The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (53 page)

“I hear you are looking for your woman,” she said in a hoarse whisper, the spittle flying from her toothless gums.

Yul-chun drew back. “What have you to tell me?” he asked.

“She stayed with me after she left you,” the old hag said. “She came to my house on her way to Siberia and she stayed half a moon of days. I sold her cabbages cheap and she sold them again in the markets and got herself some money for her journey north.”

“How can I believe you?” Yul-chun asked, not believing and yet longing to believe.

“She gave me this,” the hag said.

With this she reached into her scraggy bosom and pulled out a filthy string, at the end of which was a small amulet, a little silver Buddha, which he remembered now that Hanya had kept in a box with a few treasures she had saved from her mother—a pair of jade earrings, a thin silver bracelet, a thimble, and two brass hairpins.

“Now do you believe?” the hag asked.

“I believe,” he replied. “Only tell me where she went.”

“She said she went to her brother in Siberia,” the hag replied.

“She had no brother,” Yul-chun declared.

The hag showed hideous broken teeth. “That is your misfortune,” she cackled.

She held out her hand, and poor as Yul-chun was he put into her dry old palm a piece of money.

Northward again they went and Yul-chun stopped in every place where he found people of his own country and inquired of any one who might remember Hanya. None remembered. She had walked alone and kept to herself, it seemed, and he knew that was her way. Before he reached Mukden he and Yak-san both put on Chinese garments, gray cotton robes, so that they appeared as two scholars who come to visit a city. They put their hands in their sleeves and hunched their shoulders as such scholars do, and the Japanese police thought them men of Peking and let them pass. Koreans they arrested, for they knew Manchuria had many Korean exiles, all of whom were rebels against Japan, unless they were traitors.

It was not possible, however, for Yul-chun to pass through Manchuria without being known. By this time more than a million landfolk from Korea were exiles here and they worked as farmers for wealthy landlords. Yul-chun delayed, and with him always Yak-san, until he could inquire into their plight. When he found it was hard and that they were poor, he met secretly with leaders of the Chinese peasants, hiding themselves in the fields of tall sorghum as though they were bandits, as many of the Chinese were, and in this way he united both Chinese and Koreans—the Koreans the leaders, for the Chinese peasants had no unity. The new group was called the Korean-Chinese Peasant Association. The young Korean scholars had their own secret group which was called the Korean Revolutionary Young Men’s League, in which the leadership was Communist. These Korean Communists were poor and hungry and many of them were ill. They had no homes and they slept under trees and in crevices of the earth, in caves in the mountains, wherever they could, and this in winter as well as in summer, the bitter winters of a northern land. Yul-chun was determined now against Communism, fearing that for his country this would mean exchanging one tyranny for another and he drew aside from the Communist young men, much as he pitied them and praised them, too, for their courage.

What was his surprise then when one day Yak-san came to him and asked to remain in Manchuria with these young men!

“You desert me!” Yul-chun exclaimed.

“Let me remain with these young men,” Yak-san replied.

“I said I would take you to my own home,” Yul-chun argued.

“I am an orphan, so destined by fate, and I must avenge my parents,” Yak-san replied.

“How will you avenge them?” Yul-chun demanded.

Yak-san looked away. He scraped his bare toes in the dust of the road, for they had stopped in the middle of the day to rest under a date tree and gnaw their dried unleavened bread.

“I know you do not wish me to say this, Elder Brother,” Yak-san said at last, “but the Communists will help me.”

Yul-chun tried not to be angry. “You believe in them?”

“I believe in their ways,” Yak-san said. “I care nothing for their faith in this or that, for or against, but I like their ways. When they meet an enemy—” He drew his finger across his throat.

“You think this settles everything?” Yul-chun demanded.

“I have two enemies,” Yak-san replied in the same slow steady voice. “One killed my father, the other killed my mother. My father was crushed to death under the butt of a gun. I know the man who did it. I know his name, I know his face. He is not dead. My mother died from a stab in the belly with a bayonet. She carried a child in her—my brother, ready to be born. I know who stabbed her and who killed my brother before he could draw his first breath. I shall kill that man.”

What could Yul-chun say? A dozen years ago he would have leaped to his feet and cried out that he would go with Yak-san. Now he knew that merely to kill a man did not end the evil he had done or that others like him would do. Only to kill was not enough.

“You long to have the comfort of revenge,” he told Yak-san.

“Say so if you like,” Yak-san retorted.

At the next center of Koreans, in Antung, on the border of Korea, Yak-san left him. A coolness had grown between them, but when the last moment came, they looked into each other’s eyes, and suddenly they embraced. They parted then and without looking back each went his way.

… At Antung, Yul-chun was tempted to go without further delay to his father’s house. During the years of his youth he had never been sick for home, but now he was. He longed for the safety of the old house about him, and this though his mind told him there was no safety even there. He longed for his lost childhood and even for his mother’s cookery. He remembered his tutor, their walks in the gardens along the country roads, the many stories his tutor had told him and read to him, and the poetry he had recited to him, the ancient beautiful poetry. His tutor had a sweet singing voice, neither deep nor high but warm with love of country, and as a child he, a stormy, restless boy, would sit in the cool of the evening and listen to this singing, and feel a brief and melancholy peace. Who could have thought in those quiet days and nights that the young poet would have joined the terrorists! His own first doubt of death as a weapon had begun then, when he saw his gentle tutor so changed, a dagger in his hand instead of a lute. It is not only the stabbed who die. He sighed at such thoughts and turned away from his home. No, he would continue his way northward to Siberia. If Hanya were alive he would find her and find his child. If he made a center of his own, he could begin again.

He rested in a small inn for three days and told himself that he would soon set forth on his long and lonely journey into the wide plains and eternal forests of Siberia, forests of pine and birch, stretching endlessly beyond all horizons. But now he waited, making inquiries of any Koreans, as his habit was, to know whether one had seen or heard of Hanya. Some replied with laughter and teasing, asking why he still yearned for a woman he had not met for many years, to which he replied simply that she had his child, who might be a son, to which they replied in turn that any pretty young woman would willingly give him a son. He smiled without mirth, knowing that none could understand his need for Hanya and his own child. And yet after so long a time, would not both be strangers to him? He was irresolute again and lingered still longer in the inn, divided by his longing to return to his father’s house and his wish for his own. He was angry with himself, too, for surely this was no time to indulge his private family longings.

And while he lingered thus, time passing, he perceived that every year, every month and at last every day the ingredients for war were more near to boiling and again in Germany. An ancient and demonic spirit was combining them with present discontent, a mixture resolving into a concentrated surge toward violence and power, waiting only for the voice of some one man to be the vent. The man was found, and in Europe the old turmoil began, the rush and halt, the protests and the justifications, the talk of peace while peace became impossible. All made him know that war was near again, world war, and he must not go north to Siberia, for it was too late and he must not linger.

And yet he did linger, making excuse at last that he should start some schools in the countryside around Antung. The landfolk here were as ignorant, as good and as eager as any he had found in China, and he might never return, and they would in that case remain forever unable to read. In one village and another he set up such schools.

One day in spring he walked back from a village school to the city. Something of the softness of the spring crept into his blood and bones, the lovely and reluctant spring of a northern climate. The Yalu River swelled with spring floods, fruit trees blossomed and weeds grew green on the roadsides. The land women and children came swarming out of their villages to dig the fresh weeds for tonic food. He wandered into the country one day in his irresolution, and an impudent old woman looked up from her digging to remark his good looks.

“Here is the man I look for,” she cackled, “no longer young and not yet old,” and she thrust out the tip of her tongue until it touched the end of her flat nose. Her wicked old eyes twinkled at her companions and they burst into ribald laughter.

Yul-chun smiled. “I might accept your favors, Mother, except that I have a wife. True, I have lost her but I look for her—and for my son.”

Womanlike, they were ready to hear such talk, and they squatted back on their heels and tossed out their questions.

“Where did you lose her?” “Is she young?” “Is she pretty?” “How long ago and why did you let her go?”

He answered, half absently, half playfully, making a romantic tale of it partly for their pleasure, partly to satisfy his own heart. He could not speak of Hanya to his fellows except to say he searched for her, but to these old wives, whom he would never see again, he could speak.

“I lost her long ago,” he said, “and yes, she was young, and yes, she was pretty, and she carried my son in her. I know it was a son. And I lost them both because I did not know I loved her. I thought my duty was elsewhere. She went away one day and I did not go to find her. Why? Because I thought she would surely come back if she loved me so well.”

“Ah ha,” the old woman said, “there you were wrong. When a woman loves whole and is not loved, she must leave the one she loves, or see her heart break slowly day by day. Better to leave him and have it broken, clean and forever.”

Here a small crumpled woman piped up. She had not spoken before but had kept on busily at her weed-digging. “There are many who look for those they have lost—wives looking for husbands, sons for fathers, daughters for sisters and mothers. In these times many are lost and many are looking, especially here in this region between one country and another.”

“Have you heard of a wife looking for her husband?” Yul-chun asked.

She looked up at him sharply and down again. “Not for a man like you,” she said. She sat back on her heels and stared at him. “There is a young man—very young—who comes here in the winters and in the summers he turns north again. It may be that he is already gone north. Coming or going, he passes through our village since the road north runs through it.”

“How old is he?” Yul-chun asked.

She pursed her dry old lips. “Eighteen—say—or something more.”

He refused to believe that any good fortune could be his. Nevertheless he put the next question. “Do you think he has passed through to the north yet?”

“I have not seen him,” she said slowly, still staring at him. “I have not seen him since autumn. But he does not look like you.”

Yul-chun put his hand into his pocket and drew out a piece of money. “I am at the inn at the corner of the first street to the left of the city gate. Bring him to me if you see him, and I will give you twice this much over again.”

He gave the money to the old woman, scornful of himself that he did so. The money was not his to give. It was the scanty precious store that his fellow Koreans sent him from time to time, knowing that he kept watch for them while he lived here in Antung, between Manchuria and Korea, a likely place for news, and he was wise in knowing what such news meant.

“Take this,” they said when they gave him money. “Use it for the cause.” Well, he would pay it back double for the cause some day, when the world war was won.

He returned to the inn, still scornful of himself for dreaming even the smallest faintest dream that this youth might be his son. Yet it was true that many people were looking for others lost and Antung was the place of meeting. Many stayed as he was staying, in hope. He refused to hope but he stayed. He tried to make himself hopeless, it was urgent that he go home, and he stayed on, clinging to his dream of taking Hanya with him and his son. And dreaming of his son, he thought often of his brother’s son, that child, that babe, that matchless boy who, springing into his arms and embracing him as though he had found one for whom he had long searched, had so astounded them all, that one must now be a young man. Yul-chun’s first question when he heard of his brother’s death, through a spy, had been to ask of Yul-han’s son.

“What of the boy?” he had cried.

“He was safe with his grandparents. He is with them now,” the spy told him.

And there he must be now, growing into that grace and strength that only such a child can have. No, he would wait a few days more. And these days grew into weeks.

Then suddenly, on a midsummer day, war broke across the Western World. Now Yul-chun knew he must go home, even childless, and he prepared himself toward that end and in haste he taught others how to do what he did. He gave a thought or two as to whether he should find the old woman once more. He had seen her every month at least twice, had asked her if—and when she shook her head and cracked her knuckles, he gave her a coin and let her go.

He could not believe what he saw therefore when, a few days before the day he had set to begin his journey, the old woman came to his door holding by the sleeve a tall bone-thin young man who needed to have his hair cut. Long and straight his black locks fell over his forehead and down his cheeks, and he wore Russian clothes, full trousers and high boots and a tunic belted at the waist.