The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (8 page)

He left his house, therefore, dressed in his usual street garments, his robes whiter than snow, his tall black hat of stiff horsehair gauze tied under his chin. On so fine a morning it was his pleasure to walk, and he did so with the measured speed befitting a gentleman and a scholar. Many recognized him and gave him respectful greeting, and because of his height and appearance the people parted to give him room, not stopping to show servility or fear. Indeed they had no fear. Accustomed as they were to dangers and distress, since the gods had given them a land which surrounding countries envied and longed to possess, the people were calm but firm in purpose and they were not afraid. They gave their greetings and went about their business while Il-han went on his.

His father was wont to meet him at the palace. When he entered the gate, however, the guard, peering through to see who stood there, opened the gate hastily and closed it at once.

“Is my father here?” Il-han inquired.

“Sir, he is already with the King and has been since dawn,” the guard replied, “but I have orders from the Queen that you are to go alone to her palace in the Secret Garden for audience. Meanwhile your father says I am to tell you that if his audience with the King ends first, he will await you here. If yours ends first, you are to wait.”

Il-han hesitated. It puzzled him that the Queen should send for him privately in such fashion, and what would he say to his father, or even later to the King? Nothing is hidden in palace or hovel and all would know that his father was already in audience with the King while he was only now waiting upon the Queen, an inexplicable division. Yet what could he do but continue to obey the royal command? He followed the guard through the palace grounds without further speech.

It was the season of chrysanthemums, and everywhere the noble flowers lifted their brilliant heads. In the Secret Garden the path was lined with potted chrysanthemums in waves and clouds of color, and thus escorted he came to the steep stone steps which led to the high terrace before the palace. At the carved and painted doorway of this palace he waited until the gate guard announced his presence to a palace guard, who announced it in turn to a palace steward. Then the doors opened and he was ushered into the large waiting room he knew well from other times when he, but always with his father, had been summoned by the Queen. Low tables of fine wooden chests bound in brass and cushioned floor seats gave the room comfort. Upon the wall opposite the door were scrolls painted by ancient artists, and the corners of the room were banked with rare and beautiful chrysanthemums in porcelain pots.

“Sir, be seated,” the steward said. “The Queen is finishing her breakfast and her women are waiting to put on her outer robes. She will receive you in the great hall as usual.”

Il-han sat down on a floor seat and gave thanks for the tea which the steward poured from a pottery teapot into a fine silver bowl. The tea was an infusion of the best Chinese tea, the tender new leaves of spring unscented by jasmine or alien flowers, and he drank it with pleasure and slowly. In a few minutes the steward entered.

“The Queen,” he said in solemn voice.

Il-han rose and followed the man into the next hall, a vast room bare of furniture except for the throne set upon dais at the west wall, the hall itself facing south. No one was there, but he knew the custom and he stood in respectful waiting, his head bowed, and his eyes fixed upon the floor.

He had not long to wait. In less time than he could have counted to a hundred, the curtains at the north wall were put aside and the Queen entered. He saw the edge of her crimson robes moving about her feet as she walked to her throne, and lifting his eyes no further until she gave permission, he bowed low three times in silence.

It was for the Queen to speak first and she did so, and continued thus after suitable greeting.

“I have received your memorial,” she said, “and doubtless you think it strange that I have sent for you apart from your father. But you are so dutiful a son that if the two of you come together, as you have always in the past, whether I am with the King or alone, your father speaks and you keep silent or you defer to what he says, and do not speak your own thoughts.”

Her voice was fresh and clear and young. He did not reply, perceiving that she would speak on, and thus she continued.

“I have read many times your memorial. Why did you send it privately?”

At this word “privately” he felt hot blood rise up from his breast to his neck and even to his ears, and he cursed the trick his blood could play on him to turn his ears scarlet.

The Queen’s quick eyes, all observing, now noticed his confusion. “Do you hear what I ask, you with the two red ears?”

She laughed and it was the first time he had ever heard that gay laughter. He dared not smile or reply and he felt his ears hotter than ever. In his confusion he let his eyes move toward her and saw the tips of her silver shoes beneath the crimson satin of her full skirts. Small silver shoes, so strangely like those of Turkish women. Where had they come from in the beginning? But who knew the wellsprings of his people? In that long struggle, covering how many centuries could not be known, the tribes of Central Asia who were his ancestors had mingled with others, and now these little silver shoes of a Korean queen were a lost symbol of woman’s grace.

“And dare you dream in my presence?” the Queen now inquired. Her voice was playful but she put an edge into the words.

He lifted his head, startled, and then blushed anew because inadvertently he had seen her face.

“You need not turn so red,” the Queen said. “I am old enough to be looked at without fear by a young man.”

“Forgive me, Majesty,” Il-han said. He fixed his eyes on her rounded firm chin and the royal lips went on speaking softly but with definition in shape and sound.

“Will you answer my question?”

“Majesty,” he replied, and because he was angry with himself for his confusion in her presence, and especially for his wayward thoughts concerning her shoes, he made his voice low and stern. “I sent the memorial to you because I know your loyalty to China.”

He needed not to say what they both knew too well, that he came to her because the King was torn between his father and her. This was to say the King was torn between the Regent’s desire to balance one nation against another and so gain precarious independence for Korea, and the Queen’s resolute faith in China. Therefore he continued to skirt direct speech.

“You have reason, Majesty, for your faith. Through centuries China has avoided anything that can alienate our people. But now when we must prevent Japan from landing soldiers on our soil can the Empress save us when it may be she cannot even save her own people? Remember the opium wars which China always lost to England, who is friendly to Japan, Majesty, and who will always take Japan’s part. And remember that France has cut a huge slice from the Chinese melon and claimed it for her own—Indo-China, Majesty! And China cannot prevent it or take it back again.”

Now the silver shoe on the imperial right foot began to tap impatiently.

“France! What is it? We have only seen French priests, bearing in one hand a cross, in the other a sword! I have heard that they are winebibbers, but they make their wine of grapes, not rice.”

“I still regret, Majesty, that our people massacred the French Christians,” Il-han said, “and even more, that in our anger we attacked the American merchant ship, the
General Sherman
. And the worst folly was that we killed the American crew.”

The Queen waved this off with her right hand. “What right had an American merchant ship in the inner waters of the Taedong River, near so great a city as Pyongyang? Are there Korean ships in the rivers of—of—of—what are some of the American rivers?”

“Majesty, I do not know,” Il-han replied.

“You see,” the Queen cried in triumph. “We do not so much as know the names of their rivers, much less sail our ships on foreign waters! I see no difference in these wild western peoples, and as for the Americans, who knows what they are? A mongrel people, I am told, made up of the cast-offs, the renegades, the rebels, the younger sons, the landless and the homeless of other western nations!”

He could wait no longer. “Majesty, they are our only hope, nevertheless. America alone has no dreams of empire. With her vast territories it may be she has no need to dream and so can be our friend.”

“You hurry me,” the Queen complained, “and I am not to be hurried.”

“Forgive me, Majesty,” Il-han said.

His eyes caught sight now of her hands, elegant and restless upon her silken lap, and involuntarily he lifted his eyes and saw her face, this time all in a glance, the dark eyes large and glorious in the light of her intelligence, the black brows straight and clear, the brilliant white of her smooth skin, the red of lip and rose of cheek. He looked quickly at the floor. If she noticed, she did not say so, and she went on musingly and as though to convince herself.

“These western nations—have they anywhere done justly to other peoples? Their pretense is trade and religion but their true purpose is to annex our land. No, I will have none of these western nations!”

Il-han continued in steady patience. “I will remind you, Majesty, that when the diplomatic mission from Japan returned only recently from the western countries they reported to their Emperor that these great new western nations would not look with favor on a military coup in Korea by General Saigo. We were saved by the western nations, Majesty!”

He had gone too far. The Queen rose, took three steps forward, drew a closed fan from her sleeve and struck twice, once on his right cheek and once on his left, as he knelt before her.

“Dare to speak!” she cried. “Was it not six years ago—only six, it is to remind you—that the Empress Tzu-hsi, my friend, forced Japan to make treaty with us and recognize us as equal with Japan? It is China, not the western nations, who saved us!”

Il-han could bear it no longer. He forgot that she was the Queen and no simple woman. He lifted his head and glared at her and he lifted his voice and shouted at her until his voice roared into the beams of the palace roof.

“That Treaty of Amity? Treaty of Amity—a joke! When the ambassador came with four hundred armed men to convince us! Japan was given special privileges here on our soil, and how can we depend now on China, when Japan has invaded Formosa, and even the Ryukyu Islands?”

The Queen shrieked in return. “Will you not understand? Small as we are, and weak in numbers, we can be attacked—attacked, absorbed—there are a hundred ways, if China is not our suzerain! We can only live in freedom and independence if we are in friendship with a powerful nation, and pray heaven it will never be Russia or Japan—no, nor America!—and therefore it must be China!”

At this Il-han was speechless and in his anger he did what no man had ever done before. He left the truebone royal presence without permission and turning his back on the Queen, he strode out of the palace, his head high and heart beating fit to burst.

… His father was waiting for him in the entrance hall at the gate of the palace. They walked out together, and he waited for his father to speak. How could he say, “The Queen wished to speak to me alone”? But his father was complacent. He walked with measured steps, his toes turned outward as an old scholar walks, a smile on his face.

Seeing that his father was not disposed to speech, Il-han kept silent, too. The day was fine and the people on the streets were enjoying the mildness of the autumn. Each such day was precious, for there could not be many now before the snows of winter fell. Over the low walls of the courtyards between the houses, or in front of gateways, the persimmon trees were bright with their golden fruit, and piles of persimmons were heaped on the ground, ready for market. Children ate until they were stuffed, their cheeks sticky with the sweet juice, and for once no one reproved them. It was impossible, moreover, to speak of important matters in these crowds of people.

“I will come to your house now and visit my grandsons,” his father said.

It was not usual for father and son to live separately, but Il-han lived in the Kim house in the city, that he might be near the palace, and his father preferred to live outside the city in the ancestral country home of the Kim clan. Here he could indulge his love for meeting his friends and making poems, subject only to the occasional summons from the royal family.

“I have only one grievance against your father,” his dying mother had once told Il-han. “He has never visited other women nor does he gamble, but he cannot live without his friends.”

It was true that these friends, themselves idle gentlemen and poetasters, gathered every day in his father’s house to remember together the glories of ancient Korea, to recount the events of her heroes, to recall how even the civilizing influence of Buddhism reached Japan only through Korea, to repeat that sundry monuments of art and culture now in Japan had been stolen from Korea—was not the beautiful long-faced image of the Kwan Yin in Nara sculptured in Korea, although what Japanese would acknowledge it! And from such raptures came poems, many poems, none of them, Il-han thought bitterly, of the slightest significance for these dangerous busy times.

Yet when he had complained in private to Sunia, she refused to agree with him.

“Not so,” she declared. “We must be reminded of these past glories, so that we know how worthy of love our country is and how noble our people are.”

He walked in silence with his father now along the stone-paved street until they entered the gate of Il-han’s home and there his father led the way to the main room while Il-han bade a servant bring the children to see their grandfather. “And invite their mother, also,” he called after the servant.

His father sat himself down on a floor cushion and a maidservant bustled in with tea and small cakes, and Il-han sat in the lower place, as a son should. In a few minutes Sunia entered with the children, the elder clinging to her hand and the younger in the arms of his nurse. She made the proper obeisance and watched while the elder son made his and the grandfather looked on with pride and dignity.