Festival for Three Thousand Women (16 page)

“Not at all,” said Mr. Soh. “The spy could easily be foreign. And the Peace Corps would be the perfect ruse.”

They were sitting there in their business suits, sweating like crazy and asking Bobby, who was naked under the water, to pretend to be a North Korean spy. And his best friends at the school were about to boycott the whole affair.

“No,” he said. “I can't do it.”

The headmaster and Mr. Soh spoke together again, purposefully using that heavy country dialect, and then they got off their stools and knelt down on the tiles, soaking their suits and bending their heads over and touching their noses to the floor.

“Headmaster Kim is deep in trouble,” said Mr. Soh. “If we don't find a good spy tonight he will lose his job.”

“Surely not,” said Bobby. “After all, it's only a game.”

“It is not a game,” said Mr. Soh, practically hissing. “The Minister of Education—everyone is watching. This is the most important day for our course in moral education. You, from America, may find it hard to appreciate, but North Korean spies have landed at Taechon Beach before. And no one will suspect you. Everything will be fine.”

“No,” Bobby said. “Please. Surely you can find someone else. If I'm the spy everyone will say that you cheated.”

He had expected the two men to confer again but they only knelt there, sad faces sweating, eyes down against the tiles. And to make matters worse, for the past several minutes Bobby had been dying to get out of the tub. His pores were as wide as barn doors by then, and he was feeling faint, his heart beating wildly around in his ears.

“I need to get out of the bath,” he said.

“Must we ask again? Everything depends upon it.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Bobby, “alright. But you'll have to tell me what to do.”

The two men stayed where they were, their foreheads down like that, embarrassing Bobby greatly and making him ask them once more to please get up.

“We'll go to your house and wait,” said the headmaster, speaking to Bobby directly for the first time.

As soon as they were gone Bobby jumped from the tub and got cold water from the tap to pour across his desperate body. He dressed in his clean clothes and left the bath with dirty ones across his arm, looking up at the high half-moon and shaking his head at everything. Thirty minutes before, he had convinced himself that the Peace Corps was calling to tell him Cherry Consiliak was dead, and now he would be a North Korean spy. As he walked along he laughed, and his laugh caused a dog to bark, and that brought a couple of beggars back into the street.

I have been working on my speech for more than a fortnight now, and when I discovered that the American would not be around to hear it, I felt quite unhappy. Of course logic tells me that a man who has been studying Korean for less than a year cannot understand such a difficult speech, but I wanted him there just the same, pretending to understand as he stood by his chair.

Imagine my relief, then, when things changed and I was told that the American would be back in time to hear my speech after all. This speech represents ethical and moral education at its highest, and in past years it has been my finest moment. When I remind everyone that a society can exhibit good health only if the people of that society are knit together through a series of interdependent relationships, I can always see, in the shining of the teachers' eyes, that I have moved them by my words. It is the old values that come through in a speech like this, the old truths that are remembered—that is why I wanted the American to hear it. Think what it might mean if, through words of my own, the American actually began taking the world seriously for a change. If that were to happen I would retire a happy man. Think what it would mean to move the American.… That would be something to remember!

Written under a momentary clearing in the clouds as I try to understand whether or not it will rain.

Six in the fourth place means: Walking in the midst of others, one returns alone
.

 

T
he morning meeting was scheduled for eight and the students were assembled in the yard, waiting to be set loose upon the town. The students had rules too, of course. They could not detain anyone unless certain criteria were met. Overhearing someone ask the price of cigarettes was one of the criteria, as was a consensus concerning strangeness of dress or the genuinely odd nature of someone's speech.

Bobby had been told to wear odd clothing, so he found his oldest suit, a brown one bought at a Robert Hall store just before he went off to college. But since Bobby had been fat since high school, the suit fit loosely now, making him look, he thought, not so much like a spy as a fool.

All of the teachers stood when the vice-headmaster began his speech on the importance of moral education in a changing world, and when he finished Headmaster Kim came into the room. The headmaster was always pensive, but today he brought a soberness to his words that counteracted the general giddiness felt by the teachers at the prospect of a day of leisure, walking about the town.

“Last year,” he said, “our spy was Mr. Nam's older brother who spent his day holed up inside the drugstore, getting captured late, just before the five o'clock deadline. It was a fine experience. The students worked together, which, we mustn't forget, is one of our goals, and everyone sharpened their ability to notice someone strange, someone odd, so that when the next real spy lands at Taechon Beach, he will not be able to walk among us with impunity, but will be found out quickly and brought into the hands of the authorities.”

The headmaster's tone had the effect of dampening everyone's holiday mood and giving them a proper sense of gravity. Mr. Lee, when Bobby looked at him, was so grave that Bobby thought the floorboards beneath him might crack, but Mr. Kwak's face was quizzical, as if the headmaster had said something that had not occurred to him before.

“This year,” continued Headmaster Kim, “we have confidence that our spy will not be caught. Of course, we secretly hope that he will be caught, but this year we have plumbed the depths of deception and come up with a wonderful spy, a foolproof spy. That is all I will say. The rules are known to you all, but I will reiterate that it is a teacher's job to interfere only if the students are bothering innocent people unnecessarily, or if you feel the real spy is at hand.”

The teachers were stirring when the headmaster finished. In a moment they would release the students, who would stampede into the town like bulls into Pamplona. Could it be that Mr. Kwak and the Lees had foresworn their plan?

But as the headmaster sat down, the dissidents stepped away from their desks. Bobby could tell from the various faces around him that no one suspected a thing. And though he'd been sure that Mr. Kwak would do the talking it was Mr. Lee whose voice broke the general elation in the room.

“The three of us,” he said, “would like to comment on spy-catching day and what we believe are its real implications for our society, for Koreans in general, and for our students here at Taechon Boys' Middle School.”

Mr. Lee's tone was so quiet that the other teachers had not yet recognized it as contrary. The vice-headmaster, certainly, had not caught any of its underlying tone. His head moved mechanically, like a nodding dog in the back window of somebody's car.

“To be sure, North Korea sends out spies,” Mr. Lee said, “but they are not everywhere and to search them out in this little yearly drama contributes to our students' already narrow view of the world, taking from them any hope of a democratic spirit and lessening Korea's already small opportunity to become a true democracy, where people are free to choose and to go about as they will.”

By now, of course, everyone was alert, even the sleepers stirring like someone had just splashed water in their eyes. “What? What?” they said, and it was then that Mr. Kwak took over, making everyone turn his way.

“Therefore,” he said, “Mr. Lee and Miss Lee and I respectfully decline to take part in spy-catching day. We will remain here, working on our lessons, and we urge any like-minded teachers to join us. We share with everyone a distaste for North Korea, so much so that we must protest activities that make us narrower and sillier in the eyes of the world, activities that contribute to our already well-developed inability to think for ourselves.”

After Mr. Kwak spoke there was a moment of numbed silence, and then the place erupted.

“That's communist rhetoric!” shouted someone.

“Fools!” screamed someone else. “Inhuman fools!”

For a moment Bobby thought one of the teachers might actually strike Mr. Kwak, but the place quieted again when Miss Lee insinuated her voice into the fray. It was the uncommonly high-pitched quality of the voice that got to them, coming across the top of all their protests like a siren.

“Friends! Friends!” she said. “When you think about it, spy-catching day is for fools. We need to build a country in which spies, when they come, will only want to stay, living freely among us, never to leave again.”

This made a good number of the teachers laugh, whether because of what she'd said or because a woman was saying it, no one could be sure. But then all three of them sat back down, pretending to turn their attention to their lessons, while voices swirled around them like tornadoes, everyone aghast at the impropriety, the downright turncoat nature of it all.

Bobby didn't know how it would ever end, but through the limbs of the outraged faculty members he saw the headmaster rise from his chair and when that happened the others seemed to float back to theirs like so much driftwood after a storm.

“Teachers,” said the headmaster, “I have one thing to say.” He paused, letting everyone hear that there was no anger in his voice. He was looking not at the three traitors but over the heads of them all. Even Mr. Kwak took his eyes from his lesson book when the pause grew long. The headmaster made them wait, but in the end all he said was, “Everyone in this country is entitled to an opinion. Spy-catching day will, of course, go on as scheduled.”

Then the vice-headmaster dismissed them, sending them out to the students and the warm June morning and the town where, everyone knew, a spy most certainly lurked. Bobby stood up and marched out too. And though he glanced back repeatedly, trying to catch the eye of one of his friends, they did not look up. They bent their heads to their lessons and were writing, fingers moving from text to paper as if they really were deciding what they would teach once they got their students back again.

Bobby did not know how to remove himself from the predicament he was in. It was clear as they marched that he should not have agreed to be the spy, but that had not been nearly so clear in the steam of the public bath, with Mr. Soh and Headmaster Kim burning their foreheads against the tiles. But where were his loyalties, where should they be? Mr. Kwak and the Lees were his true friends. They had shared the secret of their boycott as a sign of that friendship, and they were really standing up for courageous ideas in a country such as this, where open discussions about the North were out of the question. Freedom and democracy. Was he on their side, then, or on the other? He had been moved by their speeches, but to back away from his obligation to the headmaster after saying he'd do it seemed impossible.

All of this occurred to Bobby as he marched resolutely along in his oversized Robert Hall spy suit, among the disconcerted teachers and the happy students, who, anyone could see, viewed the whole thing as a lark.

When they got to the edge of town they spread out, students breaking into teams, teachers walking with their hands behind them, their gazes roaming. Bobby strolled for a while with Mr. Soh, but Mr. Soh said that the spy should act furtively, so he broke away and went into the market alone, examining the produce and looking for a place to buy cigarettes. Everyone knew he didn't smoke, so he recognized that this purchase was his one chance of being caught. And he really should have bought them early, he realized, for in the next instant the Goma found him.

“What's up?” asked the boy. “Has anybody spotted the spy yet?”

“Maybe this year they won't find him at all,” Bobby said.

“Ha! You want to bet? We find him every year.”

“You still owe me a thousand won,” Bobby told him. “You should be thinking about paying me back, not betting.”

“Double or nothing,” said the Goma. “If I lose I'll pay tomorrow.”

They argued for a while, but Bobby finally bet him, hoping to send him on his spy search so that he could go somewhere and quietly buy his cigarettes, first asking the price. Once that was accomplished he'd be home free.

Right then Mr. Nam came in from the other direction. Mr. Nam looked at the Goma in time to see him slip the old English book under his shirt.

“Hey!” said Nam. “I've been looking for that.” He tried to grab him and the Goma backed away, running out of the market with Nam on his tail.