Major General Martin
Major General Martin had been to the U.S. Eighth Army base in Yongsan on business, and he was riding a jeep back to Camp Casey.
Before the jeep reached the main gate he always looked up at the large portrait of himself that hung outside the portrait shop. It had become a habit. That day, though, a portrait just as large — some Korean man — had been hung beside his own, and it stirred his curiosity.
"Hold up a minute."
Martin climbed down and walked over to the shop. He stood before the big canvas, wondering who the man could be.
A portrait that size, right beside mine. He must be somebody well known in Korea. What's his line of work?
The painter came running out of the shop the moment he caught sight of him, and Martin turned to the man.
"Who is this?"
"Ah — yes, General. That's Lee Ki-jo, a well-known Korean businessman. Very highly trusted in these parts."
The painter had taken a generous fee from Ki-jo for the picture, and a fine fountain pen besides, and he was glad to talk the man up, mixing what was true with whatever else came to hand.
"Is that so?"
"Yes, sir. They say he's running a brickworks in Yeoncheon these days."
"A business, right after the war... The young fellow must be quite the worker."
"Hardworking, clever, and a good heart besides. I painted his portrait, and he liked it so well he gave me a fountain pen."
Martin stole a glance at the Parker pen the painter had hooked, with plain pride, onto his suspenders.
A fountain pen would be a luxury for most Koreans. A businessman with money to spare? The name Lee Ki-jo fixed itself in his mind.
"Bricks, you said. What kind of brick does he make?"
"Red brick, so I hear."
"Red brick... All right. Here — take this."
He held out a photograph of his family and asked to have it painted.
"When it's finished, bring it onto the post."
"Yes, General."
The shopkeeper took the photograph in both hands, and Martin went back to the jeep. He liked the man's hand — the painter who worked just outside the gate. He didn't render people too solemnly, nor too lightly either. There was a balance in the work, a middle way.
The jeep carried him into the compound. He was not fond of Camp Casey in Dongducheon, where the U.S. 7th Infantry Division was posted. The armistice had come and they had gone on using the place ever since, but the base was little better than a tent village. It had been laid out as a temporary encampment, and then the division had simply sat down and stayed.
That day, too, he had gone to Eighth Army headquarters in Yongsan to ask for the money to build the place into something that deserved the name of a base, and he was on the road back.
Who knows how sturdy Korean brick will prove. Still, if the price is low enough, it would do for the construction. The Eighth Army commander is so tightfisted he won't send down a dime...
Martin had already made up his mind. When the painter brought the family portrait, he would ask to be introduced to the businessman called Lee Ki-jo.
Meanwhile, in Eundae-ri, Ki-jo was worrying over the problem Old Man Gusuk had set before him — how to get water onto the fields.
The land of Yeoncheon had been made by lava. Two hundred and seventy thousand years ago Mount Ori, in Pyeonggang of Gangwon Province, had erupted, and the molten rock had come pouring down and built the ground he stood on. The river was strange for the same reason. The only volcanic river on the Korean peninsula flowed through Yeoncheon — a river, that is, that followed the channel the lava had melted into the earth as it passed. And so the Hantan River ran some ten meters below the ground where people lived.
However hard the rain fell, the water never overflowed, and there was no need to fear a flood. In place of that mercy there was a serious flaw. A man might want the river for his farming and still find it no easy thing to haul the water up from under the cliffs. The Chatan Stream, which ran beside Eundae-ri, was no different. It flowed beneath the cliff, and it was hard to draw on for irrigation.
Electricity and a pump would settle it. But there's no chance of either in 1954...
The simplest answer he could find was to give up wet-rice farming, which drank so much water. The trouble was that most of the people who had followed him into Eundae-ri were tenant farmers out of Yangju, men who had never grown anything but rice. They had taken it for granted that they would grow rice in Eundae-ri as well.
Prices are climbing hard just now, but the price of rice is going to collapse before long...
From the life he had already lived, Ki-jo carried two searing memories of the rice market. One was a surge. The other was a crash.
The surge that burned brightest was the spike of 1947, when the price rose three hundred times over. In all the history of Korea as he had lived it, there had never been another rise like that. It was a story from before the Republic was even founded, from the days of the American military government — the military government had bungled its reckoning of how much rice Korea needed, cut the food aid, and the country had gone half mad. Set against the prices of the life he had left behind, ten kilograms of rice that ordinarily sold for forty thousand won had changed hands for no less than twelve million.
In 1952, too, rice had briefly cost more than gold. But that had been a short convulsion in the middle of the war, when there was simply not enough to eat. The moment the United States released its relief grain, the price was brought to heel.
His memory of the opposite — the collapse — belonged to 1957. After the Korean War, American relief goods came pouring in, the price of rice plunged, and a great many farm households went bankrupt. Vast shipments of American cornmeal and wheat flour had arrived, and that was what had done it.
For now, I'd better tell them to plant barley.
As a stopgap he would have them sow barley, which could be raised in dry fields, and after that he would have to lead the farming of Eundae-ri by a longer plan. They would need vegetables and fruit that could hold even if rice collapsed, and the fruit in particular would have to be grown by some uncommon method, one that could raise its worth.
He had been down at the Chatan Stream, taking in the basalt columns and the wild rock, and from there he climbed up onto the plain of Eundae-ri. He was home with a cigarette between his lips, resting, when a voice called to him from outside.
"Village Head — are you in?"
Who is it? Ki-jo got up and opened the door.
"Good day to you, Village Head."
"Hello. It's been a while."
It was Mr. Mulbak, the one with the pretty youngest daughter.
"It's cold. Come on inside."
Ki-jo brought him into the warm room. The man looked as though he had been through a bad ordeal. His face had darkened, his eyes were red and bloodshot, and his cheeks had fallen in, as if he had not eaten in days. Then he spoke.
"I... Village Head. I need you to set a trouble of mine right..."
"What? Me?"
"My youngest girl..."
Mr. Mulbak could not get the rest of it out. He broke down and wept in front of Ki-jo, and Ki-jo was startled.
Has Mulbak's youngest come down with something fatal...?
"What's happened? Is she very sick?"
"No... I'd sooner she'd taken sick and died..."
"What? What are you saying? What parent wishes their own child dead?"
"No. That girl of mine has gone and made herself a whore for the GIs down in Dongducheon. Better she dropped dead..."
"What...?"
Ki-jo was certain of one thing. Mulbak's youngest was no camp-town prostitute. He knew it because he had met every woman in Dongducheon who lived that way, and she was not among them.
"I think there must be some misunderstanding. Sit down with your daughter and talk it through properly."
"She won't hear a word I say. A daughter old enough to be married, and now she stays out the night as regular as sitting down to eat..."
Mr. Mulbak kept his head bowed, and fat tears fell, one heavy drop after another.
Has she run off? Ki-jo turned the possibilities over.
"Mr. Park... please don't let yourself think she's become one of those women. Just wait a little."
"Seeing as you'll help me, Village Head, I'll trust you and wait..."
Eh? I never said I'd help...
Before he quite knew how, Ki-jo had been left with the job of finding Mr. Mulbak's youngest daughter. Even so, he could not coldly turn away a man who had come asking.
"All right. For now, trust your daughter and wait. I'm sure it isn't what you fear."
He soothed Mr. Mulbak and sent him home.
Around the time hunger began to stir, Sunrye came in with Soon-young.
"Sis, tell Brother-in-law the funny story. That thing we saw."
Soon-young snickered.
"What a thing to tell. Young men and women are all like that..."
The two of them laughed and left Ki-jo hanging on it.
"Don't just laugh between yourselves. Tell me what you saw."
"Well, dear — it's Mr. Mulbak's youngest..."
"Mr. Mulbak's youngest?"
"Yes. That sly little thing..."
"Soon-young and I went down to the Hantan to collect the fish from the ice fishing, and would you believe it — there was Mulbak's girl walking the bank arm in arm with an American man. The two of them hugging, and kissing..."
"But Sis, wasn't that American handsome? Not a match for our Ma-ryang, of course, but he had a cowboy hat on, and he was making a fine show of himself."
Ki-jo felt the pieces of Mr. Mulbak's misunderstanding fall into place.
Aha. So that's where he went wrong. Nothing to it after all...
Leave it alone, he thought, and it would sort itself out. The notion lightened him. Sooner or later, either Mulbak's youngest would bring the American in the cowboy hat home and make the introduction, or the man would up and leave for America and she would come home in tears. One or the other.
Common enough in the fifties. Common as anything...
Ki-jo hummed under his breath, drawing in the smell of the spicy fish stew Sunrye and Soon-young had on the fire. He hadn't the faintest dream that the romance between Hee-ja, Mr. Mulbak's youngest, and the American in the cowboy hat would ever come to be tangled up with his own life.