12
It was the beginning of the rainy season, sometime in the second half of June. I had gotten into the habit of going fishing in our little pool behind the hill almost every day, either early in the morning or just before sunset. At first I would dig in the moist part of our backyard to find worms for bait, but one day Yoon Hee bought me a box of paste bait. I diluted it with water and sometimes mixed in ground shrimp shell, and some days I caught maggots and washed them in clean water. In time, I figured out a few places where the fish gathered, and I began to catch good-sized stone morokos. Once, I caught a foot-long catfish.
One day, I went as soon as I finished breakfast, carrying the fishing rod on my shoulder. It was a cloudy day with no wind; the water’s surface was calm, and it was easy to watch the float. As soon as I sat down I caught a goby minnow. It was so impetuous, it stiffened and died as I pulled up the rod. I sat there until almost eleven o’clock, but I only managed to catch three or four minnows. I thought about moving to another spot, but I suspected it would rain soon so I packed up and left. As I headed home down the hill past the orchard, I noticed someone in front of me, walking in between trees while pulling a bicycle at his side. I sped up to follow him. He was wearing a dark yellow jacket and a pair of the camouflage pants of the reserve army, and his hair was shaved short. I thought maybe he was going to the main house, but he passed it by. I deliberately slowed down and watched him from a distance. As I suspected, he disappeared behind the fences surrounding our house, and I heard his voice clearly.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
I tried to slow down my racing heart and tried to think. There was no plan, no preparation for a situation like this. First of all, Yoon Hee and I had never discussed a cover story that we could present to others, and all we had told the family at the main house was a vague statement about me being Yoon Hee’s fiancé. The excuse for the fact that I did not have a job was that I had been preparing for the bar exam for the past couple of years. I decided to avoid this stranger. I quickly walked away from the fence and went into the orchard, squatting behind the trees. A minute later, I saw the man leaving our courtyard and mounting the bicycle. He held onto the brake and went slowly down the hill. He stopped at the entrance to the main house. Again, I heard every word that came out of his mouth.
“Good morning, ma’am. How are you? Is the vice principal at school?”
“Yes, he is. And what brings you here?”
“Who lives in that house up there?”
“Why? The art teacher at the high school is renting it.”
“I heard there is a man living there, too.”
“Oh yes, her fiancé. He came down to study for the bar exam, but I also heard he’s not well.”
“So he’s here to recuperate, is that it?”
“Sure, to rest and to study.”
“I need to meet him. When do you think I can come back and find him?”
“Why don’t you come around dinnertime?”
The bicycle emerged again and went wobbling down the hill. I sat among the trees in the orchard listening to the bees buzzing until everything was quiet.
I closed all the doors and windows except for one back window and waited, flipping through books, for Yoon Hee to come home. There was the familiar sound of her footsteps, followed by Yoon Hee, muttering to herself.
“Are you home? Has he gone fishing again?”
I stayed down on the floor with my chin on a pillow, and Yoon Hee absentmindedly opened the door, surprised to find me in there.
“My goodness, you were in here! Were you sleeping?”
“Just come in.”
She saw my face and lowered her voice.
“Did something happen?”
When I told her about the man who came by the house before noon, the color of her face changed.
“Did the Soonchun lady know him?”
“I think so. He said he’d return in the evening, so he should be here soon.”
“Wait, wait, wait. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I mean, think about it, if he knew who you were, would he have come like that, by himself on a bicycle? I’ll go to the main house and ask who came by earlier.”
“What are you going to say when she asks you how you know someone came by?”
“Well, I’ll say you were napping and heard something while you were sleeping.”
Without changing her clothes, she went straight down to the main house. Maybe she thought I would be going crazy, because she came right back within five minutes.
“No need to worry. Only the chief of a substation at the next village.”
“Still, you never know. We should be prepared.”
“Okay. We got engaged last year. You were studying for the bar exam, but you became ill, something with your lungs. The early stage of tuberculosis. Have you memorized your ID card? What’s the name on it?”
“Jang Myung Goo. Age twenty-nine. The home address is in Inchon.”
“Let me see. Hmm, it’s not even Kim Jun Woo! Whose is this?”
“Don’t know. A friend got it for me.”
Right on cue, we heard a bicycle bell ring behind the fence. Yoon Hee quickly threw the ID card back at me, whispering, “He’s here!”
“Excuse me . . .”
Yoon Hee deliberately pushed the door wide open and walked out. Beyond her legs I saw the dark yellow jacket out in the courtyard. Taking a commanding position on the porch, she called out to him.
“Who are you? And what is this about?”
“Ah, yes, I’m from the substation. There’s something to be cleared up. What is the number of family members in this house?”
“Two.”
“So . . .”
The chief of the substation searched beyond her and hesitantly looked toward me. I went out to the narrow porch where Yoon Hee was standing and sat down with my legs hanging.
“So you teach at the girl’s high school, and this is . . .”
“My fiancé,” Yoon Hee replied sharply, without giving him a chance to continue.
“I would like to see your ID cards, please.”
“Both of us?”
The chief nodded meekly, as if he was somewhat flustered at having to do this. Yoon Hee turned to me and I handed her my ID card. She stacked it on top of her Teacher’s Identification card and fanned herself with them.
“Wait a minute, what is this for? What needs to be cleared up?”
“Please, there’s no need to get upset. We just to need to know who the new residents are in our neighborhood. That is the basic duty of our substation.”
He carefully studied the two ID cards that Yoon Hee handed to him.
“You’re from Inchon? And what do you do?”
“I was studying, but I’ve not been feeling too well.”
“Do you plan to stay here for a long time?”
“He’ll be here for the summer vacation,” Yoon Hee replied quickly, “and he’ll return home as soon as it’s over.”
He gave us back the ID cards and awkwardly raised his right hand to his forehead to salute to us, even though he was not wearing a hat.
“Beg your pardon, sorry to have inconvenienced you. We’re in a state of emergency, you know.”
He climbed onto his bicycle, and Yoon Hee walked to the opening in the fence to watch the bicycle leave.
“It is a state of emergency, you know,” Yoon Hee imitated the chief’s manner of speech as she walked back in. I guess I was quite nervous, since this was the first inspection I had to go through in Kalmae. From then on, a sense of uncertainty surrounded me like a fog. I was not worried about getting caught, but I feared that the peace of this little house would cease to exist. There were no more lunchboxes and hiking, no more tranquility at our laundry spot, staring absentmindedly at the smooth water’s surface while fishing, no more long afternoon naps and the sound of night birds and rain. Yoon Hee went all the way to the city and bought a suitcase full of law books from a used bookstore. She stacked them neatly on the low desk, which was the first thing you saw when you opened the door. When Yoon Hee was at work, after lunch and before a nap, I made an effort to actually read them. Reading about different laws, the world seemed to be filled with things you should not do. It was as if the sky and the earth and the mountains and the village were covered with an invisible net. Feeling helpless, I would fall asleep.
I went into the next village one day while Yoon Hee was working. I avoided it during the weekend when it was full of people running errands. I was craving a bowl of noodles with black bean paste, and I needed to contact Preacher Choi, who was now in charge of my security. There was no point eating lunch while I was nervous or worried, so I decided to head to the Chinese restaurant first. It was full, even though it was not market day. A woman with three children was sitting at a table covered with bowls of noodles in spicy broth and noodles with black bean paste, busily cajoling her kids to eat. The delivery bicycles came and went, and from the kitchen came the sound of someone kneading dough. I liked the chaotic liveliness at the Chinese restaurant. Of course, I ordered a double portion of noodles with black bean paste, the same thing I always got. Sitting at an empty table, I stared absently at the man at the next table until something in the newspaper he was reading caught my eyes. The headline “A Network of Spies Captured” was printed in big white letters against a black rectangle. There was a list of names, including Choi Dong Woo, Kim Kun, and other familiar names, but the rest of it was covered by the man’s hand. The customer’s food was brought out, and he threw down the newspaper and began eating. I could not wait, I reached for it.
“Do you mind if I borrow your newspaper?”
The man glanced at me and nodded once. I picked up the newspaper and sat down, turning my back to him. I spread the paper out on the table and began reading. There were mug shots of Choi Dong Woo and Kun, and other familiar faces. The number of those arrested was somewhere between seventy and eighty, less than a third of the whole organization. Still, what the investigation had uncovered was quite close to the truth. At the bottom, I recognized a photograph of myself, which I had not noticed at first. Shocked, I inhaled and looked around. Everyone was busy eating; no one was paying attention to me. It was an old photograph taken before I went into the army, the one used on my ID card. My hair was longer, my cheeks were hollow, I looked unsophisticated. I comforted myself by thinking that no one would recognize me here based on this photograph. My bowl of noodles came, so I closed the newspaper and mixed the noodles and paste and ate, bewildered. I kept pushing noodles into my mouth with chopsticks, but my head was filled with what was in the newspaper.
According to the diagram, I was the chief operator and the principal offender. That was about it: a simple label of “wanted,” no mention of specific charges against me. Dong Woo was the vice chief who established a base in Inchon and Boopyung to persuade and influence laborers. There were names I had never heard of before, and they were described as field agents of Dong Woo. Books and papers from North Korea were discovered with him, and Park Suk Joon in Japan was named as a contact. Kun was said to be the manager of the secret base of our operation, with the names of Jung Ja and Hae Soon and other factory workers included. I did not return the newspaper to the other patron; I left it on my table and stealthily got up to leave. As I paid the cashier I glanced back, and the man still had his back to me, busily eating and showing no interest in the newspaper. I had already decided to keep this information to myself and not tell Yoon Hee about it. First of all, I needed to contact Preacher Choi and ask him how bad it was. I did not go into the pair of telephone booths in front of the post office, even though there were not many people around. I walked all the way to the bus station. It was busy as usual with buses continuously streaming in and out, and there were four telephone booths in front of the station building. There were a lot fewer people there compared to the weekends, and all the booths were empty. I walked into the furthest one. I dialed, and I heard Preacher Choi’s voice.
“Hello? Hello?”
“It’s me. I saw the papers.”
“Is that you? It’s all a mess. The Inchon guy was dug up, and everyone else became potatoes.”
Just as when I’d read the newspaper, I did not blame Dong Woo. If you were caught first, it was customary to dump everything onto those who had not been caught yet, to lessen the burden and buy more time. The problem was that people who were outside of our organization were mentioned. Maybe there was something else that he had to protect. No matter what, Dong Woo was the potato vine, and when he was pulled, all the bulbs underground followed him into the light.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”
“Listen, I can’t talk to you for too long. We worry about your health, more than anything. Consider yourself a hermit. Take care of yourself.”
I tried to whisper farewell but the words never left my mouth. I hung up without saying anything.
I found out later that Choi Dong Woo deserved to be criticized. The first rule for an activist who had gone underground was not to be captured, but it was the hardest one to follow. You are isolated from daily life, and as the pursuers tighten their net, you become more militant and begin to hallucinate that you are fighting against the whole world. You are prone to being impatient and ever more radical. Dong Woo had been staying at the rented place of a laborer comrade in an industrial zone, where he had continued to run a study group. At first, he only used practical books published legally, but he gradually moved onto illegal ones from Japan, and eventually introduced books from the other side. He distributed the books by copying them into a notebook by hand and having his students copy them again. After Kun was arrested, Dong Woo had not left. He’d gone further, distributing leaflets in the industrial zone. A supervisor who used to be a technician saw one of those leaflets at his factory, and he took the laborer, who happened to be Dong Woo’s student, to a pub to buy him drinks and gently question him. The student proudly told him everything. It is not clear whether the supervisor directly informed the police or not, but there was no question that the agency was secretly investigating in that area and had a widespread network of agents.
They descended on Dong Woo at three o’clock in the morning. He must have been exhausted; he had gone into hiding long before the Kwangju Incident, during the last years of the previous administration. He had a steel pipe on hand for self defense, so he resisted at first, swinging it around. When he had a chance, he took the back window and climbed over the neighbor’s wall and roof to run away, as he had done before. But they were more experienced and prepared now—they had surrounded him in layers—and as soon as he got out of the alleyway and ran toward the major boulevard, a motorcycle was waiting for him. There were two men on one motorcycle, one driving and the other brandishing a bat. It soon caught up with Dong Woo, who was running, and as it inched ahead of him the man in the backseat wielded the bat and hit the back of Dong Woo’s head. He bounced off like a ball, spun around, and fell to the pavement on his back. Naturally, he was unconscious. Before he was dragged in for interrogation, he was brought to an emergency room where his head was stitched and he was hooked up to an IV until he regained consciousness. It was the only lucky break we had. Because he was injured during the capture and because it was their fault, he was able to insist on his right to remain silent for four days. Time was golden. During those four days, Dong Woo rearranged and cleared his thoughts. First, he erased the names of laborers who were barely surviving and replaced them with the names of intellectuals who were managed by Kun through correspondences, even though they had little to do with what he was doing at the moment of his arrest. He also tried to minimize the damage by remembering only a few names of laborers from where he was staying. He followed the new picture he had composed, surrendering only a name at a time, and faced two months of torture. I cannot even begin to describe it. You would never know how sensitive your penis and anus are to electric shocks, and you would never know how it feels when your eyes jump from their sockets, as if they are about to burst. Dong Woo was a boy from the sea who could always see the smallest fishing boat out on the horizon, but after that he became terribly short-sighted and had to wear thick glasses.
He spent twelve years in prison and got out before I did. His last three years were split between a regular prison and one in the south, where there was a psychiatric ward. Once there, he would stay at least six months in the psychiatric ward. I heard about him from time to time from other students who were transferred to my prison.
We were together in the same detention house before the trial—not in the same section, since we were coconspirators, but in the same compound, his building right in front of mine. From the window in my bathroom, I could see his building’s public bath. Whenever he went out for exercise or for lunch, or whenever he left the building to attend hearings or visitations, he would call for me.
“Oh Hyun Woo! Hyun Woo, where are you?”
I looked out through the bars on the bathroom window and waved to him. Dong Woo climbed on top of the washstand, squatted down in front of the grilled window, and gave me news from outside and about people who came to visit him. The prison guard sometimes interrupted.
“Who’s talking to the other prisoner? You know it’s not allowed.”
“Shut up, you fool. You’re the one who should be quiet.”
A little later, the chief guard would appear beyond the grilled window with his cap on.
“Get down! Hey you up there, get back inside! Who told you to talk to each other?”
“Hey, I’m doing my business here. Man’s gotta go when he’s gotta go.”
We did not care, we told each other to eat well and take care, and finally said our goodbyes. After the final sentencing, before we were transferred to different prisons, both of us put in a request so we could say farewell to each other. We sat side by side at a table, drinking barley tea and looking out the window. It was snowing. We saw a corner of the female prisoners’ exercise ground, and there was a lone woman in a gray prison uniform kicking a ball. The ball she was using was sold in the prison store, a soft volleyball. The snowflakes were quite big, but she kept kicking the ball against the long, high wall, skillfully catching it with her chest or foot and kicking it back repeatedly. Her action seemed so futile, kicking the ball again and again against the wall in the empty playground. Maybe she was killing time. Both of us watched her for a while in silence. Of course, Dong Woo and I each knew one another’s thoughts, as well as the recent news regarding our other friends. Dong Woo spoke first.
“Kun left already.”
“You saw him?”
“Yeah, he came to see me while he was being transferred. He happened to pass our section, so he just ran in with his bags. The guards knew we were saying goodbye, so they pretended not to notice.”
At the time we were called “prisoners of public order crimes,” and this was signified by a red triangle on our chests. Sometimes other ordinary criminals would taunt us as we passed their cells by calling out simultaneously, “Hey you, Commie bastard!” The red triangle was gone by the time we were transferred to our prisons, but we always stood out because our heads were not shaved as other prisoners’ were. He was sentenced to twenty years, I to life.
“I am so sorry.”
Dong Woo dropped his head.
“For what?”
“I didn’t do it right, the interrogation.”
“What’s the difference? One way or another, it’s either you or me, nothing else would be different.”
“We won’t be able to exchange letters ourselves. Let’s keep in touch through those outside.”
That was how we parted. For the next three or four years he did well, and he sent his regards a couple of times a year through our families, the only ones who could exchange letters with us. About five years later, I heard news about him from another prisoner of public order crimes who had been transferred from a southern province.
“Choi Dong Woo is in the hospital ward now.”
“Really? Why was he sent there?”
“My last prison has a tuberculosis ward and a psychiatric ward. He was sent there last year.”
“Are his symptoms serious?”
“That’s usually the case. They only transfer the worst cases. I heard he doesn’t recognize anyone.”
I remembered things I had seen in the prison I was in before, and I could easily guess his condition. I had been on the second floor, a special section for prisoners of public order crimes, and below me was the infirmary. The long corridor was divided into two by a partition; closer to the entrance were patients with normal illnesses, and inside, behind another set of iron bars, were mental patients. The mental patients’ cell was immediately beneath mine, and I knew their activities and movements very well. In the cells closer to the iron bars were the relatively benign patients, while more violent ones were housed in the innermost ones. There was a man, another lifer, who stayed in the cell right underneath mine for a long time. I had heard that he was from the notorious boot camp in Samchung, where gang members and other “menaces to society” were sent in the name of purification. He rebelled against the guards and injured some of them, and in return he was beaten just enough so that he would live and then be transferred to our prison. After he arrived, he suffered a psychotic episode while working in the prison factory and killed a fellow prisoner with a hammer. Even when he had those episodes, he continuously proclaimed his innocence and protested against his enemies. He would debate passionately, and he gave a speech every night. His screams at night were wretched. In the middle of the night, the whole building would be in commotion: other prisoners, awakened by his howling, screamed back at him to shut up so they could sleep, while guards shouted commands. I had permission to use the tiny courtyard, which faced south, as a little vegetable garden and as a place to dry my bedding. The mental patients’ windows looked out onto it, and their sewage tank was in the corner of that courtyard, so I ran into them from time to time. One day I was watering my lettuce when, out of the blue, someone began shouting behind my back. It was him, the guy from Samchung, making another speech, starting with “My dear fellow citizens.” He ended it by asking people to vote for him in the next parliamentary election; I do not know how he knew the name of the president at the time, but he named the president and shouted, “Down with the presidency!” In the beginning, the prison guards would get angry and try to stop him, but after a while they let him be. This sort of thing was actually uneventful compared to his more serious episodes. One time when he was edgy he remained quiet for a while, then collected his feces in a bowl and threw it at the chief guard during his regular inspection. Once in a while I saw him from the courtyard as he stared out the bathroom window. He was always looking far away and did not seem to notice me. He would stand there for a long time without moving. When he received meals, sometimes he ate them, but most of the time he threw them all over his cell and painted the walls with his feces. The prison assistants, who had to bathe him and clean his cell and clothes every three days, detested him. Every six months he was sent to another prison with a psychiatric ward, then he would come back a bit subdued. For three years he went back and forth, until one day he never returned. I once mentioned him to a prison guard, who snickered and mumbled, “I guess he left.”
“How? He was a lifer.”
“Therefore, he left because he died.”
I remember another guy, the one nicknamed Daddy Long Legs. He was in his early twenties, and he seemed perfectly normal at first. He knew my name and the charges against me, and he even asked me if I would lend him books. He was bony and tall like a basketball player, and whenever there was a prison championship, everyone said, What a shame, if only he had a clear mind, he would be the best player we had. Daddy Long Legs made scenes only when the warden or the prison board or someone high up came for an inspection. As they stood in line to take a look, he spat and swore.
“You assholes, am I a zoo animal? What are you looking at?”
Naturally, the important people would hurry up and leave, but his swearing trailed them into the corridor.
“You fucking asshole, you think you’re so important? All you have is a shitty cap on your head! You bastards, you browbeaters, you blackmailers!”
As he banged the door and got hopping mad, it took three or four prison guards to overpower him, tie him up with ropes and leather straps, and put a muzzle on his mouth. When they left his cell, utterly exhausted, he continued to kick the door with his foot.
Daddy Long Legs was also sent to the other prison every six months, and he gradually stopped talking. His cheeriness was replaced by silence, and his body grew even thinner. The youthful energy that had filled his eyes disappeared, and he began to look like a middle-aged man. One day I was watching the group of men from his section doing exercises and drying their bedding out in the courtyard, and I spoke to a guard in charge of the exercise.
“That guy, Daddy Long Legs, he’s changed a lot. He’s in such low spirits.”
“Isn’t he a gentleman now? Well, he’ll have to be. He has to change if he wants to survive when he leaves this place.”
“No, I mean he seems worse.”
“I heard he’s much better now. He doesn’t talk nonsense anymore, does he?”
I did not think he had gotten better. I thought he had gone to the other world, from which he could never return. Over a couple of years, after he had done three round trips, he turned to stone. He did not remember me. He finished his six-year sentence and disappeared.
For everyone, there is a line that should not be crossed. It does not matter whether you are inside or outside. During imprisonment, it went without saying that everyone would go through several crises: the first day after sentencing; facing your fourth year in solitary; going from your ninth to tenth year. When your wife leaves. When a family member, especially your mother, passes away. When your child is sick. When the guard you hate is put in charge of you. When you are punished unfairly. When you are handcuffed from behind and your feet are tied, when you have to eat like a dog in a dark windowless cell. At that moment, you cross the boundary from this side of life to the other. Unable to bear it, your spirit leaves the space around the body and creates a world of its own.
Dong Woo survived the first four years of imprisonment, but he lost it in his fifth year. Like others, he was sent to a psychiatric ward every six months, which only made him worse. I got word that when Dong Woo was released his older brother and mother took him to a house they had bought in the countryside. Chul Young remained trapped in the moment of the Kwangju Incident, and he still remembered the situation and the names of friends, but Dong Woo did not remember anything. I think I am going to go see him one day, even if all there is left of him is his aged face.
The tranquility in Kalmae had been shattered. The rainy season was over, the mosquitoes in the bamboo forest became fat, and everywhere things grew tired and dark green. Yoon Hee’s school was on vacation, so she no longer went there. We spent most of the time in our house, only going out when it was absolutely necessary. We did not want to be seen by anyone. But during that July there was something that Yoon Hee and I had to accomplish.
On the first day of vacation she was crouching in the kitchen, stretching a canvas. I was moving about in the room, pacing, then lying, then sitting, then reading, all without meaningful intention.
“Why are you making so much noise so early in the morning?” I asked Yoon Hee.
“I’m making my frame.”
She always referred to her canvas as her frame.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to paint.”
I did not probe further, as I normally would, but rather left her alone. Yoon Hee did not explain either; she simply stretched the canvas cloth over a wooden frame and nailed it. She studied it to make sure the cloth was taut. Afterward she turned to me.
“Can you help me?”
I thought she wanted me to lift something heavy or put the canvas somewhere high up, so I jumped up and went to the kitchen. Yoon Hee picked up a small chair and placed it in front of me.
“Sit there.”
Without knowing why, I perched on top of the chair. Yoon Hee came toward me. Without saying anything, she turned my body sideways toward the window, then turned my head toward her.
“What are you doing?” I asked, embarrassed.
“I want to paint you,” she replied calmly. “So that you can remain in that frame for a long time.”
I grinned.
“Well, that’s unnecessary . . .”
Yoon Hee glared at me with unforgiving eyes.
“Unnecessary?”
She began to squeeze oil paints onto her palette.
“Hyun Woo, you’ve already left this place. I want to keep you here in the painting.”
I knew she was not joking around, so I closed my mouth. Yoon Hee did not say much after that. She picked up her brush and began painting. I thought perhaps she was doing an outline, sometimes narrowing her eyes to gauge the light and shadow, but she never stopped moving her brush, continuously looking back and forth between the canvas and me. She did not stop when she spoke again.
“It shouldn’t take long. You’re not going anywhere until the summer vacation is over.”
I could not tell if she was talking about her painting or our life together. A little angry, I shot back, “I’m leaving this place before summer is over. I do not want to inconvenience anyone.”
Yoon Hee stopped painting.
“I can barely capture your shadow now. I cannot paint your face without looking at it, not yet. Maybe I won’t be able to finish painting you before the end of the summer.”
“Can I move?”
“As long as you keep the same basic posture, it’s okay. But your thoughts should remain in the same place.”
“What thoughts?”
She stopped painting again. This time, she held up the brush and narrowed her eyes, measuring the distance between us. I felt a little tired and powerless, but I stared back at her sharp gaze, poised on the tip of her brush.
“Just think about this place, nothing else,” Yoon Hee mumbled as she began painting again. There were times when she had sketched my likeness in her sketchbook with charcoals or crayons. She was not satisfied with any of the drawings. If you are an artist, I guess the most basic skill is to depict the likeness of a person as closely as possible. Some of her sketches did indeed look like me, capturing what I considered to be the distinctive features I saw in pictures or reflected in mirrors. But most of them looked a little different from me. At first, I pointed out the ones I thought were a faithful depiction of my likeness and told her that I liked them, but Yoon Hee felt the opposite. She said she did not like them for that very reason.
“A person’s face is not an object like a kettle or a glass or an apple. A face is an expression. It is a vessel projecting one’s heart. The artist should be able to see that. Moreover, we’re together all the time. Who knows?” Yoon Hee mumbled as she kept painting. “Maybe I’ll finish it after you’re gone.”
In an instant, I thought of the past few months, the peaceful days when nothing happened, yet much did, the clear recollection of the little things that happen in everyday life. I thought of the sense of spring’s arrival, and the deepening of that season as it enriched the land around us. I thought of the rain and the wind and the thunder, the sound of birds and water, the laundry and fishing spot we found, the pool and the fish and the smell of water plants.
“It’s like you’re pushing me away.” Yoon Hee kept moving her hand and then uttered in an indifferent voice, “I saw the newspaper.”
When we first began living in Kalmae, we had agreed that there was no reason to bring in the outside world. I listened to the radio news once in a while, but we decided not to subscribe to newspapers. Above all, we did not want someone to visit us regularly to deliver them. At first I felt a little uneasy, but soon I got used to it. Listening to the radio became a cumbersome and burdensome exercise, so I stopped that, too.
“I saw it at the school, purely by chance . . .”
I had to say something now.
“I saw it, too. When I went to the Chinese restaurant in the next village.”
“I thought you did. Why didn’t you say something to me?”
“Because you’d worry.”
Deliberately, I tried to sound cheerful and indifferent. Yoon Hee put her brush down and got up from her chair in front of the easel. Suddenly, she rushed at me, grabbing my head in both her hands and hugging it to her chest. Coming from her body I could smell turpentine, like pine trees.
“Is that why you said you’ll leave before the summer is over? Is that it? Tell me.”
I kept my head against her chest and waited quietly. Her lips traveled down through my hair to the crown of my head, to the temples, to my cheeks.
“When I read the newspaper, I had this premonition that if you leave this time I will not see you for a long, long time. Why summer? Stay through the snowy winter, think about it again when the new spring is here. I can quit my job, we can go deeper into the valley.”
“Everybody has been caught, so how much longer can I last? And they’ll leave the others alone only when I surface.”
“I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing if you have to go.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll find those still in hiding. I’ll fight against the military dictatorship.”
“You’re already doing that.”
“No . . . please, wait just a little more. You never know when things will change.”
From the day she began painting my portrait, Yoon Hee became quiet. Sometimes she asked me to go into the next village and get her green apples. Now that I think about it, she must have already been pregnant with Eun Gyul by that time. I was so foolish, I had no idea. She seemed so vulnerable and sensitive, yet, for my own convenience, I simply assumed that she was conflicted because of my dangerous situation and her desire to keep me there. I thought, Ah, this woman really wants me to stay. Until then, Yoon Hee was never weak. She fit into the stereotypical image of an artist, independent and self-centered, and she rarely showed her inner emotions. Looking back, Yoon Hee was pregnant with our baby. The reason she desperately argued for next spring was because that was when Eun Gyul was to be born.
I have been looking at the portrait of me that she left behind in Kalmae. At first it was only of me, but after a long time she added her self-portrait to the same canvas, as though she were looking at my youth from behind. There is dark shadow around my eyes, my cheeks are hollow and my face is thin, revealing the anguish of that time. The background is the dark red of dried blood. That must be the world surrounding me. On top of that dreadful red there are vertical stripes of cobalt blue, and that transparent blue somehow manages to make my gloomy and tired face still appear youthful. From mid-July to early August, while she painted the portrait, there were more hours of nervous silence than we had had in the preceding few months of languid comfort. But it was then that we realized how deep our relationship had become. We gazed at each other without speaking, and I discovered Yoon Hee’s mysterious smile. It was not a big smile, but a very faint one that was barely a smile at all, as if she was about to say something. Yes, now that I thought about it, she was not looking at me by herself, she was looking at me with our baby. There used to be a latticed window in the portrait, but it was gone now, and a little further back Yoon Hee emerged. She said she painted it before she became ill, so she must have done the self-portrait three or four years ago. Unlike the dark background I had to bear, hers was a thick coat of light gray paint, close to the color of a dove. Her brushstrokes appeared to be a lot rougher and more mature. Her high cheekbones, the little lines under her eyes and the gray in her hair, her cheeks painted with overlapping colors, together they betrayed her withering youth and her solitude. But her eyes were calm and collected, and there was that mysteriously tender smile. Here were a thirty-two-year-old man and a woman in her forties, depicted in different colors and distinctive tones, standing side by side and watching the world beyond the canvas. She was right behind me, not looking at what was right in front of her but staring at something far away, over my shoulder. Where was I looking, so nervous and pained? And where was she looking years later, with the hindsight of her age? Which way in the world were we going?
In our garden, asters and cosmos began to bloom. Yoon Hee’s school was about to start again. Our friends in Kwangju, those who had somehow survived and gone through humiliating trials, were released from prison on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the liberation, some pardoned, others paroled. Either way, they should have been grateful to be alive, but they also had to live the next decade with the guilt that came from owing their lives to others. Around that time, Yoon Hee was almost done with my portrait. It became all that was left of my youth.
Before the season changed, it was rainy and windy. During the rainy season of early summer, the atmosphere was filled with sticky, hot, humid air, but on a rainy day on the cusp of autumn, a gloomy chill filled the sky. Even the still green leaves left the violently shaking branches and floated away as if they had been kicked. The thunder in spring comes from far away, in summer it is impatient and close by, and in autumn, even thunder disappears from the low sky, as if the world is sinking.
I didn’t know why, but I didn’t feel good. I felt dizzy all the time, I had to take breaks when I climbed stairways. If I left the school building after being in there for a while, or if I stepped out of a shadow into the sunlight, the sky would turn from yellow to dark black. You know that I decided to take a leave of absence soon after school began. My health was one issue, but above all, I knew for sure by then that you would leave. The day I handed in my notice, I bought a fat chicken from the next village. It was a cute hen, its comb small and dainty like a flower and its feathers reddish brown with a light brown tail. I chose her from the chicken coop at a butcher’s stall in the market. As soon as I pointed her out, the female owner in a rubber apron took up a crude cast iron knife and adroitly turned around. It did not look like she was doing much, but in a few minutes she presented to me a naked piece of meat, whose wings and legs stuck out like branches on a bonsai tree. Like my mother used to, I bought a small bag of sweet rice, garlic, dried dates, and a handful of young ginseng roots. The truth was, I thought I would throw up if I even caught a scent of cooked chicken, but do you remember how poor our diet was that summer? All we had were greens we grew ourselves. Oh yes, I forgot, there were those stone morokos you caught. They were good. You told me how to cook them with seasoning and pepper paste and honey, how to combine them all in old soy sauce and braise them at low heat for a long time till the bones melted away. Whenever I stopped at the market on the way home, you acted like a little child, checking each bag to see what I had bought. Sometimes I bought sweet rice cakes with bean flakes, or wormwood cakes covered in sesame oil, and you would be so happy that you would hum a song while devouring them.
“Let’s make a chicken stew!”
When I said that, you pushed your stubbled face into the kitchen and said something silly.
“What are you trying to do, fatten me up?”
“Isn’t it too late for that? Tomorrow, I’ll make spicy beef soup.”
“What’s going on? Did you get a raise?”
“No, we didn’t eat properly during those dog days of summer, so I decided to cook everything over the next three days.”
I filled the cavity inside the chicken with ginseng roots and sweet rice, and I closed it up with white thread. When it began to boil, however, I began to feel queasy and I could not bear it. I did not want you to notice, so I shut my mouth and covered it with my hands and went outside. I vomited before I could find a place to squat down. It was not like there was anything left to come out, just liquid, but the nausea would not go away. I was worried and decided to go see a doctor. I had to be extra careful that you would not notice anything. I would have told you if we were going to be able to continue our life in Kalmae, if you were not suffering from the guilty feeling that you were the only one in a comfortable hideout. I knew what the two of us would have to face after sending you away. I thought about contacting my sister, but what was most important to me was for you to go through that process with no reservations. I was encouraged when those who had armed themselves, fought with weapons, and been fortunate enough to stay alive were pardoned on Liberation Day. I did not know that you were about to fall into a dark, bottomless pit. They were hostages freed to show the newly formed government’s mercy, but you and your friends were the new sacrifice made to justify a new wave of repressions to come.
“Hyun Woo, I’ve decided to take a leave of absence from school.”
You did not appear to be too concerned.
“Well, that’s good. Why don’t you start preparing for the national competition? You should concentrate on painting now.”
I remained cautious for the next few days, trying to control my emotions. And then the typhoon came, signaling the beginning of autumn. I did not want to look at the orange asters shaking under the cold rain as soon as they bloomed; instead I cut an armful and put them in a round clay jar that we used to store pepper paste. We stood on the porch together and watched the leaves blow away in the rain and wind. And I remember us sitting next to each other on a torn cardboard box in front of the fuel hole and building the fire. You start by placing a bunch of twigs in the fuel hole and lighting them. At first, the weak flame makes a crackling sound as it moves from one twig to the other, then, all of sudden, the whole bunch catches on fire. We put dry logs on the fire and watched as the resin still stuck to the log smoldered. Sometimes the twigs crackled and sparked, and a little piece of burnt wood landed on my bare foot. I would scream, and you would put your finger into your mouth and rub my foot with it.
“Saliva is the best cure for burns.”
“That’s disgusting.”
One night the fuel hole was glowing, touching our faces with warmth and light as darkness fell. I felt so relaxed and languid, I put my head on your back. Through your back, I heard the air moving in and out of your lungs, and your heartbeat. Silhouetted in the glimmering light, I saw your shaggy long hair sticking out and felt somehow helpless. I grabbed the back of your head where hair spread out like a sparrow’s tail and jiggled it.
“Look how long your hair is. You need a haircut.”
“Hey, that hurts.”
Remember how it rained all through the night as I cut your hair? I took off your shirt and made you sit on the floor covered with newspapers, draped a sheet around your shoulders and gave you a mirror to hold, so that you would not be too bored. I used to cut my friends’ hair, so I was pretty confident. All I needed was the double-sided blade that you used to shave, held between my thumb and index finger. I opened my left hand like a comb and raked it through your hair, and I held onto a handful as if to bite it with my hand, then sheared the ends lightly. When you use a blade instead of scissors, the tip is not cut off, but sliced at an angle, and it made your hair shine. It twinkled as you moved your head.
“Hmm, not bad, not bad at all,” you said, while looking at your own reflection in the mirror and shaking your head. “But why is it so shiny?”
“Because I used a blade. I think it looks good. It’s as if stars had showered down on your head.”
I was kneeling behind you and you were sitting on the floor holding the mirror. In it were our faces, mine hovering on top of yours. You looked into the mirror for a while without saying anything. Perhaps it was the same composition as that of our portrait I finished many years later. I wonder what you were looking at. Whenever someone gets a haircut, nice and neat, it means there is going to be a change in his everyday routine, in his appearance. You quietly put the mirror down and turned around to face the real me behind you.
“I’ll be leaving soon.”
My heart dropped. I thought I would say it first. I wanted to tell you to leave the two of us here, but hurry back.
“When?”
“Maybe the day after tomorrow or the following day.”
I raked your hair scattered on top of the newspaper with my hand. I collected it all, but there was barely a handful. Do you know what I did with it? Without thinking about it, I went out and opened up the tin shield of the fuel hole and threw it in, little by little, onto the red embers that remained. They burst into flame with a scent of burnt skin. I flicked off every tiny particle of your hair from my hand into the flame. Later I read in a book that soldiers, before going to the front line, cut their hair and nails, wrap them in a clean piece of paper, and leave them for their mothers or lovers. And what did I do? They say you burn the hair when you say goodbye to those who have already passed away.
The following evening, the western sky was the unlucky shade of dark gray. There was not a single line of color, it was dark as far as we could see. Meanwhile, the sky above us was red, as if draped with a piece of cloth, its color fading.
“I think it’s going to rain,” you said, looking at the sky from our porch. “The old farmers always said that it would rain when there was no sunset in the western sky.”
“No wonder, the red dragonflies were flying really low,” I said as I gathered the laundry hanging on the clothesline. The sun had not gone down completely when we sat down at our dinner table, but suddenly it became dark. I had to get up and turn on the light. A cool wind came like a rising tide, and the rain came down in large drops all over the courtyard and on the roof. It was not the noisy, driving summer rain, but the slowly escalating rain of the early autumn that falls continuously. From that night, the wind became stronger.
The bamboo forest outside was thrashing violently in the wind, and I lay there with my head on your arm, nervously listening to the gloomy sound of an approaching storm.
I imagined that by the ocean all the boats and ships were tied to the port, and there was a typhoon warning. No seagull dared to fly, and dark waves with white teeth charged up the shore endlessly, shattering into white droplets as they crashed into a wall. In the complete darkness, where we could not find one flicker of light, we were tied to a broken, listing raft, scared. The waves rose up like walls around us, as if they would devour us. At that moment, I saw far away a few specks of light, perhaps a big ship, perhaps a little village on the shore. I cut the rope that tied us. I let you go, the brave one, to swim there first.
The rain and wind continued all the next day. I took out and ironed your clothes, from underwear and socks to shirts and jackets and pants, and I folded them neatly and packed them in a bag. At first, you said you were going to leave in the afternoon, after lunch, but I did not say anything, and neither of us could walk out the door. Was it because it was still raining?
The wind had died down, but the rain poured on, and unlike other days when the twilight would last for a while, the darkness came in quickly.
“Why don’t you eat dinner before you go?”
I did not say that to make you stay one more day. You know that, don’t you? I cubed the new potatoes we pulled up from our garden, sliced the zucchinis and green peppers that had grown throughout the summer, and cooked them together in a broth with bean paste. I braised salty mackerel, one of our favorites, in a peppery sauce with radishes, accompanied by the sesame leaves pickled in bean paste that they sent from the main house and the young radish kimchi that I had made. You used to say that salty mackerel with young radish kimchi and hot rice in cold water accompany each other perfectly. I always presented mackerel with its flesh exposed, but you insisted on turning it over to showcase its skin and dark meat, saying that it looked more appetizing that way.
We ate together in good spirits, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Suddenly, the electricity went out; we lit two candles, but it took a while for our eyes to get used to the darkness. It was comforting to light the candles, just like it had been in the first days we came here, when we felt like we were so far away from everything. A little later, after I sent you away, I lay in the empty room, unable to fall asleep as the candles melted away.
“Would you please tell me where it is?”
Out of the blue, you used the respectful form of speech, as if we were strangers. Of course I understood that you were not doing it to distance yourself, you were just concerned that I would be too distraught before we parted.
“I once saw it stuck inside a book,” you continued.
“What are you looking for?”
“The passport photo.”
“I don’t like it, I look weird.”
You went through some books on the low desk and managed to find my passport photo, hidden in a book of poems either by Heine or Neruda.
“Here it is!”
I did not try to take it away from you, I let you have it. As soon as you put the photo in your wallet, you got up, as if the idea had just occurred to you at that moment. You picked up the bag I had packed. Powerless, I was going to follow you, but then I remembered to go to the kitchen and find a flashlight and an umbrella we could use together. I returned to the room to blow out the candles, and darkness enveloped us again. You held up the umbrella and walked in silence, and I held on to your arm, illuminating the path with the flashlight.
The raindrops felt cold on my bare feet, and I saw them clearly as they landed on that familiar pair of shoes of yours. The apple trees in the orchard stood there like dwarf monsters, their limbs shaking. At the bridge where Kalmae began, you embraced me with your free arm and kissed me. Both our lips were cold.
“It won’t take too long. I’ll come back soon.”
How presumptuous! You’d be back soon? Still, at that moment, a year or two later seemed not too far away. The last bus was approaching slowly, driving on the newly paved road along the stream. Suddenly, I decided to take my ring from my finger and give it to you. I did not say anything.
Before you climbed into the bus you turned around for a second to look at me, and I waved back to you meekly. The windows on the bus were too dark, and all I could see was black.