The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The next day we did not accompany Young Soo. We gave him a map and a little money and sent him out on his own. For three days, Young Soo traveled around the city riding the trams and buses, and by his tenth night in West Berlin he seemed to be in a very different spirit.

  “Why don’t you go see him?” Mr. Yi whispered to me. “He’s in his bedroom, and he’s not coming out.”

  “Maybe he’s sleeping because he’s tired.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. He seemed to be really depressed from the moment he walked in.”

  I opened the bedroom door quietly and found Young Soo sitting on the bed, his head bowed.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  As I walked in and took a seat across from the bed, I saw Young Soo quickly wiping his eyes and turning away as he hid something underneath his pillow.

  “Did something happen?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “What’s that? Show me.”

  “It’s just a picture.”

  “May I?”

  He held the small picture, but I snatched it from his hand. It was a black-and-white photo of a family, five of them standing in line in front of a weeping willow tree. The man wearing a suit with buttons up to his neck must have been Young Soo’s father, and the woman with tightly permed hair wearing a traditional Korean dress his mother. In between them stood a boy wearing a white shirt and shorts and a Youth Group scarf around his neck, perhaps a third grader. I knew for sure that this boy was Young Soo just by looking at the face. Two girls wearing middle-school uniforms were likely his older sisters.

  “You were looking at your family picture. Where was this taken?”

  “We had a picnic by Daedong River.”

  I gave the picture back to Young Soo.

  “Listen. I’m going back tomorrow,” he said, taking the photo.

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “I called the school dormitory today, while I was out.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  “A friend who’s studying here, too. He said everything will be fine as long as I go back, that I should just come back as soon as possible.”

  “If you did something wrong, there will be penalties. But just be honest, tell them everything and be candid about it.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “Let’s eat dinner.”

  When I brought Young Soo back to the dining table, Mr. Yi had already set it up. I opened my mouth before he could.

  “Young Soo is going back to school tomorrow.”

  “Really? We should take him back, then.”

  As the three of us ate dinner, we did not have much to say. I cleaned up and made some tea. The two men sat quietly and drank the tea, and then Young Soo finally opened his mouth. “What happens if you ask for refugee status here?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I guess you have to get a lawyer and report to the government. There will be an investigation and you have to spend some time at the refugee camp. Since you do speak a little German you’ll be able to find a job soon, and then . . . something like that.”

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like living here. Germans seem so lonely. Everyone is on their own.”

  “Everyone’s in charge of their own lives. Isn’t it so wherever you go?”

  “They just work and make money and buy things.”

  The next morning, we took Young Soo to a discount store nearby and bought him a few presents. I chose a wool scarf with a British label and a pair of gloves, and Mr. Yi found him shoes. Right there and then, Young Soo wrapped the scarf around his neck and put the gloves on and changed his shoes. We took the train to Friedrichstraße, where one side of the railway was West Berlin and the other side was East Berlin. Our plan was to drop him off at customs, but he asked us, practically begging, “Please come with me. They’ll come get me once I call them.”

  I followed them while Mr. Yi wrapped one arm around Young Soo’s shoulder and went downstairs to the underground passage. We passed through the crowded station and crossed a road to Potsdamer Platz. In the middle of the square was a poorly maintained field. There were benches all around the square, and a public phone booth.

  “Call them,” Mr. Yi told Young Soo.

  When he came out of the phone booth after a long telephone call, his face was flushed.

  “They’ll be here soon.”

  Potsdamer Platz was quiet, with few people walking through. Across from it was a government-run hotel and a busy street beyond. We sat on a bench facing the hotel and waited for more than half an hour. A car turned the corner and two men got out. Young Soo stood up. He took a few steps forward and stopped, and the two men who were looking around the square were now headed toward us, walking on the lawn. As they approached us, Mr. Yi got up from the bench, too.

  “I should get going. Take care, both of you,” Young Soo said.

  “Goodbye. Study hard!”

  “Bye-bye.”

  As he walked across the square, Young Soo looked back at us several times, and Mr. Yi and I waved to him. We took the train from the Friedrichstraße station and went back the way we came.

  At that time, Eastern Europe was changing fast. In Hungary the Socialist Party took over, in Poland the Solidarity Trade Union, in Czechoslovakia the Civic Forum, followed by Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Croatia. Eventually European socialism was revealed to be a failure. It was inevitable that the system switched from national socialism to the free-market economy of capitalism. We did not know it at the time, but 1989 was a turning point in world history.

  The dream that my father and you shared, the one that I supported deep down in my heart, had to return to the starting gate. The whole world had to start all over again. We all knew very well the current way of living was not right, and so the countless poor and powerless people had to begin all over again in this changed world.

  During the 1990 summer vacation Mr. Yi Hee Soo went back to Seoul for a visit, but I stayed in Berlin. I considered making a short visit, too, but I knew that all I would gain from the trip would be some weight, thanks to my old mother, who would feed me as much as she could. The thought of having to go to Jung Hee’s house to see Eun Gyul also dissuaded me. In order to teach at a Korean university as a real professor, I needed to go back with a title, but the art school here did not offer acceptable degrees. A diploma was sort of a master’s degree, but we art students had the option of doing a Meisterschule. I was lucky that my professor was quite favorable toward my work, which tended to be neoexpressionist. I was planning not to go back to Seoul until I was done here.

  It was one of those late summer evenings at the end of August. During summer in Berlin the sun lingers until around ten at night. It is the opposite of winter, when it gets dark at three in the afternoon. In summer I would open all the windows wide at dusk and enjoy the tranquil hours of faint light. One evening the doorbell on the front gate rang. I asked who it was. It was Song Young Tae. I pressed the button to open the gate. A little later my doorbell rang, and there was Song Young Tae. In both hands he was carrying suitcases and bags and other things. In his navy blue suit, white dress shirt, and red tie, sweating heavily, he looked like a country bumpkin visiting the city for the first time. I could not resist laughing out loud but then I covered my mouth.

  “What is this, are you going on a date or doing an interview?”

  “Can I have a glass of water, please?” he said, as he entered my studio and dropped his luggage. I took out a bottle of water from the refrigerator and he finished it in one gulp. He collapsed onto a sofa.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Can’t you tell? I’m arriving from somewhere far away.”

  “Somewhere far away?’

  “I have just crossed over Eurasia.”

  “Pfft! Who hasn’t flown in a plane these days?”

  “But I bet only a few have crossed the Ural and Xinganling Mountains.”

  Young Ta
e was loosening the tie around his neck and undoing one button. He put a shopping bag and a box on the table.

  “What’s all this stuff?”

  Without saying a word, he opened the bag and the box and took out several things. A bottle of ginseng liquor, another bottle of liquor made from the azaleas in the Baekdu Mountains, Younggwang cigarettes, and cultivated ginseng roots. It was only then that I figured out where he was coming back from.

  “What do they mean . . . all these things . . . ?”

  “I’m coming back from Pyongyang.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “Because everyone said it’s the one place we can’t go, so I thought, why not?”

  I was not too surprised after all the things that had happened in the last few months, but this did seem to be quite a sudden leap.

  “Really, it’s about time you stopped acting like a desperado, don’t you think?”

  I was pretty certain that Young Tae had been to the big event organized by Koreans from both sides and all over the world. He probably went with Korean-Germans.19 I found my wallet and walked to the door.

  “Let’s go get some dinner.”

  “Aren’t you gonna cook for me here?”

  “Didn’t you have enough Korean food over there? And I’m tired. Can’t you just eat what is offered to you, please?”

  I took him to the Italian restaurant Roma, across the Bundesplatz. I wondered why there were so many elderly couples in the neighborhood restaurant every evening. The food was really good there. The owner still wore an apron, but he usually greeted and talked to customers out front instead of staying in the kitchen. We took a table in the innermost corner and ordered red wine. Before our food arrived, I tore up the freshly baked bread that still smelled like flour and began interrogating Young Tae.

  “How was it?”

  “It’s complicated. I can’t describe it in one word. I’m both impressed and depressed.”

  “What kind of doubletalk is that?”

  “It made me cry to see the resourcefulness of those who survive despite the harsh conditions, but it is depressing to see the absolute control there is over everything.

  “That’s what I would have expected anyway, none of that’s new, is it? I once read that they call themselves a porcupine whose quills stand up to imperialism.”

  “You say it as if it’s about some foreign country! While we were rolling in the lap of luxury, they were doing what we should have done.”

  “What are you talking about? We weren’t standing still. It took a while, but we’ve been crawling diligently, like a tortoise.”

  “We’ll change, too. But the transition could take decades.”

  “What are you going to do now? This is a big deal. You don’t expect that you’ll be able to go back to Seoul without getting into huge trouble, do you? How stupid are you, to do this at a time like this?”

  “I just decided to be on their side, okay? Besides, I’m just a nobody. I’m not going to be of much help.”

  I told him the story of Cho Young Soo, and Young Tae listened to it patiently without interrupting. I ended the story by telling him, “Of course, it cannot end like this. Even if it takes time, it should not be resolved the way it was in Vietnam or here. It’s a fight that has continued for over a hundred years since we opened up the port.”

  “I am just sick of this place now. It’s like everyone prepared for the meal for a long, long time and just when the table is set they turn the light off. Even though the hunger is still fierce.”

  “I’m told that’s human nature.”

  Both of us stopped talking. We ate and drank, smoked cigarettes, paid the bill, and left the restaurant. I could not bring him to Mr. Yi’s place this time, so I had to take him to my studio. I went up to the loft and got into my bed while he slept on the sofa at the foot of the ladder. As I tossed about, the mattress spring made small metallic sounds. Out of the blue, he spoke. “Do you ever think of Chae Mi Kyung?”

  “Once in a while . . .”

  Then this time, it was me who suddenly raised my voice, “Why are you so stupid? She was in love with you. I knew from the moment I saw her.”

  He did not answer. He remained silent for a while then asked again, quietly, “Miss Han . . . Are you really in love with Mr. Yi Hee Soo?”

  I was angry he was doing that again, and I didn’t think I could stand it. I remembered that early morning at the humble restaurant, where he spoke in low tones as if acting in a romantic movie. But my heart was beginning to ache as well. Really, our lives were so difficult. I did not answer. And then he brought up what I was afraid someone might ask.

  “What about Mr. Oh?”

  “And what makes you think that you can ask such a question?”

  I sat up in bed. Inside, furious words were bubbling up wildly. Ten years ago, a shadow of my father’s youth came to me, asking for my protection. We tried to lean on each other, despite the guilty conscience that every young man and woman of that time carried within themselves. He disappeared behind a darkened window, and he was erased by time, dust, and wind, like words written carelessly on a wall with a pencil. He is still there. But he’s there as something missing, an absence. I wanted my life back, a quiet life where no one interfered. The bubbling words could not flow out my throat, but sank down slowly into my heart, like water going down the toilet.

  “I just . . . I thought I would ask,” Song Young Tae whispered, barely audible.

  I lay down again, and finally I realized that you had come back to me.

  The next day, after I dropped off Young Tae at the train station, I paced around the house, my heart an empty vessel. I went over to see my neighbor Mari. I pushed the doorbell several times but no one answered. I was about to go back to my studio, but then I banged on the door with my fist. I thought I heard someone’s footsteps inside and felt that someone was watching me through the peephole in the door. The door cracked open a little, and I pulled it wide open. Mari was standing there in a bathrobe like a ghost. Her white hair was let down and she had no makeup on, and she was swaying because she was drunk. I did not feel like making light of the situation, so I just supported her walking back inside and helped her sit on a loveseat. I sat down next to her, too, and saw a half-empty bottle and glasses strewn on the table. I had already decided a long time before not to criticize her about the drinking, so I just sighed.

  “Mari, have you eaten anything?”

  “Yes. I ate a lot.”

  I did not bother quarreling with her, I just went into her kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A little bit of sausage and milk and butter. No dry cereal, but I found powdered grain, and I mixed it with milk and brought it to her. I placed the bowl right under her chin and fed her a spoonful at a time. Although she frowned and turned her head away at first, she began taking the liquid after the first spoonful.

  “Did you drink all through the night, alone?”

  “No . . . I . . . drew something.”

  Under the sofa, I found the small sketchbook, opened to a random page. I noticed a few pages with drawings I had seen before, followed by a few empty ones, then I found writing in German.

  The life of a human being is like poetry, there is a beginning and an end. It’s just that that is not all.

  Would lovers be scared in front of the dead? Ah, the dead, please let her rest.

  After the writing were drawings in pencil and pen. I had seen her drawings many times before, and I knew the several important clues to them. A circle with several lines growing behind was Mari herself. Like in a child’s drawings, there was a triangle underneath the body, perhaps a skirt. Meanwhile, Stephan had a round head and a long body but no triangle, so he must have been wearing a pair of pants. Here he was a long stick man lying down below a straight line and among slashed ones. Maybe this was dead Stephan buried underground. In another, Mari was standing on top of another straight line, and there was a ball of wool, too. The winding line looked like a leash. It seemed like she wa
s visiting Stephan’s grave with Hans. But above the ball of yarn was a small cloud. I pointed at it with my finger.

  “Mari, what is this?” I asked.

  She chuckled with a hoarse sound, and when she spoke she did not sound like herself at all.

  “That’s a hat for Hans. The one that the dead ones carry around with them.”

  A halo. It was Mari taking dead Hans to the grave of dead Stephan—in the end, it was a drawing of Mari left alone. Mari gazed at her own drawing, her eyes vacant.

  “Hans lived for a long time, until he was fifteen years old. But I never took him to the sanatorium. Stephan didn’t even recognize me, and I had to take a train. Hans died before Stephan did. Turn the page.”

  Mari with the triangle skirt was pointing at a straight line with an arrow. I thought the straight line meant the ground, and next to it was a group of snail-like circles with tails and a rectangle. I turned the sketchbook around to figure out what was going on, but I did not get it.

  “What is this?”

  This time, Mari answered curtly, “Just lines.”

  “What is this arrow?”

  Without saying anything, she took a glass and poured liquor into it. I knew what she was going to do, so I grabbed the glass from her.

  “Stop it. I’ll take this one.”

  “Oh, Yuni, if you get as drunk as I am we’ll understand each other.”

  “I don’t think so. My drinking is different from yours.”

  I took a sip and gave it back to her, and she took the rest in one gulp. She looked at her own sketchbook over my shoulder.