The Calligrapher's Daughter (10 page)

Father called in Japanese, “One moment! Just a moment!” Then softly, “Byungjo, the gate!” Men banged on the sturdy wooden door, and the iron latch and hinges shook. “Yes, yes!” Father crossed the front yard, his shoes flapping.

Mother slipped into my room, the baby in one hand, the other pressed against her lips for silence. I couldn’t see her eyes. The room felt cold with fear.

The gate slapped open and men shouted Father’s name. “You must—”

A scuffle, curses, then I heard my father gasp and moan. More curses, grunts, and the gate clanged shut. From the neighbor’s came muffled commands, a woman’s scream cut short and sounds of breaking wood. Faintly—shouts, screams and slams from other homes. Then silence.

I clutched my blanket and the baby whimpered. Mother opened her nightdress. The sound of his feeding and a far sighing wind in the bamboo left a strained quietude. Mother began to pray. I bowed my head to focus on her hushed sounds, the whispered words, the baby suckling, and nothing more.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” began Mother, and I joined her.

It confused me to say, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” How could anyone feast with one’s enemies about? But I understood who the enemy was.

Mother said, “Go back to sleep. I think I must go out. If I’m gone too long, Cook will show you how to feed the baby rice water with honey.”

“But I should go with you! Cook can—” I wanted to wrap my arms around her waist and scream that it wasn’t safe.

“Not another word. I need you rested to watch your brother. Cook has her own worries.” Mother put her finger on my lips. “This is the best way you can help your father.” She dressed and took the baby to Cook.

Bundled in my blankets, I stayed sitting up and breathed in the last waft of milky scent as I listened to her pad down the hall and cross the yard to the servants’ quarters. I buried my eyes in the darkness of my bedding and prayed, chanted, “Keep her safe. Keep her safe.”

I WOKE TO a still house, remembered, and thought it too quiet. There’d be no church on this Sunday. After washing and dressing quickly, I went to
the kitchen where Kira rocked the whimpering baby while Cook boiled down rice water to feed him.

“Where’s Mother?” I asked, scared when I saw Cook’s face unnaturally red, eyes swollen and wrinkles deeply drawn. For the first time she struck me as being an old woman, but when she faced me, she looked nearly herself again.

“Joong is out with her. She’ll be fine. Are your hands clean?”

I nodded.

Kira made room for me on a low bench beside the hearth. “Your mother said to show you how to feed the baby when there’s no wet nurse.”

I wanted to shout at them. How could they act like everything was normal? “Where did she go? Is— Was Abbuh-nim— Is he—dead?”

“Such crazy ideas!” Cook grasped my shoulders and turned me toward Kira and the baby. “Feed him first, then you can have breakfast.” She turned to the stove and stirred honey into her bubbling reduction. “Not dead,” she said. “They arrested him last night. Your mother went to find out why, and where. He’s done nothing bad, and she’s sure to get him released soon. Aigu! This morning the night-soil man said many were taken like that. He heard women crying in the houses. What a time we live in!” She wiped her face with her apron. “You’re to stay close to home today. No wandering off. Your mother will want you to take care of your dongsaeng.”

I untied him from Kira’s back. He began to wail and I held him close. My arms felt heavier than the infant’s weight. I watched the two women busy themselves in the kitchen and looked at my hands; their veins seemed filled with mud.

“Hold him thus.” Kira repositioned the baby in my lap. He instinctively turned toward my heartbeat and flailed his arms at my chest, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

“Take this and knot it, see?” Kira dipped a twisted cloth into the soupy mix Cook had set before us. “It should be neither hot nor cold. You shouldn’t really feel it.”

I felt nothing of the moisture Kira dripped on my inner wrist and realized I didn’t feel anything at all—not the roundness of the baby in my arms, his fists floundering at my unformed breasts, the temperature in
the kitchen, my own weight on the bench. I took Kira’s words to mean that I wasn’t supposed to feel anything, and was relieved.

The baby quieted, rhythmically sucking the knot I repeatedly dipped for him. Kira left to replenish the cisterns from the stream while Cook prepared a breakfast of porridge and sautéed greens. I began to feel the kitchen’s heat and hoped that this warm day might make my father suffer prison a little less.

I played aimlessly with the baby strapped to my back all morning, wandering through the courtyard and gardens, dawdling by the locked front gate, jealous that besides my brother’s need for Mother’s milk, he was unaware of our missing parents. I fed him twice more with the cloth and rice-water solution before Mother returned with Joong.

Mother kept her cloak fastened despite the warmth. Reassured that she acted calm, I saw that she also looked drawn, and fragile. Cook immediately set about preparing food for her. Mother held the baby a moment then gave him back to me. “Wait for me in my room,” she said. “Ask Kira to bring bathwater. I have a few more things to take care of before I can feed him.”

Mother spent some time in Father’s sitting room. I heard her call for Joong, who hurried across the yard swallowing and wiping his mouth.

Between arranging flat pillows beside my mother’s eating table and bouncing and tickling the baby to distract him from hunger, I paced the room. From the window I saw Joong again crossing the yard, stuffing letters into his vest. Mother finally came in and removed her cloak, revealing the front of her blouse and skirt stained dark with wetness.

“Is that blood?” I almost screamed.

“Heavens, no! It’s milk your poor little brother didn’t get to drink. Help me undress and bathe, so I can feed that hungry boy, will you?” She touched my cheek and let me gaze at her calm, tired eyes. “Your father’s alive, in jail, although no one can say how he is. I haven’t seen him, but the deacon and our friends are working to get him, the minister and others released.”

My hands shook with relief as I helped my mother disrobe. I bathed her elegant neck and narrow shoulders, and with each stroke of the washcloth, I felt I was reclaiming a small amount of our lives from before. Mother said she’d keep the baby and rest, that I should thank God that Father was alive, and pray hard for his quick, safe release.

In my room I knelt on the floor, clasped my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. I tried to do as Mother said, but my head was filled with confusion and angry questions, my body anxious with fears that prayerful words couldn’t assuage. The mat felt rough against my ankles, and I wondered if my father’s prison cell had flooring. Was he alone or with others? I hoped his stomach wasn’t bothering him as it did when he was upset with me. I promised God that I’d be respectful to my father forever and would always be ladylike, someone who’d never be a bother to him again. I’d never forget he needed elegance and beauty around him, and I’d do all I could to provide that. I would eliminate my gangly manners and unruly ways, if only he would come home safely. The more promises I made, the more I felt alone and incompetent. I knew it was bad to think that God didn’t really care about my family or me, but it seemed an easy truth.

The remainder of the day passed with unusual quiet. Joong came and went once more with letters, and Mother kept to her room with the baby, praying. I sat for awhile inside my open doorway and listened. My mother’s murmured prayers seeped down the hall and reached my hungry ears, the unintelligible sounds giving me more assurance than any prayer I could voice. When the hallway grew silent, I tried to study for an arithmetic test and eventually fell asleep on papers carelessly scrawled with long division—homework from a time when homework mattered.

SEVEN DAYS PASSED, the house somber with the relentless strain of not knowing and waiting. A quick look out the gate showed dozens of posters fluttering from tree trunks and fence posts. They pronounced a curfew and listed names of agitators. I almost stuck my entire head out to see more, until I saw two soldiers come out of the near alley dragging something across the street. I withdrew and quickly, quietly latched the gate, my chest pounding with what I’d seen.

Mother and I sewed and prayed together for many hours, which simultaneously irritated me, gave me calm and left me sleepy. Sewing was an endless chore. Skirts, pants and tops were deconstructed before laundering so the fabric would fold perfectly flat and we could beat out the wrinkles with two smooth sticks. Stitch after stitch, threading one needle after another, I grew resentful of the necessity for Confucian perfection in dress. With Mother’s help, I had begun studying the
Four Books for
Women.
Though written in Korean, the vernacular was archaic and difficult, and many proper nouns were in Chinese characters. Schoolwork in Japanese and Korean had taken precedence over home studies, which left me weak in Chinese writing. I had recently read that a virtuous woman ensured that every member of the household was impeccably and properly clothed according to class and family position. As my neck cramped over the exacting work, my head was abuzz with resentment. Who cared about impeccable shirts and virtuous dress when my father was in prison?

Among unnamed errands that made my mother venture daily beyond the gate with Joong, she took as much food as she could carry to the prison. When she returned, her face was always gray, her eyes dark, their expression hidden. There was no way to know if the rice was actually delivered to any of the prisoners. The unusually temperate days and the sweet smells of spring were an affront to our vigil. Playing with Dongsaeng was a distracting, guilty relief. On Monday Mother said the authorities had announced that all businesses must reopen, and children were required to return to school. She refused to let me go. She herself did not visit the market, and we ate dried fish left over from winter storage. I wasn’t allowed to leave the estate, and I assumed that Mother was too afraid to have me outside our walls. In the meantime, we waited for news about Father.

On the seventeenth night after his arrest, I woke to scratching sounds at the front gate. My eyes snapped wide to the fading black of predawn, and I heard my father’s muted voice, “Yuhbo—”

Mother rushed by my door, calling for the menservants.

“Wait—” I yanked off my covers.

“Watch the baby!”

The gate creaked open and Mother cried out. Father said things I couldn’t discern. I heard Byungjo’s and Joong’s voices, then receding shuffles. In my mother’s room, I tucked myself in beside my sleeping baby brother, telling him not to worry, Father was home now. God did watch over him after all. All was well, at least for now. “You’re safe with me, Little Brother,” I said. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll take care of you always.” I said a silent prayer of thanks, whispering that I wouldn’t forget the promises I’d made.

In the morning they remained cloistered in Father’s rooms. Cook delivered the baby to Mother for feeding, but I wasn’t allowed to go in. I broke several rules of protocol by eating breakfast in the kitchen with Kira and Cook, who told me they’d heard that nearly all the town’s men who weren’t already in jail had since been arrested. Several were missing entirely. Cook said, “It’s a lucky thing your family knows how to make influence.” She turned her body, but I saw her make a counting-money gesture to Kira.

I was kept from my father for two weeks, until his most pronounced bruises healed. When allowed to see him at last, I was warned not to show in my face anything that might indicate his changed appearance, including his head, shaved of its topknot. My mother’s instructions on this point were so firm that I barely dared to look at him at all, and it took several days of surreptitious peeks to understand that he’d been severely beaten—far more than the last time. His face wasn’t as monstrously swollen as then; his cheeks were gaunt and lax. It was worse. With stooped shoulders and eyes that looked vacantly at me, his presence was wraithlike. His stitched head wound seemed like a careless, forgotten brushstroke. Visible through bandages wrapped like a leper’s, his thumbs were enormous and black. The first few times I saw him, his empty stare reminded me of what I had seen outside our gate soon after that joyous and then terrifying day. The two soldiers had dragged from the alley a dead body—bloated, stiff, the color of dirt. Only when I saw the clothes did I know it was a woman. Her gruesome remains, the foul stink, the flies, the utter absence of life in her body, I would never forget.

Although he breathed, ate and slept, even smoked, my father seemed like that the first few times I was allowed to see him. Only when my baby brother was laid in his lap did I see a glimmer of my father, and only then was I not afraid of him.

I finally did go back to the classroom several weeks after the command to return to school. I discovered that none of Korea’s children had complied with the command, nor had the businesses reopened for some time, and I realized it was defiance that had closed the shops and kept me home.

Over time, we learned that the national demonstration had prompted unprecedented brutality from the military and police. Months later I
heard whispered reports at church about massacre and carnage: all the men in one village burned alive in a chapel, women and girls humiliated, slashed and shot, countless beheadings, people beaten unconscious and revived to be beaten again. Half of the men from our neighborhood who had gone to Seoul were dead. The remainder were imprisoned, flogged and tortured to reveal the names of the movement’s leaders.

Our neighbor, Hansu’s father, had also been arrested, beaten and eventually released. When he recovered, he and Hansu’s mother traveled to Seoul at great risk and found their son still alive, although wounded, and sentenced to West Gate Prison for eighteen months. They returned to raise money for bribes that could reduce his term or at least improve his conditions. I took all the jeon I’d received for good schoolwork, and a chipped jade comb my mother had given me long ago, and slipped them through the neighbor’s front gate wrapped in a piece of paper marked only with his name.