The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (35 page)

It was Induk who spoke first. “I have not told you what your mother said when I told her my family is Christian.”

“Tell me,” he said without urgency, his eyes on her calm face.

“At first,” Induk went on, “she could not believe me. Then she was puzzled and she asked me what it meant to be a Christian. Would it mean, she asked, that we would not let her see the children? Assuredly not, I promised her. I said that everything would be the same except that our children would not go to the temple to worship Buddhist gods. Instead they would go to the Christian church and learn the teachings of Jesus. ‘Who is Jesus?’ she asked. When I told her, she was unhappy. ‘He is a foreigner,’ she exclaimed.”

His children Christian? The thought was new and Yul-han was not sure he liked it.

“I had not considered the matter of children,” he said slowly. Far off against the purple-blue sky an eagle soared upward toward the sun.

“Do you not want them to be Christian?” she inquired.

“How can I tell? I know nothing about this religion.”

“But it is mine!”

“Must it be mine?”

She looked at him thoughtfully, considering how to answer. “Have you read the book I gave you?”

“Some of it.”

“What do you think?”

“It is a strange book,” he said in the same slow voice, almost as though he were dreaming. “When one reads it—well, there is a short story in the last part—a revelation. Someone, I do not know who, says that he ate a small book. He had been told to eat it by a spirit from Heaven—or perhaps from Hell, I could not decide, since it is all a sort of poetry, but this man ate the book. It tasted sweet upon his tongue, but when he had eaten it the sweetness went away and the taste was bitter. That is how it was with me. When I read your book it was sweet to my taste, but as I think about it, I feel bitterness.”

“Oh, why?” she asked softly.

“I cannot say,” he replied. “I only feel. It is dangerous to take a new religion in an old country. It is an explosive.”

He did not wish to tell her now what his father had said, not on this first day of their being alone.

“Do you wish me not to be Christian?” she asked after silence.

“I want you to be yourself,” he replied. “Whatever you are, that is what I want you to be.”

“If you are not Christian, I do not wish to be Christian. I will not be separated from you.”

His heart flooded his being with tenderness. What? She would give up so much for him? He could not allow it but he felt his blood warm in his veins.

“Nothing can separate us,” he said, “nothing—nothing! And I give you a promise. I will talk with the missionary. I will learn more about this God in whom you trust. If I can come to the same faith, I will not hold back.”

“But shall we be married by my religion?”

“Yes! I have none of my own any more. The old beliefs have been taken from us and we have been given nothing in return. Why do I say they have been taken from us? Perhaps they have died of their own age and uselessness. Now let us talk no more of these matters. Time will guide us because we love each other.”

He dared to put out his hand now and take her hand and they sat side by side, shy of more than this and yet yearning for more. But the old traditions held. The palm of a man’s hand, they had been taught, must not touch the palm of a woman’s hand, for the palm is a place of communication, where one heart beats close to another heart. It is the first meeting place of love between man and woman, and for these two it was a virgin experience. From it, love would proceed to consummation.

He sat holding her palm against his until he grew afraid of his own rising passion, to which he must not yield.

“Come,” he said resolutely, “it is time for us to go back to the city.”

… Their wedding day was set for the summer solstice, which is on the third day of the lunar month and the twenty-first day of the solar month. Yul-han sent word to his father, and to his mother, and he gave the name of the church where the ceremony would take place. Whether they would be there he did not know, and no letter came from them by servant or by the postal system which the Japanese had reformed and made useful again. Neither he nor Induk spoke of his parents but both waited during the closing days of their schools. In the few days before the wedding he did not return to the grass roof to visit his father, lest his mother insist that he must bring Induk there to live. For Induk wanted a small house of her own and in his heart he planned that he would ask for some of the land he would inherit from his father. He had saved money enough to build a house but he could not buy land, for the cost of land had risen since the Japanese were buying land everywhere. No Korean was able to buy unless he had influence to help him.

The wedding day dawned in mist. The season called the Small Heat was hotter than usual, and the sun hung in the sky like a silver plate.

“Shall I wear my Korean robes?” he had asked Induk.

She had hesitated. “I have never seen you except in this foreign dress, but yes, I would like to marry a Korean in Korean dress.”

He put on his Korean robes, therefore, and his best friend helped him, a teacher of mathematics, surnamed Yi and named Sung-man, a secret revolutionist but a man of merry nature. Sung-man had never married and he made jokes as he helped Yul-han to put on the white robes, and the boat-shaped shoes made from Japanese rubber, and the scholar’s hat of woven horsehair, the crown high, the brim narrow.

Sung-man stared at his tall friend. He himself was a short stout man, not handsome, and clumsy of hand and foot.

“Is it you?” he exclaimed.

“I feel strange to myself,” Yul-han acknowledged, “as though I were my own grandfather.”

Nevertheless thus garbed he walked to the church, Sung-man at his side and taking two steps to his one. So they arrived at the church and went in. The benches were already full of people, men on one side, women on the other. On the platform the missionary stood waiting, dressed in black, and a foreign music came from somewhere, of a sort Yul-han had never heard. He walked up the central aisle looking neither to right nor left, Sung-man behind him, and the missionary motioned to them to stand at his right on the platform. While they stood there waiting suddenly the gentle music changed to loud clear music, very joyous, and Yul-han saw Induk coming up the aisle beside her father. In front of her walked two small boys, her brother’s children as Yul-han knew, scattering flowers as they came, and behind her walked her mother and older sister. But it was at Induk that he looked. She wore a full skirt of pink brocaded satin and a short jacket to match, and her face was half hidden behind a veil of thin white silk. She walked steadily toward him and up the two steps while he waited, trying not to look at her and yet seeing her all the way until she was at his side.

Of that strange marriage ceremony he remembered not a word, except that when he was asked by the missionary if he would have Induk for his wife he replied in a loud voice that he would indeed, and it was only for this purpose that he had come. He was surprised to hear stifled laughter from some women in the audience and he wondered if he had said something he should not have said. The missionary went on, whatever he had said, and in a few minutes, before he could recover himself, he heard the missionary pronounce them man and wife. He hesitated, not knowing what came next, but Induk guided him gently by her hand in the curve of his elbow and he found himself walking down the aisle with her, arm in arm.

He had all but forgotten his parents in the agitation of the ceremony but when he reached the door he saw his father standing at the end of the last bench and passed him near enough to touch his shoulder. Father and son, they looked at each other, the one in gravity, the other in amazed gratitude.

Now he and Induk were at the door and now they had passed through into the outer air. It was over. Yul-han was a married man.

“Why should you build a house?” Sunia demanded. “Our ancestral house is empty of children. When we die it will be yours.”

Yul-han and Induk exchanged looks. How could they explain to his mother that they were different in this generation? Sunia had come to her husband’s house when she was a bride, the house was the home of their ancestors, and where else could she go, or indeed where else would she want to go?

She continued, addressing herself to Induk. “It is because you think I will not have a Christian in my house?”

“Surely not, Mother,” Yul-han said quickly.

But Induk reflected. “Mother, you are right—and wrong. Being Christian does indeed make me different from other young women. You are kind, but you would find me irksome in your house.”

“How are you different?” Sunia demanded, doubtful but determined still to have her own way.

Induk turned to Yul-han. “How am I different?”

He stroked his head, considering. “I have not had time to find out, but different you are.”

Sunia yielded then, complaining privately to Il-han. “She wants to take care only of her husband. Is that a good daughter-in-law? Who brought her precious husband into this world? Who but me?”

“You forget that I—” Il-han began thus but Sunia stopped him.

“Oh you men,” she cried, “you never think whether what you do will produce a child. Yes, yes, you are necessary, else why would a woman spend her life taking care of you? But it is we who create the child and with no more from you than a few drops of water upon an open flower.”

“Peace,” he said with dignity. “Tell me what you want and I will see if it is possible, but do not make me promise that they live with us under our grass roof. These are new times. And I myself do not know whether I want a Christian under the same roof with me.”

The compromise was that Yul-han was to build a house attached to his father’s but with a separate entrance. During the summer months of his great happiness with Induk thereafter Yul-han began the building of his own house. With the help of the one man servant he brought gray stones from the mountains and he cut cedar trees from the forest lands for the pillars to holdup the roof, but to his father’s annoyance Yul-han employed a Japanese roof company to make the roof of tile instead of thatch.

“What,” Il-han exclaimed one day when as usual he walked into the garden to see the new house, “do you buy tiles of the enemy instead of using the good thatch grass from our own fields?”

“Father,” Yul-han replied, not pausing in the work of making a window, “the thatch must be renewed every three or four years, whereas this red tile will last for a century.”

“You are too hopeful,” Il-han retorted. “It is enough to look ahead for a few years. Who knows whether any of us will be alive beyond that?”

“You are too hopeless,” Yul-han retorted gaily.

The house-building was only for the summer until such time as the schools were open after harvest. He must continue his teaching and so must Induk, she at least until she had a child, and in this summer he and Induk lived in a part of the ancestral home, and it was during this time that they both began to understand the sufferings of their people. In the village near which they lived Yul-han heard one night a great wailing of a woman screaming and crying for help. He was working late and alone and was about to break off his labor, for the mosquitoes were singing about his ears, when this voice came to him in waves of agony, borne upon the rising night wind. He put down his plastering trowel and listened.

What he heard were the sobbing words repeated again and again, “O-man-ee, O-man-ee, save me!”

Someone, a girl, was calling on her mother. He listened and then he went to find Induk. She was in the small porch outside the kitchen, pounding his clean clothes smooth on the polished ironing stone. Beside her was a jar of heated charcoal, upon which rested her small, long-handled, pointed iron. He paused to enjoy the picture she made, kneeling on the wooden floor in the light of a paper lantern, the wind blowing her hair as she pounded with two wooden clubs, one in each hand, the folded garment, his shirt as he could see. This wife of his, when she was about her housewifery, could seem the simplest of women. The sound of women pounding the garments smooth was the rhythm and the beat of the Korean countryside.

Without seeing him, Induk lifted the iron from its bed of hot ashes and he spoke.

“A woman is wailing in the village. Something is wrong.”

She put aside the hardwood ironing clubs and the iron. “Let us go,” she exclaimed.

Here was her difference. Where a usual woman would have said it might be dangerous to interfere in another’s troubles and thereby bring down trouble on one’s own house, her thought was only to go and help.

They walked down the road quietly but quickly. The screams had subsided to low moans and these came from one of the village winehouses. Small as the village was, there were three winehouses in it where, before the invaders came, there had been none. These winehouses were places where men came to drink and to seek women. In the deep poverty of the landfolk it was easy to buy girls for such places and few indeed were the girls who dared to rebel when such employment was all that kept their families from starving.

“Let me go in alone,” Induk said when they reached the door of this lowly house of pleasure.

“I will not let you enter such a place alone,” Yul-han declared.

Together then they went in. A slatternly old woman came toward them from behind the gate.

“We are neighbors,” Induk explained, “and we heard someone wailing and we thought you might need help.”

The old woman peered at them from smoke-blinded eyes and replied not a word. Before Induk could go further a young girl ran out of the house, her garments half torn from her body, her hair in disarray and her face scratched and bleeding. A man ran after her. Induk put out her arms and caught the girl, and Yul-han stood between her and the man.

This man did not at first recognize Yul-han since he had lived in the city for the later years of his life and the man pushed up his sleeves and made as if to attack Yul-han.

“Take care of yourself,” Yul-han said to him with calm. “I am her husband.”