The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (58 page)

“There is no guarantee of freedom merely because a new power arises in a nation,” Yul-chun concluded. “We must be prepared against such power. We must still distrust those who have been our ancient enemies. It is true, I have trusted the Americans. Yet of all the nations, we must count them as our only possible friends. They have betrayed us—yes, but it was in ignorance, not greed. Perhaps they have learned now. If not, we must teach them. That is what our fellow countrymen must do—teach them, so that when victory comes, they will know what to do with it. Let us forget the past. Let us remember only that the Americans among all nations have not seized our land or tried to rule us. And I do not forget their Christian missionaries. I am not Christian and I doubt religion, but they have opened hospitals and schools and they have been friends to us, these missionaries, and they have spoken for us and it is not their fault that they have not been heard. Governments are deaf and blind. Therefore I accept the Americans! They are our only hope. I was bitter against my father once because he said these very words. I am not bitter now, I am in despair. I know that in the world we face after the war there will be the same enemies, and the same passion to rule. We must have friends—and our only hope is the Americans. Above all, we must find someone who will go to America, and soon.”

Liang listened to this speech with quiet attention and again Yul-chun felt the comfort of his total understanding, so complete that he had the illusion that he need not have used words. It was a strange feeling, one that he could not analyze or compare to any other, but it permeated him.

“I know one who can help us,” Liang said. “She is a woman.”

Here he stopped. He filled his uncle’s tea bowl and his own, then went on.

“A few months ago I would not have hesitated to bring her to you. Now—I hesitate!”

Yul-chun proceeded cautiously. “Is this woman young?”

“Very young.”

“And beautiful?”

“Very beautiful.”

“A friend? Or something more?”

“Let us not speak of what she is to me—only of what she is.”

“Then what is she?”

Yul-chun leaned against his back rest and fixed his gaze on Liang’s face. He imagined that he saw a cloud there.

“She is a famous dancer,” Liang said.

“A dancer!” Yul-chun exclaimed. His voice expressed what he thought. A dancer? How could she be trusted? Above all, could it be possible that Liang was like other men, his calm beautiful face merely a trick of birth?

Liang smiled. “I know what you are thinking and I agree with you except in this one person. She is not merely a dancer. She is—everything.”

“How is it you know her?” Yul-chun demanded.

“She came to our hospital two years ago, from Peking. Since she is partly Japanese the Chinese had arrested her as a spy and tortured her.”

“Partly Japanese!”

“And partly English. Her grandfather was an English diplomat in China and he fell in love with a beautiful Manchu girl, the daughter of a prince. They had to escape from China to save their lives. Nor were they accepted in England, and so they went to Paris, and there Mariko’s mother was born.”

“How is she Japanese?” Yul-chun inquired.

“Her father,” Liang replied. “Her father was the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, and on a holiday he met her mother in Paris. They were married, and came back to Japan, where Mariko grew up until she was twelve when her father was sent as Special Envoy from the Emperor. She speaks five languages equally well, but first of all she is an artist.”

Artist, he said, not woman! Yul-chun put his next question.

“And why is she here?”

“She is dancing in the Japanese theatre.”

“How can she be of use to us?”

“She is going to the United States to perform.”

“And you trust her?”

“As I trust myself.”

Yul-chun sighed deeply. He had known no dancers except the simple girls who danced in the Communist propaganda plays used for the landfolk in China and Manchuria. Cynic though he considered himself, of women he knew nothing, and a dancer, he believed as all Koreans did, was woman at her lowest level. He did not speak these thoughts lest he offend Liang, but Liang answered as though he had spoken.

“You have been so absorbed, Uncle, in your devotion to our cause that you have not had time to realize the change in the world. I assure you that she is a woman of dignity as well as beauty. Many men pursue her, of course, but I insist that she is trustworthy.”

“I must take your word for what she is,” Yul-chun retorted. “It is not likely that I shall ever be able to judge for myself.”

“Many men have also confided in her,” Liang replied. “She has been the confidante of prime ministers and kings. She listens, she keeps their confidence, she is partisan of none.”

“I wish to meet this paragon,” Yul-chun said drily.

For the first time Liang hesitated. “It would be easy enough,” he said slowly, “for she wants to meet you. She has heard of you, as who has not, and she has several times begged me to bring her here—it must be in secret, for she has the confidence even of the Governor-General—”

Yul-chun felt a chill at the heart. How could such a woman be trusted?

“There is one difficulty,” Liang was saying. “Sasha is in love with her.”

Yul-chun cried out, “Sasha! Does she respond?”

“She says no, but there is something of yes in the way she says it,” Liang replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps she feels something of both. Perhaps it is not love at all. Sasha is impetuous—importunate—very handsome—”

Impetuous—importunate!

“I see I do not know my own son,” Yul-chun said quietly.

Silence fell between them. He yearned to discover whether Liang also loved this woman, but he could not ask again. The young man had such natural dignity, with all his ease and grace, that the elder man could not cross the delicate barrier between the generations.

“Perhaps we should think of someone else. This young woman seems too complicated.”

Liang laughed. “Ours are complicated times, Uncle! She is not simple, but nothing is simple. No, she is the only one, and I will bring you both together somehow.”

He rose as he spoke, and whatever his inner mood, he appeared his usual benign self. The change had been only for a moment and he had restored himself. As for Liang, he bowed and left the room. At the same moment he heard a noise at the outer door, and Ippun’s voice scolding Sasha.

“Little master—little master, you are too late! There is mud on your coat.”

“I fell.” Sasha’s voice was thick.

“You have been drinking,” Ippun scolded.

“It is not your business to tell me!” Sasha shouted.

Liang went to the door. Sasha was leaning on Ippun’s shoulder, unable to walk.

“I will take care of him, Ippun,” Liang said. “See that the door is locked for the night. Make my uncle’s bed, and then go to your own.”

He put Sasha’s arm about his neck and half carrying him, he led him to the room which was now Sasha’s own. Ippun had made it neat, she had spread the bed and lit the night lamp on the low table at the head of the bed—and had put a thermos of tea there and a bowl. Liang lowered his cousin to the bed and then poured the bowl half full of tea.

“Drink this—it will help you.”

Sasha obeyed without protest and still without protest he let Liang undress him to his undergarments. Then he threw himself down and slept while Liang covered him with the quilt.

Liang sat in his usual seat in the theatre, in the middle of the fourth row. Somewhere in the shadows behind him he knew that Sasha was watching the performance, too. He had seen Sasha at the ticket window when he came in, but the crowd was dense and Sasha had not, he believed, seen him. He gazed intently now at the flying figure on the stage, Mariko in the closing scene. Her long sleeves waved like a bird’s wings and then whirled as she whirled, the slow rhythm quickening as she approached climax. Clever, clever these ancient dances, seeming religious, seeming reverent, and underneath the delicacy and the grace all the dark passion of mankind! And no one understood this better than Mariko. He had known her now for two years and still he had not fathomed her. She was a child of many races, the human emblem of mixed cultures, holding within herself the hostile drives of her ancestral past, brilliant and willful, lawless and tender, never to be trusted for the next emotion, the next impulse, the next decision to act, and yet she was deeply trustworthy because she could never be partisan. Such was Mariko. She would do nothing for a cause, of that he was sure, but she would do anything for him.

She was closing the dance. Slowly, slowly the silken wings of her wide sleeves descended to the dying movements of the end. He caught her eyes, those startling eyes, shining and dark, and he knew that she was telling him that he was to come to her. Not to her dressing room—

“Never come to my dressing room,” she had told him when they first met. “That is for everybody. Not for you!”

He had not known what to make of her directness, her boldness he would have said, except that it was not bold, only exquisitely shy and childlike, and he said nothing because he did not know what to say.

To his startled look she had replied. “We have no time, you and I. I must leave Seoul in twenty days, and I have never seen you before. There are only these twenty days. Then I fly to New York, London, Paris. I may never come back—who can tell? I thought I was safe in Peking because I have a Chinese godfather there, but when the Japanese came, the Chinese called me a spy. And in Tokyo I was nearly thrown into prison because I speak Chinese so well—I speak the language wherever I am. But I was never a spy. I cannot care enough about any country to be a spy. I dance. I am an artist. If I do anything else it is for a human being—not for a country. I belong to no country—and every country.”

All this she had poured out in her soft hurried voice, stripping off her costume as she spoke, revealing a skin-tight undergarment which she slipped from her shoulders before she drew a western dress over her head. He might not have been there for all she cared, it seemed, or he might have been a woman, except from the instant their eyes met they shared the knowledge that she was woman and he was man.

They had not met often since then. He had never made an advance toward her, nor she toward him. Yet when they were alone for the first time in her house, without invitation or hesitation they had embraced, though without words. They had never spoken of love but they were in the state of mutual love. To have put it into words would have been to enclose it and belittle it and define it.

Once when he had visited a monastery on Kanghwa island, he had called upon the abbot, and they had fallen into deep conversation. He had listened while the abbot explained the mysteries of Buddhism, of which he was not ignorant, for he had studied well the books in his grandfather’s library. Of all religions he was most drawn to Buddhism, and yet he had no wish to become Buddhist. There again he refused definition. To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.

“And beyond this,” he had said when the abbot had finished, “there is the difficulty of Nirvana—the difficulty for me, at least. You tell me that Nirvana is the ultimate goal of the human spirit—or the soul, if you wish. But Nirvana is non-being, and I have no longing not to be. On the contrary, I long for all-being.”

The abbot had replied, “You mistake the meaning of Nirvana. It is not non-being. True, it is the absence of pain, the absence of sin and wrongdoing, the absence of passion, and even of temptation, but not because of non-being. Not at all! On the contrary, it is that very all-being of which you speak. It is total awareness, total comprehension, total understanding, so that we do not need words to communicate. We simply know. We know because we are. Nothing is hidden from the mind and the spirit that dwell in Nirvana. The absence of suffering, of pain, of passion, of temptation itself, is the result of already knowing and therefore understanding, aware of all that exists in this eternity which we call time.”

When the abbot spoke these words, Liang had felt a relief and release in himself, a complete peace pervading not only his mind but every part of his body. His muscles, his heart, his inner organs, all moved into a harmony which was peace. He had waited for many minutes while he assimilated this peace. Then he was ready to return to his life.

“Thank you, Father,” he said to the abbot. “What you have said is true. I feel it in my whole being. Now I understand what is meant by Nirvana. I shall know as I am known. Yet—and I hope that this will not hurt you—I do not wish to become a Buddhist.”

“Why should you be Buddhist?” the abbot replied. “In Nirvana there is neither Buddhist nor any other division. These classifications are not needed when we reach the state of total awareness and total understanding. Go in peace.”

With this the abbot had blessed him and Liang came down from the mountain and went home at once. The abbot’s words came back to him when he first saw Mariko alone. It was the evening after Japanese bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor. He had had no intention of going to the theatre that night. The evening had been spent with others of his own age, young men from the university. They had argued and discussed the news, searching it over and over again to know what portent it held for Korea. He had been about to go back to his room in the hospital when darkness fell, and passing by the theatre on his way he had lingered, he did not know why, except that he was reluctant to return to his solitary room and was disinclined for study. His mind, usually calm, was still disturbed, for the attack on Pearl Harbor had been altogether unexpected and he had not been satisfied with the conclusions his fellow students had reached. Yet he could not reach his own. Restlessly, senselessly he had thought at the time, he had stopped at the theatre, and noticing that the beautiful dancer who had been treated at the hospital was to perform, he had bought a ticket and gone in.

The place was half empty. People had stayed at home to ponder and to talk and to guess the future. He sat in the middle of the first row, close enough to catch the scent of Mariko’s robes as she danced, close enough to see her lovely face. She was small, her face oval and pale and her eyes large and glowing with exhilaration and joy in the dance. She was as light as a bird, her shoulders moving with every movement a separate grace and elegance, and this not only of the body but of her inner being. She had a rhythm of her own, expressed with elegance, and the master drummer followed rather than led. She appeared to stand still while she moved, and yet when she was still she seemed to move with inner exhilaration. Her performance that night had been the Fairy Dance, its story that of a fairy who was bathing in a lake when a woodcutter stole her clothes, so that she was compelled to marry him and live on earth. Liang had never seen it performed with such artistry, and watching her gossamer garments floating about her like mist, he forgot for a little while the tragedy of the day. And afterwards did what he had never done before. Driven it seemed by a spirit in his feet, he had gone backstage. Although usually her door was crowded, no one was there that night, and she had opened the door herself, still in her costume, and they had stood looking at each other.