Then, the last night before they were to rise early and begin their walking again, an old woman came to the gate of the Korean’s house.
“A beggar woman,” he said, “but she pretends she knows you. It is a ruse for begging.”
Yul-chun rose, nevertheless, and went to the gate and recognized the old woman as one from whom Hanya used to buy cabbages for kimchee. The years had changed her from a buxom countrywoman to a wizened hag. She put out her withered hand and seized Yul-chun by the sleeve.
“I hear you are looking for your woman,” she said in a hoarse whisper, the spittle flying from her toothless gums.
Yul-chun drew back. “What have you to tell me?” he asked.
“She stayed with me after she left you,” the old hag said. “She came to my house on her way to Siberia and she stayed half a moon of days. I sold her cabbages cheap and she sold them again in the markets and got herself some money for her journey north.”
“How can I believe you?” Yul-chun asked, not believing and yet longing to believe.
“She gave me this,” the hag said.
With this she reached into her scraggy bosom and pulled out a filthy string, at the end of which was a small amulet, a little silver Buddha, which he remembered now that Hanya had kept in a box with a few treasures she had saved from her mother — a pair of jade earrings, a thin silver bracelet, a thimble, and two brass hairpins.
“Now do you believe?” the hag asked.
“I believe,” he replied. “Only tell me where she went.”
“She said she went to her brother in Siberia,” the hag replied.
“She had no brother,” Yul-chun declared.
The hag showed hideous broken teeth. “That is your misfortune,” she cackled.
She held out her hand, and poor as Yul-chun was he put into her dry old palm a piece of money.
Northward again they went and Yul-chun stopped in every place where he found people of his own country and inquired of any one who might remember Hanya. None remembered. She had walked alone and kept to herself, it seemed, and he knew that was her way. Before he reached Mukden he and Yak-san both put on Chinese garments, gray cotton robes, so that they appeared as two scholars who come to visit a city. They put their hands in their sleeves and hunched their shoulders as such scholars do, and the Japanese police thought them men of Peking and let them pass. Koreans they arrested, for they knew Manchuria had many Korean exiles, all of whom were rebels against Japan, unless they were traitors.
It was not possible, however, for Yul-chun to pass through Manchuria without being known. By this time more than a million landfolk from Korea were exiles here and they worked as farmers for wealthy landlords. Yul-chun delayed, and with him always Yak-san, until he could inquire into their plight. When he found it was hard and that they were poor, he met secretly with leaders of the Chinese peasants, hiding themselves in the fields of tall sorghum as though they were bandits, as many of the Chinese were, and in this way he united both Chinese and Koreans — the Koreans the leaders, for the Chinese peasants had no unity. The new group was called the Korean-Chinese Peasant Association. The young Korean scholars had their own secret group which was called the Korean Revolutionary Young Men’s League, in which the leadership was Communist. These Korean Communists were poor and hungry and many of them were ill. They had no homes and they slept under trees and in crevices of the earth, in caves in the mountains, wherever they could, and this in winter as well as in summer, the bitter winters of a northern land. Yul-chun was determined now against Communism, fearing that for his country this would mean exchanging one tyranny for another and he drew aside from the Communist young men, much as he pitied them and praised them, too, for their courage.
What was his surprise then when one day Yak-san came to him and asked to remain in Manchuria with these young men!
“You desert me!” Yul-chun exclaimed.
“Let me remain with these young men,” Yak-san replied.
“I said I would take you to my own home,” Yul-chun argued.
“I am an orphan, so destined by fate, and I must avenge my parents,” Yak-san replied.
“How will you avenge them?” Yul-chun demanded.
Yak-san looked away. He scraped his bare toes in the dust of the road, for they had stopped in the middle of the day to rest under a date tree and gnaw their dried unleavened bread.
“I know you do not wish me to say this, Elder Brother,” Yak-san said at last, “but the Communists will help me.”
Yul-chun tried not to be angry. “You believe in them?”
“I believe in their ways,” Yak-san said. “I care nothing for their faith in this or that, for or against, but I like their ways. When they meet an enemy—” He drew his finger across his throat.
“You think this settles everything?” Yul-chun demanded.
“I have two enemies,” Yak-san replied in the same slow steady voice. “One killed my father, the other killed my mother. My father was crushed to death under the butt of a gun. I know the man who did it. I know his name, I know his face. He is not dead. My mother died from a stab in the belly with a bayonet. She carried a child in her — my brother, ready to be born. I know who stabbed her and who killed my brother before he could draw his first breath. I shall kill that man.”
What could Yul-chun say? A dozen years ago he would have leaped to his feet and cried out that he would go with Yak-san. Now he knew that merely to kill a man did not end the evil he had done or that others like him would do. Only to kill was not enough.
“You long to have the comfort of revenge,” he told Yak-san.
“Say so if you like,” Yak-san retorted.
At the next center of Koreans, in Antung, on the border of Korea, Yak-san left him. A coolness had grown between them, but when the last moment came, they looked into each other’s eyes, and suddenly they embraced. They parted then and without looking back each went his way.
… At Antung, Yul-chun was tempted to go without further delay to his father’s house. During the years of his youth he had never been sick for home, but now he was. He longed for the safety of the old house about him, and this though his mind told him there was no safety even there. He longed for his lost childhood and even for his mother’s cookery. He remembered his tutor, their walks in the gardens along the country roads, the many stories his tutor had told him and read to him, and the poetry he had recited to him, the ancient beautiful poetry. His tutor had a sweet singing voice, neither deep nor high but warm with love of country, and as a child he, a stormy, restless boy, would sit in the cool of the evening and listen to this singing, and feel a brief and melancholy peace. Who could have thought in those quiet days and nights that the young poet would have joined the terrorists! His own first doubt of death as a weapon had begun then, when he saw his gentle tutor so changed, a dagger in his hand instead of a lute. It is not only the stabbed who die. He sighed at such thoughts and turned away from his home. No, he would continue his way northward to Siberia. If Hanya were alive he would find her and find his child. If he made a center of his own, he could begin again.