The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I yearned to quit school after failing my previous year. Mother was preventing me from taking the decision, but Taek’s words struck a chord in my heart. “I’m going with you,” I told him. “I can’t stand school anymore.” Now that I had decided, I felt a rush of relief.

  I returned home late that night and turned off the light as if I were going to sleep. At dawn I went out into the yard and packed my bag with pots and utensils, then raided the kitchen for rice and other food. Finally, I chose the books I would take with me, which made the bag twice as heavy.

  I wrote my mother a short letter before leaving home. I said that I did not have the confidence to attend school in the state I was in, that I was going to stay at a temple until I felt like myself again, that she shouldn’t worry about me. I folded it, wrote “To Mother” in easily legible letters before placing it on my desk, and left the house in the still-dark dawn with my heavy bag on my back. I had some cash wedged between the pages of a book and wore a watch that I could sell in an emergency, enough to survive on for about three months.

  Later on, Mother said this had been the hardest time for her since Father passed away. “You weren’t a little boy anymore, but you weren’t a man yet either. I didn’t worry much about your older sisters. But they say boys your age really need their fathers.”

  Taek’s cave was in a valley behind Hwagye Temple in the Suyuri neighborhood. There was a little path next to a clear, roughly flowing stream, but it was mostly out of the way of hikers. We climbed the ridge behind Hwagyesa’s main hall and reached the last hill before the valley. There were a few large boulders on top of each other on that hill; from up there, you could see the adjacent peaks of Bukhan and Dobong Mountains, the carpet of dark-green pine trees below, and the tiled roof of Hwagyesa.

  There was a steep slope next to an outcrop that you had to carefully descend. The edge of the rock protruded out like the eaves of a roof; ducking under it, you found yourself in what you might call a courtyard. Inside the courtyard under the overhang was a little space. It was surrounded by rocks and as cozy as the inside of a dolmen. I used my experience during this time to write “By the dolmen,” for which I won Sasanggye magazine’s new writer’s prize. In other words, my life as a writer began in that secret headquarters, while in the liminal space of the end of boyhood.

  The bear in the Dangun legend survived for a hundred days on nothing but mugwort and garlic, and so we were determined to hold out for three months and ten days ourselves, whether together or alone, one keeping watch in the cave when the other left.

  I learned to meditate while in that cave. A young monk from Hwagyesa happened to come along and teach me meditation: how to keep my hips and spine straight, how comfortable it was to support the tailbone with a cushion of soft cloth, how I should keep my eyes half open and my gaze on an unfocused point three palm widths below knee level; how I should see my sitting body not as myself but as my house, and that it wasn’t anyone else but me who was breathing in and out.

  Sitting on top of the rock in the lotus position, I would first hear the sounds of night birds or the wind rustling through the pine forest, but eventually my breath would deepen and I would begin to hear nothing, my body would feel like a carapace, and the true self living inside my pupils felt as if it were staring out at an alien landscape. As time passed, I felt that I had turned into something exactly like the little stone lying next to my knee. Meditation helped me later, when I was older and in a prison cell by myself; there’s nothing like it to take yourself outside of time.

  Taek and I whiled away our days in that cave on the ridge of the mountain behind Hwagyesa until summer vacation approached. Whenever our supplies ran low, we couldn’t bear to go back home, so we’d call on Sang-deuk, whose family was rich, or Min, or charge into their homes. We sometimes visited the boardinghouse room of a friend from the countryside, to raid his food. We called this our “supply struggle,” in the parlance of war, and Taek was much more into it than I was. During those three or four months, I sent a couple of postcards to my mother to let her know I was doing fine. Mother would spend her remaining life desperately waiting for me to come back from something, especially during the Vietnam War. Eventually, her yearning seemed to have granted her some kind of special insight: I would often return from one of my sojourns away to find a special dish or two waiting for me, as if she’d known exactly when I’d be back. When I asked her about it, she replied, “I always see your father in my dreams right before you show up.”

  She was only in her forties at the time. Thinking back, she was still young and beautiful then. It seems amazing that she never remarried, but still managed to raise four children and send them all to college.

  A few years after I married, my mother, for whatever reason, gave her daughter-in-law her old notebooks bundled up in wrapping cloth. These notebooks revealed that there was more to my mother’s life than just being my mother. In fact, I discovered that Mother had once had a lover who was not my father. After my parents got married and were living in Manchuria, my father had had to retreat to a place with clean air to recover from a bout of tuberculosis. Mother went back to her parents’ home where she sought out “the man,” as she calls him in her notebooks; he had been studying in Japan and was a volunteer teacher in the countryside near Hwanghae Province. The record simply states she stayed there for two weeks (two whole weeks!), but it happened to be before I was born, which gave me an odd feeling.

  “Maybe this gentleman is your real father?” my wife teased.

  All I could do was laugh and say, “Surely not … Maybe Mother wanted to be a fiction writer as well when she was younger. And this is the first draft.”

  She must have kept those diaries during bouts of insomnia through the long nights she spent alone after my father’s death. But even so, what of my memory of the man we spent an afternoon with at Changgyeongwon Garden, where my mother took me a year or two before the war broke out? Those melodramatic notebooks aside, the man had clearly said to me: “Hey kid, do you want to live with me?” and “What do you think of me moving in with you?” So was this really my mother’s attempt at fiction? And what did the two of them talk about when they met at Changgyeongwon Garden, with me sitting between them?

  Even as Mother celebrated the rich lifestyle she enjoyed as a newlywed in Manchuria, she also spoke of how her life had ended when she left her girlhood behind in Pyongyang. During the nights in prison when I lay unable to fall asleep, my heart would ache with belated regret at the thought of all the suffering I had caused her when I was young.

  ~

  One day, after a stretch of living in the cave alone, I went out to the end of the subway line in Miari in the early morning and called Seong-jin. I tried reaching him at Donghwa, but they said he’d moved and gave me his new number. Seong-jin picked up when I dialed, his voice drowsy. He said he was working in a friend’s art studio. I wrote down the address. The place stood out even from a distance, being the only two-story Japanese-style house in the neighborhood. The first floor was a cigarette store that doubled as a general store, with a hair salon attached. I could hear Seong-jin singing as I walked up the narrow stairway. Singing was what he did instead of calisthenics before breakfast. There was a rude picture on the door of a thumb wedged between two knuckles, with the English word “OUT” written underneath.

  His apartment was one large open space, littered with paints, paint cans, and canvases, with a wooden army cot and a jerry-built chipboard table in the middle. Seong-jin must have slept on the table because there was a crumpled sleeping bag on it. His friend, who rented the place, was sitting there eating. Seong-jin introduced him to me. He had a strange name, Jang Mu, which sounded like it was taken from the subtitles of a Hong Kong period martial arts film. As I repeated it, he added, “My first name, Mu, means ‘dense.’”

  He was much taller than either of us and very skinny. His hair was closely cropped, and his fingers, arms, and legs were all willowy and long. Mu was preparing a one-man
show. He spread his canvas on the floor and painted in his shorts, becoming covered in sweat and streaks. Mu used to stare down at the paintings and say to me, “Writing is probably much easier.” To which I would retort, “Colors are easier. And sound even more so.”

  His paintings were, of course, abstracts. They featured blotches of pigment with little groupings of the kind of bright colors you find in traditional architecture. From the twinkle in Mu’s eye to his witty comebacks, I recognized a kindred spirit and immediately took a liking to him.

  “So, how’s life in the cave?” Mu asked.

  “I should be leaving it soon.”

  Mu gestured with his chin for me to follow. He led me up a small ladder in the corner right underneath the roof to an attic that was crammed with stuff. Mu bowed his head as he edged through the stacks with me close behind him. The sides of the loft were low, but there was an empty space in the middle where you could move around as long as you kept your head down. A ventilation window had wooden slats running across it instead of glass.

  “I think this used to be a storage space. Before that, the second floor was a tearoom. You could use this space to work.”

  It was cluttered and dusty, but I could see that it would be a good space once I had done some cleaning. I answered, cautious of accepting: “It looks fine but it probably gets really hot in the summer.”

  “That’s no problem. Just sit up here naked. All you need is a fountain pen and some paper, right? I’ll make you a writing desk.”

  I decided to pack up the cave first and go home before moving in. The three of us drank soju late into the night. Mu, like me, was the eldest son of a widowed mother. His parents had fled South like mine, and his father had died early, too. His own house, surely enough, was losing what it used to have as his mother grew older, much like a well slowly running dry. Back then, all you needed was to exchange a few words to know someone’s life story.

  The next day, when Seong-jin and I got to the cave in Suyuri, we found it still empty. I left a short note, packed up, and returned home for the time being. My older sisters were still diligently attending university and Mother seemed as confident and calm as usual, but very tired at the same time. I told her I wanted to write for a bit and would be living with a friend, and then I packed up again and left. I was halfway down the hill from the house when I heard Mother calling me. I set my bags down on the slope and walked back up the hill. Mother handed something to me. “Someone gave this to me. And this … Don’t waste it on alcohol, buy something tasty for yourself.”

  Mother handed me some cash and a long box. I stuffed it into my shirt pocket and left. Later I opened the box to find a fountain pen. Of course, nobody had given it to her; she would have carefully picked it out herself. She was always very good at picking things out. I almost started to cry. Perhaps this was her way of gently appeasing me, even while strongly wishing I’d abandon my useless pursuit of writing.

  In the attic above Jang Mu’s studio, I cleaned up the mess and put down about two pyeong’s worth of linoleum. Mu, as promised, built me a desk I could use while sitting on the floor, and it was so sturdy and perfect in height that I took it with me when I eventually returned home, to use exclusively for writing.

  As predicted, the attic turned into a steam room in the summer. I spent those hot days reading or lolling about in the little room next to Mu’s studio in return for cooking all of our meals. I returned to the attic only after the sun had gone down, to work on my writing until dawn.

  Seong-jin entered his competition as planned, Mount and Mu was also nearly done with preparing for his exhibition. I had an idea for two short stories and scratched away at them before repeatedly tossing them aside. On the weekends, it was Mu who scraped together enough money to buy a few bottles of soju so we could go up the hill out back and talk about our plans for life as we got drunk.

  Seong-jin actually won a prize in the competition, but his expectations must have been very high because he was still dissatisfied with the outcome. Mu smiled and said, “I’m deigning to hang out with you guys but really you’re just a couple of high school students. You’ve done pretty well, considering.”

  Looking back, we were barely older than a couple of hatchlings who’d just flown the nest. And yet we were already jaded, like adults who had been through the mill. There was nothing fixed in our future, we had no skill or potential to earn money, and we had only begun to understand a little about our talents.

  One day, Seong-jin and I had the studio to ourselves. The monsoon rain had been coming down for days. Staring out at the downpour, Seong-jin suddenly said, “I’m leaving.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m leaving Seoul.” He turned to me and said, “Let’s go down to the country. Not my grandmother’s house, but someplace I know.”

  He said we would drop by his grandmother’s in Namwon, but where we were really headed was a village near Shilsang Temple. There was a mountain hut there where one of his relatives lived alone; he had cleared a field and was growing crops. Seong-jin said he wanted to help his relative and think of a new way to live: he did not want to go on living this way. I agreed to join him, because I wasn’t ready to part company. All that was left to figure out was the money.

  “Let’s go to my place,” I said, thinking of things we could take with us to sell.

  We didn’t tell Mu our plans in detail, only that we were moving to the country. Mu, who was only two years older, responded as if he surpassed us by decades. “Life isn’t that easy. But knock yourselves out. I’d consider it a success if you can come back next year.”

  We said goodbye to him and headed home. My sisters hardly gave me a glance, resenting me for appearing out of nowhere with Seong-jin in tow, and Mother wordlessly set the table for us. We kept to my room that evening, flipping through books, waiting in silence. Seong-jin, exhausted, dozed off after midnight.

  I thought four in the morning would be the best time to make our move, as that was when the nationwide national security curfew ended, and Mother would be sound asleep. I heard a chiming from far away and waited fifteen more minutes before slowly crossing the living room, past the dining room, in front of the kitchen, and slowly opening the bedroom door. My goal was the top drawer beneath a pile of folded blankets in the wardrobe. I knew that Mother kept all sorts of contracts and receipts from utilities payments there, as well as her old-fashioned handbag with the crudely misaligned lock. Mother lay on her side with her back to me. I lay down next to her to wait for a while before pulling at the wardrobe door, which slowly opened. I pulled the drawer and took out the handbag. Just as I was about to push the wardrobe door shut, I noticed a Zenith radio next to the dresser. It was so heavy that my shoulder sagged when I lifted it by the handle.

  Seong-jin was still fast asleep when I returned to the room. I shook him awake. Seong-jin’s eyelids cracked open as he peered up at me. I grabbed half of the bills from inside the bag and stuffed them in my pocket, leaving the rest, and gently placed the handbag in the middle of my desk.

  Seong-jin’s jaw dropped when he saw the Zenith radio. That radio was the only bit of cultural apparatus we had in our house.

  Televisions were rare at the time, and it was not until the 1970s that record players were included among dowry items like wardrobes and other furniture. It was also the last cutting-edge product of the radio era that we had managed to get, through a leak in the American post exchange, or PX. Under the lid were frequencies for radio channels around the world.

  We crept out of the house and decided to finish sleeping at a run-down inn downtown. After a good, long sleep, we woke, went to Namdaemun Market, sold the radio, and went out for dinner.

  Late that night, at Seoul Station, we waited for the Jeolla Line night train. People say that once you’ve committed your first bad deed, you’re already on your way to more, and that was true of us. The overhead lights cast a dreary glow over the country folk waiting with us. A middle-aged woman approached, w
ith what looked like a forced smile. “And where are you two students going?”

  “To Namwon,” I said indifferently, assuming she was going to ask about train lines.

  “That train’s not until 11:30,” she said. “Plenty of time before that. Why don’t you have some fun?”

  Unlike me, who had no idea what she was talking about, Seong-jin caught on immediately. “Do you have anyone pretty?”

  “Of course, they’re all fresh today.”

  Seong-jin gave me a sideways look and said, “It’s your graduation day today.”

  His words made me come to my senses. I’d heard Taek use that expression before. He meant losing my virginity. Seong-jin stood up first with his luggage, and the woman, reading his intention, quickly joined us. “Will you be staying all night?”

  “No, we won’t be long … Let’s go.”

  Up the street where the Gukje Hall restaurant sat across from Seoul Station Plaza were narrow alleys stretching in all directions. After the war, red-light districts had sprung up in Jongno 3-ga Station, Dodong, and Yangdong, and near train stations like Cheongyangri, Yongsan, and Yeongdeungpo, the same as in every other city.

  The woman took us to a two-story building that looked more like a pile of cement blocks. A man, who I assumed was a pimp, looked us up and down as we stepped through the second-floor entrance. I couldn’t even raise my head. I stuck close to Seong-jin.

  Doors lined both sides of the hallway. Women walked by in their underwear, dragging their slippers. The pimp directed me to a room. Seong-jin sat with me for a long time before leaving. In the room was a set of red Cashmilon quilts, two dirty pillows, a small hole cut into the wallpapered particleboard wall, and a cheap light bulb hanging from the hole. The same bulb illuminated both my room and the one next to it. There was a shelf right above the door for shoes, and I put mine there. A small window opposite the door offered a view of the roofs of the shacks down the hill and the lights of the streets beyond.