Maninbo (21 page)

Lieutenant Bak Baek,

adjutant of the search company, 2nd battalion, 16th regiment, 8th division.

He advanced as far as Chosan

on the banks of the Yalu River. He was very much moved, impassioned.

It was early winter, 1950.

He gazed across the river

at Manchuria, Chinese land.

They encountered the Communist Chinese army.

His body turned into a hedgehog.

On a hill

between Huicheon and Gujang

he was taken prisoner by the Chinese army.

The company commander was killed in action,

two soldiers were killed, three injured,

and the remaining thirty taken prisoner.

The POW camp at Gwansan in Hwapung

held five hundred South Korean soldiers

and three hundred American soldiers.

In the bitter winter prisoners kept dying.

In the camp

each room held twenty men, no space to lie down.

If one died,

the rest had a little more space.

Keeping prisoners’ corpses

for two or three days in the room,

leaning them against the wall

at roll-call,

the rest shared the rations of the dead.

They were given one handful of corn twice a day.

In one day fifty or so died.

One cupful of lice came crawling

from every corpse.

Some died gnawing icicles.

Numb from frostbite,

they felt no pain when a finger was cut off.

Lieutenant Bak Baek did not die. He came back in an exchange of prisoners.

Goods from the PX on the American base at Yongsan are loaded onto a truck.

Kim Cheol-su, a Korean,

and Harry, a black American,

are expert thieves.

They pass the checkpoint at the back gate

when MP John Beckham is on duty,

that's 4.30 in the morning.

At 5.30

they deliver to Pyo Jong-seon in Namdaemun's Dokkaebi Market.

Watches,

chocolate,

‘Akadama' cigarettes,

Camels,

blankets,

military boots,

UN jackets,

fountain pens,

woollen underwear,

gum,

electric razors.

Pyo Jong-seon is from Haeju, up in Hwanghae province.

He never haggles over goods.

He pays what they ask.

This makes him popular,

So the thieves

sell to him cheap.

His nickname is Bracken of Mount Suyang.

On Mount Suyang in Haeju

there's a shrine commemorating

the Chinese brothers Boyi and Shuqi.

When Mount Suyang Bracken

goes home,

he tells his first grand-daughter about Simcheong,

the second one about Princess Nangnang.

He was one of the rich folk of Chungmu-ro street

but one day

American MPs, preceded by Korean MPs,

raided his store and took him away.

In 1952

people were drinking Nakdong River
soju
.

In a bar in an alley of Hyangchon-dong in Daegu

Yi Jung-seop vomited.

Colonel Yi Gi-ryeon

jokingly mocked the drunken Yi Jung-seop:

‘Hey! You smell like a proletarian!’

That means

you’re a commie, you’re a red.

The next day Yi Jong-seop, having sobered up,

remembered the words about his proletarian smell.

He remembered them the day after,

and the next day, as well.

His whole body shrank.

He went to see the head of investigations in Daegu police station.

‘I am not a red.

Please certify

that I’m not a red.’

His friend the poet Ku Sang came to take him home.

Everywhere people were suffering from red persecution complexes.

If someone says

you’re a red, you’re done.

If someone reports you as a red, you’re done.

Such was the age. Fearful.

I am not a red.

September 29, 1950.

The day before, the three months of communist rule had ended.

The Republic of Korea that had run away

came back.

The city was still empty.

At the Gwanhwamun intersection

one man came limping from Jong-ro 1-ga.

A ragged figure was approaching

along Sinmun-ro.

They met in the middle of the intersection. They were strangers to each other.

For a full thirty minutes

they talked.

They told tales

and listened to tales

about how each had survived,

survived in hiding.

How painful it was to live alone,

how despondent they felt

to have survived alone.

The two men shared a cigarette, then parted, saying: ‘See you again.’

Midday came.

At the intersection,

not so much as a mouse in sight.

Anyone was free to get drunk and collapse in ruined Myeong-dong,

free to piss to his heart’s content

on the eulalia growing as dense as pubic hair

between the pieces of broken brick

and cement walls.

Anyone was free to show off,

bragging how splendid he’d once been

but now he was a beggar.

Anyone was free to become an artist

the moment he stood beside an artist.

Beside the tall painter Kim Hwan-gi

anyone could turn into a modern artist

who painted pictures of Joseon-era white jars.

Beside Kim Hyang-an, the former wife of poet Yi Sang,

now the wife of Kim Hwan-gi,

anyone could turn into a stylish essayist.

While walking along with chain-smoking Yi Myeong-on,

anyone could turn into an essayist and former journalist.

Poet Bak In-hwan died

after writing his boisterous poem ‘The Rocking Horse and the Lady, Virginia Woolf’.

Anyone who shook hands with Kim Su-yeong,

who had joined the volunteer army

and was just out of Geoje Island POW camp,

became a post-war poet.

In ruined Myeong-dong there was the freedom of the True and False as one.

The drunkard Na Jeong-gu,

who pushed his way in wherever people were drinking,

was today a poet,

tomorrow an essayist.

What might he be the day after?

So long as he had a mouth to drink with

he was free to enter the bars Poem or Eunjeong

and join any group he found there.

Ah, in the ruins of Myeong-dong under the Republic of Korea

there was freedom for every kind of extravagance and bluff,

freedom hanging in the air like the spell of a dead age.

One writer’s dream was glorious, his life short.

Hong Sa-jun,

a fine-featured young man,

was a literary star

during the three months of the communist occupation.

North Korean writers praised him highly.

Young Hong Sa-jun’s novel
The Deer

was idolised as a model of proletarian literature.

Writers who came down to Seoul

such as An Hui-nam,

Yi Won-jo,

Yi Gi-yeong,

Bak Tae-won encouraged him, one after another.

On their recommendation

he enjoyed the honor of visiting Pyongyang.

In August 1950

he returned from his visit to Pyongyang.

He turned from being a leftist to a rightist.

Pyongyang had disillusioned him.

I am a rightist.

I saw the reality of Pyongyang.

Tell everyone

that I am a rightist.

I curse what lies beyond the 38th parallel.

After Seoul was recaptured he was arrested as a traitor.

To save him, the writer Kim Dong-ni

visited the police and the prosecutors.

When Hong Sa-jun was imprisoned,

fearful, apprehensive,

he resolved to escape.

While attempting to escape he was killed. He was like a drop of dew.

If he had only held on a little longer,

he would have been released

after investigation.

His writing would have bloomed to the fullest.

After all, the poet No Cheon-myeong, who ran wild under the communists,

she was released.

His Japanese wife died.

Love lost.

Alone he moulded clay

chiseled stone.

The sculptor Gwon Jin-gyu

had a room in Donam-dong, Seoul.

The sculptures were quite at home.

The sculptor

was a guest squatting on the edge of a camp bed in a corner.

One clay figure breathing.

One sculptor gasping.

It seems there are cliffs in art.

Failing to avoid the cliff,

he walked over the edge

and after that, there was nothing.

He ended his life.

Not because he hated the world

Not because he hated himself.

Because art had been driven out.

In the winter of 1953

Jiri Mountain was the main objective.

The path to Jiri Mountain crosses many steep mountains.

The Imsil contingent found itself scattered all over the ridges

when it got cut off from the main battleline.

News came that the guerilla unit in Huimun Mountain had been annihilated.

Feet were heavy as they marched on by night.

The Jiri Mountain contingent

were sure to be attacked by the expeditionary forces.

Where could the sixth division of the 102nd guards’ battalion be?

They too must have been attacked.

Each evening they cut arrowroot vines and plaited shelters,

with pine branches to form a roof.

Mount Jang-an was full of expeditionary forces.

Night fell.

Flashlights were moving upward.

The lights of the expeditionary forces.

They ran madly, walked, crawled.

They wedged themselves under rocks.

Nearby

two people were holding their breath and trembling.

In the falling snow

those two were comrades:

a woman member of the contingent, Gang Sun-ok

and a straggler from the People’s Army, Jang Gwan-ho.

Where had the other members of the contingent gone?

We’ve fallen into those bastards’ trap.

It would be a waste of energy

to go on wandering.

Let’s see what things are like here.

Sleep overcame them.

A loudspeaker rang out from below:

You’re surrounded.

Come out quietly with your hands up.

Let yourselves be embraced by the Republic of Korea.

They heard it in their sleep

as day broke.

The two were found lying side by side.

Their hands were blue with frostbite.

Barefoot, for they had taken the wrappings off their feet.

Locked in a tight embrace, they did not move.

Soldiers shook them

but they did not budge.

They had frozen to death in the night.

That girl from the South, Gang Sun-ok,

and the man from the North

must have fallen in love on their march over the mountains.

Loving

then dying,

no rancour remains.

They were not far from the secret hideout.

Unable to make it there

and dying,

no rancour remains.

There were almost no young men left in Jeju Island.

They had all been drafted into the army,

or sent to distant coal mines,

or conscripted to fight in the South Sea Islands.

From every seaside village

twenty

or thirty

had gone off
en masse
.

In one village

twenty-five gone off

between the ages of eighteen and thirty left.

The girls left to be comfort women.

Once they left

after a couple of postcards

there was no more news.

At the end of the Japanese occupation,

even the houses were requisitioned for the military,

the harvested grain taken to feed the army.

Those remaining,

between the ages of fourteen

and seventy were mobilised.

In the days of forced labour

one or two hundred

were forced to work in canteens.

When Japan surrendered,

some three hundred corpses

were piled up at the workplaces.

Such was Liberation.

Such was Jeju Island at Liberation.

Half the young folk who had been taken away

didn't come back.

Those who came back

were injured,

were invalids.

A few lights floated on the sea at night

from boats fishing for hairtail.

Im Gyeong-bok

of Bonggae-dong in the hilly regions of Jeju Island

could not find the body of his father Im Chang-ho.

He searched three different forced-labour camps

but could not locate his father's body

among the corpses.

Weeping bitterly

he burned a set of his father's clothes

and put the ashes

into the grave mound for his father.

That was on August 17, 1945,

two days after Liberation.

He chose August 15,

Liberation Day,

as his father's death anniversary day.

‘Father!

Father!'

Returning home

after building the grave mound

he called out toward the horizon.

‘Father!'

That night in a dream

his father came back in a boat.