The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Several travel agencies are going crazy now. I got them from a Japanese one. We’ll be part of a tour group.”

  What I still cannot understand now is that there was not one thing suggested by Song Young Tae that I ever turned down. Maybe he was trying to leave me an imprint of himself and our time together. I studied the ticket and the travel brochure with pictures of the Siberian landscape. When we told Mari about the trip she said, “When we were young the continent was blocked and divided into several pieces. Even the sky was divided into two.”

  I had no choice but to accept.

  “Looks splendid,” I said.

  Song Young Tae and I left Berlin in early September. We had to arrive in Moscow on the date the travel agency had specified. We made preparations based on our own research. Did you know, for example, that there are only two months of summer in Siberia, and that the first snow arrives by late August? We made sure we had enough instant noodle packages. From the last U-Bahn stop at Berliner Straße we took a bus to the airport. The Schönefeld Airport was once an international airport in East Germany, with flights to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and other socialist states in Asia. Of course, there was a flight to North Korea, too.

  When we arrived at the Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow via Aeroflot, it was raining insistently. The airport was enormous but almost empty, with only a handful of passengers, maybe because the high season was over. We took a bus to our hotel, which was near the Red Square and the Moscow River. It got dark early, and the streetlamps were misty in the rain.

  That night, we went out in the rain and wandered around, then had dinner and stayed at a café until late drinking beer. On our table were two brass candleholders, a red candle in each one, and because it was dark I did not realize how drunk Young Tae was. Both of us had been pretty quiet from the moment we began that trip. I had followed him without too many questions because I had fantasized for a long time of traveling through a continent without barriers. The city was not as scary or disquieting as I’d imagined it would be, but even our modern hotel was gloomy. It felt like a gigantic but deteriorating government building. The faucet leaked rusty water and drunk people staggered along the alleyways outside. The airport was full of austere officials with overbearing manners and female volunteers who were fat and brusque. At least I could understand the bare stores, and the expressionless faces with tightly closed mouths in the long lines outside every store, no matter how little or insignificant the merchandise was. The locals, who did not care for the tourists, probably felt less discomfort than we did. They could at least retreat to their own tiny apartments. Song Young Tae poured more beer into his glass with a trembling hand.

  “This is really ridiculous. How can a country with one-sixth of the landmass of the whole world be so poor? The whole place is like a crumbling wall. The building has been abandoned for too long without maintenance, and the concrete parts are falling down. How can they take such poor care of people?”

  “Are you talking about buildings or people, Mr. Song?” I asked. “Everything is made by people, and in the end people are the problem,” I said, without too much of emotion. “It’s like dreaming of an ideal woman and then discovering her dirty underwear.”

  “Is there any place not like this? An island or a mountain or a village, still untouched and undiscovered at the end of the world?”

  Suddenly, the few months you and I had together went through my mind, followed by the beautiful open school Mr. Yi Hee Soo talked about. I saw how the candles dimly lit the space above the small table.

  “From now on, the material world will dominate. The market will demand uniform production from everyone on Earth, and it will say that this is civilization, that people will have to accept it if they don’t want to collapse. Everyone will turn into a pair of brilliant crystal eyes, a product with no imagination, only responding to money.”

  I remembered the helpless sneer that spread around my mouth when I heard the news of Mr. Yi Hee Soo’s death. I felt the same way now.

  “Whether you like it or not,” I spat, “this is the world we live in. There is not much I wish for anymore.”

  “I don’t think you really loved Mr. Yi.”

  “I guess you can say whatever you want now, since we are in a foreign place. It’s not like I can leave you here.”

  “You just wanted to escape to someplace else, like I do now.”

  “Is that so . . . ?”

  I replied with fatigue in my voice.

  Another day was beginning on a continent where only a hollow shell remained. In the morning, our tour group gathered in the hotel lobby. The tour guide did roll call and lectured us on how to behave and what to expect. Most of the tourists in our group were Japanese. Most of them were young, but there was an elderly couple, too. At two o’clock in the afternoon, we went to the Yaroslavl train station in front of Komsomol Square. The Trans-Siberian train headed to Vladivostok was departing at three o’clock. Before the departure, Young Tae and I went to a berioska on the other side of the square to buy food, as we were advised by the tour guide. We got three bags filled with everything from cigarettes and vodka to salami and ham and instant coffee. At that time, no solo foreign tourist was allowed to change route or get off the train and stay at a city during the transcontinental trip, but tourist groups were. It took one week for the Trans-Siberian train named Russia to complete its tour. Our schedule included a night’s stay at a hotel in Irkutsk and another at Khabarovsk, and then the group was to disband in Vladivostok. The train was an electric locomotive painted green with a red star, and there were only two passenger classes, first and second. All foreigners were to use first class only. A female attendant dressed in a light blue shirt and a navy blue skirt and tie greeted us at the entrance. Like in Europe, a passenger train had compartments furnished with a pair of seats on each side that could be used as beds. The window was draped with curtains, a table suspended underneath it, and the floor was carpeted. The attendant distributed blankets, pillows, sheets, and towels to each compartment.

  The train began moving, and as soon as it left the city we saw white birch trees everywhere. Even in the darkness, pale trees were visible as they passed. It would be the beginning of autumn in other places, but here it was already deep into the season, the leaves darkened to the deepest shade of brown. The train crossed over the Moscow River headed toward Kirov. Until you cross the Ural Mountains, you’re not in Siberia yet. In darkness, the black wall of forest sprouted up like irregular teeth beside the endless fields.

  I began to realize how beautiful this enormous land was when I saw the sunrise on the great plain dusted with frost. The train moved without stopping, and the low sun would be revealed then hidden again by tree branches. Little villages, rooftops, and fences were scattered on the endless field. They looked like tiny blemishes on Mother Earth.

  The sunshine turned the yellow and brown leaves of the birch trees into golden fragments, and the larch leaves had started to turn yellow. Beyond the grassy fields and wetlands, the evergreen forest of fir and spruce and pine trees stretched on. The forest touched the distant horizon, which we never seemed to reach even though we were moving all day long. We spent the first couple of days just watching the overwhelming land, both of us looking out the window without saying much.

  We saw the morning sun reflected on the surface of a river or a pool of water in the wetlands, creating a pattern like a silver net on it, or a group of ducks and birds flying over the fields of reeds. Among the weeds, the fertile black soil of Russian land exposed itself and coursed down along the tracks. No one was working on the unharvested wheat fields. Only a rusted tractor stood in the middle of them. The train passed several small stations in the middle of wilderness, never stopping. They were old wooden structures whose color had faded to gray, and the staff, wearing black uniforms and hats with a red stripe, would stare at us while holding a flag. Or there were robust railroad workers wearing orange vests wad
dling away while carrying a railroad tie.

  We used the first-class bathrooms at each end of the car to wash our faces and sometimes our bodies with hot water. Then we ate breakfast. This usually consisted of dark bread and ham, and we bought warm milk from the cart pushed around by a train employee. Lunch was served in the restaurant car, the only meal served during the day. We started with borscht, a vegetable soup made with beets, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage and topped with sour cream, accompanied by tough and sour rye bread. Then came a stew with pasta and meat and peas, and we laughed as we ate it, calling it a different version of our beloved noodles with black bean sauce. It was actually quite good. The beer bottle had a Russian label, and its slightly sweet taste and fermented smell were so lively that we called it a version of our rice wine. When the train took a break at a crossroads, which happened rarely, we went out to find women selling food. The passenger car was warm, but when we stepped out it felt like the cold air was cutting through our backs. The sunlight was so bright and the sky was so blue, but the cold air made it feel like early wintertime. Women wearing scarves on their heads and sweaters or vests were calling and beckoning to us. They offered homemade bread and cookies, hardboiled eggs, still steaming boiled potatoes in a pot, fries, toasted sunflower seeds, ugly little apples, and scallions. Young Tae and I bought the hot potatoes for snacks. The woman wrapped them in newspapers and gave us a bunch of scallions. It was only later that we found out you were supposed to dip the scallions in a sauce as you ate the potatoes. Our train car attendant was a plump young woman named Tania, and we communicated through hand gestures most of the time. She did not speak a word of English or German, but if Young Tae looked through the Russian dictionary and tried to speak a word of Russian, she quickly understood what we were trying to say and even corrected his pronunciation. Thanks to her bringing us hot water in a samovar, we were able to eat ramen noodles for dinner. Of course we offered some to her, and Tania ate them, almost crying because it was too spicy for her, but still exclaiming, “Karacho!”

  Dusk on the plain was magnificent. Birds flew over tall birch trees, and the mist rose from the earth and filled the air as the temperature dropped. The sunlight faded into muted shade, and the sun turned red and appeared misshapen, like a watercolor whose colors have spread. The earth and the forest, the sky and our train, even our faces looking out the window and our clothes were colored red. Hills and mountainous regions began to appear, and far away we saw tall mountaintops covered in white snow, protruding like sharp teeth. As she passed by, Tania pointed out the window and yelled, “Ural! Ural!” That night, with the Ural Mountains as the border, we said goodbye to Europe and crossed over to Asia. Siberia was a wholly different world, another mighty land.

  Moving through three nights and days, the train crossed the Ob River and arrived at Novosibirsk. It was around eight at night. The train stopped for about an hour at the station, and I woke up Young Tae, who had fallen asleep earlier, and went out to get fresh air. Since we had been sitting down for so long, the passengers tried to get out and walk on firm ground, no matter how much the attendants tried to stop us. We saw a small crowd gathered outside, near the exit where the cargo was transported. There was a big street market there, larger than any we had seen, and men approached us to exchange US dollars. Others were selling hot bread filled with smoked salmon and chicken soup with noodles as thick as my finger. I chose chicken soup, because it reminded me of the bowl of noodles I used to eat at Daejun Station.

  We arrived in Irkutsk the following afternoon, and had to leave the train with all our belongings. We were to stay there one night, tour around the city and Lake Baikal, and then switch to a different train. From our hotel I could see the Angara River, and I remember the moment I opened my window to let in the sky, the river, and the forest colored by the red sunset. The following day, we were transported in a tour bus all over the city and up to Lake Baikal. I can barely remember the walkway along the river in front of our hotel and the Museum of Decembrists, but Lake Baikal looked like an ocean, and all around it looked like a village in the Alps. I did not want to leave the warm bus to be swept up by the freezing wind coming off the lake.

  “They were the heroes and heroines of War and Peace,” said Song Young Tae as we passed by a row of wooden houses. I knew the Decembrists were actually aristocrats who led the first revolt against the czar and the system into which they were born. As Napoleon stirred things up across Europe, the idea of a republic spread like dandelion seeds blown in the wind. The five leaders were executed, and more than one hundred aristocrats were sentenced to life and exiled to the lumberyards and mines near this city. The wives and fiancées of these men came through the snowstorms to be with their loved ones. Some of them were reunited, but sometimes the man died or the woman didn’t survive the journey. The women worked as laundresses or maids while they waited for the men to finish their sentences, suffering the insults and scorn of the guards and judges. Tournetshaya, a duchess, did not stay in Irkutsk, but went into the mountains to the village of Nerchinsk to be with her husband. Madame Borkonkaya found her husband among the mine gang, and instead of embracing him, she kissed the chain around his feet. It took more than thirty years for them to be pardoned and released from hard labor, and those who managed to survive never returned to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Many revolutionaries went through here afterward, Lenin and Chernyshevsky among them.

  I remember the two of us walking along the Angara River talking about them, stepping on the yellow leaves carpeting the ground. I was wearing a windbreaker, and Young Tae was in a thin winter coat and a wool hat. On the riverside road were mothers pushing strollers and young lovers taking walks.

  “After all that sacrifice and effort, the modern age was barely able to hold the barricade of the antiestablishment for seventy years. The bourgeoisie has taken over again. The whole world is in the process of being colonized.”

  As in Berlin, Young Tae constantly wanted to return to talking about current events, but I did not want to be disturbed on this very personal and lyrical journey. I think I was very tired. At the Museum of the Decembrists, before the humble objects and other traces of those exiled to a lonely life here, I thought of the dark windows I had seen when I tried to visit you in prison. For an instant, my eyes felt warm. Looking up the tall, straight body of the white birch in front of the museum, I shook off that memory. And what I regret most now is that I did not try to understand Song Young Tae at that moment.

  “You should call it a change. Everyone and everything under the sun changes.”

  “Look at how those whities got together to bash everything in the Persian Gulf! The only place that’s left is the North or Cuba. Maybe I should go to the Caribbean and try to get along there? But it’s too far.”

  “Look at that baby!”

  I approached a baby who must have been two years old, sitting in a stroller and laughing out loud at her mother’s hand gestures. The mother had taken a ribbon from her hair and was shaking it in front of the baby, and as it fluttered in the wind the baby laughed. Young Tae remained in front of the concrete barrier on top of the high bank facing the river. The mother did not seem to mind that I held the baby’s fingers and gently shook them. I kissed the baby’s cheek and returned to Young Tae.

  “Look, there’s one, and there’s another. There are lots of moms and babies here.”

  “Didn’t you see a lot of them in Berlin, too? What are you fussing about?”

  “Nothing. You don’t like family, do you?”

  “I hate my father.”

  “Then how can you survive anywhere? The two places you talked about are only persisting because of a central father figure.”

  “I hate the fascists and the bourgeoisie.”

  “Your father was one of those?”

  “He was in parliament and a member of the ruling party, someone who served the dictatorship for a long time. You know that.”

  “I think I‘ve finally begun to understand my father,” I
said, but I was thinking of something else. I was not sure which was correct, his hatred or my understanding. And each of our beginnings was so different, like heaven and earth. I mumbled as if I was still talking to myself, “There are so many people like them, just ordinary people all over the world. Who’s going to protect them now?”

  “Aren’t they the ones who resisted their protection, who wanted to go back to the old days? The market will swallow them.”

  “Competition is bad, of course. But government control is just as bad.”

  “It’s futile to go on about things that don’t exist.”

  We returned to the journey that had consumed our lives over the previous few days. But how irresponsible it was, the traveling. Like the wind, we passed fields and villages and houses of people. But this road was a path across the continent that brought me closer to my own dividing lines. To my country, which was divided in the middle, where so many people had sacrificed their lives for their dreams and now were exposing the wounds all over their bodies before the onslaught of change.

  As we passed Lake Baikal and traveled into East Siberia, a range of mountains appeared at the far end of the great plain, and we began to notice long winding rivers and hills. The coniferous forest of taiga continued, with spruce trees and cedars and larch trees with elegant brown leaves, and what seemed like every birch tree in the whole wide world, unendingly following the railroad. The Trans-Siberia train followed the course of the Amur River, the life source of this continent that greets the rising sun and guides it until it sets. Riding nonstop for two nights and days, Young Tae and I could no longer bear being on the train. We usually had a little bit of vodka as a nightcap, but the night before we arrived in Khabarovsk we were drinking more. At first we were just a little bit tipsy, but things accelerated, thanks to Tania, when she brought us a hunk of pork and Russian sauerkraut, so similar to our own kimchi. The day before, I had given her some pairs of pantyhose as a present. We began drinking in earnest. The nighttime air was cold, but we kept the window open. The refreshing fragrance of trees and the river drifted in. Each of us talked and sang and chattered, not necessarily to each other, and Tania left after a few glasses since she was still on duty. Song Young Tae and I had not lost consciousness, but we were slurring. At one point we started to calm down, and soon both of us were quiet in his or her own thoughts, as we normally were.