The Dwarf (Modern Korean Fiction)

by Cho Se-hui

  “All right, then, that’s fine.” I inched closer to Father.

  “I’ve been thinking about being away from you, but just for a while,” Father said. “Remember Humpback, who came to see me once? I’m going to work with him—it’s the only way. He has a friend who’s crippled. I think you’ve seen him too—Squatlegs? And there’s a medicine peddler who performs feats of strength and acrobat stunts, and he says he’ll help the three of us if we join him. He makes big money; he even has a couple of cars to go around in. He goes all over peddling medicine—no place he hasn’t been—and he’s sent his children to college, has a big house—nothing he doesn’t have—and he lives very well. He says he’ll treat the three of us as partners, and that’s good enough for me. Says he’ll split the money equally. It’s my last chance. Our house is going to get torn down because it’s in a redevelopment zone, and with you three going to work in a factory instead of being in school there’s not a day goes by with me having peace of mind. No hopes either. I’m a worm. Got to squirm one last time and get some money together.”

  “Father, you’re not Humpback. And you’re not Squatlegs. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Father spoke again. “I’m a worm.”

  “He’s probably found peace by now.” Mother’s voice had grown softer.

  “I hope you live a long life, ma’am,” said Chi-sŏp. “I’m sure your children will take good care of you in the future.”

  “Will the day ever come?”

  “Surely it will.”

  “I don’t believe it. Somehow I just don’t believe it.”

  Father rowed toward deeper water. The chunks of ice that were pushed aside by the boat sounded like panes of glass being stacked up. I didn’t know how deep the water was. The wind still blew cold.

  “You should get Mother’s opinion,” I said. “And please talk with Yŏng-ho and Yŏng-hŭi too.”

  “Everything will get screwed up then.”

  “If Mother, Yŏng-ho, and Yŏng-hŭi say fine, then I’ll go along with them. And I’ll keep quiet. I won’t say anything about what you’ll wear or what you’ll do with Humpback and Squatlegs to draw a crowd. But first ask yourself what the medicine peddler is up to—wanting you in addition to Humpback and Squatlegs. Isn’t it obvious he only wants to take advantage of the three of you?”

  “That’s enough.” Father put down the oars. “My heart aches. You have to realize that. It aches.”

  Father beached the boat on the opposite shore. I remained seated in the boat as Father stepped out onto the dried-up weeds. Several steps away he sat down. I watched as Father lowered his head until it touched his gathered legs. I imagined him stabbed by the blue steel of a knife, his flesh sliced and gouged, the wounds bleeding, and something, its true nature eluding me, sprinkling salt over those wounds. My thoughts about our time in Felicity Precinct were always accompanied by sadness. It was my misfortune, born and raised the elder son of a dwarf, to have never exercised choice in my life. The circumstances of my birth and growing up, though, and my thoughts and experiences along the way, helped me to understand Chi-sŏp. Though Chi-sŏp, after he arrived in Ŭngang, was in many respects similar to the minister and the man of science, in one respect he was completely different. He himself was a worker. To borrow an expression he used, he himself was one martyr among many. We in our family had watched when just after our Felicity Precinct home was torn down he was dragged away bleeding across the empty lot. More or less driven from Seoul, he had bounced from one countryside factory to another working as a temporary laborer. Starting out as a foundry cutter, then a bike shop welder, then an assistant in pouring tempering water in a casting plant, he had been an unskilled laborer doing physical work in the massive factories of new industrial cities. He had picked up at least some experience at a variety of plants—wharf building, shipbuilding, glue, textiles, motor vehicles, appliances, cement, ice making, clothing. My work experience at the Ŭngang factories was only a fraction of his experience at various factories.

  That Chi-sŏp, whom Father liked, had become a labor activist during an age that had heaped economic affliction on Father was not entirely coincidental. Who knows? Perhaps the family of a dwarf was for him a subject of observation. The important thing was the warm affection he had extended to Father. At that time, only in his mind did there exist the beautiful, unspoiled world that he called the Land of the Moon. To make that world a reality outside his mind, he came to Ŭngang a brave man of action. He wanted to know what I had done to get my name on the bosses’ blacklist. It was a matter of a fifteen percent increase in pay for the work I did at Ŭngang Textile, a hundred percent increase in our bonus, and the rehiring of eighteen workers fired without cause. It was not, of course, a simple matter. While Yŏng-i, the steward of our union local, was taken away for a week to some unknown place for questioning, the union members were holding out by refusing to eat until they collapsed. Yŏng-hŭi was among them, singing, falling silent, shouting slogans, getting dizzy, passing out. Only later did the company people realize that the person who had set fifteen hundred people in motion was an assistant mechanic in the Maintenance Department. I sat in front of the raw cotton storeroom listening to the sad song sung by a man with a skein of thread in the Spinning Department. Yŏng-i, whom I hadn’t seen in a week, was unrecognizably thin and pale. Yŏng-hŭi brought Yŏng-i home. Yŏng-i burst into tears the moment she saw me. I was lying down, and the tears streaming from her haggard cheeks fell onto my chest. In a dark alley behind Ŭngang Machine Tools I’d been beaten by muscular shadows until I collapsed. Chi-sŏp calculated that I had succeeded in extracting 200 million wŏn from the unfair gains of the industrialists, who had violated their agreement to share. And there was an invisible outcome, too, the awakening of union members. I had revived a dead union, he said. I took his words as praise.

  “I didn’t do very much,” I said.

  “I know,” he responded.

  I didn’t know why he had spoken in that way.

  “You’ve only followed in the footsteps of many other people,” he said. “And now you had better realize your mistake.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Ignorance is of no help in anything you do,” he said in an angry tone.

  But I had something to say about that. “As you know, hyŏng, I haven’t had much opportunity to study. I had to cut short my studies in the high school correspondence course, and college was out of the question. And so I read books that fall into my hands, and whenever I don’t know something I find someone and ask. And when we came here, there were many things I didn’t know, so I went to the workers’ church and studied under two of the grown-ups. And I attended an institute at a college.”

  “And what did you get out of it?”

  “It opened my eyes.”

  “You talk as if you were born blind!” he said in a loud voice. “If a person like you knows a lot about a situation, what’s there to learn by leaving it? Here you’ve got people whose only knowledge of the situation is what you can tell them, and you’re telling me your eyes are opened? You’ve become completely blind—blind. And so you’re all tied up, unable to act on your own. Your ignorance has tied you all up. You’ve abandoned all the young people who trusted in you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I set up fifteen discussion groups. The people on the General Council led them.”

  “And who led the people on the General Council?”

  “The steward did a good job of that.”

  “And how about you?”

  “There were meetings set up by the minister—meetings of labor reps from various industries—and I started leading those meetings some time ago.”

  “Wouldn’t your father be amazed if he were alive now? Yes, indeed, you’ve got what it takes to be a fine theorist. If you want, you could be a high-level leader of the labor movement.”

  “I wish I knew why you’re speaking that way, hyŏng.”

  “What’s your reason for doing some
thing that someone else would do if you didn’t?”

  “Well, then, what should I be doing?”

  “Staying where you are.”

  “That’s the place where I work.”

  “Then stay there. Don’t leave. Think there, act there. Stay at the contact point—the place where workers and bosses meet.”

  He was a busy man. I had known that from the beginning. He hadn’t come up to Ŭngang from the south, changing buses and trains, merely to reminisce about the days in Felicity Precinct. We had a talk as we walked along the shore. “They say that at the ocean the best thing is to walk on the water,” he said. “The next best thing is to sail your boat on the water. And next is to look out on the water. Not a thing to worry about. Because we’re doing the third best thing now.” His voice was very gentle, making me believe he had read poetry. That night, however, he was a completely different person. He gave a one-and-a-half-hour lecture to a gathering of Ŭngang laborers at the workers’ church. Everyone was moved. All the time he was speaking, Yŏng-hŭi cried. Yŏng-i, the steward of our local, gave Yŏng-hŭi her handkerchief, but when the tears continued to flow, Yŏng-hŭi covered her eyes with the vice-steward’s handkerchief as well. “I thought of God’s grace.” Yŏng-i relayed these whispered words of Yŏng-hŭi to me. I hoped that Yŏng-hŭi’s god was the warmest possible god for her. The greatest gift that Yŏng-hŭi received from her god was that very benevolence. The day Chi-sŏp left, though, Yŏng-hŭi was working her shift and unable to see him off. It was the same with Yŏng-ho and me. Mother had prepared to leave for the lumberyard, and she stood in the dirty alley waving in response to Chi-sŏp’s farewell. Yŏng-i and the union’s general-affairs director saw him off at the station. The minister, the man of science, and the stewards of several other union locals turned out, Yŏng-i told me. I wondered what influence Chi-sŏp’s abrupt visit might have on me in the future. We had wasted too much time trying to figure out what was right, he said.

  After Chi-sŏp had come and gone, the first person to read the next change in me was the man of science. “If you think about it, the minister and I are not in line,” he said. “I’m not standing at the head of the line, either,” I said. “I’m not worthy of it.” “But it’s your line. How can I stand outside the line and shout for you?” In his room at the workshop he showed me a bottle I could not make sense of at first. I call it a bottle, but it was not the usual type of bottle with an inside and a closed-in space. It was a peculiar bottle formed by making a hole in the wall of a tube and passing one end of the tube through that hole. The man of science called it a Klein bottle. Figure 3 is that very bottle. The man of science had made such a bottle from a glass tube like the one in Figure 1. After flaring one end of the cylinder and tapering the other end, as in Figure 2, he made a hole in the wall and finished up as in Figure 3.

  Paper has two surfaces, inner and outer, but scholars have done research on “one-surface paper,” “closed space,” and other things without insides and outsides—queer things that common sense would not lead you to think of. And according to the man of science, this peculiar bottle was described in a research paper by a German mathematician, Felix Klein, that was based on purely abstract theoretical research. The man of science had me wondering. “This is the Klein bottle. No inside or outside, and it has a closed space,” he said. I looked intently at the bottle shown in Figure 3. It was simple in appearance and simple to explain, but I had no idea what he was talking about. I believed that since I hadn’t received a normal school education, I couldn’t understand a problem that was based on the most fundamental ideas. But the man of science said that even someone without educational training could bore his way to the core of a problem through commonsense methods. Sticking to theory makes a problem ever more complicated, he told me, and so I should think in simple terms. I observed that bottle for the longest time. “It really doesn’t have an inside,” I said. “I can’t tell the inside from the outside. And now I understand what they mean by a closed space.” The man of science smiled. “We wouldn’t have this kind of phenomenon if there was a distinction between the inner and outer parts.” That day when I asked why he had shown me the bottle he replied only that I had arrived at the instant he finished making it. It didn’t seem coincidental to me, though. What was even less understandable was that the essence of the bottle in Figure 3 was right there before my eyes, but its reality was ignored and it seemed to exist only in the world of imagination. And so I picked up the bottle shown in Figure 3 and asked, “Then what is this?” He merely said, “It doesn’t really exist.” I said goodbye and left his room.

  The machine workers at Ŭngang Heavy Industry had finished their overtime work and emerged from the factory’s main entrance and were dispersing into the dark. There was a vacant lot between that factory and the aluminum factory. There dark figures were burning and burying solid industrial waste. I arrived home late to find Mother counting money. It was from the sale of the bark, and she moistened her fingers with saliva to count it. I went up to the loft and lay down. Yŏng-ho returned from the factory and Yŏng-hŭi left for the night shift. From where I lay I could hear the one-eyed old man next door coughing. The working couple who rented a room from him had tipped over their meal tray and were fighting. Their child was wailing. Winter came to Ŭngang. The laborers of Ŭngang hunched up, went to the factories, and worked. It was a terribly cold winter. Everyone grew weaker.

  “Yŏng-su,” Mother called me one day. “Is something going on at the factory these days? Are you cooking up something again?”

  “We’ll have elections for our General Council and our steward in the spring. There’s some friction with the company people, but nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Then why are you meeting with people from other factories? Any connection with why Chi-sŏp came up?”

  “We all work for Ŭngang Group factories. Chi-sŏp too. He works down south, and the Ŭngang Group has a lot of factories there too.”

  “And so?”

  “And so we’re trying to do a good job with our union work, discussing what our wage demands should be, and talking about how we should encourage the workers in any factory where friction develops with the company. We have to meet a lot in order to get information. That’s all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then,” Mother said. “I had an awful dream. I dreamed you were arrested. You went to the main office in Seoul and killed one of the higher-ups. It was a terrible dream. Terrible.”

  “Mother,” I said. “Will you please not worry?”

  “If something happened to you it would be the end of us.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got to listen to me. Just do what you’re supposed to do at the factory. You’ll be arrested for sure if you don’t listen to me. You’ll commit a crime, you’ll be sentenced, you’ll end up in jail.”

  “I said I know!”

  It was too cold and depressing that winter. I suddenly felt as if I had lost everyone. In my sadness I tried to analyze myself. There was nothing to be done about my solitary nature. There wasn’t a single person who knew what I was thinking. I went to see the minister wanting to talk about something other than the work we had begun, but returned home without bringing it up. And so it was with the man of science too. When I thought about it, I realized we didn’t have time for leisurely talk. The company people had begun to stifle us. I wanted to make the higher-ups in the company realize that we were all in the same boat. But they couldn’t see it. They stubbornly insisted that they were in a different boat, and they expressed their own one-sided demands. I couldn’t contain my rage toward people who gained such huge profits—not through good work but through opportunism, outside support, ignorance, cruelty, luck, favoritism, and such.

  One day when the cold had slowly begun to abate, I sought out the man of science. The Klein bottle was on his windowsill. I considered it.

  “Now I understand,” I hastened to say. “In this b
ottle, inside becomes outside and outside becomes inside. Because there’s no inside or outside, we can’t talk of containing the inside—the notion of closing has no meaning here. If you just follow the wall, you can get out. So in this world the notion of enclosure itself is an illusion.”

  The man of science looked blankly into my face. “It’s just as you say,” he said.

  He picked up the Klein bottle and turned back toward me, but I had to leave.

  The assistant mechanic in the Maintenance Department of Ŭngang Textile walked off quickly toward the factory.

  The Spinyfish Entering My Net

  FIVE O’CLOCK ALREADY and still it was dark. The first light of day ought to have reached the window by now, where the curtain would absorb it while gloom was driven from my room. I picked up the intercom at the head of my bed and pushed the button that connected me with the kitchen. The speaker diaphragm trembled with the girl’s sleepy, tentative voice. I told her I wanted coffee, then rose and drew the curtain. Fog draped the window; it crept toward the ground. I watched the old dog moving in the fog. Still it lived, scattering and dispersing the fog, this dog that had belonged to my departed grandfather. The dog had been a gift to my uncle from a German businessman. Uncle in turn had presented this gift to Grandfather, letting it be known that the dog’s pedigree made reference to none other than the royal house of Hohenzollern. The old dog’s more recent ancestors had taken part in the Second World War, patrolling the Normandy coast and crossing the deserts of Africa. This story excited me. It was good to obey a leader’s orders unconditionally. The old dog’s ancestors had accompanied their masters to war, keeping watch over their trenches and standing guard. The leader had given the order to charge. “I am always right—trust in me, obey me, fight!” he had said. Typical of Europeans, who received a sound education, those people had fought with all their might. I admired their history. Sitting beside the pond, Grandfather’s dog struck out with its forefeet and killed a sparrow that had lit in search of food. Father said he had never seen such an alert, intelligent hunting dog. Whenever he went hunting, the car returned full of bloody animals. Grandfather had the animals dragged into the living room, staining the carpet, and he would roar with laughter. And then the dog, whom you could count on to be out in front of Grandfather, cornering the animals he shot, went out to the doghouse and chewed on an ample portion of ribs. That was when it was young. The old dog moved slowly. I picked out a thick book and threw it at the dog. It fell wide of the mark on the tile deck of the swimming pool, and the old dog disappeared into the fog.