The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (7 page)

On this morning, bright and calm, she walked under the mulberry trees with her son, and she felt of the leaves and tested them on her tongue for their taste. They were not yet strong or bitter, but no time must be wasted.

“We must set the silkworm eggs today, my princeling,” she told her son, and with him she went to the service house where the eggs had been kept on ice during the winter and through early spring so that they would not hatch before the mulberry leaves were ready. Now she bade her women prepare the large baskets for the eggs, and they made themselves busy, the little boy running between the women here and there and everywhere at once in his excitement.

“I want the worms to come out now,” he cried impatiently.

Sunia laughed. “They are only eggs! We must let them feel the warmth and then the worm will begin to grow and when the shells are too small for them, they will come out.”

After a few days of such warmth, the child asking a hundred times a day, they did come out, thousands of small creatures, each no more than the eighth of an inch in length, and no thicker than a silken thread, and the women brushed them off gently upon the finely cut leaves of the mulberry trees which now covered the bottom of the baskets. For three days and three nights the women fed the small creatures every three hours, and in the night again and again Sunia arose from her wide bed, while Il-han lay sleeping, and walked softly across the moonlit courtyards to see how her silkworms did. When the three days were passed, the silkworms stopped eating and prepared for their first rest. Now they spun out of themselves silk threads, as fine as hairs, and they fastened themselves upon the mulberry leaves, except for their heads which they held erect. Slowly they changed their color.

“See,” Sunia said to her elder son, “the silkworms are putting on their sleeping robes.”

Heads up, the silkworms slept for a day or two, while Sunia waited with her son.

“What do they do next, these silkworms?” the child asked.

He had refused to study or to stay with his tutor during these days, for he could think of nothing except the silkworms and what they did. They had become creatures of magic to him, fey and enchanting, as indeed they were to Sunia herself, for she could scarcely stay by her infant long enough to suckle him, and she hurried the child to finish without dawdling so that she could thrust him into a servingwoman’s arms and return to the service house.

“Now,” she replied to her son, “the silkworms must push off their old skins, for these skins have grown too small and they are making new ones while they sleep.”

“Shall I push off my skin one day?” the child asked in alarm.

Sunia laughed. “No, for your skin is made to stretch.”

At this moment she heard Il-han’s step, for though silkworms are women’s business and he pretended no interest in them, yet he came a few times to see how they did and to observe the life process of which they are the symbol. He spoke now to answer his son’s question.

“You will grow too big for your skin, too,” he told his son, “and skin after skin you will cast aside, but you will not know it. Without knowing, you will change into someone tall and strong and you will grow hairs on your face and your body. Then you will be a man, inside and out.”

The child listened, and his mouth trembled and turned down ready to weep.

“Why must I grow hair on my face and on my body?” he asked in a small voice.

“You scare him,” Sunia cried and she gathered the child into her arms. “Don’t cry, my little—you will like being a man some day. It is beautiful to be a man and strong and young and ready to make children of your own.”

The child stopped his tears at the wonder of this new thought. “Who will be the mother?” he inquired.

“We will find her for you,” Sunia said, and over the child’s head she met Il-han’s eyes upon her with the look that she loved.

Four times the silkworms ate until their skins grew too small and four times they slept and shed those skins, eating at last so heartily of the mulberry leaves that the trees were stripped and the worms themselves so large that the champing of their jaws could be heard even in the courtyard outside as they chewed upon the leaves. Meanwhile no man or woman was allowed to smoke a pipe of tobacco near the silkworm house, for such smoke kills the worms.

All this time Sunia hovered over her silkworms. “Oh, you special creatures,” she murmured, in endearment.

At last they became a silvery white, a clear pure color, and this meant that they were ready to spin their cocoons and change to moths. The women prepared twirls of straw rice for the spinning and the spinners began their work, weaving their heads this way and that as they fastened a few threads of the silk to certain points of guidance, and this was the task of shaping the cocoons. They wove their heads this way and that inside the cocoon shape until it was a nest of silk, firm and soft, and each cocoon was made of a filament many thousands of feet in length and each worm became a chrysalid. Now was the time to choose the best and biggest of cocoons to make next year’s seed, and these cocoons were not used for silk but, as chrysalids became moths, they were allowed to cut their way through and lay eggs upon paper cards, each moth laying four hundred eggs before she died. But the other cocoons were dropped into boiling water before the chrysalids were moths, and the cocoons were kept in water, boiling hot, so that the gum which held the filaments together could be melted and the filaments reeled off and spun into thread.

Yet Sunia did not allow these broken cocoons to be wasted either. She bade the women boil them, too, and remove the empty chrysalid skins. When this was done, the women pulled the cocoons into small flat mats of silk. These were dried and used to quilt the linings of winter garments and make them soft and warm. In such ways Sunia tended her household and faithfully she kept the old customs and the family lived as though peace were sure and life eternal, and Il-han watched her as she moved about his house, the wife he loved and mother to them all. He had no heart to tell her of the world outside her house until he must.

… Thus the spring passed in one glorious day after another. The rain fell in good season. The ancient land grew fresh and green and gay with flowers and the people prepared for Tano, the spring festival which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. True, Il-han was put to much discomfort during the festival, for Sunia was a zealous housekeeper and this festival was the time, by custom, for housecleaning and mending and renewing after winter. The paper on lattice walls must be torn off and fresh paper pasted on, and even the paper covers of the ondul floors must be changed.

“You must allow me my library,” Il-han said every year and against the complaints of her women, Sunia obeyed him because she loved him and could refuse him nothing.

“We will watch for a day when he is summoned to court,” she told her women, “and then we will steal into his library and work like magicians and clean everything before he comes back.”

This was her usual ruse, and meanwhile Il-han enclosed himself among his books while around him the household was in a happy confusion. When the rooms were cleaned and the courtyards swept, the women washed their clothes and then themselves and the children. This was the season, too, when they gave special heed to their hair after the winter, and into the basins they poured the juice of changpo grass, which cleanses and leaves a fragrance exceedingly pleasant and rare, and as they dried the long thick locks they thrust leaves of the grass into their hair and on both sides of their ears. Women less learned than Sunia believed that the changpo grass kept away the diseases which the heat of summer brings, but she declared herself against such superstitions because Il-han would not allow them, although in her heart she did not know what she believed.

The time of the Tano festival was a time of joy and freedom, a festival of spring celebrated for thousands of years and long before the beginning of written history, and Sunia, though a wife and mother, had kept the girl alive in herself. Thus during the festival she joined in the sport of swinging, which belonged to the day. Il-han, knowing that she loved the sport, ordered the servingmen to hang ropes as usual to make a swing from the branch of a great date tree in the eastern courtyard. There he watched Sunia and her women swinging and she went higher than any of the women, until his heart stopped to see her high in the air, her red skirts flying and her hair, freshly washed, loosening from its braids. What if one day the rope broke and he saw her lying broken on the ground? But the rope had never broken and he tried to believe it never would.

When the festival was over, nevertheless, he ordered the swing taken down and in the night he clasped her close again and again, with renewed passion until she could not bear it, dearly as she loved him, and she cried out at last against his arms so tightly holding her that she felt imprisoned, though by love.

“Let me breathe!” she cried.

He loosed her, but only a little, and she lay in his arms.

“Why are you so silent now?” she asked at last. “Did I offend you?”

“No,” he said. “How could you offend me? I am oppressed by happiness—our happiness.”

“Oppressed?” She echoed the word, uncomprehending.

“How can it last?” he replied.

“It will last,” she said joyously, “it will last until we die.”

Why did she speak of death? It was on his tongue to cry out against the thought that they could die, but he kept silent. Death was what he feared, not the sweet and quiet end of a long life, but sudden death outside their door, death waiting and violent. Yet the difference between Il-han and Sunia was only the bottomless difference between man and woman over which no bridge is ever built nor ever can be. Il-han’s life was centered outside his house, and what went on within the compound walls was the periphery. Joyous or troublesome alike, the household life was diversion from his mainstream. He trusted Sunia with all that went on inside the walls, and when she complained that he did not listen to what she told him at the end of a day, he smiled.

“I know that you do all things well,” he said.

She would not accept this smooth reply.

“What have you to think of, if not of us?” she demanded.

“Is night the suitable time in which to inquire of so large a matter?” he countered, and he made love to her so that he could divert her and be diverted.

Somehow the summer slipped past, the days hot, the nights cool, and Il-han was so perturbed and puzzled by the tangled affairs of the times that he did not count the days or the months.

One morning, waking late and alone in their bedroom, he smelled the sharp autumn fragrance of cabbage freshly cut. Could it be already time again to make kimchee for the winter? He rose and looked out of the window. Yes, there in the courtyard were piles of celery cabbages, brought in from the farm, doubtless, the day before. Two servingwomen were washing the cabbages in tubs of salted water and two more were brushing long white radishes clean of earth while still two others were chopping both cabbages and radishes into fine pieces. At a table set outdoors on this fine clear morning Sunia, wrapped in a blue apron, was mixing the spices. Hot red peppers, ground fresh ginger, onions, garlic, and ground cooked beef she was mixing together, exactly to his taste and according to the Kim family recipe. He knew, for in the first year of their marriage she had made Pak kimchee, so bland a mixture that he had rebelled against it. He had laid down his chopsticks when he tasted it for the first time.

“You must invite my mother to teach you how to make kimchee,” he told Sunia.

Her eyes had sparkled with sudden anger. “I will not eat Kim kimchee! It burns the skin from my tongue.”

“Keep this Pak stuff for yourself,” he had retorted. “I will ask my mother to give me enough kimchee for myself.”

She had shown no signs of yielding but the next year, he had noticed, she made the kimchee according to Kim recipe. Now, by habit, each year he inspected the kimchee and tasted the first morsel. He smiled and yawned to wake himself and then began to wash himself and to prepare for the day. When he was ready, he sauntered into the courtyard and it was here that Sunia continued again her gentle accusations that he was always busy and apart from family life. The women had fallen silent when he appeared and they did not look up or seem to listen while their master and mistress talked, after he had tasted the kimchee and approved it.

“For an example, this morning,” Sunia said, her eyes upon the thin sharp knife with which she chopped the spices, “where do you go now? Day after day you leave after the morning meal and then we see you no more until twilight. Yet you never tell me where you have been or where you will go again tomorrow.”

“I will tell you everything when I come home tonight,” he said. “Only give me my breakfast now and let me go.”

Something in the abruptness of his voice made her obedient. She summoned a woman to finish her task and washed her hands and followed him into the house. In usual silence Il-han ate his morning meal of soup and rice and salted foods, and Sunia kept the children away from him, the elder son given to his tutor, and the younger, now beginning to creep, to a wet nurse. She suckled her children until they were six months old and past the first dangers of life and then she gave them to a wet nurse, a healthy countrywoman, to suckle until they were three years old and able to eat all foods.

This morning she served Il-han alone and when he had eaten she ate her own breakfast quietly, glancing at him now and then.

“You are losing flesh,” she said at last. “Is there some private unhappiness in you?”

“No unhappiness concerning you,” he said.

He wiped his mouth on a soft paper napkin and rose from the floor cushion and she ran to fetch his outer coat and thus, with a warm exchange of looks, his kind, hers anxious, they parted. He dared not tell her what lay upon his heart and mind. His memorial which he had begun in the spring and then put aside as better left unsaid was now finished and in the Queen’s hands, for as he had watched the tide of affairs sweep on he could keep silent no longer. He was now summoned by the Queen to come alone to her palace. At the same time the King had sent a summons to his father. Until now father and son had gone together in obedience to royal command. Did this separation signify a new difference between King and Queen? He did not know and he could only obey.