The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (47 page)

Il-han was hard put to it until he remembered that the Christians believed that all good souls went to heaven, and he seized upon the thought.

“Your father and your mother and your little sister have all gone to heaven,” he told the child.

Liang had heard of heaven, and he listened to this with a grave face. “Is heaven far?” he asked.

“No,” Il-han said, “it is no more than a minute away.”

“Then why do we not go, too?” Liang asked.

“We cannot go without invitation,” Il-han said. “When we are sent for, we go.”

“Shall I go with you and my grandmother and Ippun?” Liang asked.

“Yes,” Il-han said. “We will go together—”

All this he considered a lie, yet the more he considered it the more he was not sure whether it was altogether so. Who knew what lay beyond death’s horizon?

“Meanwhile,” he told the child, “we will live together.”

He had still one great comfort, his secret that now began to spread through the company of the underground, that the Living Reed had escaped. The cell in which he had lived so long was small, it was said, only a little larger than a coffin, the floor of stones laid close one upon the other. Yet one day guards found it empty. Empty? No, for up through those stones a green young bamboo shoot had forced its way!

Among the people the news spread, a ray of morning sun breaking through the darkness of the night, and nowhere was this light more bright than in Il-han’s heart. He still had a living son.

“WHY DO YOU FOLLOW ME
?” Yul-chun demanded. He bent over the small refractory hand press. It was too old, this press, worn out years ago in an American newspaper office in a country town in Ohio. Without it, nevertheless, the
Independence News of Korea
could not be published. As it was, the sheet appeared irregularly, although he had been able to keep it weekly after the Mansei Demonstration had been put down at the end of the World War. It was well that the press was small for he had to move it from place to place now that the revolution had to go underground again. Only in America could the Koreans continue openly in rebellion against the invaders.

The bitter tonic of anger and disappointment had invigorated him and others like him. When he left Yul-han’s house that night, he had not gone to China as he had said he would. Somewhere, by someone, he had been betrayed. As he stepped into the street, he had been seized in the dark by rough hands, and bound. He never saw the face of his captors but he knew by their muttered words that they were Japanese although they spoke in Korean. They had beaten him with the butts of their guns until he was insensible. When he woke he was once more in a cell in an old prison, lying on a floor of uneven stones laid on the earth. He did not know why he was not dead, why they had not killed him. No one was within sight or hearing. He heard no sign of voice or footsteps except that once a day a guard brought a bowl of millet and a gourd of water. He saw nothing of this guard except his hands, sliding open an aperture in the iron door. Slowly he had recovered until he was able to think of life again, and escape. Yet perhaps he could never have escaped had it not been for the madness of the Mansei Demonstration. He would not have escaped then except that the guard, handing in his food as usual, handed in a steel file, and still without a word. A steel file! The guard could only be a Korean, a traitorous Korean whose conscience was moved for some reason. He had taken the file without a word and had compelled himself to eat the miserable food to which he was sternly accustomed. He must have time to think. Was the file a trick to tempt him to escape? Were his murderers waiting outside the window?

Then he had heard, far off, like the surf of a distant ocean, the uproar of human voices. That had decided him. He must chance his escape. He worked all day on the thick iron mesh of the hole in die wall that served for light and air, an aperture too small, one would have supposed, for a human body, but he was bone-thin, a collapsible skeleton, he had told himself grimly, and he had forced himself through it in the night, tearing the flesh from shoulders and hips. Immediately he had lost himself in the swarming crowds and then had hid in a ruined temple outside the city walls, where old and toothless monks were his faithful watchmen. From here he sent out the small printed sheet. Another young rebel, disguised as an acolyte, helped him here in the temple, sleeping by day and at night distributing the sheets throughout the city and to others throughout the country. Others, monks themselves, were also his messengers and his news-gatherers.

On this day, now drawing near its close, Yul-chun was making haste to finish his task, a warning to his fellow patriots that they were to take no heart in the proposals of Woodrow Wilson that there should be a League of Nations.

“If we cannot trust one nation, will twenty be more fit to trust?”

He was setting the type for these words when the girl appeared at the door. He had met her at a secret meeting, a strong slender figure in man’s trousers and jacket, and she had followed him from then on, appearing wherever he was, obedient, speaking little, persistent in offering herself to him. He would not have noticed her except she moved swiftly to obey his commands. Today she came in a blue cotton skirt beneath her jacket instead of trousers. She did not speak when he looked up. She was simply there at the door, and he remembered now that he had asked a question and that she had not answered. He straightened himself, pushed back a lock of hair and left a smudge of black on his forehead.

“Well?” he said impatiently.

She came in and stood leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her breast.

“You said you needed someone to help you.”

“Not you,” he retorted. “Not a woman.”

“Man or woman, it makes no difference in our work.”

“It makes a difference when it is you.”

“Can I help being a woman?”

“You can help pursuing me.”

She made her eyes wide at this, great dark eyes, the whites very clear.

“I have chosen you,” she said simply.

“I have no wish to be chosen,” he retorted. “I have too much to do. Ah, this wretched machine!”

He had worked as he talked, and now the press stopped. Ink ran over the paper in black streams. He tore out the paper, threw it on the floor and set the line of type again.

“I know how to set type,” she said.

He seemed not to hear her, absorbed in his task, his mind busy. He had to think far ahead now. The revolution must never fail again. Nothing must be wasted in petty effort, and that it might not, he and his fellow rebels must join with others like them in every country. The mistake had been that here in Korea they had thought they could win alone against their own aggressors. He knew now that they could not. Revolution must be worldwide. Wherever the most immediate need was, there all must attack, until country by country the people were free. Divided, the revolution would always be crushed by the stronger foe. Nothing could be done now in Korea.

“Never hit a Japanese, even in retaliation.” Yul-chun had sent the advice into every part of Korea, and he had watched it obeyed. Now was not the time to strike, he had said, and he had seen his fellow patriots tortured and some of them die, but had not lifted a hand to strike back. How long it could go on he did not know. Six thousand fresh soldiers had been sent from Japan. Yet less than two months after the Mansei Demonstration, through his printed sheets he had summoned representatives from every province and they had organized again a secret Korean government. They had elected a president, a young man surnamed Yi. There had been meetings in China and in Siberia, too, to support the secret government. Then Yi had gone to America to meet with Koreans there, but Woodrow Wilson had forbidden his State Department to issue a passport to the Korean, saying that a passport to such a person would disturb the Japanese whom he did not wish to disturb now, since he planned to build peace in Asia upon the foundation of Japanese power.

When this news was brought back to him, Yul-chun had bared his teeth in grim laughter.

“Peace? Can peace be built upon Japanese power politics? War is certain—another world war! It will begin in Germany as it did before, but next time Japan will strike at America.”

At this moment he felt her hand on his shoulder. She stood beside him, but he went on working. The sheet was coming through at last.

“When you go to China, take me with you?”

“I am going to Russia.”

“I will go to Russia.”

“Perhaps I am going to China.”

“China, then.”

He shook off her hand and stopped the press. “Where I am going you cannot follow,” he said bluntly.

“Where are you truly going?” she demanded.

“To many places.”

“Where first?”

“To Kirin in East Manchuria. Is that a place for a woman?”

She knew Kirin as well as he did. When the Korean soldiers were disbanded by the Japanese years ago, thousands of them went to Kirin. There they had built a military school to train guerrillas. Since then some had come back, one by one, few by few, to fight in the mountains of Korea and in the city byways. Not only soldiers but many Korean landfolk had gone to Manchuria, a million and more, and these supported the army. Besides these men were those who had gone to China when the Manchu dynasty ended, and they were not a few millions. In every country in the world he supposed there were at least some Koreans in exile.

“I am as woman what you are as man,” she was saying.

He ignored this. She was always stressing their difference—she a woman, he a man.

“From Kirin I shall go on foot through China to the center of the revolution now shaping itself in the southern provinces.”

“I can walk,” she insisted.

“I may even go into Russia, to see what their new techniques are for training the landfolk.”

“I have always wanted to go to Russia.”

He struck his hands together in desperation. “Hanya!” he exclaimed. “You know that I have sworn never to marry. I have no life to give a woman. I have no home.”

“I have not asked you for marriage.”

“Well, then love, if that is what you mean! Such love always ends in quarrels and hatred. I have no time for women, I tell you!”

“I am only one woman,” she said stubbornly.

He exploded. “I will not have myself weakened and distracted by emotions!”

“You are a man. You have desire—”

“I am a man, yes, but not an animal! I can control my desires and I do.”

He looked at her, his eyes hard. “What sort of woman are you that you would force a man?”

She returned his look, her eyes as hard. “I am the sort of woman you men have made nowadays. You tell us we must take our share in the struggle for independence. You say that we cannot be soft, or think of childbearing, or living safely in houses. Yet I am still a woman.”

“Is it your need to pursue me?”

“If you do not pursue me, I must pursue you.”

“I have told you I will not allow myself to love a woman. If a man loves a woman, whether he marries her or not, he loses his freedom.”

“If you cannot love me, then—”

“I am not saying I cannot. I am saying I will not.”

He went back to his work. She stood in silence, watching him.

“When are you going away?” she asked after a while.

In the rattle of the machine he pretended he did not hear her, but she knew his silence intentional and she came close to him.

“If you are going away, when will you go?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps.”

She stood looking at him, again in silence. She let her eyes linger on his body, on the straight shoulders, the bare brown arms, the strong neck, his clipped dark hair, his thighs, his brown legs bare beneath his upturned rolled trousers, his feet in sandals—how many miles those feet had walked! She loved even his feet and she could have cradled them in her arms. She yielded to the strange sweet enchantment of his body, the attraction of his flesh. She longed to spring at him as once she had seen a female tiger in the mountains spring at her mate, forcing herself beneath him, but she dared not. He was capable of such rage that he could throw her on the ground and trample her. A deep rending sigh shook her and she turned and went away.

He knew when she had gone but he continued steadfastly at his work. When it was finished he bound the sheets into bundles and hid them behind a corner of the wall. With them he left a printed message, unsigned, that he was going away. He needed to say no more. Someone would take his place. Then he took up his knapsack and strapped it on his back and walked away into the darkness, heading north for Siberia.

He had not been in Russia before but he would be no stranger there. When the Japanese occupied his country many Koreans and their families in the north had crossed the short boundary between Korea and Siberia. They had been welcomed and had settled on lands allotted to them, or if they were scholars they had gone to Moscow and Leningrad. Koreans had taken part in the Russian October Revolution and in the Civil War and through the disturbances of the intervention. Lenin himself had taken advantage of the Korean struggle against the Japanese invaders, declaring that in Korea the people understood better than the Chinese the necessity for learning the methods of revolution. Yet Yul-chun had never been to Siberia or to Russia. It was his intention now to go there first and to discover for himself at the purest sources what the new Communism was and how it was succeeding. He would learn the techniques and master the logic. In his knapsack he carried Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
and a copy of the
Communist Manifesto
, and Lenin’s
State and Revolution
, all translated into Korean. This was not to say he had any love for Russia or Russians, but simply that now when Japan was the enemy, it was time to make Russia a friend. Long ago Taiwan-gun had played the same game, hating both countries meanwhile. Reflecting upon history in the long days while he walked and in the lonely nights when he slept in a village inn or under a mountain rock, Yul-chun remembered well that twice in his lifetime Russia and Japan had met in secret to divide his country between them at the 38th parallel, and they had been prevented from announcing such division only because they feared the Americans and English.