The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (54 page)

“Here he is,” she said, mumbling through her broken teeth. “He came through our village late this year, after I wasted many days watching for him—good days of work I have missed—and I told the guard at the village gate to wake me if a young man came by, and he must be paid, too, that guard!”

Yul-chun was lying on his bed when she came in, his hands folded under his head, reflecting and regretting, perhaps, the time he had spent here in waiting and watching, and wondering if he should have gone into Siberia to look for Hanya. Many times he had been about to go and had not gone, prevented by his fellow Koreans who said that since it was well known that he had refused to be a Communist, he would be killed if he went upon Russian soil.

“Dead, you will never find your woman,” they argued.

“You must think of your country first,” others argued.

And so he had not gone as he had thought he would when he left China, and now would never go. Yet while he had lingered here, he held together the exiles through the news sheets he printed wherever he went. Thus only he had told the others how the Japanese were victorious in China, and how a month ago in Canton seven thousand Korean conscripts had turned against their Japanese officers and killed them.

Now when he saw the old woman he rose from his bed and went toward the young man she led. He saw no likeness in that sullen face either to himself or to Hanya. Let him be prudent lest he commit himself to a stranger!

“Do you look for someone?” he asked.

“This old woman,” the young man answered, his voice lusty and strong, “this old woman has dragged me here, saying that you are my father, but I see no likeness to what my mother told me.”

They looked at each other with mutual distrust.

“Nor have I reason to think that you could be the son I have never seen,” Yul-chun rejoined.

The old woman set up a clamor. “Where is my money?” she screamed and she thrust her dirty palm up into Yul-chun’s face.

He was on the point of saying that he owed her nothing since this was not his son, then he remembered that his bargain had not included such certainty. He had said that she was to bring the young man to him wherever she found him, however long the search, and he had given up the search. Yet here the young man was! He could only reach into his pocket again and take out two coins and put them in her black-lined palm. She looked at the money coldly.

“Come,” she said, “for how many days I have not worked, spring and autumn, watching at the city gates for this fellow! And because this year he was late, I watched through summer, too!”

At this the young man took umbrage. “You!” he shouted. “You bring me here for nothing! I am set back in my journey. This is not my father. My father is a young man, taller than I am, very handsome—his skin white as milk, my mother said!”

So shouting, he took the old woman by the shoulders, spun her around twice and sent her flying from the door. Then he closed the door and barred it. “These land people,” he complained. “They are too greedy and altogether ignorant. They need a power above them to compel them.”

Yul-chun was not listening.

“Your mother said your father was young—and handsome—and his skin was white? How many years ago did she say that?”

“Many years,” the young man said. “She died,” he added. He gnawed at his lower lip and mumbled. “Died? She was killed.”

“Killed?” Yul-chun’s lips went dry. He sat down on the bed. “How was she killed?”

The young man sat down on the bed beside him. “We lived in a hut on a Russian peasant’s land. It was not his land, but we helped to till it. A nobleman owned the land. Long ago that was—long ago, and everything is changed now. But in those days the winters were endless and we were always hungry before spring came. We dried berries and roots and mushrooms but we always ate everything too soon. That is—I ate too much. I was young and I did not see that she gave everything to me. One day in the spring she stole into the forests of the nobleman to find some early mushrooms, or a few green weeds. She said she knew a hollow where the sun shone warm and where there was no wind. There she went and I followed. She told me to hide among the trees, and so I hid, but where I could see her. It was a quiet place, scarcely the birds were there. Suddenly I heard footsteps and a great crackling of broken branches on the ground. I saw a big man in good clothes, high leather boots and trousers of leather and a loose jacket belted in at the waist, a bearded man, with a whip in his hand. He shouted at my mother that she was a thief and she tried to run but he laid hold of her—and—”

The young man faltered and bit his lip and then went on.

“He beat her when he was finished with her and she did not get up again. She fell in a drift of late snow under a thick pine tree. She did not move when I called. She did not answer. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing. I was afraid and I ran away. I left her there and I never went back. Nor did I ever tell what had happened to her. And I do not know why I tell you now, for no one can do anything.”

“What was her name?” Yul-chun asked.

“I do not know,” the young man said. He frowned. “You will think I lie, but I only called her O-man-ee. And we knew no one except the Russian peasants. They called her Woman!”

It was on the edge of Yul-chun’s tongue to ask the next question. Did she not tell you your father’s name? But resolved against hope, he would not. At this moment the young man shook his hair back and it fell away from his ears. Yul-chun stared. The lobe of the left ear was not perfect. It was the same ear with which his brother Yul-han had been born!

“What is your name?” Yul-chun muttered. His voice would not come out of his throat and his heart beat hard enough to make him faint.

“Sasha,” the young man said.

“Sasha!” Yul-chun exclaimed. “But that is a Russian name.”

“I was born in Russia.”

Yul-chun looked at him with reluctant certainty. The young man got to his feet. “I must be on my way,” he said.

“What is your haste?” Yul-chun asked, to delay him.

“I am a trader,” Sasha said. “I bring furs and woolens here to Antung and I take back brass and silver goods and sometimes a rich man orders celadon dishes and lacquer chests from Korea.”

He was set on going, and Yul-chun could think of no other way to delay except by telling the truth.

“It may be that you—it may be—you are my son,” he stammered.

Sasha paused at the door.

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“You bear upon you a family mark,” Yul-chun replied. “My blood brother had that same ear you have. It cannot be accident that there should be two such ears.”

He came near to Sasha and lifted the lock of his hair and looked at the ear.

“It is the same,” he said.

But Sasha pulled away from him. “That cursed ear,” he muttered.

“Not cursed, but perhaps most fortunate,” Yul-chun retorted.

“Fortunate? Unfortunate,” Sasha exclaimed. “Too many men tease me for my ear. Did a Russian bear bite me—what woman loves you too well—such things, all stupid!”

Yul-chun, fearful and hopeful, tried to laugh but Sasha looked at him gravely. For an instant the two men exchanged a speculative gaze.

“Do we part?” Yul-chun inquired at last. When Sasha did not answer he stepped back. “It may be you are right. The lobe of an ear—it is no proof. Who knows how many people in the world have the same defect?”

Now it was Sasha who hesitated. Then he spoke. “My mother had something of jade which she valued above all else. Though we starved, she would not use it. What was it?”

Yul-chun answered instantly. “It was a seal of red jade which was once her father’s, before he was killed.”

Sasha could not hide his astonishment. Speechless, he put his hand in the bosom of his tunic and brought out the jade seal.

Yul-chun gazed at it and nodded. “I saw it last in her hand,” he said slowly.

Suddenly he could not hold back his tears. He threw his arms about his son.

“Now we will go home,” he said. “At last—at last!”

… He was a silent young man, this son of his. He must be wooed and coaxed, it seemed, for he could let hours pass in silence. But Yul-chun’s heart melted into constant warm-flowing talk, so moved he was by having his son. For the first few days he held back nothing. He drew his son into his own life and into the life of the Kim family. When he found how ignorant Sasha was of his own people and his own country, he talked of the early history of the Korean people, and how they came to be living here on this long mountainous strip of land hanging from the Russian mainland like fruit upon a vine. He told of the struggles of their people to keep their independence and how they had been compelled through the centuries to play one nation against another, lean first toward this one, and then toward that.

“I tell you, Sasha,” he began earnestly one day as they walked side by side, and then paused as he spoke the name. “Sasha?” he repeated. “How can I take you to your grandfather with that name? I shall give you another. Yes, I have it—you shall be another Il-han. Your grandfather’s name will honor you, and may you honor him.”

His son did not say yes or no, but as the days passed, Yul-chun saw that he would not accept the new name. Unless he were called Sasha he did not answer. For a few days, as they traveled on, Yul-chun inquired of himself whether he should not argue the name, and then decided he should not. It was too soon. The bonds which should have been between father and son since birth must be knit now as carefully as though his son were newly born to him, as in a sense he was. He returned then to the Russian name, and still Sasha said nothing for or against. Studying that closed handsome face, the high forehead, the broad cheekbones, the small dark eyes under flying black brows, the full stubborn mouth, Yul-chun puzzled as to what sort of man his son was. Closed against the world, secretive, brooding, and yet sometimes suddenly impetuous, how could Sasha be revealed to him? He had told Sasha everything and Sasha told him nothing.

“Will you not speak to me of yourself and your mother?” he said at last one day.

They were well into Korea now, walking through high mountains, treading narrow footpaths that clung to the cliffs and wound in and out among the rocks.

“I have nothing to tell,” Sasha said. “Every day was a day of work on the land. At night we went to political meetings. There was nothing more.”

“But after Hanya—after your mother died, what did you do?”

“I was put into a Russian orphanage.”

“And then?”

“Nothing.”

“You were sent to school?”

“Of course. All children are sent to school.”

“Were they kind to you?”

“Kind? I had enough to eat and a place to sleep.”

“But someone was—someone took the place of your mother?”

“No—there was no need for that.”

“You missed your mother—being so young.”

“I do not remember.”

“Are you—have you ever been in love?”

“Love? No!”

“How is it you are a trader?”

Yul-chun put the question innocently, and he was surprised to see that Sasha turned suspicious eyes on him.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Why? Because you are my son.”

Sasha waited an instant, then answered. “I am restless. I like to wander. Since I am Korean I am not forced—that is, I am free. Also my mother told me to find you if I could, and especially to look for you in Antung. If you returned to Korea you would pass through Antung, she said.”

“Did she say I would return?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Surely there is more,” Yul-chun urged. “What are your dreams? Where are your hopes? Every young man has dreams and hopes.”

“Not me,” Sasha said stubbornly, his eyes on the path ahead.

“Have you known terrors that make you silent?” Yul-chun asked next.

“There are some things I will never tell you,” Sasha said.

Yul-chun felt a desperate reluctance to reach home with this son until somehow he had discovered how to open his heart. If Sasha could not love him, the father, how could he love his grandparents, or even his country? Moreover, there was no haste. The Japanese had strong hold everywhere, and the time for revolt was not yet. Why, then, Yul-chun inquired of himself, why should he not linger here in villages as he had in China and Manchuria and near Antung, and sow the seeds of the people’s schools? It would be difficult for Japanese police would be watchful, but he would be wily. He would teach the people Japanese words by day, but at night he would teach them Korean.

He told Sasha of his plan, and begged his help. Sasha listened, unmoved. “The government should do this,” he said.

“It is not our government,” Yul-chun replied.

Sasha shrugged and said no more. Thereafter he sat watching while his father labored earnestly with new and old scholars and then a young student teaching them the way to teach the unlettered landfolk.

“Son, will you not help me?” Yul-chun asked one day.

“I read only Russian,” Sasha replied carelessly.

Yul-chun’s jaw dropped. It had not occurred to him that though Sasha spoke he could not read or write Korean, his ancestral language.

“How is it you did not tell me?” he demanded.

Sasha shrugged again. “I am not one for books,” he said.

“Nevertheless I must teach you,” Yul-chun said firmly.

And he did so from that day on. Each night, wherever they slept, Yul-chun taught his son. Sometimes in the day, too, if they were in a lonely place, he stopped and gave Sasha a lesson.

As for Sasha, he learned well enough, neither willingly nor unwillingly, and unmoved as ever. No, not by touch or word was this son’s heart moved. Days passed and months, for Yul-chun continued his building of schools, as slowly they went southward, until almost two years had passed, and Yul-chun, at first wounded, had learned to accept Sasha as he was.

This was the son he had found, a slim, silent, grim young man, who hid himself even from his father. Urging and persuasion only made him draw the invisible cloak the more tightly about him. Somehow he must be won, but not by force. Thereafter Yul-chun used every device that love and pride could conceive. For already he loved this son. The human feelings he had so long repressed emerged powerfully now from his strong nature, and finding no other object they centered on Sasha. Often in the evening when they sat resting after the day’s travel on foot or in some passing vehicle a landman offered, he longed to put out his hand and touch the warm brown flesh of his handsome son. He did not yield to the longing after the first time. Sasha had endured the touch and then had moved away and Yul-chun let his hand drop. No, not by contact nor by word was this son’s heart to be moved, if indeed it could be moved. Yul-chun, wounded, could only sigh and try to remember himself when young. He, too, had not welcomed the touch of his father’s hand. Now that he had this son, he began to understand how often he must have grieved his own father, and from his present hidden pain he spoke one day, as he and Sasha came out of the mountains and into the foothills below.