The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Summer 1996, Your Yoon Hee

  P.S. My sister passed away three days later, on the evening of July 21. According to her wish, her body was cremated. Before she died she said these words to me: I’m going to Kalmae, tell Mr. Oh, if you see him later, tell him to please come there. She made me promise, so I did. I do not know when Mr. Oh will be able to receive this letter, but I wanted you to know.

  Han Jung Hee

  After persevering in solitary confinement for a long time, your small emotions are mostly hidden deep underneath a thick layer of insensitivity. Showing them helps no one. In the beginning, you forget words. It’s an easy one. You can’t remember when last you actually wanted to use them. More words disappear from your mind, even the names of those around you. The next step is when you cannot recall names of everyday things that are right in front of you. Wait a minute, what was that thing called? Then comes the symptom of muttering to yourself. Hey, it’s time to sleep, or that guard is such a stickler, or you fart and complain to yourself, gee, that stinks. Among the prisoners, those with long sentences rarely smile or cry. During the audio-visual education lessons, when they show you movies, prisoners shed their tears in darkness and cry to their heart’s content. Their eyes are red and bloodshot when they walk out of the room. For those who have spent too much time in solitary confinement, however, their ability to express feelings is taken away. It is impossible to empathize. You forget words, feelings. Even your memories get bleached away.

  I sat there in the room in a daze, her letters in my hand. Collecting myself, I put the letters back in their envelopes, then put them in the innermost pocket of the travel bag I had packed. My nephew was not home yet, he would probably be working late again. My brother-in-law and I sat in the living room while my sister prepared dinner. We sat a little apart on a sofa and stared at the television without talking. In between programs there was a cooking segment. A prim woman in her thirties wearing an apron brought out pots and pans and began cooking.

  “In this hour, we’ll make a soup with dried pollack. As many of you know, it is made in many different regions, a very well-known cure for hangovers. It’s easy to make, and it is very soothing, a perfect soup to comfort those troubled stomachs the morning after.”

  Her hair was neatly pulled into a ponytail, a few strands falling to the side secured by a simple barrette in the shape of a butterfly. The neck of her sweater was modest, and her apron had blue stripes and was edged with frills. She looked like a proper housewife, an ordinary woman such as are found everywhere in the world.

  “Here are the ingredients. We need dried pollack, ginger extract, chopped garlic, and some pepper for seasoning. Fifty grams of ground beef, and to season the meat we need one teaspoon of soy sauce, three tablespoons of chopped garlic, a little bit of pepper and one teaspoon of sesame oil. Also needed are one scallion, chopped, one egg, and a little salt.”

  Staring at the television and thinking of a warm pollack soup for a family, my eyes welled up and a tear rolled down my cheek. My brother-in-law saw this and was about to say something, but he turned around and lit a cigarette, pretending he did not notice anything. I stood up surreptitiously and sneaked into the bathroom. For the first time in a long time, I looked at myself reflected in a big mirror. My closely cropped hair was half gray, which made me look tired. Both eyes were bloodshot, and underneath them were two crescent bags deeply creased and shadowed. Without the prison uniform I looked like the old man I was. I washed my face with cold water. I dried my face, took a big breath through my nose, and went back to the living room. Both my sister and my brother-in-law pretended not to have noticed anything and remained silent. That was how I said goodbye to Han Yoon Hee.

  3

  The airplane was slowly descending. They no longer told us to lower the window shade as they used to. I looked down at the familiar landscape of fields and streams around the airport. Far away toward the downtown area of the city, something gray like smog or a fog was hovering, and the freeway was lined with bare trees on both sides.

  As I left the gate, I saw him. He’d been pacing, and he raised his hand high when he saw me.

  “Mr. Oh, here!”

  “Kun! It’s been too long!”

  I hugged him tightly. Then I began to study his face. There were many strands of white hair from his temples to almost the top of his head, and many little lines around his eyes. I had seen Kun briefly at the detention cell, then we were separated. He finished his sentence and was released a few years before me. He was probably five or six years younger than me. I had escaped from Kwangju, but he took up arms as part of a civilian militia. Later, he was arrested for his underground activities. If he had been captured earlier at the state capital, Kun would have led a much easier life. Kun found me at my hiding place in the slums two days after the last crackdown at the state capital. His cheeks were hollow and his face haggard; he was wearing a shirt stained with dirt; he grimaced and burst into tears as he tried to hold on to us. Sang Woon is dead. Young Joon insisted I get out first, later I saw he was gone, he got shot just once. Ah, we would never be able to embrace each other again as we did that dawn. About one week later, the comrades who’d somehow flown from that city gathered, then spread out again, each looking for his own hole. Some people openly ignored us, some gave us a little money and begged us to go someplace else. Some accepted us as family and hid us.

  “It’s an old car. Someone gave me this.”

  Still a little proud of his car, Kun chattered on as he put on the seat-belt.

  “You wanna go to the inn first?”

  “No, let’s go to Nam Soo.”

  “Of course.”

  Instead of taking the highway downtown, Kun half-turned the wheel.

  “I’m going to take another way around. It’s so congested.”

  “It has changed so much, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s busier than the old Seoul. Every country bumpkin bought a car, it’s swarming with cars.”

  “Is your sense of direction a little bit better now?”

  We laughed together. It must have been better, since we avoided the traffic and drove around downtown. Soon we reached a quiet part of the town near the Mang Wal Cemetery. He stopped the car near the Moo Dung Mountain.

  “You sit here and wait. I’ll go get some flowers.”

  In one corner of the three-way road was a flower shop. I followed Kun out of the car. Pushing the glass door we entered the shop. I felt instantly better when I breathed in the fragrance of fresh flowers and moist, warm air. There were roses, gypsophilas, which had become common but since when I did not know, carnations, and different shades of mums. Kun was nodding his head, counting something in his mind. He bought different flowers and prepared four bouquets.

  “Why are you buying so many?”

  “Once you begin, there’s no end. Just think of those you were really close to, how many there are.”

  I remained quiet and did as Kun suggested, and stood and walked behind him. The temperature had not dropped, but the wind was cold. We climbed the overhanging hill on the way up the mountain.

  “Those up here, they’re noninstitutional, and down there are institutional. Even the graveyard is divided into two.”

  Muttering under his breath, Kun climbed and found Nam Soo at once. Someone had brought him flowers, wilting away in a glass liquor bottle. Kun murmured as if he was talking to someone standing next to him.

  “Hey, good to see you. I brought Mr. Hyun Woo today. You guys have a lot of catching up to do.”

  There was a little mound covered with dry grass shivering in the winter wind. So . . . how are you, I said without opening my mouth. I could see Nam Soo’s tanned face breaking into a wide grin.

  It’s been more than twenty years since Nam Soo first went into hiding after the Reading Group incident. He was imprisoned for ten years because of a case involving another organization and was released before I was. During the bloody uprising in Kwangju he was already in prison, and by the tim
e he was released I was in prison. When we first met in the seventies, I was a high school teacher in a small southern town and was preparing to leave the country to study abroad. We both were young and opposed the Yushin regime, which changed the constitutional law in order for General Park to continue his dictatorship. I read him a poem by Sergei Yesenin, handwritten in an old notebook. I do not remember where I got that notebook.

  Still around, old dear? How are you keeping?

  I too am around. Hello to you!

  May that magic twilight ever stream

  Over your cottage as it used to do

  People write how sad you are, and anxious

  For my sake, though you won’t tell them so

  And that you in your old-fashioned jacket

  Out onto the highroad often go

  I could not clearly remember what followed next. It was something like, Don’t go eating your heart out with worry that I am now an unknown drunk at a tavern for fear that someone will stick a knife into my chest.

  I’ll return when decked in white the branches

  In our orchard are with spring aglow

  I recalled the night Nam Soo left for Seoul, sometime in the late seventies. At the time, I was renting the wing of an old-fashioned house. It had a sliding door that opened to a small porch, and next to the stone wall stood a magnificent zelkova tree. When the wind came, its branches shook and the leaves rubbed against each other, and it sounded like the sea. We turned off the light and lay down, listening to the waves of leaves. Nam Soo was restless, turning left and right, unable to fall asleep.

  “You know what? The first time I was caught distributing the underground newspaper, when I was taken handcuffed to the interrogation room and slapped around, someone pretty high up from the Intelligence Office came in. He handed me the printed leaflet that I wrote and ordered me to read it out loud. So I stammered but read it. Then he slapped me really hard, and he screamed, you bastard, my son goes to a good school, too, and do you think he’s behaving himself because he doesn’t know as much as you do? Then he took out a gun and put it to my forehead. The muzzle looked so big, my knees gave out and I just knelt down in front of him. Whenever I think of that . . . it’s just humiliating.”

  Nam Soo got up and sat. I fumbled in the dark and found a cigarette and lit it.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Suddenly, Nam Soo pushed the sliding door open. He looked out at the zelkova tree, its branches quivering in the dark.

  “I want to be a real fighter now. This is the end of my half-hearted-ness, as of tonight.”

  “They say a road is made after many people walk on it.”

  “There’s always someone ahead of everyone else.”

  Early the next morning, Nam Soo left for his hiding place in Seoul. All he had was a battered travel bag full of worn-out underwear and unwashed socks. When I walked with him that early morning, caged dogs barked and wailed all around. He left me a piece of paper onto which he had copied a letter from Che to Fidel, written when he had given up all his power and position in the party and had left for Bolivia. On the back was another letter from Che to his children about the future.

  “Look, there are many more waiting for you over there,” Kun said as he stepped away from Nam Soo’s grave. I passed by the grave where Ki Soon and Sang Woon were buried together. They were married in a posthumous ceremony.

  “Sang Woon is buried in the 5.18 cemetery down there. This is a temporary one. So you can see him again there.”

  We said hello to many different names. In the 5.18 cemetery were Sang Woon, Young Joon, and Chul Young, who passed away more recently. Chul Young, unlike me, spent nineteen years in a psychiatric hospital, his brain injured during torture. He lived his whole life stuck in that day. He lost his mind because the memory was frozen. Whenever his struggling wife came during a visitation, Chul Young asked her about the safety of those already dead and what was happening in front of the state capital. He’d been the last of the civilian militia in solitary confinement at a psychiatric hospital. Decorated with marble, the 5.18 cemetery looked more like another kind of prison. Where Nam Soo was resting was a real, older cemetery, where myriad friends gathered amiably. There, even the dry grass seemed warm and comfortable.

  Kun took me out to dinner downtown. Nothing much had changed there. Some people had gathered at a Korean restaurant and were waiting for me.

  The whole evening was a tedious performance, and I have no specific memory of it. I kept saying no, but despite my objections the gathering continued on to two subsequent bars and I lost consciousness in between. It was my first night out drinking since my release and I was cautious until someone at the first bar provoked someone else and began a fight. I think I took shot after shot at that point. What I remembered from the conversations we had that night played out like a strange movie that was shot slowly but projected at a furious pace.

  “I guess there’s no way to bail out Yang Hoon from his bankruptcy now, is there? How much did you put in there?”

  “Just a couple, but it’s just not right. What am I supposed to do, he just ran away after things went kaput!”

  “Listen, listen, everyone from Kang Wook to Duk Hee took the parachute and got something but you? What are you doing, just looking after everyone else? What’s the use of all these committees and boards and memorials when you can’t even get a seat on the local assembly?”

  “It gives me a headache, I want nothing to do with them. How come there are so many organizations related to the Kwangju Uprising?”

  “The revolution is short but life is long, I guess. To be alive is to be ashamed.”

  “Look who’s talking! Take care of yourself and don’t fool around.”

  “It’s a disease caused by too much to eat and too little to do.”

  “Don’t just think of your business, think about others, too! Help some of them, at least show up for special occasions like funerals and weddings. Look what happened to Hyo Shin. We ignored him until his liver dried up and his face went totally black. What kind of community is that? Where’s Bong Han tonight?”

  “Well, well, look who’s talking now. Community? It was shattered once compensation began.”

  “We always end up bickering when we get together. Why? Why is that?”

  “Is this living? I am just empty and bitter inside, that’s why.”

  I could not remember whose words turned the table upside down. It was quite certain that I was there, based on the red pepper sauce splattered all over my shirt. I climbed up the stairs of the inn, wobbling and supported by someone. I guess others staggered toward taxis or climbed into their cars, held up by their chauffeurs. Maybe they dozed off in the back of their taxis. Or maybe some felt lonely and stopped by a street bar and had another glass. What were they thinking, with a cold glass of soju on a stained table? Would they be as devastated as I was? There was a woman who came with me. I would presume someone who owned a business sent her with me, like he would do for a client or a government official he wanted to butter up, take care of me in bed. I yelled, I kicked the door, the bellboy was annoyed and pleaded with me to be quiet, the woman ran away, I vomited in the bathroom, in the sink. My mind was blank, I was sitting down on the bed in my underwear. Like I used to in solitary confinement, I spat out the words in a garbled mumble, “No one can win against time.”

  The telephone rang. I let it ring for a while before picking up.

  “This is Bong Han. Kun called me and I’d like to take you out for lunch.”

  “Well, I’m still hungover . . . I guess I can leave now.”

  “You should take better care of yourself. Why did you drink so much?”

  “They started it.”

  “How long are you staying here?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t have a schedule. I have someplace else to go.”

  “Whatever, hurry up. I do want to see you.”

  He was a man of principles. He counted every bean, and he rarely trusted anyone but him
self. He divided things into black and white and then cut them with a knife. Many people complained that he was hard-hearted. His life was locked up in Kwangju in 1980. In the middle of the massacres, he had escaped to Seoul and hidden in an attic for two years before he was smuggled out of the country. Kang Won, who wrote poetry, met him accidentally during his underground days, and the little study group they organized together became a network of spies. After serving five years in prison, Kang Won struggled to make ends meet and died of cancer like Nam Soo. I liked Bong Han and loathed him, equally. It would have been better if he had remained a revolutionary, like those of the Japanese occupation era, but he was lucky enough to survive and unfortunate enough to live past the end of his own legend. For ten years he was in exile and managed to build several well-organized youth groups in Europe and America. I heard of him from time to time when I was in prison. Maybe he was now a scrapped vessel, his propeller gone, anchored at shore. But is there really anything you can devote yourself to for your whole life? I remember a phrase from a song.

  I know in my memory

  lies my strength

  Slowly, very slowly, like a mound of earth dissolving little by little in the wind, what we wanted to accomplish was now leaving its mark on the world in a shape quite different from that we expected. But what could we do? There were still so many unknown days left.

  “This town has gone to shit.”

  That was the first thing he spat out when I pleasantly greeted him.

  “Maybe that’s for the best. Now this city has gone back to normal.”

  Every fire in the world goes out eventually. What is left is ash. Perhaps some things are salvaged, but most are swept away by the wind.

  “How’s your health?”

  “I think I’ll be okay. And you?”

  “Pretty bad. I once had a problem with my lungs, now it’s back. I have to do these breathing exercises..”