The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  He entered, striking a match to light the kitchen’s oil lamp, but the moment he turned up the wick, he cried out, “Oh my god, a ghost!” before his voice was choked off and he toppled over. Right before his eyes was the ghost of Mandogi, holding something in his mouth, his face and clothing caked with blood, chewing as he stared blankly at the patrolman. Confounded, the patrolman crawled out to wake his colleagues.

  “Oh—oh—oh my god! Th—that guy M—Mandogi, f—f—finally, thanks to that tightwad Mother Seoul, that guy Mandogi, he fi—finally turned into a ghost and came back! There’s a ghost at the temple!”

  “Idiot! What is it? What is it? Get ahold of yourself!”

  They soon realized that he wasn’t making it up, and the three men (which was the entire police force at the temple) grabbed their guns and said, “Hmph. All right, leave it to me,” their minds and bodies tense as they came to the entrance to the kitchen. One of them timidly poked his wrist inside and shined his flashlight around the room, but what they were looking for had already disappeared.

  The midnight silence of the temple was broken. Before long, the report had reached the captain, who was uncharacteristically manning the sentry post late at night, not wanting to return to the temple. The captain, who couldn’t help but be concerned about a second appearance of the ghost, wanted a detailed description of what had happened. And at first he showed astonishment, saying, “Hmm, I see. Yes, that really is strange.” He said that he had heard about it, but he had never actually seen the ghost. And if the ghost was actually the dimwit Mandogi, by any means, he wanted to meet him sometime. The captain kept coughing dryly. As a captain, sometimes he had to tell lies like a captain, but he was different from Mrs. Yun. He wasn’t the type of person who would see a ghost and instantly pass out with a fever. He couldn’t allow himself to clamor about ghosts with his men, so he must have felt rather constrained.

  If there were a ghost, what could he do? No, in fact, it was the position of the police that ghosts weren’t even strange anymore. But the living Mandogi, who hadn’t returned to the temple, had already been executed. They had already confirmed it with the dispatch station. He had been charged with treason against President Syngman Rhee and against the Republic of Korea, and somewhere along the line he had become a fighter for the reds, and that very day he had been transferred from the substation to the main police headquarters in Sŏngnae. At headquarters, they found out that Mandogi was a kongyangju at S Hill Temple with Mother Seoul, who was well known for being wealthy, so they contacted her at her address in Sŏngnae. Not wanting to stand out from the rest of the police in this country, whose most important job was to take bribes, they wanted to turn Mandogi into a bargaining chip. But Mother Seoul wasn’t born yesterday. “Humans die but come back to live in this world again, and we all go around and around in the endless cycle of death and rebirth, so if I pay this money, what difference will it make? And what makes you think I have that kind of money in the first place? And in any case, it must be difficult to stay alive in this world, in the Republic of Korea, if you’ve committed treason against President Syngman Rhee,” she said, refusing the offer that the demonic chief investigator at the headquarters had taken great pains to propose. Mandogi, thus abandoned by Mother Seoul, was penciled in to be executed in three days. In the policemen’s opinions, it was only natural that Mandogi should hold a grudge, and there was no way around being haunted by his ghost. But the ghost really resembled his incorrigible living self, and while the police officers didn’t know about the first time, the captain knew that he had appeared twice in the same night. And of course, after midnight, in what they call the wee hours, they say it’s the perfect time for ghosts to come out. All the same, Mandogi was a temple hand, so it must say a lot that he appeared at a temple, where it was rather difficult for ghosts to appear, given that it is governed by Buddhist law. The policemen looked at each other face-to-face, nodding in agreement.

  The next morning, the captain sent a messenger to the jurisdiction’s substation on the New Road, and to Mother Seoul’s residence in Sŏngnae, to tell of the appearance of Mandogi’s ghost.

  Mother Seoul knew about the sudden death of Mrs. Yun from Shimomura, who had been possessed by the girl’s bitter ghost, so she was horrified that the next ghost had chosen to appear at S Hill temple. That stupid dimwit, obstinate as a snapping turtle, had some bad karma, so she probably couldn’t put an end to the curse of this ghost very easily. She must have caused it in the first place when she turned down the chief investigator’s deal. But she thought, there’s nothing I can do about it now. If you just had money, you could stay afloat in these turbulent times, so why should she have wasted tens of thousands of her own on this? But she had to do something about this bitter ghost. If it kept coming around the temple all the time, it would affect her dignity and her credibility. So which road should she take? This way, or that way, she racked her brain. On the one hand, she could soothe his bitterness and ask him to stop wandering the earth, but on the other hand she could use the power of spells to wring the life out of the ghost and thrust him down into hell. This way, or that way, she had to do something. But, in order to release him from his cold grudge, she would have to devote herself wholeheartedly to praying for several days, and she herself would have to wholeheartedly repent. Once she thought it out that far, Mother Seoul burst out laughing in spite of herself.

  “Really, what the hell took me so long? Yes! These days, you have to survive by tearing flesh off of others. Really, really, repenting? As if I’m really going to repent? That really doesn’t sound like me.”

  This soliloquy strengthened her resolve, and she firmly made up her mind. She decided to go back to the temple right away, and to make offerings to the Buddha, and to pray the spells herself.

  Before he appeared at the temple as a ghost, Mandogi spent three days in an overcrowded cell at the headquarters, standing on his two feet with no space to sit down. During that time, he came close enough to hell that he could peek into its dark gates. The events of the day he left the temple had fallen on Mandogi like a sack of bricks. Because of this, though he couldn’t help but feel that it was a little late, now that he had come to the end, he felt that now he could clearly see the contours of this life. Even if you could call him a dimwit, he wasn’t blind, and he wasn’t deaf. On the third day, Mandogi was taken across the courtyard again to the interrogation room, which he could see from the skylight in the cell.

  His manner calm, the square-faced chief investigator announced that because his guardian, Mother Seoul, had refused to bail him out, he would unfortunately have to be taken to the drill field. “It’s too bad she abandoned you,” he added, as if it was something he himself regretted. In fact, it had been unfortunate for him that Mother Seoul had rejected his offer, as he had failed to get his hands on that wad of cash. So you could say that even the veteran slaughterer, Chief Investigator “Demon,” as they called him, had a motive for letting Mandogi go. Though of course, it wasn’t out of benevolence or compassion.

  Staring at the shiny, fat, golden ring around the investigator’s finger, Mandogi listened to his sentence.

  “Don’t you have anything to say? Why are you so quiet?” the investigator asked Mandogi, who wouldn’t take his eyes off his gold ring and did not respond. “You’re going to the drill field, you know. Do you know what happens at the drill field?”

  “I know. It’s where you get executed, the drill field.”

  “Mmhmm, you do know. So don’t you want to keep on living?”

  “How come you’re asking me something like that?”

  “How come? I’m just asking you if you don’t want to die.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” asked Mandogi, fixing his eyes on the investigator’s face. “Didn’t you already say, Chief, that I was going to the drill field?”

  After he had finished saying this, Mandogi paused for a bit, then smiled quietly. There was no meaning behind his smile, but after he stopped smi
ling he clammed up and didn’t answer a single question more.

  Well, the chief investigator was worried. More than worried, he felt that the young priest had gotten the best of him. But then again, he kept insisting that his occupation was not temple work, but sentry. It was as if the dimwitted priest were dodging his attacks. This was too different from the slaughterer’s own self-centered way of doing things. If you had any sense of this world’s customs, when you were sentenced to die, you would cower before death, prostrating yourself on the floor and begging for your life, finally driving yourself insane. Of course, there were brave men among prisoners. They could calmly look death right in the eyes. Instead of saying last words, they would sing songs of the revolution, and they would die relaxed, standing upright. But even then, there was usually a tinge of tragedy in the air. While they didn’t cower, prostrate themselves on the floor, and beg for their lives, there would be flickers of this trapped, pitiful feeling, and suddenly their instincts would kick in. They would suddenly experience sorrow and tragedy, which is what made slaughtering them so thrilling. It was fuel for the slaughterer, who was overflowing with feelings of scorn and sympathy.

  That was the way it was, but still he looked for an exception to the rule. “Isn’t there anyone who stays silent and smiles quietly as he dies?” This was one of the things the boastful, unscrupulous chief inspector would say all the time. He would say, “Isn’t there anyone who stays silent and smiles quietly as he dies?”

  But how could this be? Didn’t Mandogi fit the bill the best? Up until now, no one had fit the mold. When he smiled, he didn’t give the slaughterer the motivation he needed to smile quietly as he killed. In fact, the quiet smile came first from Mandogi. That is, the one whose head was going on the chopping block was first to smile. But if he smiled first like that, it cast doubt on the purpose of having executions in the first place. There would be no executions if they couldn’t be used to establish absolute power through fear of death. And maybe the main problem was that execution wasn’t any fun anymore.

  When, despite his habitual saying, someone like Mandogi, someone so unfeeling, appeared before his eyes, he eventually got irritated. It became extremely unpleasant. But he had his way of responding. While he should have taken a cue from Mandogi and shut his mouth, it was understandable that he started shouting at Mandogi for no reason and commanded the jailer to take him back to his cell. “Hmph, this is the kind of guy you should let live. Once you kill him, there’s no bringing him back to life. It’s too bad you can’t make him suffer twice. Ah, hahaha!” Muttering in his chair, and laughing loud enough to blow away the smoke from his cigarette, the chief investigator watched Mandogi walk away. Inside, he had wanted to save Mandogi, but it was already too late. After the deal with Mother Seoul fell through, he couldn’t let his reputation be tarnished.

  Mandogi had resigned himself to the drill field, but he couldn’t understand the first thing about Mother Seoul’s abandoning him. The others in the cell said that Mother Seoul hadn’t paid the money, called “bail,” that was necessary to get him out. Oh, I see, he thought. That seems reasonable, he thought. “That’s a reasonable thing to do,” Mandogi told the others.

  Dozens of people were crammed into the three- or four-tsubo cell, packed together in one giant pile. When he got back from the interrogation room across the courtyard, the space was already full and there was no place to sit down. It was like the surface of a pond that closes and surrounds a sinking stone. The cell was so packed with prisoners that Mandogi couldn’t get inside, and two of the jailers had to kick him and push him from behind, until they could finally close the door. There was a steady flow of the sick, the malnourished, and those up for execution leaving the overcrowded cell. Fights would break out among the companions, who were robbing one another of places to sit. If you woke up to a cool sensation around your shoulder, and you turned your neck, it was often the cold corpse of one of your comrades, leaning on you for support. During those three days, Mandogi performed the services, which he had been unable to complete for Old Man O and his daughter-in-law, for seven of his companions who expired in the cell.

  The cell, with only one small window, was a crucible for smells. If you opened the door, the foul odors would come at you like daggers. They would stab into your nose, all the way up inside your head, then down to your stomach, where they made you want to vomit. Like a moment of being enveloped in a harsh, invisible smoke, it almost made you faint. But after a while you got used to the smell. It was the smell of the foaming bucket of human waste that the maggots swam through, the smell of layer upon layer of every kind of secretion stuck to the skin of the prisoners. The bodies that were close to death were already giving off a gassy smell. It was the smell of the blood squashed out of the bedbugs, the fleas, the lice, and every kind of parasite. The air was as heavy as mud, thick with all kinds of odors, so much that it was as though the smell could take shape and you could see it with your eyes, and it would solidify and stick to your fingers. Everyone was packed into a cell like this. But among the prisoners, there were probably some who were bailed out and set free, but only in cases where a family gathered all of its fortune to exchange. Most of them had to resign themselves to dying immediately. But what about those like Mandogi, who didn’t have a single relative? Who would help them? So Mandogi himself thought it strange that anyone would want to pay the money to set him free. Mandogi thought that even if someone did, the police would have no reason to let him go. For this reason, the next morning at dusk, when he was loaded onto a truck for the execution grounds with over twenty other prisoners, he didn’t feel any bitterness toward Mother Seoul.

  On the execution grounds in the corner of the airport drill field, the executions had been carried out, to be sure. But in the world of humans, it seems that sometimes coincidence rears its ugly head. There was no doubt that the executions had been completed, but Mandogi hadn’t died. At the break of dawn, Mandogi burst out from under all the corpses. The bullets should all have flown through the beam of light bored out of the darkness of daybreak by the truck’s headlights, but Mandogi had come back to life. As soon as the bullet flew out of the gun barrel, it must have confused Mandogi’s sharp, tonsured head with his oddly long, stretched nose, and it had missed him. No, the louse that he rescued must have rallied his comrades to bite him all at the same time, and at that moment the itchiness must have been too much to bear. Mandogi gave his body a great twist and then a great shake. The bullet had probably missed him and grazed his ear. No, even if it missed him altogether, he still fell over. From the moment he heard the gunshot, he was already dead. From the group of over twenty, they formed smaller groups, and when they first bathed them in the light from the headlights, Mandogi stood ready in the flood of light, unable to open his eyes. Mm, I’ll be dead soon. That is, he expected to die. He had to die, he thought, so with that intention, he waited for that moment. It was even his duty to die if the gun went off—bang! So he fell over, and became one of the dead, and woke up to a flock of crows.

  When he opened his eyes, he felt as if he were looking up at the blurry surface of the water from the bottom of the sea, and his legs were caught in something and he couldn’t move. On the other side of the water’s surface, a baby was crying incessantly, and there was a strange feeling in his ankles, like being trapped under a boulder. The upper half of his body upright, Mandogi moved the lower half and jerked his legs up and out. Right then, one of the objects that were holding his legs fell, and it was a corpse that seemed to have been leaning against his neck and had fallen on top of him. When he touched it in the faint light of dusk, a chill ran from Mandogi’s hand up his spine. By then, Mandogi already had to use his energy to fend off the beaks and claws of the attacking crows, rather than to confirm whether or not these bodies were dead.

  Bawling in voices just like those of crying babies, the crows swooped in from all directions. Mandogi waved both big hands to shoo away the crows that perched leisurely, flapping their wings on to
p of his head and shoulders. Finally, Mandogi took the stubborn crows by their stomachs and threw them to the ground. After the crows confirmed that he was completely alive and flew away, Mandogi discovered another flock of crows, aside from those already dotting the surrounding corpses with black. The crows that stayed there surrounding him were even more ominous than the corpses beneath. This ominousness shocked him back to his senses. It seemed like the crows were staying in one place, but they weren’t. There were some that were constantly moving, though never venturing far from their original positions. Standing with their wings folded, they hopped up and down on the bodies just like boxers. Maybe they were making fun of humans. Not wanting the crows to land on him, Mandogi crawled on the ground to get away.

  After he got away from the flock of crows, Mandogi realized that he had somehow miraculously escaped death. Even after discovering that his ear had been shaved off, he savored the warm feeling bubbling up inside him. Having gone back through his memories, he finally moved both hands and pressed down on the inside pocket on the left side of his cloak. There was something that had to be there. Oh! There it was! It was definitely there! There, in his hand, he could feel the hard, half-moon-shaped comb. He remembered pressing down on it with his left hand just before his execution. He slowly pulled it out. He stared at the comb, shimmering in his soiled fist. Then he lifted it to the tip of his nose and sucked the scent deep into his nostrils. He breathed out and then breathed in deeply once more. Mandogi smiled his first quiet smile since waking up and stood up. Now that he was standing, he knew that he had to leave. He felt in his heart that this wasn’t the place to be daydreaming. Well then, where should he go? Mandogi just stood there for a bit. He moved the comb (which could be said to have become a good-luck charm) in his hand and soon smelled it again. Hmm, if I just follow this scent, I should be all right. Mandogi decided to let the comb guide him.