Korea (36 page)

A few months before she had met and fallen in love with a married man—the only kind of man, she had to acknowledge, who might yet marry her. And by what she regarded as great good fortune he was also, she felt, the sort of man who would regard her as a spiritual and intellectual equal: she would not have to follow meekly in his wake, as is the lot of most Korean wives. But her pleasant fantasies were not to be: a week before we met he had returned to his wife, and she was cast down into the deepest of glooms. ‘My only chance is with a
yangnom
,’ she said, forcing a smile. She was probably right. Marriage to a foreigner—however alien to her principles it might be to marry beyond her country-caste—would give her the freedom to travel (she had never been out of Korea, not ever would, she supposed) and a married life that promised her some form of equality.

She stayed the night—she was far too drunk to go all the way back to Seoul, and besides, an American sentry at one of the pseudobridges had warned that the road was curfewed after midnight, and here it was, 12:45
A.M.
So we weaved our way through a cold, spitting spring night, to the flickering lights of the Arirang
yogwan
. The matron was still awake, idly watching the television, and she poked her head around the door as we were removing our shoes. (There were a dozen pairs, and all, as is common in Korea, had their backs broken down—a conse
quence of a system of politesse that requires the shoes to be taken off and put back on maybe twenty times a day. Cobblers, and shoe shops, make good money in Korea.)

The concierge whispered a few words to Choon-sil, who promptly collapsed in a fit of drunken giggles, and I had to hush her and take her to the room and quieten her down. When she had caught her breath she explained: the old woman had remarked on how sad it would be for this nice room—Western bed, naked girl on the wall, deep bath, and so on—to be wasted on a man alone. So good, she said to Choon-sil, that someone was going to share. ‘Except,’ Choon-sil said, her voice slurred both with weariness and an excess of
maekju
, ‘that I go to sleep, right away.’ And she did just that, and she snored boldly for hours. When I woke at seven she had already gone, and there was a note in English, saying how sorry she was for her distemper, and how she wished me good fortune with my final few miles. She had to be in her office in Yoido at eight: given the rush hour she had to wake at six, and the concierge had duly obliged.

I was up and on the road by nine. It was a brilliant Friday morning. The roadside grass was still damp from overnight rain, but the sky was now cloudless and clear, and a cool and quite stiff wind was blowing down from the north. Kumchon sits a half mile off the road, and I had to walk along a crowded spur road—a market was in full swing, and there were dogs and chickens and piles of vegetables on sale from a hundred tiny stalls—and cross the railway line—well fortified, with machine-gun emplacements beside it and another collapsing bridge—before I was back on the highway. I had been walking for ten minutes along Route I when I suddenly became aware that passing motorists were waving at me much more cheerily than ever they had done before. I realized what had happened. I must have been on television.

The day before, when I had crossed the Han River, a small television team had been waiting for me. MBS, one of the two Korean networks, had heard that an Englishman was making a
journey along the path taken by the sailors from the
Sparrowhawk
and had sent a crew out to find me. I had had some kind of warning the day I left Kunsan base, when one of the American airmen had reported hearing from a Korean news agency, who had been asking how to find me. He told them I had already left. The MBS people had missed me at Chonan and missed me again at Anyang; they therefore laid an ambush on the south side of the Mapo Bridge, and I walked straight into it.

The interview was short and much as I had feared. Koreans are properly proud of their country, or they are in public, at least, even if a lack of confidence, and self-pity, and deep and inconsolable melancholy sometimes seem to be the national malaise—and while they find foreign attention flattering, they regard themselves as eminently deserving of it. So there is—I had been warned—a touch of condescension about their response to anyone who takes an interest in them—much as there is in Japan. And so the interviewer asked me to speak in Korean, not to laud my efforts with the language but rather to show how badly a foreigner speaks so complicated a language. Then again, I was asked to sing a Korean song—to demonstrate how difficult it was for anyone other than a son of Choson to tackle the mournful rhythms of the local music. No one in the interview had wanted me to lose face; it wasn’t as crude as that. But I was expected to offer a display that would reassure the viewers of their unassailable superiority in all things I might attempt—and I, having been told exactly what to do, wasn’t going to disappoint them. The television people knew what they wanted, and I think they knew that I knew what they wanted—so everything was conducted in good spirits, and the results, I thought, were probably usable. They apparently were. It turned out the network had used seven minutes of the interview on the MBS breakfast programme that morning—yes, Korea has breakfast-time television—and all the drivers who hooted and waved (and the few who stopped to shake my hand) had evidently watched as they took their morning
kimchi
and their soup and rice and cold barley tea. I had to realize that I had become, over these past three hundred miles, a small celebrity.

The plan for the final few miles had had to be agreed on in Seoul with the commander of the UN garrison. To walk right up to the frontier, to the strange border-that-is-not-a-border that is formally known as the Military Demarcation Line, requires special permission. Military escorts are needed. Sentries need to be forewarned. One of the North Korean duty officers is told, out of politeness, and to head off any possibility of trouble that might stem from so unexpected an arrival in the sensitive area. And so that everything is expected—and because soldiers run the final miles—a timetable has to be agreed on. I had thus promised to be at the southern end of Freedom Bridge over the Imjin River at noon precisely. Provided I did that, the officer had told me over the phone a few days before, everything should go like clockwork.

At eleven I was striding past yet another sprawling military base at the city of Munsan. A band was playing, its sousaphones and serpents gleaming in the steady sunshine. Two hundred soldiers in gleaming ceremonial helmets and white uniforms were wheeling and marching and countermarching on the parade ground. My feet moved involuntarily to the infantry pace, and I was out of town in moments and back in open country once more.

The railway line—the line that had been with me, on and off, ever since I left Mokpo more than a month before—passed across the road. But here it was rusty from disuse, and I saw that a few yards north of the road the rails had been taken up, and there was a pile of old sleepers and a small hill of sand, and the cutting that went under the old iron bridge was choked with grass and rosebay willow herb, and the bridge itself, still with its black stain of smoke, was thick with moss. This was the main line to Pyongyang—the line to Manchuria, to Mongolia, to Peking. It had been a busy line forty years ago, a trunk route, its timetables in
Baedeker
and the
Cook’s Continental
. But now it stopped dead a couple of miles south of the Imjin and ran into a pile of old sand, and all because of the vagaries of politics, or ideology, and of war.

Suddenly from behind, a toot on a car horn, and a cheerful
shout. ‘Hey! You’re gonna make it, ol’ son! Keep goin’! Don’t stop!’ It was Billy Fullerton, a large, ebullient Texan who has worked in the information office at the Yongsan U.S. Army Base for the last twenty years and who has befriended and helped everyone and anyone who has ever been interested in the country that he has adopted as his second home. It was Billy who had persuaded the UN bosses to allow me to walk to the Line—‘Figured it’d be pointless you stopping at Seoul. You gotta go as far as you can git. They bought the argument in the end, but they weren’t eager, I can tell you’—and it was Billy who had arranged the necessary escorts and the blue armband that the North Koreans insisted that I wear whenever in their line of sight. His driver slowed to my speed, and Billy took my order. ‘Gotta eat when you get to the bridge. What’ll you have—chocolate, peanuts, ice cream? All on me. Glad to help.’ He was a blessing. I asked for a couple of cans of orange juice and a Hershey bar, and then he zoomed off ahead of me, promising to have them ready.

Forty minutes later I came to the summit of a low rise and was looking down into the valley of the Imjin-gang. Here on the hill it was sunny, with the damp smell of balsam pines wafting from the thick woods beside me. Wildflowers grew in abundance. There were small houses with orange and bright blue roofs, and farmers were tilling their fields for the late spring crops. It had all been so different thirty years before: this small river valley, so savagely fought over for so long, by so many forces going so many different ways as the war ebbed and flowed, advanced and receded, had been utterly torn and bombarded to shreds. Twisted metal, huge artillery holes, discarded equipment, stranded tanks, spent shell cases, ruined houses, and legions of dead and maimed men—the valley had been littered with them all, whether they had been covered by snow, half sunk in yellow mud, or baked in the summer sun.

The Imjin! The name seems appropriately redolent of the Dakotas, of Custer, of cavalry charges and stockades and em
battlements a hundred years ago, when the warriors were the Sioux and the Apache and the uniformed forces ordered down from Washington. And just as the Dakotas have recovered physically from those times but have never allowed them to be forgotten, so this countryside in Korea has sprung back too, as countryside always does, from the immediate physical horrors of conflict. Except that here, as I walked down towards the infamous stream, it was dismaying to see that man had planted more than his customary share of memorials, since this war had only been halted in its tracks and was still always on the verge of being fought again. The peace that bathed the Imjin Valley today could be broken in an instant, in a way that it never can be again ten thousand miles away on the high plains of America.

I rounded a bend, passing beneath another bridge barrier, its giant building bricks looking as though they might topple and flatten me at any instant. And then, just ahead, was a glitter of parked cars and a long, low building festooned with flags and surrounded by monuments and, I could see as I came closer, khaki-coloured tanks and half-tracks and spiked guns. This was the Imjingak Museum—the most northerly point on Route I that ordinary South Koreans are permitted to visit. The place is dominated by a huge permanent exhibition of the follies of war, and each day—as on this Friday lunchtime—it is crammed with bus-hauled visitors chattering with rapt fascination as they are led from picture to picture, from tank to howitzer, from atrocity to atrocity, to be reminded yet again of the war that has resulted in what seems the permanent division of their peninsular country. From time to time a distinguished visitor passes through Imjingak and changes cars, and the crowds have more to gawk at than usual: this morning a South Korean general was due to come on up to the Line for a meeting with an American colleague, and a caravan of long black cars swished into the bus parking lot, and heavily armed soldiers and aides with walkie-talkies conferred as jeeps manoeuvred alongside them, and a small, fattish man in uniform, wearing dark glasses, was helped from the deep leather of the Lincoln on to the more austere vinyl of the Willys. A
gold-braided South Korean national flag, with its colourful
taeguk
emblem, was raised on the jeep’s wing, the outriders’ visors were snapped down, powerful motors were gunned, and the new convoy sped away, and Army drivers parked the empty limousines under a shade tree and waited for orders, while curious children examined the paintwork and grinned at themselves in the gleaming chrome.

Billy Fullerton was waiting with my rations, which I fell upon with glee—I hadn’t eaten breakfast back at Kumchon, and had been walking fast for the last three hours. And then here was a new man, a tall, kindly looking American lieutenant wearing the shoulder patches of an elite corps of foot soldiers. ‘Hi, sir,’ he said, stepping forward briskly and giving a half-salute. ‘I’m Lieutenant John Wiegand, first of the five-oh-sixth. Glad to meet you, sir. Well done. I’m your military escort for the last miles. Shall we get going? We’ve a fair way to march.’ He had an automatic pistol in a holster, and canvas walking boots, and he looked very fit. I collected my pack and my shepherd’s stick and marched smartly past the parked limousines and the coaches filling up or disgorging their charges, and came to the sentry box at the left bank of the Imjin and the southern end of the Freedom Bridge.

‘Stand Alone—Suh!’ screamed two voices in near unison, and the two American sentries shouldered their automatic rifles and slapped their hands across the magazines, making as much clatter and noise as they could. John returned the salute with equal vigour. ‘Rock Steady, Men!’ he shouted, and we stepped beneath the steady gaze of the soldiers and onto the wooden planking of the rickety structure. ‘Sorry about the display,’ John said, once we were out of earshot. ‘But that’s the way we do things up here. It keeps the morale up, they say. These cute little exchanges between officers and men remind everyone why we’re here. We used to have a little routine going where the soldiers would say “One Man, Sir!” and we’d return the salute by shouting “One Bullet, Men!” and everyone would get the message about
economy with ammunition, and of effectiveness of fire. Nowadays we stress the simple importance of being up here, close to the Communists. We say “Keep up the Fire, Men!” or “In Front of Them All, Men!” They like it. It makes them feel good. And up here there’s little enough opportunity for feeling good—especially in the winter.’