The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I find it painful to watch the crippled pigeons. They are always a little behind the group, alone, unable to find their way into the flock where the others find the food, only able to hop around while others stroll on top of the roof. The reason I remember Captain and Sooni together is because I had decided that they were a couple after observing them carefully. And I adored Sooni.

  I remember the day I met each of them. When I put out the peanut food, a flock of pigeons who were waiting by the storage building flew over at once. They pushed and shoved each other to get to the best spot. The hierarchy among the pigeons was determined by strength, of course. But they were cowards, and they always acted as a group, never alone or just as a couple. Then one day, a handsome pigeon with pure white feathers came by himself. I cannot remember if it was before or after the usual feeding time. I guessed he had come several times before to my window to be fed with the group. The lone pigeon pecked on the plastic window as if he was knocking, and I opened it. Most pigeons flew away or moved to the side when I opened the window, but this one stayed there, faced me squarely, and cooed in a low tone. When I threw some self-made bird feed on the window ledge and the sill, he came in, as if he trusted me, and slowly ate his food. He rubbed his beak on the iron bar before he flew away. We repeated this a few times, him coming by himself and asking me for food by knocking on the plastic window, and I responding to his request. One day, Captain brought another pigeon. That was Sooni. Her feathers were pure white, and I knew right away she was a hen because she had a habit of looking down. Her modest posture was actually due to her lame left foot. Unlike other birds whose feet were severed, Sooni’s ankle was curled up inward. When I gave them food, Captain stepped aside to concede the best spot to Sooni, and stood patiently, his chest puffed up, while she meekly pecked away. Only after Sooni had her fair share did he eat. Then they flew together to the roof of the storage facility and sat next to each other. When other pigeons came according to their usual schedule, they moved further away as if they were avoiding the crowd, and soon flew away.

  After a few days, once I became familiar to her, Sooni sometimes came first, by herself. Standing there on one foot with her lame one curled up, she silently watched me from beyond the plastic window.

  “There you are, Sooni! Would you like something to eat?”

  She approached me only when I beckoned her, and she never ran away when I opened the window. The quantity of my self-made birdfeed varied, and there were times when I could afford to give her more, but she always ate just the right amount and left. On one rainy day, when I came back after being away from the cell, Sooni was sitting by the window, resting alone and waiting for me. Sometimes I saw her from the exercise ground. She would be sitting all by herself after the other birds had flown off to the kitchen area, looking for more food. Captain flew around freely and only came with Sooni near dinnertime. I had decided to separate their meal from the other pigeons’. But the others soon caught on to the special treatment the pair were receiving, and they began to follow Sooni to my window. Surrounded by the flock, Sooni was easily pushed away, and she never fought back, just flew to the roof of the storage facility and sat there alone before she disappeared altogether. It was different when Captain was around. He still knocked on my window, even when he was followed by the flock, and he ate alone while the others seemed to be waiting for him to finish. Once in a while, a brazen cock or two would come over and eat with him. Captain would ignore them at first, but the moment the other bird came too close, Captain opened his wing like an arm and slapped him. The pushed-away pigeon dropped from the window and flew back to the other roof. Captain ate just enough and flew away beyond the main building.

  There were a few other pigeons beside Captain and Sooni that I began to pay attention to. There was Hoodlum, who always tried to hoard more food than he could eat, and who rushed about on the windowsill and started fights with other birds. Glutton still had the string from the hunters attached to his foot, yet brazenly came to the window if there was food for him. And then there was Fake Sooni, who looked so similar to the real one that I was fooled several times. She had white feathers, and she silently stood on the window ledge with her left foot curled up. I fed her a few times before I saw her with a perfectly fine pair of feet standing among the crowd on the roof of the depository building, hopping around and brushing her feathers using both feet. She had pretended to be a cripple! I guess she figured out, after accompanying Sooni to my window a few times, that I treated her differently, and she decided to copy her. So I decided to feed this smart, fake Sooni, too.

  Perhaps even more strange, there was a pigeon I really liked at first, then grew sick of. I named it Quasimodo after the hunchback of Notre Dame. It was really an ugly-looking bird, and the only one whose sex I could never figure out. I guessed that something went wrong in the egg. Its body was about two-thirds the size of the other pigeons, its neck short and its body stout, and it looked more like a little quail than a pigeon. Its feathers were a dark and dirty gray, with brown ones like those of tree sparrows mixed in, and it looked shabby. And Quasimodo had the most tragic weakness for a bird: his beak was cracked open like a broken pair of scissors. There was no way for him to pick up the food properly; it was like he was using curved chopsticks. Around his beak and neck was grain dust from the pen, making Quasimodo look dirty and unkempt all the time, because it was impossible for him to brush or clean his feathers with that beak. Quasimodo seemed to try hard to conform to the flock. He pecked away at my window, but it seemed he never got one piece of peanut into his mouth. The other pigeons pecked at his head mercilessly whenever he approached them, so his head was covered with scratches and sometimes dried blood. But Quasimodo was unbelievably tenacious. He learned to visit me by himself. For Quasimodo, I saved whole peanuts and watched the bird pathetically trying to pick them up. As he pecked on the peanut with his cracked beak, the nut would roll away. Even if Quasimodo managed to pick it up, it was difficult to push it inside his mouth. The bird kept trying and trying and finally, by chance, he would swallow one nut. It was pretty obvious that Quasimodo’s ferocity was related to the lack of food available to him and to hunger, and soon he became shameless. When I tried to feed him, Quasimodo was always in a hurry, and he pecked my hand in anger, puffing up his body in a strange manner and crying. I hated that twisted beak, and I felt sorry for him. Sometimes I just grabbed him and wrenched him hard. And gradually, I could not stand Quasimodo’s ferocity.

  One winter, on a snowy day, Sooni was killed by a cat right in front of my eyes. Viking, the striped vagabond, occasionally hunted pigeons. He patiently waited in the darkness below the storage building, aiming for the pigeons who landed on the open field in front of our building looking for food. Men awaiting trial, housed downstairs, sometimes threw a piece of bread or peanuts for the birds, and they hopped around down there. I saw a flock of pigeons landing on the snow-covered ground, including Sooni. She limped around on top of snow, but before long, something darted out from the shadow underneath the storage facility and attacked her. Sooni did not even struggle, she was just hung motionless from Viking’s mouth. It was weird how calm and collected I was while witnessing the slaughter. The cat walked around the corner and disappeared behind the storage facility with his prey in his mouth, and I could not see anything any more. I did go and look behind the storage facility during my exercise hour. Before I even turned the corner, I could see that the ground was dyed red with blood, and the actual scene was even more brutal. There was blood everywhere on white snow, and all that remained were her feathers. The soft feathers were swept away by the wind and caught on the chain link fence nearby, where they fluttered as if they were still alive. The next day, and each day following until the spring arrived, I continued to feed the pigeons twice a day, but I stopped naming them and singling any out. Attachment is vain.

  What were 1983 and 1984 like? Each year not so different from the year before. I went on a hunger strike, kicked the door or banged metal cu
ps and plates on the iron bars, screaming slogans and singing combat songs, and I was sent to the torture cell. This sequence was repeated a number of times. I wanted a cellmate, even if we bickered and argued all the time, even if we got sick of each other until we were about to kill each other and fought over little things like food and insulted each other. Eventually we’d get used to each other. The powers above knew how to manipulate me, they knew it so well. They knew all too well that time was everything. Through the Japanese occupation, the war, and all the changing administrations, they had years of experience breaking prisoners. They always had a new deck of cards to play.

  I forgot the details of the books I had once read. The only thing that remained with me were the general principles.

  16

  In the spring of 1984 I went back to school. I was old enough to be called ma’am by other students but I still looked young. Eun Gyul had just celebrated her second birthday. I moved out of my mother’s house and started graduate school. Jung Hee was an intern at the university hospital. I opened a studio on the second floor of a building in the university neighborhood and taught high school students who were preparing for college entrance exams. I did not want to work as a tutor, but I also did not want to depend on my mother, even if her business was booming. And I wanted to be alone and concentrate on doing my work well. Eun Gyul stayed at my mother’s house. There was a live-in maid to help take care of her, and my mother was not as busy as she used to be, since she employed more staff now. She actually thought it would be better for Eun Gyul to stay with her.

  I don’t think you knew what was going on then while you were inside. At the time, the university neighborhood was cloaked in tear gas day after day. Many student activists who had spent time in prison or outside the campus in factories and night schools returned to colleges and universities. They were slowly roused from the shock of that May in Kwangju, and people were gradually coming together. Over one thousand political prisoners were released, but not one of the so-called lefties, like you. The Cold War was reaching its climax, and we half-expected there was going to be another world war.

  Around that time, I got to know a man. Please, don’t be disappointed, it was not like I fell in love with him or anything like that. It’s just that he became my closest friend during your absence. And anyway, now that I think about it, how I felt about him was quite different from how I felt about you, but still, I liked him. I think I understand a little bit of what you were trying to preserve in there, staring at the walls. You were in that silence for a long time, but you would appear in my dreams every few years. There is nothing simple about living. Even your life in solitary confinement, wasn’t it as grand and complicated as your own thoughts? We stood there on the edge of a precipice of social change. Some people were sliding down to the bottom of everyday life, some were carried up by their desires. As you had said, capitalism in South Korea was already on a roll, and it rumbled on by itself with little resistance, following the laws of motion. We never fought properly, we just argued about how to fight, looking for answers in textbooks, and we ended up losing in a few years what others took over a century to lose. This was the life that went on outside.

  I think it was the early summer of ’84. I went to see Jung Hee where she worked. I don’t know why, but we had not seen each other for a few months. We talked on the phone once in a while, and we would arrange a date to see each other, but something would happen and we would miss each other at my mother’s or one of us would cancel. I waited for her sitting on a bench in a corridor of the hospital, and Jung Hee finally appeared, wearing her white coat and looking tired.

  “Have you been waiting long?”

  “A little while. I’ll go if you’re busy.”

  “No, I have the night shift anyway. I asked already, we can have dinner together.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Just wait one more minute. I want to go change.”

  Jung Hee and I slowly walked across the campus. The green of the trees and lawn outside was darkening but the wind was still refreshing.

  “The truth is . . . I’m sorry, Yoon Hee, but I’ve double booked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was supposed to meet this person, I promised days before you called. Would it be okay if he joins us?”

  “I guess so. Who is it?”

  “My patient. A friend of his.”

  I knew who she meant when she said “his” like that. He was Park, a medical student a couple of years ahead of her, who was doing his mandatory army service as a medical officer. Later, he became her husband. Anyway, that is how I met my friend. Jung Hee did not tell me anything more about him.

  We walked along the wall around the campus and then to a quiet restaurant, I think one of those serving casual, Western-style food. Jung Hee probably wanted a beer. Maybe she was stressed from working too much. I remember she was drinking a lot at the time. We climbed the stairs and pushed open a pair of French doors to enter the restaurant, and we saw a man sheepishly stand up from the corner by the window. I cannot remember my first impression of him, but I thought he looked like someone I knew. I think he was wearing a wrinkled shirt and an old dark suit.

  “This is my sister,” Jung Hee announced with no apology for my presence there, but he was very polite, bowing down to me at almost a ninety-degree angle.

  “My name is Song Young Tae.”

  I felt a bit awkward, so I just nodded and mumbled something, never introducing myself. Jung Hee seemed to be intent on taking care of her business first.

  “The results are very good, I don’t think we have to worry about it too much. There was a cavity, but it’s pretty faint now. Still, I think you need to keep taking your medicines. Let’s get rid of it completely while we’re at it. Your stomach didn’t look great, but . . . well, I think that should get better, too, now that your dosage is a lot less than it used to be.”

  “Ah, glad to hear that.”

  “How are you these days? How do you feel?”

  “I am still tired, but I don’t have a fever anymore. In there, I was always a bit feverish.”

  “How long were you inside?”

  “Three-and-a-half years.”

  “Really? Has it been that long already? It seemed like a while.”

  “Not really. It’s about the same amount of time others rot in the military.”

  It was becoming more and more uncomfortable for me to sit there with them. What they were talking about did not sound foreign to me. In fact, it was quite painful to listen to them, because it reminded me of you. I figured he had just gotten out of prison, and based on what Jung Hee had said, he had tuberculosis or something like that.

  “Park called and told me that he has a furlough coming up next week. He asked about you, so I told him that you’re fine, just as I told you now. But you still have to be careful, okay? At least for the next six months. By the way, I heard you’re going back to school.”

  “I’m a bit embarrassed to say so, but yes, that’s the case.”

  “My sister is doing her graduate work there.”

  “Oh, really? Happy to hear that.”

  “She’s an artist. She’s not as boring as I am.”

  We ate dinner and emptied a few bottles of beer. I thought this Song Young Tae guy was very sincere, but he was not much fun because of his relentless sincerity. To make matters worse, he was a philosophy major. Philosophy? What good was that? I know, I know—look who’s talking, what good was art, then? Song Young Tae was what we used to call a work in progress. He would never be impatient, he would simply try and try to persuade you with logic, sincerely, step by step by step.

  I think I saw him again the following week. The evening was the busiest time for me, but that was when Song Young Tae showed up at my studio. During the summer, students had more time to practice their drawing skills, so I had almost twenty of them coming to my studio every night. I had to work until late at night, walking among the students as they sketched pl
aster casts, commenting on their work and correcting them once in a while. A college student, who I had hired as an assistant, came in and told me someone was waiting for me. There was a partition that separated the studio and the entrance area, and near the door was a sofa. He was sitting there, behind the partition. I probably would not have recognized him if he had not sheepishly stood up from the sofa, just like he had at the restaurant.

  “Ah, it’s you . . . How did you know I was here?”

  “Yes, well . . . I asked your sister.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you? Actually I’m really busy right now.”

  At this point, any other man would have scratched his head and lost his nerve and mumbled something like, when will you be free? or when do you have time, maybe I should get going today. But his response was completely unexpected.

  “I am not busy at all today. I can wait here until things slow down.”

  “It’s going to take a while.”

  I tried not to be annoyed. I was old enough to be a mother and I thought I should be mature enough to control my temper. His eyes were smiling, narrowed into little slits behind his thick glasses. He seemed to be saying that he had nothing to hide, and he appeared to be nice, yet also confident, as if he had all the time in the world.

  I could not firmly ask him to leave, so I just left him there and went back to my students. It was not just because he was somehow connected to my sister, but it was his natural ease that infected me and made me unable to kick him out. Even after I went back into the studio, I could not forget about him. I kept looking over toward the entrance. While walking among the students, I would stop at a spot where I could see the sofa and steal a glance. Song Young Tae had made himself quite comfortable; he had taken from his old leather bag books, papers, and a dictionary, and spread them out on a coffee table to work. From my vantage point I could see his bent back and the back of his head. His thick, curly hair was bushy and entangled like a madman’s, yet he parted it so sharply that I thought I could see the crown of his head showing through. He was almost blind. Even with that pair of thick glasses he had to put the dictionary right up to his nose in order to read it. Somehow, it seemed like he had been working there in my studio for a long time. No, it was more than that—I almost had an illusion that he was the original owner of this space.