From Wonso Pond (34 page)

Judging from how Sonbi had always been somewhere in the back of his mind, it would have been natural for him to long to be with her—especially since he had seen her pass right in front of him a few days earlier. But his once burning curiosity seemed to have fizzled away, and now all that was left were these lingering mysteries he still entertained about her. Instead, it was Okchom—those lively eyes, those hands, that face—that he now tried to imagine.

Could Okchom be married now? She was so devoted to me, he
reflected, and I was so ruthless! There were tears welling up in Sinch'ol's eyes, though he did not know why exactly.

Only now could he see how sweet her face had been when she'd unwrapped that piece of chocolate for him and blushed with the words, ‘Open up wide.' Oh, if only he had a second chance, he'd . . . But Sinch'ol caught himself before finishing the thought. “Oh, you disgusting hypocrite!” he shouted out loud.

He heard the sound of a taxi honking its horn in the distance. The clock in the inner room struck ten. ‘Dong! Dong!' He closed his eyes tightly in an effort to fall asleep. But all he saw were bricks, and more bricks.

85

A few days later Sinch'ol met Ch'olsu and told him of his plans to go out to the labor market again. Ch'olsu smiled.

“My friend, if you try that again you'll end up in bed for twice as long next time, maybe for a good week! Just give it up.”

Sinch'ol's readiness to perform manual labor was admirable, but without a body toned to carry out that sort of labor, it seemed rather problematic to Ch'olsu. Sinch'ol smiled back at his friend, but deep down he felt hurt. When Sinch'ol compared himself with Ch'olsu, it didn't seem like Ch'olsu was any bigger or stronger than he was, or in any way better than him. The way Sinch'ol saw it, he simply wasn't yet properly trained to carry out this type of labor, and once he'd made it over that hurdle, the work wouldn't be very difficult for him. And come on! If Ch'olsu can do it, and if labor is what human beings do, why should I be any different? I'll do it. Even if it kills me! he thought. What was more painful to Sinch'ol than anything was the fact that he was sitting around all day long, eating food that his friends bought with the earnings from their own labor. But Ch'olsu seemed to sense what was getting at Sinch'ol.

“All right then, well, why not give it one more try,” Ch'olsu said, with a smile. “Let's go out to the wharf together tomorrow morning. The pay is bad, I'm telling you, but the fact is that carrying bricks is the easiest job in town.”

At Ch'olsu's mention of bricks he shook his head emphatically.

“No way! No more bricks!”

He felt a chill run down his spine and a prickling sensation in his fingers. He'd prepared himself to do any sort of labor, no matter how hard
it was—even if his friend had said it was harder than carrying bricks. But he knew he could not handle the bricks. He never wanted to see another brick again.

That night the two of them stayed up late, as Ch'olsu gave Sinch'ol a very detailed explanation of the kinds of work they did on the wharf. The next day at dawn Sinch'ol went there along with Ch'olsu. By the time they passed in front of the customhouse, there were already several dozen workers gathered around a man in nickel-rimmed glasses, all vying for his attention, “Mr. Foreman! Mr. Foreman!” Ch'olsu pushed his way through the crowd.

“Mr. Foreman! One over here, please.”

Nickel-rims glanced at Ch'olsu over his glasses and then stretched out a hand with a red band in it. Ch'olsu immediately took the band and made his way back to Sinch'ol.

“This band is your work tag. Make sure you keep it tied around your wrist.”

Looking down at the band Ch'olsu was tying onto his arm for him, Sinch'ol could feel his heart thumping.

“Okay, I'm going to be unloading freight over at the station . . . You hang in there, okay?”

Ch'olsu dashed off as soon as he'd finished speaking. Even though Ch'olsu had given him a detailed explanation of the work the red-bands did, as he watched Ch'olsu leave, it dawned on him that he didn't have a clue what he should be doing. He concentrated on what all the men with red bands were doing and tried to follow their every move without attracting any attention.

The harbor works in Inch'on, in the very heartland of Choson, were of such a grand sight and scale that nothing else like it existed in all of Korea. Huge ships weighing thousands of tons were lined up one after another, their broadsides banked up against the wharf. From their thick smokestacks black puffs of smoke billowed high up into the sky. Out on Wolmido, that dark island jutting out of the sea, stood a white light-house. Far beyond that lay the horizon.

The workers swept down onto the wharf in a massive crowd. In no time at all the harbor works were abuzz and swarming with what looked like several thousands of workers. More than half of them carried A-frames on their backs, but there were others, people pushing handcarts, people rushing into cargo holds with rice sacks on their
shoulders, people carrying things in pairs with poles resting on their shoulders; young ones, old ones, even children, all brushing up against each other as they wove their way through the masses of people.

Nickel-rims stood up on the deck of one of the ships.

“All right, you morons! Now get over here and put up a ramp!”

At the sound of the man's thundering voice, the red-bands ran over toward him and started building the ramp. They laid several logs between the ship and the concrete wharf and then laid wide boards across them as they gradually worked their way up to the ship. Then one of the red-bands standing next to the base of the crane pulled a lever which sent a cable whirring down into the cargo hold of the ship. There was a Japanese man they called “the supervisor” standing on deck, watching the cable go down inside and making a continuous gesture with his hand. When he stopped moving his hand, the crane operator took it as a sign to stop the cable. A minute later the supervisor made another gesture, this time raising his hand into the air. The crane operator immediately pulled the lever. The crane began whirring again, but now there was a piece of freight as big as a house attached to the rising cable. When the workers crowded around the ship saw the size of the load, the hue and cry on the wharf grew even louder.

86

What must have been several thousand pounds of freight dangling from the crane was lowered onto the wharf with another whir of the crane. Pushing back against each other to make room for it, the workers then rushed up to the cargo and started to take down the separate pieces of the load, handing them off to the red-bands, who circled busily around, first grabbing the packages with their iron hooks and then lifting them up onto the porters' A-frames. Sinch'ol wanted to make use of the hooks that Ch'olsu had given him, but he didn't know how. He had no other choice but to fasten his hooks onto the back of his pants and use his bare hands. A new red-band stood facing him with each load, as he lifted up package after package without a moment's rest.

The freight continued pouring out onto the wharf with each whir of the crane. Sinch'ol lost his breath, and his arms felt like they were about to fall off. He lifted all sorts of things—huge boxes, sheets of iron, cakes of soybeans.

“Alright, you idiots! Get that cargo unloaded fast!” thundered Nickel-rims, his eyeballs practically popping out of their sockets. Sinch'ol had at some point injured his fingers, and blood was streaming down his hand, but there was nothing he could do about it, so he wiped it off on his breeches and continued to stack the packages on the backs of the workers—they kept coming and coming.

“Hey, there! Your hands are going to kill you, if you don't use those hooks!” shouted a red-band in front of him. Sinch'ol unfastened his hooks and grabbed hold of the package, but the hooks slipped and he ended up whacking one of the porters in the head.

The porter immediately turned around to him.

“You idiot! What do you think you're doing? Hitting someone in the face like that! You almost poked my eye out, you moron. Pay attention!” The man glared at him ferociously.

Sinch'ol's eyes brimmed with the tears he'd been trying to hold back. Without a word in reply, he turned away and looked out onto the deep blue water. He felt like diving into that water and escaping from this place forever. The rough talk they used and the way they behaved—it was no different from the nails in the crates and the sheets of iron that mercilessly ripped his aching hands!

“Hey, come on! Load me up?”

His arms shaking uncontrollably, Sinch'ol tried to lift one of the big crates, but he kept having to put it down—he just couldn't lift it. In the end, he practically fell head first over it.

“Oh, come on . . . I've got a job to do here. If you're going to end up on the ground, just get out of here!”

The red-band standing in front of him would have preferred Sinch'ol to quit. Far from helping the man, Sinch'ol had become but another burden. He was barely able to collect his senses and stand up again. He wished he'd banged himself up a bit when he'd fallen, so that he might at least have an excuse to leave. But when he checked himself, he couldn't find a single scratch.

The dust coming off the cargo and the dirt swept up by the wind hung heavily in the air. Thousands of toiling workers milling around kept it from settling down to the ground. The fierce rays of the sun, it seemed, were frying people to a crisp, and Sinch'ol could practically feel his skin peeling off him. The air was choking him; his throat was dry; his mouth was filled with dust. Water, water, water! He needed water!
But there was no option of slipping away, for even a minute. Of all the people milling around him not a single one of them—not even the children—seemed so incompetent, so feeble as he.

He could hear the screech of a machine sawing wood at a lumber mill in the distance. On the next dock he saw mountains of coal piled up, as it was scooped out of a steamship docked just to the side.

“All right, boys, if you want to fight, just move it on over there,” yelled the red-band standing in front of Sinch'ol.

Sinch'ol turned to look. Two men had been grappling over the same load, and the argument had finally come to blows. Soon the men had pushed the package to the side and began rolling around on the ground. In the meantime, someone else picked up the package they were fighting over and carried it off. The men rose and went to take back the package, bringing yet another into the fight. There were three of them, then four, going after each other.

When Sinch'ol realized that one of them was Double-lid, he felt like running over to stop him. But it was only a fleeting thought, for Sinch'ol knew that he had a hard enough time keeping himself out of harm's way. Anyway, in a place like this, a fight was just a fight. Hardly anyone even blinked an eye at the sight of them. When the men eventually tired themselves out, they brushed the dirt from their clothes and got up off the ground.

Well after the electric lights came on, the workers were still working. But eventually Sinch'ol and the other red-bands followed Nickel-rims to collect their day's wages. At the sound of somebody whistling, Sinch'ol looked behind him and saw Double-lid, A-frame and all, slowly making his way toward him. Even he looked completely exhausted.

87

“My friend!”

Sinch'ol called out to Double-lid as he passed by. Double-lid stopped and looked around in confusion.

“Hey, I was looking for you!” continued Sinch'ol.

Only then did Double-lid notice Sinch'ol.

“So you're back again, huh?”

“How much money did you make today?” Sinch'ol asked.

“Money? All I did was fight.”

“Fight over what?”

“Nothing, I guess.” Double-lid scratched his head.

“Swing by my place sometime, okay?”

“Where do you live?”

“You know the Catholic Chapel on the way up to Sa-jong?”

“The ca-tho-lic . . . what?”

Sinch'ol drew the sign of the cross in the air with his hand.

“You know, that building with this symbol sticking up on the roof.”

“Oh, you mean the church. Okay.”

“If you go past the church, there's a public toilet, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Just up the hill is a place where they chop firewood for sale. And just beyond that is a small grass-roofed house.

“Okay.”

“My room is in the back of that house.”

“Got it. I'll stop by sometime.”

“Be sure to, okay?”

“I will.”

And without so much as word of good-bye, Double-lid was striding off again. Sinch'ol watched him walk away—a man like that would be first-rate if only he had a proper consciousness, he thought.

Nickel-rims slipped into an inn of some sort. The red-bands who were following him stopped and waited for him to come out. They turned around and saw Sinch'ol and started snickering amongst themselves. When Sinch'ol realized they were mocking how he had worked that day, he felt so humiliated and so indescribably alone that a moan almost escaped from him before he caught himself. He felt a heaviness bearing down upon him impossible to resist, so he dropped to the ground and sat with his back to the standing red-bands.

In front of him was a cement-sealed wall over which golden letters spelling out ‘King Bar' in Japanese were lit up with electric bulbs. Tears welled up in his eyes. He looked down at his shabby appearance and the feeling of loneliness intensified, as though he'd been completely forsaken by the world. He'd come out to the labor market in a desperate effort to make friends with the workers, and here they all were making a laughing stock of him, unwilling to offer him even the slightest bit of sympathy.