The Rat-Fire Play
Lee Ki-jo gathered the villagers and led them out to the broad plain of Jeongok-ri, where the land looked down over the Hantan River.
Before he gave them their orders, he raised the pick he had brought and drove it into the earth. Clang! The iron struck ground frozen hard as stone, and the point would not bite.
Just as I thought. The earth is frozen solid.
He gave up on digging and offered another way.
"We'll have to set fire to the fields. I'll hand out lamp oil and lighters. Let us burn the Jeongok-ri plain."
"Village Head, are we going to play the rat-fire game?"
Juseok, all of ten, asked it in a rush of excitement.
"That's right, Juseok. The rat-fire game."
Ki-jo answered the boy with a small smile.
When the adults put fire to the bone-dry field, the children went wild with delight. The smell of burning grass spread on every side, and the flames ran with the wind, savagely devouring the wide plain.
A few of the village men, watching from a distance as Ki-jo set fire to the fields out of nowhere, muttered among themselves.
"Hold on — isn't today Daehan, the Great Cold?"
"Great Cold, sure enough."
"The First Full Moon is still a month off. What's the Village Head doing, playing at rat-fire like a child?"
"Just do as you're told. When have you ever seen the Village Head waste his effort on nonsense?"
"Even so, this sits wrong with me. It's a bit much..."
"You talk too much. This land is the Village Head's too. Maybe he's of a mind to plant beans out here."
"Ah, right — beans. This would be a fine place for them."
Ki-jo smoked in silence for a long while, watching the Jeongok-ri fields burn. Old Man Gusuk, the eldest man in the village, came up beside him.
"Village Head... Breaking new ground on the Jeongok-ri plain is one thing, but cutting a water channel through Eundae-ri looks more urgent to me..."
The old man wore an apologetic face and brought the words out with difficulty.
"Elder, I don't mean to plant crops here. And the channel at Eundae-ri — I'll see to that myself."
"I know you'll handle it as it ought to be handled. An old man, meddling for nothing. I'm sorry..."
"Not at all, Elder. I've taken on so much of late that I haven't looked after the village as I should. The apology is mine."
"No, no. The fault is mine. You keep us fed, and here I go opening my mouth without a thought..."
Ki-jo closed his hand around the old man's bone-dry fingers and held them tight.
"You are the elder of Eundae-ri. If you have something to say to me, say it freely, whenever you wish."
"Thank you... Village Head. Truly, thank you. You show such regard for a useless old man like me. How am I ever to repay a kindness like this..."
Ki-jo looked at the deep-cut wrinkles of Old Man Gusuk's face. The old man resembled the man Ki-jo himself had been before the regression. His son had been dragged off for forced labor under the Japanese and had died; his grandson had been taken by the People's Army during the war and had never come home. Whenever Ki-jo saw him — always sunk in worry, a man heavy with old grief — he wanted to look after him.
"Village Head, the fire's dying down."
Kim Seogwang came over as he spoke. Ki-jo called the villagers together and began to give his orders.
"Adults, search the field and pick up pieces of stone. Children, go down to the river and turn over the sand. If you find a flat stone about the size of a grown man's palm, bring it to me."
"Stones?"
"Yes. Stones — but not smooth ones, like pebbles. Choose the kind that settles into the hand when you close your fingers around it."
"Village Head... did you burn the field just to find rocks?"
Little Jang asked.
"Hey! Why so many questions? Do what the Village Head tells you! Don't you know a man who talks too much is a communist?"
Kim Seogwang tore into Little Jang, and Ki-jo checked him.
"It's all right. Brother Kim, please don't be so hard on him."
It pained Ki-jo that he could not tell the villagers what this project of his really was. But he could not reveal the plan at this stage. One careless word, and he might hand them a hope that came to nothing.
"Don't let the children climb up onto the river ice. Suman, you can keep them in hand down by the water, can't you?"
"Yes, Village Head."
Suman answered smartly. He was thirteen — not old enough to be called a man, and too big to be called a child. So Ki-jo had set the in-between boy to watch the others.
The villagers scattered across the field, bending to hunt for stones, and Ki-jo searched the ground nearby as well. What he was looking for was an Acheulean handaxe.
It was a Paleolithic relic that would be discovered in 1977 at Jeongok-ri in Yeoncheon, Gyeonggi Province, and turn the archaeological world on its head. Acheulean handaxes had been found west of India — in Europe, Africa, and West Asia — but never to the east, in East Asia or the Americas. On that basis, Movius's theory, that the lands east of India had lagged behind the Paleolithic world, was accepted as established fact.
Ki-jo meant to smash that mistaken theory twenty-three years ahead of its time.
Whenever someone picked up a stone that seemed as if it might be the one, they ran straight to Ki-jo and held it out. Each time, he shook his head. The sun slid slowly west. The cold deepened, dusk gathered over the fields, and Ki-jo decided to call the search off. A woman who had come out with a child strapped to her back kept catching at his eye, and his resolve went soft.
Right. A relic is the sort of thing you fail to find the moment you go looking for it on purpose.
He remembered that even in 1977, when the handaxe came to light at Jeongok-ri, the finding had been pure accident. An American soldier who had studied archaeology had been on a date with a Korean woman along the Hantan River when he stumbled on it out of nowhere.
Ki-jo was about to gather the villagers again when Suman, down by the river, came running in a breathless rush.
"Village Head! Village Head!"
The moment Ki-jo saw the stone in the boy's hand, he knew. This was it.
"Where did you find this?"
"At the far end of the sandbar."
Ki-jo ran for the river with Suman, and when the villagers dug with their bare hands into the sand where the boy had found the handaxe, a whole heap of stones of the same sort came up out of the bank.
"Is this what you were looking for, Village Head?"
"Yes. Yes — this is it."
Unable to contain his joy, Ki-jo dropped down onto the sand, clutched the stone, and laughed aloud. The villagers had never once seen him let his feelings show like that. He drew the children who had found the Acheulean tools into his arms one after another and let them feel how grateful he was.
"Well done. Well done. You've saved me."
He gathered himself and spoke to the villagers.
"We have to collect these stones and lay them out again on the ground we burned. Carry them gently, so they don't break."
"But Village Head, you searched so anxiously for them. Why scatter them back on the ground?"
"I only need to take five. Leave the rest in the earth."
The villagers still could not fathom what he intended. On the road back to Eundae-ri, Ki-jo's shoulders looked as light as those of a man dancing.
That night, at home, he began to write a letter.
Dear. professor.
I live in South Korea. I found it in my land. please come to korea. and see this strange stone.
I sent this letters to five famous universities. Buy my land. I hope you are the fisrt man who buy my land. You buy land, you have the stone...
He placed the five letters into five boxes. Each one, packed full of straw, held a stone tool found along the Hantan River. When the work was finished, Sunrye turned to her husband.
"Dear... when did you learn to speak American?"
"I picked up a little English on the docks when we were in Busan. American military goods came in by the crate, and I had to know what was inside."
"Why have you had so many secrets lately? You're not hiding something else from me, are you? Don't tell me..."
Ki-jo laughed, deep and easy. He had returned to 1953 because of her. As if he would ever let his eyes wander. But Sunrye had felt the slight of it all the same — how many secrets he seemed to keep these days. Then he rubbed her back with his hand, and the hurt melted away like snow.
"There's nothing like that. Let's turn in early. I think I have to go up to Seoul tomorrow."
"Seoul? What for this time?"
"I need to send a parcel to America."
"You're going to send stones to America?"
"I have to. I mean to sell the Jeongok-ri land dear to a rich American university."
"Sell the Jeongok-ri land to Americans?"
"Yes."
"But... how?"
"There's a way."
"How much will you ask?"
"I intend to take the same price as land in the district where that university sits."
"But the Jeongok-ri land is enormous..."
"America is a hundred times the size of our country. A tract the size of Jeongok-ri isn't even as big as an ordinary ranch over there."
"Even so... if you send them stones, will Americans really come all the way to Korea to buy land?"
"We have to try. Academic honor is at stake, so they'll take an interest. They will."
"Academic honor...? In a rock?"
Sunrye could not make sense of her husband's words at all.
"Don't carry what I've said to the neighbors. This may come to nothing."
"All right. I won't..."
She made up her mind to keep her mouth shut, lest her husband look like a man chasing empty schemes.
The next day Ki-jo loaded five wooden boxes onto his back and set out for Seoul. Each box bore the address of a different American university — addresses he had memorized by heart before the regression. He left them at Umigwan and asked a man of the Jongno Faction to send them on to America through the post office of the United States Eighth Army. With only those words, he slipped out of Umigwan as if the wind had taken him, and went home.
After Ki-jo had gone, the Jongno man brought the boxes to Kim Doo-han.
"What are these?"
"I couldn't say, Boss. Mr. Lee made the request and left at once, so I never had the chance to ask."
Kim Doo-han called over a subordinate who knew English and had him read the addresses written on the boxes.
"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford... Every one of them is a famous American university."
"Oh... Just what I'd expect of Mr. Lee. Gifts for his old schoolmates over in America, I'd say."
"So it would seem."
From that day on, Kim Doo-han found himself missing Lee Ki-jo and Jang Ma-ryang, who had not come looking for him. The National Assembly election was only four months away, and his mind was growing urgent.
"The next time Mr. Lee comes to Umigwan, don't send him off at once. Hold him a while, and send for me."
"Yes, Boss."
More than anything, Kim Doo-han wanted Ki-jo and Ma-ryang up in Seoul soon, and he wanted their help.