The Investigation (33 page)

I managed to dictate the telegram. ‘Dong-ju died 16 February. Collect body.’ My hand – no, my entire body – was trembling. I returned the receiver to its cradle. I opened
my hand to count out the days that remained until his release.

I paced the frozen prison yard like a caged animal. Ten days later, Dong-ju’s father and cousin arrived to gather Dong-ju’s remains. I approached them as they headed out of the
prison. I bowed my head. I wanted to say something. I wanted to convey his appearance, his last words, something that would allow his father to remember his son the way he was. After a while I
raised my head. ‘It’s unbelievable – Dong-ju has died. That beautiful person . . .’ I quickly turned round and walked away; my own tears were inappropriate in the face of
their grief.

Time stopped for me, but it somehow kept ticking away for everyone else. Snow fell, piled up, drifted and melted, and new grass sprouted. On frozen branches spring flowers
bloomed and died. I didn’t notice the winter fading into spring, which heated into summer in turn. I was a small, unmoored boat on an empty ocean, my sail torn, my oars broken. I was haunted
by the men no longer here; Sugiyama’s face and Dong-ju’s voice dogged me wherever I went. My memories flashed back to the guard’s corpse hanging in the main corridor. I heard the
plangent strokes of
Die Winterreise
, saw the poet’s long, pale hand opening the door to the interrogation room and Sugiyama’s rough hand writing on coarse recycled paper, and
recalled Dong-ju’s eyes as he recited poetry under the stars. I thought often of the underground library, the long, narrow tunnel, Midori’s fingers flying across the piano keys like
birds on the wing and the way she said, ‘He was a poet.’ My memory swam with poems that withered into a plume of smoke, books that transformed into a handful of ash, conversations in
the interrogation room and Dong-ju’s words: ‘A book that takes root in someone’s heart never disappears.’

Everyone was leaving this world, especially the innocent. The war wrought violence on my soul. People left even when it wasn’t death that took them. Midori was suddenly transferred to a
military hospital in Nagasaki. Perhaps she wanted to get out of here, knowing what nightmares were happening in this place. She left in a swirl of dry wind, without leaving behind even the shortest
smile. Her departure made the prison feel emptier. I thought of her every moment I was awake. To push her away from my thoughts, I brandished my club with fervour and harassed the prisoners
brutally, like Sugiyama used to. I thought I could understand him now, the guard who couldn’t help but become a monster, walking arrogantly to conceal his limp and turning brutal to hide his
guilt. The prisoners began to avoid me, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to stop thinking about Midori; she was a good person, not like me. I could stand to be alive only if I could become
even more brutal than the war.

I wanted to be invisible, to get out. I holed up in the inspection office, reading books and postcards, consoling myself that I wasn’t the only person bruised by the times. With the excuse
of my censorship duties, I skipped meals and didn’t show up for the soldier-guard assemblies. Whenever I thought about Dong-ju, I went to the bookshelves, even though his box of confiscated
materials was long gone. In those moments, I took out his black leather-bound Bible from the bottom of my drawer. This was the only thing that still proved his existence to me. I flipped through
the pages his fingers had touched and opened it to a passage I’d read so often that my lips moved almost by rote:

Dong-ju had made peace with unfathomable despair, even in his brutal, barbaric death. Now, these calm sentences that had meant so much to him soothed me.

One day, I opened the back cover of the Bible and a small piece of paper, covered in neat, familiar handwriting, fluttered out like a feather.

I felt an immense despair. The repetition seemed to fore-shadow the acceptance of his fate, but the last line emphasized that the pain would go on for eternity. Had Dong-ju resigned himself to
this? I shook my head. That wasn’t like him. He would have looked squarely at the hardship he faced; his poem was a promise that he would accept and survive it, no matter what happened. I
couldn’t give up now. I had to face these times courageously, just as he had done.

With renewed energy I headed to the post room every day, filled my mailbag and brought it back to my office. Once in a while there was a big package. But my duties bored me; all I was doing was
snooping into other people’s correspondence. Postcards flew in and out of my office like a flock of swallows, gliding over the prison walls and onwards to the mountains and the ocean.

One day at the end of May I came across a letter addressed to Warden Hasegawa. I hadn’t seen the warden receive personal post; he usually only got official documents sent from the police
department or the Interior Ministry. I flipped through the logs to see how Sugiyama had dealt with similar letters, but the warden had never received private letters under Sugiyama’s watch,
either. I held the brown envelope under the light and noticed the foreign stamp. It was from Manchuria. The warden had never been stationed in Manchuria, and if he’d had a friend in the
Kwantung Army, he would have used the military post, which was cheaper and faster. Who sent this letter? There was no return address, and the sender’s name consisted of uncommon Chinese
characters:
. Hakuaki Jutaro? Hakuteru Jutaro? Or was it Hakumitsu Jutaro? What kind of name was this? All of a sudden, the letters began
to regroup before my eyes.

The first character,
, could be divided into two:
. 300. That meant that the
next character,
, might not be
aki
or
teru
, meaning bright, but a number as well –
mitsu
meant three.
Hakumitsu.
, which I’d read as
ju
, could be
, meaning ten, which
had the same pronunciation. The numbers revealed themselves in front of my eyes.
! 330? With wide eyes I stared at the last character. I
suddenly remembered the first time I’d brought Choi into the interrogation room. When I asked him for his Japanese name, he’d replied, ‘Call me Ichiro (
).’ Taro (
) was, like Ichiro, another name to refer to the eldest son of a family.
. 331. Choi Chi-su. Could it really be? Was he still alive?