The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  You were able to withstand for two more days. Your coworkers finally entered the management office, something you had all decided to wait to do. Once there, they trashed the place, throwing computers and other office supplies out of the windows, destroying the sofas and chairs, all that was so neat and clean and proper, and breaking all the windows. I later learned that the committee did not order them to do this. It was just some young men who were unable to take it anymore and did not listen. I can understand why they would be inflamed, comparing the inferior and deteriorating environment of their own work spaces to the clean office furnished with air conditioners, water purifiers, and vending machines. During the negotiations, the representative of the labor department informed you that the committee, unapproved by the government as it was, had no power to censure management. Then things began to fall apart. During one week of the strike there were three negotiations, and when certain compromises and agreements were made, the committee, unable to carry on, folded.

  Soon afterward, the police stormed the factory and arrested a number of leaders, including you. You were all fired, naturally, but you, Mi Kyung, were not charged, since you had no record of falsifying personal information in order to get a job at the factory. You were released after a month. Your letter ends like this:My dear Yoon Hee,

  A few of us, Ki Hun and Shin Ja and some people from the hiking club, go to the factory every morning to protest the firings. We are poor, but still thriving. Whatever little savings I had are all gone, but our friends bring us all sorts of things. We have boxes of ramen noodles and more than enough briquettes. Come what may, I think I am staying here. I was once able to break out of the thick and foolish shell of illusion, so how am I supposed to turn my back and return to an untruthful life?

  It was too late by the time I found out that you no longer existed in this world, a world that is like an ocean full of hardships and tribulations. Winter had arrived again. People scattered and went their own ways. The young ones with shy eyes who were so excited that now we could actually vote, that we had achieved a democratic state, the ordinary citizens who clenched their fists and rose up, the distinguished personalities with white hair and faces filled with rage. All of us were out of our minds. Were we drunk? I feel like it all happened a long, long time ago. Our once boiling blood cooled down in our veins, and we just bowed our heads or smiled bitterly, unable to hate, and each of us went his or her separate way, as if we never wanted to meet again. Scattered on the cool road after the tempest of an election were pamphlets and printed papers, wet from the frost of the night before. That was it, that’s where we had arrived.

  I met Song Young Tae, the man you would have followed to the end of the world. I know it is all in the past now, but I do want to say this. There’s nothing between us, Young Tae and I. I think of him as a friend, and I feel comfortable when I am with him, as if we grew up together. And both of us were lonely at the time. Don’t you think he is so immature? I mean, he’s not an adolescent anymore, but he still passionately detests his father. And I was tricked by him into serving as his stenographer, but it was worth it. It was a chance for me to remember to be my daughter’s father. I guess both he and I have now moved a certain distance from a simple yearning for each other.

  When Song Young Tae told me about your death I just could not believe it. It was the second time I saw him put his head of unruly hair down on my lap and cry. He is doing a lot better at the hospital. My dear Mi Kyung, I think of your youth, which did not have enough time to express itself. I think of how your face lit up at the mention of him, your eyes smiling and squinting with pride.

  I have been there. I stood on top of that building, the one across the street from the factory’s front gate, where you poured a bottle of chemicals all over yourself and fell as a ball of flame. There was a restaurant on the first floor, a café on the second, a billiard room on the third. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I climbed up the steep cement steps and reached a small steel door. When I pushed the rusted door it opened quietly, like magic. I took one step and stood on the flat rooftop, so desolate. There were empty soju bottles rolling around and a strong smell of urine. I was able to stand exactly where you stood, where you could see the front gate directly. I heard that it happened during the rush hour, when laborers were done with the day’s work and left all at once, crowding the street. I wonder what you looked like. Probably not like a flower. Perhaps, the pamphlets you threw into the air might have looked like petals. But you just dropped to the ground, a burning object that landed with a thud.

  If I were there, even though we are all daughters, I think I could have been your mother. But if I could have caressed you, your singed hair would have broken into pieces. Your fingers would have been the remains of burnt twigs.

  I walked down the stairs again and into the restaurant with aluminum sash windows. I ordered a spicy stew and drank soju by myself. The day was short, and it was soon dark as night, illuminated by pale streetlamps in front of the factory. Dim traces of human forms began to appear and soon filled the street. Under the bleary light in their drab clothes, they looked like water flowing through darkness.

  When will they stop and form an ocean? How far do they flow?

  23

  Hello. It’s me, Han Yoon Hee.

  I just came back to Kalmae.

  I feel like one thousand years have gone by.

  As soon as I returned, I bought our house. It looks the same, but is more of a ramshackle. It was filled with bags of fertilizer, and the wallpaper and floors were covered with mold. Still, it’s not overrun with weeds, as they say in fairy tales. The water pump is red with rust. The Soonchun lady told me to take down the old structure and build a new one, but I want to leave it as it is until you come back. So I’ve just fixed the floor and redone the wallpaper.

  I came by myself this time, but I will bring Eun Gyul here next winter. It is 1993, and Eun Gyul is almost twelve. She starts junior high next year. Her breasts are budding already, and she looks like a woman. She resembles you a lot. She is my daughter, but then again she is not. Sometime around the ’88 Olympics, Jung Hee and her husband adopted her. She had to go to school, and I was still unmarried. She calls me Mom, of course, but I think it feels more natural to her to call her aunt mom.

  That was an unbearable period for me. Why? More hardship and pain were waiting for me, but that was the most difficult time I faced. The hope that you might return one day began to fade away, as did every value I had held onto in the past. A quiet disillusionment was spreading from the bottom of my heart, making me wonder why I still kept on painting.

  I said I just returned, right? For the first time in five years. Starting today, I will record the last five years of my life. I have written down a few words in a sketchbook that I had left here.

  The road that brought us here can be the road by which we return. No one’s journey has ended. I am here, again, where once I was, absent. I am him, always. I come to meet him. Nothing has changed. Since the beginning the way was set.

  I wanted to leave this country, especially after sending Eun Gyul to Jung Hee’s house. My sister also has a son who was almost three years old at the time. I decided to study abroad. Maybe I wanted to examine myself and this place from far away. I thought New York would not suit me. For me, whether it is food or clothes, if it is too complicated, it is not comfortable. As for Paris, I confirmed later that it was a city where liberty was once flaunted like a festival but now looks more like wet bunting fallen to the ground. Indifferent, I headed to Berlin. A wet and gloomy city from espionage movies.

  All I could picture of Germany was beer and bread. When I first arrived in Berlin I was planning just to visit, but I liked the city. The early winter is cold and windy. It is either drizzling and foggy or sleet falls for days. Sometimes, incredible thunder and lightning tear the sky apart. By three o’clock in the afternoon it is dark, and the city is empty by six. I took a train from West to East Germany, and even I, who was so used
to things like this, got a little nervous. I have lived too long in a land where too many things are forbidden.

  Berlin was just like an island. Through the train window I saw the white branches of birch trees and an old tractor, abandoned in an empty wheat field that looked like a ruined battlefield. Guards wearing red clips and leather straps around their shoulders, and long boots on their feet, came into the car and examined my passport. I entered the occupied city surrounded by tall walls.

  The Ku’damm was crowded with young people, but the narrow streets and alleyways were mostly empty. Paint was peeling off of old unkempt apartment buildings, and a yellowish smoke from coal fires filled the cloudy sky. Berlin is like our demilitarized zone, or a corridor where two different buildings face each other. It is a buffer zone. I decided I liked this city of neutral temperaments. North and south are opposites, like front and back, but east and west are the same, aren’t they, two sides of one? The sun rises on one side and it sets on the other, but dusk is not too different from dawn.

  I spent the first day in this city where I knew no one sitting at an unremarkable café on a street corner, and then at an ordinary Italian restaurant, staring out at the street, my mind empty. I had no desire to be impatient and busy, to visit the museums and galleries as most travelers do.

  The nervous silence in front of Brandenburg Gate seemed to be even deeper than that of the plaza in front of the city hall in Seoul when martial law was proclaimed. I only found out much later, after the wall came down, that it was actually a window into the other world, forbidden to East Berliners from the moment they were born.

  I was staying at a small guesthouse near the wall whose owner I thought was an Arab. The interior was decorated with tapestries with arabesque patterns and huge pottery vases in primary colors. There weren’t many people there, just a few English students backpacking and a Turkish couple I sometimes saw during breakfast. I remember the shocking moment when I opened the window facing the street in my bedroom. First I had to open a set of heavy drapes, then the dark tinted glass window, then still a pair of wooden shutters. When I pushed them open, cold damp air rushed in and an enormous gray wall emerged in front of me. It stretched as far as I could see from left to right. I cannot forget how helpless and suffocated I felt, as if someone had just punched me in my chest. It was as if the opposing views and thoughts of a people had materialized as an object in reality. I have never been to the demilitarized zone in our country, but I do remember that feeling of helplessness whenever heavily armed soldiers climbed onto a bus I was in and inspected everyone.

  The wall appeared to be stubbornly asserting the fact that it was an inorganic thing. It stood there, curt and gruff, with not a crack or a hole. There was no decoration; it was a gray rock that blocked the street with iron rods poking out of it here and there. I left the guesthouse and went down an alleyway to look at the wall more closely. It was a dead end, blocked by the buildings on the West Berlin side that had been in the shade for so long that they were covered with moss. Garbage cans lined the entrance, and it looked as if people never used this side. Not a single flowerpot decorated the windows facing the wall. I found that what appeared to be just gray from a distance was actually covered with graffiti and drawings and posters. Some of them were really carefully applied paintings. I was moved, witnessing this unusual art exhibition. On top of this cement structure that so mercilessly covered up any feelings, dreams, hopes, and memories, there were traces of life. In tiny holes where the cement had crumbled, dust had gathered, and tiny wildflowers were growing in this miraculous soil. My eyes filled with tears and for the first time in ages I thought of you.

  My German was poor, but I wanted to stay there. I liked the attitude of the young people who disliked both the Yankees and Russkies who occupied the city, and since I had just left the place of abstinence, I thought it would be better for my mental health to stay at a place similar to a church with a cemetery or an old school instead of suddenly moving onto a brighter, vicious place. Berlin was a forgotten place, and it reminded me of the view I saw when I went to visit you, when I had stared at dark windows and hanging laundry from far away before turning around. Maybe I wanted to put myself in exile here.

  One day I met someone I knew at the currency exchange booth in front of the Berlin Zoo. She was a couple of years behind me at university, and although she was not a particularly talented artist, she was a really nice person with no prejudices, and she had many friends. I had not seen her for a long time, since we graduated, but I found out she was studying here in Berlin. She had married a German, a lawyer at that, as she put it. I cannot remember her name. It is hovering somewhere in the back of my brain, but I just cannot say it out loud. I think we saw each other about three times while I was staying there. Anyway, thanks to her fluent German, I was able to interview with a professor at an art school, and I made an appointment to see him again when all the paperwork was ready. I asked my friends and Jung Hee back in Seoul to send over the certificates I needed, and I prepared a portfolio of my work. After the final interview, I was admitted to the school. At the time, the real estate market in Berlin was quite favorable for renters, and it was easier to find a cheap but spacious place there than it was in Bonn or Frankfurt.

  This may sound unfair to you, but to be honest I’ve been relatively lucky in my life except for my relationship with you. I was able to find a studio with a really reasonable monthly rent near the Bundesplatz. It was only three U-Bahn stops away from downtown Berlin, and only one stop away from a large park with trees and grass and a lake. From the square, five streets stretched out like the spokes of a wheel, and each street corner was lined with convenience stores, groceries, and little ethnic restaurants. A farmer’s market opened there every weekend, where I was able to buy fresh vegetables, fruit, homemade cookies, sausages, and hams.

  The place I found was over a hundred years old, built during the Prussian period. It used to be a factory building but was converted into a dormitory for laborers after the war. Each floor was about twice as high as an ordinary apartment. The front gate was large enough to let a truck through, and next to it was a row of nameplates with unit numbers and a buzzer next to each one. When a visitor pressed my buzzer, they could let me know who they were, and I could open the small side door next to the enormous iron gate. Inside, right next to the door, was an old steel switch to turn the light on. The dark corridor along the courtyard was lit with a row of single lightbulbs on a timer, which would turn off automatically by the time the visitor reached the entrance to the building. Inside the building, there were doors in every direction, but the center of the building was a shaft of open space all the way up to the third floor. In the center of this space, a wrought-iron stairway coiled up in a spiral around a pillar. Although technically the third floor was the top floor, the building was actually six stories tall, since each floor was a duplex. I remember how I would push the light switch at the bottom of the stairway and start climbing. When I was carrying nothing my steps were lighter, and the light would stay on until I got to my apartment. But on days I came back from shopping, the lights would switch off without mercy and I would have to fumble in the darkness to find the next switch on the landing. I always wondered how much energy they saved by doing that.

  The previous occupant of my unit had left behind a drape hanging across the ceiling, perhaps because she did not like looking at the high ceiling. It was made of white broadcloth printed with blue seagulls. Next to the entrance was a built-in closet to store shoes, umbrellas, and coats. There was no door into the room, only curtains draped on each side, which had also been left behind by the previous occupant. At the front of the room the ceiling seemed very high, and there were many windows with white cotton drapes hanging languidly upon them. The lower part of the windows could be pushed open, but the upper part was fixed shut. Actually, I did not mind looking at the ceiling, which was supported by an absurdly large I-beam. Shaded light fixtures hung from the ceiling, while the loft created
a shelf and occupied about one third of the space. A steep ladder was attached to it. The loft was my bedroom, furnished with a low bed, a night stand, and a drawer to store my underwear. I brought up a low table for the empty corner and stacked up books I wanted to read. I would read lying in bed before I fell asleep. Under the loft was a pair of long folding chairs, the sort usually used at the beach, and a sofa bed. On the left side of the apartment was a round table and two wooden chairs, a desk and a chair, and a large easel and a midsize one that I bought myself. In the middle of the wall with windows was a gas stove that looked like a radiator. A pilot light the size of a candle flame was always lit, and when it was turned on a row of flames spread out to the left and right and heated it up. On the right side of the apartment was a huge built-in closet, and on the left was a door to the kitchen. Right behind that door was a small bathroom with a water heater, a toilet, a shower, and a little window.

  Through the little window I could see the courtyard with pine trees, white birches, and zelkova trees. Right in front of my window stood a large horse chestnut tree with abundant green leaves whose flowers would float into my studio every spring. Just under the window was a small table for one, covered with galvanized iron, and a matching chair. I ate most of my simple meals there and became friendly with the horse chestnut tree. This long and narrow space lined with a sink and refrigerator was much cozier to me than the empty apartment, which looked like a storage room. Coming back home, I would sit there and drink warm tea mixed with liquor in order to warm up my cold body in wet clothes.