The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (48 page)

He walked by night and slept by day until he reached the high mountains. Then, as the danger of meeting Japanese soldiers and spies grew less, he walked at dawn and after sunset, sleeping through the small hours under some rock. His was a country of mountains, four-fifths of the land area in high terrain, and he loved the heights. To rise when the first pale light broke over the lofty crests still black against the silvery sky, to breathe in the mists from the gorges, to hear the splash of waterfalls and the echoing voices of singing birds, cleansed his mind and renewed his spirit. Alone as he was, stopping near a house of a village only to buy food, he could not but remember Hanya, however unwillingly, and he reflected upon his relation to her. That there was a relation he could not deny, although he had never so much as touched her hand. Yet a man cannot hear a woman declare her love for him without knowing that a relationship is established, and this though he will not allow himself to respond or indeed wish to respond. He had a strong natural desire for women, and this he knew, but he would not yield to it. He had remained virgin in spite of much teasing and ribaldry among his fellow revolutionists, who took women wherever they went and left them behind. Sejin, for example, who was like a brother to him, had often argued women with him.

“It is dangerous for you to continue a virgin,” Sejin declared. He was a tall slim young man from a seacoast village, and he could swim in any sea and dive deeper than any woman abalone diver. “You are defenseless, you saint among men! You are afraid of love, but the only defense against the one great love is women-women-women! To have many makes it impossible to have only one. It is the one who is the tyrant. If you have many women they are all your slaves, rivals, and therefore eager to please.”

“Not so,” Yul-chun had replied. “A single love may be a tragedy but it is not a day-to-day, bit-by-bit destruction.”

“Ah, you innocent,” Sejin had retorted. “I agree that we should not marry. None of us should marry when we have a revolution to make. But it is not we who are destroyed, it is love that is destroyed. I daresay I could love one woman and write poetry and live obsessed, as you will do if you are not careful, but my safety is that when I think of many women, I lose the possibility of the one—and the dream. Thus I keep my freedom. You still dream, and even your dream enslaves you.”

Yul-chun had listened but remained unchanged, reflecting that it was Tolstoy who decided his mind and gave him strength to deny all women, even Hanya. He had been inspired by Tolstoy and when he discovered that Tolstoy had created his greatest novels only when he had ceased to occupy his time and his energy with women, he had determined to renounce women from the first. Why waste any part of his life? Nevertheless, he was too honest not to acknowledge to himself that in spite of resolution he found himself curious about women and what their place was, however he might decide that they had no place in his individual life. In the society of the future it was scarcely sensible to believe that a woman could be allowed only to do the slight work of her own household and her own few children. The problems and labors of the times were immense, and was it just that all solutions and labors should devolve on men while women were permitted to busy themselves with the small affairs of single households? But why was he thinking of women? He would not think of any woman. Since he had sacrificed everything for his country, he would also sacrifice desire.

… He walked northward through the mountains to Antung, a city at the mouth of the Yalu River but on the soil of Manchuria. Here he planned to rest for a while and learn of what was taking place in Russia before he made the long journey northwest. Since Antung was a city where many travelers met, he would hear news. He arrived at Antung in early summer and found many Koreans there, some in families eking out their livelihood as petty merchants and traders, but most of them solitary men like himself, restless and searching for a means to free their country. All advised Yul-chun against going to Russia.

“Go to China,” they told him. “The revolution is finished in Russia. In China it is only beginning. The Chinese leader, Sun Yat-sen, has invited Russians to help him, since Western powers have refused him help, and you will see their tactics. We Koreans are more like the Chinese than like the Russians.”

He followed this advice and after staying long enough in Antung to learn what he wanted to know, he packed his knapsack again and went deeper into Manchuria. In Manchuria he stayed with the escaped soldiers, and found them not dismayed by the failure of the Mansei Demonstration. Instead they were training themselves for the next world war, which they said was surely coming, for Japan was making ready to conquer China now while confusion was increasing in that country. A great new revolution, they told him, was shaping itself like a thunderhead out of the south.

“Sun Yat-sen needs an army,” they told Yul-chun, “and Russia is training Chinese soldiers for him. When all is ready they will make a second attack, marching along the Yangtse River to the southern capital of Nanking and then they will seize the country and set up a new government.”

Yul-chun listened to this and much more, and then without telling anyone where he went he headed south again to China.

… It was nearly winter before he reached Peking and there he was halted by a fierce storm, the wind blowing out of the cold desert and driving the snow in drifts along the country roads. Half frozen and his money gone, he was compelled to stay for a while in the city and he sought out the Koreans he had once known and who had fled there. Most of them were gone, some killed in the south, some killed or in prison in Korea, but he found one whom he had known, a monk who came first from the Chung Dong Monastery on the island of Kanghwa and later had gone as a mendicant monk to the Yu-lin Monastery in the Diamond Mountains.

The monk was also a Kim but not of Andong and he remembered Yul-chun from earlier days when they had worked together in their own country. Now when Yul-chun stood at the door of the small, poor house where Kim and his fellows lived in the Chinese part of the city, they cried out in joy each at the sight of the other.

“Come in, come in!” Kim cried. He shut the door quickly to bar the great drifts of snow that blew in with Yul-chun. “Say not one word until you have taken off those wet garments,” he went on, “and I daresay you have had nothing to eat all day.”

“I am empty as a bag,” Yul-chun confessed, “and a penniless beggar besides.”

As he changed into dry garments and ate the hot noodles that Kim prepared, they talked, exchanging news and hopes. In the year of Mansei, the young monk had become a member of the Monks’ Independence Movement, and with his fellows, some three or four hundred, they too had printed a declaration of independence. He had traveled among villages, wearing his monk’s robes, but when he came to the capital he was too late for the day of Mansei, and he was seized by the police and put into prison for a year. When he was free again he went on with his work. While he was in the capital he fell in with the young men and women who were reading Russian books, and so he read Karl Marx, for which Hegel, he said, had prepared him.

Last year, with seven fellow monks, he came here to Peking so that he might learn more about revolution, but after a few months, five of the seven monks returned to the monastery, where they said life was more pure and more safe than among these revolutionaries.

“What shall we do now?” Kim asked.

Yul-chun, remembering his printing press, made reply. “We must publish a magazine.”

“There has been one called
The Wild Plain
.”

“We will make no poetry,” Yul-chun said bluntly. “We will call ours
Revolution
.”

Long into the night they talked and they ate again and at last they went to sleep. Before he slept, however, Yul-chun made up his mind that he would stay in Peking at least for a time and return to his best loved work, that of creating new literature for the revolution, his home here with his fellows. For this he needed only a pallet for bed, and he had in his knapsack his lacquer rice bowl and the silver chopsticks and spoon which his grandfather had given him a hundred days after he was born. He was happy again, safe among his kind, and he set himself to his chosen work.

“You make yourself blind!”

The sound of Hanya’s voice struck a blow across his brain. His hand, holding the chisel, hung motionless above the stone. He did not turn his head, but he knew that she was crossing the brick floor, though her straw-sandaled feet made no sound. She came to his side and snatched the chisel from his hand.

“They told me you were doing this stupid thing,” she cried. “Do you imagine yourself a god? Can you make miracles?”

“Give it to me,” he muttered between his teeth.

He put out his hand to take the chisel from her but she held the tool behind her back.

“I would not believe it when they told me,” she went on with the same passion. “‘He is making himself blind,’ they said—‘writing the magazine with his own hand, all of it,’ they said, ‘and then carving the letters into stone—’”

“I am compelled to use lithograph because I can find no printing press in the city, at least none that I can buy,” he retorted.

“So you will be blind because there is no printing press in Peking that you can buy!” she mocked. She threw the chisel on the floor and took a magazine from the table of rough unpainted wood. “Thirty-two pages! Twice a month! How many copies?”

“We began with eight hundred, but now we have more than three thousand. It goes to our own country, but also to Manchuria, America, Hawaii, Siberia—”

“Be quiet!” she cried. And stooping she took up the chisel, and walking to the door she threw it as far as she could into the street.

He was too surprised to move, not imagining that she could do such a thing. Then he sprang at her and twisted her out of his way but she clung to him and would not let him go. Try as he would, he could not rid himself of her. Arms about his neck, legs around his thighs, she clung, catching his arms when he flailed at her, kicking him when he pulled away. They fought in silence, their breathing hard, their faces set in angry grimace, their eyes furious.

He was shocked at her strength. Passive he had always said women were, passive and negative, weak frail creatures at best, but this woman he had to fight as though she were a man. He paused for a moment to get his breath and she seized the instant to wrap her arms around him under his shoulders and then he felt her teeth bite into his neck.

“You—you tiger,” he panted. “You—you—dare to—”

“Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue,” she murmured against his neck.

And he felt her lips soft against the spot where an instant before he had felt her teeth. He stood motionless, suddenly aware that she was no longer fighting him. Her body relaxed, she lay against him, yielding, her face in the curve of his shoulder. She was drawing him down slowly, gently, and he felt his head swim. She reached out her hand and between thumb and finger she pinched the wick of the candle by whose light he had been working, and they were in darkness. In darkness she drew him down until they lay on the floor, she beneath him. His whole body was warm and fluid, his will gone, his entire being one swelling urge toward her.

… This was the story of their love thereafter. He yielded to her and he fought her. When she insisted that he must stop printing the magazine he declared that he was by nature a writer, and never so happy as when he wrote, and he was fortunate that the revolution needed writers. He insisted that he would never yield to her and daily he did yield to her until in desperation he decided to leave Peking and go south again. This he did because she told him one day that she would have a child.

He forbade her to come with him. “There will be war,” he told her. “It will be dangerous for you. And I must not be hampered by a pregnant woman. I would think of you instead of the battle.”

They had been living together for more than a year, here in Peking and in villages of North China and Manchuria to which they wandered from time to time, but he had never ceased to believe that it would be better if he were alone and to tell her so. When she said that a child was coming, her black eyes soft with joy and her whole being radiant, he felt a strange new anger against her, a surge of love mixed with hatred, and he cried out now, against her joy.

“You know I said we must not have a child! You use this trickery to compel me to think of you—you and the child—you divide me! I am to pity you and the helpless child. You make a triumph of it.”

She heard this, her eyes wide, and she looked at him as though she had never seen him before. “You are not a man,” she said, her very voice wondering. “I have not wanted to believe it, but now I know. You are not a man, and I have loved you, thinking you were a man, believing that in your heart you loved me.”

She studied his angry face, dwelling upon its every feature.

“How I have loved you,” she said, still wondering.

And with these words she turned and left him standing there in the room which for this short time she had made into a home.

… He waited for her through twenty-three days and nights and he could not believe that she would not come back. When day passed into night and night dragged endlessly toward dawn again, he began to understand that she was never coming back. Then he had himself to battle. He longed for her. He yearned to go in search of her. He dreamed of taking her with him to Korea to his father’s house and staying with her at least until the child was born. He had told her of that house and of his family. Lying quietly side by side in the night after they had made love, she had often asked him to tell her about his childhood. She asked him of every small thing, as though she herself had lived in that house.

“Did you sleep in the room next to the kitchen, or in the one next your father?”

“We spread our beds in whatever room we wished,” he explained, “but never in my father’s room. My tutor slept with my brother and me, after we no longer needed a nurse. My brother was a good child, but I was not good.”