Aftermath
Having cleanly discharged the favor Kim Jong-pil had asked of him, Ki-jo set about repairing his ruptured relations with Kwak Young-joo.
If history ran on as it was scheduled to run, Kwak had some two years of power still ahead of him. Ki-jo had no wish to stand as close to the man as he once had, but neither did he mean to come to grief for having offended him. What he needed, at the least, was a footing on which the two of them could meet without an open quarrel.
He decided to work through the Dongdaemun Gang. Lee Jeong-jae would before long fall out with Kwak; in his place, Ki-jo drew closer to Lim Hwa-soo—the very man who, once the fight over party nominations between Lee Ki-poong and Lee Jeong-jae had run its course, was destined to become Kwak's trusted right hand.
Lim was in the film business, so his path and Ki-jo's crossed often enough. He made a habit of bringing the entertainers under his wing up to the broadcasting station, and that day, too, he came to the president's office and they talked.
"Little brother. You been to see Brother Young-joo?"
Ever since the day Kwak had struck Ki-jo across the cheek, and Ki-jo had addressed Lim as brother, the two of them had settled for good into speaking as older and younger.
"I still haven't been able to call on him. I think I made far too grave a mistake. I can't bring myself to show my face."
"Come now. Be a man about it and go apologize. If that's too hard, I'll lay a bridge for you."
"No. I'll try a little harder on my own."
"Try? And what kind of trying would that be?"
To the curious Lim, Ki-jo said he meant to devote himself to looking after Mi-hyang, Kwak Young-joo's mistress.
"Ha! That's one way to do it. Of all the salesmanship in the world, pillow salesmanship is the best there is. Nothing beats Mi-hyang whispering in Brother Young-joo's ear under the quilt."
Ki-jo's approach was not to settle the matter by facing Kwak himself, but to work through the people nearest him—Hwa-soo, and Mi-hyang.
"Little brother Ki-jo, you and I have got to have Brother Young-joo's help. No two ways about it. And the two of us have to pull together, besides."
Lim's thoughts, as ever, ran straight back to his own business.
"Yes, Brother. We will."
When he had finished with Hwa-soo, Ki-jo summoned Jin Hyun-kyung and Won Tae-sik to the station. There was something he needed to confirm.
He sat Hyun-kyung and Tae-sik down on the sofa in the president's office and asked about Mi-hyang.
"Hyun-kyung, how is Miss Mi-hyang applying herself to her studies?"
When Mi-hyang had said she wanted to enter a university and learn French, Ki-jo had steered her toward Jin Hyun-kyung's night school. If she was willing to study alongside the bus conductresses, then her hunger for learning was real; if she came for a few days and quit, he would write it off as an empty whim.
"Miss Mi-hyang is a very fine student, President."
"Truly?"
He had not expected that.
"Yes. She comes every day, and she prepares and reviews in earnest. What I've felt, teaching her, is that she understands quickly and she's diligent."
"I see..."
Still a little dazed, he put the question to Tae-sik as well.
"And how is Miss Mi-hyang's entertainment work?"
"Doesn't look to me like she's got any mind for acting or singing."
"Then where does her interest lie?"
"Volunteer work. A lot of it, and she throws herself in. The free meals for kids who go hungry, the visits out to the orphanages—she doesn't miss a one."
Hyun-kyung was quick to second him.
"That's right. I remember. The days Miss Mi-hyang skipped night school were nearly always days she was off visiting an orphanage out in the provinces."
"Hm."
Mi-hyang's transformation left him unsettled. What on earth had happened to her? He wanted to know. Had he been looking at only one side of her? People changed greatly with their lot and their surroundings, and now and then—rarely—some single turn of events swung them a full hundred and eighty degrees.
"Director Won, what's Miss Mi-hyang doing at the moment? Does she have anything on her schedule?"
"No Miss Korea engagements today. She'll be home, most likely."
When Tae-sik had answered, Hyun-kyung added her piece.
"Then she'll be home doing her homework. She kept begging me to assign her a great deal, so I gave her as much as she asked for. Right about now she'll be clutching her head over middle-school mathematics."
Ki-jo nodded and spoke to the two of them.
"Then shall we go and see our Miss Mi-hyang?"
Mi-hyang was living in an apartment in Cheongnyangni. By rights such a place was a privilege reserved for Miss Korea and her two runners-up, but she had been given one all the same, as a perquisite of being Kwak Young-joo's mistress.
Ki-jo took the two of them and headed for Cheongnyangni. He stopped the car in front of her building, put Hyun-kyung forward, and had her knock.
"Miss Mi-hyang, it's me. Jin Hyun-kyung."
The door opened at once. Mi-hyang came out to greet them without a trace of makeup, her hair yanked back into a plain knot, dressed with a simplicity that startled him.
"Oh my, the President has come as well. Welcome, President. Teacher Jin, Director Won—good day to you both."
Faced with a Mi-hyang so very courteous and correct, Ki-jo was startled all over again.
Am I looking at someone else entirely?
He ran his eyes once more, quickly, over the whole of her. Something about it was familiar. She gave off a feeling close to Hyun-kyung's own.
While he stood awkward in the doorway, Mi-hyang opened the door wide.
"Please, come in."
For all the suddenness of the visit, the apartment she lived in was neat and clean. There were no showy ornaments, no luxuries set out to be admired. The bookshelf in the living room was packed tight with books, arranged by subject, and the range of their owner's interests lay open to anyone who looked. It seemed less a place for secret meetings with Kwak Young-joo than the room of a cultivated college girl.
And yet this room, too, was familiar. It was not unlike the room of his neighbor Hyun-kyung, which he had stepped into once or twice. Had Hyun-kyung ever brought Mi-hyang home? That was what he wanted to know.
"Miss Mi-hyang, have you gotten far with the homework?"
Hyun-kyung asked it of Mi-hyang, who was brewing tea in the kitchen.
"Yes. I finished all of it this morning, Teacher."
"Is the factoring difficult?"
"Even the parts I don't understand, I memorize for now. Once I start working the problems, the understanding comes of itself."
She said it with a shy smile.
Tae-sik spoke up as well.
"You finish those reply letters to the orphanage kids, you hand 'em to me. I'll drop 'em at the post office on my way in to the company."
"Yes, Director. They're all written."
Ki-jo could hardly believe the scene in front of him. If the Mi-hyang before him was a performance, she had poured a tremendous effort into it; if she had truly changed, the advance was tremendous. She had become another person altogether.
Talking with the three who had come to see her, her face stayed clear and bright the whole while. After they had spoken for about half an hour, she begged Hyun-kyung's and Tae-sik's pardon.
"Teacher, Director. There's something I need to discuss with the President in confidence. Might I have a little time to speak with him alone?"
At that, Hyun-kyung and Tae-sik told her to go ahead, and turned to Ki-jo.
"Would it be all right if we left first?"
"Ah, please do. Take the jeep you came in. I'll stop by the Cheongsan yard, catch a ride on a truck, and head back to the company."
He saw the two of them as far as the door, arranging his manner as though he had business to discuss with Hyun-kyung. Drawing her a little aside, he asked, low, almost a whisper.
"Have you ever brought Miss Mi-hyang to your home?"
"Yes, President. We've even stayed the night. She said she wanted to."
Ki-jo nodded without a word. Her style, her way of speaking, even the room—all of it was a copy of Hyun-kyung. There was an old saying that one who keeps close to ink is blackened by it: Mi-hyang might have admired Hyun-kyung so deeply that she was imitating her without knowing she did so. Or it might have been the welling up of a fierce desire to become a college girl herself.
"Why do you ask?"
"Ah, it's nothing. Go on back safely with Tae-sik."
"Yes, President!"
Hyun-kyung smiled brightly.
Ki-jo sent the two of them off and went back into the apartment with Mi-hyang. In the living room, gone quiet now that Hyun-kyung and Tae-sik had left, he sat down facing her.
Mi-hyang, who had been seated on a floor cushion, suddenly dropped to her knees.
"I want to apologize for having been rude to you before, President."
To Mi-hyang bowing as she apologized, he said,
"Please don't, Miss Mi-hyang. Don't do this."
At his refusal she slowly raised herself. Tears stood brimming in her eyes, and he was at a loss.
"President, all this time I have lived exactly as I pleased, doing only what I wanted. But even living that way, my heart was never at ease."
Thick tears fell, one after another, and Ki-jo asked,
"What do you regret the most?"
"I think I lived resenting everyone. I resented my parents for selling me to a rich old man, and I resented myself for abandoning my child and running away..."
Hm. So the girl had been adrift all this while. That she had borne a child in her middle teens was, in the end, what came of poor parents selling a daughter as concubine to a wealthy old man. The child would not have been her own wish. And fleeing to Seoul while leaving him behind must have sat on her heart ever since; however she pretended otherwise, it was no easy thing to turn one's back on a baby she had carried in her own belly for ten months. He could well imagine how thoroughly a girl who had lived out a wretched adolescence, come up to Seoul, and sold her body and her smile to men would have had her very soul worn away.
And yet, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the changed Mi-hyang, a dissonance he could not name had come over him. Because of that feeling, the discomfort had never quite left him.
He went on putting questions to her.
"Miss Mi-hyang."
"Yes, President."
"What is your dream?"
"I want to go to France to study."
"Why France?"
"I want to go somewhere no one knows me."
So she had already resolved to leave Kwak Young-joo's side.
"And the child you left behind?"
He asked after the person who ought to have mattered most to her.
"He'll be far better off living with his father. He'll go his whole life without a worry for his next meal."
"Without a mother?"
"I was nothing to that house but a woman bought to bear them a son. They must have wanted me to run. The moment a boy was born, they hurried to enter only the child on their family register. I doubt he even knows I'm his mother."
"I see."
One could say that, as a mother, she had done what she could for her son's future. But she might just as well have done it for the sake of her own freedom.
What an impossible woman to read...
A bitterness kept rising in him. Even so, he needed Mi-hyang's help however he could get it, and he set that thought aside for the moment.
"I never truly knew what sort of person you were, Miss Mi-hyang. And now that it seems to me this is your real self, it pains me to think how hard it must have been for you all this time."
He said it as generously as he was able.
"Thank you, President..."
Mi-hyang covered her face and broke into sobs, grief welling up past all holding. Ki-jo gave her time to cry her fill, and while she did, he kept ordering his thoughts. He had to leave her satisfied, so that she would tell Kwak Young-joo she was receiving a great deal of help from him. And tell him often.
"Don't worry about a thing. Study. Give yourself to the Miss Korea work as well. I'll see you through university, and all the way to study in France."
"Thank you. For understanding so unworthy a woman, and for helping me..."
"I'm grateful too. Seeing you changed like this gladdens my own heart."
He talked with her of one thing and another, and presently worked the conversation around to the grave mistake he seemed lately to have made with Kwak Young-joo.
"Because of the mistake I made, I can hardly sleep these days."
At that, Mi-hyang took his hand, lightly.
"President, the Superintendent is a large-hearted man. He never holds a small matter in his heart for long. I'm certain he has forgotten all of it."
In the instant she said it, Ki-jo caught in her eyes the look of the Mi-hyang he had known in the days of Myeongwolgwan.
Please. Let's make this a win-win, Mi-hyang.
When the talk was finished, she saw him all the way to the entrance of the apartment complex, and he made his way back to the yard. He took it as given that she would plead his case from the pillow. He alone could open the way to the study in France she wanted so desperately.
A few days later, a call came from Kwak Young-joo.
"Yes, Superintendent. Have you kept in good health?"
Kwak hesitated a moment, then went on.
Ki-jo smiled, faintly.
"It's the same with me, Brother. I opened my eyes in the morning and found myself home in the inner room."
Ki-jo and Kwak spun out a transparent lie between them. They were trading the wish to mend things, and for that the truth was of no use. It was a trick drinkers reached for all the time.
"Of me, Brother? I'm honored."
"I'm sorry, Brother. I've committed a sin I ought to die for."
When Ki-jo apologized once more in extravagant terms, Kwak broke into a rough laugh.
There was a certain broadness to Kwak, in his way. And behind that Kwak, Ki-jo could feel Mi-hyang's efforts.
"About me?"
"Understood, Brother. Thank you."
Ki-jo set down the receiver and let out a long breath. The breach with Kwak Young-joo, it seemed, had been neatly sewn shut.
His eyes went to the calendar. Time I looked after the business. The year '57 is nearly gone.