From Wonso Pond (31 page)

The sorghum and foxtail millet growing densely on both sides of the road swirled and swooshed at the whim of the wind. The sound of rustling leaves faded, then surged up again like a wave gathering strength on the ocean. And then, riding on those undulating waves, came the sound of a piano! Clink, clink, clunk! At first it sounded to Sonbi as though she were standing right next to the piano, but the next moment, the sounds were as faint as if she were hearing them in a dream. Whatever the case, the notes seemed to pierce into her very core. Fighting off the vision of Okchom sat at her piano, Sonbi placed her hands over her ears.

But just then she heard the sound of whimpering, and felt something in front of her block her way. Sonbi jumped back in alarm. She then realized it was Blackie, the puppy she always used to feed, and she scooped him up into her arms. All the rage that was sweeping through her body transformed into a flood of tears. Blackie's wagging tail thumped against
her face and he started whimpering even louder. Then he started licking Sonbi's face.

“Oh, Blackie!”

Sonbi buried her face into the puppy's neck and dropped down onto the road. And right there, twinkling off in front of her, she saw the lights of the village. To her tear-drenched eyes they looked like pieces of thread from a skein of orange silk. How similar those lights were, she thought, to the lamp she had gazed upon at the moment of her mother's death.

“Oh, Mother!” she cried, turning toward the mountain where her mother had long been buried. What then flashed into her mind, however, was not her mother's face, but that bundle of sumac roots, and then Ch'otchae's big, round eyes. The thought of what she'd done just before her mother's death now struck her with no less force than a bolt of lightining. The money that Tokho had given her she had carefully placed inside her bedding, but the sumac roots she'd received from Ch'otchae she had tossed into a back corner . . .

“Oh, Blackie!” cried Sonbi again. “Do you want to come with me?”

A bolt of lightning flashed through the sky.

77

“Hey, hey! Don't you think you've slept long enough? Wake up already, sleepyhead!”

Sinch'ol awoke with a start. His friends were already awake and washed up, it seemed, for their foreheads were shining. Kiho stared down at him.

“ We don't have a thing to cook for breakfast. Come on, you're going to have to get up and figure something out.”

“Oh, leave me alone, will you. I'm just going to sleep for a little bit longer.”

“Come on, get up. It's almost high noon out there. If we can't have breakfast, we're still going to have to find something for lunch or dinner . . . The longer the days get, the longer we've got to worry about going hungry! Hah, ha.”

Sinch'ol sat upright. The sun shone brilliantly into the room.

“How can anyone live with these damn things biting you all the time . . . Shit!”

Sinch'ol tore off his undershirt and began picking off lice the size of grains of barley. Ilp'o sat beside the door with the discarded butt of a cigarette, one of the cigarettes he'd bought back when he had a bit of spare change. He lit the cigarette and took a long drag. The smoke streaming out of his nostrils snaked its way up into the air. By the way Ilp'o kept looking at the side room, Sinch'ol guessed that the pretty girl who lived there was at home today.

Ilp'o looked chubby, and had some real flesh on his bones. So whenever they ran out of food to eat or had no wood to light a fire, he never seemed very nervous about it. In the mornings, after waking up, he would always go over and sit by the door, just as he was doing now, all the while glancing at the side room. If he didn't have any cigarettes to smoke, he'd pick his nose or clean out the dirt between his toes, and he'd constantly sniff at his dirty fingers. Sinch'ol pretended not to notice any of this, and kept himself from even glancing over in his direction. Kiho, on the other hand, could never hold his tongue when he caught Ilp'o cleaning his toes and sniffing his fingers.

“Oh, Hell! Are you at it again? How can you be so disgusting! Does it really smell all that good?”

Ilp'o always pretended not to hear to what Kiho was saying, and went on picking and sniffing uninterrupted. Wiping his fingers on his socks was yet another of his dirty little habits.

Luckily today he had a cigarette to puff on, so he wasn't picking anything.

“You think you can find something for us today?”

Kiho looked at Ilp'o. Ilp'o, as usual, ignored Kiho and concentrated on his cigarette. Unless he was bad-mouthing someone or had something to say about the pretty girl next door, Ilp'o never got worked up about anything. And when Kiho asked him to fetch rice or wood, or when Kiho was doubled over laughing at him for picking his nose, Ilp'o always pretended not to hear. Now, he just smiled contently and puffed away on his cigarette. Sinch'ol finished picking off the lice from his undershirt, and he put it back on. Then he tried to set his mind into gear: what might he still have to bring to the pawn shop?

They had already pawned all his valuables, down to his very last book, so that now practically all that remained was the flesh on his bones. Sinch'ol considered going to Pamsongi again to ask for something. Pamsongi had recently found a job delivering newspapers and
now had some spare cash on hand, which was why Sinch'ol was always bumming five or ten chon off him to buy rice or bread.

Sinch'ol put on his suit before going outside. It was the one set of decent clothes any of them owned. The three of them had decided they would share it, for whenever one of them went out.

“Make sure you find something to bring back . . . And if it looks like you can't manage it, just do whatever you have to, even if it means going back home. If you're hungry enough, you're just going to have to eat some of that pride of yours. Hah, ha. Am I right?”

“That you are!” chimed in Ilp'o. Sinch'ol smiled as he went out the front gate. He pictured Ilp'o's chubby face and those wide eyes of his, constantly ogling the girl in the room next door. He found Ilp'o's arrogance quite detestable, but when he thought of how he picked at his feet and nose and sniffed his dirty fingers, he couldn't help but laugh. Sinch'ol had come to think of Ilp'o as the perfect picture of a fallen intellectual. Sinch'ol himself could well have been considered a member of the intellectual class, but he had recently developed an intense disgust for these so-called
intelli
. And something about the way Ilp'o kept sniffing at his smelly feet seemed to reek of the intellectual class in general.

With these thoughts on his mind Sinch'ol came upon a public swimming pool and a crowd of swimmers. Their red and blue caps, bobbing up and down, stood out against the surface of the water sparkling in the sunlight. Just last summer, Sinch'ol remembered, he and Okchom had run on the beach of the wide open Western Sea. Then a picture of Yongyon village drifted into his mind, followed by an image of Sonbi's lovely figure.

78

In no time at all Sinch'ol began to feel the warmth of the sun on his back and to hear a grumbling sound coming from his stomach. He slowly started down the hill in Samch'ong-dong. If he couldn't get anything out of Pamsongi, where else would he go? He'd already made the rounds so many times to bum money off his friends that it seemed shameless to ask them for anything more. It was still early in the day and he wasn't yet very hungry. But a few more hours of this and the pangs in his stomach would be enough to make him throw himself at the feet of any one of his friends.

He finally arrived at Pamsongi's house in Kwanch'ol-dong, but he was told that his friend had just gone out. Clicking his tongue, he turned around and went back outside. When he made it to Chongno, he stood lost in thought. A bus heading toward Tongsomun zoomed right by him, sending a cloud of white dust into the air. He missed his home. More than anything else, he missed the way little Yongch'ol used to stick out his hand and say, ‘Gimme some caramels.' And even more than Yongch'ol, he missed the
tubu tchigae
always set out for him on the dinner table, made with tofu and meat, simmered in red pepper paste and seasoned with garlic . . . It was this on his mind and nothing else as he slowly dragged his feet forward. By now he wasn't just hungry, he was famished. Where the hell did Pamsongi go? Sinch'ol asked himself. He couldn't come up with a single place where his friend might have gone. He'd already delivered the morning paper, and the evening edition wouldn't be out until much later . . . So just where the devil could he have gone?

Sinch'ol circled through Chongno and headed toward HwanggÅ­mjong. There seemed to be no end to the streetcars that whizzed by from this direction and that. Countless numbers of taxis and buses raced by him as well. Sinch'ol had inhaled so much dust that his throat was burning, and it took all the strength in him just to walk over the asphalt. Gradually the heat of the midday sun bore down on him harder and harder. Sinch'ol was still wearing his winter fedora. He was afraid someone might see him, afraid that maybe his father or stepmother might come out for the day and run into him. He lowered the brim of his hat to shield his face and he walked with his eyes fixed to the ground.

The shoes he'd once polished every day before school had now, for a lack of shoe cream, gone without a polish for who knew how long. They were covered in dust, and the leather at the very tips had peeled away in places. His feet seemed hotter and heavier now than back when his shoes had been properly cared for.

“Hey, man! How many you sell today?”

“Barely broke even today . . . How about you?”

“Yeah, me too.”

Sinch'ol turned around. The two men were walking side by side, wooden A-frame packs strapped to their backs. Hey, maybe I should become an A-framer too, thought Sinch'ol. I could walk around selling anything I wanted. Maybe for now it would just be plain old Chinese
cabbage, he thought, but then I could switch to anything . . . Yet it hardly seemed plausible that Sinch'ol might one day strap an A-frame on his back and pound the pavement like those two men. But why not? Why the hell not? Sinch'ol had the vague feeling that his own inability to do anything like lug around an A-frame on his back was hardly different from that stubborn way Ilp'o was perfectly willing to sit there and go hungry.

I wish I could leave my work here to somebody else and get a full-time job somewhere off in the countryside, he thought. That way, it seemed, he could spend time working the land and learning about all sorts of things alongside the farmers. For all the world it seemed impossible for him to get a job like that here in Seoul. Too many people know my face here, and besides, my father and stepmother live here, and so many girls here know who I am, thought Sinch'ol. He could see the smirks on their faces now as he stared at the pavement.

He looked around and saw he was at the Mitsukoshi Department Store. Why not go inside? he thought, taking several steps toward it. But he hesitated: What if someone who knows me is shopping there? This always came to Sinch'ol's mind whenever he found himself in front of this building. And again, as he always did, he looked down at his shabby clothes.

The only people heading in and out of Mitsukoshi were properly groomed ladies and gentlemen. He hadn't yet seen a single person dressed as he was, in a shabby suit and felt hat. Everyone seemed to be wearing bright summer hats that gleamed in the sunlight. And everyone was dressed in cool summer clothes. But there was nowhere else where he could give his feet a needed rest. He could climb up to Namsan, but it was far too hot to head all the way up there. So for the time being, he thought, why don't I just go inside here for a little rest.

Sinch'ol took the elevator to the top floor of Mitsukoshi, sat in a chair and stared blankly into the fountain. The man and woman in the chairs beside him, who had ordered shaved ice with fruit, seemed to be enjoying themselves talking about something when they suddenly started laughing. To Sinch'ol it seemed as though they were laughing at his shabby appearance, so he glared in their direction for a while and finally turned his back to them. It took everything inside of him to keep from spinning back around and shouting, Oh, you people, you don't even know the slightest thing about what it means to live a life of honor!

79

Sipping on their shaved ice and giggling, the young couple had so sickened Sinch'ol that he'd turned to face the opposite direction, but now he could feel the couple's gaze aimed straight at his back and the nape of his neck. The sun, too, shone down on him unbearably. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. This was, of course, the last of the handkerchiefs he still had with him. He had brought four or five of them when he left home, but each of his friends had taken one for himself, and this threadbare hanky was the only one left over. The voice of the woman eating shaved ice next to him slowly started to sound similar to Okchom's. Oh, was Okchom married yet? And did she still think of him? These questions were beating down onto him just like the fierce rays of the sun—yet he couldn't help but smirk at the way he was being carried away by his feelings. For a while he was able to simply laugh them away, but then he started to miss the time he'd once spent with Okchom. In fact, he really did miss her! And what a happy time that summer had been for him! At this, Sinch'ol jumped out of his chair. Such thoughts were even more old-fashioned, more disgusting, than Ilp'o's nose picking.

The streetcars sped by from this direction and that, and Sinch'ol stood there, staring down on them as they passed by. His eyes were dazzled by the rows of buses and taxis endlessly following behind each other. And yet somehow the longer he stared down at all those streetcars and taxis and buses from up high like this, the more they seemed to move further and further away from him—he could somehow feel this in his very soul. No matter how much he thought about it, he hadn't the faintest memory of riding in that streetcar bound for the Han River, except for when he'd ridden it with Okchom last summer. There was no mistaking the fact that he'd of course taken that streetcar many times, but these memories had become dim, and all that was still clearly engraved in his mind were the times he had done so with Okchom.