The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Dear Jung Hee,

  I begged you not to do this, but if you must, I’m not going to stop you. The sunflowers and China asters I planted in a corner are now in full bloom. The rays of sunlight aren’t too strong. In the early evening, red dragonflies fly at an angle into the sunset, and I think of snowy winter. They say it is really cold in prison. We’re fine. The changes that have happened to my body are truly amazing. I had no idea that so much liquid could gush out from my body, like a maple tree. I have gotten bigger. I eat a lot, and I am always sleepy. Ah, I wish I could show him once, just once, the little angel’s face when she sleeps. She looks into my eyes and smiles. At first, her head seemed so flat, she looked like a baby owl. The contours of her face became clearer, her eyelids have come down, and now she looks like a little girl. You have to promise me. I’ll tell Mom later, you really cannot say anything. There are so many things I worry about. Mom will have to take care of her until I finish graduate school. Yes, I worry about many things, but my worries are always about others. As for me, I am full of energy and courage to go on. And I am passionate about my work, too. Also, when you come here, can you bring some baby clothes and bedding? I did prepare, but I didn’t find anything here that’s good quality. Nothing synthetic, only cottons and natural fabrics. I am happy to hear that Mom expanded her store again. Really, she should have been born a man. She was never once depressed while being a breadwinner her whole life, and she has never been indebted to anyone. And that’s not all! We were never late to pay our tuition fees, not even once. I am determined to be as tough a mother as she was. I don’t think I can say anything when I am face to face with you, so I am writing this all down beforehand. As your older sister, I am so sorry. But I hope you understand.

  Dear Jung Hee,

  It has been already a month since you were here. Winter has come already. Migrating birds carry winter in their wings to the southern provinces. I can hear mallards crying from the reservoir and the lake. The tips of bamboo leaves are drying yellow, and only a few persimmons remain on top of the tree for the magpies.

  I found our baby’s name while scanning through a dictionary. It’s Eun Gyul. It means the sunlight reflecting on a river. She is crawling everywhere now. The room is too small for her to ride the walker, but I can’t leave her on the floor of my studio. The bedroom is filled with her stuff. We’ll get through this winter here and will go to Seoul by next spring. I remember you saying that it may be less of a shock to Mom if you tell her gently, before I show up. I was against the idea at that time, because I didn’t want her to run down here. I’ll send you a letter a few days before our departure. Would you please talk to her around then? You also said that we should tell Mr. Oh, but I’ll never allow that. He has too many things besides himself to protect for the rest of his life. I do not want to disturb him. Incidentally, he sent me a card. It has been confirmed, he got life. I expected it, but I sat there in a daze, breastfeeding the baby and reading his card over and over again. We don’t know how the world will change in the future, and maybe he’ll come back at one point. No matter what, I am not going to tell him until he’s back. Or until he somehow finds out himself. Why do I have this premonition? I get startled sometimes with the ominous thought that I’ll never see him again. If that happens, I want you to tell him about Eun Gyul.

  The last few months of my father’s life was a serene period of reconciliation for me. Except for the last month, he didn’t stay in bed that much. He sat on a futon, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of wide-legged Korean pants, and read books. His face got darker and darker, and he was not able to eat much because his digestive system was failing. We could only offer him liquids. Later, he slept a lot. Once, he looked for me in the middle of the night.

  “Yoon Hee, are you sleeping?”

  “No, Father . . .”

  “Open that door.”

  “Why, is it too hot in here for you?”

  “No, just open it.”

  I got up, still half asleep, and pushed the sliding door of the room. The cold air drifted in from the empty living room, and we looked past the steps to the little courtyard of our house.

  “Is there someone who came to see me?”

  “Who’s going to come at this hour?”

  “Right . . . close the door.”

  Not understanding what was happening, I shut the door again.

  “Father, did you . . . dream of someone?”

  “I guess it was a dream.”

  “Who came to see you?”

  “My old comrades came. They were all wearing tattered American military uniforms and had long hair and beards, like animals.”

  “You mean, your friends in the mountains?”

  “There was a student, a factory girl, and my closest friend, the captain of cultural affairs—they were the people who were also sick and spent ten days at the infirmary with me right before I was captured. The two younger ones died before me, but the captain left us. He promised to come back and walked out of the tent, but he never returned. I guess he must have died, too.”

  “Look, Father, drink some fruit juice. You must be thirsty.”

  “I think I don’t have much time left. I think they came to take me.”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t even look like a sick person.”

  “I smell something fishy from my mouth. I know roughly what’s going on. Your mom’s not back yet?”

  “No. It’s right before the Lunar New Year, things are really busy at the market. She said she’d stay at the store until tomorrow.”

  “I should apologize to you both.”

  “Why do you say such things? We are so grateful to our parents. We went to good schools without worrying about anything. I’m already a senior at university, and Jung Hee will be a university student next year.”

  “That’s what your mom did. Dear Yoon Hee, just after the liberation, I worked with my friends with the hope of making our country a place of freedom and equality. But look where we are today. I still can see the mountains where we ran around, making our way through snowstorms. But I was captured and sent to the Namwon detention camp, I wrote the letter of conversion like your uncle ordered me to, and my younger self died right there with that generation. I somehow persevered with this shell of myself until today.”

  “No, you did your best, Father.”

  “You resented me for that.”

  “Yes, when I was younger, because I didn’t know anything. I thought people like you were evil.”

  “It seems I just waited in silence until you read many books and learned about history and all that. Yes . . . the world will keep changing. We were a tiny part of that change.”

  As he spoke, my father’s voice became lower and thinner, and he began to fall asleep.

  “This is not our world.”

  “What, Father, what did you say?”

  “Walk your way, no matter what they say . . .”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to go . . .”

  Then he fell into a deep sleep. Until a few hours before he passed away his mind was sound, he drank lots of fruit juice and, although his voice was weak and almost a whisper, he talked to me for a long time.

  “Listen, when you face the end, you know exactly what your mistakes were, and you can also forgive yourself. I will never regret that period of my life. But I do wonder a lot if that was the only way. Yes, the Buddha said all of creation is bound by our own limitations. The world imagined by my friends was just a shining star up in the sky. Now looking at both sides, it’s like looking in a mirror, the left and the right are reversed, but that’s it. While fighting, they began to resemble each other. But don’t you think that this incompleteness of our world is quite splendid? Before anything is accomplished, everyone from the same era all die. How do they say that in Buddhism . . . In one hundred years, none of us who exist today will remain. People of that age are all new. It just repeats over and over.”

  My mother brought the minister
and deacons from her church. When they walked into the room, my father barely managed to sit up, but looked directly into the minister’s eyes and said, “I have no prejudice against any religion, but I hate doing what I’ve never done before. I am repenting my sins, but I don’t think there’s any time left to correct them now. I’ll allow you to pray quietly if it is for yourselves, not me.”

  It was a cold-hearted gesture toward my mother, but I thought he seemed so dignified. As the minister prayed for his pain and suffering and for peace of mind, my father lay there in silence with his eyes closed. When the prayer was over, the churchgoers quietly left the room so as not to disturb this dignified patient. My mother and I stayed up the whole night watching him. He withered away like a burning candle. Then he suddenly opened his eyes wide and screamed:

  “I cannot die like this!”

  My mother gathered his clenched fist quivering in the air and folded his hands on top of his chest.

  “Please, my dear, some peace of mind . . .”

  Sometimes, he muttered a song he used to sing when he was young.

  “We’re the fire that burns down the world, we’re the hammer that shatters the iron chain. The sign of hope is the red flag, what we shout for is the battle . . .”

  “My dear, please, no more, please, let’s pray together . . .”

  My father’s breathing became difficult, and he was in pain as he coughed with blood pooling in his throat. My mother burst into tears.

  “Go now, please. Go!”

  That night, my father was placed in the coffin my mother’s congregation had prepared. According to the men who prepare the bodies for funerals, they can work out the life of the dead by looking at the corpse. And they also say the body of someone who dies from liver disease has the worst appearance, because all the other organs become filled with liquid and the body tends to decompose quickly. The body slowly deflates to about half the size it used to be and the arms are so stiff that they need to be broken with force when placing the body in the coffin. Fortunately for us, my father was put into the coffin as soon as he passed away, and his body was slipped in whole. But the problems began afterward. It was still cold outside and the room with the coffin was kept unheated, but it was springtime, after all. The body began to decompose soon after, and we could not get rid of the stench no matter how many sticks of incense were burnt. If I borrow the words of Christianity that mother believed then my father definitely went to hell, based on what his dead body looked like. Until the end, he was holding onto something and unable to let go, I think. When the pallbearers went to lift up the coffin, it would not budge. There was a commotion, and my mother ran into the room, wailing, to comfort the dead.

  “My dear, please, you need to rest now and go where you have to go. Don’t worry about me or the girls. I won’t hate you, so please get up and go!”

  People rushed into the room and pulled the coffin from the floor. Some sort of liquid had trickled out of it, and the coffin had stuck to the floor. I was standing outside the living room, facing the house. The pallbearers were carrying the coffin with strips of cotton cloth, but the one on the front missed a step as he was stepping down from the living room to the courtyard. The coffin slid toward me, and I fell backwards while trying to catch it. The people who were supposed to be in charge of running the funeral were so inexperienced that they didn’t know what do, and I began to cry from shock and fear. Then I felt something wet running from my chest to my legs. I looked down and found dark blood that had collected in the coffin and oozed out from it. My two hands soaked in the blood of my dead father, I fell to the ground screaming and writhing and crying as if I had become a ghost myself. My mother was wailing, too.

  “Dear God, how can you do this to us? How can you do this to your most beloved daughter? If you still hold onto all your sorrows and bitterness, you won’t be able to rest anywhere, not underground, not in water, nowhere!”

  That was how my father left us. I do not think that all those incidents were just accidental, as my mother tried to explain to me. Did he know that I would meet you and live the way I do now? Is that why he could not let go and leave in peace?

  Later, I found a few curious things in a hidden drawer in my father’s stationery case. There were three books and a bullet shell. The books were published in the years following the liberation, printed on what we called horse shit paper. You know, there was a shortage of everything at the time, so many books were printed faintly on dark recycled paper with speckles.

  There was a collection of poems by Yi Yong Ak called The Old House, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Chekhov’s In the Ravine. Inside the front covers, written in small, dainty handwriting, was a name Kim Soon Im and a date of Dan Ki year 4281. It was fashionable at the time to note the year starting from the founding of the first dynasty in the Korean peninsular, so Dan Ki year 4281 meant 1948. The ink had smudged and faded, but in that name the owner’s touch still clearly remained. On the rusty and crumpled cover, a small piece of paper was attached with scotch tape. Something was written on it in tiny letters. While hiking the Jiri Mountains, Spring 1969. Where did it go, the bullet once attached to this shell? I’m guessing there’s no connection between the books and the shell, based on the long period of time between the two dates. I just wonder, what was his relationship with the books’ owner, Kim Soon Im? Did they meet after the liberation and fall in love? Or were they just comrades who belonged to the same organization? My father once said they shot the wounded when they had to retreat urgently, because those in pain would not survive at the infirmary. Maybe my father, on a hike years later, found the remnants of those old battles, in which one could not distinguish an enemy from a friend. Something made him want to pick up that shell and keep it. What triggered this, I’ll never know. Now I safeguard the shell and the books that my father held onto.

  However . . . ah, I do remember something! While he was sick, he once asked me, out of the blue, to get persimmons for him. It was too early in the season for persimmons, so I asked again, “Do you want the ripe ones or the sweet ones?”

  “Try finding the unripe ones. If you soak them in salt water, they taste good.”

  We were told that vegetables and fruit were good for him, so my mother was buying case after case of not only the seasonal fruits but also sweet pineapples and other imported tropical fruits. I went to the market and tried to find the unripe persimmons that my father talked about, but all I could find were the sweet ones nicely packaged.

  “Father, there’s no unripe persimmons these days. They use chemicals or something like that to ripen them all.”

  “I guess they have to in order to sell them. Maybe we’ll find them in the rural areas.”

  “Kids these days won’t eat things like that.”

  My father held a sweet persimmon on his palm and opened and closed his hand several times while staring at the fruit.

  “You just wanted to look at it, didn’t you? “

  “Why not? You can see the autumn.”

  He looked at the fruit for a long time. Finally, he spoke again.

  “You’re an artist, you want to hear a funny story about one autumn?”

  My father told me that after the liberation, as soon as he came back from Japan, he joined the Preparation Committee for Founding the Nation and the Communist Party of Korea. At the time, although he was eager, there wasn’t much for him to do, so he worked as a translator for publishers or a lecturer at factory night schools. My father got more involved during the movement against the new laws governing Seoul National University and the October Incident in the province of Kyungsang. Around the harvest time of that year, my father went down to his hometown to get some rice, which was becoming more and more scarce in Seoul.

  He spent two days in the village and was coming back to Seoul. It was right after the railroad workers’ strike, and there was a rush of passengers who had been delayed for days. Too many people were getting in and out of the train, breaking the glass windows,
and even climbing up into the baggage compartment. At first my father rode the train by the exit, hanging onto the door, and slowly he was able to push inside until he ended up in a little corridor in front of the bathroom. When he sat down, he saw a young woman with bobbed hair squatting on her own bag. He assumed she was a student who had gone to her hometown to get food, just as my father had. Before they exchanged words, he knew, he said, he could feel that she was an intellectual. She was reading a pocket edition from Iwanami, the legendary Japanese publishing company.

  “It’s only been two days since the train started running again, I think that’s why there’s such a crowd.”