The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I somehow managed to put a pot of rice on the stove, which was black with soot. Thankfully, the fluorescent light worked. He came back with water and prepared to make a stew, using a tiny cutting board about the size of a palm and a rusted knife to mince the meat and scallions and garlic and cut tofu. He cut some kimchi from the store, opened a bottle of soju, and filled an aluminum bowl. He placed the open bottle by his father’s head and offered him the bowl.

  “Father, here’s your drink.”

  I could not believe my eyes. The man was as crumpled as an empty sack a minute ago, but he suddenly got up as if by reflex, snatched the bowl and emptied it into his mouth in one motion. Kaa! he exclaimed, then he picked up the bottle and poured the contents directly into his mouth. He put the bottle down and wiped his mouth only after he finished more than half the bottle.

  My eyes welled up. My father was not as bad as he was—at least he was cleaner and neater—but they were in a similar desperate state of a declining life. And my father was slowly dying. The artist watched his father without saying anything. When the rice was done, he put the stew on the stove. His father had already finished the 1.6-pint bottle and smacked his lips. He asked his son, “Get the salt jar from the cupboard for me.”

  The artist got the salt jar and gave it to his father while remaining silent. His father took a pinch of salt and sprinkled it into his open mouth. The artist set the dinner table without saying another word while his half-brother galloped around the room with a spoon in his mouth, excited for no apparent reason. Deep inside me was a mixture of pity and empathy. We sat around the circular table and ate dinner like one big family. The artist opened another bottle and slowly poured one bowl at a time for his father. After we were done I washed the dishes while he continued to pour drinks for his father. Later, the gray-haired man who looked like an empty sack hummed a couple of songs, and at one point slowly fell to his side. The artist carefully tucked the sleeping boy in next to his father, gave me a signal with his eyes to leave the room and turned off the fluorescent light. We carefully climbed down the stairs. We walked back toward the Yumchungyo bridge. It was late at night; the market’s lights were out and it was empty. Instead, the once-quiet neighborhood around the railroad and the slum on the opposite side was full of life. I think there was a red-light district nearby. I learned much later that the artist’s father was a ruined landowner who did not adjust to the changes in the postwar period. He had sold his land to open a distillery, started and bankrupted a number of small manufacturing companies, then met a young woman and left home as if to run away. We walked to the South Gate without talking. I was the first one to speak when we saw the bus stop.

  “Where are you going now?”

  He no longer scratched his head.

  “Going home.”

  “Home?”

  “I mean school.”

  I ran to the bus stop and hopped onto one without looking back, like I was angry. This was the beginning of my first love. I never asked if he went back to see his father, but he started to work at an art studio run by an alumnus of our school. We were still really poor.

  For the rest of the year, we were very close. We left behind the remains of our homes and traveled to draw the living, sweating people of our time. That winter, we went on a short trip to an island on the west coast. It was very windy; there was a storm warning and ferries stopped running. We were staying in a boarding house not too far from the coastline, and there was no electricity on the island. We spent the night in candlelight, as you and I did in Kalmae. We had brought hiking supplies like a camp stove and a gas burner, but the last night we hung a cast iron pot over the fuel hole in our room and made a soup of fish broth cooked with little pieces of torn dough. It was snowing hard outside, and so dark that we could not see the inside of the pot. We sat in front of the fuel hole with our heads touching, each of us with a handful of dough that we threw in little pieces into the boiling broth.

  As soon as he graduated he began the mandatory military service. Like other women at that time, I went to Yongsan Station early in the morning to say goodbye as he got on the train to Nonsan training camp. But he was luckier than others. He had won the grand prize at the national competition around his graduation. He was extremely talented, and his worldview was much more mature than that of others his age. His father had passed away by that point. He found the abandoned body at a civic hospital and brought it back to his hometown. My father passed away the following year, and I think it was around the time of his death that I went to the eastern front to visit the artist.

  Deep in the valleys of Kangwon province, the winding one-lane road went on endlessly. On the way I saw soldiers wearing dirty padded suits and laboring, cutting down trees or digging. At the entrance to a minor unit, I gave the guards his name. Walking down the road from his unit, his face was so burnt and caked with dirt that he looked like an old farmer. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was past April, but there was still snow in the valley, and azaleas were blooming only in places where the sunlight reached.

  He said he was allowed to stay out overnight, meaning he was allowed to sleep out of the unit. Don’t you think that was really crude of them, that a soldier was allowed to sleep outside for one night, no questions asked, if a young woman came for a visit? We had to walk for a few miles to get to the nearest village. We walked without saying much. He was always like that, but he was devoid of all emotion during his army days; he was like a burnt, dry piece of coal. His hands were cracked from the cold like a turtle’s shell. I felt like I was his mother.

  It was a small town, the main business district only about twenty yards long. We went into a small motel. The room was newly wallpapered, though the pattern was too loud for my taste. The floor was covered in vinyl, and part of it had been burnt away by the heat radiating from beneath. I guess they had seen many couples comprised of soldiers and visitors, as the owner seemed to be unsurprised by our appearance. She told us to take a bath. The communal bathroom was next to the kitchen, a huge, old-fashioned iron tub heated with logs from below. It was a Japanese-style tub lined inside with wood, so one could submerge one’s body in hot water. There were wooden boards on the floor of the bathroom, too, so one could pour water without slipping, and a number of buckets and dippers of various sizes. I washed myself first and then took him in there. I’ll spare you the details, but I saw his naked body for the first time that night. The short bristles of his hair were stiffer than a brush. I washed them with fragrant soap, not the laundry soap he asked for. From his head and body came the odor of a lonely man, different from that of sweat. A bit like an animal, a bit like the odor of steamed rice gone bad, with a dash of soy sauce added to it. The odor of a man worn out by solitude. I scrubbed his back, and dirt came off like grains of rice. I forced him to soak his hands in hot water and scrubbed them with a red scratchy cloth. He screamed in mock agony and he kept pulling his hands away, I kept hitting his back but did not stop scrubbing.

  I held him in my arms that night. Tears rolled down my face when I thought of saying goodbye to my father. He apologized in a faint voice, thinking that I was crying because it was my first experience. I had a hard time suppressing my laughter. The sun was rising, and he fell into a deep slumber, softly snoring with his back turned toward me. I doodled with my fingers on his back as I watched the paper door becoming lighter behind his shoulder. Looking back after all those years, I was still not ready to be freed from my father. What I loved was the vague image of his beautiful youth. To me, the artist’s dark youth was not unfamiliar, and maybe I was trying to soothe myself by comforting him.

  I graduated, took the teacher’s license exam, and took a teaching post in a suburb in Kyunggi province. That same year, he was discharged from the military. The moment he was discharged, he came to see me. For him it went without saying that of course he wanted to marry me. But I did not really care. As I expected, he took the art world by storm. He was quick to figure out the trend of the moment and the a
udience’s taste. Within eighteen months, he swept three grand prizes.

  His work was no longer the powerful and vivid art of the days when he slept in a sleeping bag at the school studio. His praised works were mostly based on other artist’s concepts, nimbly adapted to his own style. In my mind, his paintings were now just concepts. He called me after we had not seen or spoken to each other for months. He wanted to introduce me to a new friend. So I met him for the first time in quite a while. He told me to meet him at a coffee shop in a hotel. When I walked in, a neatly dressed executive popped up from his seat. I almost didn’t recognize him, he had changed so much in a few months. His once disheveled hair was now trimmed tidily and slicked back with a hair product that made it shine. And there was no sign of stubble on his face. He was wearing a double-breasted suit with a tie.

  “It’s been a while.”

  He sounded rather solemn. I slowly looked him up and down, and I could not stop myself from laughing.

  “You look like a CEO!”

  He did not laugh. He added quite seriously, “So, doing well these days?”

  It made me laugh even more, he sounded like a stockbroker or something like that. But I tried not to make fun of him. I was expecting it, too, and I did not want him to misunderstand, I did not want him to think that I was hostile toward him because we were about to officially break up.

  “And your friend?”

  “Coming. So how are you, how’s your work?”

  “So so. I saw the last National Art Exhibition.”

  “What did you think?”

  I thought it was a bit shameless to ask me what I thought of his painting, but I decided not to reveal anything.

  “Well, you got the big prize, good for you. And you know yourself what’s best.”

  “I think you’re right. The biggest weakness we painters have is that we’re so skilled with our hands but have no philosophy.”

  I did not say anything. He hesitated, but finally said, “The thing is, I got engaged last week.”

  Inside, I told myself that it did not matter, but the aftershock made me tremble a little. But you know what? Human relationships can be very lonely. There are so many pop songs about it, how once all the feeling and sentiments have been removed, our naked selves emerge. It’s like a child making clothes for a paper doll. She designs and colors all the dresses she wants, then she cuts them out and stacks them in a box. She spends hours changing the clothes on the paper doll, trying different dresses. Later she opens the box for the first time in a while. The colors and designs of the past are now tired.

  “Great! Congratulations.”

  As I said these words, I did not think of his sleeping bag filled with chicken feathers or the cracked backs of his hands. He was just beginning to be rewarded.

  “Next month, we leave together to study abroad.”

  He described his fiancée with sincerity. Well, it was a typical story you see all the time in soap operas. Maybe these stories were so prevalent because they reflect the reality after all. A union of a poor young man with tremendous potential and a little rich girl, a marriage, time studying abroad, and a farewell to his past. Just about when we were running out of things to say, his fiancée arrived. I guessed she must have just graduated from college. There was something about her that reminded me of graduation parties. She was dressed in a pink silk dress with a row of buttons, and her eyes and cheeks were perfectly shaded. The fiancée nodded her head, but she seemed to be waiting for a proper introduction from her man. I quickly opened my mouth.

  “I’m Han Yoon Hee. We went to the same university. Nice to meet you.”

  “I heard a lot about you from him. I really wanted to meet you.”

  We went somewhere else for dinner. We each had a glass of something alcoholic, too. He seemed to be gradually growing more uncomfortable, so I got up first to leave. He followed me down to the lobby of the hotel. As I was looking for a taxi, I heard him say from behind, “Thank you.”

  I stared at him for a while, then I asked him quietly, “For what?”

  “For being so kind to me.”

  I told him with real sincerity, “Be brave. Best of luck.”

  That’s how our movie ended. The reason I wrote a story like this in detail is because I wanted to show once more the silliness of this life, no matter how much we talk about our dreams and ambitions and success.

  9

  The evening wind hissed through the forest, and the barking dogs quieted. As I walked toward the main house, the Soonchun lady looked out from the kitchen; she seemed delighted to see me. “Come in! I went up to your house a while ago but it was so quiet, I thought you were sleeping.”

  I walked into the pantry and found a table set for one.

  “Where’s everybody?”

  “We already ate.”

  The Soonchun lady came back from the kitchen with rice and a bowl of soup and sat next to me.

  “This is a soup with young barley sprouts. You like this, right?”

  “Wow, I haven’t had this in a long time.”

  “That’s the taste of spring.”

  The Soonchun lady sat there quietly for a while, but soon she sighed and began talking.

  “You know, how should I say this, about this afternoon . . . I’m really sorry.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Well, didn’t you meet with someone from the police?”

  “Ah yes, it wasn’t a big deal.”

  The Soonchun lady lowered her eyes and rubbed her finger against the edge of her skirt.

  “I know this is difficult for you. When my husband was alive, after what happened to you, we all got into big trouble. Miss Han was the first one, she was sent all the way to Kwangju, and we were interrogated by the district police, too.”

  “I caused too many troubles for you all.”

  “So I was just nervous about everything this time. But I thought about it, and you’ve done your time, and what else can happen at this point? So I told my son to report you.”

  “You did the right thing. It was my fault, I should have called them.”

  “My goodness, I just felt awful about all this. When he left, he said there will be no more trouble as long as they know when you leave here.”

  “I’ll give him a call when I leave.”

  “I have to say, it is so much better now. Before, they would want you to go here and there, it would have been a huge hassle.”

  I somehow managed to finish dinner. I kept quiet and took out a cigarette. It tastes best after a meal.

  “Did Miss Han visit here every year?”

  “Well now, more than once a year. Every vacation, summer and winter, she spent months up there. Never got married, just waited for you. No, wait, she skipped a few years around the ’88 Olympics. Let’s see, she didn’t come here for about five years, that’s right. We got postcards from Germany, here and there. And when she returned, she came back first with her sister. And then she bought the house.”

  Her eyes suddenly welled up, and she touched her eyes with her stubby fingers.

  “I think the last time she came here was the winter of ’96. She was already sick by then. Maybe she knew something was going to happen, but the summer before that she came here and renovated the whole house. I heard why she was sick, but I didn’t know how quickly she would . . .”

  I sat there with my head down and listened to her rambling on. She continued.

  “I had to say something. I asked her, why are you spending so much money fixing up an ordinary hut? It’d be better to tear it down and rebuild a new house. What did I know? You know what she said? She said Hyun Woo will not recognize it when he comes back. I didn’t know, we didn’t know what she was really thinking about.”

  I got up without saying anything. I wanted her to stop talking without being too obvious. I sat on the narrow porch and put my shoes back on, and she continued from behind, “By the way, I saw that you had gas delivered and you’re buying all these things, but re
ally, it’s no trouble to us, all we do is add another place at the table. Eat your meals here.”

  I had no choice but to tell her, “No, you really don’t have to. Frankly, I have to catch up on reading and organize a lot of things, so my daily schedule is very irregular. I can take care of myself. There are many things I want to cook, too.”

  Walking up the narrow path, I realized the nighttime breeze was quite warm now. Kalmae was not as quiet as it was in my room. It was weak, but I heard the driving beat of a pop song coming from somewhere. In between the branches of the orchard, I saw the flickering red neon sign of the Korean barbeque restaurant at the entrance to the village.

  I returned again to Yoon Hee’s voice. Her handwriting in ink was so familiar by now, I could see it shifting and turning into a gentle voice. Captured in her handwriting was the tide of her emotions. When she was sad the flow of ink was faint and weak, when she was happy her letters were round and free. And when she was swept away in violent emotions, there was the imprint of her pushing the pen down hard onto the paper at the end of each stroke. Sometimes on the back of the notebooks were rough drafts of letters she wrote to family and friends. I sorted through them carefully and read everything.

  Dear Jung Hee,

  How are you? I am spending this summer in Kalmae. I think my life as a teacher is over at this point. The truth is, I got married in secret last summer. I am truly sorry that I did not even tell you. But there was nothing I could do. He is a so-called activist. You guys would call him a militant. But he’s neither too theoretical nor hardened. He’s not like those young men from poverty who want something back from society, who form a small group and practice power control rather than quickly transforming themselves into something. He’s, how should I say it, a bit tentative. With his circumstances it’s too late, but he hopes to become a poet. I think he’s very stubborn. Ah, I knew this relationship wasn’t going to be easy. As soon as he left here last year, he was arrested. He may not be able to come back to this world for a long, long time. Yet I volunteered to be his wife. Why? He has no one but me. I’ve decided that I need to study more, since I’ll have to live by myself for a while. I am thinking of applying to graduate schools. I don’t think you remember the last year of dad’s life. You were a senior in high school applying to universities, it was too hectic for you. I used to spend day after day with him. Because it was liver cancer, his head was clear until the day he died. We talked so much. Later, I felt I wanted to write down every detail of the last few days and what happened just before he passed away. I want you to remember, too. I’m not alone here in Kalmae. I haven’t told Mom yet, but I’m going to ask you for a lot. You have to help me. I know you’ll be curious, but you’ll soon find out, perhaps by this fall. If you promise that you’ll not rush to come here, I’ll tell you. I didn’t know before, I thought all women lived the same way, but that’s not true. A caterpillar pops out of an egg, and that caterpillar builds a cocoon and becomes a chrysalis. The chrysalis sleeps in the cocoon for a long time. By the time it breaks the cocoon and sheds the shell and becomes a beautiful butterfly who flies away in the blue sky, this butterfly is no longer the caterpillar of the past. A woman who has become a mother is not the woman of before.