The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  His only traveling companion, Mother Seoul, the manager of the temple, stood watching him from a safe distance. To tell the truth, she should have been sitting and crying together with Mandogi, but what’s the use of playing the part of the mourner on a lonely mountain with no audience around? More than that, she was scared to death of the deranged dimwit, who was bellowing like a bull ready to charge. For a while, she could only stare, her mouth gaping.

  On the road through the forest at the foot of the mountain, looking up at the summit of Mount Halla, its towering brown cliffs sparkling in the sun, then surveying the tranquil sea, not far beyond the base of the mountain, and then Sŏngnae on the coast, Mandogi cried as hard as he could.

  At last, his tears dried up. He wiped his tear-stained face with his towel. He slouched a little as he looked at the ocean, and he moved his right hand from his forehead down to pinch his nose, and with a snort, and then another snort, he blew his nose into his hand. He sucked in air through his puffy, swollen nostrils, wiped the filth from under his nose, and he smiled. As he smiled he looked over toward where she was standing some distance away and said, “Mother Seoul, it’s such a good feeling, how empty my heart is.”

  But she wasn’t there. And not just her. Her little bag and her cloth bundle had also disappeared, and all that remained were the faded, withering weeds, bending in the autumn wind. If he hadn’t spotted someone racing along the other side of the trail, down the cliff and out of the forest, then he probably wouldn’t have moved from that spot. He would have spent the whole night wandering around the woods looking for her. Resenting the priest, who wouldn’t even come on a day like this despite being in Sŏngnae, Mandogi’s gaze moved toward the city, past the forest and the foothills, to where he caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure running down the mountain.

  His pack strapped tightly to his shoulders, Mandogi raced down the mountain path, its rocks jutting out everywhere. How come Mother Seoul went ahead all by herself, he wondered as he called out, “Mother Seoul! Mother Seoul!” hurling his cries forward. He didn’t know if they could reach her, but he kept calling, “Mother Seoul! Mother Seoul!” begging her to stop. Eventually, he noticed that the tone of the cries coming out of his mouth had changed. At some point, he had switched from calling, “Mother Seoul!” to calling, “Ŏmŏni! Ŏmŏni!” as he chased her.

  He hadn’t been the slightest bit conscious of the change. The moment the last bit of the temple was obscured by the shadows of the forest, he thought that the temple itself was somehow similar to his disappearing mother. He vaguely remembered her figure climbing up the mountain toward the temple with him on her back, calling, “Keiton! Keiton!” He could almost see the two of them, his long-lost mother and his childhood self, and his mother, who had handed him black candy wrapped in white paper as she left the temple, was now the person rushing down the mountain. She had gone far away, leaving him all alone. But that mother’s shape was no longer blurry. At some point, she had become the spitting image of Mother Seoul.

  She suddenly slowed her pace, maybe because she was relieved to hear Mandogi stop crying. You couldn’t blame her for trying to escape in a cloud of dust. Mandogi was a fearsome lion, and she was the lion tamer, but she had lost the power to brandish her whip. For the first time, she saw the confused, cowering heart deep inside the dimwit. She feared Mandogi’s trembling body, his insides seething, ready to erupt, spewing hot lava all over her. She was afraid of his arm. With her own eyes, she had seen that same arm holding down the arms of eleven other men in an arm wrestling match at one of the gatherings of the temple benefactors. If he opened his big hand to strangle her, used the superhuman strength in his arms, her worn-out bones would crumble just like that.

  After catching up with her, Mandogi’s face was dripping with sweat, as if he had just plunged his head underwater. Even so, the single tear trickling down his face stood out from the rest. The two squatted down on the path in the wind-swept pampas grasses, where they could see the horizon above the ocean. Mandogi buried his head, riddled with flaky, foul-smelling scabs, and sobbed into her chest.

  “Mother Seoul, you seem like my ŏmŏni to me now. I thought I saw her shape, which I’ve seen in my dreams, in the temple forest. I forgot my ŏmŏni a long, long time ago, my ŏmŏni who gave me candy wrapped in white paper, but I thought I saw her riding away on a white cloud like a goddess. Mother Seoul, you sure do look like my ŏmŏni.”

  “What kind of person was your mother?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember very well. But she was like you. Her face, her voice, all like yours. She was such a nice person,” Mandogi said, though they couldn’t have looked alike, because his mother’s face was round like the moon, whereas Mother Seoul’s was long and thin.

  “Hmph, I thought you were mute—you can talk like a decent human being?” Her true colors returned, the harshness returning to her voice, but she wasn’t completely without compassion. When Mandogi agitated her explosive temper, she brought her fearful whip down upon him, but that could be attributed to her illness. Her moods would change suddenly and completely, like a clear sky suddenly clouding up and pouring rain. A few days later, on the way back from Sŏngnae, she stepped into the store and bought him some socks. And then she bought him some undershirts. For poor Mandogi, it was like receiving fine garments, stitched with silver and gold. His towering six-foot frame covered in a tattered coat and paji (Korean trousers), his respect and gratitude for Mother Seoul overflowed.

  As he looked down at the flat, sprawling city of Sŏngnae, at the blue of the ocean and the endless blue of the sky, he cursed the priest. Mother Seoul had almost ridden away on a white cloud like his long-lost mother, so he was happy to have found her, to be able to sit together with her. He was still sad to have left the temple, but he thought he would be very happy if the priest could come to the temple and he could only serve the Buddha there one more time. He asked Mother Seoul if he could. But she wouldn’t listen. Aside from saying, “You have an important duty that you don’t understand,” she never touched on the topic of the priest. Their relationship, as head priest and temple manager, was give and take in ways that Mandogi couldn’t understand, but it could be said that she understood how the priest felt. He had taken the tonsure and dressed up in a priest’s stole, but he was a more worldly man than the old priest who came before him, and eventually he had to abandon the temple, which was right in the middle of the partisans’ sphere of influence. As the fighting on the island got more violent, people stopped coming to the temple, and it was no use managing it anymore. There were rumors that the priest went around visiting mistresses he kept in every myŏn (an administrative division between county and village) on the island, staying at a different house every day, and perhaps planning with each one a new scheme for how to make money, a new candidate for the national assembly. Soon, he had no reason to go up to Kannon Temple, which was clearly bound to be destroyed.

  Mandogi and the others stayed in a makeshift temple in Sŏngnae for a while but eventually settled at S Hill Temple. It was small and felt more like the ruins of a temple, or perhaps it could best be called a police station. When winter came, Mandogi looked upon the distant, snow-covered Mount Halla for the first time as one from outside the heart of the deep valley. Before long, thick clouds rode in on strong winds, covering the mountain with snow from the peak down to the foothills, and these gloomy days continued on.

  One sunny day, a pale light shined on the snowy Mount Halla. It was a beautiful sight on one of the island’s rare calm afternoons. Suddenly, a thick, black smoke started rising from the side of the mountain. In the wink of an eye, the smoke had erupted, casting long, black shadows over the white snow as it hovered in the sky above. At night, it continued burning in thin swirls, like a brush fire. Kannon Temple had finally burned. The government’s anticommunist (or antipartisan) troops had won the battle for the temple. The temple, demolished and soaked in gasoline, disappeared into the rising flames.

  Kannon Templ
e had a history longer and more colorful than any other temple on this island; its sanctuary was the pride of the people. But Mandogi’s heart cared little for its value to society. It wasn’t just a temple that had burned down into ash. Mandogi’s heart, too, turned to ash and crumbled inside him. If Mandogi were a fish, the temple would be a pond, deep and wide. His umbilical cord had been cut, and now he had to live on his own. The first fissures had begun to form between Mandogi and “temple hand,” which had been one and the same.

  Though from another point of view, Mandogi had been exploited for over ten years, so much that he didn’t have time to eat or sleep. He could have been saying, “Ahh, what a relief that it burned.” You could say that it wasn’t an umbilical cord, but a slave’s chain, eating into his very soul, that had been cut, leaving him a free man. Mandogi could have gone far away from this bloodstained island, maybe even to Mount Chiri to find the high priest who saw the heart of the Buddha in his eyes. Why would anyone still cling to this island, which had been reduced to a bloodbath? The high priest had said, “Don’t cry! Your tears tear at the very heart of the Buddha. If you don’t want to go with me, that’s fine. If you ever have a mind to study, or want to see my face, just cross the sea and come find me any time.” If he had the will, the way was open, wasn’t it?

  But of course, never for a moment did Mandogi think of the high priest. Kannon Temple had gone from the earth, but not from his soul. And if he never thought that the temple exploited him, never formed bitter, painful feelings toward it, could you really say that he had been exploited? His very breath and smell must have clung to each and every tile in the roof of the temple. It must have lay hidden there together with the benevolent old priest’s warm breath. But now, that roof was scattered everywhere, crumbled and turned to ash. It must be said that, to Mandogi, who was so attached to the temple, the flames brought a shock that threatened his very sanity.

  Perhaps the temple-goers thought that in such turbulent times, it was especially important to rely on the Buddha. But as soon as it burned— no, as soon as she heard that it burned—one woman among them went mad dancing the dance of the destroyed temple. But there were also those who came out to laugh at her in a village that had just been soaked in gasoline and burned down.

  “Haha, what? A mad butterfly died in the cold winter? Oh, what, a temple burned down? Oh, I know all about it. That woman went mad because of it. Going crazy just because a temple burns—I’d sure like to try it. Forgive me, Buddha! Forgive me, Buddha! There might be other temples elsewhere, but oh, my loved ones, my children, they’re nowhere to be found. My father, my mother, every last relative killed by the police. My clan will disappear from the earth. My house, my belongings, everything burned up. If the sky crumbled and fell, I would have no place to hide. All my hiding places have been plugged up. And even so, I’m not crazy. I’m even sane enough to sing. ‘In the early morning the bird cries, my stomach is empty! In the early evening the bird cries, I love my husband! Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat! An aged squash is tasty, but an aged person is ugly.’ Hey, what’s wrong? The drum in my stomach is beating. Oh, you want to sing a song too? You want to sing your mother’s song, don’t you? The child in my stomach, he’s still just a little ball of flesh, but he’s already good at the drum. He must be, he must be a boy. Don’t you know by now? I’m not crazy. It’s just that, ah, that damn crow keeps following me. This big, black shadow keeps following me …”

  Standing in the ashes of what used to be the village, the pregnant madwoman danced, holding her belly. She muttered, she shouted, she sang, and she screamed. And with a single round fired from the M1 of a national defense guard on patrol, she fell.

  1 Ŏmŏni is the Korean word for “mother.”

  S Hill was set in the rising area between the mountains in the center of the island and the plains in the coastal areas. If you went down to the base of S Hill, you could see the village of Shimomura. From there, the ocean is still far away. The sun had not quite risen as Mandogi walked the rough, rocky mountain path from S Hill down to the valley. He had just finished his shift at the sentry post and was on his way home, an iron spear made in the shape of a gun hanging clumsily from his shoulder. Mandogi’s relief had come just at the break of dawn. As he lumbered along his back was always hunched over, probably from overwork. For some reason, Mandogi felt uneasy. He felt as though there were rocks packed into the pit of his stomach. It was so suffocating that it made him want to shove his arm down his throat to fish them out. The tension was so great that it made him want to pull out his ribs and tear open his chest. And yet, it was permeated with a twinge of sadness. He had no relatives, so it could be said that he had no experience with grief. Since the time of his birth, he hadn’t even known his parents, so he would have understood neither the aggravation and loneliness of losing your parents, nor the gratitude you feel toward your parents. Besides, he had grown to the age at which his beard grew thick on his chin, so not having parents wasn’t a problem anymore. On top of that, he worked so hard that he had no time to indulge in sadness. All the same, today he felt uneasy, with a twinge of sadness.

  Ahh, my heart’s so tense, thought our Mandogi. Lumbering along like a bear, he stopped and looked back at the footprints he was leaving in his straw sandals. The early spring grass had begun to sprout, green and sparkling with drops of morning dew, but dirty and crushed flat where he had cruelly trampled it. Last year, at the beginning of spring, Mandogi couldn’t have brought himself to step on the grass sprouting on the road, vigorously pushing its way up through the snow. To avoid it, he had to slowly pick his way through, widening and narrowing his bowlegged stance. He stopped and crouched, fixing his gaze on those brave green sprouts, shivering in what was left of the melting snow. He felt somehow happy, smiling to himself as he tenderly touched the grass with his fingers. Before long, the little sprouts would rise up and shake off the snow, and they would steadily grow as tall as Mandogi himself, and then he would clear a path through the grass without even thinking about it. But a year had passed since then, and today Mandogi’s figure on the road was quite different. He recognized the change in himself, now trampling the green grass underfoot, though he hadn’t thought about why the change had taken place. His gaze moved from the weeds at his feet up to the distant mountain, to the peaks of Mount Halla beneath the clear, blue afternoon sky. Suddenly, Mandogi thought, Ahh, it’s been a month since then, since the government burned down the temple. The sun took on the light of early spring. There were those who had gone mad back then, but Mandogi had not. He felt like he had watched his soul leak out like a puff of smoke, but eventually his tears had stopped.

  “How come, in this world, a girl so young and so pretty has to die? Oh, my heart’s so tense,” muttered Mandogi as he squatted on the road, unable to understand his own complicated thoughts. As he muttered to himself he stroked the trampled grass in his fingers.

  “Hey, Mr. Yi, don’t worry. No matter who dies, all our spirits are the same after we die,” he repeated what he had said to Old Man Yi, with whom he had just parted after spending the night together at the sentry post.

  “Oh, Mandogi. The poor thing. That poor girl …”

  “Hail Mother Kannon. Hail Mother Kannon,” said Mandogi, fingering his rosary beads, Old Man Yi’s voice echoing inside his eardrums. Perhaps this was the reason for the inexplicable tension forming in the pit of his stomach. As they walked back after finishing their shift at the sentry post Old Man Yi from Shimomura had asked him to hold a service for the poor girl.

  “Hey, Mandogi, you just have to hold a service. Please, you just have to. What a pity, too, about O Sŏbang (“Sŏbang” means something like “Mister” or “Miss.” In the past, it was attached to the names of people with low status). It’s like he killed her, that pretty, sensible girl. Ah, such a pity. Such a pity, right, Mandogi? That poor girl?”

  That poor girl, Old Man O’s daughter-in-law, had hanged herself in the old persimmon tree in the courtyard of the house that morni
ng before dawn. Whenever Mandogi went down to Shimomura, he liked to drop by this house, where the husband, the wife, and their daughter-in-law lived together, just the three of them. On autumn days, while Mandogi sat on the porch and stuffed his cheeks with tender steamed potatoes she would always come by and say, “I love that persimmon tree, love it so much I can hardly stand it,” in those exact words. Since he was a child, her husband had played in the persimmon tree, so she felt that the tree could understand her husband’s feelings. They say she would sneak down at night to climb the tree and sit there pining for her husband. The tree’s branches were already heavy with fruit, which was starting to get its color, like her ruddy face in the autumn sun. She would hike up her skirt a bit and stand on an old orange box at the base of the persimmon tree and pick a big piece of fruit with the leaf still attached. At times like those, her white teeth sparkling in the autumn sun, her smiling face was truly beautiful. In fact, she even aroused a sense of beauty in dimwitted Mandogi, who looked at her and thought, “Ah, it’s Kannon, right here on earth.” And she wasn’t just beautiful. She never called Mandogi “dimwit” or “idiot,” nor did she think of him that way. Even for dimwits like Mandogi, she was a kind, approachable, beautiful person. Sitting close to her, just hearing her talk, Mandogi could feel warm and happy.

  Though she climbed the persimmon tree at night and pined for her husband, she was not a widow, but an upstanding wife. Her husband, a peasant and an only son, had joined the partisans and had gone up to Mount Halla. Before long, Old Man O’s whole family was labeled “red,” that is, part of the mountain unit. They insisted to the police, who would take advantage of their son’s absence, that he was away working on the mainland, but they had no proof. Under martial law, when no one could leave the island without a special certificate, work somewhere on the mainland was a rather overused excuse. Of course, this didn’t mean that there was proof that he had gone up the mountain with the partisans, either. But that wasn’t important. In this country, an official could arrest a woman walking down the street on a whim. If he said, “You’re a red,” that would be enough. Similarly, Old Man O’s family just had an air about them that was enough to bring the police around.