Authors: Ko Un
Time brings today and yesterday together.
Time brings here and there together.
Even long-lasting sorrow
cannot but be the veins of time.
His mother wore a black skirt and white blouse made of cotton.
She never wore any other clothes.
When she came home from the millet field
and removed the towel from her head, she was beautiful.
To the son
who left his mother
in a remote village in Uncheon, North Pyeongan province,
time meant here and there.
That image of his mother in black skirt and white blouse from fifty years ago
stuck with him, unchanging.
Kim Yeong-man, a sixteen-year-old in the People’s Army,
came down South from the North.
His battalion came down
as far as Yeosu
on the Southern Sea.
They crossed the Seomjin River
to attack Masan.
He soon forgot his familiar landscapes.
He was taken prisoner during the Masan assault.
In the prisoner-of-war camp on Geoje Island
fervent communist prisoners were fearless together.
The anti-communist prisoners began to gather separately.
Kim Yeong-Man
chose neither the North
nor the South,
but went to neutral India.
From India he went to Mexico.
From Mexico he and others went to Cuba.
In a slum alley in Havana’s old town
Ortega Kim
forgot every last word of Korean.
Only the image of his mother in black skirt and white blouse
hung hazily above his eyebrows.
Born in 1872, died in 1933.
Born in Seokbo, Yeongyang, North Gyeongsang province,
she married at nineteen.
Her husband, Kim Yeong-ju,
was killed fighting in Kim Do-hyeon’s righteous army.
She remained with her husband’s family
bringing up his posthumous child.
When the Independence Movement started in 1919,
she left her remote village,
left her home town
shouting, Long Live Korea!
Manse!
She was determined to live for the independence of her country
She worked in the kitchen for the Independence Army
in western Manchuria
across the Yalu River.
She quit the kitchen,
made a plan secretly to assassinate the Japanese governor-general.
She failed.
She went to Jillin in Manchuria and continued to work for the Independence Movement.
She planned to rescue General Kim Dong-sam
while he was being transported after being arrested in 1931.
She failed.
In 1932 she cut off two fingers
and wrote an independence petition
in her blood,
addressed to the League of Nation’s fact-finding commission.
Attempting to murder the Japanese ambassador in Manchuria, she was arrested
then tortured severely.
She died in Harbin in 1933.
She was buried in one of the White Russian cemeteries.
No one knows where her child lived or died.
At dawn on 28 June 1950,
the bridge across the Han River was blown up.
That ear-splitting boom!
Pandemonium.
Silence.
Screams. Groans.
About a thousand
of the Seoul citizens who fled hastily over the bridge
after the war began
died in the explosion.
Among them
a man who lost one arm
grabbed a drifting box with the other hand
and held on to reach the bank at Noryangjin.
He survived,
became One-armed Park, gang-leader of Nampo-dong, Busan,
in 1951, while Busan was the provisional capital.
‘Those goddamn bastards escaped first.
After they made broadcast announcements
telling the people of Seoul to stay and not worry,
those goddamn bastards themselves escaped.
The goddamn President,
those goddamn ministers.
‘Goddamn military, goddamn whoever.
What?
They were serving the nation?
They called themselves the nation’s bulwark?’
One-armed Park spouted abuse as he snuffed the lighter.
The cigarette smoke drifted off. Goddamn!
Truly his home was poverty itself.
This five-year-old
had moved his lips for half a day.
Does he have a sweet
in his mouth?
Is a sweet melting
in his mouth?
‘Say “Ah.”
You little rascal, what’re you eating?’
He opened his mouth, ‘Ah.’
On his little tongue
was a pebble.
He was hungry and wanted something to eat,
so he’d picked up a stone,
put it in his mouth
and was moving it around.
At sunset, as goose-flesh spread wide,
a wind came down from the hills.
After the three months of the People’s Republic,
everything in Seoul was destroyed.
Empty houses and
the houses of those who hadn’t left yet,
all of them,
on every rainy day,
echoed with the endless sound of raindrops falling from the eaves.
Those who collaborated during the occupation numbered 400,000.
Sentenced to death,
imprisoned for life,
30 years’ hard labour,
15 years,
5 years.
People were arrested after anonymous tipoffs,
rounded up on false accusations.
Ancient enemies
were denounced on concocted charges of being reds.
Kim Cheong-nang in Seodaemun Prison,
sentenced to life in prison,
had a black wart between his two eyebrows
that made him look most solemn.
All he had done was attend one rally
organised by the city communists during the occupation.
He was indicted as the vile instigator of a rally
thanks to the scheming of Yun Min-u, who owed him money.
Tortured, he was dying
of malnutrition,
of depression.
Finally, he died of a stroke
after he’d served only two years of his life sentence.
No one came forward to claim his body.
He was buried on the slopes of Mount Geomdan, Gyeonggi province
in the cemetery for prisoners with no known relatives.
The more remote a village was,
the more the people there used the lunar calendar.
People’s birthdays were lunar dates,
ancestral rites were lunar, too.
The year’s farming was done by lunar dates:
when to plant barley,
when to plant buckwheat,
when to plant rice
in terraced paddy fields.
In people’s memories
every day was a lunar date.
He spoke with a running nose.
His breath
spilled out and dispersed in clouds of steam.
So, on the twelfth day of the sixth lunar month
the People’s Army
passed through this mountain village
Someone said they were from the North’s Fourth Division.
They reached the hills of Geochang in the north
via Hamyang from Namwon.
Soldiers who looked very young
were carrying submachine guns the wrong way up.
There was no doubt we were in trouble.
Thinking I should escape somewhere
I took the ox from the stable
and went to my in-laws’ home in Sancheong.
The Communist army passed through there, too.
I took the ox and came back home.
I swept away the cobwebs,
warmed the room,
dried out the green mildew.
While I was living like that
someone came down from the hills and took me with him.
I carried food up and down mountains until I was caught.
I was sentenced to twenty-five years.
My knee got broken in jail, my teeth fell out.
I tossed the fallen teeth through the bars.
Sometimes I cried.
I was a commie.
I was no commie.
One day I met my kid’s schoolteacher
and bought him a drink
in the tavern at the junction.
As we were drinking a measure of
makgeolli
, then another half-measure,
the school teacher
praised my kid saying
his grades were so-so
but he was good at stopping kids fighting.
Then, pinching the wrinkles between his eyebrows,
Mr Kim said:
‘In future,
the time will come when everyone lives equally well.
The land will not belong to landowners
but to all who farm it.’
I lost all taste for liquor and opened my eyes wide.
Inside the tavern
there was an old woman
and two other drinkers.
A few days later I heard
that a plainclothesman was coming to arrest me.
The village head shook his head:
Strange,
strange.
You’re no commie.
I was scared.
I escaped to my wife’s home several miles away,
then moved to another house.
I kept moving around,
as I hated being a burden to other people.
Then a man told me he was on his way up into the mountains,
so I followed him.
I was no commie.
Then, eventually,
I became a commie.
From Jiri Mountain I used to look toward home,
longing to go back down.
Longing to go back down.
When I was six,
my maternal uncle
set me behind him on his bicycle
and sped along the new road with poplars on both sides.
That uncle
was my ideal.
Uncle was a university student in Japan.
Uncle passed the higher civil-service exam.
Everyone in the village came to the congratulatory party
at my mother’s parents’ house.
But my uncle rejected official positions,
went roaming
all the way to Seoul,
to Buan,
to Daegu.
He was arrested at Suwon Station in 1943.
He spent six years in Daegu jail.
Uncle was a socialist.
Uncle was a revolutionary.
I thought about my uncle in prison.
I stopped playing with Bong-Jin, the local landowner’s son.
I decided to stop thinking about pretty Suk-Nye,
daughter of the village head.
Instead,
I played with Su-Man and Tae-Rang who were from poor families.
I shared my ration of food with them.
I gave them my pencils.
From the age of 15
I was a socialist like my uncle.
Only nobody
knew that I was a socialist.
At night, alone,
I used to tremble.
Uncle Yu Sang-Seop finally died in his fourth prison.
It was the day after Stalin died.
I burned one of Uncle’s books up the hill behind the house.
I cried a lot.
It was where foxes used to cry
but now there were no more foxes.
He was such a lovely boy.
It was no surprise that even men,
sighing in admiration,
felt secret passions for him.
Truly,
he was a boy like a spider’s web with fresh dewdrops
like a flower’s stamen with pure dewdrops,
a boy with the spirit of the point of an arrow flying
He was a young old man
such that no one should dare make light of him.
Living in exile high in Mount Paek-un,
Heobong had a little boy, Geum-gak,
as company for his solitude,.
By the age of ten he was said to have read most books.
Heobong praised him:
‘You are truly my teacher,
how could I ever be your teacher?’
At eighteen, that boy was dying of lung disease.
‘If heaven grants me a few more years of life,
I would like to read the books I have not yet read
before I leave the world.
What’s the use of praying?
Father, mother, do not cry for me,’
and with those words, he closed his eyes.
Should a life be supposed to be long?
Should a life be supposed to be whole
only when it leaves something behind?
Swallows go south leaving nothing.
The headmaster wore round, black-rimmed glasses.
The moustache below his nose
was always neatly trimmed.
He left a dry cough as a sign of his presence
in places where nobody was to be seen.
He had extra time to care for the flowers,
in the school garden
and in the garden in his official residence.
Coxcombs,
four-o’clocks,
asters,
plantain lilies,
chrysanthemums…
the flowers bloomed in harmony according to the season.
One evening
guerrillas came down from the hills.
When they demanded the mimeograph machine,
he said he could not give it to them
because it belonged to the school.
They said that they couldn’t help but kill him.
He opened the office.
They carried off the machine.
The next day the police took away the headmaster, his hands tied;
he was guilty of helping guerrillas.
He became a traitor,
a red.
His limbs drooped.
He was beaten with clubs
until nearly a corpse.
He ceased being a headmaster,
became a convict and began a ten-year imprisonment.
What he most envied were those convicts who took care of flowers.
Every day,
they took care of flowers –
dahlias and roses.
The cut flowers were sent outside to be sold.
How he longed to take care of flowers,
just like when he was headmaster.