The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “You should go back home now.”

  Soon Ok wavered, touching the pavement with the tip of her shoe and her head bowed down.

  “Do you have . . . money for the bus?”

  I smiled and tapped the chest area of my jacket.

  “I have a lot of money. Well, then . . .”

  But before I crossed the street, Soon Ok raised her voice, speaking quickly to my back.

  “If it becomes too hard, just turn yourself in.”

  I pretended I did not hear her and ran across the street. Just in time, a bus was coming toward me, so I waved my hand to stop it and got on. The bus was completely empty. I glanced back as I took a seat, and I saw the red of her sweater still standing at the street corner. The bus soon took a right turn, and she disappeared.

  Later, in prison, I thought of them often. I had forgotten most of the dangerous situations in Seoul; I did not want to remember those days anyway. For me, those dreamy months in Kalmae were everything that I had, but that one month in the hellish honeycomb house lingered deep in my mind as well. It was awful, but the confirmation of trust from the few young workers I met there sustained me. It was one of the reasons I did not give everything up during the years of imprisonment. I wondered where they were now. What happened to the willful Myung Soon and the nice but weak Mr. Park? Were they able to rent a better place and get married, as they had hoped? And did Soon Ok realize her little dream of going back to Daejun and opening her dress shop with a pretty sign? Did she make money, support all her siblings, and finally find time to get married herself and have babies? And those young girls at the factory who I met while teaching at the night school, all of them so scared and hungry, were they now mothers in a different world?

  The police were closing in, so it was too dangerous for me to see Choi Dong Woo again. The organization had to give up the plan to keep me near Seoul for a while. When Kun told me, I accepted it without protest. Until the end of that year, I stayed at a boarding house in a middle-class neighborhood near a university in Seoul, and the only connection I had with the organization was an occasional notice Kun somehow managed to send through a third party. I decided to leave Seoul and ask for help from other organizations who managed those on the wanted list in different regions. Winter in the city was colder and more desolate when spent alone. No one was surprised when Chun Doo Hwan was again nominated as the sole nominee for presidency and as the head of the new party. The emergency martial law was withdrawn.

  It was the first snowy day of winter. I was passing by a gift shop full of high school girls and it occurred to me to buy a number of cards for the holiday season. Remembering my childhood, I walked into a bakery, took a seat in the back corner, and ordered a roll filled with pastry cream, bread with sweet crumble on top, and a glass of milk. I began writing on the cards in tiny script.

  Dear Mother,

  It’s already the end of the year, and it is snowing. I am well, so please do not worry. And do not waver no matter who comes to see you and what they tell you. I sincerely believe that you understand your own son’s intentions. I once read somewhere about a woman who had a son in a similar situation to mine. She was caught while distributing leaflets, and she said this:

  “I do not know politics. I begged my son not to do what he did. But he did not listen to me. He knows how much I love him. I think he disobeyed me for something that is bigger than the love between us. Therefore, I decided to join him.”

  Dear Mr. Park,

  I wonder how everyone is. I’ve been regretting the hasty way I left you all. I am sorry. It’s time to take down the calendar in your room. I remember you wrote on there this verse: “Should this life sometimes disappoint you, Don’t be sad or angry at it.” I hope you write that again in your new calendar. Hope you’re well. Please give my regards to Maeng Soon and Manager Yim.

  Soon Ok, Myung Soon, Kyung Ja,

  I hope you’re all doing well. Wherever you are, life can be tough. Once the time goes by, however, you look back on your past and find there were good days, and you’re proud that you made it so far. I’ve met many different people in many different places, but the most beautiful ones are those who work hard.

  11

  In darkness I groped for his skin, his hair, the outline of his bones. But I could not clearly recall the familiar odor of his armpits, his protruding Adam’s apple, the coarse texture of his shaved chin and his most private parts. In the dim gray of the morning I woke up, still resting my head on his arm, and touched him to confirm his presence. Sharing a bed became a daily routine for us. According to that melancholic scientist who interpreted dreams, the earliest hour in the morning is the moment when suppressed thoughts rise to the surface. We could not tolerate the sordid and evil world before us. It was like the backdrop of a surrealist painting, and in the foreground was the two of us, distinct figures. In my head, I black out that background. We’ll never have a child together. I inject all my feelings and emotions into him and create another me. That becomes the familiar image of myself. He and I have become each other’s reality. Would it be possible for us to remain confined forever? Just the two of us in hiding?

  Spring passed before we knew it. About three months after we met we finally became used to each other. They say a baby is accepted as a real human being one hundred days after birth, and you should pray for one hundred days if you want to move heaven. We had created our own unique world. It was a four-poster bed draped in white cotton, like those in a tropical climate. Our own little world separated from the rest. He and I, we really didn’t think about anything, we did nothing. We would lie down next to each other and we were lazy, or we might go out to the backyard to watch insects. Once we decided for no apparent reason to climb up the little path behind the house. Panting like one body, we hovered around each other. Sometimes our eyes would meet, sometimes we would lift our fingers in slightly different gestures. We would turn our heads or scratch with the tip of an index finger the itchy spot on our cheek.

  Looking back, every day in our life as lovers was a new beginning. Birth, togetherness, aversion, weariness, understanding, death, hatred, anger, yearning, tediousness. All of it passed by like an endless parade of clouds during the rainy season. Like the scene in a documentary where flowers sprout from a tree branch and grow and bloom and bloom too quickly and wither and droop and each petal falls away and finally only one petal is left, and it flutters and gives up in slow motion. Then the film is rewound and starts over again. Each start is new, every time. I am sometimes anxious, like in those paintings from the fin-de-siècle. A farewell, too, could be a new start. Perhaps he will steal himself away from me.

  We have to last for a long time here in the valley. One year, or two? Or tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the following day? But how should we continue? Have children, live happily ever after? In order to do that, he’d have to vanish from himself forever. Perhaps everything feels so vivid and we’re so nervous because we are taking refuge from battling that enormous power. If we were no longer suffering from trials and tribulations, would we love each other like we did at first? Standing on our two feet in this world with nothing in our hands?

  You said you liked our mountain. Not the majestic peaks, but the humble, ordinary rolling hills one finds in every neighborhood. One morning while we were having breakfast, you suddenly spoke.

  “Yoon Hee, why don’t you skip school today?”

  “They’ll fire me if I don’t work today. I already did that once.”

  Then you stuck your lip out like a petulant child and put down your spoon.

  “Okay, what do you want to do if I don’t go to work?”

  “Let’s go hiking with rice rolls. I can make rice rolls.”

  It was such an absurd idea, I had to laugh out loud. Yet I could not help myself.

  “It is very tempting,” I said. “I should just quit my job.”

  “I hope that school burns down.”

  “My goodness, you want to be a poet and you want a
school to be torched?”

  As you usually did, you pushed relentlessly once you got started.

  “We can come up with a new way to educate our children without schools.”

  “Look, I may have just begun but I am still a teacher.”

  We brought in a chopping board to make the rice rolls. You insisted that you did not like the nice-looking ones rolled up with various fillings and cut into a nice round shape, that you wanted to do it your way. You spread out rice on a rectangular sheet of dried seaweed, then added little pieces of kimchi, torn with your hands, of course, and seasoned dried anchovies. You rolled it all up into a long log.

  “You hold the whole thing in your hand and chomp on it from the top. It is the best!”

  That kind of rice roll was prevalent during the war, when you were a toddler, or during those difficult times after the war that our generation experienced. I ate something like that during the annual picnic at school. They were rolled in newspaper sheets, and the smell of ink had permeated here and there. The seaweed was dehydrated like tree bark and the filling was mostly coarse barley, and each bite had to be taken with a sip of water. Otherwise, it stuck to my throat and I could barely swallow it. You insisted, but certain things had improved, so we packed our rice rolls with plastic wrap. And we did not forget to brush the rolls with sesame oil.

  We went up the hill behind our house, carrying a little backpack with the rice rolls and a small water bottle. I’ve written in this notebook how I went up there once in a while after you left. Every few months or so. At the top, it was connected to another ridge. Turning to the right there was a lonely grave that seemed neglected, and to the left was a descending path that led to the summit of the next mountain. We were sweating and out of breath, and we walked through thorn bushes to climb up. It took us about an hour to reach the summit, and from it we saw the other side of the valley, where we had never been, because we usually turned and walked around the mountain when we got out of the bus. And we saw the blue ridge of the faraway mountains and the upper reaches of the stream that passed through Kalmae toward the big town.

  “Hyun Woo, let’s take a break and eat lunch here.”

  “Here? Now? We can go higher, to our left.”

  “No, this is the end of the hill behind our house. We have reached our destination.”

  I was about to sit down on the grass, but you grabbed my wrists and pulled me up.

  “What destination? We can’t see anything from here.”

  You dragged me along the edge of the ridge.

  “Maybe we can see something really fantastic from up there. What kind of an artist are you?”

  I thought I was going to die hiking another mountain. I lagged behind you because I rested for a while, and even after that I could not walk well. I heard you shouting from the summit, “Look! There’s the world!”

  It still took me quite a while to reach where you where. The sky was wide and open. The fields seemed to extend endlessly, and there were pale white and pink patches of flowers blooming in orchards across the curve of the hills. Here and there, little villages were nestling into the hills, and beyond them was the haze of the city. Cars were crawling down there like tiny insects.

  “This is refreshing!” I exclaimed as I sat down on a rock, but you remained silent, contemplative. I took out a water bottle from our backpack, took a gulp, and handed it over to you. “I’m starving. I’d say breakfast has been digested. Let’s eat!”

  Still, you did not turn around, you just kept staring beyond the horizon. You finally opened your mouth. “What day is it today?”

  “Wednesday, May 27th. Three hours for the ninth graders and two for the tenth graders.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My art classes. Since I skipped them today, they would be doing study hall now.”

  “It was exactly a year ago,” you said, still without turning to look at me. “The last massacre at the state capital.”

  At that moment, your young friends had been transferred from the jail at the military academy to a local prison, where they protested by kicking the iron bars and singing and refusing their meals. The dead people had yet to have a proper burial. But I wondered why you had to bring it up there, on that day? I wanted to console you, so I casually blurted out, “Let’s have a memorial service tonight.”

  “Yes, let’s do that.”

  The truth was, I was worried. I had a feeling that your eyes were wandering toward the world over there. We ate the rice rolls. It reminded me of past picnics, and you seemed to be in a better mood.

  Since we decided to hold a memorial service, I went to the village market to buy some fruit and fish and beef. I also got some sheets of rice cakes, one with embedded flower patterns made out of dates and beans, and another with red bean flakes. That night I prepared the food we were craving, the memorial service being an excuse. I cooked in the kitchen, while you set up a table in the bedroom. The candles were lit, but we had no incense to burn. We opened a bottle of soju and poured some into the lid of the rice bowl, and we knelt down next to each other. I was a little embarrassed—your somber silence made me feel uneasy. But honestly, all I wanted to do was to hold still your restless heart. I was just helping you, it was not like I was keeping you captive as if we were characters in some kinky story. But I was feeling guilty, and I did not know why. You took out a piece of paper and began reading out loud. You started with a year and month and date, some long sentences that I can no longer remember. But I do remember the last sentence, about longing for a new, different world.

  “From Baekdoo to Halla, I can see the beautiful land of Korea as one. But you are all gone now. What kind of world did you picture in your mind?”

  Now that I think about it, leaflets containing similar sentences were frequently circulated at the time, and most of them sounded hackneyed. Yet my heart was aching and my blood was boiling. Being a radical meant inclining toward the Left, but it was only after the massacres that you and your friends began to read books and study the other side. We no longer had a home. The classic revolutionary age was already finished. Still, ideas can be renewed and move forward as much as the world will let them, and I never once had any intention of dissuading you from your choices.

  The next day, when I returned from school, you were not there, just as I had feared. You did take a look at the world when you were up on the mountain. After all, Kalmae was not your reality. On the low table pushed against the wall was your note.

  I’ll be right back. I won’t go all the way to Seoul, just to Kwangju. I can’t bear it, I keep seeing my friends’ faces. I think I’ll be back by late tonight at the latest. Please, don’t worry even if I have to stay one night away. I promise I’ll be back by tomorrow morning.

  That was what you wrote, but you did not come back on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Do you have any idea how much I cursed you during those days? The thing I feared the most was parting from you without preparation or warning. I used to wake up in the middle of the night covered in cold sweat, did you know that? I was afraid that it did not matter how we felt for each other, that one day you would be captured in some unknown place and taken away with no way to let me know where you were. I used to think that what we wanted, what we dreamt of, was something similar to the simple and peaceful existence in Kalmae. But the world you pictured while reading books, the world you wanted to create, would never be simple or peaceful. It would be a place of nervous turmoil with endless struggles and determined, forceful battles for equality among different classes. There will always be enemies of the revolution. Do not criticize yourself over life in Kalmae being the luxury of a libertine. It’s all I ever wanted. No matter what system took power, our humble hiding place would remain. Ideology is not an issue for me, if you are by my side.

  She was right. When I stood on that summit, my heart was about to burst with the burden of self-exile. They flourished as a mighty military power through brute force, while our dead friends were secretly rotti
ng in shallow graves surrounded by the hushed cries of their loved ones. We needed power and structure to control it correctly. No matter how long it took. Somebody had to take the first step, the shortcut through the mountains that Nam Soo spoke of. It was also the long way of Bong Han, who told us to survive by all means and to somehow gain back the people’s power one day. Dong Woo dreamt of a new solidarity among the people. The Kwangju Uprising was the crossroad where our path became clearly separated from the others.

  I waited until Yoon Hee left for work, staying under the blanket and pretending that I was still sleepy and unable to get up. As soon as she left, I sprang up to change my clothes and I left the house. I walked to the edge of town and took a bus near the bridge to the next village. Then I took a cross-country bus to Kwangju. I got off the bus on the outskirts of the city by a railroad crossing. It was a clear day, and sunlight bathed the empty ground with white light.

  First, I decided to go see Choi, a preacher, to get information regarding the current situation in Kwangju. I walked to Yanglim-dong, following the railroad. I had once rented a room in that neighborhood, so I was familiar with its narrow alleyways. It was an old neighborhood with a low roofline, and the houses were so close to each other that it would have been considered a slum in Seoul. I stood where I could see the two-story house of Preacher Choi, and I made sure that there was no corner store or telephone booth from which someone could observe the house easily. I walked up the iron stairway outside the house to a small veranda where I could look into a window and see inside. His new wife was cooking something in the kitchen while Preacher Choi was reading a book, lying on his belly on the floor. With my fingertips, I tapped on the window right behind him. He turned his head reflexively and his mouth dropped to the floor. He jumped up and hurriedly opened the window.