The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “My God, is it really you? You are safe, Hyun Woo!”

  “Yeah, how are you?”

  As I walked into their house, the first thing his wife did was to draw the curtains. We sat facing each other, and Preacher Choi’s eyes reddened in an instant. He wiped away tears with his shirt sleeve.

  “Did you come down from Seoul?”

  “Yes, I did. How are the rest of the people here?”

  “What rest of the people? They are all dead or in prison or have no jobs. It’s not a living. We can’t even say hello when we see each other, we’re so ashamed. In fact, we avoid each other.”

  “What are you ashamed of?”

  “The fact that we are still alive. How about the Kwangju people in Seoul?”

  “I think they are okay.”

  “From what I’ve heard, they are arresting group after group, accusing them of being secret agents.”

  “I can imagine. In South America, revolutionaries were accused of being Communists.”

  “It’s almost like they are pushing us to go over to that side. And I believe in Jesus!”

  “If we’re against the US, we must be red.”

  His wife had been preparing lunch just then. She brought in a full table for two. The green of the baby lettuces and crown daisies was so vivid.

  “You need protein for energy, but all we have are leaves.”

  “Don’t worry, I eat meat all the time in Seoul.”

  With enraged voices, they told me stories. Stories of bodies found on the northern outskirts of the city, secretly buried in the mountains. Stories of someone witnessing a garbage man carrying bodies in his truck and dumping them in a park pond. Stories of dead bodies thrown into the reservoir, which was then filled with a powerful disinfectant. Stories of how people could not drink the water from the faucet throughout the summer. For them, the situation was not over yet. On the street, they avoided meeting others’ eyes, as if they were accomplices in a crime. They told me stories from the deepest part of their hearts.

  “Can you take off for a couple of days?”

  He knew right away that it was a serious proposition, and he got nervous.

  “Today’s Thursday? It should be okay until Saturday.”

  “Good. I want you to come with me tonight. Let’s go to Seoul.”

  “I thought you just came from there.”

  “I really need to see Kun. But I’m a stingray, submerged and swimming at the bottom of the sea.”

  “So you want me to contact him?”

  Preacher Choi quickly understood the situation. He once went to prison while serving in a ministry in an impoverished neighborhood.

  “The thing is, I have this bad feeling. I think the phone’s been disconnected.”

  When I’d left Seoul in February, I’d contacted Kun. Hae Soon had been there to make sure that our meeting place was secure, and he waited at least twenty minutes before appearing. Throughout the winter, the organization was managed via correspondences, but information was somehow leaked and a member was arrested. They did not know all the details but had heard that one member, a graduate student, had accidentally left his backpack filled with papers and leaflets at a pub in front of his school. Both of them were extremely nervous. Dong Woo had severed any contact with them, and he had ceased his monthly safety report. Whenever I went to the next village I tried calling Kun, but there was no answer.

  “Why not? Thanks to my minister, I’ve been well fed and safe.”

  When darkness had fallen we prepared to leave. His wife approached us with eyes full of fear.

  “You were interrogated so many times already . . . why are you doing this?”

  “Don’t worry, darling, nothing will happen. It won’t take too long.”

  “Yes, don’t worry too much. We’ll be back by tomorrow.”

  We went to the train station. At the time, the police frequently inspected ID cards at the station, searching for the wanted. They would stand by the entrance and target young men. Before we entered the station, we looked around to see if any detectives were standing outside, and we decided to separate.

  “Buy two tickets and go to the platform. I’ll use another way to get inside.”

  I checked my watch; there were still fifteen minutes left until the train’s arrival. After sending Preacher Choi into the station, I walked around the building and approached a fenced area where baggage was handled. There was no one around, so perhaps it was dinnertime. I found a cardboard box for fruit or ramen noodles and stealthily went into the baggage area, the cardboard box secured under my armpit. If someone asked, I was going to say I was looking for the place where I could send a parcel. Fortunately, no one approached me while I hopped over several tracks. I hid under the dark shadow of a freight car waiting for a go-ahead signal at the far end of the station. The cardboard box was a perfect seat once I flattened it. I resisted the urge to smoke and waited. Soon I heard the announcement and saw people rushing to the platform. I strolled over the tracks again and stood among the crowd. Preacher Choi quickly stood by my side. We did not exchange one word until the train came. It wasn’t a market day, so there weren’t too many passengers. With many empty seats in the car, we chose a middle section and sat facing each other so we could watch the corridor in both directions.

  When we arrived at Youngdeungpo Station in Seoul, it was almost five o’clock in the morning. Although we had not planned to, Preacher Choi and I decided to find a public bathhouse with a sauna. Each of us took a shower and fell asleep on the floor with a wooden block as a pillow. Preacher Choi tried calling Kun around seven o’clock, but again we did not get through. It was not yet the morning rush hour, so we decided to move quickly and headed toward the slum where Kun’s knitting factory was. We got out one stop early and walked to a modest restaurant that specialized in soup with stuffed pig intestines, close to the entrance of a market. We decided to meet there later, and Preacher Choi went to Kun’s house according to my directions. I could not just sit there at the restaurant, so I ordered a bowl of soup and pretended to eat. Hae Soon came in, lifting the drape by the door, which also served as a menu board. Preacher Choi followed her, and both of them sat across from me silently.

  “Are you out of your mind?” She whispered, but it was clearly a rebuke.

  “Something happened?”

  “Yeah, something happened. Kun was arrested.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Over a month ago.”

  “Well, that explains your telephone situation.”

  Hae Soon let out a long sigh and began to cry. It was not violent, just a few tears asking me to take her side.

  “We disconnected it. We visit the stores in person to get orders.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “No one can figure that out. Could be Namyoung-dong,10 could be Namsan. Jung Ja is running around like a madwoman, but everyone says they don’t know.”

  “Contact the Catholics. They’ll help.”

  “People are being killed for no reason. All organizations are scared stiff.”

  Hae Soon explained what had happened over the last few months. Right before I left Seoul, the graduate student was arrested, as Kun had feared. They quietly investigated for more than three months, using the list of names they had obtained. They must have put everyone on the list under close surveillance. A meeting between one of the members and Kun was witnessed, and the tail was moved to Kun. They monitored the knitting factory for a few days.

  “For some reason or other, we were inundated with peddlers. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, they would just push the door open and come in, and they would linger even when we refused to buy anything.”

  Then they came, almost twenty of them, in the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep when the plywood door was suddenly broken into pieces with a great noise, and men in work uniforms jumped into the house. Caught off-guard, Kun sprang up from his bed, but a man who seemed to be the leader put a gun to his forehead.

/>   “Someone turned the light on, and they began to beat everyone with bats. They didn’t care who was there, they just beat us. Then they dragged us out to the alley and made us put our hands behind our head and kneel. They kept beating us even after they handcuffed us from behind and even when we were walking to the traffic lane. Then they stuffed all of us into a tiny chicken coop car.”

  While being interrogated, Kun named a few members, but Jung Ja and Hae Soon and everyone else who worked at the knitting factory persevered, insisting that they had no connection to the organization and that they did what was told to them by Kun because he paid them.

  “This is not over,” I whispered to Hae Soon.

  “This is only the beginning. Did you have any papers in the house?”

  “They found everything except for the organization’s roster. Jung Ja said they have enough to sentence him for many, many years.”

  I knew that Choi Dong Woo kept the most important papers. Still, they must have found the mimeograph and the minutes of our meetings and other information. The brain may not have been revealed but the intestines were laid bare. Preacher Choi, who had been quietly listening to us, opened his mouth.

  “Well, everyone, I don’t think we have much time. We need to separate.”

  “Yes, we’ll go first. You should eat something here, though.”

  We looked around and found the owner sitting on the threshold of her living quarters, absorbed in a soap opera on television. When I got up, Hae Soon burst into tears, covering her face with both palms and doing her best to muffle the sound.

  “Don’t worry, everything will be okay,” I whispered to her, lightly stroking her back.

  “I don’t know why I keep going,” she managed to utter. She lowered her hands and regarded me, her face stained with tears.

  “Hyun Woo, why don’t we just give up? Let them enjoy their power for the next ten thousand years.”

  Preacher Choi and I were weeping, too. We left the restaurant feeling like we had been kicked out. From behind, I heard Hae Soon’s voice.

  “Don’t ever come back here. Goodbye, Hyun Woo.”

  And I never saw her again. During the long years Kun was imprisoned, Jung Ja found another job and ended up marrying someone else, another worker who shared a similar background. I think I once heard that she lives in Ansan. Their situation was even worse than ours, the so-called intelligentsia, and they were soon forgotten. They coped on their own and withstood hardships, but no one cared to remember them later. But no one can take away from them their generosity and their youthful dignity, despite their anonymity in history.

  You came back to me late on the Sunday night. I was not sleeping. I knew it was you when I heard footsteps approaching from beyond the fences. The door quietly opened, and there was that familiar scent of you. Like a dog who had returned home, you gulped down water from the yellow tin kettle on the table. I waited for you to fall asleep, lying there with my back to the light from the desk lamp, but you had to look over my shoulder at my face. I could not resist it any more, so I talked to you first, trying to sound like I was just waking up.

  “When did you come in?”

  “A while ago.”

  You were lying. I knew you had sneaked in just then. But I was determined not to show any sign of the agitation I had felt staying up every night for the past few days, worrying about you. I got up, rubbing my eyes, and pretended to be indifferent.

  “How was your visit to the world?”

  “It is just as it was before.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  You took off your clothes and went outside. I heard the sound of running water and splashing. I did not say anything when you came back into the room, fell on your back, and finished a cigarette.

  “We’ve been crushed,” you mumbled, but I pretended I did not hear you. It took a while for you to say something again, still looking at the ceiling.

  “There was a guy who got lost deep in the Himalayas. He found a crevice between rocks and he went in there to escape from the snow and wind. Inside, it was spacious and it was a different world, a gentle world where there was neither pain nor separation nor sadness, nor poverty nor hunger. There was a garden blooming with flowers of every radiant color, and fruit trees. None of the bad things in the real world existed there. No one fought, no one got sick . . . somehow, this life of harmony continued. But one day, he began to wonder what was going on outside and how his family was, so he left the cave. He returned to the country he was from and lived the rest of his life there, going crazy with a desire to return to that different world. He went back to the Himalayas to look for it, but he never again found the little crevice under the snow.”

  You were murmuring as if you were talking to yourself, and you came into my bed. You were not wearing a shirt, and I felt your firm shoulder blades when I put my hands around your back, almost automatically. We shared a long kiss. With one hand you grabbed one of my breasts while with the other you took my underwear down. Your touch was rougher and more forceful than usual. When it was over, I didn’t mean to cry but tears rolled down my face. You had not just visited the world outside, you had rooted yourself in it again. The choices you and my father made caused you to look down on what we shared as insignificant, the domain of the petit bourgeois that created a false sense of freedom. Yet we were on a ship together, raising the sail and about to leave the port to cross the ocean through countless storms and rough waves. And our love had only just begun.

  We got back into the old routine, an ordinary daily life where nothing really happened. And I came up with a cunning plan to grow vegetables. It happened to be a market day, so I went to the next village to buy young eggplants and peppers and tomatoes. I wanted to plow the little field and plant seeds for lettuce and crown daisy, and to dig a hole for compost and grow pumpkins, too.

  “How about we grow a vegetable garden?”

  “Yeah! Why didn’t we think of that before?”

  I had no idea that you would like my idea so much, but I was relieved to see you jump at the suggestion and grab a shovel. You dug the field and turned over the earth, and I followed behind you, breaking the bigger clumps of earth with a hoe. All afternoon, we made furrows and ridges in the field. We even decorated our little vegetable garden by building a low stone wall around it.

  “It might be too late,” you said, “but let’s plant the seeds anyway.”

  “Sure! We just have to water them twice a day, they’ll grow like crazy. Let’s plant some flowers, too.”

  We went to the next village to buy the young plants, we got little branches to use as a support, and we seeded various annuals. Morning glories, four o’clocks, rose mosses, balsams, zinnias, even cosmos and asters. We were going to have a garden where all these flowers would bloom in sequence from early summer to late autumn.

  How can I describe that feeling when you see the very first sprout coming out of the dry soil where nothing used to be? At first, there are only a couple, and I cannot tell if they are buds or weeds. Then, as if the first couple whispered to the rest that it is okay to come out, the field is covered with numerous sprouts the following day. They are almost transparent light green and look like they would be broken by the softest wind or the thinnest drizzle. The shifting appearance of our garden was a calendar. They used to grow so rapidly that I would not recognize them if I didn’t look at them for a couple of days. You went out to the field every morning with a bucket and a watering can.

  By early summer, our field was full of abundant green leaves. Do you remember the first time we picked lettuce for lunch? The leaves were not fully grown, but it was about half the size of my palm. If we overlapped two or three of them, we could wrap a spoonful of rice. Eating young lettuce leaves, my mouth was filled with the fragrance of life.

  I was happiest when I watched you tending our vegetable garden. Every farmer can become a poet. Whenever you caught an insect on crown daisy leaves or picked up a snail, or even when you shook aphi
ds from a plant, you touched them gently and made sure that you did not hurt them. You put them on a leaf and took them away. I loved that you did that. It comforted me and made me think that maybe nothing bad would ever happen to us, that heaven was watching out for us, too. People from the city get bored quickly with the stillness of the countryside and its scenery, and they run back in a few days. But open your eyes and look around! Nature is ever changing; it is alive and shifting. When the grasses and leaves dance, they look so different depending on the wind. In a soft breeze they flutter a bit, in a gentle wind they rustle, and when the wind becomes strong they sway and wave and shiver. Even in silence when the wind chimes are still and the air is not moving, it is soon altered by a grasshopper or a locust jumping out of the grass forest and hopping over the path. Or a frog jumping into water. The summer in Kalmae was a concert stage for the chorus of everything alive. I remember the evenings when we sat out in the courtyard with a straw mat on the ground. We burned dried wormwood from the main house to repel mosquitoes, and ate rice wrapped in steamed pumpkin leaves for dinner.

  The rest of our lives would be dominated by those three months, and that summer was our life. It rained so frequently then.

  Plump rain clouds of the blackest shade graze the mountain tops and rush toward us, and you run around the fence and shout, “Rain’s coming! Get the laundry!”

  By the time I find a pair of shoes and get down from the porch, big, fat drops of rain are falling already, on my head, on my arms, on the dry ground. A lightning flash crosses the sky, followed by a loud noise that shatters everything around. That noise spreads far and wide, echoed by the grumbling sound of thunder. When the rain begins, the hot earth cools down and releases the fresh scent of soil. A cool wind arrives and a delicious scent of air fills our noses. We hurry, gathering what needs to be gathered and putting away what needs to be put away, and then we stand on the porch or by the kitchen door to watch the rain come down, filling up the void. A flash again, lightning, and again the shattering noise.

  “Let’s make pancakes,” one of us would suggest. I love the dark sky right before the shower begins, I love the peals of thunder that sound loud but are in fact gentle and lonely, and I love the fragrance of wild flowers and soil and the chill that brings goosebumps to my skin.