Lost Souls

by Hwang Sunwon

  A match was struck, and there in the light of the match was Kwidong. Pau barely managed to keep from calling out to him.

  Kwidong was noticeably bigger, and maybe because it was night, he looked different, especially his face, which was more coarse. Pau wondered if he still had those dimples.

  Kwidong lit the candle but the flame immediately died.

  “What’s the matter, can’t you light a candle?”

  It wasn’t his fault, thought Pau.

  Kwidong struck another match, and this time he managed to light the candle, in spite of Old Kim Long Pipe’s trembling hand.

  The next moment Old Kim was shouting into the dark: “Come on, be quick there! Hurry up!”

  Kwidong disappeared into the gloom of the storehouse. Once again Pau felt an urge to call out his name, but managed to contain himself. Another man with a sack of grain came out past Pau.

  The cries from outside sounded closer. Shouldn’t I try to keep all that grain from being sneaked away? He momentarily forgot about trying to find his father, and his sweaty hand clutched the backrack stick more tightly.

  And then the men who had carried off the sacks of rice scuttled back in out of the dark, hurrying one after another past Pau, still toting their loads. Old Kim Long Pipe’s candle came close to reveal the first man, who said in a panting voice, “We’re in big trouble—they just raided Chief Yi’s home.” Without waiting for a response, he staggered toward the storehouse and disappeared inside.

  “They went to the chief’s?”

  As Old Kim said this, the sleeves of his traditional jacket trembled. The candlelight kept glinting off the bowl of his ever-so-large pipe. Old Kim seemed not to know what to do with the candle he held.

  An idea seemed finally to have come to him—he brought the candle close to his mouth and blew. Pau caught one last glimpse of his drooping nose before it and the candlelight disappeared, and then the trembling hand and the ever-so-large pipe were no more.

  December 1946

  TO SMOKE A CIGARETTE

  It was a habit developed over the ten long years he had been a junior clerk at the courthouse, and by now a daily routine: every morning when he rose, he took from the shelf his bag of leaf tobacco and a page of newspaper, rolled a cigarette, and had himself a smoke.

  And so that morning he slipped out of bed, picked out his clothes and put them on, and with a shiver retrieved his Puyong tobacco and a sheet of newspaper from the shelf. He began to tear off a strip—it was the same newspaper he had used the previous day—but his hand came to a stop. There on the page he had been tearing was the headline CHRONIC STOWAWAY PROBLEM, along with the subheading MOST ARE STREET WOMEN, followed by the article itself. Judging from the small headline, it was a low-priority item.

  Several months earlier, each of the dailies had carried a lengthy report on the plight of Koreans who had gone to Japan during the colonial period, had returned to what they considered their homeland, but within a year had felt compelled to go back to Japan as stowaways in order to make a living. It was a story that had left readers choked up. Since then, similar articles had appeared from time to time, so that by now the account had been relegated to the city pages, and readers, himself included, were hardened to it.

  The reason his eyes had come to rest on this article was the MOST ARE STREET WOMEN subheading. The phrase “street women” reminded him of that woman he had seen the previous evening at the bar in Ta-dong.

  This brief article related how on January 5 a boatload of stowaways bound for Japan had been intercepted off the coast of Ulsan by the Coast Guard. Almost all were Koreans who had lived in Japan, and of these the majority were street women. To stem the increasing tide, the authorities were subjecting the stowaways to summary trials. He wondered if the woman he had seen the previous evening was one such woman. I’ll bet she was. As if to seal this verdict, he finished tearing the strip from the newspaper page and rolled his cigarette.

  Returning the tobacco and the newspaper page to the shelf, he made his way around the head of his son, who was curled up asleep on the warmer part of the heated floor, then slid open the door to the kitchen. This was the signal for his wife to take an ember from the cookstove and light his cigarette. The next moment all was forgotten. All except the thought of that first deep drag.

  He returned to where he had been sitting. As the cigarette paper, that is to say the newspaper article, burned, the image of the woman in the bar the previous evening flickered across his mind: her lack of a coat; her tight-fitting, faded red sweater; the long, slender neck; and the way she slurped her soup and rice, which told him she was starving.

  The episode at the bar had resulted from his chance encounter with Teacher Suam in front of Tŏksu Palace after his deliverance from the daily routine at the courthouse. As he was walking home, head hunched down because of the cold, someone took his arm. He looked up, and there was Teacher Suam. At first he couldn’t help feeling a prickling sense of guilt at not seeing to the favor that the teacher had asked of him. This guilty feeling, combined with the fact that Teacher Suam’s face was noticeably more haggard than when he had last seen him several days earlier, produced a twofold weight that hung heavy on his heart.

  Pulled down over Teacher Suam’s forehead was a shabby felt hat he had never seen before. Beneath it were lusterless eyes tearing from the cold. Teacher Suam’s drawn face with his breath freezing on his untrimmed white mustache was that of a sick man. Was Teacher Suam ill? he asked. The answer was an unconvincing “No.” Blinking twice and releasing a couple of tears, Teacher Suam explained that he had been on his way to the courthouse when he tried to take a shortcut and ended up lost, and he had been wandering around ever since. “I almost missed you,” said Teacher Suam. He tried to smile, but wrinkles appeared instead.

  Again he reproached himself for not doing what Teacher Suam had asked of him, and after he had confessed to his failure, Teacher Suam said, “I’m sure you’re terribly busy,” in a tone of voice that told him the teacher actually believed he was busy. The realization that Teacher Suam was not simply providing him an extenuating circumstance or making small talk overwhelmed him with shame.

  Teacher Suam suggested going someplace nearby where they could sit for a moment. He offered his home, and when Teacher Suam responded, “Next time” he realized that even if he took the teacher home, there wasn’t much he could offer on short notice. And so, thinking he would treat Teacher Suam to a nice hot meal of rice and soup, he set out across the streetcar tracks in the direction of Ta-dong.

  Along the way, his departed father came to mind, the youthful face of a man in his thirties. A face in a photograph. His father and Teacher Suam had been as close as brothers. The two families had lived next to each other in the ancestral home in Masan, and his father and Teacher Suam had gone to the village academy together. Teacher Suam had always been praised for his talent at reciting the classics, whereas Father had been a mischief maker, never any good at his studies, scolded or whipped almost daily. He still remembered these stories, which he would hear at home when Father and Teacher Suam were drinking together. The two of them had continued to be close as adults, after Teacher Suam became headmaster at the village academy and Father went into business. Father, never good at studies, proved in business to be a man of unusual talent and resourcefulness, and was able to provide a comfortable living for a family that until then had never had enough. In contrast, Teacher Suam, as a headmaster, was indescribably destitute. And so Father provided him with endless assistance. When he became headmaster, Teacher Suam moved into a room attached to the school, while Father within a few years had moved his family to the pier district, some distance away. Thereafter, without exception on every holiday and festival day throughout the year, Father sent Teacher Suam grain and meat as well as a variety of delicacies prepared at home. He remembered being sent on these errands. And then the day came when Teacher Suam had to leave. A new wave of education had washed ashore at Masan, and Teacher Suam’s only opt
ion was to look for a village school up in the mountains. His father made a proposal: “Since you and your wife don’t have children yet, why don’t you move into our guest room and you can teach our boy classical Chinese?” Teacher Suam replied that if it were a few years earlier he would have gratefully accepted, but in the new order of things, subjects like classical Chinese weren’t of any use in the big cities, so the boy should be educated in the new learning. So saying, Teacher Suam left for a mountain village. Thereafter, letters of greeting arrived frequently, Teacher Suam’s calligraphy redolent of the scent of ink. Perpetually busy, Father was always saying he should send a reply, but he sensed that Father never got around to it.

  And then, beginning in the spring of his third year of primary school, Father began spending days at a time at home—something without precedent in his working life—until finally he was bedridden. In no time a rumor arose that he had failed in some sort of business. What he didn’t realize until he was grown up was that the business was grain speculation. The illness hadn’t seemed serious, but Father ate practically nothing and wasted away by the day, and in early autumn he passed on. It was a stunning development. How he had cried, along with his mother. His little brother wasn’t yet old enough to feel sorrow. He remembered it to this day, remembered how his mother would weep whenever she saw him, and how he had tried to avoid her by staying at school until evening instead of going straight home after dismissal.

  One day about a month after his father had passed away, he returned home as usual in the evening and was startled to hear from the guest room the sound of a man weeping. He went into the family room and found his mother crying as well. Sometime later he learned that the man weeping in the guest room was Teacher Suam. He had never known a grown man to cry like that. Teacher Suam had made it a point to pay them a visit on each of the first two anniversaries of his father’s death—which required inquiries on Teacher Suam’s part because they had moved. Some two months after Father’s funeral, Mother had sold their house and they had taken a smaller one. The former house had been their only asset, but you can’t make a living just from owning a house. And then a year later they moved to a house that was smaller still. Most of the furniture they sold off. Mother then got to thinking that since there were only the three of them they could get by with just one room, and that by minimizing their belongings she could give both boys an education. And so he was able to go to Seoul for middle school. But the family fortunes were such that he alone finished middle school, and even that was barely affordable. They had long since sold their tiny house and were renting a room, and there remained no piece of furniture that could fetch a price. In spite of the income from Mother’s various labors, his middle-school fees would have been beyond her reach if not for the sale of the house and furniture—indeed, it had already been a year since his little brother had had to drop out of primary school in the middle of the school year. Things got so bad they had to skimp on meals. Fortunately his grades had been good enough for him to secure temporary employment at the courthouse, but it was not a job that would support a family of three in Seoul. So Mother decided to move with his younger brother to a village not far from Masan and farm—there was no other choice. She was still there, past the age of sixty, farming with his younger brother. Now as then, the fact that his own middle school education had cost his brother a grade school education, combined with his inability to provide a comfortable living for his mother, who had spent half her life in hardship, caused him bitterness and regret. After three years of temporary employment he was able to pass the examination that qualified him for the lowest level of the government bureaucracy, and over the course of the following ten years, working as a junior clerk, he had taken a wife, fathered a child, and settled into his present rut. His seemingly endless life as a junior clerk had continued after Liberation to the present day.

  And then ten days earlier at the courthouse, he’d been told he had a visitor. He went out to the hall and found an elderly man, who asked, “Is that you, Mr. Kim?” Yes, he replied, whereupon the man said he was Suam and took his hand in his. Teacher Suam? He was so surprised he just stood there, his hand in that grasp. The old man’s hands were rough and knotted. At that moment he felt as if he understood all that Teacher Suam had undergone in the thirty years since he had seen him last. It was a good thing they were both alive to meet again, said Teacher Suam, tears filling his eyes, while for his part he realized that he would never have recognized the old man if they had passed each other on the street. After saying he had known about his job at the courthouse, Teacher Suam asked about his family—how many children did he have, and how were his mother and his brother doing? He asked when Teacher Suam had arrived from the countryside. Not very long ago, replied the teacher. And actually he had come to ask a favor. He had had a son late in life and wanted to send the boy to middle school, but couldn’t think of a way to pay the school fees and wondered if an old man such as himself might be able to find work here at the courthouse—scribal work was something he could manage. The father had always helped him when he was alive, and now here he was in the same situation with the son. “I know you’re busy and I’ve bothered you enough for one day, but I’d like to drop by again in a few days.” And with that Teacher Suam released his hand. He walked Teacher Suam out to the main gate, but not until the teacher had disappeared around the corner did he realize it was almost lunchtime and that he was being less than gracious in not inviting him home for a meal. Wanting quickly to see to Teacher Suam’s request, he went to the courthouse registry. But the registry head was away, so he returned to his desk, planning to go back the following day. But when that day came, he put it off another day, and so on, so that when Teacher Suam next visited, he still had not been back to the registry. He explained that he had to go through several more levels before he would have an answer. Teacher Suam said he was sorry for bothering him when he must be busy, and turned to go. It happened to be near the end of the work day, and he suggested that they go to his house, but Teacher Suam said he would visit on a subsequent occasion, and with that he left. And so today had been the third time Teacher Suam had come to see him.

  But he still couldn’t give Teacher Suam a definite answer. He had in fact met once in the meantime with the registry head, who had said he might consider a scribe who was licensed but that otherwise there not much hope. And then the head had said, “Don’t you know this by now?” It wasn’t that he didn’t know; rather, he was hoping the head would approach his superior, but when he broached this issue the head said, “You’ve been here a lot longer than I have—wouldn’t it be better if you spoke to him directly?” And with that the head had skillfully washed his hands of the matter. His only option now was to speak with the superior, something he had been putting off. He had a hunch that somehow it wouldn’t work out even if he did speak with the superior, and this prevented him from acting. But lately an honest-to-goodness cold snap had set in and his concerns about fuel and food for his family took precedence over all else. Under the circumstances, was he wrong to have neglected Teacher Suam’s request?

  Maybe not, but then he had not done right by Teacher Suam either. My efforts have been lacking. Father would not have acted like I have. If only he were alive! But all that was left of Father was the coat he used to wear. He himself had managed to get by until now with that coat. It was so faded, and the fabric so worn, that it was difficult to tell just what color it had originally been. He raised the collar of that coat against the wind, as if this had just now occurred to him. Genuinely sorry that Teacher Suam had had to venture out on this cold day, he turned to look at the old man, and when his eyes traveled to the worn-out felt hat pushed low on his head, he was struck by the thought that perhaps he had just picked it up at a second-hand shop. He doubted Teacher Suam had owned that hat for as long as it had taken to become so shabby. The sun-darkened, careworn face beneath the lowered brim told him this, as did the rough, knotty hands stuck in the pockets of his traditional overcoat.
Besides, Teacher Suam hadn’t been wearing that hat the previous two times—doubtless he had bought it used. Quite a few times he had seen the ragpickers who exchanged taffy for second-hand items collecting such hats. But even hats such as these were probably useful in cold weather. And the weather, after all, couldn’t have cared less as he and Teacher Suam walked along the darkening streets.

  Happiness in the form of toasty warmth welcomed them into the bar in Ta-dong. This warmth was due not to a blazing stove but instead to a charcoal brazier rigged on top of an oil drum and used for grilling snacks and warming drinks, and to the body heat radiating from the customers already there to those coming in out of the cold. On the bare earth floor near the oil drum three long tables were laid out, each with a long bench on either side. It was spacious for a bar, and already a party were drinking at the middle table. After he and Teacher Suam were settled across from each other at the far table, he asked Teacher Suam what he would like for a meal. Teacher Suam suggested they first warm themselves up with some yakchu. He obliged, asking the boy grilling ribs over the charcoal to bring them half a kettle.

  When the warmed yakchu arrived, he poured Teacher Suam a drink while asking if his son had been admitted to school, then said he would pour his own drink. But Teacher Suam insisted on taking the kettle and filling his glass for him, before replying that he had sent his son to night school, but he had no idea how he was going to pay the fees; the boy wanted to earn his own school fees and had found a job delivering newspapers, but that barely put a dent in the amount due; so saying, he heaved a sigh. Teacher Suam said no more, but that much was enough to tell him that apart from the problem of the school fees Teacher Suam needed scribal work or something similar if he and his family were to live another day. In the presence of Teacher Suam, this man with dimming eyes, whose hands were accustomed to holding a writing brush but had in the meantime performed all kinds of rough work, and who now wanted to work with the brush again, he upbraided himself yet again that he had let the teacher down. He had sat like a bump on a log instead of visiting the registry head’s superior—and just because of a hunch that it wouldn’t work. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He would see the superior face to face no matter what. And if that didn’t work he would go back to the registry head and pester him to let Teacher Suam work as an assistant to the court scribe. The registry head wouldn’t try to weasel out this time. With that in mind he asked Teacher Suam to come see him two days later. And then he changed his mind and said he felt sorry for Teacher Suam having to be out and about in this cold weather and asked where he was living, offering to go see him instead. Not to worry, Teacher Suam responded—he would pay the visit.