The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Why are you weeping?”

  Only when Young Tae pointed at me with his finger and asked did I realize that I was crying while staring into the darkness outside the window. I was thinking that I wished Mr. Yi was with me right here, right now. This was completely different from the absence of you, still alive.

  “I was thinking of Mr. Yi.”

  “A selfish individualist . . .”

  “Hey, I am no ‘ist’ of any kind.”

  “All you care about is yourself. And your paintings are awful.”

  “You think you’re better than me? All you do is talk, talk, talk. Why don’t you just do something instead of talking about it? Or do one thing well and forget about the rest.”

  Song Young Tae’s mouth was twisted, he seemed to be sneering.

  “You’re hopeless. You never loved anyone, not even yourself.”

  Tears were gushing down my cheeks. About half of it was the effect of the vodka. I was crying, but I didn’t feel despondent and I wasn’t screaming. It was my turn to attack.

  “You bastard, you knew what was happening! And what did you do to Mi Kyung?”

  “It was that kind of time,” he murmured.

  “Don’t you dare blame the times,” I shouted. “Admit that you made a mistake!”

  Suddenly, his face became curiously contorted, and he began to weep as I was. “I can . . . disappear . . . if that’s what you want.”

  That made me loathe him even more, so I climbed into my bed and closed the curtains. The rhythmic sound of the train wheels on the track continued. Was it true that we did not love anyone? Or is it just that we did not know how to love? I think I fell asleep. The curtain was opened stealthily. The light was out, but I was able to make out the upper torso of Young Tae standing right above my head. He bent down and kissed my cheek. I did not know what to do. My head was a jumble of thoughts. He got up quickly and left, closing the curtain again. I turned toward the wall. As always, the rhythmic sound of the train wheels continued, and the restless train moved into the night.

  When we arrived in Khabarovsk, the first snow of the season was falling on the Amur River. The strange thing was that the snow was coming down while the sun was dimly shining on, like rainfall on a sunny summer’s day. We unpacked at a hotel near Lenin Square. This was to be the last city we would stay in. The next day, we would go to Vladivostok, and the group tour was to end there. In the hotel lobby, there was a ticket office for a cruise on the Amur River. In our itinerary, a cruise at sunset was already included. Young Tae’s face was puffy, and he had not said much all day. The hotel looked out over the square and the grand avenue named after Karl Marx. We got into a tour bus in front of the hotel and went north on the grand avenue to the harbor. The sun had set, but it was still a little early for the white sunlight to turn red. The first floor on board was the cafeteria and the second floor the deck, and everyone tended to stay on the deck. We stood among other tourists on the right side of the deck and looked down at the river, leaning on the railing. Far away were the dark mountains and forests of China. There they call the Amur River the Black Dragon River, the name we are more familiar with. This magnificent river flows through most of Eastern Siberia and into the Sea of Okhotsk at the northern part of Sakhalin. The cruise ship was to travel slowly down the river to the iron bridge of Khabarovsk and then turn back, which would take about an hour and a half. The sun was going down on the other side of the river, and bands of yellow and red appeared in the sky. Like an ignited tree, the bands widened into a wide swath that colored the surrounding area, the sun falling fast as it burned into a red flame. The river was also turning red. The water closer to us was a darker shade of blue, and the color faded as it moved away from us. When it finally met with the red sky there seemed to be no boundary between the two.

  “The sun is going down again,” I thought I heard Young Tae mumble.

  I watched his face as he stared down at the river.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “What . . . ?”

  “You said your stomach hurt before.”

  “Hmm, I’m really hungry now. Thanks for asking, though.”

  I regarded him in silence.

  “I really appreciate that . . .” Song Young Tae said to me in the voice that I was so familiar with. “I really appreciate that you came on this trip with me, Miss Han.”

  “I’ve enjoyed it.”

  I hoped a few words like these might clear the air. When the cruise was over and the tourist group dispersed at the harbor, the two of us went to a Chinese restaurant we had seen from the bus. We ordered four dishes and ate rice for the first time in a while. Then we went to a café, and that is where he disappeared. After he ordered coffee, he got up and left as if he was going to the restroom. He still had not come back long after I’d finished mine, and I simply assumed that he had become sulky again and had gone back to the hotel by himself. I ordered a cocktail and stayed longer, listening to a chamber music group playing there. Alone, I felt rather free and unencumbered after being obliged to accompany someone for more than a week. I was alone again, thank God. And even if I’d still been with him, would I have been able to stop him from what he was about to do? After spending about two hours there, I slowly walked down the grand avenue back to the hotel. The moment I walked into our room I saw that his bag and clothes were gone. Somehow, I remained calm at that moment. I looked around and found a piece of notepaper leaning against the vanity mirror. Hastily scrawled onto the paper were his words:I was going to leave as soon as we arrived here, but I decided to stay and have at least one more dinner with you. My dear Miss Han, I am going to the most secluded village in this world, and I won’t be coming back from there. The north of the peninsula is perhaps the most isolated and difficult place in the world right now, but I can’t stand idly by . . . or kill me! I’ll never forget this trip. Dasvidanya!

  At first, I had no idea what this extraordinary action of his really meant. The next morning, I simply told our tour guide that we would be ending our trip here, and I stayed at the hotel for one more night. Of course, he did not come back. After spending a whole day in an unfamiliar city all by myself, it finally dawned on me. He had had a different destination in his mind since the beginning of this trip.

  27

  After I returned to Korea, I came here for every vacation. This place has changed a lot, too. The intoxicated noise of drunk people singing karaoke and the smell of fatty meat grilling have replaced the gentle sounds of the brook and the refreshing fragrance of the breeze.

  I am now a professor at a university outside of Seoul, and I live by myself in an apartment near there. The world has changed but nothing seems different here, and people are even more individualistic. They seem to think that they have achieved everything now, and they are more obvious than ever about their selfish nature and their obsession with money. Wealth has become the most important basis for relationships, not just among friends, but among family, between parents and children and among brothers and sisters. I wonder what they would do if all at once they were stripped of their material wealth. I just know that they would have to pay for it one day. The people are mired in inertia, the youth have lost their idealism and now only seek pleasure. The fastest way to win in politics is through hypocrisy and opportunism, and the media openly continues to fabricate and distort information. This corruption is an open wound from the violent rule of the past. After living in a restricted society for too long, it is said, people are afraid of creative power or spiritual fulfillment, and they come to detest change. While we still have a long way to go, and you are still in the same place, all the values are mixed up, and those who hold power are still the strongest.

  Yet, I love this place and I am proud of it. I lived through an era with people who achieved some progress, inadequate as it is. From this pile of poor and miserable rags, we will weave beautiful new clothes.

  When I came back two years ago, I bought this house and the land around it in our names. A
nd finally this year, 1995, I renovated the house. At first, I did not want to touch anything, because I did not want to spoil anything you might remember when you came back here, but things were deteriorating. I had to fix the roof and the bedroom, and I updated many things, too. As I am writing this, I hear the owl’s hoot as we used to. Around dusk, I heard the cry of turtledoves, too. Do you think they are the same birds as before, who have somehow survived until now? Or are they the spirits of dead ones, united with all the things that we have lost?

  Once, I was criticizing a friend and I screamed in despair that we did not love anyone, that we did not know how to love. But now, I want to correct myself. On this Earth, at any given moment, there is love. How it appears to others may differ depending on the era. I watch our friends being worn down by everyday life like pebbles being washed away and slowly disintegrating in seawater, and I hope that they are not regretting anything. I want them to respect the depth of meaningful, plentiful life that still remains in their hearts, and I hope that they will be able to embrace their pasts and their futures with more mature love.

  I am not feeling well these days. I think I am too tired. Summer vacation came to my rescue, but at the end of the semester, I was supposed to monitor an exam and almost collapsed in the classroom. I was standing up front for a while, then I took one step and was about to turn to the window; maybe it was because of the bright light, but I felt dizzy and stumbled. I somehow managed to grab the windowsill, and I remained standing there, my eyes closed.

  A similar incident happened while I was taking a bath. I was sitting down, letting the water run down my back, and all of sudden there was a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed my sides and twisted my body as I moaned. It took a while for the pain to go away, like waves calming. Recently I have lost a lot of weight, and I always had pretty pronounced cheekbones, but now they seem to protrude even more.

  I have been thinking about motherhood, a perennial topic of mine. The one that begets all others. Rosa Luxemberg’s foundation for criticizing tyranny and bureaucracy was motherly love for the masses. The modern world has been a dreary and bleak era of males, filled with conflict and anguish. Like the life of an old secret policeman who used to torture his prisoners but is now in hiding somewhere, it is devastated and lonely. Look at those dreary eyes, glaring with determination to hold onto the hegemony that he may lose, and to regain the power he has already lost. Look at that insipid smile that he is trying to pass off as warm love, and the cold eyes that want dominion over everything and obedience from everyone. They cannot be hidden beneath the sinisterly warm expression.

  I am once again looking at Käthe Kollwitz’s woodcuts from her later years. I had forgotten about them. Now I keep going back to her self-portraits, as I did when I was a student, especially those from when she was an old woman whose face was filled with empathy, roughly delineated with crude knife lines. Reflected in her face is the long, agonizing journey, starting with her son’s death on a battlefield during World War I, to her sympathy for the underprivileged, and the persecution that she and her colleagues suffered, to the death of her grandson on the Russian front during World War II. While I was in Berlin, Mari Kline once said that we are living in a world that would not allow us to work the way Käthe did. I think I said something like, “Here, people are sick of each other, they chase each other away or avoid one another, but there are other places where people are desperately looking for each other.”

  Well, this place has become the place Frau Kline was talking about.

  I’m thinking of the last time I saw Mari. In the winter of 1992, the last winter I spent in Berlin all by myself, she was taken to a nursing home run by the government. Even in the eyes of our building manager, she was severely alcoholic. Right before she left I saw her, thin as a piece of paper, sitting on her bed. Her studio had been cleaned up, and there was a single suitcase, small and worn out, placed next to the bed. She was wearing a gray suit that was too baggy on her now and a felt hat, and she looked like an actress from an old silent movie. I had brought her yellow roses, and she took them close to her face and inhaled deeply. And then she did not say anything, and just smiled gently.

  I want to go back to Käthe’s last image, the lithograph that is considered by some people to be her last testament. It is an image of a mother hiding three children inside her coat. The mother’s face, which looks almost androgynous, is strong and powerful. Her hair is swept back, her mouth closed, with hollow cheeks that emphasize the cheekbones. She is raising her arms to protect her children, and it looks like her head is connected to her shoulder with no neck. Her eyes are determined and unafraid, looking up as if to say, So, what are you going to do now?

  Under her raised arms, two children are facing to the left while the last one is facing forward on her right side. The little one on the right is lifting up the mother’s coat and peeking out with a mischievous expression while the larger one on the left is looking up to where the mother is turned, with a startled face. The other child right beneath him also peeks out, about to cry. The title of this lithograph is Seed for the Planting Shall Not Be Ground, a line from Göethe’s poem. It is so powerful and realistic that it is difficult to believe a seventy-six-year-old woman did it. And it is a simple image, maybe too simple for the artists of today, who tend to consider everything they do so complex and sophisticated, even though all we all do is paint. Well, I finally began to get an inkling of what living is all about after I turned forty. Here, I want to write down a few words of Käthe’s.

  A mother is someone who doesn’t think about anything else; her entire life can be summed up in the life of another. Old people internalize things and remain indifferent, it’s true, but I should add that this introverted quality can be just as pure as a mother’s oneness.20

  As always, when I bury a person I mourn them, but I don’t cry too bitterly because I am always overcome by the feeling that I must live on. “Who knows what might not be possible tomorrow. So I must live today.” Everything has its due time. It is beautiful. But all things must pass.21

  As I bid farewell to a century of wars, of men killing men, I think of the maternal instinct that’s been murdered with these men. I killed mine. I was forced to, when you were taken away from me. But, I am determined to regain that great essence.

  It is snowing outside. Jung Hee drove me to Kalmae. Another year is about to end. Last month, I wrote my first letter to you. Of course I did not send it to the prison, but to your sister, even though I do not know when you will be released. I did that because I may not be here in this world when you finally regain your freedom.

  As I wrote in my letter, I am sick. I have been to the hospital. I knew something was wrong, my skin felt like the skin of a dried fish. I was sitting on the toilet to urinate but felt something warm gushing out. I looked down and saw red filling up the toilet. It did not hurt, but there was the blood. When I called Jung Hee and told her about it, she came to me right away and took me to a big hospital. The results came back; the doctor was hesitating and Jung Hee was already crying, so I knew it was something grave. I was actually quite serene, maybe because I have gone through so many shocking incidents throughout my life. Before we finished the registration process and I was assigned to a single room, I spoke to Jung Hee, calmly and without anger. I told her, if it is serious or hopeless I should be told first, before anyone else, so that I may tidy things up with some dignity. So it is cervical cancer. I have received radiation and chemotherapy, and the pain has lessened, but I am not too hopeful. I am losing weight at an alarming rate. I think I will stay here in Kalmae for three days. I had to cry and beg, saying that I thought I would get better instantly if I came to this beautiful place with its clean air, saying that they should think of it as my one last wish, the one thing that they could do for me. So I think this will be the last time I write something from here. Maybe I will write another letter and send it to your sister when I go back into the hospital.

 
I was never able to be a real wife to a man or a real mother to a child, and in my forties it finally dawned on me that I truly want to be a mother. As a failed artist who has accomplished nothing, I was finally beginning to understand the meaning of motherhood and the way to look at the world as a mother, and now I have a disease that takes away the root of motherhood. Life can be so strange.

  I need to ask you for one thing. I do not know when, but by the time you finish reading all my writings in Kalmae you will learn about our child, Eun Gyul. I did not want you to know about her while you were in prison, but there were times I just wanted to take her there and push her through the iron bars and show you her smiles. And there were times when I wanted to escape from her, and from you. Everything that I cannot teach her or give to her in the future, I want you to do for your daughter.

  I guess you are an old man now. Everything that we wanted to protect, the things that we endured so much for, are shattered now, but they are still shining through the world’s dust. As long as we are living, we will have to start over again and again. What did you find within those lonely dark walls? Did you walk through the path in between rocks and find a place suddenly bright, blooming with a multitude of flowers? Did you find our old garden?