On the shoe ledge at the outer quarters lay four or five pairs of inexpensive rubber shoes. With his grandfather’s tightfisted way of running the household, sixty-year-old Secretary Ji was the only one designated to take care of the outer quarters. But several old acquaintances gathered there anyway, those who had nowhere else to go for a free meal. Deok-gi entered his room, lay down, and thought about what he had just heard in the inner quarters.
His grandfather had made a great fuss about finding a suitable girl for him from the right family and had forced him to marry. Deok-gi had liked his bride at first, but by the time he went to Japan he had begun to lose interest, and now he felt sorry for her, thinking how hard it must have been for her to put up with her step-grandmother-in-law while he was away.
His wife tolerated the situation because she had been raised by an old-fashioned family and had only gone to elementary school. A modern woman would have caused plenty of trouble. Deok-gi had hated the idea of marrying an uneducated woman, but given the circumstances he thought it was better that she hadn’t received a modern education.
Before he knew it, he had fallen into a deep sleep.
“I told Deok-gi to leave after the ancestral rite.”
Startled, Deok-gi opened his eyes. Was he dreaming? He thought he had heard his grandfather’s voice. Sunlight streamed in from the window high above his head. It was after three o’clock. Still hung over after breakfast, he had lain down on the warm floor and fallen asleep. As he raised his head, it cleared and his body seemed lighter.
“I told your wife to stay. So, are you going to stop by the day after tomorrow? Although what use would you be anyway?” His grandfather’s disapproving tone smacked of sarcasm, as though he were intent on making a scene.
Guessing his father had arrived, Deok-gi looked out through the tiny glass panel. The back of a slender man in a black coat with an otter-fur collar was visible in front of the main veranda on the other side the yard. Facing him was his grandfather, sitting in the room with the window open. Deok-gi felt the urge to venture out and greet his father but restrained himself, deciding to go out after his grandfather closed the window.
“I’ll be here, but why does Deok-gi have to stay? He’s a student. We should send him off as soon as possible, no matter how urgent the matter.”
It was his father’s voice. His slow, careful way of speaking gave an impression completely different from the thin, nervous figure he presented. Deok-gi always thought that his father’s gentle voice and measured speech must be something he had acquired since becoming a Christian, though it was possible that he had spoken this way all his life. In contrast, the grandfather’s voice was high-strung and tense — exactly what you would expect from the way he looked.
“What do you mean, no matter how urgent?” Grandfather’s voice rose a notch, as if he were happy at the chance to start an argument. Deok-gi’s father stood in silence.
“If a woman made him stay, would that be urgent enough? Or if his father or mother dies?”
“Why get so worked up over something so trivial?” The voice was still calm. It sounded as if he had made a point of speaking only a certain number of syllables a minute. But the old man couldn’t appreciate his son’s meticulousness; on the contrary, he thought his son was trying to provoke him.
“What are you trying to say? Would you even blink if I died this very moment? You ignore your own mother’s memorial. Why did we even bother to give you an education?”
Deok-gi’s grandfather pounded the ashtray with the long pipe he had been holding in his mouth. The old guests, who had been sitting with the old man, sat quietly with their heads bowed down as if in slumber, occasionally rubbing their hands together. They couldn’t judge whether the elderly master of the household was right or wrong, but they believed his remarks made some sense.
Deok-gi’s father responded, “Even if a person doesn’t perform ancestral rites because he believes in a different religion, that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t sit at his father’s deathbed.”
The old guests thought that the son made sense, too, though they believed the master of the household was right to scold his son for not attending the ceremony.
“How dare you say that to me! Shut up and get out of here! Do you think you’re going to turn your son into the spitting image of you? You were responsible for his birth, but that’s all. I raised him and I’m paying for his tuition. Did you feed him even once with your own hands when he was a child? Did you contribute anything toward his schooling? I couldn’t possibly do a worse job raising him than I did raising you! Now stop talking shit and get out! Do you actually think the world will be a better place if you keep up this empty moralizing about philanthropy and salvation while you fail to teach your own son a single thing?”
The guests had heard the old man say this many times. They thought that he was in the right again.
“Please calm down, sir,” said the oldest of the guests. “Everything you say is justified, but your son doesn’t attend the ancestral rites because of his work in society. No one has said that he’s against the rites.” The guest was biding his time, his stomach rumbling, hoping that a liquor tray might suddenly materialize after some of the other guests left for their evening meals.
Deok-gi came out of his room, unable to stand listening to this any longer.
“I was going to pay you a visit today, Father. I think I’ll leave in about three days or so.” Deok-gi invited his father to come in.
The father regarded his son silently, doffed his hat, and bowed toward the room. Then he proceeded out the front gate without stopping at the inner quarters.
The old man slammed his window shut. Deok-gi was dismayed as he watched his father walk away, the father who was scolded whenever he visited and who always left quickly without venturing into the inner quarters.
Father was, of course, to blame, but he wasn’t an evil man or a world-class hypocrite. If one weighed him against all the people in the world, there might be a difference of a tiny stone, not enough to make any noticeable difference. Like so many young men of his generation struggling to cast off the burdens of a feudal society, Deok-gi’s father had stepped forward as a young patriot. Many of those men had flocked to the altar, kneeling before it as political possibilities dwindled. That was how Deok-gi’s father had taken his first step toward religious life. If, instead, he had chosen to “come to terms with his past,” to use today’s parlance, and had learned to distance himself from it, he might have succeeded in making the ideological transition into a new era. And he might have developed a lifestyle more suitable to his character, instead of leading a double life.
“It’s not that I don’t understand how you feel. I’m not blind to the reality of society. But I want to find some common ground between the ideals of my era and those of yours. In simple terms, I’m hoping for the so-called Third Empire where your ideology and mine can meet. It’s true that you’ve advanced a step and I’ve fallen a step behind. But when you take another step forward, who’s to say that you won’t need the ideology of my era, even if only a small part of it? I believe this could happen, and I am actually looking forward to it.”
This was what his father had said to him recently, when Deok-gi returned from Japan and had asked him to give up his religion. He had been talking with his father and Byeong-hwa, and the conversation had drifted to current events and social activism.
Deok-gi was inclined to contradict his father, but custom would not permit him to do so, and he had no talent for long, circumlocutory arguments. He decided to shrug it off instead. He was glad at least to find, against all expectation, that his father was not completely clueless about, or uninterested in, modern ideological trends and social phenomena. This made him feel closer to him. Deok-gi pictured his father standing on a narrow log, linking the feudal era to modern times. It occurred to him that his father was himself in a similarly awkward position in the family, stuck between his own father and Deok-gi. Deok-gi could side with neither. He knew his father agonized over social issues, his own family, and his beliefs, and therefore often found himself pitying or sympathizing with him, while from time to time experiencing a surge of antipathy toward him as well.