The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  A cool wind blew in, carrying with it the scent of the forest. It sucked up the thick, acidic smell of the stagnant air between the two of them. Mandogi knew that stagnant smell. He was sweating a cold sweat. He even felt chilly now. Mandogi, determined to resist his own desires, was still afraid and confused by the thing between his legs. While she stroked Mandogi’s wet, wounded face she murmured to him in a low, gentle voice.

  “What an ugly face you have! You’d need a yardstick to measure your nose and your ears, and your mouth is so huge you could fit both fists inside. It must be your punishment from a past life, such an ugly face you have.” Then, her voice hushed, she called to him: “Mandogi.”

  “Yes?” answered a raspy voice.

  Rubbing her own body up against his, then falling over to the side, she said, “What an ugly man you are!” Then, taking Mandogi’s arm in both hands, “Hey, come here,” she urged. His face shone with sweat, and his eyes could see nothing in the glare. The sound of her voice saying “come” hit the outside of his ear but didn’t make it inside. Reacting to this new behavior of hers, Mandogi complied with her order to “hurry up!” and instinctively stood up, pulling his paji, which had slid down, all the way up to his back. Wiping the sweat off his face with his arm, he looked down at her lying on the floor and said, “I don’t wanna!”

  And that was all. That was all that had happened, but to him it was a terrifying event. As always, she made Mandogi rub her back and shoulders but never again did she touch his body. The only thing you could really say had changed was that she had a couple new horrible things to say during her whipping fits, like “I don’t care if you’ve got a big thing dangling between your legs, you’re still not worth a damn,” or “Quit wallowing in your own shit, you filthy pig!” Mandogi had felt unsteady on his feet when he came down from the shed, and he had completely lost his sense of direction, so he ended up behind the shed facing away from the temple grounds. He fell spectacularly into the cesspool they used for fertilizer, which bubbled and frothed in the hot weather. She had added this to her cursing routine right away.

  Sure, it had been only a one-time thing. But even as time went by, poor Mandogi could not forget what had happened that day. How come I left the shed? I don’t know. I wonder how it would be if I just stayed in the shed? I don’t know. He thought about what had happened and felt bad about it. He was very conscious of the fact that he was male and even wanted to succumb to his personal desire. So those times when he was called into the priest’s room and was able to touch her body, he felt close to the gods and to the Buddha. If he could get to that place, even her whip would no longer be fearful or painful. In his dreams, there was someone gently rubbing between his legs. To his surprise, sometimes those gentle hands belonged to Mother Kannon. There was no mistaking the fact that the goddess had crawled out from the cesspool, but there was no feces on her clear, silk gown, and her heavenly scent put Mandogi in a trance. When he looked closer, it wasn’t a cesspool at all. Beautiful clouds of five colors had gathered. Mother Kannon, who had ridden in on those clouds, drew near and gently caressed Mandogi down there. Then, without warning, she pulled it out from the base. She yanked it out the same way Mandogi always pulled out daikon when he worked in the fields. Much bigger and harder than a daikon, it hit Mandogi squarely on the back as he stared into the deep, dark hole hollowed out of his crotch. As it hit him again and again, it turned into a snake with a single fat tail and many bodies, and it wrapped around Mandogi’s neck and torso, and he couldn’t get away. Mandogi cried out in pain while it strangled him. As he screamed, still in the dream, he thought that it wasn’t painful at all, and when he woke up, he could feel what was left of a pleasant sensation down there.

  Around the time he had this strange dream, Mandogi had a secret in reality. Perhaps it was a silly thing, but in the spur of the moment, he had taken Mother Seoul’s comb and had secretly walked away with it. If the rosary beads on his wrist were the yang, then the comb placed inside the homemade inner pocket on his cloak was the yin.

  One day at Kannon Temple, when Mother Seoul was away, after Mandogi had finished cleaning her room, he squatted down in front of her little red vanity. His hands moved mechanically to the cover, which he picked up to reveal his own face in an elliptical mirror. He smiled to himself, but in the mirror he saw a strange, crooked smile not at all like Mandogi’s smile. I have a crooked smile, he thought. “Your face looks so ugly! What an ugly face you have!” It’s just like Mother Seoul cried out that time in the shed, sure enough, my face is gross. I can fill up the entire mirror with just my nose. His big nose, with its pimples popping out all over, reminded him of the backside of a plucked chicken. And then the marks where she had pinched him and the cuts from the edge of the whip made his face all the more unbearable to look at. So as he sat staring at his own face, I guess he couldn’t understand that Mother Seoul’s emphasis on his ugliness was just her way of praising him as she stroked him. Mandogi put the cover down, covering up the mirror with its distorted reflections. Then, having all the curiosity and self-control of a monkey, he opened the drawer of the vanity. A vaguely familiar scent wafted up and soaked into the mucus membrane of his nose. It was a secret world, a mixture of all the different feminine scents. Along with the bundle of the delicate smells of makeup, of hair oil, and of body odor that tickled his nose, there was one moldy, offensive smell that enveloped Mandogi’s face. Mandogi almost instinctively brought the hand that held the rough wooden comb up to his nose and slowly took in the smell of the comb, which had been blackened by oil. With the comb, its scent acidic, soaked in camellia oil and thick, sticky dandruff, right below his nose, he breathed deeply. His mouth watered. Suddenly, his heart was throbbing so hard he could hear it. He was confused by the smell. The part of the smell that was camellia oil brought back memories of his mother from his childhood, but his mother’s scent wasn’t the confusing part. But he was still a little confused. After moving away from his mother’s smell, the other parts of the smell were just the smells of women, which absorbed the smell of his mother, and Mandogi felt the impact in his very nerves. Without hiding the confusion in his heart, he hid the comb in his breast. He returned to the servants’ quarters and sat for a long time panting like an animal, as Mother Seoul’s scary face got bigger and bigger and filled up the entire room.

  Oh no, what will I do if Mother Seoul suspects? No doubt, if she knows that something’s out of order in her vanity, she’ll call for me. Mandogi was afraid. One time, he left the room, thinking he would return the comb to its original place in the vanity, but then he made up his mind to lie and say he didn’t know. And he probably prepared himself for the fearful whip that would inevitably come down on him. She would probably beat him harder than ever. But, as time passed, while Mandogi kept howling, eventually her sadism would be satisfied. And then, before long, she would calm down, and the missing comb would cease to be a problem.

  And after Mother Seoul returned, things went just as Mandogi had predicted. She would never have imagined that Mandogi could have taken it, and not knowing the truth, she assumed that she had just lost it herself somehow. And in this way, Mandogi made the shiny, black comb completely his own.

  The comb was only about as big as a child’s fist, and shaped like a half moon. It had long ago lost the color and smell of boxwood, and instead the hair oil and dirt and grease from human skin melted together to make a blackish brown gloss that made it shine from within. And that gloss emitted the smell. But if you held the comb over a fire and raised its temperature, the grease would sizzle and float to the top. And if you brought it to your nose, in an instant it would penetrate to the very depths of your nostrils and make you dizzy. Mandogi searched there for a smell of neither his mother nor of women, but he couldn’t have understood the woman’s bitterness that was bottled up in the comb. The comb, which Mother Seoul used to comb out the long, black hair that came down to her knees while she sat at the mirror, probably contained her joy, sorrow, anger, and calm,
as well as all her bitterness. Maybe Mother Seoul’s bitterness about those moments that had changed her life were bottled up in that comb, but Mandogi couldn’t have understood that. But he resisted powerfully sometimes, smelling a scent of neither his mother nor of women. The scent drew him toward Mother Seoul, and oddly enough it gave Mandogi strength.

  After he finished rubbing her back, Mandogi’s spirit felt uneasy, but he didn’t have time to go and meditate in the sanctuary. He had to go straight to the kitchen and hurry to make the rice for the captain and his men who had gone out to patrol. “Mandogi, that’s enough for me,” Mother Seoul had said. “So get out, and go make those dirty cops their rice. I think I might have said too much before.” This time, the cooking order had come from her. Even if she yelled at them once in a while, she knew better than to disobey their orders.

  As soon as he had finished cooking, Mandogi neatly portioned out the white rice. He knew that it was the kongyangju’s foremost duty to take the rice reverently in both hands into the sanctuary and offer it on the altar. Setting the table would come afterward. When he had finished setting the table, he went to the sanctuary again, sat in the corner, and sounded the drum and the service bell. In this way, Mandogi always ate last, and alone. He would always eat alone, sitting on the dirt floor of the kitchen. But today, even after he cleaned up the lunch things, it still wasn’t quite time to eat. Finally, the extreme mental and physical tension that had built up in the priest’s room began to loosen. Right after he finished rubbing her body, he felt so confused and intoxicated that his head even started to hurt.

  Vacantly watching the weather outside, Mandogi’s mind drifted into a soft sleepiness. Inside the gloomy kitchen, its walls and ceiling stained with soot, the dazzling light in the doorway invited him to doze off. He stood up all night at the sentry post, then returned at dawn to do the cooking and the services, and when he was finished, he went back to the sentry post, so I suppose the drowsiness eventually had to catch up with him. It was much better to fall asleep in the kitchen, rather than at the sentry post, where you couldn’t slip up and fall asleep no matter what. Mandogi was always nervous at the sentry post. It was an inappropriate occupation for a kongyangju, but even so, he was nervous. He was alert most moments, but the moments in between must have been enticing, as sleep would unexpectedly force its way in. And then the enemy would come. Recognizing their black silhouettes in front of him in the lamplight, he would think, Over there! There are men from the mountain unit coming from over there! And even though he was aware of this, his eyes would get tired and he would fall asleep in front of his attackers. The partisans knew this too, so as long as the worst didn’t happen, the sentry post wouldn’t be drawn into battle. Say, for example, you wanted to attack the police headquarters—if you wanted to take a shortcut through S Hill, you would have to get over the fortress they had erected out of stone, about as high as a fence, and of course you would have to attack the sentry posts like Mandogi’s. So even though he had certainly spent the entire past night at the sentry post, it must be said that even Mandogi wouldn’t know whether or not he had dozed off at some point.

  In the middle of lunch, Mandogi rubbed his eyes as he moved his line of sight along the ground. When he bent over to take a closer look at the edge of the straw, he could see one surviving louse crawling along weakly. If the louse was still alive, it must have just come off his own body. Mandogi was yelled at all the time for picking lice off himself in the kitchen. You might say that the kitchen was as good a place for stripping to the waist and picking off lice as the causeway around the pond at the edge of the grounds in springtime. He would have to sit burning wood in front of the stove, with its three huge, black, iron kettles. In the kitchen, which had no chimney, the swirling smoke would violently attack his eyes and nose, but at the same time exposing his bare chest to the glow of the flames licking at the door of the stove was a feeling that couldn’t be described. Listening to the popping sound of the fire, he would grab ahold of one louse after another, each only as big as a grain of rice, and throw them into the fire. He said one “Hail Mother Kannon” for each louse and threw it in with a “pop.” But while he was throwing them in the stove there was one who missed the hell fire and dropped all the way to the ground. Mandogi hadn’t noticed, but a couple of them had survived and were now wandering around haggardly on the cool, wide, dirt surface, which they had never experienced before.

  As he watched the lice, so much smaller than himself, tottering around with no confidence, his heart went out to them. Mandogi picked up one that was struggling in a small hollow in the ground and placed it on his big palm. He watched it for a long time. “Even if it is a louse, in the heart of the great and merciful Buddha, all life is the same,” Mother Seoul had said while she herself threw lice into the stove. In a world where we’re all reborn as each other, a human has no right to kill a louse, thought Mandogi. But he also thought, it can’t be helped, though. After hundreds of thousands of millions of years, maybe I’ll be reborn as a louse. Then if someone—no, if the louse is reborn as a kongyangju, maybe he’ll throw me into the fire and I’ll go “pop.” Soon, the squirming in his hand started to tickle. The louse moving around on his hand seemed sort of cute to Mandogi. And so, smiling to himself, he picked it up again, and, into the smell of blending sweat and oil on the back of his neck, he returned it to its former home.

  Mandogi put on his priest’s robe, his mind on the one louse he had returned to his old home, as if he were some kind of Sanzang.1 In other words, he set out with the louse as his sidekick. Mother Seoul happened to be in a good mood too. When, looking down at the floor, he timidly told her about Old Man O’s daughter-in-law in Shimomura, she was unexpectedly pleasant and agreed to let him go, even if she sternly reminded him to collect all of the offerings at the service.

  Mandogi went back into the kitchen and closed the door. There, he pulled out the comb, which had now become his good-luck charm, from the pocket that was specially sewn into the back of his cloak, and he held it to his nose. While he slowly drew a deep breath he closed his eyes for a bit. The scent soaked into his brain and ran through the rest of his body. Mandogi felt great.

  Mandogi picked up his empty chigae (a kind of backpack) from the corner of the kitchen, then went out and left the temple. It wouldn’t have been as bad had it been a miniature shrine filled with sutras, but the chigae paired with the priest’s robe was a very strange outfit, but then, it could be said that it suited Mandogi better than the iron spear shaped like a gun that hung down from his shoulder. From the beginning, kongyangju have been temple manservants, so carrying a load in a chigae wasn’t enough to make him look especially strange. It was just that when the kongyangju at other temples put on their priests’ robes, they didn’t do boorish things like carrying their chigae. It was just that part of it that looked funny. But for Mandogi, this was quite common, and from long ago, at Kannon Temple, it had been his custom. He also wore his chigae because, while he was going to Shimomura, he figured he might as well go a little bit farther down the New Road to the coast to get some groceries. He would pick up some pollack and some seaweed, and he needed two to of millet,2 and he needed to get a few jujubes to replenish the supply for offering on the altar. So in this case, the chigae was not only habitual but necessary.

  The sky was clear, but the wind that blew twenty-four hours a day was strong today, and all the way to the end of the S Hill valley, the forest trees kept clamoring, their branches getting tangled up with one another. But in the shadows of the valley’s short cliffs and around the roots of the trees by the roadside, the azaleas and other flowers were starting to bloom in brilliant colors, and the colors and smells of spring were gradually being reborn on the forest floor. When you came out of the valley, off in the distance you could see the spring sea, its deep blue color heightened by the light from the sun. The great ocean swelled abundantly, and as it drew close to the land it was suddenly rough, baring its white teeth. The hem of his robe fluttering i
n the breeze, the giant Mandogi faced the sea and lumbered down the hill. Before long, the road became flat, and then S Hill looked suddenly short in the background, as if it had collapsed. Beyond that, Mount Halla sloped up from its base to the cloudless sky, quietly towering over everything, stretching into oblivion. The peak, its white snow shining in stark contrast to the color of the sky, sat heavily on the indigo ridges of the mountain below, holding them down away from the sky. In the heart of that deep valley was Kannon Temple. The government had burned the temple down, but it still felt like Kannon Temple was down there in the heart of the forest. “Hail Mother Kannon,” Mandogi prayed.

  Some grass was starting to sprout on the desolate fields and knolls where almost all the trees and bamboo thickets had been burned, apparently to prevent them from being used as hiding places. If you left the beaten path and climbed over the hill, there was a single old pine tree that had survived the fire. Mandogi stretched out his neck to see smaller branches coming out of the old tree’s roots. He stood there in the shadow of the tree for a little while. His eyes followed the path, which was carved up with the tracks of livestock but was almost never traveled by humans, and before long his feet were following that same path. On the edge of the rocky path, the marigolds, which could be found anywhere on the island, were silently sprouting buds and blooming. One way down the path, the half-burnt, smoky-smelling shrubs and the dead, blackened trees stood drearily in a row. Even so, the birds perched in their branches. But when Mandogi came closer, they were startled by the unexpected intruder and struck the dead branches of the bushes as hard as they could with their wings and flew away. Eventually, he came to a stout boulder that stood about as high as a child. The bottom half of one side was covered in thick moss, and he was sure that he had seen this rock before.