Period of Distrust by Park Kyung-Ni (Part 1)

On the eve of the 28^th September reclamation of Seoul, Jinyong’s husband was killed by a bomb. Before he died, he had been talking about the death of a puppet soldier he had seen on the Seoul-Incheon highway. He was still a young boy. The boy soldier collapsed beneath the trees and a swarm of flies, which smelled the sickly stench of blood from his guts that exploded like a storm, came at him like a hungry demon. While he begged for a sip of water, he called out to his mother as if in a dream. One passer-by who saw this picked up a watermelon that had rolled down the street, split it open with a stone and gave it to the boy, but he died unable to eat it.

Almost as though her husband had predicted his own death, he died a few hours after telling this story.

At the time of the 4^th January retreat, Jinyong, having lost her husband, was the very last to leave Seoul with her mother and her three year old son on her back. But before they’d even reached Anyang, the Chinese Communist Army had overtaken and they were placed under fire from the UN army. Countless refugees fell down on the icy roads. The cow that pulled along the refugees rolled down the bank, still in its harness. A child was crying beside a corpse gushing out blood. Jinyong covered her eyes and fled.

The nightmarish war had ended.

Jinyong returned to Seoul, now in ruins, with her son, Munsu. Their lot was razed to the ground and she could barely even find its foundations. Beneath the tiles embedded in the weeds, she picked up a book that was falling apart. It was a Japanese book called ‘An Overview of French literature.’  When this was on the bookshelf – for a moment that recollection passed through her mind like an illusion. Jinyong gazed vacantly at her son’s indifferent eyes for a long while.

In the early summer when Munsu turned 9, Jinyong dreamt of the child soldier with flies swarming around his burst guts. As though she had foreseen death, the next day Munsu died. It was a rainy night.

The mother, who lived with Jinyong, her only child, repeatedly hit her head against the door frame, saying “it should’ve been me,” but Jinyong just stared into the void.

Her son didn’t die from an illness. He fell down on the road and died in hospital. But if that had been all, Jinyong may have been able to gradually forget it, as though it was one of the nightmares brought about by the war. But that wasn’t the case. The doctor’s negligence nearly killed him alive. The doctor didn’t even take an x-ray for the vital brain surgery and what’s worse, he started without even preparing the medicine. Her son died like a calf in a slaughterhouse without anaesthetic. This is how she threw her child away.

Outside, the evening’s rain was pouring down onto the road.

Jinyong’s eyes, which gazed vacantly at the ceiling, glistened in the light from time to time. Her pale cheeks became red. It was a fever from tuberculosis.

The sound of the rain pouring down incessantly could still be heard. It had been about a month since he died, but it felt like a thousand years.

Jinyong quietly closed her eyes. The sound of her son crying in the operating room washed over like waves.

She sprang up from her chair and gulped down a bottle of liquor. It was wine a friend had given her to drink when she couldn’t get to sleep.

Jinyong lay face down on her blanket and listened to her son’s cries in the operating room, which swept away like a strong current.

Somehow, she fell asleep. In her dream, Jinyong wildly roamed the hazy streets looking for her child, but woke up aghast at her son’s appearance, whose eyes, nose and mouth were all wrapped round and round in bandages and couldn’t be seen. Her body, drenched in sweat, was trembling.

She was suddenly struck with fear.

The rain had now stopped, and dawn was gradually permeating into the room through the window.

Staring into space, Jinyong had no idea why she felt so scared. It could have been because her son was already a spirit of the other world. If so, how could there be such pitiful human relations? She hated herself so much she could be sick.

She could hear the church bells ringing in the distance. She recalled having asked the ajumeoni (*a polite way to refer to a middle-aged woman) from Galwol-dong to take her to church on the next Sunday. Today was that day.

As promised, the ajumeoni from Galwol-dong came by before it turned eight o’clock. A long time ago, she had been married to a distant cousin of Jinyong’s, now deceased. Having no children, she turned to the church and became a devout Catholic, but then recently fell into hard times after joining a gye(*a private fund where the members put in a certain amount each month and take turns to use the accumulated money). Even Jinyong had once abandoned a gye in secret, with almost the entirety of the twenty thousand hwan that had been hurriedly gathered up by the members. She was persecuted by the thought of this ajumeoni’s misfortune. 

The ajumeoni, dressed in mended ramie clothing with a cicada wing pattern, comforted the wailing mother, her gold tooth sparkling when she spoke.

Whenever the mother saw someone she knew, she would hold their hand and whine about losing her grandson. Jinyong hated her for this, but it could not be denied that her mother, who had lived trusting in her only daughter, was in many ways put in a sorrowful position.

“Don’t cry, dear. You’ve got to think of the living. Jinyong must be so distraught. Let’s think of a way to move forward.” Since Jinyong was unemployed, they had no means of livelihood.

The ajumeoni soothed the mother saying all kinds of things, then adjusted her ribbon (she always tied a ribbon around her jacket, even in the summer) and said,

“Let’s try to live our lives somewhere. I’ve thought about it too… should I give you back your money? I can’t pay back the interest though…”

The mother’s face brightened. Jinyong put on her socks without a word.

The three of them stepped outside. The street was cool in the morning sun.

The mother, who was originally a Buddhist, had been a little reluctant to go to church, but she was now fine with it. She intended to always stay by her daughter’s side.

The ajumeoni drew herself under Jinyong’s parasol and started to whisper.

“The Lord won’t let us be unhappy anymore. It’s because he loves you that he gave you this opportunity. He’s calling for you. In this false human world, only He is the light.” She said words that any Christian could say. Looking down at the ground, Jinyong said,

“I’m not going to church to be saved. I just want to think there’s a heaven and that Munsu’s up there.”

“Of course he went to heaven. Such a sweet boy… he’ll be playing in a field of flowers. He’ll be happy.” She comforted her just like an elder should, but she spoke naively.

“Even if there are fields of flowers, he’ll be lonely. He’ll think of his mum.” Jinyong muttered to herself and looked up at the sky. Light clouds rolled past like a heaving sea.

“Don’t say that, just prepare to get christened or something. Even Sangbae’s already been christened.” Her voice seemed to ring out from the distant horizon.

“That atheist…got christened?” she asked mechanically.

“He had a change of heart recently.”

A faint smell drifted towards them. Jinyong stared at the ajumeoni’s mouth and her glittering gold tooth.

Sangbae was a university student lodging in the ajumeoni’s house. Just last spring, he had mocked her in his Busan accent, saying,

“Ajumeoni, Jesus could’ve walked on water. Ha ha ha! Maybe he lifted up his right leg before his left could fall in the water, and then lifted up his left leg before the right could fall in. Ha ha ha!”  He laughed, flaring his nostrils, clearly believing himself to be wonderful. While Jinyong thought of this, the ajumeoni wiped her sweat off with a handkerchief and said,

“He’ll move out of our house soon. His dad’s going to Seoul for work… so I wanted to get him christened before he left…” She spoke in a soft voice.

When they came before the church, a ginkgo tree blocked the gentle sunlight. Light pink gladioli were in bloom in the garden; for some reason they reminded Jinyong of the lotus flowers symbolic of Buddhism. Then somewhat randomly, she contemplated the distance between East and West. It was just a vague thought. But the next moment, she retraced her thoughts in a daze. That she was considering things so coolly without a hint of reverence when she here to see God for Munsu, could you call that just a kind of visual natural conceptualisation? Or else does it mean there’s room enough for such thoughts amongst my sadness? She felt embarrassed towards Munsu. She was sorry.

She looked indifferently at the ajumeoni‘s bosom, which was giving off a sweat-drenched smell.

Some children had gathered in the tree shade. Beside them, a middle-aged man had lain out crosses and bibles and such like a street stall and was selling them. She looked over at that scene as a stranger to the area. A cool breeze blew through her heart devoid of atmosphere.

Jinyong went inside the church. The ajumeoni wrapped her shoes in a cloth and said,

“This mass is mainly for the kids so it’s pretty noisy. Next time we’ll come earlier.”

Jinyong wasn’t listening; she was following the churchgoers with her eyes as they came in with their cumbersome shoes all wrapped up. Suddenly she thought of a song full of jeers about people going to chapel to give their love to Jesus, dying, and getting their shoes stolen. But then she felt an indescribable fear. She had blasphemed in a temple – pursued by her sense of sin, she followed the ajumeoni.

Mass started a little while later.

“I’m praying for my poor son Munsu. I beg you… truly, sincerely. Please take away his pain and give peace to his young spirit…” she murmured, closing her eyes. But the whispers of a cynic in a small corner of her heart were more persistent. The cynic whispers.  Munsu’s dead. He’s gone forever. She feels the gloom take over. The cynic whispers. His brain was split open by a knife. He died a cruel death.

She sees a deep red fireball blaze before her eyes. The cynic whispers on and on. The sound of a child’s hoarse, constricted cries in a dark and gloomy afterlife. Jinyong opened her eyes in a sweat. The smell of perspiration from the ajumeoni’s hair was suffocating. She feels dizzy. The white veils the churchgoers wore over their heads whitewashed her vision and her consciousness into one.

After some time, Jinyong looked over her shoulder. The choir boys, lined up like relief supplies, appeared. The hymn, a harmony of the boys’ different ranges, resounded through her ears like the noise of an organ unable to take in air. The figure of her wretched self, kneeling inside the church – Jinyong realised what a poor position this was.

Jinyong closed her eyes again, but she hated herself. She hated that she could never get rid of her sense of self. Somehow or other, she wanted to break free from her objective self-consciousness. As if looking for lost romance, she thought it true that God and Munsu’s death were mysteries of the same rank, and that nobody could ever criticise God or death.

When she first decided to leave the church, she thought that even if it (religion) was only an imaginary chronicle created by fiction, for Munsu alone, she could become a clown or a roly-poly toy. But conscious blindness is never really blindness.

Mass was nearly over. She saw something like a butterfly net, with a purse for contributions attached to a long stick, float in front of her chest. When the ajumeoni tossed a few coins into it, the butterfly net-like purse snuck away to the back row. Jinyong thought of a street singer’s worn-out hat passing before his onlookers. With that thought, she went outside.

Jinyong flopped down beneath a tree and looked at her mother’s red eyes as she left the church. She also watched children the same age as Munsu come out putting their shoes on. It felt to her as though the church standing under the summer sun was swaying gently. 

(More to come...)