Korea (23 page)

He then chose the
hwadu
‘No!’ and in 1931—though it might be difficult to accept this kind of thing happening so recently, so much does it sound the stuff of legend—had himself walled into a tiny hermitage, with only a tiny hole for food to be passed in and out. He stayed there for eighteen months, until one day in 1933 he realized that all of his doubts had been resolved. He had himself unwalled, and as a conclusion to his lengthy meditation on the
hwadu
‘No!’ wrote the following lines:

After which revelation, Hyobong became a Zen Master, a respected teacher, and was appointed spiritual head of the Chogye order—the principal order in Korea. Thus, while cynics might not accept the validity of the
hwadu
system nor the sense of the poem that resulted, it has to be accepted that the man who so meditated, and the man who came up with this answer, was appointed to a position equivalent to the head of a major Western church—a church whose rituals must seem as strange to Zen Buddhists as their ways must seem back West.)

Do Yaun, then, was off to contemplate his
hwadu
in the silence of the meditation hall. It began at three; the monks bowing to the Buddha, then taking their places for the first period of meditation, which began, as always, with three strikes of the
moktak
. The period lasted for fifty minutes, ending with a brisk ten-minute walk around the hall; this schedule continued until nine or ten at night—fifty minutes’ meditation, ten minutes’ walk, for the better part of eighteen hours. Do Yaun, however, had dispensation to look after his guest, and was back at 9
A.M.
‘It is raining,’ he said, with a triumphant gleam in his eye. ‘You must stay another day!’

But I said I wouldn’t—that I wanted to walk through the mountains in the rain. ‘Excellent,’ he exclaimed. ‘I will walk with you. You do not mind? I have no boots like you, but I know the back way across the mountains. We will go together. Is this good?’

And so I bathed in the ice-cold water of the bathhouse, rubbing my skin until it tingled deliciously. I took more soup and tofu and rice and water. The other monks bade me their goodbyes. Do Yaun gave me a small plastic-and-bamboo umbrella to hold in case the rain fell more heavily, and he picked up one himself.
He had a pair of running shoes peeking out from under his voluminous baggy trousers—his only concession to the walk ahead. I strapped on my pack again, set my recorder and wound forward my camera, zipped everything that could be zipped to keep out the rain, stepped out and left the guardian kings behind. A steep mountain range lay ahead and beyond that, the province of North Cholla, the rice bowl of Korea.

The path to the top of the Naejang Mountain ridge was narrow and muddy, and it was a bleak morning, gnawingly cold with a fine misty rain. But while I might have been miserable alone, Do Yaun was the perfect walking companion, and we chatted amiably as we wound our way through the thick, leafless, dripping forests. He had a phenomenal knowledge of the outside world and quizzed me endlessly about finer points of geography. ‘South Dakota—why is the capital called Pierre?’ he would ask. Where did I think Columbus had first sighted land?

He was also very fit and nimble, so that even though he was wearing tennis shoes, he scrambled over the wet, moss-covered rocks like a mountain goat and never stumbled once. He somehow managed to keep his robes magically clean and free of the mountain mud, while I was splattered from end to end. When, after about four hours’ hard uphill going, we arrived at the
summit of the knife-edge and the pair of us stood in the clouds looking down on the plains of Middle Korea bathed in the early afternoon sunlight, he looked just like a young god. I felt suddenly proud to have known him.

The downhill going was even tougher—fifty-degree slopes, wet earth and loose stones, and bamboo leaves that cut your hands to shreds if ever you were foolhardy enough to grab hold of one to stop you from sliding. (Bamboo, which grows in profusion in this part of Chollanam-do, is known to Koreans as
taenamu
, or the Great Tree; while it is nowhere near as great to look at as the great ginkgos found near Seoul, nor as impressive as the huge Chinese elms and oaks, it is greatly revered here as in China. It has the advantages of strength, suppleness, and lightness, so that it can be used to make scaffolding or baskets, chopsticks or tablemats, carved spoons or furniture. And its young shoots can be eaten. The oak and elm, ginkgo and cherry may be more spectacular, but they are hardly as useful, nor do they play as large a part in Korean life.)

As we reached under the winter snow line once more, so the flowers began to appear by the boles of the trees—the cosmos and the gentian, bushes of forsythia, and the first of the lilacs. The sun emerged suddenly from the clouds and beat down on our backs, warming the air in an instant and setting the earth steaming, the steam mingling with the perfume of all the wildflowers that rose in a heady bouquet. Do Yaun stopped and pointed to a mass of cherry blossom in the valley.

‘That is so sad to see,’ he said. His voice was oddly thick with gloom.

I confessed I could see nothing sad in it at all; it looked astonishingly beautiful, and that was all.

‘Ah yes, but soon it will be gone. Another few days, and the branches will be empty again. That is what is so sad, thinking of it going away.’

I had read of Zen sadness at the idea of nature’s transience. But it seemed pointless. After all, there would soon be leaves in place of the blossoms, and then other flowers would bloom, and
then there would be the autumn colours—the books all say the slopes of Naejang-san looked as though they were on fire in early October. Was that not sufficient compensation?

‘No, for all that says is that all beauty is transient. Everything passes by. Even this sadness!’ and he laughed, and thus having cheered me up, carried on slipping and sliding down the hill.

All of a sudden the slope flattened, and we emerged from a grove of maple trees and out onto a main road—a transition far more brutal than that between the seasons of a cherry tree. It was not a busy road—an occasional bus went by, a few tractors—but it brought the smell of civilization back again, and neither Do Yaun nor I was happy to see it. I could see the disappointment in his face; he had been sunny and cheerful up above, and now he looked nervous and uncomfortable. Up in the quiet hills, where he lived all his life, up with the mist and the crags and the distant sound of the temple bells, something of the more real Korea had been present. But it was a reality that had proved to be evanescent, and now the brash, new, prosperous, busy Korea had asserted itself again.

An immense tourist hotel loomed suddenly from the mist, like a blockhouse in some Ruritanian frontier post. We climbed its steps and passed in through its electrically operated glass doors—no guardian gods here, nor any bodhi tree in the forecourt—and in place of silent monks there was a disconsolate-looking desk clerk and a pair of honeymooners wrestling with an umbrella that had blown inside out in the gales. I asked for the coffee shop, which was quite deserted. Do Yaun ordered a glass of Chinese tea, and I tried gamely to work my way through the worst apology for a hamburger I had had in all my days. I missed the rice and even the tofu soup, and when I told Do Yaun he laughed and suggested that I come back with him and become a disciple.

He turned back after lunch; he had to be in the monastery at the close of the canonical day, to take part in whatever was the Zen equivalent of compline. The last I saw of him was very much a Mallory and Irvine sighting—the curtain of mist, which still swirled down from the jagged peaks, parted briefly, and I
saw a tiny grey-robed figure moving briskly across a clearing in the woods. He had his straw hat on and seemed to be using his umbrella as an ice axe. Then he passed back into the trees, and the curtain of mist reformed, and a bus roared past me sounding his horn in what I thought was irritation, but turned out to be friendliness, because when I looked back everyone on board seemed to be waving and giving me the V-for-victory sign. I had to forget about Do Yaun for the time being.

The foothills smoothed themselves out, and the forests gave way to orchards and then to small fields filled with the curiously thatch-roofed rows that denoted ginseng plantations. It takes six or seven years for a ginseng root to grow to maturity, and during that time the soil that holds the precious plants must be protected from sun and frost and rain and wind, with straw strewn thickly on the ground, a timber frame built above it, and a thatched roof kept neat and rainproof above that. There had been little ginseng south of the mountains, where it was quite probably too warm or the soil was too thin or too acidic. But now, on the northern slopes of the foot-hills, just above the barley fields and the limitless acres of rice paddies, ginseng was grown in well-organized abundance to feed the ever-growing appetite for this most celebrated of nostrums and sexual tonics.

I came at last to Chonju, a town of very little distinction and even less beauty, where I stopped for the night. The hotel, which for no discernible reason had the Canadian flag flying above the front door, was a dreary place. The room boy, however, was an obliging sort and organized a washerwoman to scrub the accumulated dirt from my clothes and a pretty young girl to massage my back—there was a point somewhere near my right shoulder that burned, almost as though a welding torch was playing on it, after I had been carrying my pack for more than ten minutes.

The boy grinned as he ran off to get the masseuse. I knew why, of course. The girl he came back with, who looked like a young and perfectly respectable housewife, came into my room, shook my hand peremptorily, and started to take her clothes off
with all the charm and allure of a coal miner who had just ended his shift. I told her—or rather, since she spoke not a word of English, I indicated to her, by pointing to her fast-accumulating pile of clothes and then to my back, and by making squeezing motions with my hand—that I wanted her to deal with my shoulder and (for reasons of fatigue rather than morality) nothing else, at least for the time being. She looked rather grumpy at this news, and assumed an expression of deep puzzlement: most Koreans are inveterate call-girl fans, and there is a routine and a set of protocols to which this Miss Lee was accustomed. But she eventually agreed, got herself dressed again, and pummelled my back in a half-hearted way for ten minutes.

Then she began to make a fair show of real affection, and there was a moment of some temptation for me, but it passed as I considered the twin costs in
won
and in potential transmitted ailments, and I asked her to go. She gathered up her coat and sailed haughtily out of the room, probably to complain to the ever-eager room boy about having her time wasted. The room boy poked his head around the door five minutes later. ‘Massage good, yes?’ he asked. I grinned, he winked, and thus linked in conspiracy, he promised to meet me in the bar later that evening.

He brought three friends—a boy of nineteen (he being twenty) and two girls. I was the first
yangnom
they had met, and they were intrigued, and went through the routine of stroking the hair on my forearms. But their real purpose in coming, they explained, was to buy me dinner (I accepted) so long as I agreed to talk to them in English (I agreed). And so we all repaired to the nearest
bulgoki-jip
and feasted on barbecued spiced beef (though never lamb: both the Koreans and the Japanese loathe the smell of lamb) and
kimchi
and rice and plenty of beer (which the girls drank with great gusto, and in consequence giggled a great deal), and I taught them idioms like ‘The game isn’t worth the candle’ and ‘Half a loaf is better than no bread’ and the difference between ‘big’ and ‘huge’ and ‘catch’ and ‘capture’. They left me back on the hotel steps late at night, with addresses of my children and various friends back in Oxfordshire to whom they promised they
would write and who, I promised in return, would write back to them. (The promises, made after many bottles of O.B., were not ones for which any of us could vouch the next morning—and in any case, I could not be sure I had the addresses right.)

The next day, which was bright and clear, I stepped out early. I had fifty kilometres to do, and I planned to keep going. Everyone had warned me that this would be the most tedious part of the entire journey, across endless tracts of flat rice country, peopled by unfriendly farmers and the rural poor. And certainly as I strode away from Chonju, and the hills faded into the distance behind me, the countryside took on the aspect of northern France or Belgium, with haphazard and grubby little towns that looked like the setting for a Zola novel about grim folk enduring grim times.

Every few miles a large sign had been installed by the roadside—six lines of
hangul
script and the numbers 113, 112, written in red. I could just about make out the words, but there was no possibility of my understanding them, since the tiny dictionary I carried in my pocket only worked from English to Korean. After I had passed about five of the signs I started to get exasperated, and asked the owner of a shop where I had stopped to buy chocolate. He had replied ‘hello’ when I greeted him with ‘
annyonghaseyo
’, giving me confidence to put the question. However, his English was virtually non-existent, and the only words I could catch from his torrent of explanation were ‘north’, ‘spy’ and ‘telephone’.

Getting nowhere (I was being especially obtuse, it now seems), he started to play charades. He put imaginary binoculars to his eyes (I pulled out mine, and he nodded his head vigorously). He began writing on an imaginary pad (I took mine from my pocket), and he took pictures with an imaginary camera (I pointed to the Leica slung around my neck). He nodded, and then his nodding slowed, and he looked at me with a strange expression on his face. And then I realized—the notices were warnings to the public to be on the alert in case of spies from North Korea, and to urge them to telephone 113 or 112 if any were seen or
suspected. A spy, this Le Carré of the shopkeeping world seemed to think, carried binoculars, a notebook and a camera—and I had all three! I edged from his shop, sliding the screen door slowly open, mustering as warm and friendly a smile as I could, slipping beyond the door and sliding it shut again. I wondered if he had his doubts. If he had telephoned, his message was lost in the bureaucracy, for I heard nothing more.

My destination was the town of Iri and at dusk, dog-weary and with badly aching feet, I reached the outskirts. (Miss Lee’s ministrations, or something, had certainly improved my shoulder muscles.) I was rather surprised to find the place standing. And not just standing—Iri seemed a busy, prosperous little town, all lights and action, the shops crammed with people, the factories noisy with three shifts of production every day. It had not been that way eight years before, the night Iri blew up.

It was an icy midwinter night, and a munitions train was passing through town. Iri is an important railway junction, where the main line from Seoul divides into three, and this train, so it is said, was heading along the west-bound spur line to the huge American air base at Kunsan thirty miles away. It was said to be loaded with bombs and ordnance for the storage dumps there, though the air force has never admitted as much. Whatever the precise nature of the contents, the train stopped in Iri to take on a fresh crew. It was about 2
A.M.
, and the guard took the opportunity to steal a few moments in one of the few
makkoli-jips
still open for a bottle or two of the milky rice wine and perhaps a piece of
ojingoa
brought all the way from the Falkland Islands and, if he was hungry enough, a delicious bean pancake known as
pindae-ttuk
. He forgot the tall candle he had left burning in his cabin.

An hour or so later the candle tipped over, setting afire a pile of hessian sacking. Within minutes the whole rear of the train was ablaze, and then, in one enormous, unforgettable blast of noise and white-hot destruction, the entire tonnage of high explosives went up, sending a huge shock wave rolling out from the goods yards by Iri station. A crater fifty feet across and twenty
feet deep was all that remained of the railway station. Hundreds of surrounding houses were flattened—some say that a third of the town was either demolished or had to be. Officially, three hundred people died; today residents say the figure is closer to six hundred. There was an inquiry that blamed the guard; but no questions were ever raised in public about the nature of the load or about the wisdom of routing such massively destructive trains through so heavily populated an area. Questions like that are rarely raised, and even more rarely answered, in Korea.