The sunset drew red shadows over Midori’s face. ‘The sound?’
‘No, not the sound — the playing. Your playing has become so natural.’ Thick veins bulged in his neck.
To Midori, he seemed angry, but actually Sugiyama was embarrassed. He was ignorant of most emotions. The world had never been gentle to him and he didn’t expect kind treatment; he had wrapped himself in the armour of fury. When he hated something he got mad. He expressed his love and embarrassment in anger, shouted to express sympathy and was brusque when he was showing interest. He was most comfortable with silence.
He placed a hand on the piano and swallowed. ‘I have a favour to ask. I have to find someone outside the prison. ’ He trailed off. As a soldier he had to maintain barracks life, but a nurse was free to come and go as she pleased.
She widened her eyes and looked round. ‘Who?’
Sugiyama couldn’t bring himself to speak for a long time. Then he spoke hesitantly. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a man or woman, or their age or address. Or what they look like. But I know they must live somewhere around here. Every Tuesday someone flies a kite outside the prison walls. Might be young. Supposedly thirteen or fourteen, and lonely.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Hiranuma Tochu. I mean, Yun Dong-ju. You must know him?’
Midori’s eyes flickered in fright. She not only knew Dong-ju, having met him in the infirmary, but she’d grown to know about his poems and his favourite music. She respected him. She had included ‘Va, pensiero’ in the concert at his suggestion. She hesitated. ‘Has he — done something wrong?’
Sugiyama shook his head. The more he got to know Dong-ju, the more he was convinced that the prisoner had done nothing wrong. He looked down at his thick, calloused hands. ‘He hasn’t written a single line since he got back from solitary. Makes sense. Solitary destroys your body and soul. And while he was in solitary the child flying the kite disappeared.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Tell her to fly her kite again. Tell her she’ll be able to fight us if she flies it right outside the prison.’ He looked out of the window at the golden sunset that was listening in on their clandestine conversation.
‘And a few days later the girl’s kite flew up. This must be the one she cut down that time.’ Midori touched the mangled kite, whose broken shaft and ripped tail contained beautiful memories of soaring in the sky against the wind.
‘So now we won’t be able to see the kite again.’
‘When the war’s over and the girl returns, the kites will fly again.’
‘It was smart of Sugiyama to bring her back into kite-fighting. It enabled him to control the prisoners effectively.’
‘Sugiyama-san didn’t bring her in for that,’ Midori shot back. ‘What he sent over the walls weren’t kites. They were poems.’
A stray cat came up to the window. I could hear its footsteps crunching on the snow. ‘What do you mean?’
She explained Sugiyama’s ruse. He’d had Dong-ju write poems and fly kites; he brought the girl into the fight as part of an intricate plan to smuggle Dong-ju’s poems out of the prison. ‘Sugiyama-san had a deal with Dong-ju. He would allow Dong-ju to write poems in Korean if he recited them in Japanese. Sugiyama-san became his audience. When Dong-ju recited his new poem in Japanese, Sugiyama would write it down and then use that paper to make a kite. Dong-ju didn’t know that. But his kites would often fall outside the prison, releasing his poems into the world.’
All winter Dong-ju read his poems out loud in the interrogation room and Sugiyama wrote them down as though he were taking down a confession. The poems Dong-ju recited were dark but glorious, steeped in sorrow but brimming with joy — they sang of a wanderer’s thoughts as he walked down a dark snow-covered road, a man suffering in a strong tempest, a young scholar betrayed by the times. His poetry illuminated the darkness briefly, line by line. Sugiyama copied it all down. He was the first to hear the young poet’s new work, poems that had formed in Dong-ju’s head over weeks or months, poems previously unknown to the world.
The poems flew up like doves on the belly of Sugiyama’s kites. They leaped over the walls with the breeze. The kite danced and circled in the blue sky in tandem with the girl’s kite waiting on the outside. The prison’s feeble kite, cut by the girl’s glass-studded line, tilted in the wind and sank. The girl chased after the kite as it took off sluggishly over the fields. Often the kites disappeared from the girl’s sight and became stuck inside a thorny bush, fell in mud or ended up in a narrow, dirty alley. The girl looked all over for the missing kites until, late in the evening, she found them impaled on an electric pole in the harbour or torn and wet on the sandy beach. She discovered clumsily written poems on the back of the creased kites and, upon returning home, hid them deep in her cupboard.
OUR LOVE WAS MERELY A MUTE
Dong-ju often entered the interrogation room looking grey and pallid, as though he had been doused in ash. But he regained his vitality as I began to question him. He talked about things that didn’t exist but could be perceived, that couldn’t be seen but could be inferred, that vanished from earth but remained in memory, that he couldn’t possess but longed for. We sat facing each other. We talked not as a guard and prisoner, but as equals. We discussed writers and their tales, conversed about poets and novelists, philosophers and artists.
But the very fact that we were in this interrogation room enraged me. ‘Poetry?’ I spat out once. ‘Hope? It’s ridiculous. We’re in a barren prison.’
‘We’re waiting for spring, but maybe spring is already here,’ Dong-ju insisted, ever optimistic. ‘One realizes that spring has come and gone only when it’s summer. There’s happiness even behind these cold bars.’
‘No,’ I argued. ‘There’s nothing in this forsaken hell. There’s no beauty or virtue or intellect in this place.’
‘But we can look for it.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘If we look and we can’t find it, I guess we’ll just have to create hope and happiness and dreams and beautiful poetry. The poetry we both long for isn’t on paper. Look around you! It’s everywhere; in the narrow cells and behind the thick bars. Thanks to the thick steel that imprisons me, I can write even more heartfelt poems.’
I hoped that was true.
‘After I came here, I gave up on poetry for a while,’ Dong-ju confessed.
‘How were you able to write again?’
‘Sugiyama — I had Sugiyama,’ Dong-ju said, looking pained. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to write again.’ He suddenly looked very old.
I wanted to lighten the mood. ‘I have a question about your poem “The Blowing Wind”. You say, “I haven’t loved a single woman.” Are you saying you’ve never loved anyone?’ Although I’d read many of Dong-ju’s poems, I hadn’t come across a single poem about love. Had he truly never loved anyone? There had to have been a happy period in his life, when he’d been able to laugh, sing and love.
‘Everyone has secrets,’ he answered obliquely. He frowned, gave me an embarrassed smile and began to recite a poem. ‘“The Temple of Love.” Suni, when did you come into my temple? / When did I enter yours? / Ours is / A temple of love steeped in old customs. / Suni, lower your crystal eyes like a doe. / I will groom my tousled hair like a lion. / Our love was merely a mute. / Ah, youth! / Before the weak flame on the holy candlestick extinguishes / Suni, run towards the front door. / Before darkness and wind slam into our window / I will carry my eternal love for you / And disappear through the back door. Now / You have a cosy lake in the woods, / And I have steep mountains.’