A Sugar Cube
In the middle of August, as the worst of the heat at last began to loosen its grip, Lee Ki-jo came home from a long journey through the provinces.
From June his trips to Yeongwol had grown frequent, and from July he had all but lived there, often unable to come up to Seoul even for the weekend.
"The machinery has all arrived from Japan, and the tungsten is moving without trouble. The only one run off his feet now is President Lee Man-ik. I don't think the construction crew will be able to leave Yeongwol before the year is out."
He sat on the wooden veranda tugging off his socks, smiling with his whole face, and the sight of him wrung Sunrye's heart. His skin was burned near to black, mosquito bites stippled him everywhere, and he looked much as he had in the days when he worked the wharves in Busan. He must have labored in earnest. The muscle across his chest and down his forearms had thickened and gone solid, and when she washed his back she found that burned dark and drawn taut as well.
In the pocket of the trousers he had taken off, Sunrye found a single sugar cube. At first she had only wondered at the little cotton pouch tucked inside them. When she opened it — the cloth softened by the wear of his hands — an ordinary cube of sugar lay within.
A man who hardly touches sugar. Why would he carry a sugar cube about with him...
She could not guess the reason. All she knew was that six hundred grams of sugar cost more than the same weight of beef. She meant to ask him why, but she was so purely glad to have her husband home after so long that the question slipped her mind.
The man who had returned from Yeongwol was a little changed. Beyond looking more like a man, a tension had settled into his eyes, and his gaze had grown sharp.
She had not been able to keep Chobok or Jungbok for him — the first and the middle of summer's dog days — and so she set a pot of samgyetang to boil, ginseng chicken to build him back up. Ki-jo ate his supper with pleasure, then sat out on the veranda to rest, turning the sugar cube over and over in his fingers. He seemed lost in some long thought, and Sunrye left him that solitude.
At Cheoseo — the Limit of Heat, when folk say a mosquito's mouth twists crooked and even the grass weeps and turns its back — Lee Seong-ryong of Myeongwolgwan came to call on Sunrye.
The air had cooled, but the sun was still fierce. Seong-ryong arrived beneath a parasol, and Sunrye set before her a cup of misutgaru heaped with sugar, a cold drink of roasted grain. It was cool, and it was sweet.
"Sunrye. I'm telling you this ahead of time, so you don't go misunderstanding that husband of yours." Seong-ryong dabbed her mouth as she spoke.
"Misunderstand?"
"That's right. Don't jump to conclusions — just listen. Your husband recently took over a teahouse in Myeongdong. There's a place called the Sunday Teahouse. The madam's family went under, and they'd had to shut the doors."
"I see..."
"He's meeting writers and actors there, and anyone looking on could easily take it the wrong way. Plenty of pretty young things hang about the place, and Yeongsu's father buys them meals and drinks."
"I'm sure he has his reasons. He wouldn't do a thing like that for nothing." Sunrye said it smiling, trusting her husband.
"I know that. I do. Still, once people start whispering, foolish thoughts have a way of creeping in. If you're curious, ask him. And then tell me why he's doing it, too."
"So even you don't know why Yeongsu's father is doing this? You came to tell me not to misunderstand?"
"That's right. I don't know either. I came because I wondered if you did."
Sunrye and Seong-ryong laughed together. Summer was waning, but the cicadas cried on as ever.
Seong-ryong looked out over the broad yard of Ki-jo's house. "Mind you, Jongno is a good place to live. A neighborhood where people have lived a long time is still the best there is. Hannam-dong has a fine view, but that pleasure lasts a day or two at most. The place is too bleak."
"Soon-young says the same. She says the neighborhood is so quiet it feels strange."
"And yet that girl is holding fast in Hannam-dong without a wobble, all to keep her husband alive, isn't she?"
Sunrye and Seong-ryong laughed again.
Soon-young had believed what a monk told her at Myeongwolgwan, and she absolutely refused to move out of Hannam-dong. She was convinced, iron-firm, that Ma-ryang would live long only if he lived beside the water.
"In any case, the things your husband does may look strange at first, but in the end they always turn out right and true."
"Yes. I think so too."
Sunrye never doubted her husband.
While Sunrye and Seong-ryong talked, Ki-jo was receiving people at the Sunday Teahouse he had taken over. He had renamed it the Drama Salon and was giving tea away free to the poor artists of Myeongdong.
In the nineteen-fifties, Myeongdong was a mecca for artists. Ki-jo courted not only the writers but the singers and the actors, and the reporters and producers of the broadcast stations, treating them with particular care so they would come to the shop. Reporters and producers, above all, held the status of civil servants; frequent a teahouse or a salon and they were liable to be caught in a secret inspection. Ki-jo asked the stations to issue teahouse passes, and in that way he shielded them.
He had met a producer from KBS Radio the day before, and now he was meeting a producer from CBS in turn.
"So what you're saying is, Cheongsan Seasoning will put up the drama's production costs, and in return you want Miwon mentioned in the show?"
"That is correct."
"And Cheongsan will take on the actors' fees and the playwright's as well?"
"Of course."
"Well, well. That's handsome. Have you spoken with KBS too?"
"I spoke with them yesterday. As you know, KBS belongs to the government, and they told me the men above would have to give their leave."
"So KBS still hasn't managed to decide."
The CBS producer was pleased. "At CBS, terms like these are entirely workable. A man like you isn't about to let an opportunity this good slip away."
Ki-jo was pleased as well. Through CBS he could put a radio drama backed by Cheongsan on the air, and work advertisements for Miwon in as product placement.
His plan took a simple shape. Wherever the characters sat down to a meal, or someone was at work in the kitchen, the script would ease in a line.
"Did you put the Miwon in?"
"Put the Miwon in, and the broth comes alive."
"Have the actors been engaged?" the CBS producer asked.
"Look at the young people sitting over there."
Where Ki-jo pointed, actors, men and women alike, had gathered and were reading through a script.
"A drama goes out live, so reliability matters in an actor. More than talent, they have to be people who don't come late and can hold their condition every day. If someone drinks the night before and causes a scene, it's a disaster."
Ki-jo knew that. For a good while yet, Korean broadcasting — television and radio alike — was live. Even the dramas were performed as they went on the air.
"Don't concern yourself with that. I looked into every one of them before I signed the contracts."
"Did you? Ha ha."
The CBS producer looked the company over once more, then smiled and lifted a hand to an actor whose eyes had met his. Someone he knew, it seemed.
"At this rate, President, Munye, Daeseong, Galchae, and the Dongbang Salon are all going to have to close their doors."
He meant the four great salons where the men of letters gathered.
"Would it really come to that? Artists are firm in their tastes. They only come and go where a place suits them."
Ki-jo's Drama Salon was no gathering place for people who practiced art for its own sake. It had the feel of a social hall that connected commercial writers and artists with ways to earn a living — something like an employment office.
While they were talking, the door opened and a party of people came in. They caught sight of Ki-jo, came over, and offered their greetings.
"Good day, President. We've arrived."
"Hello. The seats for the film people are over that way. Rest, and make yourselves easy."
"Thank you. But may we really drink tea for nothing and stay the whole day?"
"Of course. Stay as long as you please."
They were Chungmuro people, come over the rise of Jin-gogae from Chungmuro into Myeongdong. They had haunted the Taeguk Teahouse and the Star Teahouse, and they had turned up because Ki-jo had opened the Drama Salon and was giving the tea away free.
When the film folk had withdrawn, the CBS producer spoke with a satisfied face.
"President Lee, you ought to found a film company outright while you're at it."
"Ha ha. What would I know of movies?"
Ki-jo declined. The picture business was, to exaggerate only a little, gang territory, and Lim Hwa-soo of the Dongdaemun faction was the man throwing his weight about. Lay a careless hand on it and he would only stir up another quarrel. If Lee Hwa-ryong had leapt into films earlier than he did in the original history, it might have been possible — but Hwa-ryong was still giving himself wholly to the gangster's trade.
"Even so, gather the actors and writers and singers assembled here, and I should think you could comfortably stand up one heungeopso..."
"I'll give it some thought. But what does a man who sells bricks know, that he should go into the heungeopso business?"
Ki-jo did not inflate his own standing; he stayed modest, and for that the CBS producer liked him all the better.
"President, CBS will reach a decision faster than KBS. I'm sure of it. And the proposal will be accepted. You know, don't you, that CBS has better sound facilities than KBS?"
"Yes. I know."
CBS, which had gone on the air at the end of the previous year, had newer equipment than KBS and a larger library of records. It was the hottest station of the moment.
"Later, even if KBS comes asking to join in, please turn them down — and if you contract with us, give CBS the exclusive. I'll put in a good word with our president and see about securing spots for Miwon commercials before the drama and after it. Phrase the request well, and we may even place an advertisement on the sibo."
"I'll have the drama well prepared on my side, too. Please show our scripts to the president of CBS."
Ki-jo slid across the table the scripts for episodes one through ten. The title on them was Seoul Ttoksuni.
The producer riffled through the pages and broke into a hearty laugh.
"A comedy. It suits CBS. There isn't much to laugh about these days, so if the thing is a comedy, it has a real chance."
Ki-jo finished with the CBS producer, saw him off, and sat alone at the table drinking his tea. From his trouser pocket he drew the sugar cube and turned it in his fingers. Every time he touched a cube from Cheil Jedang, Lee Byung-chull's sugar company, the man himself rose in his mind.
In Yeongwol, when the day's work was done, he would lie on a field cot and worry the cube between his fingers, brooding on how he might fend Lee Byung-chull off. The Miwon drama was what he had thought up. He meant to raise Miwon's name as high as he could before Lee Byung-chull and Lim Dae-hong ever stepped into the seasoning trade.
He had just set the cube down and lifted his tea when an actress came over.
"Hello, President. May I sit for a moment?"
Ki-jo nodded.
Small in the face, her features fine and neatly set, she settled lightly before him and asked, her look quietly suggestive, "President, you wouldn't happen to know of an inn nearby?"
"An inn?"
Ki-jo was startled. But he soon understood why she was asking, and he answered with a smile.
"Before long I'll be buying an inn, and a dressmaker's, and a tailor's as well."
"Oh my. Truly?"
Perhaps because she had just come from reading a confession of love in the script, the eyes she turned on him looked as if she had fallen for him.
"You really are clever, President. The moment I mention an inn, other men go red from the face. They seem to wander off into some strange notion."
Ki-jo did not take up her words.
"I mean to build Korea's Hollywood here in Myeongdong, so wait just a little."
He knew why an inn was wanted, and a dress shop, and a tailor's. Actors and playwrights would have to rehearse and write through the night, so they needed a place to sleep; a proper dressmaker and a proper tailor were needed for the costumes.
He slipped the sugar cube into his pocket, drank off what remained of his tea, and stood.
"I'm pressed for time, so I'll be going. If you grow hungry while you're practicing the script, tell the madam. I'll have lunch sent over."
"Thank you, President."
The actress smiled with her eyes and bowed to him.
Ki-jo stepped out of the Drama Salon and walked slowly along the Myeongdong street. The day had cooled; even with a jacket on, he did not sweat much.
It came to him that he did not know why he was so mindful of Lee Byung-chull. From the first he had never meant to become a world-spanning conglomerate on the order of Samsung. He wanted only to answer, to the very end, for the people he had taken on, and he did not want to lose to Lee Byung-chull and have to shut his doors. That feeling was the whole of it.
I don't want to lose.
Ki-jo put a hand into his trouser pocket and turned the sugar cube over once more.