The 111-Year Prophecy 1-8: A Child Between Bamboo Spears and Torches

Section 8 — A Child Between Bamboo Spears and Torches

Less than twenty days after the men left, a sound reached Cheongsugol.

It was midday on the twenty-third of the tenth month. From beyond the pass, a sound like beans roasting in a pan came riding on the wind. At first they thought it was dry lightning far off. But the sky was clear. The sound broke off and came again through half the day, and in between, thicker, duller sounds crossed over, shaking the ground. The villagers put down their work and looked toward the pass. Fighting had broken out around the provincial headquarters at Gongju. The rising that in spring had been an affair of the south a thousand li away was now making its own sound two passes away.

The sound went on three days. On the evening of the third day it stopped. And news came. The rising army had met the capital troops and the Japanese on the Iin plain and the Hyopo hill below the headquarters, pushed and been pushed back, and in the end, unable to open the headquarters, had withdrawn toward Nonsan. Many were dead, they said. But the rising army still numbered tens of thousands, and would come up again. The women of Cheongsugol clung to that. If they were coming up again, then they were still alive.

Cheongsugol in those days had become a village without fathers.

Only the old, the women, and the children remained. Choe Do-hyang kept the head house, went round the houses left on their own, and opened the storeroom to share out winter provisions. Little Mu-gung did not leave his mother’s side. Since his father left, the child had grown markedly quiet. Every day he went out to the mouth of the village and looked at the sky beyond the pass where his father had vanished. Whatever a four-year-old could know, over that small face lay a shadow that did not belong to his years.

From the seventh of the eleventh month, the month of the solstice, the sound came again. This time it was louder. Night and day for three days the sound of beans roasting did not stop beyond the pass. It came at night too. At night the villagers lowered their lamps, barred their doors, and listened to it. The children learned to hold back their crying, and the grown-ups learned not to ask. Then at dusk on the ninth of the eleventh month, the sound stopped. And after that it never came again.

From the day after the sound stopped, those who had gone out to the rising and survived began to drift back into Cheongsugol, one and two at a time.

Few came back whole. Most had a broken arm or a limp, and some had been shot. The news they brought was all of one kind: terrible. It had been a great battle at the Ugeum pass south of Gongju. The capital troops and the Japanese had camped on the crest of the pass, and the rising army had climbed toward that pass more than forty times in two days, they said. Each time they climbed, bullets poured like rain from the crest, and the white coats fell and covered the slope white. Bamboo spears could not beat guns. The incantation did not stop bullets. When a bullet goes through the body, what use is a charm, what use a chant? Of the tens of thousands who went up the slope, a few thousand came down, they said. The survivors scattered and were hunted. Remembering that hellish slope, the men who came back shuddered. Some could not speak a word for days, like men whose souls had left them; some called the names of dead friends in their sleep every night. Of So-mun no one had news. Some said they had seen him on the slope; some said they had not.

Choe Do-hyang hid them in and around the head house and took them in. She rubbed salve into the wounded and boiled gruel for the starving. The Way that says there is Heaven in man, so serve man as Heaven, she kept alone in her husband’s absence. But at night she would go out to the back yard and stand a long time looking toward the pass before coming in. And word came from the mouths of the returned that the government troops, saying they would pull up the rising by the root, had begun to descend on every district, every village. On the pretext of hunting out those who had joined the rising, they were seizing and killing even the guiltless and burning houses, it was said. The fire of calamity was at last drawing near Cheongsugol. If the rising army had collapsed like this, all that remained was the government troops’ revenge. This valley, which had been a base of the rising, could not be left unharmed. Each night she held Mu-gung to her and prayed that her husband was safe, and that this calamity would pass Cheongsugol by. But that this wish was idle, she herself knew.

One returned believer, his eyes unfocused, said this. The most frightening thing he had seen was neither gun nor sword. It was the look in the eyes of men killing men without the least hesitation. The faces that pulled the trigger without blinking, as if they were not killing men but slaughtering beasts. Little Mu-gung, listening beside him from behind his mother’s skirt, gazed steadily at the man’s face. The child’s face showed that he did not understand all of what was said. Only, while the man’s voice shook, Choe Do-hyang knew through her fingertips that the small hand gripping her skirt kept tightening.

Mu-gung in those days had become, markedly, a child who studied the grown-ups’ faces.

Even to a four-year-old’s eyes it was plain that the village had changed. The grown-ups let their sentences trail off, lowered their lamps at night, and started at an unfamiliar footstep. The child watched all of it quietly. And he too lowered his voice, and softened his footsteps. As if learning with his young body that the whole village was holding its breath against something. At an age when any other child would run and play and throw tantrums, Mu-gung did not. He only held his mother’s skirt and stared at the world with his large black eyes.

Choe Do-hyang would look at the child a long time. One night, holding the child who tossed and could not sleep, she asked softly:

“Mu-gung, are you afraid?”

The child was silent a moment, then answered in a small voice:

“Father… doesn’t come.”

Choe Do-hyang’s chest was wrung. What the child asked about was never the fire or the gunfire, always his father. She held the child tighter. And as her husband had done every night, she whispered the six names softly at the child’s ear. So-mun, Mu-gung, Dae-han, Dok-rip, Man-se, Tong-il. The child’s breathing settled little by little. To this child the six names were still an incantation without meaning, and seemed only a lullaby standing in for his father’s voice. Listening to the sound, the child fell asleep. Choe Do-hyang looked down at the sleeping child and prayed that he would grow strong enough to bear the weight of those six names. That this disordered world would not break the child, but only temper him hard.

And that night came.

It was the night the government troops camped in the neighboring district beyond the pass and began to fall on the nearby villages one after another. Near midnight, the people of Cheongsugol saw the sky beyond the pass turn red. At first they thought the sunset had lingered late. But it was not the sunset. It was fire. The light of the neighboring district burning was dyeing the night sky red. Under that red sky, now and then, gunfire rattled like beans roasting. And on the wind, something like people’s screams came faintly across.

The villagers froze where they stood. The women clutched their children and hid in the corners of their rooms. The old gathered before the village shrine and put their hands together and prayed. Choe Do-hyang took Mu-gung in her arms and went into the inner quarters of the head house. But little Mu-gung could not take his eyes from that red sky.

The child slipped out of his mother’s arms and went out into the yard. Choe Do-hyang, startled, followed. Mu-gung crossed the yard and climbed the path that led to the hill behind the head house. Though his mother called his name he did not stop. As if drawn by something, the child climbed to the top of the hill. And standing on that hilltop, he looked at the neighboring district burning in the distance.

The small back of four-year-old Yeon Mu-gung stood on the hill against the red night sky.

Choe Do-hyang came up after him and tried to take him in her arms. But even at his mother’s touch the child did not turn. He only stared with those black, deep eyes at the flames burning far away. The red firelight flickered over the child’s face. There was a sound of teeth chattering. The small hand moved as if groping in the air, and finding nothing, seized the hem of his mother’s skirt. Something warm ran down between his legs and wet his trousers, but the child gave no sign of noticing. What that fire was, what that gunfire was, a four-year-old could not have known. But not knowing did not, it seemed, keep it from reaching him. The child made not even the sound of breathing. The small shoulders trembled finely.

Each time the wind came up, an acrid smell came from far off. The smell of something burning. Thatch burning, storerooms burning, perhaps people burning. Little Mu-gung smelled that smell for the first time. And he never forgot it as long as he lived. In later years, grown to a man, whenever he smelled something burning somewhere, his body went back to this night without his willing it. To the red sky, the gunfire like beans roasting, the faint screams carried on the wind, this acrid smell. It was a memory carved in smell. Deeper than what the eyes saw, what the nose breathed lodged in the young body.

From the burning district far away, now and then sparks shot up into the sky. The child watched those red sparks rise into the black night sky and die out among the stars. At last the child spoke.

“Mother. Does that go to Heaven too?”

Choe Do-hyang could not answer at once. It was what the father had told the child at his ear night after night. That when a person dies they do not go back to the earth but go to Heaven. That those words would come back out of the child’s mouth on this night, in this place, she had not known either. It was not a question that should come from a four-year-old’s mouth.

Choe Do-hyang stood beside the child and tried to gauge what he was seeing, then gave it up. It was too great a sight for a four-year-old to bear. She wanted to cover the child’s eyes. But strangely, her hand kept faltering as it reached to shield him. Some foreboding held her: that this child was seeing now what he must see, that this moment was a moment this child needed. The six names her husband whispered at the child’s ear every night flashed suddenly through her mind. Perhaps this child, in order to walk the road of those six names, was carving this horror into his two eyes now. Instead of shielding the child, she quietly wrapped her hands around his two shoulders from behind. To watch with him. That was all a mother could do.

But in that burning night, something else was coming into bloom alongside it.

In later years Mu-gung never forgot this night as long as he lived. Even as a grown man he remembered clearly the red sky of this night. And he used to say that this was the night he first “saw” the world. The fire carved into a four-year-old’s eyes was not a nightmare that passed in a night. It was the first letter carved into a young soul, of what kind of place this world was, of what people could do to people, and of what must be protected. As his father So-mun, thirty years before in the spring of his fifth year, had first felt something in the silence of a village that had lost its Teacher — now the son Mu-gung, at the threshold of winter in his fourth year, looking at a burning world, was feeling something for the first time. Across a generation, in the same place, a seed was falling again.

The people of this family, in every generation, saw the horror of the world first, at a young age. The Teacher’s martyrdom, the calamity of the rising, and the bitterness of a lost country and the oppression of sword and gun yet to come. Perhaps that was the part Heaven had laid on this family. To hurt before others, to understand before others, and so to step forward before others. On little Mu-gung’s trembling shoulders, the weight of that part was being laid for the first time. The child did not take his eyes from the red sky. Though the hands wrapped around his shoulders tightened, the small body never did turn away.

The child suddenly spoke. His eyes had not left the flames.

“Mother.” The young voice shook. “Over there… people are crying.”

Choe Do-hyang’s chest was wrung. This little one was hearing the weeping of people dying in the flames far away. The sound the grown-ups tried their best to turn from, the child was hearing with his whole heart. She wrapped the child in her arms from behind. And putting her mouth to the child’s ear, she said softly:

“Yes. People are crying. There is Heaven in those people too, and that Heaven is being trampled, and that is why they cry. Mu-gung, look well. And do not forget. That there is Heaven in you, and there is Heaven in those people. That one day, when you are grown, you must do something for those crying Heavens.”

The child’s face showed that he did not understand all of his mother’s words. But at the words “do not forget,” the small hand gripping her skirt tightened again. As So-mun’s father, thirty years before, had carved the words “gone to Heaven” into little So-mun, now Choe Do-hyang was carving the words “do not forget” into little Mu-gung. They were words this family would hand down from generation to generation.

That night mother and son stood a long time on the hill. Until the flames died down. Until the sky that had been dyed red turned black again. And until, above that black sky, the chill stars of early winter in the year Gabo came out one by one.

That night it was not only mother and son who stood on the hill.

The villagers, alarmed by the light, came up the hill one by one, and each looked at that red sky. The old put their hands together and chanted; the women clutched their children and sobbed. No one could make a loud sound. The thought that those flames might swallow this valley next stopped their mouths. The swallowed silence that had covered this village thirty years before, the night the Teacher was martyred, now covered the hilltop again. The years had passed, but the silence of the trampled had not changed in the least.

One old man came up beside Mu-gung. It was the old man who, thirty years before at dawn on the day So-mun was born, had looked at the persimmon blossom and said it had bloomed too prettily. He was older still now, bent, his eyes dim, but still alive and keeping this valley. He stood beside little Mu-gung and looked at the firelight with him. And he murmured softly, as if to himself:

“It was like this thirty years ago too. That spring too, the sky grieved like that… the year the Teacher went. But this time it’s not spring but the month of the solstice, and it cries louder than it did then.”

Tears ran from the old man’s wrinkled eyes. He looked down at little Mu-gung beside him. He who had watched the dawn of So-mun’s birth was now watching the son grown enough to watch this night of calamity. With a trembling hand he stroked Mu-gung’s head. And he could say nothing. Only the hand stayed a long time on the child’s head.

Before daybreak, people went down the hill one by one. The flames had died down, but the acrid smell and the trembling the fire had left did not easily pass. Choe Do-hyang too carried Mu-gung down the hill. The child had fallen asleep in his mother’s arms. He was worn out from watching that terrible sight all night. Choe Do-hyang looked down at the sleeping child’s face. On that small face the afterimage of the red firelight still seemed to linger. She kissed the child’s forehead and vowed in her heart. Whatever happened, this child she would keep. The mission this child would shoulder, she would see that this child lived to carry on.

That night, when she came home, Choe Do-hyang laid the sleeping child down and opened the wall cupboard.

Inside was the paulownia box. The box in which her husband had put the written revelation of the six names, and enshrined the old object wrapped in cloth. The box that held this family’s mission. Choe Do-hyang did not open it carelessly. Only, now, when the government troops might fall on Cheongsugol at any moment, she knew that this box above all must be kept. It was the very thing her husband had charged her with as he went out to the rising. The charge to keep this box, this prophecy, whatever happened. She took out the box and wrapped it in several layers of cotton cloth. And she hid it under the maru, the wooden floor of the inner quarters, in a deep place where no eye would fall. In a place where, if fire came, if men burst in, it could be kept to the last.

After hiding the box, Choe Do-hyang put her hands together before it a moment. What names were written on that paper, she too knew. Only, she had never opened the box and seen inside with her own eyes. But that this was this family’s future, and the fate that sleeping child would shoulder, she knew entirely. She vowed in her heart. Even if it cost her life, this box and that child she would keep. Her husband had gone out to the rising with his body; she would fight here, in this place, the fight of keeping the purpose. That was the road the mistress of a family that had conceived a prophecy must walk. The road of the keeper, which the daughters-in-law of this family would walk generation after generation in later years — Choe Do-hyang was the first to begin walking it, on this night of calamity.

But the flames of that night were only the herald of the calamity that would fall on Cheongsugol. The feet of the government troops that had swallowed the neighboring district would turn toward Cheongsugol within a few days. And before that — So-mun, of whom all news from the battlefield had been cut off, would come back to the village with his body broken to pieces.