by Bandi
Occupying pride of place at the top was the soldier’s honor medal, received for having driven his ammunitions wagon over a wooden bridge engulfed by flames; beneath that, the First Order of National Merit, for his work on the construction of the Haeju-Haseong railroad; beneath that, a Labor Medal and another Award of Merit, awarded, respectively, at the construction camp of the 2.8 Vinylon factory, a textile fiber launched in 1960, and the Seodusu power plant.
Reckoning it up by these medals, you could see that the main chunk of his life, around forty years out of fifty-six, had been spent either on the field of battle or at various construction sites. And it was precisely in those days of dust and lack that Yong-su had acquired his reputation as “Communism’s Swift Steed,” the revolutionary wagon driver whose brawny frame meant he even loaded his wagon himself rather than employ an assistant as the other drivers did. And yet, whatever the circumstances, he was always quickest to load and unload, swinging huge packs up onto his shoulders as easily as he lifted his opponents in the ring. All this meant his brow sparkled with sweat the whole year round, and the heels of his trainers would wear away within the space of ten days.
Such were Seol Yong-su’s medals, salted with his own sweat and blood, tempered in wind and rain. Today another medal, perhaps the last, had been added to this hoard, so how could he be expected to keep his thoughts from drifting away on the waves of memory?
Yong-su noisily blew out a stream of smoke, and Yeong-il finally managed to tear his gaze from the medals.
“You must have a lot on your mind, Uncle? Receiving your thirteenth medal, I mean.”
“That’s right. Before you arrived, I was just thinking about the true owner of these medals.”
“What are you talking about, true owner? They were each awarded to you for your unsparing devotion to this country!”
Yong-su was silent, visibly hesitating over whether or not to speak what was on his mind. After a while, he continued. “The true owner of these medals … is standing outside.”
“What? Outside?” Yeong-il blanched. “You don’t mean …”
“Why so startled? That’s right, I’m talking about that elm tree out there. That’s what’s had me on my feet my whole life, working myself to the bone! Every time I looked at it, it’s like I could see them come to life—all the promises they made me when I was a lad. All the wonderful things that were going to come true. It’s that elm that’s spurred me on to do the things they gave me these shiny medals for; and yet, in the end …”
“But this is exactly what my father said to me! The evening before he died, he gazed at the elm outside our window and said the same thing you’ve said to me. That was one thing, but hearing them again now …”
“Of course he did! That little brother of mine was another one who spent his life slaving away for the dazzling dream promised by that elm. He had ten medals all told, didn’t he? For his pains.”
“That’s right. The tenth was his last.”
“The tenth—ha!—and all thanks to that elm!” Yeong-il thought he spotted a way in, to broach the subject that their conversation had been circling around.
“So, Uncle, you’re saying that you’ve been thinking a lot about that elm this evening?”
“Why wouldn’t I have been? Ever since I first became a Party member, that elm has been my rock, a pillar propping me up. And isn’t it also what’s brought you here today?”
“Oh, no!” Yeong-il blustered, caught off guard by this turning of the tables. He’d only ever known his uncle as a simple soul; now it seemed he’d been hiding another man inside him, one who was shrewd and perceptive! In any case, it was lucky that Yong-su had been the one to mention the elm himself.
“All right, let’s have it,” Yong-su said, with an air of pulling down a veil. “You’ve come to ask me about that business the other day, haven’t you? Those military police goons who tried to cut down my tree.”
“I have,” Yeong-il admitted with an apologetic smile, grateful for his uncle’s understanding.
“Well, it’s as I thought. Do these men ever quit?”
“But what happened exactly?” Reassured, Yeong-il felt able to cut right to the heart of the matter. “Is it true what I’ve been told, that you waved an axe at them?”
“True, well, yes … and then again maybe not. Lightning always strikes some innocent toads, or so they say.”
“Toads? What … Uncle, now that we’ve got around to it, please let’s stick to what’s important. I need to hear your side of the story….”
“Well, and why not? I’ve nothing to fear, after all. The fact is that right before it all kicked off—yesterday lunchtime, that is—me and your aunt had been having a fair old bust-up.”
Yong-su fell silent, and Yeong-il began to roll himself a cigarette while he waited for his uncle to find the thread of his story. These days even the military police were having to tighten their belts, meaning Yeong-il too had been reduced to roll-ups.
“The reason we were arguing …” Yong-su went on. “Well, I’d just come home for lunch, and I knew I had to be quick, so I left my wagon outside, with Swift Steed still hitched up. I’d barely finished chewing when your aunt started clearing the table, bustling around telling me to get my quilted jacket on—she was already wearing hers. I was wondering what she had to do that was so urgent, when she noticed that I’d begun to roll myself a cigarette. And do you know what she said? ‘The winter sun sets swifter than a pea rolling off a monk’s head, and you want to smoke the day away?’ Come here!”
As he sat there listening to his uncle’s story, the smoke from Yeong-il’s cigarette quietly unspooled into the freezing air, and a space gradually formed between the two men.
“What? What are you saying?” Yong-su regarded his wife with suspicious puzzlement, and her own gaze instantly hardened.
“So you’re not going today either?” Only then did Yong-su recall the conversation they’d had the previous day. Damn it!
“I’ve already cut off the branches and stripped the bark,” his wife had said, “so there’s only the trunk left. But it’s too heavy for me to manage on my own. It’s not far, only in the Jeoldang valley, so can you come and fetch it with your wagon?”
This had come after she had acknowledged her worries about not having enough firewood, something she’d hitherto been keeping to herself. Yong-su had been coming home from work with nothing more than damp sawdust for fuel—and even that had been hard to come by; there was barely enough to fire the stove, never mind stoke the underfloor heating. Even steaming a cob of corn presented a challenge. This was no exaggeration. Recently, the number of factory workers arriving late to work had been increasing exponentially, and all for the same reason: because it was taking so long to cook even a small breakfast. If it hadn’t been for his wife, whose white hair had done nothing to slow her down, Yong-su too would have been swelling the ranks of those tardy arrivals.
Yong-su was well aware that she had been spending her days rummaging through ditches and the like in search of whatever might burn, though he hadn’t realized she’d recently been having to wander as far afield as the Jeoldang valley. If it hadn’t been for the situation at the factory, she never would have waited so long to ask for help, for she had more than enough to deal with just to keep the household going.
But Yong-su simply had no time. These days, every pair of hands the factory could muster was enslaved to the needs of the boiler. Sawdust was a pitiful substitute for coal, and the boiler raced through it like fire through dry tinder, constantly demanding to be fed again even when everything that could be used for transportation, even handcarts and packs on people’s backs, was employed to carry fuel to it. The broadcast car, which used to come out only at the beginning or end of the daily shift, and when things were particularly busy, was now harrying the workers nonstop, loudspeakers bellowing that if the boiler were to stop running, the steam pipes would inevitably freeze and burst, and then the whole system would be destroyed….
“It’s not as though I’ve not been worrying too, but I’ve had that broadcast car at my back the whole time. Don’t you know how serious things are at the factory? Let’s wait for a better opportunity.”
Yong-su had said this so earnestly, so pitifully, that his wife hadn’t had the heart to insist. The next day, the broadcast car had been back and forth shouting about the boiler right through the usual lunch hour, which was why Yong-su had just been shoveling some corn porridge down as quickly as possible, with Swift Steed still hitched to the wagon. However, it seemed his wife had mistaken the cause of this haste, thinking that he was planning to use the rest of the lunch break to drive out to the Jeoldang valley.
“How can you ask me to do this now, when you can hear the broadcast car just as well as I can?” Yong-su took a last drag on his cigarette, which he’d already smoked down to the nub, and stubbed it out in the ashtray. He gave an apologetic glance at his wife, who was still watching him with narrowed eyes. “I said we’d wait for a better opportunity—I didn’t promise I’d go today.”
“You don’t seem overly concerned,” she said in a choked voice.
“Just think for a moment. Right now, with everyone panicking, afraid that the factory boiler might explode, how could I save face if I went to fetch wood for my own home? People look up to me and my wagon, you know. And my elm …”
“For God’s sake, not that elm again! ‘My elm’ this, ‘my elm’ that, morning, noon, and night … Where are the so-called fruits of this elm, eh, that you’ve worn your life out on? Still on their way, are they? Soup with meat and pure white rice—”
“Stop flapping your tongue, woman. They’re awarding medals at the factory tomorrow; I’ll need to be able to hold my head up then, won’t I?”
“Another medal! What good is a medal to us? Will a medal keep us warm? Will a medal fill our stomachs? It’s just a useless chunk of iron; it’s a far cry from silk clothes and a tile-roofed house.”
“What? You bitch!” Yong-su thundered, snatching up the ashtray. It flew past his wife’s face, almost grazing her cheek, then smashed against the wall of the kitchen, exploding into a spray of fragments.
“I couldn’t understand what the hell had gotten into her, talking to me like that all of a sudden. I was furious, absolutely furious. The slightest thing would have tipped me over the edge. And just then, the military police showed up in their fancy uniforms.” Yong-su paused, seemingly struggling to repress the pent-up emotions that were flooding back again. “My wife had run out into the yard after I’d thrown the ashtray, and I heard the sound of her arguing with someone, so I went outside to see who it was. And what do you think I saw? The last thing I needed right then, I can tell you. My heart was already ready to burst, and now here was some more oil to pour on the flame: those goons trying to saw off one of my elm’s branches, and pushing my wife away when she tried to stop them!
“Well, as they say: For those who are a bit slow in the head, every slur cuts twice as deep. The axe was leaning against the wall of the stables, and I had it my hand before I knew what I was doing. The policemen just stood and stared while I bellowed at them: ‘Touch even a single twig on that tree and you’ll feel my axe. You and the tree both!’ I was that miserable…. The men all cleared out of there quick sharp; if they hadn’t, I don’t know what might have happened.”
After this speech of such unprecedented length, Yongsu clamped his mouth tight shut. Then, as though needing a drop of water to splash on his burning heart, he downed the dregs of alcohol still lurking in his cup.
Through eyes screwed up against the smoke from his third cigarette, Yeong-il was studying Yong-su attentively. On the one hand, Yong-su’s last remarks seemed a clear enough conclusion to his story. And yet, thanks perhaps to his line of work, Yeong-il could sense that Yong-su hadn’t said all he might have, that the words he’d ended with had others hidden inside. From the moment he’d entered Yong-su’s house, he’d felt as though he were engaged in some form of conversational hide-and-seek. As a supervisor, he was used to having people behave cagily toward him; he’d just never imagined Yong-su would be capable of such tricks.
Clearly he’d been wrong. But if he was to extricate Yongsu from Chae Gwang’s clutches, he needed all the information on the table. Most important of all was to clarify just what lay between the lines of Yong-su’s story.
First of all, there was Yong-su’s claim that he couldn’t understand how he’d ended up hurling an ashtray at his wife. Why not? Surely he ought to disclose that much at least? All he’d said was that he’d been unable to control his rage at her comparing his medals to mere scrap metal, instantly robbing his life of its meaning.
Next, there were those two curious phrases he’d uttered: “For those who are a bit slow in the head, every slur cuts twice as deep,” and “you and the tree both!” “A bit slow in the head”—that was a euphemism if ever he’d heard one, but what was behind it? And why would Yong-su have threatened to harm his precious elm? It wasn’t as though he’d needed to make a confession in the first place; Yeong-il certainly hadn’t been expecting it.
Now he saw it plain. A combination of recent events had led the scales to fall from Yong-su’s eyes, revealing the always postponed fruits of his labor—that pure white rice and tile-roofed house—to be nothing but an illusion, one that he hadn’t had the wits to see. He’d felt rage and sorrow, yes, but also shame at having been so easily placated, shame at the pride he had taken in useless lumps of metal; and so he’d wanted to punish himself, by striking at that which was most dear to him….
Yeong-il was genuinely stunned. He would never have dreamed that that simple phrase, “waving an axe,” could have had its roots in such enormous turmoil. And yet, even this was not as shocking as his own thoughts on the matter. Now that he had seen right through to the core of this man Seol Yong-su, a man who clearly believed himself to have been duped by socialism, how could he, an officer with a star on his shoulder, be regarding him with such equanimity?
Because of their intimate relationship? It seemed it wasn’t just that. If you looked into it closely, the truth of the matter was that, considering what Yong-su had bumped up against in his life, wasn’t it perfectly natural that he would in fact be jealous of Yeong-il and hold him in reproach!
Once Yeong-il’s thoughts had reached this point, the floodgates were opened, and his boundless sympathy for Yong-su brought an ache to his chest and a lump to his throat. Seol Yong-su! Was there any man more worthy of pity?
What suffering could compare with the disappointment and regret that Yong-su must have felt when he came to realize that the simple faith with which he’d once shouted “It’s—a—pro—mise” was founded on an illusion? He’d had to bear that acute sense of loss alone, with no one but himself to blame or reproach, the torment compounded by the lack of any outlet for it, the impossibility of allowing any outward expression. From that perspective, the axe-waving had been, not a threat of violence toward either the military police or the tree itself, but a cry of self-denunciation, the sound of a human being torn apart by contradictions.
Chae Gwang! You too ought to know the suffering of this man, a kindhearted man who has been cruelly deceived! That day will have to come, before too long.
Yeong-il stubbed out his cigarette. Yong-su, sensing a shift in his attitude, did the same.
The cold would not let up. The air inside the house was almost as bitter as outside, perhaps a sign of the impending turning of the year. The cold leached through the blanket they were sitting on, numbing Yeong-il’s flesh, and the cloud of his breath was beginning the resemble cigarette smoke. He stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“Now that I’ve seen how the situation stands, there are a few things I’ve got to do.”
“Very well …”
“But what are you going to do about the cold?”
“Good question. I feel like I’m sitting in a refrigerator, not a house.”
As Yong-su raised
his fist to his nose, clumsily brushing away the moisture that had gathered there, it seemed as if he had aged ten years in a moment. In the window’s upper corner, a spider’s web swayed gently in the draft, and the desiccated corpse of its maker rustled.
“Try burning a bit of the horses’ hay. Then you’ll be able to get some rest.”
“You’re right. I’ll give that a go.”
Yeong-il never imagined that this would be the last time he heard his uncle’s voice.
The next morning, Yeong-il received a phone call saying that Yong-su had had an accident, and ran straight over to his house. More than the stiff limbs and shuttered eyes of his uncle, who must have died the night before, alone in the empty house, what startled Yeong-il was the body of the elm, lying splayed out in the center of the yard, having been hacked in two near the base of its trunk. The repeated blows had been delivered with such force, such frenzy, that there were tiny white chips of wood speckling even the stable roof. Stepping through the side door into the crowded kitchen, Yeong-il saw a block of elm wood burning in the fireplace, making a sound like the snickering of false laughter.
The coroner diagnosed the cause of death as a heart attack.
29th December, 1993
So Near, Yet So Far
