Byeokje
Ki-jo drove slowly along the unpaved road. Byeokje lay close to Seoul, and yet it was country through and through. The sun was sinking in a long, languid slant when the jeep reached the village where Sunrye's aunt lived.
Just as Kwak Young-joo had promised, two policemen came into view, blocking the lane into the neighborhood. Ki-jo eased the car to a stop and submitted to the inspection of the officer with an M1 rifle slung over his shoulder.
"Where are you from?"
One of the constables put the question with a hard, overbearing look.
"Seoul."
"Your name?"
"Lee Ki-jo."
The moment the name left his mouth, the startled constable snapped a salute.
"Loyalty! All quiet on duty, sir!"
The abrupt reversal caught Ki-jo off guard, but he answered with his usual calm.
"Thank you for your trouble."
"Not at all, sir! Forgive me for not recognizing you!"
"Please. It's quite all right."
He asked Sunrye for two bags of sweets, and when she passed them over he gave both to the officer.
"The car behind is with us."
"Yes, sir! Understood! Thank you!"
The officer who had taken the sweets saluted once more, and the police waved both jeeps through—Ki-jo's, and the one carrying Ma-ryang.
"Why are the police blocking the road into the village? And they seemed startled when they heard your name..."
Sensing her unease, Ki-jo offered a brief account.
"I helped a senior police official not long ago. He asked to see me today, and when I told him I had somewhere to be, he wanted to know where."
"I see..."
"I think he posted those officers on the road as thanks for the help I gave him."
Sunrye took his words without a shadow of doubt. She did not know what her husband did out in the world, but he was not a man to earn anyone's grudge, and he went about doing good; if people treated him with respect, she thought, it was no more than he deserved. Watching the police salute him as though he were some high official, she felt a small, private pleasure all the same.
The two jeeps crossed the stream on a bridge newly laid. They were near the place where she and Ki-jo had first met, and a smile came to her before she knew it. The stepping-stones were still there, the very ones he had led her over with her hand in his, and that a bridge fit for cars had risen beside them filled her with a quiet pride. As her aunt's house drew near, her face brightened further. She had lived here from the age of five until seventeen—twelve years. It was as good as home.
Ki-jo stopped the car in front of the house, gathered the family, and led them together into the yard.
For Sunrye it was a meeting after ten years. For Ki-jo, after nearly fifty.
Sunrye, with Yeong-eun in her arms, called from the yard.
"Aunt, I'm here. It's Sunrye."
She had scarcely finished speaking when the door of the thatched house opened and her aunt appeared.
"Sunrye?"
Her uncle leaned his face out the doorway as well.
"Sunrye's come?"
"Yes, Uncle. I'm here."
The couple hurried out of the room. They were only just entered upon old age, and when they saw Yeong-eun in Sunrye's arms and Yeong-su standing at her side, their faces broke into light. Their niece, married and gone these ten years, had come home with children. They looked as if they could not tell whether they were dreaming.
"You've come. You've come. Two children."
Aunt Yang had never laid eyes on the child Sunrye had been carrying when she left.
"Aunt. Uncle. Don't you see me?"
Soon-young took a step forward.
"Soon-young."
Aunt Yang drew her into an embrace and patted her back. She had held this girl from the time she was a swaddled infant and raised her as near as her own daughter, and all she had known was that four years ago Soon-young had fled her husband's house. Tears stood in her eyes.
"Soon-young. I heard you'd been cast out and run away from home. What happened...?"
"Cast out? I walked out on my own two feet. Went to my sister's in Yeoncheon and met a new man."
Ma-ryang, standing at Soon-young's side, bent in a bow to the couple.
"How do you do? Jang Ma-ryang."
Only then did Aunt Yang and Uncle Park truly take him in. They started, looking from one to the other.
"Welcome. So you're Soon-young's husband?"
"Yes, sir. Father."
"Ah... from the North, then. Welcome. You're welcome here."
Uncle Park offered Ma-ryang his hand. When the handshake was done, he took Ki-jo's hand at last and held it fast.
"You've come. I've wondered how you were getting on."
This was the man he himself had chosen and bound to his niece. At the sight of him something tender welled up, and tears glimmered in Uncle Park's eyes.
Ki-jo beckoned Ma-ryang to his side.
"Come. We'll offer Father and Mother a proper bow."
"A bow on the bare ground?"
Uncle Park tried to wave them off, but the two men dropped flat in the yard and bowed to the earth.
"Up, up, the both of you. Seeing you alive like this—we're the ones who ought to be bowing."
He led Ki-jo and Ma-ryang up onto the wooden porch. Aunt Yang stared at Ma-ryang's towering frame, startled by the sheer size of him, and yet she could not look away, plainly proud that Soon-young had remarried a man so solid and steady. Once they were seated, the two jeeps the young couples had come in caught the old pair's eyes. They saw, too, how bright the couples' faces were, and how fine their clothes. The children's clothes were fine as well.
"You've made good, the both of you. Made good..."
Uncle Park's throat closed. Ki-jo had gone away with nothing in the world—nothing to hope for but a decent heart—and here he was returned, prosperity written clear on his face. She was his niece, yes, but he had not been able to send her off with so much as a spoon, and the shame of it had grieved him ever since. For days after Sunrye left with Ki-jo he had done nothing but drink, sick at heart. Now that same girl had come back radiant, dressed like the lady of a rich house. Nothing could have pleased him more.
"You ought to greet your grandmother and grandfather. Yeong-su."
At his father's word, the boy bowed as Ki-jo had done.
"Grandfather, Grandmother, please accept my bow."
At the child's words and his solemn little bow, fondness all but spilled from the old couple's eyes.
"So the eldest is Yeong-su. What a bright, sharp-eyed little face."
Aunt Yang stroked the head he had bowed.
"The very image of his father."
Uncle Park found the boy endlessly dear, and young as he was, his likeness to Ki-jo made him seem a child one could trust.
"The second is Yeong-eun, Aunt."
"Let me hold her."
Aunt Yang took Yeong-eun and fussed over her, crooning. The child was shy of no one. She patted the old woman's face and laughed, bright and open, and then Uncle Park wanted his turn, and Aunt Yang passed the baby into his arms. As if none of it could be real, she laid a hand over her heart.
"Sunrye. Soon-young. It's like a dream. It truly is. All through the war I told myself it would be enough if you were only alive, and now here you stand before my eyes, all of you, living well. I'm frightened this might be a dream."
Soon-young gathered up Aunt Yang, who was wiping at the tears running down her face, and held her close.
"Look at our aunt. Get a little older and the tears come pouring. When we were small she could shout the roof down. A lioness, she was."
Tears stood in Soon-young's own eyes. Sunrye was already crying with her aunt. The men who watched them felt their chests pull tight, and for a moment none of them could trust himself to speak.
After a little while Uncle Park cleared his throat.
"Well. Our sons-in-law. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?"
"My brother-in-law and I joined hands and went into business together. At first we farmed in Yeoncheon. Then we came up to Seoul, opened a shop, and started a factory."
Ki-jo left it at that. Uncle Park nodded, and then, as if the thought of a drink had come over him, he rose to fetch makgeolli, the cloudy rice wine of the villages.
"You two wait a moment. I'll go draw some."
Sunrye stopped him.
"Uncle, please stay where you are. We brought liquor, and something to eat with it. Clear rice wine, the kind you like, and mung-bean pancakes."
"Did you? Our Sunrye hasn't forgotten what her uncle loves."
Aunt Yang said it with a smile. At his niece's words something clutched at Uncle Park's heart, and he brushed the corner of his eye. She had come to their house already wise beyond her years, and she had grown up forever watching his face, careful of his moods. That she remembered what he liked made him sorry. It weighed on him that he had not been kinder to her.
"Uncle, just sit a moment. I'll lay the table."
"I'll help."
Sunrye and Soon-young went out to the car and came back with the liquor and the dishes. Ki-jo and Ma-ryang brought in the gifts they had left in the jeeps. Ma-ryang carried the rabbit hutch; Ki-jo had Miwon seasoning, matches, and boxes of the sweets Cheongsan made. While he explained to Uncle Park how to raise Angora rabbits, the women laid out the drink. A table went up on the low wooden platform in the yard, and the eight of them sat down together, talking, passing the food between them.
In the midst of the talk, Sunrye turned to her aunt.
"Aunt, when you married me off, what were you thinking, sending me to Yeong-su's father?"
At that, Aunt Yang smiled, a little abashed.
"When the time came, your uncle said we had to send you somewhere you wouldn't suffer as a daughter-in-law, no matter what. I agreed with him."
"Why, Aunt? Yeong-su's father didn't have a thing back then."
"Because I suffered badly that way myself. If your uncle hadn't taken me out and set up a house of our own, we couldn't have lived together."
At her words Uncle Park nodded, his eyes on his own feet. Theirs, too, had been no easy marriage.
"Truly? It wasn't because he was kind?"
"A good heart mattered most, of course."
Uncle Park answered, looking at Ki-jo. Soon-young broke in as if in protest.
"Then why did you marry me off to Gimpo? Into a house stuffed with them—parents-in-law, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law?"
"That place had rice, so we sent you there. Marry her into Gimpo, we said, and at least she won't starve. And your spirit was too strong. We thought you needed a house with elders, and a full family around you."
"Do you know how I suffered in that house? Aunt, Uncle, you don't know me. The only one who knows me is my husband."
She said it with Ma-ryang's arm clutched tight against her.
"Still, it's all right. Uncle sent me to Gimpo, and that's how I ended up meeting Ma-ryang. All's well that ends well."
Soon-young laughed, light and heedless.
"Yes. All's well that ends well."
Aunt Yang took her part. The whole family laughed and drank and ate, and the talk ran on into the night. The women went in first, for the children's sake, and only the three men were left on the platform in the yard. Ki-jo and Ma-ryang drank what remained with Uncle Park.
Ki-jo knew how the Parks had passed the war. Of their three sons, the youngest had been dragged into the Volunteer Army, fled, been held as a prisoner, and come home safe. Both of Ki-jo's sisters-in-law—Sunrye's elder sisters—had survived as well. Their lot had been kinder than that of the Yuns of Mapo, the family Sunrye's birth mother had married into. The Parks had all lived long and in good health. The trouble lay elsewhere. The whole clan had scraped through their lives short of money, every one of them. He wanted to help.
"Father, I operate a concern called the Cheongsan Store."
"A shop?"
"Yes. We've opened shops in several parts of Seoul, and we need people to run the ones the company manages itself."
Uncle Park, the long stem of his pipe between his teeth, nodded.
"I would like my elder brothers-in-law to take those shops."
A directly managed Cheongsan Store was a shop for which Ki-jo himself bought the land and the building, and which he ran in his own right. Run even one of them well, and a man would do better than by farming anywhere in Goyang County. The Parks were people without so much as land of their own. When Ki-jo named the monthly wage a man would draw for running a store, Uncle Park started.
"That much? Even though the shop wouldn't be mine?"
"Yes. In return, you must be kind to the customers, and you must be diligent."
He thought it would be a fine thing if his sons helped Ki-jo with the stores, but a worry sat in him.
"They're grown men now. Will they listen to me? They'll want to go on as they are..."
He sucked at the long pipe, and it drew hard and dry. Ki-jo watched him brooding. Seen again after fifty years, the man no longer had the look of an elder set above him. Ki-jo had lived to ninety; this man in his late fifties seemed young to him, and still in the thick of his working years. His worries felt familiar. He felt, almost, like a friend.
"Why don't you take a store first, Father? If you tell my brothers-in-law the work is heavy and ask them to lend a hand, won't they come?"
"Hm..."
He himself had farmed all his life for money that never amounted to much, but he wanted something else for his sons. If they did as Ki-jo said, the eldest would come and help first, and if the work suited him, he would bring the younger ones around.
"I'll try it. Thank you."
He had accepted.
"The shop and a house to live in are already arranged. The two of you need only come."
He meant to give the aunt and uncle a house in Seoul as well. They were the benefactors who had taken Sunrye in and let her live, family who deserved as much. If the couple and their children came to Seoul, received a house, and ran a shop, they would at last be free of the grinding poverty that had followed them all their lives. And he needed people he could trust to run the directly managed stores. Uncle Park's sons and daughters were poor, nothing more. They were honest, and they were hardworking. He had confirmed as much in the life before this one. What better hands for a family business than these?
The three of them, who had drunk late into the night, went each to his own room.
The room given to Ki-jo was the one where Sunrye and Soon-young had once lived. It was the room, too, where he and Sunrye had passed their wedding night. Moonlight came through the papered chinks of the door and lay across him as he watched the three of them sleep, deep and untroubled.
From 1958 a recession would set in, and politics would fall into still greater confusion. Whether it did or not, he was certain he could go forward. Even in hard times, a business that was meant to succeed would succeed.