The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (34 page)

“She is here,” Sunia exclaimed.

“She?” Il-han repeated.

“The woman—the girl—Yul-han—” She paused, not knowing what to say. Betrothed she was not as yet and to use the word “friend” in relation to a son would have evil implication. “Her name is Induk,” she finished.

“Well?” Il-han asked.

“What shall we do? She wishes to see us both!”

“Tell her I am busy,” Il-han said promptly.

Sunia hesitated. “Will she not think it rebuff? Yet what will the neighbors say if you do see her?”

Yul-han now arrived by another way, in time to hear these words. He came in and slid the wall door shut behind him. “Father—Mother—” He had been running and he breathed hard. “Remember that everything is different nowadays. She teaches the girls and I teach the boys, but we see each other in the corridors and on the playground in passing. I asked her myself if she would have me and she said yes. She wants our wedding to be modern.”

“What is modern?” Sunia inquired with some scorn.

“Well, she does not wish you to give her the usual red and green sets of garments. She says a ring on her finger at the time of our marriage is enough.”

“How does she mean enough?” Sunia demanded. “The red garments signify the passion any marriage must have for happiness and the green signifies that you will grow together, you two young ones. How will you say such things except through these gifts?”

Yul-han shrugged his shoulders. He could not explain to his parents how such things were said nowadays.

Sunia’s sharp eyes saw the shrug and immediately she went on. “Doubtless the girl is not serious. At any rate, we do not know whether the marriage will be propitious. Fortunetellers must be called. We do not even know your two birth years. How can we know the combination of your lives?”

Yul-han smiled. He went to the garden door and stood there. The summer peonies were in bloom, their red and white flowers were vivid against the young green. In the pond a frog croaked. “Only for fun,” he said, “she and I did inquire of a fortuneteller. We were both born in the year of Earth and though she is Tiger, I am Dragon.”

Sunia could not but be pleased. “Can it be so! Earth? Then as every branch of a tree bursts into flower, your children will prosper and grow.” She turned to Il-han, suddenly radiant. “We will be cared for in our old age!”

“If we believe in such things,” Il-han said drily.

Sunia refused to be discouraged. “There is something in such symbols. Do not forget that our ancestors lived by their belief and are we better than they?”

The two men, father and son, said nothing. Each had his thoughts—Yul-han that any happiness his mother could find would be well for himself and Induk, and Il-han that he would not at this time of her life disturb Sunia’s faith and hope. They remained silent while Sunia prattled on.

“Now,” she said happily, “it is a good thing that we do not need to pay fortunetellers. The wedding must be thought of next—a good wedding. We must prepare the wedding hat and belt for you, my son, and we must mend the old palanquin to fetch the bride home to this house after the three days of ceremony. The curtains are in shreds.”

Yul-han turned. “Mother,” he said. “Remember that she comes from a city family. And I, too, do not wish to have an old-fashioned wedding. What! I go through all that clownery?”

He spoke with unusual energy, and Il-han was surprised that his quiet son could for the moment at least again resemble his older brother. But Sunia was not patient.

“Are we not to have a decent wedding?” she demanded. “True, we are poor now as everyone is, but not too poor to see our sons properly married. Sons? That older brother of yours refused to be married. Alas, where is he these many years and he with no wife to care for him? We do not even know where he is. All the more then must we see to it that your wedding is performed according to law and tradition.”

“Mother,” Yul-han urged, “I beg you let it be as I wish.”

It was now time for Il-han to interfere. “Sunia, we must consider. It is true the times have changed and I am not sure the change is evil. I remember our own wedding day with no great pleasure—all that folly of ashes thrown at me when I left this house to go to yours and all my relatives flocking after me as I went and that wedding chest carrier with his face blackened to make people laugh! And you, with your face painted thick with white powder and your yellow-and-blue coat and red skirt and your family bowing when I came in! And all through the wedding feast we were teased until I was afraid you would cry and streak your painted face. And then when they tied my two legs together and hung me from the beam of the house and they pretended to beat the soles of my feet to make me promise them another feast! Those three nights I spent in your father’s house as bridegroom were not joy, I can tell you, what with teasing friends and neighbors listening at our door.”

Sunia heard this with eyes growing wider as she listened.

“And all these years you have kept this inside yourself!”

Il-han laughed. “Until now, when I bring it out to defend my son!”

They stood, two men against the lone woman, and she could only yield unhappily. She looked at them mutely and Il-han nodded to Yul-han and he went out and brought back the tall handsome girl, whose fresh skin and dark lively eyes showed health. She was not bold, in spite of her composed ways, for she bowed to Il-han and did not speak until he spoke.

He put on his tortoiseshell spectacles and looked at her in silence and then he nodded his head.

“Welcome to my house,” he said. “We break custom here but the times are new.” With this he took off his spectacles. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is not discourtesy that makes me put on spectacles. My eyes are not what they once were.”

This was true, for the midnight teaching by the light of flickering candle made his eyes dim.

“Necessity is no discourtesy nowadays, sir,” she said.

There was no more to say, and in a few minutes she went away as gracefully as she had come, pausing at the door to look back at Sunia.

“If you please, good Mother,” she said sweetly. “Come with me.”

She held out her hand and Sunia could not resist the gentle voice, the pleading eyes. Hand in hand, the two women left the room.

Now Yul-han was left alone with his father and he knew the time had come to confess that Induk was Christian. He did not know whether his father would accept the marriage when he knew, and he had tried to prepare Induk. Indeed only yesterday they had talked long on the necessity and he had begun thus:

“How shall I tell my mother that our wedding will be according to the Christian ceremony? You know how women enjoy our old-fashioned weddings.”

“Leave your mother to me,” Induk had replied. “Tell only your father. If we are wise in what we say, we shall win them separately and each will help us with the other.”

She had a calm assurance, this young female who was to be his wife, and sometimes Yul-han felt a certain awe of her. Where did she find this wisdom? Could it be that her strange religion did indeed communicate a power unknown to him? She never spoke of religion, not even to ask him if he had read the book she had given him, nor did she ask him if he would be Christian too. Yet he knew that she made her prayers to the unknown god, and she went every seven days to the Christian temple. Now and then, however, she spoke of the missionary, sometimes with laughter, for he was very foreign, yet always with respect.

“He is honest,” she told Yul-han, “and he is incorruptible. Moreover, he is for our people. He risks himself for our sakes.”

Beyond this she did not go, except to say her parents wished her to be married with the Christian ceremony, and she also wished this to be. But they had very little time to talk. It was difficult to meet, for old tradition still held in many ways, and if they were seen alone together, tradition might compel those above to dismiss them from their schools on the pretext that their conduct could lead their pupils into unseemly freedom. For this reason Yul-han had urged immediate marriage. Afterwards, as husband and wife, they could discover each other’s minds and hearts in mutuality.

“Father,” Yul-han now said, “I need your good advice.”

Il-han made a dry smile. “Unusual, is it not, in these days, to hear such words? I try to be useful, nevertheless.”

Yul-han ignored this irony natural to age. “What I have to tell you will not shock you, Father, for you know these new times, but I fear for my mother.”

Here he paused so long that Il-han was impatient.

“Well, well, well?” he said sharply.

Yul-han forced himself on. “Her family is Christian, Father, and she wishes to be married with their ceremony.”

He had said it, and properly he had not spoken Induk’s personal name. Sitting motionless on the floor cushion, he took courage to lift his head and look at his father across the low table between them. What he saw was not comforting. His father’s eyebrows were drawn down and beneath them the eyes were narrow under lowered lids. His father’s long thin hand moved to stroke the scanty gray beard.

“Why have you waited to tell me?” Il-han demanded.

“Father, would it have made a difference if I had told you early?”

The long thin hand fell. “You are saying that you would have married her anyway.”

“Yes, Father.”

Father and son gazed into each other’s eyes.

“You two,” Il-han said at last, “you and your brother, inside you are alike. You are both stubborn and willful, he with outbursts of temper and wild words, and you Confucian, always mild in speech. Seemingly without temper, you are the worse of the two. I am always deceived by you.”

“I am sorry, Father,” Yul-han said.

“Sorry! Does that mean you will change yourself?”

“No, Father.”

“I suppose you will be Christian too.”

“I do not know, Father.”

Il-han closed his eyes. He took a black paper fan from his sleeve and fanned himself for a while.

“These Americans,” he said at last, eyes still closed, the fan still moving to and fro. “Do you know that they betrayed us? Have you forgotten that they broke their treaty with us? When we were invaded, they favored the invader. Do they speak now against our oppressors? They do not. They preach their religion, they declare that we must submit ourselves. They say they are not anti-Japanese. They even adjure us to do justice to our oppressors. They bid us remember Korea is the most exposed part of the Japanese empire. Japanese empire, mind you, no longer our country! The Russian base, Vladivostok, is very near, they tell us; it borders Manchuria and by steamboat it is only a few hours from the Chinese port of Chefoo. Therefore Japanese must be allowed to rule Korea!”

Yul-han interrupted. “They won the war with Russia, and—”

Il-han interrupted in turn. “The causes for that war still exist. Russia has no ice-free port on the Pacific.”

“Father,” Yul-han pleaded, “we were talking only of my marriage. Why are we quarreling about governments?”

“Nothing is private nowadays,” Il-han retorted. “If you marry into a Christian family, you undertake their burdens. Do not forget that among the twenty-one Koreans who tried to kill the Prime Minister of Japan who was visiting here, eighteen were Christians!” Here Il-han paused to point his long forefinger at his son. “What was the result? Count Terauchi was sent to rule us without mercy, because he believed that desperate men among us were hiding themselves among the Christians. He surrounds himself with military officers and soldiers. When he goes into our peaceful countryside—I saw it with my own eyes. Only the other day he passed through our villages on his way somewhere, an army swarming about him. Your mother was wailing. She thought they were coming after me. I am not so important any more, I told her.”

“I will not argue with you, Father,” Yul-han said. “I ask only one question. Will you come to my wedding?”

Il-han’s eyebrows shot up. “You insist upon this marriage?”

“Yes, Father,” Yul-han said, very steady.

“Then I will not come,” Il-han declared. “Nor will I allow your mother to come.”

Father and son, they exchanged a long, last look

“I am sorry, Father,” Yul-han said. He made deep obeisance and went away.

… He met Induk the next day, a holiday. The date was the seventeenth day of the fourth lunar month and the sixth day of the sixth solar month. By tradition this day was for the transplanting of rice seedlings from dry earth into watery fields, and though this was done only by landfolk, the day was celebrated by city folk, too, for rice is the food of life.

They had grown wise, these two, in their knowledge of the city and where they could meet, and today they planned to walk outside the gates and along some country road. Their meetings until now had been brief and they had always to be careful of being seen. Today, however, they would be in no haste for they would be far from all who knew them. They met by the west gate, and Yul-han paused to buy two small loaves of bread for their noon meal. Then they turned toward the mountains and away from city and field alike. The sun was already hot as they climbed the unshaded flanks of the bare mountains.

“Here is shelter at last,” Yul-han said.

He left the narrow path and stopped beneath an overhanging rock. Under it they could escape from the burning sun. He smoothed away small stones and lifted moss from the shallow cavern behind the rock and spread it as a floor cushion for her to sit upon. They sat down then, side by side but not too near, each shy of the other in this new loneliness, around them the noble stillness of the mountain and above them the deep and passionate blue of the sky.

In silence Induk poured a small bowl of tea for Yul-han from the bottle she had put in the basket and then one for herself. It was cool and refreshing, they sipped it, and gazed down upon the city they had left. The landscape was splendid, the high rocky mountains guarding the jewel of the city set deep into the green circle of a valley. The sun glittered on the roofs and hid the poverty of huts and crowded streets.

“I am hungry,” Yul-han said.

She gave him bread and broke a loaf in half for herself, and they ate. He felt a peace he had never known before. She was so near that he could put out his hand and take hers, but he had no need to touch her. They were together, committed to a long life ahead, always together. Nothing must be hurried or transient. They were laying deep foundations for the future, even in this silence. He ate his fill and leaned against the bank beneath the rock in profound content.