The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  She was listening carefully, nodding, and she just waited, looking at me with these patient eyes asking for more details. I hesitated, not knowing what else to tell her or how. She goes, Is that it? I don’t think you dragged me here to tell me that. In spite of myself I said, Mom, she said she wants to get married. Mom remained calm and replied, Really, that’s great. Who is he? I don’t know him well, I answered, but he writes poems. Her face broke into a faint smile. This is what she said: I thought I was done with bookworms. It is one thing to read poems, but writing them really doesn’t help with everyday life. Well, that’s not the case these days! You can be a teacher or work for publishers or newspapers, there are lots of jobs that you can have. Mom is our father’s wife, after all. She shook her head and said, I’m not worried about employment. During the period of crisis, a man who writes poems cannot stand it. Every book tells him that the world should not be like it is. I seized that moment to slip it in, The truth is, the man she wants to marry . . . he is in prison right now. She put down her fork on the plate and gazed outside for a long time.

  You went to see Yoon Hee a few weeks ago, didn’t you? You said she was fine and well. I just sat there with my head down and waited for her bubbling emotions to subside. Then, the thought of your loneliness and pain came to me, as well as the sleeping face of Eun Gyul. I know our mom went through a lot, but I thought our pains were part of her life, too. After all, she chose and remained with our father, didn’t she? I decided to be honest. Mom, she married him in secret. They lived together for six months. She sent me a letter saying that she’ll come back to Seoul. I decided to stop there. Mom looked like someone with a headache. She put two fingers on her temple and laid her head down. When she came back from the ladies’ room she looked perfectly fine. There was not on smudge on her makeup. Since then, she has kept silent.

  After we returned home, she did not once ask about you again. She’s really strong, isn’t she? I haven’t told her about Eun Gyul yet. I am guessing that I won’t be able to stop myself after sending this letter, I’ll be telling her soon. All I am going to tell her is how important Eun Gyul is to our family. I just want our formidable mother to want to see her granddaughter as soon as possible. Now I think about it, I’m still so young. You and Mom and Father, you’re all so unbelievably similar. You have no fear of life. Hurry home, do not worry about anything.

  15

  The first winter in prison was harsh.

  I was placed in the strictest solitary confinement. I was not even placed in the section where political prisoners were usually sent. Instead, I was locked into the very last cell of the corridor among ordinary criminals. It was a small cell divided into two by a partition, about the size of a torture cell. The next door was supposed to be a single cell, too, but it was always empty. I was completely alone. Even when I was transferred, the cell, about six feet in every direction, remained the same. I got used to it.

  The winter in solitary confinement begins early in October. Not one ray of sunlight comes in, and the tiny viewing window on the iron door is purely decorative. There is another slot on the door, through which meals come in three times a day. Those are the only times it is opened, otherwise it remains locked from outside. Right next to the door is a narrow space for a low table, which blocks about half of the door’s width. If there is occasion for me to go out, I have to walk sideways. Above the desk is a fluorescent light. This light never turns off; it is on 365 days a year. There is no “lights out” in prison. Inside, the prisoner needs to be watched at all times, whether he is eating or defecating or sleeping or masturbating. The four walls and ceiling are, of course, bare cement walls. Only the floor is covered in wood. If you spread out the thin futon on the floor, there is a gap of about a foot to the side. Sitting down, my hands touch the walls without my spreading my arms. At the foot of the bed is a narrow space about three feet wide, which I use to store my toiletries and other items. And then there is the bathroom. Its door is a wooden frame covered with plastic, so the guard can look through the viewing window and clearly see the inmate squatting. The toilet needs to be flushed with water, one scoop of water for urine, two for feces. It stinks, so I have an empty plastic bottle filled halfway with water stuck upside down in the hole on the floor. Some old-timers use a rubber glove, filled with water to the size of a soccer ball. Tied to a string, it works as a makeshift cover for the hole. You just pull on the string before you go.

  In the bathroom is a real window, a small single-pane one. During times when the prison had enough in its budget, these windows were covered with acrylic, but the older ones were simply covered with ordinary plastic nailed into the frames. The bathroom window is the only place through which you can leave the cell, a place where you can see a corner of the sky, a tip of a mountain, a little part of the road the moon travels, or a handful of stars. We spend a lot of time standing in front of it. The small rectangular frame always holds the same view, but it is possible to change the picture in your mind. The tiny bathroom became so familiar to me that I can still picture in my head the closed-in walls and the spots on the ceiling and the peeling paint. Hunkered down in there, I would move the spots and patterns around in front of me like pieces of a puzzle to create new images. There was a rabbit and a dog, or a woman with long hair, or the private parts of a man and a woman. If it looked close to, but not quite, what I imagined, I scraped it with my nails to complete the picture. After a few months, the stains and traces would shift into different shapes.

  I would wear a thick sweater and a vest underneath the prison garb, but, still shivering in the cold mornings and nights, I wrapped myself in a blanket. Then I learned from the old-timers how to chase the chills away by washing my body with ice cold water. I also got a hot water bottle, which was usually distributed only to the sick and the model prisoners. It was actually a waterproofed army surplus cartridge box. I filled it up with hot water and closed the lid tightly, put it in a sack and placed it by my feet, where it remained warm until the next morning. To get out of the bedding warmed by my own body at the coldest time of day took real determination. But if I could not resist the temptation to stay under the blanket, the whole day was shot. Your state of mind during these critical hours before breakfast determined the rest of the day. If I stayed under the blanket, feigning illness, I would miss the exercise hour, which meant I would not see the sun and breathe fresh air outside for the whole day. The sun would go down quickly, and as the evening chill rushed in and the four walls closed in, I would begin to feel I would go crazy if I did not smash my head against the steel door and scream.

  To survive the day, I run into the bathroom naked. The water bucket by the door has a thin layer of ice on top. I break it with the plastic dipper and scoop out water into another bucket, then wet a towel and begin rubbing my body with it. When the wind comes in through the plastic window and grazes my wet body, it feels like my skin could crack and split open. After rubbing for a while, the skin is flushed with energy, and warmth courses through my whole body. I wash my face, pick up the bucket, and pour whatever water is left over my head. My teeth chatter. I dry myself well, especially my ears, since they tend to get frostbite easily. I breathe in and out several times, then I support myself on the iron bars over the viewing window to do push-ups or run in a stationary position. In prison, only two seasons exist, winter and summer. Spring and fall are too short and fleeting; they’re gone before I realize they are here, and they only exist in calendars.

  After the workers leave for the prison factory, breakfast is delivered. Ready to Deliver! scream the inmates who work as the guards’ assistants. The dull sound of cart wheels and the smell of food drift in. In the corridor they post a menu that seems edible and varied, but in reality every single thing looks and tastes the same. Mostly, it is a pool of liquid in a bowl. The only way to figure out whether it is supposed to be a soup or a stew or braised meat is to see what is left at the bottom. A couple of morsels are always there, and on a lucky day I can find a piece of
tofu or some mackerel, pike, or pork. In the earliest days of my imprisonment, I felt like crying whenever the meal was pushed in through the slot at the bottom of the door. I felt like an animal, like I had plunged to the very bottom of the world. To eat and survive seemed too tiring and hopeless.

  Finally, exercise time! After breakfast, after I wash the dishes, fill the water bucket, empty out the trash can, and mop the floor clean, I get ready to go out and wait for the guard in charge of exercise. I hear his footsteps approaching, followed by the familiar voice saying, Want some fresh air? Let’s go outside! With a clank, the steel gate is opened and the corridor looks like a grand lobby at a fancy hotel. As I walk out the building, the air is cool and the freezing wind slices my ear like a knife. There are inmates exercising and doing sports out on the large ground used by common criminals. Some are doing laps around the yard wearing only their underwear, some are swinging from parallel bars. There is a group of people kicking balls, others playing volleyball or a simplified version of baseball. Some just sit there in the sun, like sunflowers. And there are the old-timers and those at the top of the inmate hierarchy who are dressed in nice workout clothes and play tennis with help from a group of ball boys. But I pass by them and walk through the fenced-in passageway to an empty space between two buildings. There used to be an exercise field exclusively for political inmates, but they built an assembly hall on that site. Maybe someone did not want someone like me to have the benefit of open space. Even when I was transferred to another prison, there was no large ground where political prisoners were allowed to go.

  When I was housed in the detention cell, our exercise ground was a circular building that was divided into fan-shaped pieces, just like a pizza or a cake, and modeled on that infamous Panopticon model devised by Jeremy Bentham. Within the structure, each inmate could be surveilled, but he himself could see no one else. Bentham got the idea for his prison from the zoo at Versailles. Each section had a door, and the inmate was locked in, surrounded by cement walls. There was a two-story circular tower in the middle. Not as high as the outer wall, this tower was the hub. There was a row of numbered doors in the outer wall, like on a flying saucer. When a number was called an inmate opened the corresponding door and walked into the fan-shaped space. The guard at the top of the tower watched all the sections from above. I never saw a guard walking around up top, diligently observing us inmates. I was pretty sure he was somewhere up there, sitting comfortably and smoking a cigarette or chatting with other guards, turning his head or stretching out his neck to observe who was doing what in each section. The structure was heavily symbolic. Our activities were as exposed as mice in a lab.

  I could hear a guy on the other side of the wall mumbling and kicking a ball against the wall again and again. Someone else just paced, counting numbers out loud. Some people stood there blankly and stared at the mountains and the sky beyond the wall. I looked at the sky, mostly. There were clouds and birds flying. And there were different airplanes, always flying on the same path. After a while, I was able to differentiate between southbound ones and southeast-bound ones, and I could guess based on the size and shape of the planes whether they were international or domestic flights. The returning flights seemed much larger, perhaps because they flew lower. I imagined the people in them. A passenger who had pushed his seat back and was sleeping comfortably, or rummaging around for something to eat. A mother soothing a child, a businessman reading a magazine or a newspaper, a student listening to music. The flight attendants walking back and forth along the aisle, someone sitting on the toilet, a man turning his head to kiss his girlfriend, and all the oblivious people in the world. Underneath, I am alone in my concrete cell.

  While spending time in that Panopticon structure, there were two activities I actually enjoyed. I raised wildflowers and I took care of ants. From spring to summer, little wildflowers and weeds grew under the shadow of the cement walls. Mostly they were dandelions, lettuce flowers, and violets. I watered the ones that seemed prettiest. I carried water in an empty milk carton and fed the delicate flowers that somehow managed to grow. Inmates also pulled up weeds and used them to write messages on the cement wall. At first the writings were green, but they turned white by the next day, and they did not wash away even with rain. Students and laborers arrested for political reasons wrote slogans and messages for their comrades. Down with the Military Fascists! Power to the People! Yankees Go Home! Long Live Democracy! Whenever there was an inspection, the first things the guards did was wash all the walls and pull up the weeds. They did not simply pull them out with their hands, they ordered other inmates assigned to menial labor to uproot everything with weeding hoes. The flowers I raised so carefully were mercilessly pulled out and left on the ground to dry. They were so delicate, there was barely a trace of them left behind.

  There were various species of ants living within the cement walls. There were the smallest ones with jet black bodies, those with a black upper half and a reddish plum lower half, those who were smaller and fast, and the army ants, who were big but not as rare. My favorites were the little black workers who were good at digging tunnels and did their job with such enthusiasm. It was the other flying insects who flew in from the outside who actually led me to study and befriend the ant colony. Many flying insects came in without realizing where they were. Some of them never found their way out; they kept spinning around and crashing into the walls until they slowly died. There were usually grasshoppers and long-headed locusts, some beetles, and once in a while perfect dragonflies. When we found a trapped insect, most inmates picked it up carefully and helped it fly away over the walls. It reminded us of our situation.

  One day, during my walking exercise, I noticed a group of ants gradually moving the body of a dead grasshopper. It was so much fun to watch them. When one ant found something to eat, it surveyed the surroundings and then quickly went back to the tunnel to fetch other ants. They returned to the spot, and it was fascinating to watch each one post itself automatically at every strategic point. If the food was big enough, they all came out and formed a line stretching from the food back to their colony to transport it that way. If another species of ant approached, they brazenly attacked as a group. Even the biggest army ant ran away in a flurry if it mistakenly approached the other ant colony. I took a couple of candies from my pocket and sucked on them a little before I placed the moistened morsels not too far from the ant colony. I crouched down by the wall and remained motionless for a long time. Sometimes the guard on the watchtower asked me what I was doing, and I would simply turn around and show him my grinning face. I was pretty sure that he already knew what each inmate was in the habit of doing within those walls. When the ants found the candy, they either spent hours sucking the sugary juice and melting it, or they dug up another tunnel from below and stored it underground. Little pieces of sugar were carried away one by one with their unbelievably small teeth. In fall, the ant queen made an appearance in order to branch off and start another nest. Nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to remain in winter. But even in the cement box the beautiful survival of tiny creatures continued, and bit by bit I became stronger.

  The exercise space designated for me at the prison outside of Seoul was just a piece of empty ground between two buildings that were vacant, as the inmates had gone to work at the prison factory. Later, I got permission to cultivate a little vegetable garden there. It was surrounded by bathroom windows, and there was a half-buried cement septic tank in the middle of the ground. It smelled bad, but the cold air was still quite refreshing. I had come up with a walking route that followed the inner walls of the prison, taking a turn around one of the buildings and arriving at the window of an administrative office. I walked fast. There were piles of snow in the shade, but the slope reinforced for erosion control was always sunny, and little but tenacious weeds were always sprouting out from the yellow grass. I tried not to start a conversation with the guard during the exercise hour. To whatever he said, I nodded and smiled like a child l
earning for the first time. In various corners on this path, I encountered many living and breathing creatures that varied depending on the season. There were grasshoppers and sow bugs, praying mantises and really big crickets. Frogs hopped over from somewhere, too. During the rainy season, a small green frog came all the way into my solitary cell through the bathroom window. Around the septic tank were numerous holes where enormous and fearless rats lived. They were not like house mice with gray fur, these were wild rats with brown fur who had settled down here. They did not run away when inmates saw them, they just stared back. I once caught a really fat one with my foot. They searched the dark and fetid septic tank for food waste thrown away by inmates while washing dishes. Of course, their natural enemy—feral cats—came too, and there were hordes of them living in the emergency bunker near the prison buildings. During breeding season, the prisoners could not sleep because of their mating calls, and we would curse and throw things at the cats. But some cats were so used to having gotten food from the inmates since they were kittens that they depended on handouts even when they were grown. At meal times, they came to the building they had always come to and meowed by the windows, asking for food. The inmates would then throw them a leftover fishhead or a piece of cuttlefish or sausages, which they bought from the prison store. Some inmates named the cats, who responded when called. During my exercise hour I ran into them often, and once I selected one to be my pet and raised it for a few weeks.

  I served my sentence at three different prisons, and I grew fond of several animals over the years. The long-timers called prison home, and the guards who transferred easily from one prison to another were called guests. The warden, whose appointment would usually last from about six months to, at the longest, a couple of years, was called a traveler. A prison in the central part of the country held many political prisoners and repeat offenders serving long sentences. The inmates there knew how to grow various plants and vegetables. Some people grew potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions throughout winter in plastic soda bottles cut into half, and some grew wild orchids found while working in the fields. Someone saved the seeds from a summer watermelon and planted them in spring. He showed it off by hanging the vines and the little fruits on the window sill. Of course, they were mercilessly confiscated before inspections, because they obstructed the guards’ field of vision.