The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Do you mind if I borrow your newspaper?”

  The man glanced at me and nodded once. I picked up the newspaper and sat down, turning my back to him. I spread the paper out on the table and began reading. There were mug shots of Choi Dong Woo and Kun, and other familiar faces. The number of those arrested was somewhere between seventy and eighty, less than a third of the whole organization. Still, what the investigation had uncovered was quite close to the truth. At the bottom, I recognized a photograph of myself, which I had not noticed at first. Shocked, I inhaled and looked around. Everyone was busy eating; no one was paying attention to me. It was an old photograph taken before I went into the army, the one used on my ID card. My hair was longer, my cheeks were hollow, I looked unsophisticated. I comforted myself by thinking that no one would recognize me here based on this photograph. My bowl of noodles came, so I closed the newspaper and mixed the noodles and paste and ate, bewildered. I kept pushing noodles into my mouth with chopsticks, but my head was filled with what was in the newspaper.

  According to the diagram, I was the chief operator and the principal offender. That was about it: a simple label of “wanted,” no mention of specific charges against me. Dong Woo was the vice chief who established a base in Inchon and Boopyung to persuade and influence laborers. There were names I had never heard of before, and they were described as field agents of Dong Woo. Books and papers from North Korea were discovered with him, and Park Suk Joon in Japan was named as a contact. Kun was said to be the manager of the secret base of our operation, with the names of Jung Ja and Hae Soon and other factory workers included. I did not return the newspaper to the other patron; I left it on my table and stealthily got up to leave. As I paid the cashier I glanced back, and the man still had his back to me, busily eating and showing no interest in the newspaper. I had already decided to keep this information to myself and not tell Yoon Hee about it. First of all, I needed to contact Preacher Choi and ask him how bad it was. I did not go into the pair of telephone booths in front of the post office, even though there were not many people around. I walked all the way to the bus station. It was busy as usual with buses continuously streaming in and out, and there were four telephone booths in front of the station building. There were a lot fewer people there compared to the weekends, and all the booths were empty. I walked into the furthest one. I dialed, and I heard Preacher Choi’s voice.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “It’s me. I saw the papers.”

  “Is that you? It’s all a mess. The Inchon guy was dug up, and everyone else became potatoes.”

  Just as when I’d read the newspaper, I did not blame Dong Woo. If you were caught first, it was customary to dump everything onto those who had not been caught yet, to lessen the burden and buy more time. The problem was that people who were outside of our organization were mentioned. Maybe there was something else that he had to protect. No matter what, Dong Woo was the potato vine, and when he was pulled, all the bulbs underground followed him into the light.

  “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”

  “Listen, I can’t talk to you for too long. We worry about your health, more than anything. Consider yourself a hermit. Take care of yourself.”

  I tried to whisper farewell but the words never left my mouth. I hung up without saying anything.

  I found out later that Choi Dong Woo deserved to be criticized. The first rule for an activist who had gone underground was not to be captured, but it was the hardest one to follow. You are isolated from daily life, and as the pursuers tighten their net, you become more militant and begin to hallucinate that you are fighting against the whole world. You are prone to being impatient and ever more radical. Dong Woo had been staying at the rented place of a laborer comrade in an industrial zone, where he had continued to run a study group. At first, he only used practical books published legally, but he gradually moved onto illegal ones from Japan, and eventually introduced books from the other side. He distributed the books by copying them into a notebook by hand and having his students copy them again. After Kun was arrested, Dong Woo had not left. He’d gone further, distributing leaflets in the industrial zone. A supervisor who used to be a technician saw one of those leaflets at his factory, and he took the laborer, who happened to be Dong Woo’s student, to a pub to buy him drinks and gently question him. The student proudly told him everything. It is not clear whether the supervisor directly informed the police or not, but there was no question that the agency was secretly investigating in that area and had a widespread network of agents.

  They descended on Dong Woo at three o’clock in the morning. He must have been exhausted; he had gone into hiding long before the Kwangju Incident, during the last years of the previous administration. He had a steel pipe on hand for self defense, so he resisted at first, swinging it around. When he had a chance, he took the back window and climbed over the neighbor’s wall and roof to run away, as he had done before. But they were more experienced and prepared now—they had surrounded him in layers—and as soon as he got out of the alleyway and ran toward the major boulevard, a motorcycle was waiting for him. There were two men on one motorcycle, one driving and the other brandishing a bat. It soon caught up with Dong Woo, who was running, and as it inched ahead of him the man in the backseat wielded the bat and hit the back of Dong Woo’s head. He bounced off like a ball, spun around, and fell to the pavement on his back. Naturally, he was unconscious. Before he was dragged in for interrogation, he was brought to an emergency room where his head was stitched and he was hooked up to an IV until he regained consciousness. It was the only lucky break we had. Because he was injured during the capture and because it was their fault, he was able to insist on his right to remain silent for four days. Time was golden. During those four days, Dong Woo rearranged and cleared his thoughts. First, he erased the names of laborers who were barely surviving and replaced them with the names of intellectuals who were managed by Kun through correspondences, even though they had little to do with what he was doing at the moment of his arrest. He also tried to minimize the damage by remembering only a few names of laborers from where he was staying. He followed the new picture he had composed, surrendering only a name at a time, and faced two months of torture. I cannot even begin to describe it. You would never know how sensitive your penis and anus are to electric shocks, and you would never know how it feels when your eyes jump from their sockets, as if they are about to burst. Dong Woo was a boy from the sea who could always see the smallest fishing boat out on the horizon, but after that he became terribly short-sighted and had to wear thick glasses.

  He spent twelve years in prison and got out before I did. His last three years were split between a regular prison and one in the south, where there was a psychiatric ward. Once there, he would stay at least six months in the psychiatric ward. I heard about him from time to time from other students who were transferred to my prison.

  We were together in the same detention house before the trial—not in the same section, since we were coconspirators, but in the same compound, his building right in front of mine. From the window in my bathroom, I could see his building’s public bath. Whenever he went out for exercise or for lunch, or whenever he left the building to attend hearings or visitations, he would call for me.

  “Oh Hyun Woo! Hyun Woo, where are you?”

  I looked out through the bars on the bathroom window and waved to him. Dong Woo climbed on top of the washstand, squatted down in front of the grilled window, and gave me news from outside and about people who came to visit him. The prison guard sometimes interrupted.

  “Who’s talking to the other prisoner? You know it’s not allowed.”

  “Shut up, you fool. You’re the one who should be quiet.”

  A little later, the chief guard would appear beyond the grilled window with his cap on.

  “Get down! Hey you up there, get back inside! Who told you to talk to each other?”

  “Hey, I’m doing my business here.
Man’s gotta go when he’s gotta go.”

  We did not care, we told each other to eat well and take care, and finally said our goodbyes. After the final sentencing, before we were transferred to different prisons, both of us put in a request so we could say farewell to each other. We sat side by side at a table, drinking barley tea and looking out the window. It was snowing. We saw a corner of the female prisoners’ exercise ground, and there was a lone woman in a gray prison uniform kicking a ball. The ball she was using was sold in the prison store, a soft volleyball. The snowflakes were quite big, but she kept kicking the ball against the long, high wall, skillfully catching it with her chest or foot and kicking it back repeatedly. Her action seemed so futile, kicking the ball again and again against the wall in the empty playground. Maybe she was killing time. Both of us watched her for a while in silence. Of course, Dong Woo and I each knew one another’s thoughts, as well as the recent news regarding our other friends. Dong Woo spoke first.

  “Kun left already.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yeah, he came to see me while he was being transferred. He happened to pass our section, so he just ran in with his bags. The guards knew we were saying goodbye, so they pretended not to notice.”

  At the time we were called “prisoners of public order crimes,” and this was signified by a red triangle on our chests. Sometimes other ordinary criminals would taunt us as we passed their cells by calling out simultaneously, “Hey you, Commie bastard!” The red triangle was gone by the time we were transferred to our prisons, but we always stood out because our heads were not shaved as other prisoners’ were. He was sentenced to twenty years, I to life.

  “I am so sorry.”

  Dong Woo dropped his head.

  “For what?”

  “I didn’t do it right, the interrogation.”

  “What’s the difference? One way or another, it’s either you or me, nothing else would be different.”

  “We won’t be able to exchange letters ourselves. Let’s keep in touch through those outside.”

  That was how we parted. For the next three or four years he did well, and he sent his regards a couple of times a year through our families, the only ones who could exchange letters with us. About five years later, I heard news about him from another prisoner of public order crimes who had been transferred from a southern province.

  “Choi Dong Woo is in the hospital ward now.”

  “Really? Why was he sent there?”

  “My last prison has a tuberculosis ward and a psychiatric ward. He was sent there last year.”

  “Are his symptoms serious?”

  “That’s usually the case. They only transfer the worst cases. I heard he doesn’t recognize anyone.”

  I remembered things I had seen in the prison I was in before, and I could easily guess his condition. I had been on the second floor, a special section for prisoners of public order crimes, and below me was the infirmary. The long corridor was divided into two by a partition; closer to the entrance were patients with normal illnesses, and inside, behind another set of iron bars, were mental patients. The mental patients’ cell was immediately beneath mine, and I knew their activities and movements very well. In the cells closer to the iron bars were the relatively benign patients, while more violent ones were housed in the innermost ones. There was a man, another lifer, who stayed in the cell right underneath mine for a long time. I had heard that he was from the notorious boot camp in Samchung, where gang members and other “menaces to society” were sent in the name of purification. He rebelled against the guards and injured some of them, and in return he was beaten just enough so that he would live and then be transferred to our prison. After he arrived, he suffered a psychotic episode while working in the prison factory and killed a fellow prisoner with a hammer. Even when he had those episodes, he continuously proclaimed his innocence and protested against his enemies. He would debate passionately, and he gave a speech every night. His screams at night were wretched. In the middle of the night, the whole building would be in commotion: other prisoners, awakened by his howling, screamed back at him to shut up so they could sleep, while guards shouted commands. I had permission to use the tiny courtyard, which faced south, as a little vegetable garden and as a place to dry my bedding. The mental patients’ windows looked out onto it, and their sewage tank was in the corner of that courtyard, so I ran into them from time to time. One day I was watering my lettuce when, out of the blue, someone began shouting behind my back. It was him, the guy from Samchung, making another speech, starting with “My dear fellow citizens.” He ended it by asking people to vote for him in the next parliamentary election; I do not know how he knew the name of the president at the time, but he named the president and shouted, “Down with the presidency!” In the beginning, the prison guards would get angry and try to stop him, but after a while they let him be. This sort of thing was actually uneventful compared to his more serious episodes. One time when he was edgy he remained quiet for a while, then collected his feces in a bowl and threw it at the chief guard during his regular inspection. Once in a while I saw him from the courtyard as he stared out the bathroom window. He was always looking far away and did not seem to notice me. He would stand there for a long time without moving. When he received meals, sometimes he ate them, but most of the time he threw them all over his cell and painted the walls with his feces. The prison assistants, who had to bathe him and clean his cell and clothes every three days, detested him. Every six months he was sent to another prison with a psychiatric ward, then he would come back a bit subdued. For three years he went back and forth, until one day he never returned. I once mentioned him to a prison guard, who snickered and mumbled, “I guess he left.”

  “How? He was a lifer.”

  “Therefore, he left because he died.”

  I remember another guy, the one nicknamed Daddy Long Legs. He was in his early twenties, and he seemed perfectly normal at first. He knew my name and the charges against me, and he even asked me if I would lend him books. He was bony and tall like a basketball player, and whenever there was a prison championship, everyone said, What a shame, if only he had a clear mind, he would be the best player we had. Daddy Long Legs made scenes only when the warden or the prison board or someone high up came for an inspection. As they stood in line to take a look, he spat and swore.

  “You assholes, am I a zoo animal? What are you looking at?”

  Naturally, the important people would hurry up and leave, but his swearing trailed them into the corridor.

  “You fucking asshole, you think you’re so important? All you have is a shitty cap on your head! You bastards, you browbeaters, you blackmailers!”

  As he banged the door and got hopping mad, it took three or four prison guards to overpower him, tie him up with ropes and leather straps, and put a muzzle on his mouth. When they left his cell, utterly exhausted, he continued to kick the door with his foot.

  Daddy Long Legs was also sent to the other prison every six months, and he gradually stopped talking. His cheeriness was replaced by silence, and his body grew even thinner. The youthful energy that had filled his eyes disappeared, and he began to look like a middle-aged man. One day I was watching the group of men from his section doing exercises and drying their bedding out in the courtyard, and I spoke to a guard in charge of the exercise.

  “That guy, Daddy Long Legs, he’s changed a lot. He’s in such low spirits.”

  “Isn’t he a gentleman now? Well, he’ll have to be. He has to change if he wants to survive when he leaves this place.”

  “No, I mean he seems worse.”

  “I heard he’s much better now. He doesn’t talk nonsense anymore, does he?”

  I did not think he had gotten better. I thought he had gone to the other world, from which he could never return. Over a couple of years, after he had done three round trips, he turned to stone. He did not remember me. He finished his six-year sentence and disappeared.

  For everyone, ther
e is a line that should not be crossed. It does not matter whether you are inside or outside. During imprisonment, it went without saying that everyone would go through several crises: the first day after sentencing; facing your fourth year in solitary; going from your ninth to tenth year. When your wife leaves. When a family member, especially your mother, passes away. When your child is sick. When the guard you hate is put in charge of you. When you are punished unfairly. When you are handcuffed from behind and your feet are tied, when you have to eat like a dog in a dark windowless cell. At that moment, you cross the boundary from this side of life to the other. Unable to bear it, your spirit leaves the space around the body and creates a world of its own.

  Dong Woo survived the first four years of imprisonment, but he lost it in his fifth year. Like others, he was sent to a psychiatric ward every six months, which only made him worse. I got word that when Dong Woo was released his older brother and mother took him to a house they had bought in the countryside. Chul Young remained trapped in the moment of the Kwangju Incident, and he still remembered the situation and the names of friends, but Dong Woo did not remember anything. I think I am going to go see him one day, even if all there is left of him is his aged face.