Maninbo (9 page)

That war

took away the greetings we used to exchange even with strangers.

It took away customs of speaking slowly,

gently.

Words became faster

and sharp.

That war took away the clarity in the eyes

of people in autumn's cool wind.

Gradually,

not only the eyes of people

but of cows and horses in the stony fields

grew bloodshot and fierce.

In front of Daejeon Station

a gum-selling kid

was clearly beating another kid to death.

Not one spectator

intervened. The wind stirred up the dust.

Not one

had the friendly face of villagers back home.

Of a sudden

shortly before the Armistice

the fierce fighting on the western front

stopped.

No sound of gunfire,

anywhere.

Was that an illusion?

Once again the sound of gunfire

filled the space between enemies.

Rain began to pour down.

Illusion?

That night

Byeon Ju-seop, a youth from Pyeongsan, Hwanghae province,

crossed the Yeseong River in the rain.

Bare-footed,

he kept on, heading over mountain ridges.

Finally, more than exhausted, he crossed the Imjin River

oblivious of the pain of his bleeding feet, their cracked soles.

When the boy reached the southern bank of the Imjin River,

his constant dream for several days,

he called out repeatedly, Mother! Mother!

his whole body shivering,

upper and lower jaws

trembling each on their own.

The rain kept on.

Mother was in the North now, son in the South.

His voice changed.

His face was full of freckles.

Now he was alone.

He would be alone when he begged,

when he filched.

He would be alone when he delivered restaurant food.

Alone, oblivious of a future in which he would father eleven children.

He had a triangular face.

He cried wildly, calling, Mother! Mother!

The division of North from South

divided one from one, one from another, individuals.

After that day the youth no longer wept.

His brows were bushy.

He did not weep even when, much later,

in a printing shop, his finger was severed by the cutter.

War widows need their smokes.

When you miss someone, you have to have a smoke.

When the person you miss has disappeared,

you have to have a smoke.

Widows, and widowers must develop a taste

for tobacco.

Friends separated forever from friends

must develop a taste for tobacco.

One nation was divided into two.

The moment of division,

the two became enemies.

Naturally,

inevitably,

absurdly,

war broke out.

For a few months the front line moved ever farther south.

It engulfed even the west of South Gyeongsang province.

The American fighter planes changed abruptly:

one moment, Second World War propeller-driven Grumman Hellcats;

the next, jet-propelled Sabers.

Then the front line shot up northward.

More and more North Korean troops retreated.

At first, the North’s advance had been unhindered,

now the advance by the South was unhindered.

The whole country was turned into scorched earth

from carpet bombing by the US Air Force.

Who among us had wanted scorched earth?

Was it ruins

we so ardently desired?

While the fighting moved up

and down,

the rice was ripening

in the fields round Jochiwon, South Chungcheong province.

Sixty-five year-old Sim Yu-Seop,

having given his paddy fields a triple summer weeding,

was waiting wordlessly

for the autumn harvest

His heart was entirely given over to his two sons.

While the country changed names,

from the Republic of Korea

to the People’s Republic,

and then from the People’s Republic

back to the Republic of Korea,

his elder son was a soldier for the South,

while the younger had gone off to volunteer for the North.

Even when the dog wagged its tail,

Old Sim’s lips wouldn’t open.

Soon he’d be marking the third anniversary of his wife’s death.

He felt lonely, he whose old nickname was ‘thin-as-a-post’.

More than himself,

his shadow was ‘thin-as-a-post’.

In all his sixty years

he had only ever told three or four lies.

He, too, needed to chain-smoke:

cigarettes rolled from dried tobacco leaves.

I grew up in the Bujeon Highlands, South Hamgyeong province.

If I climbed over the mountain, panting,

I could gaze down at Bujeon Lake.

I wanted to stand there

forever

like the trees, like the dead trees there by the lake.

And I wanted my dead friend Jin-man

to come stand with me for a really long time.

The lake was a place the spirits of the departed visited.

At the time of the January 4 Retreat

when tens of thousands were swarming southward,

I was lucky to manage to embark on an American navy LST,

a 100-to-1 chance, 150-to-1.

Tens of thousands who failed to get away were without hope.

Surrounded by anxiety and fear, I rode all the way down to Busan.

I became a night worker on number 3 dock in Busan,

then a deliveryman for a Chinese restaurant,

a carrier of relief goods at Gukje Market,

a gangster,

a jailbird doing time for violence,

a gangster again.

Once only did pure passion erupt from deep in my heart:

I fell in love with Miss Kim who worked in a tea-room

and gave her a gold ring for her birthday.

After I went to jail

she disappeared somewhere,

Seoul, perhaps,

or Dongducheon.

Throughout those hectic days,

steadfast was my own Bujeon Lake,

which lay behind me,

beckoning me to come,

come back, quickly.

I lost my left arm in a gang fight in Nampo-dong, Busan.

I am called Left-armed Yeong-nam.

On October 5, 1950, when Seoul was recaptured

after three months’ occupation by the North,

hope was everywhere.

By a low shack where the stream’s murmuring was always heard

outside of north Jaha Gate, Seoul,

surely the apricot trees would blossom next spring?

The daughter of that house, as she lay in bed sick,

was raped by a man in a UN jacket.

She collapsed,

the man spat, then vanished.

On roadside telegraph poles, flyers were posted:

Long live President Syngman Rhee! Long live General MacArthur!

Hope was everywhere.

After scattering his father’s ashes

over the fast-flowing stream

from the dusky bank of the Seomjin River,

the boy looked up

toward Nogodan Ridge.

It was shrouded in cloud.

From now on fourteen-year-old Jun-ho,

wherever he is, will live without a father,

starving one day in three.

The wind will always be against him.

The boy takes after his father, chip off the block.

Commie’s kid,

Commie’s kid:

that name will stay with him all his life.

Prisoner number 7501.

They called him ‘number seven thousand five hundred and one’.

They called him ‘seven five o one’.

Sometimes,

they called him

Bachelor Kim.

He came in aged 27 –

forty-five years of solitary confinement in a tiny cell

The day came when he was released, aged 72.

At dawn his cell door opened.

‘You’ve had a hard time,’

his first warm greeting.

A firm conviction that still sometimes blazed up

was lodged firmly inside his withering body,

utterly unchanged.

Bachelor Kim.

He entered as a youthful bachelor,

exited an elderly bachelor.

His clear, high-pitched voice

was rarely heard

under a forehead sunk like a weathered grave.

He was taciturn.

His real name was Kim Seon-myeong.

He was a soldier in the People’s Army, then a POW.

Despite the Geneva Convention

he was first sentenced to death,

then to life imprisonment.

As a child, all the land

for miles around was his family’s.

He was the son of a man whose land yielded ten thousand bushels,

10,000 bushels, annually.

Afterwards,

the war between South and North

immured one young man in prison for so many years.

He once said to someone that living is better than dying,

– sure,
living
.

Bachelor Kim’s remaining life was the life of a stone

sunk in water all on its own.

They barely avoided the miseries of a refugee camp.

They built a shack at the top of Dodong hill opposite Seoul Station.

The family of five felt blessed.

However, Mansu's grandma had lost her wits

amid the crowds of people fleeing

in the winter of 1950.

‘Let's go,

let's go,

let's go home,'

she used to insist after pissing on the floor.

Her son Sun-gon was a porter at the railway station.

Her grandsons Man-su and Man-gil delivered newspapers at dawn.

They ate dark brown soup with dough flakes twice a day,

around a small circular table.

The old woman poured out curses

at her daughter-in-law in the kitchen:

‘You bitch, you brought me here,

bitch, you brought me here to kill me,'

and then she sobbed,

and continued to shout:

‘Let's go,

let's go,

Sun-kon,

let's go home.

Let's leave that bitch behind and go.'

The nights were all hers.

She had never been more than a mile or so from home.

Born at the foot of Cheonbul Mountain in South Hamgyeong province,

on marrying she moved to the nearest village

over the hill,

lived there for sixty-six years.

Then she was brought hundreds of miles down to unfamiliar Seoul.

‘Let's go,

let's go,'

that was all she said,

never removing the towel wrapped round her head.

Sacred, truly sacred, is the smoke rising as evening rice is being cooked!

Until August 10, 1945,

Korea was a single whole.

Since August 10, 1945,

Korea has been two.

America it was that proposed dividing the peninsula at the 38th parallel,

American forces occupying the South,

Soviet troops the North.

The Japanese surrender

on August 15, 1945

was supposed to signify the liberation of Korea.

In fact, it signified

the division of Korea.

The 38th parallel passed through an old wood-tiled house,

a house built by slash-and-burn farmers

on a hilltop above the Soyang River in Inje County, Gangwon province,

at the waist of the peninsula.

Northern guards occupied it.

Southern guards challenged them.

Both shouted: It’s our house,

it’s our land.

Each threatened the other,

firing blanks.

Then someone had a bright idea:

What about demolishing

the house altogether?

That’s it!

The house roofed with wooden tiles in that remote valley,

a house inhabited by four generations,

vanished.

The owner, Im Bong-sul, aged sixty-four,

and his granddaughter Im Gasina, aged fourteen,

left carrying bags and bedding.

The old man wept all the way, without shedding tears.

The little girl did not cry.

She stared down at the Soyang River below,

a river she would never see again.

At the end of June 1950

5th-year middle-school student Kim Myeong-gyu enlisted as a volunteer.

His regiment

kept retreating on the pretext of relocating.

While Dabuwon above Waegwan

was captured and recaptured dozens of times,

he survived.

How is it that he survived?

one of just nine survivors in his platoon?

His face was covered with pimples.

After Seoul was recaptured,

he came back home,

carrying his rifle.

His long-widowed mother

and his older brother Se-gyu

had been killed by the withdrawing communists.

The neighbours held a welcoming party for him.

He spent one day

at his mother’s grave

and his brother’s grave.

He even paid a visit to his father’s grave,

whom he had never seen.

Late that night, a shot rang out.

He had killed himself.

A couple of
soju
bottles lay beside him, toppled over.