I did tell you, didn’t I, that I was assigned to work in the kitchen at the county hall with the womenfolk, right? And so I survived — just barely — all thanks to Sangho and Yohan, but so many unspeakable things happened during those three days that I can’t even recall much of it. Meals were cooked at two separate locations, the county hall and the police station. They were short-handed so almost a dozen men my age had been recruited to help out, and that was just for the kitchen I worked in. The women and I were in charge of feeding the young men who came together in the county hall meeting room. There were hundreds of people assembled in the front yard, too, but the new recruits were responsible for cooking their meals. The men in the meeting room were the leaders of the uprising, so their meals were a little better — they got rice and soup and slices of salted radish. The young men in the front yard were given plain rice balls. We all made do with rice balls during the war, out there in the streets; you probably already knew that, though. We’d just roll some cooked rice into little balls with our hands. We used to dream of finding some salty side dishes, or maybe just getting hold of some soy sauce. The cooks who made the rice balls used to dip their hands in salt water before kneading the rice to try and give them some flavor, but it wasn’t the same.
Anyway, the women and I would put all the rice in a large wooden bowl and pour the soup into a bucket and take it all up to the meeting room. The place was full of faces I’d never seen before. I gathered that these were the men who’d come up from the South. Looking a bit more closely, though, I spotted some familiar faces scattered among them. I saw one young man who used to be a member of the church youth group and another who’d joined the Korean Independence Party. Picking up bits and pieces of conversation here and there, I realized they were all discussing the arrival of the U.S. Army. Apparently the Americans had just arrived in Haeju — they and the South Koreans were headed north, marching towards Sŏhŭng and Sin’gye. The men I was feeding weren’t actual soldiers so they had no official rank, but they were all wearing American army uniforms and carrying brand new guns. It looked like they’d come in just before we brought them their dinner, so they’d probably arrived in town a little earlier that very evening — that would have been the sixteenth. They said that they were only the advance party. One of them recognized me.
Well, well! If it isn’t the deacon!
I was so panicked and frightened that I didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing a military uniform, complete with field jacket, not to mention a cartridge belt and gun at his waist. It was one of those American guns that we used to call “Chickenheads.”
It’s me, Pongsu! Remember? I used to live here.
Finally, it clicked. This man with the pomaded hair combed all the way back — this man was the eldest son of the miller. He’d gotten into some deep trouble back home, after liberation. His father crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and went down South fairly early on, and all their land, including the mill and the brewery, had been confiscated. Until that day, I’d had no idea that he even knew Yohan. Just then, out of nowhere, Yohan stuck his face out from the sea of young men.
Uncle, you know Presbyter Choi Jang-no from the church in town, don’t you?
Sure. we’ve. held revival services together, I answered vaguely, wanting to get out of there.
Pongsu joined in, You’re still under forty, aren’t you?
Yes, that’s right.
Well, then you should join the Youth Corps. We need to form a branch of the Taeha Youth Corps here in our hometown.
Feigning inattention, I simply served the rice. The roar of conversation kept going strong as the men began to eat.
Hey, whatever happened to that guy who started the peacekeeping troops in your village?
You mean Ri Sunnam?
That’s the one — he used to work as a handyman in the orchards, right?
Yohan finished that bastard yesterday.
Aw, c’mon — you guys should have left me my share — that son of a bitch was red through and through.
That was how I found out that my nephew Yohan had killed Sunnam. It’s true that people killed each other out of spite during those hellish days to get even. But you know, it’s also true that they all felt a kind of pressure to be merciless — they wanted their peers to think highly of them. If you showed any sign of weakness, if you had a single moment of indecision, well, then your whole ideology could be called into question. No one was to be trusted. There was even a joke that went around back then: that one’s a watermelon — no, he’s an apple — no, a persimmon — why, he’s a green melon — ah well, it doesn’t matter if he’s blue, red, blue dyed red, or red dyed blue — anything that’s got any color at all has got to go. When I went to clear the dishes after dinner, the young men in the meeting room were smoking. Sitting on a desk, Pongsu asked Sangho, Hey, Sangho, remember that guy who used to work as a foreman in my father’s factory?
Sure I do. Isn’t he the one that put your father through all that hell?
Whatever happened to that asshole?
Sangho snickered, We got him.
What about that piece of shit who was in charge of all the land reform in the northeastern districts?
Oh, that son of a bitch — you know, he’d actually made himself the chairman of the District Party Committee. We brought him in, too. Along with his whole family.
Pongsu hopped down from the desk. He kept touching the gun at his waist, grinning all the while, but I don’t think he even knew he was doing it. I wasn’t interested in being a spectator to such nonsense, so I hurried out of the room. Back in the kitchen I was washing dishes with the women when I heard someone crying out in pain in the backyard. Curiosity is strong enough to overcome fear, they say. Furtively, I wiped my hands on my pants and got up. One of the women looked at me.
Deacon, why bother? You don’t want to see what’s out there — whatever it is, you can be sure it’s no festival mask dance.
You just keep your eyes and your ears shut. I’m going to go sneak a peek.
We, at least, had simply been told to cook — we really had nothing to complain about. It was the men they recruited later on that had to do all the real dirty work. They were the ones who had to deal with the countless dead bodies of all the people being killed in the backyard of the police station and around the county hall. The air-raid shelter and the trench were packed with people by then, just waiting to die, with no food or water. For the first two days you could hear the kids crying, but after that everything fell silent — there wasn’t a single whimper. God only knows if they all dropped dead or what. Sometimes, when I walked by, I could see a couple of their heads poking up through the air shaft, which came up to about the height of my knees. Sir, please, give us some water, please, my child is dying of thirst. There were times I’d pass by, pretending I hadn’t heard a thing, but whenever I could I’d get a bucketful of water and pour it gently down the shaft.
The backyard of the county hall was just on the other side of a wooden fence. I stepped up on a rock to try and look over it, to see what was going on. Dusk was setting in and it was getting pretty dark. I could make out a group of people standing in a circle around two big, whitish objects. Looking more closely, I realized the pale things were two naked men. Pongsu had unbuckled the cartridge belt from his waist; he was whipping one of them with it.
You dirty son of a bitch, pay up! Cough up all the rent you owe us, everything you haven’t paid these past five years! Thief!