The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (50 page)

He spoke with eloquent energy, and Kim listened, enchanted. “You should talk instead of write!”

But Yul-chun was not finished and did not hear. He went on, his eyes blazing his thoughts. “Who can prevent this island dream? Who but us, an independent Korea, blocking the aggression? Who else sees the danger? China is no more than a watchdog, what has she done to prevent Japan? What has any other power done?”

“You should be a terrorist, my friend,” Kim said. “You would make a good one.”

And he rose and went to the open door and stood looking out into the growing darkness.

Behind him Yul-chun sat in silence. Then, overcome with exhaustion sudden and profound, he threw himself on the bed.

… “The real war,” Yul-chun complained to Kim, “is the war we wage among ourselves.”

For Yul-chun, after only a few months, discovered that the Korean revolutionaries continued here the feuds they had brought with them from their own country. Those who believed in terror were against those who believed in nonviolence. Those who came from the north were against those who came from the south. Some were Communist and believed that only a total change in ideology could save their people; some were against Communism, saying that an ideology was only an obstacle when independence was the goal. Those who had come from Manchuria separated themselves from those who came from Korea and both were against those who came from Siberia. Beyond such internal division among his compatriots, Yul-chun discovered the enmities between the sects and clans and the Chinese groups, especially the single-minded Chinese Communists who, under their Russian advisers, felt that they should control all, and were cruel to those who did not follow them.

“We destroy ourselves,” he continued despondently.

They worked all day at their chosen tasks, Yul-chun again at writing and printing, but at night he and Kim and many others gathered in a large old teashop which they had rented for their meetings. The numbers of exiles grew daily until now hundreds had come to join the Chinese revolutionaries. In a few months there were eight hundred Koreans alone, some four hundred from the Army of Independence in Manchuria, a hundred and more from Siberia, and the rest from Korea. They were all young, under forty years of age, and some as young as fourteen and fifteen. Among them a lad name Yak-san attached himself to Yul-chun, and the two became friends. This boy had put aside the name his family had given him and had chosen the name of a famous terrorist, Kim Yak-san, who had once tried to kill a Japanese Governor-General in Seoul, by the name of Saito. According to legend, the terrorist had borrowed the garments and the mailbag of a follower who earned his living as a postman. In the bag he hid seven bombs and on a day when he heard the Governor-General was to meet in his office with other high Japanese officials, he went there and threw the seven bombs into the room. The officials had already left, but the bombs destroyed much of the building and other Japanese were killed. Meanwhile the terrorist disguised himself again, this time as a fisherman, while the police looked for him in every part of the country. After a few days he escaped to Antung and from there he went to Manchuria.

When the lad Yak-san heard Yul-chun’s family name he went to him eagerly.

“Sir, are you Kim of the Kim Yak-san?” he inquired.

“I am not,” Yul-chun replied. “I am a Kim of Andong, and I am not a terrorist.”

The lad’s face fell, but he stayed with Yul-chun, nevertheless. For Yul-chun, Yak-san was like the younger brother he remembered in his father’s house, and for Yak-san, Yul-chun was both elder brother and father. Yak-san’s father, the boy told Yul-chun, had been killed by police in a northern city of Korea. He was an only child and, left alone, he had joined others who escaped to Manchuria where he heard the story of the terrorist. With the terrorist he went as far as Shanghai where he had lost him.

“He did not love me,” the lad said bravely. “He told me not to follow him, and when I said I could not help it, he moved to another part of the city and I could never find him, though I tried for many days.”

“He could not love anyone,” Yul-chun said to comfort him. “He was afraid that if he let himself love he would not be able to kill.”

The boy looked thoughtful for a while. Then he spoke. “May I follow you?”

“Certainly you may,” Yul-chun replied.

Now in the teashop he sat beside Yul-chun on a low stool and listened to all that was said.

“We must achieve unity, at least in the core of our group,” Yul-chun went on. “We should gather together those who believe in unity as we do and make the core.”

“And thereby create only another clique,” Kim retorted.

“To be a terrorist is most simple,” Yul-tan, the present leader of the terrorists, announced.

“When you have killed everyone,” Yul-chun argued, “what will you have? Terrorists who will then begin to kill one another!”

“Nevertheless,” the terrorist maintained, “we are the most unified of all the groups. We agree among ourselves that all our enemies must be killed, one by one if necessary. Houses must be burned, palaces destroyed, governments overthrown, armies deceived.”

As usual, they talked far into the night. Indeed, there were times when Yul-chun believed that talk was their chief occupation. Yet through the interchange of thought and argument slowly, as form is shaped from stone, he perceived that a certain unity was built.

After a year of such argument and still against his doubts, Yul-chun at last accepted the terrorists as the center of this unity, since they were the only ones who agreed upon one simple principle of action, that of destruction, and it might be true that destruction there must be before construction could take place. He would not accept them without compromise, however. He demanded that the terrorists promise, for their part, to give up their name of Yi Nul Tan and take instead the name of Korean National Independence. Through this core of unity Yul-chun maintained connection with all other Korean independence groups in many countries, in preparation for the day when their country could be free. That day, it was now finally agreed, could only be after the next great world war, already appearing upon the horizons of time.

He might have grown a heart as hard as stone during these years had it not been for the lad Yak-san, and two others, a man and wife who worked together in the group. Yak-san followed him like a young faithful servant, listening to what he said, obeying his every wish, and watchful that he ate his food and drank tea when the day was hot. Unwilling as Yul-chun was to allow himself to feel emotion, yet he could not but be touched by the loyalty of this lonely orphan boy. Something of the old family feeling stirred in him again and he wondered if his own child had been a son. He would be beyond babyhood now, a boy of four years. Had Hanya told him who his father was and who his grandfather? He had never heard of her since she walked away that day in Peking, he had not received a letter, nor did he know where she was. He might not have thought of her except that among those with whom he worked there were also these two, husband and wife by the name of Choi, who taught him unwittingly by their devotion what love could be between man and woman. Both were Korean, the woman a young widow whose old merchant husband had been killed on the day of the Mansei. The man was the son of a landowner, and he had been in the streets and part of the battle when he came upon the young woman, trying to lift the body of her dead husband. He had helped her, and together they brought the dead man into his house, and later he helped her to find a burial place and to buy a coffin. When the funeral ceremonies were over, he asked the young widow if she had loved her husband and she had said simply that she had not, but she wished to do her duty to him nevertheless. He asked if this duty meant that she would always be a widow and she replied that she would like to love a man. Moreover, she had no family by marriage since her husband’s parents were dead and he had been an only child. Nor had she children, and her own family had moved away to Siberia. She had begged her husband to go there, too, but he had refused, saying that since he was only a merchant and his business good, it was not likely that he would be mistaken for a rebel. On that day of his death, however, he had been so mistaken and a Japanese soldier had shot him through the head because he went into the street to see where the crowds were going.

All this Choi heard with lively interest and when she had finished he asked her if she could love him. She had looked at him thoughtfully, his tall frame, his handsome head and brilliant dark eyes, and then she said that she thought she could love him. He took her by the hand and led her away and they were married by the new code and had remained together in perfect happiness ever since, living first in Siberia and Manchuria and then coming south to help the Chinese.

These two, as he saw them always together, persuaded Yul-chun into new reflection upon marriage and he allowed himself to remember Hanya and to wonder about her. In his desire to remain free he had asked her nothing about herself. Whatever she had told him had come from her in the few times of peace between them. At night after love, she had curled herself against him and out of her quiet would come now and again fragments of her memories.

“Such peace as this I used to feel when I climbed the mountain behind my father’s house,” she told him. “To climb, to climb, and then to reach the crest of the mountain and know I could go no higher—that was peace. I lie on my back upon the rock and I gaze into the blue sky. Up there the sky is very blue.”

He listened and did not hear, drowsy with his own peace.

“My father was shot,” she said one day.

She was making
duk
, a steamed bread such as one could not buy in Peking. He had been impatient when she spent time on such cookery, but now he remembered with a reluctant tenderness how she had bought glutinous rice and pounded it to flour and steamed it in a sealed jar, and then pounded it again and rolled it out and cut it into circles which she filled with sweetened crushed beans, and how carefully she had brushed each cake with sesame oil. He had complained when she brought the cakes for him to eat to celebrate a holiday, but she had laughed at him.

“You eat them—you eat them,” she had exulted.

“My stomach is stronger than my will, and that pleases you but it does not please me,” he had retorted.

He had blamed her in his heart because this was, he thought, another of her wiles to imprison him in a house and home. Only later did he recall that she had said her father was shot, and he was about to inquire of her how it had come about, and did not for fear she might bind him to her through sympathy and her need of comfort. Her father had been some sort of official in the Regent’s court, that he knew, for she had a seal that had belonged to him, a piece of jade carved in Chinese letters giving his name and rank, and she kept this jade with her, tied in a square of silk. She had two brothers, he also knew, for sometimes she spoke of their games together in a large garden somewhere and how she was stronger than they, and this made them angry.

“I am too tall,” she sighed.

When he had not replied to this, she looked at him sidewise, her beautiful eyes longing.

“Do you not think I am too tall?” she had coaxed.

He denied his own impulse to lie. “I have never thought of it,” he said.

Now with time and distance between them, he wished that he had told her the truth, that she was not too tall, since he was the taller. And one day, consumed with longing for her, he asked his old friend Choi if marriage was not a hindrance to him, and hoped to hear him say it was.

“Not only in matter of time that a woman demands,” Yul-chun added, “but in matter of the occupation of a man’s thoughts, the division in him between devotion to his country and to her.”

Choi laughed. “You spend more time thinking about women than I do, I swear! No, my brother, when you have a woman of your own, you no longer think of women. You do not think even of her. She is simply yourself, in you and with you. She makes you free. Moreover, she shares your work, if she is the right woman. Then, too, it is pleasant to have your clothes clean and your food cooked, and she takes care of your money so that it is not spent foolishly. You are always better off when you have a good wife.”

Yul-chun put such replies in his heart and slowly his heart changed his mind and he ceased to resist the thought of Hanya. Some day, he even thought, half dreaming, he might go north again and find her and his child. Not yet—not yet, whatever his longing, for he must stay by the revolution until in triumph he and his comrades entered the imperial city of Peking. Then he would return to his own country, for with their help, whom he had helped, his people too could be freed.

He saw Yak-san grow from a child to a youth, hard and brave and ruthless. The young were always ruthless, and Yul-chun saw himself again in Yak-san. At fifteen Yak-san had a new hero, the terrorist Wu Geng-nin, who led the attempt to kill the Japanese General Tanaka when he came to Shanghai to continue his plans for empire after he had written the memorial of demands upon China. The terrorists had arranged for attack from three directions as Tanaka came down from the ship which brought him from Japan. Wu was to shoot him with a pistol. If he failed, Kim Yak-san was to attack with a bomb. If the bomb did not kill, a third terrorist, He Chun-am, was to hack him with a sword. An American woman passenger, however, came down the gangway before Tanaka and when Wu fired she became afraid and grasped Tanaka. He, seeing what was happening, pretended to fall dead, and Wu, believing he had killed the enemy, turned to escape. He leaped into a taxicab but the driver would not drive him, and Wu threw him into the street and tried to drive himself but not knowing how to drive, was arrested before he went far by British police, who gave him to the French, since he lived with the other exiles in the French concession, and they in turn gave him to the Japanese. He was locked in a tower with several Japanese, one of whom was an anarchist. A Japanese servant girl pitied Wu and brought him a steel knife and he cut the lock from the door and with the anarchist he escaped to the house of an American friend who hid him until he could get to Canton to tell his story.