Waxing Moon (16 page)

26

After drifting many days, sleeping in barns, sustaining himself with the dried meat he had taken from Mrs. Wang, and stealing eggs from chicken cages, Min managed to arrive at the confluence of the Snake River and another river whose name he didn’t know. And there it was: Sowok Island, where the lepers were now being shipped to, for leprosy was believed to be contagious. He offered the ginseng wine as the boat fare to the rowing man in his sixties. The old man took Min gladly. He asked Min if he would pour the wine for him. They drank together in silence. The boat glided on the water smoothly. Three hawks were flying around and around in the middle of the sky that was heartbreakingly blue. Min looked up and counted the three hawks, again and again, until he got dizzy.

“Why are you going there? You look fine,” the rowing man inquired tactlessly. “It’s not a contagious disease, as far as I can tell, though. I have been transporting the lepers for a decade now. Nothing has happened to me. Their limbs fall off, like leaves in the autumn. But they don’t complain. It’s interesting: they are all quite content. There is a yellow man who lives among them. Have you heard of him? He was the only survivor of the ship that arrived this past summer from a faraway land. He was in the palace for a while, but the important members of the government council voted against him influencing the king so he has been exiled to this place.”

The boat arrived at the dock. Min bowed to the chatty old man and walked up the hill.

It was a small island. Once he climbed up the steep path to the ridge, he could see the whole island, and the silvery water on the other side blinded him as he savored the vastness of the water and the calm of the island. He descended slowly, feeling the shock of the weight of his body against the ground each time he took a step. When he reached the bottom of the hill, he saw scattered huts, and some people by the shore, fishing with their spears. He stood behind a tree, observing them from a distance. Later on, they roasted fish on a fire, and the aroma made his stomach twist with hunger. He chewed on acorns and fell asleep behind a large rock.

Min opened his eyes to find a crowd of people standing near him, looking down, examining him. They were happily surprised. One said he was mute. Another said he was also deaf. Min almost fell back at seeing the foreign man, hardly yellow actually except for his hair. He was ashen white, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in years. What haunted Min even more were his large blue fish eyes, which moved just like normal eyes but seemed to conceal his feelings.

Min panicked when they took hold of him, remembering the time of his apprehension for having helped the head of the peasants’ revolutionary group. He had delivered the pamphlets explaining the condition of the peasants and the unfair tax system and the minimal wages. He had posted warning announcements for the government officials to reconsider. But all had failed, and the leader had been decapitated soon after the arrest. Min was beaten up, but he had been released when they found out he was deaf and dumb. He wished to have been a martyr, too, but his disabilities prevented even that wish from coming true. The officers had assumed he knew nothing about what was going on. After his arrest, he had been dragged, just like now; many hands grabbed him and they were looking down, studying him, except that these people were not cursing and slapping him to speak. All were silent. He was taken to a hut and fed fish and boiled radish. He ate hurriedly in front of them, bearing their stares. No one made any comment.

He spent the night there in the hut with the yellow man, or white man, whichever—it didn’t matter really.

In the evening, the man scribbled fiercely for a long time in his leather-bound book. It was not in any language that Min recognized. He closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Wang’s diary. Hong was her name. The other day, when he had reached the start of the Snake River, an elderly woman informed him that the woman named Hong had moved away to the island called Sowok, where lepers were quarantined. Min had never been curious about his birth or his birth mother, who had abandoned him. What had driven him all the way to the island was his curiosity about his father.

After his release from the police, he received a new assignment from the peasant revolutionary group. He was supposed to set Mr. O’s house on fire. He couldn’t possibly do it as long as Nani lived there, and besides, when he had snuck into the house, Mistress Yee was having a baby. He couldn’t bring himself to carry out the order. Seeing Nani also affected him. She had sobbed when she saw him bruised all over.

When he read the page that Mrs. Wang had left open, he couldn’t breathe. Did she know his intention to set the house on fire? Was that why she was revealing the secret of his birth?

In the early dawn, the blue-eyed man was cooking in the kitchen. He made porridge with salt and sliced a piece of fish, not cooked but marinated in salt and vinegar. He brought it in on a tray with two spoons and one pair of chopsticks. Min and he ate together. The porridge tasted bad and the fish worse, but Min was grateful that the man didn’t speak. Judging by the way his eyeballs moved, he wasn’t mute; he was a normal man. When the meal was over, Min grabbed the tray, for he wanted to do the dishes.

Later in the morning, the lepers were lining up outside his hut. And the foreign man took one person at a time. He examined the person’s tongue and eyes and gave the person some white powder to put on his or her wounds. Min went out the door and gagged when he saw a person missing three fingers and half of a nose. And he was wondering what that white powder did to the patients.

Sometime past noon, after the last person had been treated, the foreign man and Min sat together by the fire, roasting their hands, observing each other’s faces.

There was something repugnant about the colors of the man, Min had to admit. Tinted yellow hair and the carp eyes, but the most poignant part was his bloodless skin color. It was like death itself. And it saddened Min. He was probably dying like the lepers but with a different disease.

The man went fishing. Min went up the hill, caught two snakes, and skinned them. Outside the hut, he seared them on wooden skewers and offered them to the foreign man when he came back without catching any fish. The man looked at the meat and ate it with Min, cautiously. Min missed eating rice and kimchi and hot soup.

In the evening, the foreign man scribbled again in his book. Sitting in the corner, it dawned on Min that his profession might be along the lines of Mrs. Wang’s. Perhaps he was writing about his patients. A little later, the man pulled out a map and spread it on the floor. He pointed with his pen to where they were, and then he pointed to another place far away, indicating where he came from. The man’s eyes immediately reddened, and Min’s chest knotted with sympathy. The map of the world was a beautiful thing to look at. But the words were written in another tongue. Min hadn’t known that there were so many different places all over the map. There must be people in all those places, living and dying, with stories as painful and strange as his and this man’s.

Min suddenly realized that it was impossible to guess the man’s age. He could be anywhere between twenty and fifty. What had made him leave his country? It was odd. With his finger, the man traced the route he had taken.

They lay next to each other, candlelight still flickering on the low table. Min saw the man cry. Min groaned to tell him that everything was going to be all right. But his unexpected groan sounded wild and must have scared the man out of his wits. He wiped his eyes and stopped crying.

27

Before dawn, the sound of the gong at the temple rippled gently into the hollowness of one’s soul.

Mr. O was sitting in front of the wall in the guest room at the recommendation of the head monk. His mind was intensely focused on the sound of the gong.

Let your mind be open, and let it be part of everything that surrounds you. Don’t let any of your senses exert effort to recognize one particular phenomenon, whether it is a sound or a pain or a thought the head monk had said. Mr. O was frustrated because that was not possible. He didn’t know how to do it. The first day he had said, “Damn it, I can’t!” And the head monk, sitting next to him in the hall with the Buddha of the Universal Light, ignored his complaint.

Now, alone in his room, Mr. O sat facing the wall, trying to immerse himself in the low, vibrating sound of the gong, but his attention was directed to only one thing. His stomach was the center of the universe at the moment. Ever since he had come to spend time at the temple, he’d been feeling his stomach painfully shrink. Meals were served only twice a day, and the portions were meager. He stared at the wall and tried to let the sound of the gong seep into his mind. He was counting automatically, and then he was distracted and lost track of his counting. He opened his eyes, stopping his counting, and looked about. He was staying in one of the cubicles near the old part of the temple, behind the main hall. The cold room was minimally furnished.

When he had arrived six days earlier and announced that he was going to stay indefinitely, the head monk had accepted his proposal with a bow. Mr. O had expected his sudden appearance would disturb the entire schedule of life in the temple. But things went on or, rather, nothing happened.

That first day, the head monk had silently showed him the guest room and then left. Mr. O called him back, so he could blurt out the whole story.

“My son was born. But he was born disabled. The doctor thinks he won’t be normal. He will be slow in learning, or he may not be able to learn anything at all. There is something wrong with his head. I felt like jumping into the well in my yard with him. There was no place I could think of to come to hide, except this place. My father used to come here with me. Do you remember? I need to stay here for a while. I need to think about things.”

The head monk listened, unperturbed, with his eyes cast on his feet, his lips slightly apart, and his palms meeting tightly under his chin. When Mr. O finished pouring out his heart to him, the other man paused for a moment and then asked if he would like some tea. Mr. O was upset because he saw that the head monk was not affected by his tragedy, which was gnawing at him. Mr. O replied angrily that he hadn’t come to drink tea. The head monk bowed slightly and wished a good stay for Mr. O. He chanted something from the Heart Sutra and then left.

In a few moments, breakfast would be ready. Mr. O couldn’t wait. No one would bring him food, or come to fetch him, so Mr. O got himself ready while other monks rose to go to the main hall for morning chanting and whatever else they had to do before breakfast.

It was still dark outside when Mr. O stepped out the door and walked briskly to the kitchen. A group of monks were walking in single file, the head monk following at the end. Mr. O watched the bald heads from behind, amused, and suddenly felt an urge to fling a stone with a sling at their heads, one by one. And then he remembered that he had done exactly that to an elderly servant a long time before. Sitting on a branch of a pine tree, he flung a stone using a homemade sling, which hit the servant on his forehead. He fell and bled. Mr. O laughed hysterically then. Suddenly, his own laugher echoed in his head now.

Mr. O paused by the main hall and watched the monks walk into the kitchen. No one had scolded him for injuring the servant. He couldn’t even recall what had happened to the servant.

Slowly, he dragged his feet to the kitchen and entered the room where all the monks sat in silence. They passed the rice bowls to the right and around the table until everyone had a bowl of rice and a bowl of clear soup with a few green leaves. There was also pickled radish on the table. Mr. O sat next to the head monk and ate, conjuring up the image of a roasted duck. When they were done with their meals, they poured hot water into the rice bowls and with their spoons they cleaned the bowls and drank the water with whatever was floating in it. Mr. O was the first to get up and leave, in order to avoid cleaning the table and doing his own dishes. He could lower himself to do many things, but doing the dishes wasn’t one of them.

He went for a walk. There was a path that led to the peak of the mountain. He was climbing steadily up and when he paused to breathe, he turned around and saw the head monk following him from a distance. He waited. The head monk came close and passed him. He followed, and from behind he asked, “Don’t you all kowtow at this hour in the main hall?”

“Yes, we do,” the head monk replied, and he stopped. He picked a leaf from the ground and handed it to Mr. O. “Would you like to?” he asked, pointing to the ground, handing the leaf to Mr. O.

“What?” Mr. O asked.

“There is a caterpillar crossing the road. Someone might step on it,” the head monk said.

Mr. O picked up the caterpillar with the leaf and asked, “Where shall I put this?”

“Wherever you think it might want to be,” he replied quietly.

“How do I know where it would like to be?” Mr. O wondered, slightly annoyed.

“Well, it was going that way, and perhaps we should put it over there,” the head monk suggested.

Mr. O put it down and walked on, ahead of the monk.

They climbed to the top. The valley was blanketed with thick fog, but they could see the temple, situated deep in the middle of the mountain, in the brilliant morning light.

The head monk sat on a rock, and Mr. O sat on another rock. For a while they said nothing, but finally Mr. O broke out, “I have been kowtowing one hundred and eight times a day, and meditating—at least trying to meditate—but nothing is really happening to me. I can’t really forget anything. My mind is crowded with thoughts, and they all rush to me as soon as I close my eyes to meditate, facing the wall.”

The head monk sat still, observing a small bug on his robe.

Mr. O looked about and cut a leaf from a plant and handed it to the head monk, saying, “Do you want a leaf for the bug?”

The head monk looked at the freshly cut leaf with regret. And he said, “No, this bug has a pair of wings. It can go wherever it wants to.”

Mr. O frowned deeply.

“So what’s the point of all this? Mr. O demanded. “Why do you kowtow to the Buddha? Why do you chant? Why do you meditate? Why do you eat only twice a day? Why do you not do what you want to do? What’s the point?”

The head monk smiled like a baby, fluttering his eyelashes in the sunlight. And he answered, “There is no point.”

“Oh.” Mr. O paused, dumbfounded and slightly piqued.

“There is no point,” the head monk repeated quietly. “You call yourself ‘I,’ and I call myself ‘I.’ The novice monk also calls himself ‘I.’ And yet, I call you ‘you.’ You call me ‘you.’ We call the novice monk ‘he.’ Because we think that ‘you’ are not ‘I,’ and ‘he’ is not ‘I.’ But everyone on earth is ‘I.’ I am borrowing this body to live this life. You are borrowing yours to live this life. The fact that you are in your body, and are called Mr. O, is a coincidence. Nothing more. All Mr. O possesses or doesn’t possess is also a coincidence. But ‘I’ is troubled with the ‘me’ that wants, desires, wishes, loves, hates, feels unhappy about, and is dissatisfied with. If you let your ‘I’ think this way, every ‘I’ feels troubled.”

“I don’t get it,” Mr. O said, shaking his head.

“Your son was born. You expected him to be a certain way. But he arrived differently, in a disabled body. You are disappointed. You feel cursed. You are suffering because you want him to be not who he is. But remember, he is also ‘I.’ He is you. He is ‘I.’ This is what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I followed you up here.” The head monk got up and descended.

Mr. O didn’t move. He sat still and watched the head monk become smaller down on the path to the temple. His mind was in a violent state, and he could hardly breathe.

The other day, at home in bed, when his wife had whispered, “Should we get rid of him?” his spine had curled with immeasurable fear for the naive wickedness in his wife. But he couldn’t enthusiastically reprimand her, for the same thought had crossed his mind. Every morning, he woke up hoping his son was just a nightmare. But he wasn’t. He was there, everywhere, tainting the smell of the air in Mr. O’s world. The whole village was talking about him. Even the peasants pitied him. Or so he believed. For the first time in his life, he cried in bed alone. Whenever he looked into his wife’s eyes, he shrank with harrowing loneliness. And he grew wordless. His wife found him boring now. He wanted to find solace. So he had come to the temple, hoping to find a remedy for his deepening sickness. But even the head monk had proved to be of no help.

Mr. O came down to his cubicle behind the main hall. He vowed that he would not give another penny to the temple from then on. He got up and walked out. The novice monk, not older than eight, followed him, wondering where he was going. Mr. O turned around and said, “Tell the head monk that I am gone. I will send my errand boy to fetch my belongings.” Mr. O stopped at the stone tub where the spring water gathered. He took a gourd to scoop it up. He turned around and asked the novice monk, “Would you like to live in my house?”

The boy raised his eyebrows.

“Do you want to be a servant in my house?” Mr. O asked. He drank some cool water.

“A migrating bird flies to the south, but in spring, it ends up here again,” the boy said timidly, blinking his eyes involuntarily.

“Is that what your master told you?” Mr. O asked, throwing the gourd back into the stone tub of water.

The boy nodded.

Mr. O retorted, “Some never return from the south because they die during the winter.” He walked on. He turned around a few moments later and said, “Tell the head monk I left.”

“He knows,” the boy replied.

“Doesn’t he teach you not to fib?” Mr. O yelled and walked on.