When the lad Yak-san heard Yul-chun’s family name he went to him eagerly.
“Sir, are you Kim of the Kim Yak-san?” he inquired.
“I am not,” Yul-chun replied. “I am a Kim of Andong, and I am not a terrorist.”
The lad’s face fell, but he stayed with Yul-chun, nevertheless. For Yul-chun, Yak-san was like the younger brother he remembered in his father’s house, and for Yak-san, Yul-chun was both elder brother and father. Yak-san’s father, the boy told Yul-chun, had been killed by police in a northern city of Korea. He was an only child and, left alone, he had joined others who escaped to Manchuria where he heard the story of the terrorist. With the terrorist he went as far as Shanghai where he had lost him.
“He did not love me,” the lad said bravely. “He told me not to follow him, and when I said I could not help it, he moved to another part of the city and I could never find him, though I tried for many days.”
“He could not love anyone,” Yul-chun said to comfort him. “He was afraid that if he let himself love he would not be able to kill.”
The boy looked thoughtful for a while. Then he spoke. “May I follow you?”
“Certainly you may,” Yul-chun replied.
Now in the teashop he sat beside Yul-chun on a low stool and listened to all that was said.
“We must achieve unity, at least in the core of our group,” Yul-chun went on. “We should gather together those who believe in unity as we do and make the core.”
“And thereby create only another clique,” Kim retorted.
“To be a terrorist is most simple,” Yul-tan, the present leader of the terrorists, announced.
“When you have killed everyone,” Yul-chun argued, “what will you have? Terrorists who will then begin to kill one another!”
“Nevertheless,” the terrorist maintained, “we are the most unified of all the groups. We agree among ourselves that all our enemies must be killed, one by one if necessary. Houses must be burned, palaces destroyed, governments overthrown, armies deceived.”
As usual, they talked far into the night. Indeed, there were times when Yul-chun believed that talk was their chief occupation. Yet through the interchange of thought and argument slowly, as form is shaped from stone, he perceived that a certain unity was built.
After a year of such argument and still against his doubts, Yul-chun at last accepted the terrorists as the center of this unity, since they were the only ones who agreed upon one simple principle of action, that of destruction, and it might be true that destruction there must be before construction could take place. He would not accept them without compromise, however. He demanded that the terrorists promise, for their part, to give up their name of Yi Nul Tan and take instead the name of Korean National Independence. Through this core of unity Yul-chun maintained connection with all other Korean independence groups in many countries, in preparation for the day when their country could be free. That day, it was now finally agreed, could only be after the next great world war, already appearing upon the horizons of time.
He might have grown a heart as hard as stone during these years had it not been for the lad Yak-san, and two others, a man and wife who worked together in the group. Yak-san followed him like a young faithful servant, listening to what he said, obeying his every wish, and watchful that he ate his food and drank tea when the day was hot. Unwilling as Yul-chun was to allow himself to feel emotion, yet he could not but be touched by the loyalty of this lonely orphan boy. Something of the old family feeling stirred in him again and he wondered if his own child had been a son. He would be beyond babyhood now, a boy of four years. Had Hanya told him who his father was and who his grandfather? He had never heard of her since she walked away that day in Peking, he had not received a letter, nor did he know where she was. He might not have thought of her except that among those with whom he worked there were also these two, husband and wife by the name of Choi, who taught him unwittingly by their devotion what love could be between man and woman. Both were Korean, the woman a young widow whose old merchant husband had been killed on the day of the Mansei. The man was the son of a landowner, and he had been in the streets and part of the battle when he came upon the young woman, trying to lift the body of her dead husband. He had helped her, and together they brought the dead man into his house, and later he helped her to find a burial place and to buy a coffin. When the funeral ceremonies were over, he asked the young widow if she had loved her husband and she had said simply that she had not, but she wished to do her duty to him nevertheless. He asked if this duty meant that she would always be a widow and she replied that she would like to love a man. Moreover, she had no family by marriage since her husband’s parents were dead and he had been an only child. Nor had she children, and her own family had moved away to Siberia. She had begged her husband to go there, too, but he had refused, saying that since he was only a merchant and his business good, it was not likely that he would be mistaken for a rebel. On that day of his death, however, he had been so mistaken and a Japanese soldier had shot him through the head because he went into the street to see where the crowds were going.
All this Choi heard with lively interest and when she had finished he asked her if she could love him. She had looked at him thoughtfully, his tall frame, his handsome head and brilliant dark eyes, and then she said that she thought she could love him. He took her by the hand and led her away and they were married by the new code and had remained together in perfect happiness ever since, living first in Siberia and Manchuria and then coming south to help the Chinese.
These two, as he saw them always together, persuaded Yul-chun into new reflection upon marriage and he allowed himself to remember Hanya and to wonder about her. In his desire to remain free he had asked her nothing about herself. Whatever she had told him had come from her in the few times of peace between them. At night after love, she had curled herself against him and out of her quiet would come now and again fragments of her memories.
“Such peace as this I used to feel when I climbed the mountain behind my father’s house,” she told him. “To climb, to climb, and then to reach the crest of the mountain and know I could go no higher — that was peace. I lie on my back upon the rock and I gaze into the blue sky. Up there the sky is very blue.”
He listened and did not hear, drowsy with his own peace.
“My father was shot,” she said one day.
She was making duk, a steamed bread such as one could not buy in Peking. He had been impatient when she spent time on such cookery, but now he remembered with a reluctant tenderness how she had bought glutinous rice and pounded it to flour and steamed it in a sealed jar, and then pounded it again and rolled it out and cut it into circles which she filled with sweetened crushed beans, and how carefully she had brushed each cake with sesame oil. He had complained when she brought the cakes for him to eat to celebrate a holiday, but she had laughed at him.