The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (26 page)

Il-han stared at the tutor as though he saw a madman. “Am I to blame?” he demanded.

“You are to blame,” the tutor said, his voice and his face very stern. “You are to blame because you do not know. You do not allow yourself to know. You traveled through the country for many months, did you not, and you saw nothing except mountain and valley and sea and people moving like puppets. Have you ever heard of a Russian named Tolstoy?”

“I know no Russians,” Il-han said.

“Tolstoy was a man like you, a landowner,” the tutor went on. “Yet his conscience woke. He saw his people, the people whom he owned because they belonged on his land, and when he saw them he understood that they were human beings and he began to suffer. Sir, you must suffer! It is for this that I have saved you.”

Il-han could not swallow such talk. It was enough for him to be amazed that the meek young man who he had thought was only a scholar, employed to teach his elder son, now showed himself a stranger.

“How have you saved me?” he demanded.

“I saved you as my father saved your father,” the tutor replied. “When angry people were about to kill your father in his time, my father persuaded them to let him retire to this grass roof.”

“My father was a good man,” Il-han said.

The tutor was relentless. “A good man, but he did not lift his voice when others were evil. And you too, you are a good man, but you do not lift your voice. You have access to the King and to the Queen but you have not raised your voice for your people.”

Il-han returned look for look. “What would you have me say?”

For the first time the man’s black eyes wavered. “I do not know.”

He waited a moment, biting his lip. Then he lifted his eyes again to Il-han’s eyes. “For that, too, I blame you. It is you who should know, and because you should know, because you must know, I have saved your life and the lives of your family. Today, in the congress of the Tonghak, I stood up and declared that among those who are to die you must not be killed. You—you are not to die! But I swore by my own life that you would be brave enough, when you knew, to speak against the corruption of the government, and against the taxes heavy as death, and the pushing men from Japan who are bringing their cheap goods here for our folk to buy because there are no other goods. And above all, you must speak bravely against the Japanese tricksters who by one means and another are buying land from the landowners because the landfolk can no longer pay even the taxes on their harvests.”

These words fell upon Il-han like blows from an iron cleaver. For a while he could not reply, and indeed for so long that the tutor could not endure the silence and he cried out again.

“I tell you, it is only for this that I have saved you and your sons!”

To which Il-han again after a long silence could only answer with deep sighs and few words.

“Tonight I must rest,” he said.

“But tomorrow?” the tutor insisted.

“Tomorrow I will think,” Il-han promised.

The tutor rose then and bowed and went away, and suddenly Il-han was so weary that he could only look at Sunia, begging for her help.

“You need not speak a word,” she said. “Your bath is hot, your supper is waiting and then you must sleep.”

He rose. “You who understand—” He felt her hand slip into his and hand in hand they went toward the rooms she had prepared for their life.

“What shall I call you?” he asked the tutor.

It was noon of the next day when he summoned the man to come to him alone. He had not yet seen his sons, and he had told Sunia that he would not until he had spoken again with the tutor. His older son was old enough to have been shaped by his tutor beyond knowledge, and he must know not only what the tutor had to say further but also what he was. It seemed to him, after his sleepless night, that all his years until now had been meaningless. He had lived at the beck of the Queen and the call of the King, conceiving this to be his duty. Even his long journeys into his own country and then into the foreign countries had been in service of the truebone royal house, rather than for the sake of the people. Was it indeed true that people and rulers must be separate? When he served one, must it mean that he did not serve the other?

“I can no longer think of you as my son’s tutor,” Il-han said when the tutor came again into his presence. “You are someone I do not know. Your surname is Choi but what is your name?”

“Sung-ho,” the man replied. He smiled half ruefully. “I wish I could call myself after the great Ta-san of the past, but I am not worthy. I must continue merely to use the name my father raised for me when I went to school.”

“Perhaps you will make a great name of it,” Il-han said.

Sung-ho only smiled again.

“I have a question to ask,” Il-han went on.

“Ask what you will,” Sung-ho replied.

Il-han saw how confident the man was, how bright his look, how straight his carriage. He sat on his cushion without diffidence, eager and ready.

“Is it you who have shaped my elder son so that he prefers to live here in the country under this grass roof rather than in the city?”

“Inevitably I have shaped him,” Sung-ho replied. “At first it was only that the city was hot in summer while here it is always cool. But as I shaped him, I shaped myself. Had I not spent summers here with your father under this grass roof I might never have come to know the landfolk.”

“Are the people on my land Tonghak?” Il-han asked.

“They are,” Sung-ho replied. “At least all who are young.”

Il-han smiled wryly. “Does this mean that you will all rise up in the middle of some night and behead me?”

“No,” Sung-ho said sturdily. “It means that we look to you to speak for us.”

Il-han was somewhat confounded at this. Was he then in duress? He poured two bowls of tea, so that he could have time to think, and he handed one to Sung-ho, but not with both hands as he would to an equal. To his surprise, Sung-ho also took the bowl with one hand, and not with both hands as he must from his superior.

Il-han went on. “Tonghak is a dumping pot for all sorts of rascals and rebels, debtors who will not pay their debts, thieves who will not pay their taxes.”

Sung-ho did not yield one whit. “You know very well how common people insist upon tricks and conjurings from those whom they love and admire, and who they think can protect them, and is it just to demand that every Tonghak be free from corruption when the yangban themselves are corrupt?”

It was Il-han who must yield. “I cannot deny it,” he said.

At this Sung-ho softened his voice. “I exempt you always from the corruption of your kind. I know you to be an honest man, and I swore this in order to save your life.”

Il-han laughed. “You will not allow me to forget that I owe you my life!”

“I will not allow you to forget,” Sung-ho agreed, and he did not laugh.

Before Il-han could proceed, he heard the voices of his two sons, one shouting in anger, the other wailing in pain. Both he and Sung-ho leaped to their feet, but the door burst open and Il-han saw his elder son walking toward him and dragging something behind him. This something was nothing else than his sobbing younger son, bound hand and foot with rope. In his right hand the elder son held a dagger-shaped stick of bamboo.

“What are you doing?” Il-han shouted and seized his elder son while Sung-ho lifted the younger child to his feet and pulled away the rope. Without stopping to inquire why his elder son had been so cruel, Il-han lifted his hand and slapped him first on one cheek and then on the other, and this so hard that the boy’s head turned left and right and left and right. Now it was the elder one who began to roar loud sobs.

“You!” Il-han said between set teeth. “You, who are a savage!”

“No,” the child sobbed. “I am Tonghak, and he is a yangban who takes money—”

The younger child was loosed by now and Il-han clasped him and lifted him to his shoulder. The two men exchanged looks.

“You have made my elder son into a criminal,” Il-han declared.

Sung-ho returned his hard look with another as hard.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I do not belong in your house.”

With these words, he disappeared and from that time on Il-han saw him no more, nor did he know where he went or whether he would ever return.

Here Il-han was, then, left with the two children, both crying, and a servant ran to tell Sunia, and in a moment or two she was there. The child she comforted was the elder one, Il-han observed, and he protested.

“Do not comfort that one,” he exclaimed. “He would kill his brother if he could.”

“How can you say so?” she exclaimed. “He is only a child.”

She put her arms around the elder son and murmured to him, and Il-han stood holding the younger one on his shoulder until suddenly he was impatient.

“Come, come, Sunia,” he said, “let us make some order in this family of ours. Take the children away and feed them and put them to bed. Leave me alone for a while.”

She obeyed, casting hostile looks at him as she went, to which he paid no heed. His own confusion must first be resolved before he could be father and husband again. Impatient to be alone, he closed the door after them, and sat down on the floor cushion facing the garden and sank himself into meditation.

The disorder in his family was the disorder of his people. How diverse were the elements! Here under the grass roof of his father’s house, here where his father had lived out his long life as a scholar and a recluse, the spirit of the past descended again. Must he repeat the life of his father in his own life? He had endeavored to avoid the national disease of dissension. He had maintained a prudent and middle course, now with the Queen, now with the King, aware of old loyalties, yet ready for new. To live a floating life, swimming with the tide and never against it, ready for all change provided it was for the good of his country, he had nevertheless come to the same place where his father had come in the years before he himself was born, and this by a totally different path. His father had never wavered in his faithfulness to the past, and so had been hated only by those who dreamed of the future. Now he, the son, was hated by all, by those who clung to the Queen and by those who clung to the King. Was there no place for him in his own country? If not, what could he teach his sons? Here in his own house the Tonghak rebellion was brewing, while he unknowing had pursued his middle way. He felt lost and distracted and the day passed without clearing his mind or lifting his spirit.

“All that I know about myself,” he told Sunia in the restless night, “is that I am Korean. I am born of this soil, I have been nurtured on its fruits and its waters. The blood and bones of my ancestors are my blood and my bones. Therefore I must know myself first.”

She let him talk, his head on her breast. And after a while he said, “I have never had time to know myself. I have always been at the call of others. Now I shall answer no summons. I will close the doors of my grass-roof house against the world. I shall be alone with myself.”

Womanlike, she listened to such musings and answered yes, yes, do so, whatever you think best, and when morning came she busied herself again about the old house, silk-spinning and making kimchee and keeping festivals. To live in this country house after the years in the city was in itself a task, for here nothing was convenient. The kitchens were old and the caldrons worn thin, mice and rats ran everywhere, lizards came creeping out of walls, and spiders festooned their webs among the blackened roof beams. In the wall closets the bed mattresses were mildewed, in the rooms the floor cushions were torn and their linings split. There were also her sons, and where to find a new tutor for them was a burden.

“You must teach them,” she told Il-han one day, “or else you must find a teacher.”

Who would dare come now to this house to teach his sons? In the end Il-han was compelled to teach them, lest they grow up fools and yokels. Yet he found the teaching a task, and he could only force himself to it, teaching them two hours in the morning and then setting them free for the rest of the day, and Sunia complained that they were twice as mischievous after he had taught them as they were before, the elder one always in the lead. At last she set Il-han’s man servant to watch them and keep them from falling into the fishponds and smothering in the rice vats and running down the road to be lost.

As for Il-han, he did not know what to teach his sons and he could only teach them what he himself was trying to learn. As he studied afresh the history of his people, each day he made a simple lesson for his children of what he himself had learned the day before. His father’s books were his source and his treasure, and how vast the library was he had not realized until now. Here in the shelves of four connecting rooms lay the rolls of manuscripts and books, a room for each of the subjects of learning, one for literature, another for history, another for philosophy, and the fourth for mathematics, economics and the calendar. With philosophy was also politics, for these two were inseparably together both in history and in the present, and one cannot be considered without the other.

He knew that his people were divided by geography. Those of the rugged north, where craggy mountains split the sky, were more rude, less cultivated, less learned than those of the south. Troublemakers they were called, revolutionary by nature, and the cause for this was partly in that most landfolk owned their own land. Moreover, they did not plant rice paddies but they grew wheat on dry fields. They were scornful of the people of the south, declaring them effete and lazy, scheming rascals without ambition, working on land that others owned. This division went so deep that even here in the capital city, south meant those nobles whose families lived in the southern part of the city, as Il-han’s family had for many generations, and north meant those whose houses were in the northern part of the city. The Noron, or northern, faction, was sometimes in power in government, and sometimes the Namin, or southern faction, took power. The struggle in the capital was the symbol of the struggle everywhere among his people, and he himself was a symbol, for he and his fellows had as children been kept within the circle of the Namin, and Sunia’s family had been Namin, like his, else neither his family nor hers would have considered it possible to allow marriage between them. Namin would not marry Noron. Yet it seemed to him sometimes as he continued day after day to study the books in the library and to express them in essence to his sons, young as they were, that this very division had its benefits. For while one faction was in power, the opposition in retreat fought it with vigor and device, and their rebellion was expressed in strong music and passionate poetry so that much of the great literature of his people sprang from the sources of dissension.