The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  Mandogi brought his face close to hers for a moment, and the scent of her light, disheveled hair rose up and lingered deep inside of his nostrils. Mixed with the smell of camellia oil, it was the smell of his mother, and it was the smell of a woman. Mandogi held Mother Seoul tight. His whole body became tense, his heart swelling, and his tears—his tears overflowed. With tears streaming down his face, Mandogi smiled. Before long, with the noise of the rising flames coming closer, Mandogi felt the part between his legs get hard. With the violent sound of the flames burning redder and redder, a pure, pleasant feeling bubbled up inside him, and suddenly it stood up. He lifted her body up toward the ceiling, feeling as if she could fly. What could he have been thinking? Though he had felt bitter hatred for her from the cellar under the altar, ever since she had fallen, his body had become strangely aroused, and he had wanted to unite with her. He closed his eyes for a moment, and felt her hand, no, Mother Kannon’s hand stretching down toward his crotch. The harder it got, the tighter she held on. The power that came from down there granted Mandogi’s body a new, inexhaustible strength, and he felt so light that he could fly away, and he wanted to fly away with her. It was a mysterious strength that rose up from within his own body. He felt not a single speck of the guilt that he had felt that time in the shed on that summer afternoon. Mandogi left the burning temple, and he could see the light shining down on the path he was to continue on. After he opened his eyes, he continued across the grounds, conscious of her hand, conscious of Mother Kannon’s warm hand, which had disappeared from his crotch. At the temple gate, he touched the pile of straw and leaves covered in oil, and the burnable twigs. Once the fire had consumed them, it would make its way down to the ground, and before long it would spread toward the shed. He waited for the moment when the gasoline and ammunition in the shed would burst into flames.

  Mandogi lay Mother Seoul down to sleep on the roadside where the fire wouldn’t reach her. She lay there silently, her body glued to the ground. When he had finally taken his hands from her body and stretched out her bent back, Mandogi let out a deep sigh. Strangely, he hadn’t been conscious of rescuing her from the danger of the fire. He had just brought her out of the temple and placed her there. But at the same time, he had let the police officers burn, like burning up bugs—no, like throwing lice in a kettle fire. He no longer thought of it as murder. As if he suddenly remembered, Mandogi put his hand in his inside pocket and pulled out the comb. After drawing its smell deep inside his nostrils, he placed the comb on her chest, returning it to its original owner.

  Having changed his mind, Mandogi banged on one of the empty oil cans and started to wake the temple from outside the gate. It looked like the police weren’t completely awake yet. “The Buddha’s in your heart. The Buddha’s in your heart,” a heavenly voice came down from above the rising flames, which were burning ever more brightly. The temple was engulfed in flame. Leaving the burning temple, along with Mother Seoul and her comb on the roadside, Mandogi lumbered in the direction opposite the sentry post. Before long, he was in the forest.

  1 A sho is an antiquated Japanese unit of measure equal to about 1.8 liters.

  As many as ten days had passed, and it was a day in March 1949. An American LST transport ship had docked in Sŏngnae and was spewing out reinforcements for the government’s March operation to exterminate the communists on Cheju-do.1 The police had checked the execution log for the day Mandogi should have been executed, and now they were going out to do an on-site investigation.

  The authorities had been racking their brains over the problem of the fire at S Hill Temple. But if they didn’t take care of this quickly, they would be taking men away from the cooperative forces fighting to suppress the communists. So, in the process of the investigation, the origin of this ghost story about Mandogi, which had flown into the streets, became less clear. It was because of the testimony of the sole surviving witness, Mother Seoul. And there were the bodies of the police officers, burned clean black, to substantiate her claim that Mandogi had committed arson. But that of itself was not enough to prove Mother Seoul’s innocence, for a ghost could not commit arson. Fearing that the blame might fall on herself, she became frantic, and insisted that it was not a ghost that had come to the temple, but the living Mandogi, in the flesh. She said that while she had been held gently by Mandogi, she had opened her eyes halfway, and she had seen what the dimwit had done. The authorities were bewildered. They were bewildered because they were dealing with Mother Seoul. If it were anyone else, they could just use the usual method of hanging the witness, and the situation would resolve itself quickly and quietly. But if they accepted Mother Seoul’s testimony, it meant accepting that Mandogi had committed arson. And wasn’t that the same as acknowledging his survival? It was such a strange thing. Mandogi had already been executed, but everyone knew that he was wandering around as a ghost.

  What had been done had been deemed the embodiment of justice, so they were not allowed to question it, or find fault with it, or attempt to overturn it. This kind of system is necessary to maintain order. So naturally, the many suborders that support it have to be the same way. If you questioned them, they would fall apart, not unlike scattered building blocks. Ever faithful to order, the police chose the wiser path. If this somehow made it up to higher authorities, they would erase these events, and the police would have to be concerned for their own necks, so they needed to erase them at their level as well.

  The group that arrived at the grassy area under the little hill at the edge of the military air base, which was used for executions, was made up of the chief investigator for the on-site investigation, as well as the security chief, and five patrolmen who had been on duty at the execution that day. The patrolmen had transported the prisoners, which included Mandogi, on the truck that day. The rain the night before had soaked the ground, and there were shimmering puddles here and there. The tires of the truck that carried the party sank deep into the ground, and the police found the spot where Mandogi and the others were buried surprisingly easily. As they jumped down to the ground from the truck, the patrolmen, their faces already green, began to tense up. An on-site investigation of a grave—that meant digging up the grave again. It all started with a dead man crawling out of a grave… could that kind of silly ghost story really happen? If he had turned into a ghost, that would be understandable. Wasn’t it true that Mandogi had become a ghost? But that Mandogi hadn’t become a ghost, but had escaped from this grave, that was just idiotic! The patrolmen’s hearts must have been tangled up with anger toward their superiors and uneasiness for themselves.

  There were many ways of dealing with dead bodies. Of course there were cases where they were just left aboveground, and there were times when they were thrown into the sea. And there were times when prisoners were forced to dig their own graves just before their executions, when they were shot down into them. And then, they could be buried alive. The day that Mandogi and the others were executed, the officers had sent the police home before dawn. And in the afternoon, they rounded up the villagers to dig a big hole and bury the dead. There was no mistaking that all the bodies had been buried. The patrolmen on duty even confirmed that they had seen the priest dead and thrown into that hole with their own eyes.

  The security chief, the direct supervisor of the patrolmen, who had power over the dispatching station at S Hill Temple, and the chief investigator, who had the right to say whether the prisoners lived or died, walked over to the spot where the dead were buried. If enough soil had been piled on top of all the bodies in the grave, such that it resembled the surrounding ground, it wouldn’t have been conspicuous, but today it stood out clearly. The image of the rectangle sunken into the ground was vividly recognizable as a grave. The sunken area surrounded by flat ground had an area of about fifteen or twenty meters, and it had caved in over twenty centimeters, and rainwater had collected in the bottom. One after another, tiny ripples formed and sparkled in the strong wind under the cloudy sky.

  Now
the patrolmen had to dig up the pathetic grave and confirm whether or not Mandogi’s body was among the dead. The nervous patrolmen focused on their hands, clinging to the handles of their shovels, their hands clearly shaking with indecision. If they couldn’t find Mandogi’s body below, the blame would fall on their immediate superior, and it would be immense.

  The first shovel made a clanking sound as it hit the small stones.

  “Wait a second,” the security chief commanded, raising his hand. The chief investigator nodded silently in agreement. The security chief’s gaze went quickly to the chief investigator as he waited for him to speak, and then he looked around at the patrolmen.

  “What’s wrong with this hole? Why is it so collapsed? Why didn’t you cover it up with more soil?”

  “…”

  “You can tell by the soil how many humans are buried here—see all those mounds of soil sticking up there? Why didn’t you cover this up better?”

  “We covered it up with a big heap of dirt, but it’s rotted since then.”

  “Rotted? You mean the dirt rotted?”

  “No, I mean the bodies rotted.”

  “The bodies rotted? What difference would that make?”

  “When they rot, they get smaller. Then they sink toward the bottom.”

  “Hmm, so you mean the earth sank in? I see…” said the security chief, exchanging another glance with the chief investigator.

  “Yeah,” the chief investigator agreed. “It’s only natural that the bodies rot. They say that people go back to the earth from which they came. No wonder the farmers seem to enjoy it.”

  Here he put a cigarette in his mouth and took out one more Lucky Strike to give to the security chief. In the corner of the execution grounds, the purple smoke from the cigarettes rose up into the sky, which hadn’t yet cleared from the rain. It didn’t have time to linger in the air, as the wind carried each puff away one by one. Their subordinates could sense that the smoke from the two cigarettes was a symbol of a silent conversation going on between their two superiors.

  “Well, what should we do?”

  “Well, I guess there’s no use.” The chief investigator emphasized the “no use” part, with an echo of conclusiveness. His voice was loud enough to make sure that this one passing phrase reached the ears of his subordinates.

  “If the bodies are rotting, we can dig them up and we still won’t be able to tell the difference. What do you think, Patrolman Yi?”

  “Exactly, just like you said, Chiefs.”

  Anticipation began to shine on the faces of the men. In the heat of that gaze, the two chiefs exchanged glances.

  “Well, you men cover the hole back up with new soil, understood? Quickly! Our investigation of the bodies reveals nothing abnormal, and our on-site investigation will end here for today. Good work, men!”

  Ah, how well the security chief and the chief investigator understood things! The patrolmen were all smiles, even crying out for joy. They were so happy, they almost forgot to salute their superiors.

  So, Mandogi’s death being reconfirmed, the fire at the temple was treated as an accidental fire, the responsibility of the captain of the dispatching station. Since the body had definitely been buried in that grave, no matter how Mother Seoul insisted that Mandogi was alive, it didn’t amount to anything. But the body had completely rotted inside the grave. And since the chief who took the blame was already dead, they had no way of punishing him, so all of the problems with the fire at the temple had disappeared. And everyone involved was relieved. It goes without saying that Mother Seoul, who once feared that the blame would fall on her, withdrew her story that Mandogi had survived.

  As for the ghost of Mandogi, rumors of him ran for a thousand li, and riding the rumors, he appeared wherever they were told.2 But in the rumors, people added the parts about Mandogi’s refusing to point the gun at the partisan in the substation, and about his smiling at his death sentence in the interrogation room at the main station, and so embellished, the rumors spread, giving people strength. In one village, they say that Mandogi’s ghost caught a patrolling officer off guard, stripped him of his policeman’s cap, took his gun, and disappeared. They say he appeared in the charred remains of S Hill Temple, and that he took strolls in the charred remains of Shimomura with the ghost of Old Man O’s young daughter-in-law. The stories finally stretched out to every village in the entire Mount Halla area. From the charred remains of Kannon Temple, in the heart of the deep valley, night after night you could hear the echoes of the wailing voice of Mandogi’s ghost, and the sound of his voice chanting the sutras. But the rumor that his ghost appeared at the edge of the mountain at sunset, carrying a gun on his shoulder, was spread from the mouths of the captains who had witnessed it during the operation in March to suppress the guerrillas on Cheju-do. The appearance of a ghost carrying a gun shocked both the authorities and the people, but for different reasons.

  The story of the ghost of Mandogi, who added his name at a young age to the annals of the dead in the Republic of Korea, who never had a name, and who never had a family register, was put away for safekeeping in the people’s bag of stories. And every time the string was unfastened on the story bag, the ghost flew out from there and wandered the earth.

  Finally, as the story spread, the people of the world called it “The Curious Tale of the Ghost,” and when they attached the name, it became “The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost.”

  1 An LST is a tank landing ship.

  2 “Ran for a thousand li” references a Korean idiom that says that horses without legs (i.e., rumors) run for a thousand li (a unit of distance roughly equivalent to a league).

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