The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Does he still live in the same village?”

  “Yes. He’s a guard at the farm library now. He’s helped our family enormously. It’s only because of his pull that I was able to join the party at all.”

  Tanyŏl stopped abruptly in his tracks and turned to face Yosŏp, staring him straight in the face.

  “Think about it. Do you have any idea what it was like for us? No one in the village would speak to us. Children at school didn’t want to have anything to do with me. All we could do was go to the Cooperative Farm, do what work was allotted us and get our food rations. That was my life, my whole life, until I turned fifteen. Then, thanks to Grandfather, I was able to move to Some. And now, now that I’ve barely managed to inch my way out from under the shadow of the crimes committed by the man who was my father—now you’re here, trying to uncover the past. I mean, if you’d only just leave us alone, we might finally be living a quiet life.”

  “There is an old saying that goes ‘Start by plucking a hair, end by killing a man.’ It is also said, ‘Two hands must meet to make a sound.’ The atrocities that happened here weren’t carried out by strangers—it was us, the people who’d once lived together harmoniously in the same village.”

  “They say it was the superstitious freaks who did it.”

  “No, it was Satan who did it.”

  “Come now, what sort of a ghost is that?”

  Ryu Yosŏp replied, “It is the black thing that lives in the heart of every man.”

  At the end of the pine tree forest appeared a levee that was as tall as a man; a set of cement steps led up to the top. They walked up the steps. The first thing to greet their eyes was the vista of a wide, open field. The sun was just coming down over the field; it was a gorgeous sunset—breathtaking. The chirping of birds, magpies, maybe, could be heard from afar along the early autumn breeze as it blew across the grass. Yosŏp finally felt as though he had truly arrived; this was the hometown of his childhood. He sat down quietly on the grass atop the levee. Below him was a reservoir. The surface of the water, calm under the setting sun, rippled now and again when a fish would jump up in a flash of blinding white before it disappeared again. Each ripple was audible, and the glossy surface was momentarily broken by a series of concentric rings.

  “Come, sit with me for a moment.”

  Hesitant, Tanyŏl sat down beside his uncle.

  “Do you know why I came here?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I’ve come here to cleanse us all of the crimes that were committed by people like your father and me.”

  His nephew’s hollow face, tanned and expressionless, became slightly distorted as a cynical smile began to form on his lips.

  “Father was a reactionary. He can never be forgiven, not in a thousand years. How could such a crime ever be cleansed, especially now that he is no longer in this world?”

  Yosŏp reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. He fumbled for the little leather pouch, drew it out, and untied the leather string. He reached in and took out the sliver of bone that had belonged to his brother. Cupped in his palm, the yellow-tinted bone looked just as much like a tojang as the first time he’d seen it.

  “Your father was cremated before I left to come here. This piece of bone is his, part of his remains. In a way, your father has come home with me.”

  Tanyŏl craned his neck, staring at Yosŏp’s palm.

  “Well, go on. Touch it,” said Yosŏp.

  His nephew held out his hand. Tanyŏl’s trembling thumb and forefinger touched the bone, held it for a moment, and then leapt back to his side. The younger man began to sob, his face buried between his legs. Waiting for this wave of emotion to die down, Yosŏp put the bone back into the pouch and placed the pouch back in his inner pocket. Tanyŏl wiped his face with both hands, sniffed a couple of times, and picked himself up from the grass.

  “I am a Party member. Reactionaries like us are forever indebted to our Honorable Leader, who has embraced us into the great bosom of our Republic. I have been assigned the task of spending time with you, Uncle, in order to convey the sincere hopes of the Party that you will help lead the mission of unification for our nation.”

  “Yes, yes, right, that’s right, and I thank you for it,” said Reverend Ryu Yosŏp, patting his nephew on the back.

  They passed back through the pine forest once more and returned to the guesthouse. The guide was waiting for them at the front gate.

  “Your bath is ready. You must be tired. Take a bath and get some sleep.”

  A couple of bathrobes and bath towels had been placed neatly on the bed. Taking off his clothes, Yosŏp turned to his nephew.

  “Tanyŏl, go ahead and get undressed—we can bathe together.”

  “You can go first, if you like.”

  “I’d like you to help me scrub my back.”

  The bathroom at the guesthouse was a cozy size, about five p’yŏng,29 and the round, tiled tub had a separate faucet. A small stool made of wooden boards stood in the middle of the floor. The heavy smell of sulfur seeped out of the pipes, and the water looked slightly yellow. Without a word the two men got into the tub and sat there with their eyes closed. Climbing out of the tub, Yosŏp sat down with his back to his nephew. Tanyŏl splashed some water on his uncle’s back and began to scrub it for him with a wet towel. When his nephew’s hand touched his back, without letting him see what he was doing, Yosŏp lowered his head for a moment and said a prayer.

  Thirsty, Yosŏp woke up in the middle of the night.

  The sound of snoring filled the room. In the bed next to him, Tanyŏl was fast asleep. Fumbling, Yosŏp opened the door and walked out into the pitch-black living room. Groping along the wall, he managed to turn the light switch, but there was no response—the light was out. He thought he remembered hearing that the power was cut off in the countryside after midnight in order to conserve electricity. He decided to give up on the light. Feeling around on the table for the water bottle, he found it and took several deep gulps. He was sitting down on the sofa, intending to stay for just a moment, when two men suddenly materialized out of nowhere and sat down as well, facing him. It didn’t even surprise him anymore. One was Yohan, elderly with his white hair, and the other was the same middle-aged Uncle Sunnam.

  How—are you two going to leave now? You’re on such good terms with each other.

  The phantom of Big Brother Yohan, wearing his traditional Korean shroud, nodded.

  That’s right. But before that, we thought we’d come by and clarify a few things.

  Uncle Sunnam, still wearing the people’s uniform with the buttons all the way up to his chin, smiled. His eyes half-closed, he said, Now that I’m through with all this, now that I’ve left it all behind, it doesn’t really seem that horrible anymore. We do need to talk about it though, to be fair and honest. Besides, you have to finish any unfinished business before you leave if you don’t want to get stuck wandering around in this world.

  The first few months following liberation, everyone fell into a mindless frenzy of activity. We visited our town and traveled to Haeju and then on to Pyongyang to set up the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, and we Christians were the first out of the five northern provinces to put their ideas into action. But then the trouble started—the Communists decided to change our title to the People’s Committee. I was twenty-one at the time, and I’d long been a member of the Christian Youth Association, so it was only natural for me to go on and become a member of the Democratic Party. In Haeju, the right-wing raided the headquarters of the Provincial People’s Committee and killed three people. There were demonstrations in the streets—all this not even a month after liberation. After that the left-wing peacekeeping troops took over all the law enforcement agencies. By then any Japanese collaborators who’d been exposed had long since disappeared—when autumn came, all those people who participated in the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, all the landlords and businessmen, not to mention the presbyte
rs of the various churches, they all began crossing the border down into the South.

  That November, scores of students and Christians died in Sinŭiju, protesting against the Communist Party and Soviet authority. When we got back home, the Provincial People’s Committee for our area had already been founded—the state of the town was just ridiculous. Everyone and his grandmother, all the servants and good-for-nothings and vagabonds, the ones who felt they’d been treated badly in their own towns and villages, they were all sticking together. Naturally, we cut ties with this so-called People’s Committee and formed our own group, centered around the church.

  I went to Sanjŏnghyŏn Church in Pyongyang with our father. You see, there’d been a proclamation regarding the reconstruction of the Church, made by the Protestant ministers who were imprisoned for seven, eight years during the Occupation for refusing to comply with the Japanese enforcement of daily worship at their heathen Shinto shrines. The proclamation declared that all pastors and presbyters who’d submitted to the Japanese now had to repent before God. After two months’ suspension from their posts, they would have to confess and publicly acknowledge that Shinto worship goes against the teachings of Christ. This proclamation, however, was greeted by a significant backlash from the very people it referred to. These folks claimed that they, too, had been persecuted by the Japs, often ending up in prison and, when their churches were dissolved, they strove to quietly maintain their faith underground. They insisted that their lot had been no less difficult—after all, they had forced themselves to endure humiliation at the hands of the Japanese so that they might continue to watch over all the Christians in hiding. That winter, at Changt’aehyŏn Church in Pyongyang, we organized an alliance of all the churches in the five northern provinces. It was not long after the Sinŭiju Incident, and we ultimately resolved to unite as one and fight against the Communists.

  On March 1, the year after liberation, everything finally came to a head. We, the Christians, would soon become the mortal enemies of the Communists. With the arrival of the new year, the Joint Presbytery of the North had begun working to make preparations to celebrate the anniversary of the March First Independence Movement—our celebrations were to be based around our churches. Representatives from the Korean Independence Party and the Anticommunist Youth Corps had been visiting us from South Korea, helping to plan a nationwide uprising. We decided to hold a united prayer meeting, so our county, too, dispatched messengers to Pyongyang and Haeju. In the end, Christians from three counties: Ŭnnyul, Sinch’ŏn, and Chaeryŏng, made plans to meet at the Sŏbu Church in Chaeryŏng to celebrate Independence Day together. Some time earlier, Presbyter Cho Mansik had voiced his opposition to the Russian trusteeship of North Korea, a plan that’d been proposed at the Moscow Conference. As a result, Cho was placed under arrest at the Koryŏ Hotel in Pyongyang. We didn’t really know what was right—whether we should oppose this trusteeship or support it—we just knew that it was opposed by the South but supported by the North, and that our churches were unanimously against it.

  The maintenance of law and order had been left to the Red Guards, which was composed of the various peacekeeping troops, the Women’s League, and the Democratic Youth League. They were all run by the provisional people’s committees. They’d impounded everything the Japanese left behind—ammunition, pistols, shotguns—and they knew they had the upper hand. All the same, we were determined to resist. Together with the young men from the Bible class I held in the back room of our Kwangmyŏng Church, we ran off leaflets on a mimeograph machine. At the time, I didn’t really understand what they said, but I assume it was along the same lines as the ministers’ sermons—“We must stop the state’s persecution of the Church,” “We are against the Communists,” “We are against the Russian military.” Hwanghae Province was full of leaflets and posters back then.

  On the morning of March 1, Independence Day, we put everything aside and set off to the gathering at Sŏbu Church in Chaeryŏng, traveling in groups of three and five. Since the boys in the peacekeeping troops would have their eyes peeled all night long, many of us had gone earlier—they got to the church a couple days early and waited. Older presbyters, like our father, started their journey in the predawn darkness. Thousands of people were at Sŏbu Church by the time we began. Inside the chapel, people had to go up and sit on the platforms, and the aisles were absolutely packed—outside, the yard was teeming with people squatting or standing. The Christian Youth guarded the gate, armed with clubs and picks. No one dared to try coming in—they just watched us from a distance. Well, actually, a couple of Party members had managed to make their way in, but that was before we got there; they were already sitting in the chapel. The place was full of familiar faces, especially for those of us from the same villages. We knew all about each other’s family situations, everything, down to the littlest details, like who’d been beaten up by whom and who teased whom when we were kids.

  Later on we would hear all about the big riots in Pyongyang, but in that moment, we all thought that the world was full of Christians, that it was just a handful of Communists making all the trouble. The minister told us that we Christians were the ones who had actually brought about the March First Movement and won our country’s independence and that our new mission was to make our nation, liberated by the grace of God, into a Christian country. He told us that the Communists were heathen trash, ignorant atheists who knew nothing of the fierce punishment that would rain down upon them from heaven, idiots who simply did anything the Soviet Union told them to do. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we heard someone shout, “Enough!”and then stones came whizzing through the air in every direction, shattering all the church windows. Clubs in hand we rushed out to head them off, but the Leftist youths were already fighting at the gates, forcing their way in. Some bastard let a couple of shots ring into the air.

  Sangho cracked his skull that day, and I ended up writhing in the dirt, my shoulder struck by someone’s club. Our minister was dragged off by the police and the presbyters of the Joint Presbytery in Chaeryŏng, including Father, were arrested. Sangho and I hid at a fellow Christian’s house until late that night, and even after we returned to Sinch’ŏn, we couldn’t go home. We hid in a dugout for the next ten days.

  There was a huge uproar in Pyongyang. The provisional People’s Committee had sent a directive out to all the churches, saying that the celebration of the March First Movement was not to be observed in an exclusive manner by churchgoers and that churches would have to participate in government functions. The churches claimed that this was discrimination against Protestants and that we should be free to hold Independence Day memorial services in whatever manner we chose. The battle of wills between church and state lasted a week. When the morning of March 26 dawned, around sixty well-known religious activists had been rounded up by the peacekeeping troops. By ten o’clock that morning, ten thousand Christians were gathered together at Changt’aehyŏn Church, the church that spearheaded the March First Movement activities. The church was seized by armed patrolmen. That day’s sermon had taught us to continue on in the spirit of the March First Movement. We were told that we must never allow Chosŏn to fall under the trusteeship of other nations, that we must never settle for anything less than true autonomy, true sovereign independence. When the sermon was over, some five thousand churchgoers prostrated themselves on the spot, clasping their hands and praying aloud, completely united. They say that the sound of their weeping and wailing reached up into the heavens. In the middle of this prayer, armed police officers burst into the chapel and hauled away the minister, shoving him into their car. Churchgoers took to the streets in protest, waving crosses and the national flag. Weaving their way through the streets, they sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with all their might. That was when more Christians, those who hadn’t been able to make it to church earlier, joined the crowd. Together they returned to the church to spend the night fasting and praying.

  At that point, yet another incident occurred—thi
s time, though, it was something that no one had really expected. In the middle of a memorial ceremony station hosted by the People’s Committee at the Pyongyang train, somebody threw a hand grenade onto the platform where the key staff of the People’s Committee and the representatives of the Soviet military administration were seated side by side. A Soviet officer grabbed the grenade and threw it away—his arm was blown off. Several days later, a second bomb exploded, this time at the residence of the commander of the Soviet Army. And then, within a fortnight, there was a third explosion in the house of the People’s Committee’s puppet, Kang Ryanguk, a minister who ran a Leftist organization called the Christian League. Kang lost his oldest son.

  All these insurrections were the work of the Christian Youth. Of course, they were helped by young men from the South, members of the Anticommunist Youth Corps and the Korean Independence Party. If the Communists had Marx’s Das Kapital, we had our Bibles. We’d become the Lord’s crusaders; they were the minions of Satan. It was a conflict that had begun long before, in the generation of our grandfathers, when the people of Chosŏn got their first taste of enlightenment.

  Despite all this, though, people living in the same villages still couldn’t quite bring themselves to rise up against one another. You know how weak Chosŏn people can be when it comes to having a shared history with someone—we’ve got a soft spot for that kind of kinship. You just can’t look somebody like that in the face and be cruel and heartless. But then, you see, something happened, something we could never have imagined, something completely unheard of. What, you ask? They tried to take away our land, the land that’d been handed down to us from generation to generation. It was the beginning of what they called the “land reform.” And you know, even then, if it had been total strangers or some foreign bastards who showed up and tried to rob us of our land at gunpoint, well, then we might have just cried our hearts out, been mortified at our own helplessness, and given in—but that wasn’t how it happened. It was our friends, the kids we grew up with, the ones we’d known from babyhood until we got old enough to grow pubic hair, swimming naked together and fishing in the river—people we’d shared broth with, sometimes sleeping under the same roof after we worked side by side in the same fields and mountains—these very same sons of bitches started showing up, completely poker-faced, telling us to just hand over our land.