by Sok-pom Kim
Before long, they arrived at the police substation, whose building was proof enough that a battle had taken place in the neighborhood. The right side, or the east end, of the tile-roofed bungalow was completely destroyed, from the roof all the way down the wall, so much that you couldn’t see its original shape. Maybe it had been hit with a hand grenade. There were deep bullet holes carved into the crumbling stone fence surrounding the building. Lined up along the New Road that went by the substation were the grocery stores, the reason Mandogi had brought his empty chigae.
Once the jeeps were completely stopped, the dust still didn’t settle. Strong gusts of wind were relentlessly stirring up and scattering the dust from the dried-out surface of the New Road. One entire side of the roof was hidden by a huge camphor tree that stood in the courtyard of the substation. From the jeep, Mandogi saw what looked like the figure of a drunk in front of the crumbling stone wall in the camphor tree’s shadow, but it wasn’t a drunk. It looked that way because his feet were very close to the ground, and he was swaying back and forth in a very strange way. Up close, it was clear that it was a human corpse, hanging from a big branch of the camphor tree that jutted out of the courtyard past the stone fence. It was no accident that he was hung from that tree. About two meters of rope stretched down from the big branch, pulling up on his jaw and digging into his neck, holding up his heavy torso and lifeless arms and legs. He swayed gently back and forth as the branch swayed in the strong wind. Even Mandogi knew right away that this was the body of one of the partisans killed in the battle last night. If nothing else, it was obvious from the cardboard placard that hung around his neck. Its content was a set phrase that filled the entire page, the characters scrawled in poor handwriting. But there probably wasn’t anyone on the island anymore who needed to read each character to know what it said. Even from far away, if they saw the cardboard covering the chest and the stomach like a kitchen apron, they would nod and say, “Mmhmm.”
“I am a cowardly insurgent who has violated the national policy of the Republic of Korea. I am an evil human being who has perpetrated atrocities on the virtuous citizens of this country. This is the fate of those who follow the hateful path of rebellion.”
Of course, when this kind of huge placard first started appearing below the necks of dead men, the citizens of the island flocked together in front of them, even if they knew that they could only be warnings to the living—that is, warnings to themselves.
As soon as a corpse cast a shadow on the New Road, the crows would come. First, they came to gouge out the eyes. After they had gouged out the eyes, they came to stick their beaks in the eye sockets and pick at the dark insides. No, the crows on this island aren’t that modest. They’ve gotten in the habit of pecking at a corpse nonchalantly, even right in front of people. Turning their heads restlessly, they sit conspicuously on the bloated torso, and they pick at the dead body even if they can see living faces. While the crows are pecking, maggots gather around the mouth, nostrils, eye sockets, and ears, while the green bottle flies, which have lost their instinct to fly away, buzz around the beaks of the crows. Mucus from the body sticks to the black beaks of the crows, and countless white maggots get stuck in it and dangle from the beaks. No matter how the crows shake, they don’t fall off.
As he was walking in from the jeep Mandogi stopped for a moment to pray. His hands were pulled abruptly back to his sides, the rope of the handcuffs digging in sharply. Robbed of his hands by the police, Mandogi simply chanted, “Hail Mother Kannon.”
From the entrance, Mandogi and Old Man O passed through two rooms and finally entered the substation chief’s office. The room was five or six tsubo with two desks and a few chairs.1 The larger desk was set apart from the other one, and you could tell just by looking at it that it was the desk of the highest authority. The substation chief sat there. The chief stood up from his chair with his hands behind his back. Looking at the captain with the Colman mustache, who was reporting in front of the desk, and then at Mandogi, he compared their faces, and finally he fixed his gaze on Mandogi’s nose. Maybe he was just thinking, Now here’s a guy with a weird face. Mandogi, perhaps tacitly understanding, was thinking that the chief’s face, which had a good complexion but was covered with bumps, looked just like a potato that had been washed in a pond.
“Ha ha ha, you were obstructing justice with a face like that? A priest getting mixed up in this on purpose, that’s a hell of a bad omen,” said the station chief, ordering Old Man O to come forward. “You wait over there, priest. Right now I have something interesting to show you.”
Old Man O looked just like a ghost as he stood in front of the desk. His sunken eyes were dark to their very bottoms, casting shadows of despair in their thick corners. They were so dark that even if he winked, you couldn’t see the tiniest flicker of light. There’s a saying that goes, “If a fly landed on him, he’d fall over,” which was probably the best way to describe O’s unstable posture and countenance.
“Hmm, you’re ‘O,’ are you? I like the name ‘O,’ ” the chief said cheerfully after asking the old man his name. And then he started laughing so hard that you could see down his throat. “You’re ‘O,’ as in, ‘Il, Yi, Sam, Sa, O.’ ”2 The chief ordered the captain with the flashy mustache to take a memo, using him as a secretary, and he returned to his own desk and sat down.
A cigarette hanging from his mouth, he obediently picked up the fountain pen. After glancing up and looking over the room, he quickly wrote the character for “five” in the open notebook. It looked as though he was a fine writer; he wrote “five, five, five, five, five,” continuing straight through, writing the character five times. Sometimes he used Arabic numerals and wrote “5,” depending on how his body and mind were feeling at the time. “Five” could take the place of the surname “O,” which was pronounced the same way. This was the first time he had been asked to write something down, and he couldn’t get the tip of the pen to touch down gently, as if it were a plane that was crash landing. And when it finally did touch down, it looked like it had been steered in a zigzag and crashed. But for this era, he was relatively fast, and at least he knew how to write. And so, without too much effort, he could write. But the chief knew no characters. Well, almost no characters. It must be said that his hands, built like the tough roots of an old tree, were naturally made for laboring, so they didn’t have much use for writing. Even so, he often came across the character for “O,” since it was a common surname. It wasn’t that he couldn’t read it, but if you asked him to write it himself, his hands would suddenly shy away from the task. If he tried, it would look like the pen was wandering around in outrageous, tangled, meandering lines, but they wouldn’t make a character. And so, when he ran into surnames like “O” that could be replaced with a character for a number, they say his mood would brighten. In other words, as long as they were numbers, he could write them himself. So, it was the same when he came across names like “Yi,” which sounded like “two,” or “Yuk,” which sounded like “six,” or “Ku,” which could be written as “nine.”
That being said, this sort of thing certainly didn’t turn any heads. If you’re wondering how someone who didn’t know characters could sit in the chief’s chair at a police station, it was really quite normal.
We can only chalk it up to a difference in national character. In this country, to become a police officer or a substation chief, no education was necessary. On this island, most of the policing jobs were given to friends of the Northwest Youth Group, but the majority of them were illiterates who had never opened a book. To be sure, it was a party of ignorants and illiterates, but having been appointed as the highly educated Syngman Rhee’s special bodyguards, the Northwest Youth Group was made up of the greatest red-hunting champions in the entire country. In this country, if you could make your enemies look “red,” if you had the violent abilities needed to wipe the reds, like ghosts, off the face of the earth, then you could easily surpass the educated. They could sniff out their prey
with a sense of smell like that of a watchdog or a hunting dog, so they had no need for characters. But unlike watchdogs or hunting dogs, their sense of smell was human, and hence very prone to mistakes, so they arrested people without discrimination. One time a middle-schooler returning from Japan was arrested on the street in broad daylight just because of the badge on his cap. Always believing the star to be the symbol of the reds, our police officers from the Northwest had strange abnormalities in their senses of smell, as if their noses were severely twisted. They say the middle-schooler, who wore a cap with a gold, six-pointed star, rather than the five-pointed star, quickly came to be seen as a courageous rebel. Being the son of someone important, thankfully he was soon released, but they say the police chief still had quite a laugh about it. How silly could those cops be, he wondered. But the people couldn’t bring themselves to laugh at something so egregious. It was already a year since that had happened, but the story hadn’t ended there. There were plenty of similar stories, no, plenty of similar incidents. It got to the point that if you flashed the color red, the police might come charging, just like bulls. They probably weren’t far from causing a panic in the dye factories and from putting a ban on all imported red crayons and paints. In fact, in the farming villages where they hung cayenne peppers on their thatched roofs, where they turned bright red in the autumn sun, even this spectacle of poetic seasonal imagery, the hanging of the cayenne peppers, became a taboo.
At length, the chief put his hands behind his back again and stood up and walked over to the desk of the secretary with the flashy mustache.
“So how about it, O? Do you wish to be truly loyal to our Republic of Korea and to His Excellency Syngman Rhee?” Straightening the cigarette in his mouth, the station chief puffed out his cheeks and stretched out his hand to strike a match. Lighting the fire, he fixed his ill-meaning gaze on the old man.
“Yes, yes …”
“I don’t understand this ‘yes, yes.’ Speak clearly! Do you want to swear loyalty from the bottom of your heart?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Hmph. Well then, ‘Five,’ what do you think of the reds, who kill our poor, innocent citizens, who steal our livestock, who want to destroy our country? Tell me what you think of ‘em. I want to know. Won’t you tell me, please?”
“Yes, for sure, I can’t even say how much I hate them, the reds who kill our innocent citizens, who steal our livestock, who are trying to destroy our country.”
“Hmm? Did you just say you hate them? What about them do you hate? Tell me.”
“Nothing in specific. I just really, really hate them.” Old Man O’s voice wavered. It sounded half like he was crying. “Truly, I just hear the word ‘red,’ and my blood boils.”
“I see. So, would you shoot a red with a gun?”
“Yes.” After he responded, Old Man O suddenly lifted his face and looked at the station chief. For a moment, the speechless old man doubted his own ears. Cornered, with no time to hesitate, he had blurted out “Yes.” He had said that he was capable of shooting someone.
“Oh, excellent! With that kind of courage and resolve, no one will doubt your loyalty.”
The station chief signaled to the captain, turned secretary, with the flashy mustache. The captain had been starting to lose his composure, and holding onto the desk with both hands he stood up and looked away from the old man, leaving the desk. I imagine the station chief’s signal and the captain’s movement made the old man feel uneasy. His back bent, he timidly watched the captain with the flashy mustache disappear into the closed door at the other end of the room.
You could have had the keen senses and agility of a young man, and the instincts of a wild animal, and you probably couldn’t have heard the little noises, the subtle signs on the other side of the door before this old man did. A door-sized hole opened in the wall, and when two men appeared, one an officer, the other not, the shock must have plugged up the old man’s eyes, ears, mouth, throat, and everything all at once. He needed no time at all to recognize the man who was not an officer as his own son, with not only his hands tied behind his back, but his entire body bound, his two eyes gleaming wildly from his grizzly face.
“Untie those ropes,” said the station chief’s calm voice. From the moment he saw his son, the old man was weighed down, immobile as a stone. Untie those ropes. Could the lifeless old man have even heard the voice? Untie those ropes. Untie those ropes. Untie those ropes.
“Officer Kim, untie his ropes.” The captain with the flashy mustache repeated the station chief’s words. And even being so bold as to get a step ahead of the chief, he added, “Bring a chair.” The chief’s face hardened for a moment, but then he moved closer to Old Man O, who was sitting with his body propped up by the back of the chair. He might as well have been made of dried-out clay. Sitting isolated on the chair, the old man’s body looked extremely small. Only his small, dark eyes blinked occasionally, but even they looked like they could fall out and hit the floor at any moment.
“So how about it, O?” said the station chief, tapping out a rhythm on the old man’s shoulders, which were quivering like a flag fluttering in the breeze. “This filthy ape of a man is one of the reds, which you hate so, so much.” Soon, Old Man O’s entire body was shaking, starting in his feet resting on the floor and making its way up to his rattling jaw. His mouth wouldn’t move, and he could only say, “Uh, uh, uh.”
“Hey, bring a gun!” said the station chief.
“Officer Kim, bring a gun!” said the captain. “And bring water,” he added.
“Water? What water?” asked the station chief.
“If you don’t pour water down his throat, you won’t know where the bullet went in.”
“Ah, that water. Hey, go get some water!”
Click. The sound of an M1 being loaded. They handed the gun to the old man. He stayed in the chair, resting the stock of the gun on the floor, looking down for a while. He wondered what he, an old man, getting close to sixty years old, was doing with a modern thing like an M1, but having been recruited to the sentry posts and then the “Homeland Protection Groups,” he unhappily remembered how to operate a gun. And now the reality of this incomprehensible arrest was being piled on top of the shock of his daughter-in-law’s suicide. His own son, a prisoner of war, right before his eyes!
The son stared at the old man for a time, and when he was finished, his mouth still gagged, he strained his voice to utter, “Unhh! Unhh!” then immediately pretended not to recognize him. And he kept pretending not to recognize him to the very end. But it was easy to confirm that he wasn’t just any prisoner, but that he was from Shimomura and that he was Old Man O’s son. It was clear enough from the geography that people from the villages in the substation’s jurisdiction had participated in the partisan attack on the police station. Not even a year had passed since April 3, 1948, the day of the event known to the world as the Four-Three Incident, or the Cheju-do Rebellion. So the police were probably still acquainted with some of the villagers, and if they just called in a few of them for questioning, all would become clear.
To protect your own body—no, to prolong your life—sometimes it might be your son, or it might be your husband, or it might be your parent, but you had to point the gun at him anyway. To avoid suspicions of being a “commie family,” you had to ignore all your human inhibitions. It was best to kill the person with the first shot. If he wasn’t your parent or your son, but just some other relative, you should thank the heavens for being merciful and go forward and attack. If your human conscience lead you astray and you abandoned your gun, or even if you purposely missed and opened up a hole in the ceiling, the results would be the same. You knew very well that it would result in deaths on both sides.
The station chief ordered Old Man O to stand up, and with his hands behind his back, his gut sticking out, he started taking big strides toward the center of the room. Old Man O was silent, slowly, slowly getting up. He got up, stretched out his arm, and took the g
lass from the desk, raising it to his lips with a quivering hand. He drank the water in one gulp. His face was strangely calm. At some point, his face had stopped looking wrinkled like a dust cloth. The color of fear was also washed away, and now his face even had a warm, smooth feeling. Could a person’s face really change that much in an instant? As if cleansed from his heavy sorrow, he was not the same person who had looked so small and dried out.
Having taken a turn around the room, the station chief stopped in front of a portrait of Syngman Rhee on the wall behind the desk. In front of the picture, on top of the chief’s smoothly combed head of hair, sat a police hat, decorated with a fat gold string indicating a rank even higher than the captain’s. The collar of his uniform was neat and straightened, but he was worried about his cuffs and kept pulling on them with the opposite hand. Then, he faced the portrait and ordered the men to salute.
“Ahem, we are about to witness the execution by gunfire of a communist who makes our fatherland unsafe. Ahem, to our Republic of Korea, we pledge to abide by its noble laws, to search every corner and to fight the insurgents, and before this portrait of His Excellency President Syngman Rhee, we pledge our allegiance,” the station chief said solemnly, his sword drawn. Then, he gave a lecture to his men on the dangers of the rebels’ ideas, and he told them that in order to obliterate them, atrocities could be permitted. Then, the captain, who had been nervously shifting his weight and mumbling oddly to himself, walked briskly over to the portrait and straightened it. It had been crooked.