Lost Souls

by Hwang Sunwon

  By now the elderly realtor was a sodden, perspiring mess; his eyes were bloodshot.

  Shouldn’t I be buying the fixings for seaweed soup for my wife? Hyŏnse felt an urge to come clean with the elderly realtor about the house purchase. But the next moment he realized it wasn’t the right time, and more important, he didn’t have the energy. Hyŏnse started to walk off, but the realtor called to him, his tone urgent.

  “Wait, sir, I’ll tell you what, let’s just talk about the commission. Usually it’s one percent, so if you’re giving me a thousand wŏn, that would mean the purchase price is a hundred thousand—but it’s more than that. You can do this,” said the realtor, gesturing as if to return the bank draft to Hyŏnse.

  Hyŏnse recalled Tugap’s characterization of the realtor as a leech and his admonition that sometimes you simply had to say no. But the more important consideration now was that he didn’t have the energy to stand there and keep talking, so he walked off.

  The realtor must have thought that if he returned the bank draft, Hyŏnse would take it and walk away. And so he bowed over and over and pleaded, “Please consider it some more, sir, and do the right thing. Take care, now.”

  The clouds had lifted noticeably. Now it wasn’t just Hyŏnse’s tottering legs making him feel off balance; in addition, everything looked hazy to the eye. It helped a little if he squinted, but when he did this, a sandy, stinging sensation came to his already sunken eyes and tears welled up.

  One man’s death is another man’s cold. No longer did Hyŏnse recall this proverb. His only thought was that he had to drop by the tearoom and give Tugap the receipt for the balance of the purchase price, sell the suit at the South Gate markets and buy the potatoes at the East Gate markets, and hurry back to his family. The street seemed never-ending. Which made his legs feel all the weaker and heavier. His bundle felt ever so bulky. What if someone gave him a sack of potatoes that he could barely sling over his shoulder? Well, he would carry it home if it killed him. This thought took the starch out of him.

  By the time he entered the tearoom at Chin’gogae his vision was so dark and hazy he couldn’t tell what was what. Hyŏnse could only vaguely make out Tugap, seated across from someone else, raising the familiar fan in greeting, before he plopped himself down in the first available chair. Tugap came over to him.

  “Damn hot, isn’t it? God job!” Tugap fanned Hyŏnse with the yin-yang fan, then turned toward the serving counter and barked out, “Two ice coffees!”

  Hyŏnse was desperate to slake his thirst, whether with milk or something else. As soon as the ice coffee arrived, he gulped the entire drink.

  “You look really hot—why don’t you finish mine too?” said Tugap as he pushed his coffee toward Hyŏnse. “You brought the receipt?”

  Hyŏnse realized he had forgotten to hand it to Tugap. Why am I so forgetful today? Once again he felt how exhausted he was, physically and mentally. He quickly finished Tugap’s coffee, and was thinking that before he left he should tell Tugap it would be good if he and his family could move the following day.

  “By the way, I’m kind of sorry to say this,” began Tugap.

  A chill came over Hyŏnse.

  “But the thing is, something’s come up and the owner needs all the rooms.”

  Hyŏnse felt his heart drop.

  Tugap produced a wad of ten-wŏn bills from his back pocket and set it on the table in front of Hyŏnse. “This is the owner’s way of saying he’s sorry. It’s really too bad. I try to do something nice and instead I cause you resentment.” He gave Hyŏnse a deliberate look. “I can’t believe it—at first he tried to get away with a measly five hundred. I had to yell at him—’Do you think my friend put on that stupid clown act just for this? Five hundred wŏn might seem like a lot to you, but my friend, even though he’s a war refugee, would rather get by on his own than take a measly handout like this.’ And so he came up with another five hundred. I tell you, these Seoul skinflints. . . .”

  Tugap sounded and looked indignant. Hyŏnse for his part felt something square in the middle of his chest, a vicious anger, but directed at no one in particular, like a viper rearing its head.

  “Even though money’s lost its value these days, a thousand wŏn is nothing to sneeze at. And I’ll see what I can do about a room for you—once I roll up my sleeves and get to work, no problem. I’ll make it my responsibility. Whatever you do, don’t be upset over that house—it’s probably just as well. It’s too far from downtown, and besides, the money the owner brings in nowadays, any food supplies he wants he can have delivered—you wouldn’t want to live in the same house with someone like that. So I’m going to find you a nice room.”

  Hyŏnse now realized that the target of his vicious anger was none other than Tugap. The old-fashioned P’yŏngan Province way would be to punch this guy in his prominent nose. But that impulse was only the anger of a dying little snake.

  Tugap leaned toward Hyŏnse, held out the wad of bills, and fanned them, saying, “There’s a lot of fake number-two series ten-wŏn bills going around, but you won’t find a single number-two series in here.” His toadlike mouth reeked of grilled beef, soju, and garlic.

  Hyŏnse could no longer stand the smell; he had to get away. And before he knew it he was out the door, money in hand, the distant ring of Tugap’s voice saying they should be sure to get together and Hyŏnse knew where to find him.

  Just like a toad, a warty toad that crawled out from under a rock. . . . People don’t die from scabies, right? They die from poison ivy. . . . Was it the egg white? Or maybe it wasn’t poison ivy in the first place. Whatever the reason, his wife had gotten better. But what was he going to tell her about the house? . . . That toad, that warty toad, the only difference between that guy and a toad is that it’s beef, soju, and garlic that go into his yap, not flies. . . . It’s not right that a man with an empty stomach should have to put up with the stink that comes out of that damn toad mouth.

  There flashed through his mind the thread of a folktale he had heard from the elders when he was a boy. There was a girl with a pet toad, and one day a serpent appeared, intending to take the girl away. The toad breathed its poisonous vapor at the serpent, which fell from the ceiling and died. But in the process the toad died as well—its poisonous vapor was that powerful. And so it wasn’t surprising that the toad’s breath had chased him out of the tearoom. It could easily have killed him, tiny little snake that he was, and barely hanging on to life. . . . And that sick old Snake Neck lady too. I wonder what happened to them. Poor old Snake Neck. . . .

  Hyŏnse was struck by an image of Tugap stretched out comfortably in the room once occupied by sick old Snake Neck. The toad in the folktale had lived in the kitchen. . . . Hyŏnse imagined Tugap with his toad mouth staring down in his direction and breathing out that peculiar stink that a hungry person like Hyŏnse couldn’t endure. Puff puff.

  Before he knew it, Hyŏnse’s field of vision grew dark, even though the skies above had cleared. He was overcome with a dizziness he had never experienced before, even the time he had stood high on the roof of a building. He felt a numbness in his ears, but a voice managed to penetrate. Please, vacate this house, my brothers and sisters, now that the rainy season has passed. Have sympathy for this old man who is the same blood as you, this old man whose dreams are troubled, who cannot sleep at night on account of you, my brothers and sisters; have sympathy for me and vacate this house with all due haste. A toad with a leather-bound Bible in hand, speaking in a dignified tone that brooked no opposition. Hyŏnse felt like collapsing. He closed his eyes tight and clenched the wad of money and his bundle, as if by doing so he could keep himself upright. And from square in the middle of his chest he heard a cry: I have to stay alive! I have to stay alive!

  July 1946

  HOUSE

  The rumors swept Sŏdanggol overnight: Maktong’s father had gone to the upper village to buy an ox and had gotten mixed up in gambling again. And this time he had sold his family’s home, their old,
run-down thatched-roof house. It surprised no one that the buyer was said to be the new landlord, Chŏn P’ilsu. One of the local elders, Song Saengwŏn, said he had seen Maktong’s father come back home the previous evening—that’s when he must have sold off the house. All the villagers who heard this assumed that Maktong’s father had sold cheap—if you were a buyer, would you offer a fair price to someone who was desperate to get back to the gambling table? And they assumed that even the proceeds from the house had ultimately been blown. After all, Maktong’s father’s opponent, a gambler from other parts, was said to know every trick in the book. But according to a second rumor, Maktong’s father was cleaning out this man using the money from the house sale. At the same time, it was reported that at Maktong’s family’s home, when the grandfather heard that his son had sold the house he had lamented, “We’re wiped out,” pounding the ground in frustration, and had said that if he caught sight of his son he would cut his throat with the sickle, whose blade he had sharpened to a fine edge.

  True to the rumors in Sŏdanggol, Maktong’s father had indeed used all the money for the ox to gamble, had lost that money, and had proceeded to sell off the family’s house plot along with the vegetable plot. And the buyer, the man newly arrived in the village, who the previous April had purchased Min Ch’angho’s paddy and dry fields together, was Chŏn P’ilsu. But in one particular the rumors were wrong: although the land had in fact changed hands, the dilapidated house had not. And contrary to the villagers’ supposition, the purchase price was fair, consistent with the current market. In this respect Chŏn’s sense of propriety was different from that of the average person.

  Chŏn P’ilsu had been different from the day he arrived in Sŏdanggol to purchase Min Ch’angho’s house and his paddy and dry fields, at a time when news of the land reform in the northern sector of the peninsula was making the rounds. More than others, Chŏn had long harbored a passion for owning farmland. Witnessing from an early age the hardships and hunger of his father and grandfather slaving away on their measly tenant plot, he had always kept in mind the thought that someday, somehow, he would have himself a healthy amount of farmland. He had operated a small secondhand shop in Seoul, but with Liberation in August 1945 he had skillfully brokered items belonging to the Japanese, and his thoughts had immediately returned to land. With farmland he could expect over time to receive 30 percent of the crop from his tenants, and even if land reform were to come about here in the south, it wouldn’t be like the land reform in the north, which involved confiscation without compensation. And so he decided he would buy farmland at rock-bottom prices. At this time he happened to hear from a broker about the plots belonging to Min and his family. Chŏn had only recently gone down to the countryside from Seoul to look into the land situation. There in Sŏdanggol he had met Song Saengwŏn, who had told him that Min and his family had been run out of town shortly after Liberation and had moved to Seoul, and that Min had declared he would never again come face to face with the ignorant, ingrate farmers who had driven him off. Here we go, Chŏn had said to himself. A disadvantaged seller would sell, and he could buy, for a rock-bottom price. And in succeeding to the position of a landlord who had been run out of town, he could win the hearts of the local people just by doing a little bit of good. Buy, Chŏn told himself. Drive down the price and buy.

  In this way Chŏn had acquired Min’s land for a rock-bottom price. And from the day he settled in Sŏdanggol, he had continued to amaze the villagers he met by the way he conducted himself with them. When he had come earlier to investigate the farmland situation, he had first visited Song Saengwŏn and had addressed him most appropriately with great respect, even asking Song not to speak deferentially to him. And with the villagers in general, if his counterpart was even slightly older he would confer the old-time title of Saengwŏn and treat the person very respectfully. This could not but surprise the villagers, because Min, the former landlord, by contrast, had talked down to all of them, with one exception—Maktong’s grandfather, who unlike the other villagers was not completely dependent on Min. And even to him, Min’s reluctant attempts at polite speech came across as mumbling.

  Chŏn had devoted considerable thought to these matters. Among the multitude of reasons the previous landlord, Min, had been run out of the village, the most important would have been that he had made no attempt to mix with the villagers. Wasn’t there something to be learned from this, even though not all the previous landlords had been run out of the village? So the first thing for Chŏn to do was get comfortable with the villagers, and the best means to this end, he decided, was alcohol. Chŏn himself was not a heavy drinker, but starting with Song Saengwŏn, and afterward as the occasion arose, he treated the village elders to drinks.

  The efficacy of this policy soon became apparent. Shortly after Liberation the young men of the village, together with a group of young strangers from the town nearby, had vandalized the house in which Min was living, leaving it in ruins. But when the time came for Chŏn to move in and he had to restore the house, the only people he ended up having to pay for their labor were Big Nose the carpenter and a plasterer. The others, tenant farmers, all volunteered their labor for the various tasks.

  Chŏn himself turned out to help with the repairs. On one such day his eyes came to rest on the house where Maktong’s family lived. It was an old thatched-roof dwelling whose left side was leaning precariously forward. If it were to collapse, the rock wall that helped retain the rainwater in back of Chŏn’s house would be breached. This wall and Maktong’s family’s house were practically touching. Chŏn had had a feeling about that house when he’d first arrived to check out farmland: the day he settled in this area, he would have to buy that thatched-roof house and the land it sat on. His intention was not simply to expand the landholdings in back of his house. Rather, by adding that other lot, and its spacious vegetable patch, to his own, he would have himself a nice square plot of some five hundred p’yŏng to cultivate. He would put the land and the vegetable plot of that thatched-roof house to use. Fruit trees could be planted there, and next to them subsistence crops. And when the trees were fully grown, the yield in fruit would fetch a nice income. Besides, even if land reform went into effect in the future, the land that you yourself cultivated would remain yours, so the best policy for a man like him, who couldn’t do much in the way of labor-intensive farming, was to make the fruit trees behind his house his own, which he could do by tending to them regularly. So when the opportunity came to buy that house and its land, he would act upon it, he told himself.

  Min had also been interested in purchasing this land. Min’s motive, though, was that the land in back of his house was too small and he needed more space. So he had sent a few elderly sharecroppers to visit Maktong’s grandfather, and then he had torn down his old house, intending to replace it with a modern one complete with slanted eaves attached to the rafters. This was five or six years ago, and by that time he was sending his messengers to Maktong’s grandfather practically every day, but they were sent back empty-handed. And then the previous year, Maktong’s grandfather, who had farmed his own land until then, had begun sharecropping Min’s dry fields, but he remained attached to the land on which his own house sat and to his vegetable patch, and he declared he would be dead and buried before he would let anybody buy them. What was Min to do about this pig-headed old man, the one person he had failed to get in his clutches? Well, for starters, the new house he had built was a massive tile-roof structure, and there it sat, right alongside Maktong’s family’s house, looming over and dwarfing it, as if to say, Try this on for size; how much longer do you think you can hold out?

  Chŏn had a plan for buying Maktong’s family’s land, but his method was altogether different from Min’s. When it came to buying land, Chŏn would not rush into a deal, whether through intermediaries or otherwise; it was best, he thought, to wait for the right opportunity. And with Maktong’s family’s land, he never once hinted to others of his intentions, even when he was t
reating them to drinks. He had decided to wait until the time was right, and he believed that that time would ultimately arrive. And it did, unexpectedly soon, when Maktong’s father appeared before him in person to offer the precious land.

  Chŏn had been unaware till then that Maktong’s father gambled. And in fact Maktong’s father had given up gambling more than a year earlier—it didn’t seem that long ago—and by now his habit was no longer a topic of conversation among the villagers. What Maktong’s father had to say when he showed up at Chŏn’s door he said matter-of-factly: an ox was for sale in the upper village, and he was a bit shy of the money he needed to buy it—would Chŏn advance him some money if he put up his land as security?

  Chŏn was well aware that this was not the time of year to be arranging mortgages or lending money, but he also realized that if he really wanted that land, he couldn’t very well come right out and suggest that Maktong’s father sell it to him. So he merely said that he had no money to lend. Maktong’s father grew anxious when he heard this. But then he remembered how Min had tried to buy his family’s land—maybe this new landlord would be similarly inclined. And so it was Maktong’s father who broached the issue: “Then why don’t you buy our land?” The bait was set. Chŏn feigned reluctance, saying that if Maktong’s father really intended to buy the ox, then it so happened that he did have some money he’d been planning to use to buy an ox cart (for working the two plots of well-irrigated paddy he had begun cultivating that year); maybe he could use that money. As for a price, Chŏn decided not to try to negotiate and instead went along with Maktong’s father’s proposal of ten wŏn per p’yŏng. That way there would be no bad aftertaste, as there would if he were to persuade Maktong’s father to lower the price. He considered asking Maktong’s father to include their run-down house in the deal, but ultimately thought better of it. Not only did he have no use for the house in the first place, he had no need to buy with the intention of demolishing it because it would probably collapse within the year anyway and then Maktong’s family would most likely have to rebuild it. And judging from the timber in the corner of their yard, the family knew they would soon have to rebuild, and when that time came, he would provide them a house site elsewhere. And if by chance there were no suitable site, then perhaps the farming shack built by the previous landlord in the lower village, which Chŏn now owned, could be sold to them cheaply.