’ol knew that he had a hard enough time keeping himself out of harm’s way. Anyway, in a place like this, a fight was just a fight. Hardly anyone even blinked an eye at the sight of them. When the men eventually tired themselves out, they brushed the dirt from their clothes and got up off the ground.
Well after the electric lights came on, the workers were still working. But eventually Sinch’ol and the other red-bands followed Nickel-rims to collect their day’s wages. At the sound of somebody whistling, Sinch’ol looked behind him and saw Double-lid, A-frame and all, slowly making his way toward him. Even he looked completely exhausted.
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“My friend!”
Sinch’ol called out to Double-lid as he passed by. Double-lid stopped and looked around in confusion.
“Hey, I was looking for you!” continued Sinch’ol.
Only then did Double-lid notice Sinch’ol.
“So you’re back again, huh?”
“How much money did you make today?” Sinch’ol asked.
“Money? All I did was fight.”
“Fight over what?”
“Nothing, I guess.” Double-lid scratched his head.
“Swing by my place sometime, okay?”
“Where do you live?”
“You know the Catholic Chapel on the way up to Sa-jong?”
“The ca-tho-lic . . . what?”
Sinch’ol drew the sign of the cross in the air with his hand.
“You know, that building with this symbol sticking up on the roof.”
“Oh, you mean the church. Okay.”
“If you go past the church, there’s a public toilet, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Just up the hill is a place where they chop firewood for sale. And just beyond that is a small grass-roofed house.
“Okay.”
“My room is in the back of that house.”
“Got it. I’ll stop by sometime.”
“Be sure to, okay?”
“I will.”
And without so much as word of good-bye, Double-lid was striding off again. Sinch’ol watched him walk away—a man like that would be first-rate if only he had a proper consciousness, he thought.
Nickel-rims slipped into an inn of some sort. The red-bands who were following him stopped and waited for him to come out. They turned around and saw Sinch’ol and started snickering amongst themselves. When Sinch’ol realized they were mocking how he had worked that day, he felt so humiliated and so indescribably alone that a moan almost escaped from him before he caught himself. He felt a heaviness bearing down upon him impossible to resist, so he dropped to the ground and sat with his back to the standing red-bands.
In front of him was a cement-sealed wall over which golden letters spelling out ‘King Bar’ in Japanese were lit up with electric bulbs. Tears welled up in his eyes. He looked down at his shabby appearance and the feeling of loneliness intensified, as though he’d been completely forsaken by the world. He’d come out to the labor market in a desperate effort to make friends with the workers, and here they all were making a laughing stock of him, unwilling to offer him even the slightest bit of sympathy.
No, no! I’ve got so many comrades behind me! he thought. It was simply the unique situation he found himself in that made him feel so lonely and isolated. Sinch’ol watched as a ‘modern girl’ and ‘modern boy’ came toward him. They were walking side by side with synchronized strides, almost as though they were dancing. He jumped to his feet and leaned against the wall.
The man and woman gave off the scent of a designer perfume as they passed by, and he was instantly reminded of Okchom. Then he remembered the time he and Okchom were on the beach looking at the setting sun, and especially the way her face and her clothes had looked just then, as though they were glowing in front of the dancing flames of a fire. In the confusion of the moment Sinch’ol heaved a deep sigh. He missed Okchom so much. Could she possibly be here in Wolmido on vacation? Was she still pining after him, the poor thing? Why had he done that to her!
Then a different thought struck him like a slap in the face: How did my mind get back in the gutter? He looked up and realized that he was still leaning against the wall all by himself. The pain that he’d managed to forget for a moment raced through his body unbearably. He sat back down. If it weren’t for the others, he would have lain right down on the ground. He leaned against the wall with a moan, and thought: I wonder if there’s anything interesting in the papers today?
As recently as when he’d been at school, his heart would race with anticipation each time he read the newspapers. He was convinced that the world was being shaken up before his eyes, that something big was sure to happen any day. But now a year had passed, and nothing at all seemed to have changed. It could be decades, maybe centuries, before the current state of affairs changed. These doubts took root in a corner of his mind.
Then Nickel-rims came outside.
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The crowd of red-bands gathered around Nickel-rims and sat in a circle. They each exchanged the band tied around their wrists for ninety-five chon, their daily wage minus five chon for the cost of lunch.
Sinch’ol took his ninety-five chon and stood to go. The remaining red-bands glanced at him and started snickering again. Sinch’ol had worked all day alongside these men, and wanted at least to offer a pleasant good-bye. But when he saw them laughing at him like this, his lips automatically tightened. He took several unsteady steps through the crowd. He couldn’t be sure of when exactly it had happened, or why, but he knew that an invisible wall had formed between him and the workers, one that had completely severed them from each other. He felt trapped in a position where he couldn’t approach the people on either side of him.
He watched a worker lift onto his A-frame a load of pine wood and what seemed to be a five pound sack of rice, to which he added a few more groceries before setting off at a clip into the distance. The man was on his way back from the wharf as well, it seemed. Judging from what he had learned that day, Sinch’ol figured that after fighting to carry around packages for an entire day in that dust bowl, the man would have been lucky to take home even fifty or sixty chon. Working as a red-band, Sinch’ol seemed to get one of the highest wages offered on the wharf.
Sinch’ol bought a bowl of rice soup at a place on the side of the road and then headed home.
From that day forward, Sinch’ol gave up any ideas of going back to the labor market. He managed to survive one day at a time by relying on what Ch’olsu gave him out of his earnings.
One day very late at night he heard a deep voice calling to him.
“You in here?”
Double-lid strode into his room. Sinch’ol quickly pushed behind him the letter he was writing to Pamsongi and stretched out his hand.
“Well, look who’s here! Good to see you. I waited so long for you to stop by, I figured you’d forgotten all about me . . . Please, have a seat.”
Sinch’ol, delighted to see Double-lid, shook his hand heartily. Double-lid smiled and took a seat where Sinch’ol had motioned for him to sit. He took a quick look around the room.
“Have you been sick?” asked Sinch’ol, staring into Double-lid’s face and detecting a lack of color in his complexion.
“No.”
Double-lid patted down his hair and hung his head slightly. His fine head of hair, which hadn’t been cut in quite some time now, was coated with a white layer of dust. From beneath his jaw projected the hairs of his thick beard. Sinch’ol could tell that this was the body of a man simply exhausted from a day’s work in the labor market, and he remembered struggling to lift those iron plates. Just the thought of it now made his legs tremble. Sinch’ol neatly stacked several o
f the books he used as a pillow and pushed them toward Double-lid.
“Why don’t you lie down here for a while. You must be incredibly tired, my friend.”
Double-lid glanced over at Sinch’ol and then drew back in his seat a bit.
“No, I’m not . . .”
“Oh, come on. Please just lie down.”
Sinch’ol moved to Double-lid’s side. He caught the smell of sweat and of something else rancid in the air. He grimaced unconsciously, then quickly forced a smile. He noticed that Double-lid’s clothes were stained with patches of dried sweat. The closer Sinch’ol moved to his side, the more uncomfortable Double-lid seemed. He gradually drew back further from where he’d been sitting, scratching his head nervously.
“What’s the matter? Why don’t you lie down for a bit . . . You went to work today, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, where did you go? To the wharf again?”
“No. You know how they’re reclaiming the land in front of Wolmido? Well, I was over there today.”
“How are the wages there?”
Double-lid looked up, but hesitated to say anything. Maybe he didn’t understand the word ‘wages,’ thought Sinch’ol, convinced he’d have to learn the language of the workers as soon as possible.
“Uh . . . I mean, how much did you get paid?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah . . . If you work hard enough, you can make seventy to eighty chon. Otherwise, maybe forty or fifty.”
“I see . . . Well, just sit back and relax, so we can have a nice chat. Please, make yourself a little more comfortable. You know, we’ve known each other for a long time and yet we don’t even know each other’s names . . . I’m Yu Sinch’ol. How about you?”
Sinch’ol looked Double-lid square in the face.
From Wonso Pond Page 26