The Old Garden

In darkness I groped for his skin, his hair, the outline of his bones. But I could not clearly recall the familiar odor of his armpits, his protruding Adam’s apple, the coarse texture of his shaved chin and his most private parts. In the dim gray of the morning I woke up, still resting my head on his arm, and touched him to confirm his presence. Sharing a bed became a daily routine for us. According to that melancholic scientist who interpreted dreams, the earliest hour in the morning is the moment when suppressed thoughts rise to the surface. We could not tolerate the sordid and evil world before us. It was like the backdrop of a surrealist painting, and in the foreground was the two of us, distinct figures. In my head, I black out that background. We’ll never have a child together. I inject all my feelings and emotions into him and create another me. That becomes the familiar image of myself. He and I have become each other’s reality. Would it be possible for us to remain confined forever? Just the two of us in hiding?

Spring passed before we knew it. About three months after we met we finally became used to each other. They say a baby is accepted as a real human being one hundred days after birth, and you should pray for one hundred days if you want to move heaven. We had created our own unique world. It was a four-poster bed draped in white cotton, like those in a tropical climate. Our own little world separated from the rest. He and I, we really didn’t think about anything, we did nothing. We would lie down next to each other and we were lazy, or we might go out to the backyard to watch insects. Once we decided for no apparent reason to climb up the little path behind the house. Panting like one body, we hovered around each other. Sometimes our eyes would meet, sometimes we would lift our fingers in slightly different gestures. We would turn our heads or scratch with the tip of an index finger the itchy spot on our cheek.

Looking back, every day in our life as lovers was a new beginning. Birth, togetherness, aversion, weariness, understanding, death, hatred, anger, yearning, tediousness. All of it passed by like an endless parade of clouds during the rainy season. Like the scene in a documentary where flowers sprout from a tree branch and grow and bloom and bloom too quickly and wither and droop and each petal falls away and finally only one petal is left, and it flutters and gives up in slow motion. Then the film is rewound and starts over again. Each start is new, every time. I am sometimes anxious, like in those paintings from the fin-de-siècle. A farewell, too, could be a new start. Perhaps he will steal himself away from me.

We have to last for a long time here in the valley. One year, or two? Or tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the following day? But how should we continue? Have children, live happily ever after? In order to do that, he’d have to vanish from himself forever. Perhaps everything feels so vivid and we’re so nervous because we are taking refuge from battling that enormous power. If we were no longer suffering from trials and tribulations, would we love each other like we did at first? Standing on our two feet in this world with nothing in our hands?

You said you liked our mountain. Not the majestic peaks, but the humble, ordinary rolling hills one finds in every neighborhood. One morning while we were having breakfast, you suddenly spoke.

“Yoon Hee, why don’t you skip school today?”

“They’ll fire me if I don’t work today. I already did that once.”

Then you stuck your lip out like a petulant child and put down your spoon.

“Okay, what do you want to do if I don’t go to work?”

“Let’s go hiking with rice rolls. I can make rice rolls.”

It was such an absurd idea, I had to laugh out loud. Yet I could not help myself.

“It is very tempting,” I said. “I should just quit my job.”

“I hope that school burns down.”

“My goodness, you want to be a poet and you want a school to be torched?”

As you usually did, you pushed relentlessly once you got started.

“We can come up with a new way to educate our children without schools.”

“Look, I may have just begun but I am still a teacher.”

We brought in a chopping board to make the rice rolls. You insisted that you did not like the nice-looking ones rolled up with various fillings and cut into a nice round shape, that you wanted to do it your way. You spread out rice on a rectangular sheet of dried seaweed, then added little pieces of kimchi, torn with your hands, of course, and seasoned dried anchovies. You rolled it all up into a long log.

“You hold the whole thing in your hand and chomp on it from the top. It is the best!”

That kind of rice roll was prevalent during the war, when you were a toddler, or during those difficult times after the war that our generation experienced. I ate something like that during the annual picnic at school. They were rolled in newspaper sheets, and the smell of ink had permeated here and there. The seaweed was dehydrated like tree bark and the filling was mostly coarse barley, and each bite had to be taken with a sip of water. Otherwise, it stuck to my throat and I could barely swallow it. You insisted, but certain things had improved, so we packed our rice rolls with plastic wrap. And we did not forget to brush the rolls with sesame oil.

We went up the hill behind our house, carrying a little backpack with the rice rolls and a small water bottle. I’ve written in this notebook how I went up there once in a while after you left. Every few months or so. At the top, it was connected to another ridge. Turning to the right there was a lonely grave that seemed neglected, and to the left was a descending path that led to the summit of the next mountain. We were sweating and out of breath, and we walked through thorn bushes to climb up. It took us about an hour to reach the summit, and from it we saw the other side of the valley, where we had never been, because we usually turned and walked around the mountain when we got out of the bus. And we saw the blue ridge of the faraway mountains and the upper reaches of the stream that passed through Kalmae toward the big town.

“Hyun Woo, let’s take a break and eat lunch here.”

“Here? Now? We can go higher, to our left.”

“No, this is the end of the hill behind our house. We have reached our destination.”

I was about to sit down on the grass, but you grabbed my wrists and pulled me up.

“What destination? We can’t see anything from here.”

You dragged me along the edge of the ridge.

“Maybe we can see something really fantastic from up there. What kind of an artist are you?”

I thought I was going to die hiking another mountain. I lagged behind you because I rested for a while, and even after that I could not walk well. I heard you shouting from the summit, “Look! There’s the world!”

It still took me quite a while to reach where you where. The sky was wide and open. The fields seemed to extend endlessly, and there were pale white and pink patches of flowers blooming in orchards across the curve of the hills. Here and there, little villages were nestling into the hills, and beyond them was the haze of the city. Cars were crawling down there like tiny insects.

“This is refreshing!” I exclaimed as I sat down on a rock, but you remained silent, contemplative. I took out a water bottle from our backpack, took a gulp, and handed it over to you. “I’m starving. I’d say breakfast has been digested. Let’s eat!”

Still, you did not turn around, you just kept staring beyond the horizon. You finally opened your mouth. “What day is it today?”

“Wednesday, May 27th. Three hours for the ninth graders and two for the tenth graders.”

“What do you mean?”

“My art classes. Since I skipped them today, they would be doing study hall now.”

“It was exactly a year ago,” you said, still without turning to look at me. “The last massacre at the state capital.”

At that moment, your young friends had been transferred from the jail at the military academy to a local prison, where they protested by kicking the iron bars and singing and refusing their meals. The dead people had yet to have a proper burial. But I wondered why you had to bring it up there, on that day? I wanted to console you, so I casually blurted out, “Let’s have a memorial service tonight.”

“Yes, let’s do that.”

The truth was, I was worried. I had a feeling that your eyes were wandering toward the world over there. We ate the rice rolls. It reminded me of past picnics, and you seemed to be in a better mood.

Since we decided to hold a memorial service, I went to the village market to buy some fruit and fish and beef. I also got some sheets of rice cakes, one with embedded flower patterns made out of dates and beans, and another with red bean flakes. That night I prepared the food we were craving, the memorial service being an excuse. I cooked in the kitchen, while you set up a table in the bedroom. The candles were lit, but we had no incense to burn. We opened a bottle of soju and poured some into the lid of the rice bowl, and we knelt down next to each other. I was a little embarrassed—your somber silence made me feel uneasy. But honestly, all I wanted to do was to hold still your restless heart. I was just helping you, it was not like I was keeping you captive as if we were characters in some kinky story. But I was feeling guilty, and I did not know why. You took out a piece of paper and began reading out loud. You started with a year and month and date, some long sentences that I can no longer remember. But I do remember the last sentence, about longing for a new, different world.

“From Baekdoo to Halla, I can see the beautiful land of Korea as one. But you are all gone now. What kind of world did you picture in your mind?”

Now that I think about it, leaflets containing similar sentences were frequently circulated at the time, and most of them sounded hackneyed. Yet my heart was aching and my blood was boiling. Being a radical meant inclining toward the Left, but it was only after the massacres that you and your friends began to read books and study the other side. We no longer had a home. The classic revolutionary age was already finished. Still, ideas can be renewed and move forward as much as the world will let them, and I never once had any intention of dissuading you from your choices.

The next day, when I returned from school, you were not there, just as I had feared. You did take a look at the world when you were up on the mountain. After all, Kalmae was not your reality. On the low table pushed against the wall was your note.

I’ll be right back. I won’t go all the way to Seoul, just to Kwangju. I can’t bear it, I keep seeing my friends’ faces. I think I’ll be back by late tonight at the latest. Please, don’t worry even if I have to stay one night away. I promise I’ll be back by tomorrow morning.

That was what you wrote, but you did not come back on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Do you have any idea how much I cursed you during those days? The thing I feared the most was parting from you without preparation or warning. I used to wake up in the middle of the night covered in cold sweat, did you know that? I was afraid that it did not matter how we felt for each other, that one day you would be captured in some unknown place and taken away with no way to let me know where you were. I used to think that what we wanted, what we dreamt of, was something similar to the simple and peaceful existence in Kalmae. But the world you pictured while reading books, the world you wanted to create, would never be simple or peaceful. It would be a place of nervous turmoil with endless struggles and determined, forceful battles for equality among different classes. There will always be enemies of the revolution. Do not criticize yourself over life in Kalmae being the luxury of a libertine. It’s all I ever wanted. No matter what system took power, our humble hiding place would remain. Ideology is not an issue for me, if you are by my side.

You came back to me late on the Sunday night. I was not sleeping. I knew it was you when I heard footsteps approaching from beyond the fences. The door quietly opened, and there was that familiar scent of you. Like a dog who had returned home, you gulped down water from the yellow tin kettle on the table. I waited for you to fall asleep, lying there with my back to the light from the desk lamp, but you had to look over my shoulder at my face. I could not resist it any more, so I talked to you first, trying to sound like I was just waking up.

“When did you come in?”

“A while ago.”

You were lying. I knew you had sneaked in just then. But I was determined not to show any sign of the agitation I had felt staying up every night for the past few days, worrying about you. I got up, rubbing my eyes, and pretended to be indifferent.

“How was your visit to the world?”

“It is just as it was before.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

You took off your clothes and went outside. I heard the sound of running water and splashing. I did not say anything when you came back into the room, fell on your back, and finished a cigarette.

“We’ve been crushed,” you mumbled, but I pretended I did not hear you. It took a while for you to say something again, still looking at the ceiling.

“There was a guy who got lost deep in the Himalayas. He found a crevice between rocks and he went in there to escape from the snow and wind. Inside, it was spacious and it was a different world, a gentle world where there was neither pain nor separation nor sadness, nor poverty nor hunger. There was a garden blooming with flowers of every radiant color, and fruit trees. None of the bad things in the real world existed there. No one fought, no one got sick . . . somehow, this life of harmony continued. But one day, he began to wonder what was going on outside and how his family was, so he left the cave. He returned to the country he was from and lived the rest of his life there, going crazy with a desire to return to that different world. He went back to the Himalayas to look for it, but he never again found the little crevice under the snow.”

You were murmuring as if you were talking to yourself, and you came into my bed. You were not wearing a shirt, and I felt your firm shoulder blades when I put my hands around your back, almost automatically. We shared a long kiss. With one hand you grabbed one of my breasts while with the other you took my underwear down. Your touch was rougher and more forceful than usual. When it was over, I didn’t mean to cry but tears rolled down my face. You had not just visited the world outside, you had rooted yourself in it again. The choices you and my father made caused you to look down on what we shared as insignificant, the domain of the petit bourgeois that created a false sense of freedom. Yet we were on a ship together, raising the sail and about to leave the port to cross the ocean through countless storms and rough waves. And our love had only just begun.

We got back into the old routine, an ordinary daily life where nothing really happened. And I came up with a cunning plan to grow vegetables. It happened to be a market day, so I went to the next village to buy young eggplants and peppers and tomatoes. I wanted to plow the little field and plant seeds for lettuce and crown daisy, and to dig a hole for compost and grow pumpkins, too.

“How about we grow a vegetable garden?”

“Yeah! Why didn’t we think of that before?”

I had no idea that you would like my idea so much, but I was relieved to see you jump at the suggestion and grab a shovel. You dug the field and turned over the earth, and I followed behind you, breaking the bigger clumps of earth with a hoe. All afternoon, we made furrows and ridges in the field. We even decorated our little vegetable garden by building a low stone wall around it.

“It might be too late,” you said, “but let’s plant the seeds anyway.”

“Sure! We just have to water them twice a day, they’ll grow like crazy. Let’s plant some flowers, too.”

We went to the next village to buy the young plants, we got little branches to use as a support, and we seeded various annuals. Morning glories, four o’clocks, rose mosses, balsams, zinnias, even cosmos and asters. We were going to have a garden where all these flowers would bloom in sequence from early summer to late autumn.

How can I describe that feeling when you see the very first sprout coming out of the dry soil where nothing used to be? At first, there are only a couple, and I cannot tell if they are buds or weeds. Then, as if the first couple whispered to the rest that it is okay to come out, the field is covered with numerous sprouts the following day. They are almost transparent light green and look like they would be broken by the softest wind or the thinnest drizzle. The shifting appearance of our garden was a calendar. They used to grow so rapidly that I would not recognize them if I didn’t look at them for a couple of days. You went out to the field every morning with a bucket and a watering can.

By early summer, our field was full of abundant green leaves. Do you remember the first time we picked lettuce for lunch? The leaves were not fully grown, but it was about half the size of my palm. If we overlapped two or three of them, we could wrap a spoonful of rice. Eating young lettuce leaves, my mouth was filled with the fragrance of life.

I was happiest when I watched you tending our vegetable garden. Every farmer can become a poet. Whenever you caught an insect on crown daisy leaves or picked up a snail, or even when you shook aphids from a plant, you touched them gently and made sure that you did not hurt them. You put them on a leaf and took them away. I loved that you did that. It comforted me and made me think that maybe nothing bad would ever happen to us, that heaven was watching out for us, too. People from the city get bored quickly with the stillness of the countryside and its scenery, and they run back in a few days. But open your eyes and look around! Nature is ever changing; it is alive and shifting. When the grasses and leaves dance, they look so different depending on the wind. In a soft breeze they flutter a bit, in a gentle wind they rustle, and when the wind becomes strong they sway and wave and shiver. Even in silence when the wind chimes are still and the air is not moving, it is soon altered by a grasshopper or a locust jumping out of the grass forest and hopping over the path. Or a frog jumping into water. The summer in Kalmae was a concert stage for the chorus of everything alive. I remember the evenings when we sat out in the courtyard with a straw mat on the ground. We burned dried wormwood from the main house to repel mosquitoes, and ate rice wrapped in steamed pumpkin leaves for dinner.

The rest of our lives would be dominated by those three months, and that summer was our life. It rained so frequently then.

Plump rain clouds of the blackest shade graze the mountain tops and rush toward us, and you run around the fence and shout, “Rain’s coming! Get the laundry!”

By the time I find a pair of shoes and get down from the porch, big, fat drops of rain are falling already, on my head, on my arms, on the dry ground. A lightning flash crosses the sky, followed by a loud noise that shatters everything around. That noise spreads far and wide, echoed by the grumbling sound of thunder. When the rain begins, the hot earth cools down and releases the fresh scent of soil. A cool wind arrives and a delicious scent of air fills our noses. We hurry, gathering what needs to be gathered and putting away what needs to be put away, and then we stand on the porch or by the kitchen door to watch the rain come down, filling up the void. A flash again, lightning, and again the shattering noise.

“Let’s make pancakes,” one of us would suggest. I love the dark sky right before the shower begins, I love the peals of thunder that sound loud but are in fact gentle and lonely, and I love the fragrance of wild flowers and soil and the chill that brings goosebumps to my skin.

On rainy days, I sometimes went outside to burn little branches in the fuel hole, and I would hear you humming inside. By the time the rain’s fog was pushed down the hill, the moist air was mixed with the scent of burning pine tree branches. It would make me feel cozy and warm. It felt like I was returning from the long gone past. I could hear the rain drops pattering on fluttering pumpkin and bamboo leaves, knowing soon my ears would be filled with the constant sound of rain, and I became sleepy. Sometimes we would be hiking when the rain began. We would return home wet through, and the first thing we did was wash our rubber shoes caked in mud by pouring water on them. Then we’d rub our wet hair with dry towels, take off our clinging shirts, pants, and skirt, and change into new, dry underwear. Then we’d wrap ourselves together in one blanket and lay flat on our stomachs, our chins supported by our hands, and look outside where it was still raining. Shivering once in a while, we listened to the rainwater collecting in the gutter and flowing down. When the rain stopped, the sunlight would drape itself across everything like a gauzy cloth and then disappear. The wet blades of grass would shine, and the birds shaking under the tree would begin to hop from one tree to the other, chirping. In Japanese, an oriole cries “ho-oh-hoke-kyo.” Listen carefully, it really sounds similar to that. Like a miracle, a golden handkerchief hovers and darts around in the forest after the rain stops. First, it says “ho-oh” and extends the vowel as if it is hesitating a bit, and raises its voice to a higher octave for the “ke.”

I remember you once said that the nicknames of all the birds crying at night from late spring to early summer have something to do with eating. Around this time of the season, food in storage is almost gone, yet it is too early to harvest barley. Waking up in the middle of the night because his stomach is empty, the farmer cannot fall asleep again, thinking about how to survive, how to feed his hungry family, and fearing for the future. I always thought sotjoksae, the scops-owl, would be small and pretty, based on its melancholic, delicate cry. But I once saw a picture of it in an illustrated guide and it looked just like any other owl, except it had a pair of horns. They say a scops-owl’s cry sounds like someone complaining how small his rice pot is, sotjok, sotjok, sojokda. The great tit is called the farmhand’s bird in the southeast regions, because its short cries, tst, tst, tst, sound just like the sound a farmhand makes as he clucks his tongue when driving a cow. When he hears the farmhand’s bird at night he must think of himself earlier that day, plowing the field under the blazing sun with an empty stomach. And how does a short-eared owl cry? Here’s a rice cake, hoot-hoot! Here’s a bowl of rice, hoot-hoot! And in the northern regions they call a woodpecker a zokbaksae, a tiny bowl bird. It is said to be the reincarnation of a daughter-in-law who starved to death. She cried to reproach her mother-in-law for giving her the tiniest bowl of rice. So when the zokbaksae cries, it is the daughter-in-law asking the mother-in-law to exchange her little zokbak for a bigger one, zok, zok, zok, zok.

Do you remember the day we went to the little stream to wash our clothes? It was a gloriously sunny day after another downpour, when the sky seemed so high and masses of thick clouds hung here and there. I didn’t go to work, so it must have been a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon.

We gathered the quilt covers and sheets and pillowcases and our underwear into a huge wooden bowl. On top of that we put a wooden laundry stick, a washboard, and a couple of laundry soap bars, which at first appeared to be too soft and dark in color, but cleaned clothes beautifully. I carried the vessel on my head while you packed our lunchbox, a portable stove, and charcoals in your backpack. You followed me holding in one hand a big tin tub to boil clothes, which we had to borrow from the main house, and in the other you held your fishing bag, packed with a fishing pole, a case of bait, and a net.

We took the path away from the orchard up the hill toward the upper stream of the creek, which widened by the time it reached the next village. Here, however, both shores of the river were covered with sand and pebbles, and there were a few little bays where the stream curved and the speed of the water slowed down. It was quite a distance from the main street and the residential area, so there weren’t loud kids splashing about or farmers busily irrigating. They have built a cement dam and turned it into a swimming pool in recent years. Anyway, it was you who found this tranquil place with clean water during one of your many walks around the neighborhood while I was at work.

Past the sandy shore and down by the pebbles was a flat rock that looked like a swimming turtle, its back big enough to hold three or four people. I always wondered who brought it there. I put the vessel down near the rock and positioned myself with my skirt hiked up. You placed the other things on top of the pebbles and changed into swimming trunks, then walked into the water holding your fishing bag. The water rose from your ankles to your knees, and then to your belly, and I could not resist yelling out to you, “Don’t go too far! Do you know how to swim?”

But you pretended you could not hear me, and you kept on walking, the water rising to your chest.

“Really, what is he thinking . . . ?” Nervous, I stood up, and you disappeared underwater, the plastic fishing bag left floating on the surface. I didn’t think this was really happening, but still I was scared. I didn’t know what to do, so I walked into the water until it reached my thighs and yelled one more time, “Don’t be so childish. Come out now!”

But it took a while before your head reemerged. Your upper body followed and you stood up, and I saw that the water only came to your belly button.

You took a place across from the laundry station and began to fish. I began to wash the clothes by taking each garment out, one by one, and soaking it in water. I started with little things, soaped and scrubbed them on the washboard. The big sheets were folded in half and swirled around in water. I soaped them in parts and beat them with the laundry stick. The rhythmic sound echoed across the valley.

We placed the tub on the sandy area, then stacked and lighted the charcoal. We filled the tub with water and ashes, then neatly folded and stacked the little things together with the sheets in the tub and boiled them. I thought I had to be the last one from our generation to wash clothes like that. Doing laundry in a washing machine is really dull. As I rested, soaking my feet in the stream while the laundry was boiling, little rice-fishes gathered and tickled me, perhaps trying to eat salt from my feet and calves. Among the horse-tails and foxtails growing here and there I found little sprouts of bilberry trees. I pulled them up to find the white roots, which tasted sweet. I looked for Indian strawberries and sandburs.

You had pierced a couple of worms on your hook and thrown them into the water, and now you were intensely watching the fishing line. When you pulled something shiny out of the water, I could tell even from far away that it was tiny, because you put it in the fishing net without saying anything. If you happened to catch something larger, like a stone moroko, you hooted and howled. Later I found out that even those were only about the size of my hand.

“Wow, it’s a big one! And strong, too!”

I ignored you no matter how excited you seemed. After boiling the laundry for a couple of hours, I took it out, rinsed it in water one more time, and put it away back in the wooden vessel.

“Let’s eat!” I shouted.

“Wait, they’ve just began to bite.”

“I’m hungry. Fine, I’ll just eat by myself.”

You reluctantly gathered your things and walked across the stream to me. You opened the fishing net and proudly showed me the catches of the day.

“These are just minnows . . . you thread them on a stick, salt and grill them, they taste really light and delicious. A stone moroko, here . . . isn’t it big? This one is called a floating goby. An ugly looking fellow, isn’t he? And look, I got one slender bitterling. But I think we should let this one go.”

“Why? It looks like the best tasting one.”

“It’s rare these days to find one. It looks like a butterfish from the ocean, doesn’t it?”

You fingered its flapping tail for a while as if you couldn’t decide what to do, but then you finally picked it up and threw it back into the stream.

“So, shall we eat?”

“Not yet. You have to help me first.”

I picked up one end of the dripping bedsheet and you took the other without complaining. We wrung it out until there was not one drop of water left. We opened it flat and kept hold of the opposite sides, raised it high as if we were cheering someone, then lowered it, shaking it as the moisture evaporated into the air. We laid it out on the pebble beach. The sunshine filled the white sheet. In a line next to it, pillow cases lay next to each other like friends. We placed our underwear on top of a large, flat rock, already hot from the sun, which dried the clothes quickly. We surrendered the best spots to the laundry and ate our lunch by the sand. What seems so insignificant, the everyday tasks of a simple life, are in fact the most important part, aren’t they?