by Chaim Potok
“What do they do in the dreams?” asked the carpenter.
“They speak to me but I cannot hear them or speak to them.”
The carpenter shook his head and sighed. He tugged at his beard. Grains of rice fell onto his white shirt.
“Then you must go,” he said.
The woman moaned softly. Give and take away. Cruel heartless spirits. The old man sagged. Fear descended upon him. The power gone. The world flat and empty. Dread of brutish demons.
“Do you know how to travel to your village?” asked the carpenter. A timbre of gentleness had entered his whispery words. “No? You will tell me when you are ready to leave and I will show you the safest way.”
He rose unsteadily to his feet and the old man went with him outside.
“It will hurt me to see you leave,” said the woman. A hole opening inside her. Cold and frightful darkness.
The old man returned. They sat together awhile on the matted floor in silence.
Two days later the boy left the village, carrying a packet of rice balls and a rolled-up quilt the woman had given him. He walked through the fields and paddies and turned onto the main road and followed it to the tall stone-and-steel bridge over the river. Flanked by muddy pebbled banks, the river ran dark and fast between tall hills. The original side spans were intact but the center had been destroyed and was now of planks that rumbled ominously as jeeps and trucks passed over them. A thin waist-high pipe railing lined the single narrow walkway. He held tightly to the railing and felt a chill weakness in his legs looking down at the water foaming around the bridge piers far below.
On the other side of the bridge the road descended steeply to the floor of the river valley and ran parallel to the riverbank. He passed men coming down from the hills carrying A-frames loaded with brushwood. No one took notice of him.
Months before, on the flight from his village, he had forded the river farther north but the carpenter had warned him the river was treacherous now for the melting snow. By noon he was sweating and he stopped in the thin shade of a new-leafed tree and ate one of the rice balls. The woman’s eyes dark and moist as she handed me the packet and the quilt. Same quilt we used in the cave and later, but much cleaner now, she said, her mouth in a sad smile. The old man silent and sullen. Angry if I stay, angry if I leave. A strange old man.
Aircraft flew by overhead. Swift silvery aircraft very high; small fragile olive-colored aircraft; aircraft with whirling shadows on top and no wings. Machines on the ground and machines in the air. The foreigners seemed to have an endless number of machines. Do the machines have spirits? Do the foreigners live this way in their own land, machines everywhere?
In the early afternoon he passed a small house on the side of the road and saw three young women lounging near the open doorway and an empty jeep parked nearby. The women wore skirts and one was naked from the waist up. The boy, going by quickly, saw the light-brown rounded flesh and the darker circles with the nipples and felt his heart racing and a turbulent heat on his face and a strange gnawing in his groin. He passed directly in front of the house and none of the women even looked at him.
Later he turned away from the river onto a narrow path that climbed into the hills. Toward evening he found a small glade and spread the quilt and gathered brushwood and made a fire. He sat by the fire and ate another of the rice balls. After a while he fell asleep on the ground with the quilt wrapped around him and woke shivering during the night and heaped more wood on the embers and slept again until the sun woke him to the stillness of the early morning. He woke thinking he had heard his mother calling him and Badooki barking somewhere among the trees. He washed his face in the cold waters of a rocky stream and continued on along the path.
From time to time he caught a glimpse through the trees of the river shining in the sunlight. Keep the river in sight, the carpenter had said, and on your right. A wise kind old man. At night often drunk and loud. How did he learn so much?
He crossed a long meadow and came to a forest, where the path abruptly ended. A wall of trees. Oaks and larches and elms and pines. An open ceiling of branches and needles and cones and young leaves. The smell of cool moist shade. Soft damp floor of moldy leaves underfoot. Tall trees, gnarled spreading roots, fallen rotting hollow trunks, the scuffing sounds of his footsteps in the leaves.
He kept his bearings by carefully watching the trees. Find a tall tree far ahead, the carpenter had said, and walk to it and then find another tall tree. Watch where moss grows on some trees, it grows facing north. When you come to the end of the forest, turn right and follow the tree line. Soon you will see the pond you describe. Whispery voice. Like wind through a tube. Grandfather’s voice nasal, deep. Mother’s voice soft and sweet. Father’s voice high. There, over there, a flood of sunlight and the end of the forest. Grassy hill running downward. Field mice in the grass and yes the willows and the pond, there, the pond.
Voices.
The pond, lying at the far edge of the broad meadow that bordered the forest, was separated from the village by a row of willows. Men and women along its rim, strangers; and shanties side by side. Stagnant yellow-green scum on the water eerily bubbling along the edge. A stench came from the pond, thick and suffocating, and the boy felt it seize his throat.
No one had seen him emerge from the forest. No one paid any attention to him as he walked slowly past the pond into the village.
Shanties one next to another on blackened earth still clotted with ashes. The ground mucky with urine and clogged with firepits. A babble-voiced hum from squatting men and women. Half-naked children waddling about. Boys about his age gathered in small groups, talking. Girls playing the rope-skipping game in the swirling dirt. The air thick with the stench of filth. He walked back and forth, dazed. Where was his house? Where was the courtyard where his mother and the maids had cut vegetables and mended clothes and his sisters and brothers played? Where was the next-door house of fat Choo Kun? Here and there the remnants of a house as part of a shanty: charred roof tiles and foundation stones; a splintered plank of red pine; a blackened roof beam. Is this my village? Did I take a wrong turn? But the forest is there and the pond. And the meadow. My gang of friends building bonfires in the meadow on the fifteenth day of the New Year. And and kite-flying in the spring and summer. And bathing in the pond under the autumn moon to keep away illness for the year. And and sitting on the bank and singing. And Badooki Three Four Two Three coming out of the water after a swim and shaking himself. And and and …
He walked frantically back and forth among the shanties, seeking a familiar face. People stared at him indifferently.
Outside the village he searched for graves along the slopes of the hills. Shell craters marked the earth and many mounds had been flattened. He could not find the graves of his ancestors.
He walked back to the pond. An old man stood urinating into the water, his phallus a wrinkled brown fat worm in the sunlight. In the forest the boy searched for the glade where he had once camped with his brothers and Badooki when the deluge had knocked down their tent of quilts. He could not find it.
He went on through the forest, first walking quickly and then at a run, and emerged at dusk and slept that night not far from the house of the young women on the riverbank. In the late morning he crossed the bridge and by noon he was back in the village of the old man and the woman.
The old man was working in the paddies when the boy appeared over the crest of the low hill near the village. Startled, he leaned on his shovel and squinted into the sunlight. The boy, his eyes fixed on the ground, did not see the old man. So soon back. And with a weight on his shoulders. The spirits of his village were uncaring and cruel. The boy’s power will be used now only for us. Yet it was not triumph or exultation the old man felt on seeing the boy but a sorrowing pain he had never experienced before. He could not understand why he should feel that way and it troubled him.
In the house the woman lay in her room with an illness that had come upon her the day the boy le
ft: a weakness of the arms and legs and a murmurous beating of her heart. She heard the boy’s footsteps in the courtyard and then in the main room and rose quickly and greeted him. She brought him warm water and in the courtyard he washed away the grime of the journey and then in the main room he ate a bowl of hot rice soup and lay down to sleep. She squatted near him, murmuring to herself and making horizontal and vertical motions with her arm.
The next day the boy spoke briefly with the carpenter and the following week he went to work for the Americans.
8
The morning the boy left the village and walked along the dusty main road and entered the American compound for the first time the old man and the woman left their house and walked to their rice paddy and the woman with the old man watching slipped over her shoulders the harness of the plow. They began to harrow the field.
The plow was of wood and rope save for the curved iron blade and the woman pulled against the straps of the harness as the old man guided the plow with his hands on the shaft and the boy walked fearfully into one of the long buildings on the compound accompanied by a Korean soldier who brought him through narrow corridors to a small dimly lit room and told him to remove his jacket and shirt. The Korean soldier went behind a screen and the boy heard his voice. A tall American stepped out together with the Korean soldier and said something and the Korean soldier told the boy to stand in front of the machine that looked like a window.
The Korean soldier was a short thin man in his early twenties who wore an American uniform with foreign words on the shirt. He spoke commandingly to the boy. “Do not show the foreigner that you are afraid. This machine will look inside you to see if you have the lung sickness. If you have the lung sickness you cannot work for the foreigners. He is asking you to take a deep breath. No, no, breathe in, and do not breathe out until I tell you.” The machine hummed and whirred. “Now you can breathe out. If they see shadows it means you have the sickness. That scar on your chest, where did you get it? Ah, you are lucky to be alive. Put on your shirt and wait here. If you do not have the sickness I will take you to your work. A nice jacket. Good cut of cloth. The carpenter said you are not of their village. Where were you born? Ah, sorry to hear. No one left? Barbarians. Listen, I’ll give you a piece of advice, don’t wear that jacket here, someone will steal it.”
The boy waited in the dim room. Small. Make myself small.
The old woman pulled at the plow. A sudden sharp point of pain at the back of her head. She paused to run her hands over her sweating face and take deep breaths. A hawk circled high overhead, sailing slowly on currents of rising air. The warm spring sun and the paddy water nearly to her calves and the cool liquid mud between her toes. The rice seedlings will arrive too late from the authorities and perhaps there will be famine after the summer but the man said the power of the good spirits will help us. Now pain in my breasts, what is there in these dried-out sacks that can cause pain? The baby’s fingers clutching, the lips suckling. Little mewling gurgling sounds. Good so good his tiny lips on my nipples and his little fingers touching and tickling the flesh. Here for a moment and suddenly gone. The man calls to me to go on.
An American in a white coat emerged from behind the screen and spoke briefly to the Korean soldier, who nodded deferentially. The American looked at the sores on the boy’s face and wrote something on a piece of paper which he handed to the soldier.
The boy went with the soldier to another room, where an American behind an open window took the slip of paper and handed the soldier a small tube which he gave to the boy.
“Twice a day, morning and night, rub a little of this there and there on your face,” the Korean soldier said. “It is the medicine of the foreigners to heal your face.”
The woman and the old man had plowed nearly half the paddy by the time the Korean soldier and the boy left the long low building and started across the compound. Bare scraped brown earth, low brown buildings and tents, and a white building with a cross-topped tower at one end and rows of small canvas houses with curved roofs, and many jeeps and big trucks, and smaller trucks with big red crosses on them like the one the woman had said was driven by the Korean soldier who threw her the packet of medicine. Is he still alive, that soldier? Perhaps one should make an offering to his wandering ghost in case he is not alive. I will ask the woman.
The boy found himself being taken back to the entrance of the compound.
“Have I the lung sickness?” he asked, terrified. Once he had overheard his mother and father talking about a young uncle, a poet-scholar, who had died of the lung sickness.
“You do not have the shadows but you cannot work here until the sores on your face are gone. Come back in four or five days. Do you have the money?”
“Money? No. I have no money.”
The soldier looked surprised and annoyed. “Four or five days. If the sores are not better you cannot work for the foreigners.”
He walked away, leaving the boy alone just inside the entrance to the compound.
A cloud of yellow dust billowed up from the wide road. The helmeted soldier in the entrance guardpost looked at the boy.
The boy started down the road to the path that led across the fields and paddies to the village. Cresting the small hill that overlooked the paddies and the village, he saw the woman working harnessed to the plow. She moved slowly, bent forward, straining against the straps, while the old man guided the iron point of the plow beneath the water of the paddy. The boy went quickly down the crest and left his shoes at the edge of the paddy and felt the pondlike water and mud on his legs. Without a word he removed the harness from the woman and slipped it over his shoulders.
Behind him the old man loudly hissed his displeasure. “Scholars and poets do not work in the fields. Do you know what to do?”
“Will you teach me?”
“Today is not a time for me to teach you this. Give it back to the woman.”
She reached out her small hands to the boy for the harness. Sweat bathed her face and he heard her panting breaths. His chest constricted.
“With respect, teach me.”
The old man was in a sudden flaring rage. “You must obey me! How were you raised? A boy should know his place! I say to you, give it back!”
Cringing before the old man’s anger, the boy handed the harness to the woman and retrieved his shoes and returned to the house. In my village I never saw this. An old woman pulling a plow.
Later that day he saw the woman squatting together with other women at the side of the stream behind the village, washing clothes and chatting. The war and the Chinese and the flight from the village. Where did they find the boy? The ditch the riverbank the sea the cave the mountain the plain. The fish the dog. She said nothing of the mounds and the black smoke and the smell. Talking, they beat the dirt from the clothes, pounding them with paddles on the flat rocks. The woman wrung the streamwater from the clothes and piled them still twisted in a bundle which she placed on her head and then returned to the house.
At night she made a supper of rice soup and kimchi and sat eating with the old man and the boy.
The old man wanted to know if the boy would be able to bring food from the foreigners and the boy told him and the woman about the window machine and the medicine for the sores on his face.
The old man puffed on his long-stemmed pipe. “I am a farmer, not a scholar.” He sounded weary and vexed. “Tell me again what this machine does.”
The boy tried to explain.
The old man was astounded. “This machine sees inside the body? The heart, the liver, the lungs?”
Frightened, the woman asked, “Does it see the spirits?”
“The soldier who was with me said it sees only lights and shadows.”
“It cannot see the spirits,” said the woman. “If the spirits could be seen they would be like us.” She could barely keep her eyes open. Am I sick?
“We saw the spirits of the cave,” said the boy.
“They appeared as winged
mice only to our eyes,” said the woman. “Can we ever know what the spirits really look like?”
“This talk doesn’t interest me,” said the old man. “It is the talk of women.” He turned to the boy. “You must try to bring us food. Especially meat.”
“I cannot return for four or five days.”
“When you return you must bring us meat,” the old man said. He sucked on the pipe and emitted a cloud of smoke.
The woman removed the bowls and went into the kitchen.
The boy used the medicine, a white salve, each morning and night, rubbing it lightly into the sores. Mornings and afternoons he often stood looking across the courtyard at girls playing nearby on swings and the village farmers in their fields and the old man and the woman working bent over and seeding the rice paddy and then plowing the second field and seeding it for millet. There were many birds in the fields and trees and he listened to their singing. Often huge dark birds circled overhead. Hawks.
On the night of the third day the carpenter looked at the boy’s face and told him the sores were nearly healed. He was to use the medicine two more days and then return to the American compound. He had forgotten, he said, to tell the boy that if the Korean soldier asked him for money he was to say he would give it to him from his first wages.
“It is your gift to him for finding you this work,” said the carpenter. “He will take only what is due him and no more.”
“Remember to bring back meat,” the old man said to the boy.
“Where do you think he will obtain meat?” asked the carpenter. “You think the foreigners give away meat?”
The boy woke that night thinking he had heard through sleep the sounds of weapons firing along the edge of the village. He lay awake trembling but all he could hear in the humid darkness was the breathing of the old man and the scurrying of mice across the floor.
Two days later the Korean soldier brought the boy again to the long low building and the American in the white coat looked at his face and wrote something on a piece of white paper which he gave to the soldier. The soldier took the boy across the compound to another long low building and as they entered the building the old woman, who was laundering clothes at the stream behind the village, felt a bubble of dizziness burst inside her head. She sat back on a flat rock and closed her eyes and envisaged the house burning and looked in terror over her shoulder. The house stood intact and tranquil. What was that? A vision sent by a fiendish spirit? Mother would tell me to quickly cook and eat some medicinal rice. But where can I find sugar now or honey or plums? She waited until the bad moment passed and the strange racing of her heart slowed and then went on with her laundering. When she was done she pulled the sleeves of her blouse over her reddened arms and wiped her hands and returned to the house carrying the laundry in a bundle on her head.
