Maninbo (20 page)

On January 10, 1951,

amidst the chaos of flight,

on January 25, 1951,

amidst the final chaos of flight

markets were still open.

So long as anyone was alive

markets opened.

In Seoul, once again in the hands of the People's Army,

so long as anyone at all was around,

markets were still open.

Here and there in the ruins

rice-cakes,

noodles,

makgeolli
were for sale.

And bundles of firewood.

And old clothes taken from empty houses.

Even though the bodies of those killed by strafing

lay sprawled in the snow fields,

a market opened nearby. Chickens for sale.

Three-storey houses,

two-storey houses were bombed,

while low single-storey houses survived.

The People's Committee of Seoul City

began work

in City Hall.

Yi Seung-yeop,

swarthy and with a broad laugh,

came back and presided.

Rallies were held

on air-raid-free evenings

in the City Hall Plaza,

where pools or rainwater formed in bomb craters.

Henceforth, the heroic People's Army

will never again make a strategic withdrawal,

and so on.

And during those rallies

here and there around the Plaza,

rice-cake,

noodles,

makgeolli
were being sold.

After Seoul was first recaptured

Yi Jang-don's wife,

a strong woman,

sold rice-cakes in the Republic of Korea;

after the retreat

she sold rice-cakes again in the People's Republic.

Sure enough, in 1953, after Seoul was secured,

she made her way into Nagwon-dong, Seoul

and opened the Obok rice-cake store.

A woman

who always wrapped her head in a towel.

A woman

who never so much as blinked during air-raids.

A woman

who knew nothing of fear, or of anxiety.

On the night of January 3, 1951,

flames rose high

all over Seoul:

flames from burning military supplies,

flames from burning food stocks,

flames from burning documents.

On the morning of January 4,

low-flying aircraft

made an announcement from loudspeakers:

Citizens who have not yet evacuated

should do nothing rash.

Take care.

There was nobody left to hear it.

Seoul was just about deserted.

Maybe sixty thousand remained.

Flocks of crows, an uncommon sight,

had free run of Seoul

At dawn that day,

a baby

had just been born,

one of the sixty thousand.

As day was breaking,

communist soldiers in fur hats

marched through the streets.

The baby

was crying.

The mother with almost no milk

was holding her fatherless newborn.

It was a birth at which none rejoiced,

but nobody said it was a birth

that should not have happened.

The mother will grow strong.

The baby too will grow stronger, little by little.

Our lovely land of rivers, mountains!

Ah, did we have such hatred that we took revenge?

Did we have such resentment that we took revenge

and again revenge?

Since Liberation, Korea has been a land of blood.

Every single nook and cranny of our whole peninsula

has become a cursed place

where one is forced to kill another.

Ended now a thousand years of warm hearts in every village.

After 1945

suddenly

Jeong-tae turned from a boy into a young men.

You too

are no longer yourself

but your enemy’s enemy.

You there, America’s enemy? The USSR’s enemy?

What country are you a descendant of?

When Jeong-tae had been drinking

he longed to see his right-wing father

then if he drank more

he longed to see his left-wing maternal uncle.

The people who’d loved him

when he was a child.

In a roadside shack in Osan

lived a brother and sister whose parents had been killed.

The brother was fifteen, and

– the child below him having died –

then came Nam-ok, seven.

Her brother had gone along the railway lines collecting coals;

she was all alone,

having fun playing marbles.

Their land’s sky was completely occupied by American planes.

‘The deer,

a pathetic animal on account of its long neck.’

The woman who wrote that poem,

had a pointed chin,

wore traditional Korean skirt and jacket,

the skirt short, the jacket-ribbons long.

On June 24, 1950,

she was invited for a convivial supper

at the house of the older poet Mo Yun-suk,

who afterward accompanied her home in a jeep.

After the war broke out on June 25,

Mo Yun-suk hid on Aegi Hill behind Ewha Womans University.

She sent someone to No Cheon-myeong to ask for some food

and two summer jackets.

That woman,

far from sending summer jackets, demanded:

Tell me where Mo Yun-suk is.

If you don’t

I’ll hand you over to the security forces.

Soon loudspeakers echoed over Aegi Hill:

The reactionary Mo Yun-suk is hiding on this mountain.

Report her on sight.

In an extreme situation people have to betray even friends and colleagues.

In an extreme situation even lyric poets

become cold-blooded enemies.

In an extreme situation a delicate spinster

becomes a cruel witch.

In an extreme situation a simple rural emotion becomes an evil ideology.

When Seoul was recaptured, No Cheon-myeong was sentenced to death.

That was commuted to a life sentence,

then reduced to twenty years,

and soon

she was released on bail after writers sent in a petition.

Dressed in a white jacket and black skirt, No Cheon-myeong

turned up at a meeting of woman-writers in ruined Myeong-dong.

Allied search teams were in full swing.

Enemy search teams also.

Somewhere near Palgong Mountain

Jeong Hae-bong,

a member of the twelfth regiment’s search team,

encountered Jeong Hae-seon, from the enemy search team.

They stood there, ten yards apart,

aiming rifles at each other.

Then one exclaimed:

‘Brother!’

The other replied:

‘Is that you, Hae-seon?’

They fell into each other’s arms.

The elder was twenty,

the younger eighteen.

Jeong Hae-seon joined the Southern search unit.

The two brothers, Jeong Hae-bong

and Jeong Hae-seon

both ate a lot of rice.

Rice was their hometown, their parents..

In the 1920s

some Koreans

made their way beyond Mongolia

into Russia,

journeyed all the way to near Lake Baikal

and settled in a ruined hut kept standing by props.

Such a long way to go to live.

Despite blizzards

and days so cold their urine froze,

they managed

not to freeze to death.

So harsh a way to live.

One freezing morning

a girl in Korean dress, long skirt and blouse,

a water pot on her head

went to fetch water

carrying a club to smash the ice

Not yet called Anna or Tatiana,

just Eon-nyeon, Pretty Girl.

Her father had not come back home for several days.

Boarding a sledge,

he went off to a hunting-lodge

in Bear Forest

Eon-nyeon had

two younger brothers

and two younger sisters

The family had grown as they journeyed on.

They’re not yet called Sergei or Josip or Boris but

First Twin

Second Twin

Dong-seop

Geut-seop

Below Eon-nyeon

Little Girl

Last Girl

Once she turned eight Eon-nyeon became an adult.

She had been living the days

she was destined to live.

The Japanese imposed the solar calendar on the Korean people.

They abolished the first Korean festival,

the first day of the first lunar month,

Lunar New Year –

New Year ancestral offerings they abolished too.

January 1, solar new year, was the Japanese New Year.

Unknown to the authorities

we celebrated our own New Year.

Lunar New Year was our Independence Movement.

Broiled beef

fried flat cakes

cinnamon punch afloat with thin flakes of ice

boiled rice

steamed fish

Wearing new clothes we went round paying our respects.

But Seong-jin’s family in their grass hut outside the village

kept neither the Korean New Year

nor the Japanese New Year.

You would find there no bright party clothes,

no rice cakes.

Unearthing the root of an arrowroot vine

from the sunny side of some hill

Seong-Jin would chew hard on the root

for sudden new energy.

On a New Year’s morning

his prick stood erect in vain.

In June that year the war began.

One month later, when the People’s Army was in charge for three months,

he served as illiterate chairman for the Democratic Young People’s Front

after which he went missing, permanently.

Outside Ganghwa town on Ganghwa Island

there’s Gapgot Point, a place where breezes blow.

In the fields of Gapgot,

once the distinctive February wind drops off,

the March wind comes along.

Skylarks venturing upward are hurt by the wind.

Across the whirlwind-stirred sea,

in the haze of the Gimpo plains

the April wind urges young rice seed-beds to sprout.

The seedlings are planted out in May.

As people plant the rice, they shout:

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Once Christianity arrived at isolated villages

believers

and non-believers

became deadly foes.

In a single village

Baptists and Episcopalians

each the others’ foes

could not intermarry

or attend each others’ wedding parties.

A member of the Holiness Church, Gwak Il-gyu,

who shouts Hallelujah a hundred times a day,

is getting married to Hong Sun-ja of the same church,

who shouts Hallelujah two hundred times a day.

Episcopalians dare not attend

the wedding.

Even if they’re cousins

or distant relatives.

Former co-workers,

former close friends and kin

vanished,

became one another’s foes.

The moment the North Korea armies arrived

those on the left arose and killed those of the right.

Once the North withdrew

the right was left

having slaughtered all those of the left.

The churches prospered.

The churches distributed

American relief food and goods.

People came flocking

to collect wheat flour.

They even received a second-hand suit of clothes.

All were forced to shout Hallelujah!

Out in the fields at harvest time too:

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

At the height of Japanese rule the blue sky begot despair.

She was a poet’s wife,

a poet’s comrade.

From the very start her belated love

was heading for open-eyed darkness.

When she published her short story ‘Farewell’ in the review
Munjang

in 1940, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War

and just before the Pacific War,

colonised Korea

was proud of its camellia-like woman writer,

Ji Ha-ryeon.

She was Masan’s drunken spirit,

the desire of the night sea in Masan Bay.

Lovely Ji Ha-ryeon fell in love with handsome Im Hwa’s tuberculosis.

She made a secret conversion.

Poet Im Hwa’s original name was Yi Hyeon-uk.

They had the happiest times after Liberation.

Her husband,

putting on light linen clothes,

invited Kim Sun-nam

and Ham Se-deok to dinner,

a meal which his wife in her apron prepared to perfection.

They joined the underground,

went North.

Just after the war, the poet was executed,

the poet’s wife

was thrown into an asylum.

She spent days of despair, raving and fainting,

then died like trash.

Ideology, that was their dream.

Ideology, that was their death.

Ji Ha-ryeon.

Literature, revolution, love

beneath skies that spout blue blood.