Festival for Three Thousand Women

by Richard Wiley

  In the interior of the province, Puyo was about four times Taechon’s size. It was a pretty town, and since spring weather had arrived with them, the day was fine. Trees were aflower with apple blossoms, pink and white against the base of a looming hill.

  The grandmother, who was in charge of the expedition, would have had them immediately work their way up to the top of the hill, to the spot where the festival was to take place, but Mr. Kwak and Bobby both wanted a chance to wander, to get a feel for the town before going up high. When they stopped the grandmother held her hands over her mouth to cough. As they stood there hundreds of people passed them, and the grandmother closed her fist and shook it. “If we wait, all the good picnic areas will be gone,” she said.

  But Mr. Kwak knew that there were bookstores in this town. “Perhaps,” said Mr. Kwak, “you could go now and we could catch up later.” He looked at the grandmother. “After all, you know the hill and have a better eye for the best spot.”

  The grandmother was pleased with the idea and snapped her hand firmly onto Bo Peep’s shoulder, ready to set off. “If you’re not up there before dark you won’t find us,” she warned. “And the opening festivities are the nicest.”

  Mr. Kwak gave Judo Lee his bundle and said they would not be long, that they only wanted a sense of the place so that when they looked down from above they’d have some feeling for where they had been. And as soon as the others left, he and Bobby turned down the alleys of the town.

  Puyo seemed slightly askew, not knowable in a glance as Taechon was. Whereas Taechon had two streets, Puyo had six, and the pavement laid on top of the dirt made walking a pleasure. Yet though the people in a hurry were all on the hill, Mr. Kwak walked fast, looking for a particular bookstore and saying they could move slowly once inside. There were always good finds in the bookstores of towns like Puyo, he said, but such a situation wouldn’t last forever. Established families were selling their books now because the society was turning modern, away from philosophical thought.

  They had to ask several times, but these interior paths weren’t nearly so crowded as the main street, and soon they were in an old store looking through stacks and stacks of well-kept books. The owner hurried from the back when they came in and then hurried off again to bring them tea.

  “You look there, I’ll look here,” said Mr. Kwak. “We’ll find books for me and books for your education as well.”

  Since most of the titles were written in Chinese, Bobby was pleased that Mr. Kwak thought him competent enough to look through a stack on his own. Mr. Kwak disappeared behind a shelf on the far side of the room and Bobby picked something off the first stack, the one closest to the door. There were five Chinese characters along the book’s binding, but though he knew them all individually, he couldn’t make them fit together to make sense. inside the book, though, was a page filled with English, and he found the following:

  No Man is an Iland, in tire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if the Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were, any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

  Though the rest of the book was in Korean it was Hemingway, not Donne, and Bobby tucked it under his arm. This really was a find. A book he knew well would help him read it well, giving him only the language to worry about and not the makeup of the book’s world.

  As Bobby’s eyes adjusted to the job of decoding the titles, he was surprised to find that fully half the books were foreign translations, stories of the ages written for the average Korean to read. There was The Magic Mountain, slimmer in Korean than it should have been, and there was poetry, Byron and Keats and Pound. And at the bottom of the stack were ten thin volumes of Shakespeare, play after play after play. Who, he wondered, could have done such work? What men, during these years of Korea’s movement away from itself, would have thought such a difficult task worthwhile?

  Mr. Kwak came out to see how Bobby was doing and he had his answer. These translators were the men of Mr. Kwak’s fraternity, his true brothers, gracing the peninsula like jewels, members of an age gone by.

  When the bookstore owner brought them their tea, they all sat together happily, the books they wanted balanced upon their knees. Besides the Hemingway, Bobby had found a book by Jack Kerouac and a copy of Great Expectations. And for his part Mr. Kwak had found philosophies of the West and East, a book of Zen Koans in German, Nietzsche in Chinese, and an extra-thick volume of Twain, placed on top as if to show that what America had produced was important too. The owner raved about the choices they had made. He’d read them all, he said, and could vouch not only for their content but for the quality of the paper and bindings as well. Though these books were old, they would never fall apart. Though the paper had yellowed, it would not crumble.

  When they stood to leave, the owner walked outside with them and pointed up toward the top of Puyo hill. “I will close my store before winter comes again,” he said. It was an odd comment, connected as it was to the festival forming above them, yet when Mr. Kwak and Bobby left, the bookstore owner stood sadly watching, hunching his shoulders in the spring breeze.

  They, on the other hand, were happy with their books, and when they got to the edge of the hill the spirit of the three thousand virgins was so much in the air that they stepped into the upward-moving crowd easily, walking quickly along. There were hundreds of people on the hill, hundreds more on the path before them. But though the path was generally wide, there were places on it that were so steep that Bobby could reach out and touch the ground before him without so much as bending down. They were climbing hard and high, sometimes pulling themselves up, and Bobby could feel the elevation in his lungs and wondered how the grandmother had fared.

  When they got to the top Bobby slumped to the ground, exhausted. Looking back the way they’d come, he could see other people lying on the path, too tired to move. And the grandmother had been right—the top of the hill was larger than it looked from below. There were families and groups everywhere, staking territory under every tree.

  “There is a spot in the middle that will be the center of all the festivities,” said Mr. Kwak. “Perhaps they have found a place near there.”

  Bobby got up and followed Mr. Kwak through the intertwining network of groups, but he found it difficult to walk. This wasn’t what he had expected. It was too crowded, too festive. There were even concession stands up here, and walking among the crowd were hawkers, guys with peanuts and liver tonic in baskets hanging from their necks.

  “Look,” said Mr. Kwak. “The dancers and the acrobats will appear here tonight.”

  Bobby had been looking down, but when Mr. Kwak took his arm he saw a large clearing with a podium at its center and various pieces of equipment stacked nearby. Policemen were there, keeping people away, but right at the clearing’s edge hundreds sat tentatively, waiting to press in once the show got started. Bobby had never before been in such a crowd. There were so many people that at times he feared he’d lose his balance, falling among them and upsetting their feasts.

  They had looked everywhere when a voice finally called to them.

  “Hey! I can’t believe! Over here!”

  Startled by hearing English, Bobby turned his head quickly and sure enough, it was Gloria, sitting on a large blanket right next to the grandmother and the Lees.

  “Gloria!” Bobby shouted. He was glad to see her and looked around for Gary Smith or Mr. Kim.

  “Small world, ain’t it?” said Gloria.

  The grandmother and Miss Lee were smiling, and Mr. Kwak was glad to take his son’s hand and sit down. Judo Lee was apparently so satisfied with everything that he had leaned against a tree and fallen asleep, and Miss Lee had opened a basket and was trying to make everyone eat. Once Bobby had introduced them all, Gloria took hold of his hand. “Gary Smith gone stat
eside,” she said. “Mr. Kim still driving his bad-looking cab. Puyo my hometown. Come back all ordinary-like for starting over.”

  Bobby wanted to take Gloria away somewhere, to watch her eyes shine out from under her Cleopatra haircut and to listen to her talk, but they were seated in the middle of twenty thousand people, on the top of a mountain, waiting for a festival to begin.

  When a hawker came by with makkoli the grandmother stopped him, making him wait while she counted out the money they had to spend on drink. “Give us seven,” she said, “and a couple of bottles of cola for the boy.”

  Considering the great numbers of people, the festival seemed pretty well organized. While the man gave them what they’d ordered, Bobby noticed a dozen other hawkers nearby. And since most of the Korean women were wearing their best gowns, the top of the hill was resplendent with color, drenched in reds and greens, brightness everywhere and the sound of silk moving against itself everywhere too. Only Gloria, among all the women, was out of costume. She wore tight jeans and a halter top, but appeared to be as much at home here as she had been in the Vil or on the farm.

  “Look,” said the grandmother. “They’re setting things up. I think the festival is finally about to begin.”

  It was late and though the hill was already packed, everyone knew that, come tomorrow, it would get a lot worse. Mr. Kwak and the Lees, for example, were the only teachers who’d taken the morning off, yet many of the others were coming over on the evening train. When the headmaster heard that Bobby wanted to attend the festival, he’d insisted that he go early, and now Bobby could see why. Soon, he feared, people might begin falling from the hill for real, pushed off its edges by the bulging crowd.

  But the grandmother was right. From the edges of the clearing in front of them, men had begun bringing out long boards and were setting up contraptions that looked like teeter-totters. Something was going to happen soon, and they all stood to see more clearly what it was.

  “The T’ang-dynasty troops won’t arrive until tomorrow,” said Mr. Kwak. “In the meantime the virgins are at play, dancing and jumping, free in the enjoyment of their innocence, the last moments of their maidenhood at hand.”

  The men who’d built the teeter-totters had lit six fires, and all of a sudden a dozen girls jumped up from the nearby blankets and ran into the clearing like athletes, their skirts bouncing as they waved to the crowd.

  “These are virgins having one last good time,” said Gloria. “For them morning is an unknown whore.”

  The crowd roared, but from what Bobby could tell, these virgins could outrun most troops, for they soon commenced to sprinting around the outside of the clearing, their long strides evident in their speed but invisible under their billowing gowns. And when they’d run past everyone three times, they suddenly paired off and jumped onto the teeter-totters, two-by-two, only standing up instead of sitting down like American virgins would have.

  The pairs of women must have been matched perfectly, for as they stood out on the ends of the boards, the teeter-totters came quickly to rest, stock still, with each girl standing about three feet off the ground.

  Bobby had thought that most of the people around them were spectators too, but he soon discovered that not only had they been sitting among the virgins but among the musicians as well, almost everybody near them a part of the show. Five old farmers from the blanket next to them suddenly sat up in some kind of formation and began playing instruments that Bobby hadn’t even noticed they’d had before. There were two different drums and an eight-foot-long gaiagum, and two men were playing reeds. And the music was so atonal and cacophonous that it locked everyone’s attention on the stillness and delicate balance of the girls on the teeter-totters, who were suddenly looking so forlorn.

  “Only true virgins can stand like that,” said Judo Lee.

  After the farmers’ band had screeched into the stillness for a while, it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and at that instant a slow kind of movement began among the girls. Though they appeared to be standing still they were bending their knees under their dresses and causing, ever so slightly, a dip and pull. Earthward and skyward they moved, and soon the whole hilltop began to sway, as if the earth itself could feel the T’ang troops on the march, a few hours away but unstoppable as the tide. The grandmother took Bobby’s arm, and when he looked at her he realized that it was in order to keep her balance that she did so. The girls teeter-tottered in unison, and slowly, from the movement started by the bending of their knees, a certain acceleration took place. When the ends of the teeter-totters first touched the ground, each opposite girl moved slightly skyward as the spring from her partner sent her off the end of the board. And when she came back down, her momentum sent her partner sailing up and a little away, still standing up.

  This event was something Bobby had seen depicted on calendars ever since his arrival so many months before, and it represented perfectly a carefree afternoon for virgins, though the shadow of the wolfish T’ang was at the door. And though the farmers’ band had been quiet during the acceleration, it started up again suddenly in a plaintive frenzy of sound that tore at the sky but sent the girls up higher into it at the same time.

  These six pairs of girls were jumping perfectly and no one was falling. Yet as the band played on, the distance between the bottom of the nearest girl’s feet and that stiff tongue of a teeter-totter grew until she was ten feet above the ground and then twelve, and then fifteen. It was miraculous, but they could all see, between the girl and the board she’d left, the dark blue sky and the mountains to the west and the curvature of the earth beyond the mountains. Yet no one fell. It was as if there was no limit to the height the girls could reach, as if they could avoid the T’ang simply by flying away, fleeing into the fantastic air.

  Bobby was stunned. What a perfect depiction of the human heart unafraid, of trust in friendship and in the assurity of things remaining as they are. The girls jumped and jumped, each face composed, no mark of emotion upon it. And when, in the end, the six on top flew off the boards as if heading for the moon the crowd went wild. They were like slow female rockets and their partners on the ground stood with arms raised after them, like family members saying good-bye.

  Whether the girls turned in the air or not Bobby didn’t know. Perhaps they did, but it seemed to him that they simply sailed off the ends of the teeter-totters and up into the darkness. And when they landed, unaided and alone, they were in a perfect line, like chorus girls coming from the sky, only their skirts puffing a little to break their fall.

  For Bobby this was the performance of a lifetime, and when he turned to his friends to say so, they all had tears in their eyes, even Gloria, for the way Korea had been, when such things were possible, before the Chinese invasion ruined everything thirteen hundred years before.

  It was so beautiful and sad that the crowd might have wept the whole night through had it not been for the farmers’ band, who, as soon as the performance was done, forced a change of mood on everyone by screeching out an alleycat’s version of a waltz. In a moment the grandmother and all the other old women were dancing nearby. Only the men sat now, uninvited to dance and brooding, in postures that foretold of how badly they’d fare come the morrow. God, it’s magnificent, Bobby thought. Gloria was Egyptian in their midst and Bobby really could imagine a world full of battles, with nothing decided by any other means.

  The dancing went on and on, but when the women finally tired and came back among them to rest, they smiled and took the arms of the men and let them pour more wine. And when they all settled back to sleep, a small fireworks show began in the clearing where the dancers had been. It wasn’t much really, only six rockets shot high up into the night sky. When they burst up there, everyone could see the colors of Korean gowns coming down, and then six parachutes, like little rag dolls of women, came floating back to earth. At first it appeared as though the parachutes would land in the circle where children were gathered, hoping to catch one and take it home. But a s
mall wind came up, and as if they were tied together, the wind took all six parachutes and blew them just past the edge of the hill where they sailed on down into the town.

  Everyone went to sleep then, fairly early, a whole hilltop full of people waiting. The sky was high above the clouds and though Gloria took Bobby’s hand, they lay as still as they could and listened, both of them imagining the steady motion, the rhythmic progress of marching feet.

  The Caldron

  The image: Thus the superior man consolidates his fate by making his position correct.

  The invasion started sometime just before dawn. Bobby had not slept well. Exhausted from the previous day’s climb, he could feel a new aching in his lungs, and the tossing and turning of the people on the hilltop had given him the feeling of sleeping among a sea of grazing cattle.

  But when he was awakened by the warning system set up the night before, the shouts of men stationed at the hilltop’s edge and the beginning moans of women, he came to his feet with as much energy as he could muster, ready for what this day would bring.

  “Aigo, the Chinese are coming!” said voices all around. The weather was perfect for an invasion.

  There were no clouds in the sky, yet since it was still spring the heat would start out easy, not deterring the invaders as they climbed the hill. Still, Bobby remembered the steepness of the climb and realized why those few Korean defenders of so long ago might have thought they had a chance.

  As soon as everyone was awake, an element of frantic abandonment ran through the crowd until someone summoned all the men, restoring order. Gloria, looking even more Egyptian in the virgin light, nudged Bobby. “That’s you, man,” she said. “Get a move on.” The gaiety and the eerie quality of the night before was gone now, replaced by the sure and frightening knowledge that death was close at hand. Even Bobby felt the urgency of it as they marched off to fight. “The ordinary hopes of all manner of men are put aside when there is war,” said Mr. Kwak.