Opening Stones
The heat of August was slowly burning itself out.
Ki-jo's mind was fixed on September 17, the day of Chuseok. On the holiday itself, the enormous Typhoon Sarah would come down on Korea, and he meant to cut the damage, even if only by a little.
From the middle of August he ordered every worksite to have all its work finished before the holiday. Anyone with family or kin living near the water was to be told to stay clear of the shore on Chuseok day. The worksites in Busan, which would take the worst of it, he charged to complete their typhoon preparations before the holiday without fail. And every truck belonging to Cheongsan Transport, save those assigned to haul American military supplies, he sent down into South Gyeongsang.
The heavy-equipment, construction, and transport crews, seasoned by Typhoon Agnes, gathered machines and trucks in Busan with practiced ease. Against Sarah, though, Ki-jo set his aim differently than he had against Agnes. Not relief—supplies, and getting the displaced out of harm's way. The damage would be so much wider and so much worse than Agnes that Cheongsan, even straining to its limit, would have no strength left to carry relief.
People would not grasp how serious the storm was until a surge came rolling into Busan and a wind rose fierce enough to tear houses loose. That was when he meant to move them, in Cheongsan Transport's trucks. He could forecast a powerful typhoon all he liked. The stubbornness of people in the 1950s, who believed Chuseok had to be spent at home and nowhere else, was not going to bend.
On the first of September, Ki-jo left Seoul for Busan. He inspected the plant's facilities himself, made certain that shelter had been secured for the employees who lived near the sea, and last of all adjusted Cheongsan Marine's schedule so that no ship of theirs would be lying in Busan Harbor over the holiday. The freighters were Cheongsan Marine's precious assets. If he was not to lose them, they had to be gone from the harbor when the surge came crashing in.
Through Oh Yang-soo, whose acquaintances ran wide, he tried to persuade every boatman the man knew to pull his vessel out of port around Chuseok. No one would listen.
So Ki-jo bought boats in Busan and Masan as fast as he could lay hands on them. They would vanish in the typhoon anyway; better that he buy them and put them to use. Word got about that a man down from Seoul was paying dear for any boat with an engine on it, fishing boat or cargo boat alike, and owners of aging hulls began turning them over. He paid twice the market price, then moved every one inland or evacuated it outright to the west coast.
When the storm had passed, the boats left moored in the harbors and fishing ports of South Gyeongsang would all be wrecked. And so it would be. Typhoon Sarah would wipe out the craft that should have gone to the fishing grounds, and the fishermen of the region would cobble together even engineless boats, however they could, and put out to sea. Ki-jo had bought his at absurd prices, but once the typhoon was over those boats would earn their keep many times over.
Last of all he moved every stick of furniture out of the Cheongsan Marine office in Nampo-dong and up to a factory on higher ground. When he went so far as to take down the window glass and shift the office wholesale, the shipping companies around him laughed.
"Looks like Cheongsan Marine's folding up. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo paid them no mind. He bought up the goods in the waterfront warehouses just as indiscriminately. The sea would sweep them away in any case, but if he purchased them and moved them somewhere safe, he judged, he could keep the supplies and turn a profit besides. Cheongsan Transport trucks ranged along Busan Harbor, buying whatever they found and hauling it off.
The peculiar things Ki-jo was doing in Busan reached the ears of Major General Park Chung-hee at the Busan Logistical Command. Park went to the Cheongsan Marine office and saw for himself that it stood empty. With his own eyes he watched hundreds of Cheongsan trucks roaming the city, buying up supplies at random and shifting them out to the outskirts.
He wondered why. The Lee Ki-jo he knew was not a man to waste himself on foolishness.
Strange business......
Park went looking for him as he hurried from one task to the next, and found him at last at the Miwon plant. Meeting him, Park asked,
"Could you spare me a moment?"
Ki-jo hesitated, then answered.
"Of course. I'll call on you this evening, General."
Park told him to come to his quarters. His family was in Seoul, and down in Busan he was living in the residence alone.
Five days before Chuseok, Ki-jo was startled to find Park Chung-hee come looking for him. The eyes were intense, and yet, perhaps because the man was shy by nature, he never held a gaze for long—and that Park was asking him to make time.
Ki-jo thought a moment, and agreed. He finished checking the flood defenses at the Miwon plant, and around seven o'clock went to Park's quarters. It was the first time they would meet alone, and he was a little tense. His feelings about facing Park Chung-hee directly were complicated.
The Park of the 1960s had left a deep impression on him. There had been something desperate in the way he spoke and in his eyes, and a sincerity, plain to see, about lifting the country up. The Park of the 1970s had seemed another man entirely. After he lost Yuk Young-soo, especially, he no longer looked like the Park of before.
When Ki-jo lost Sunrye, he came to understand why. Park had been human too. Lose, in the late years of his life, the wife who stayed at his side and was always on his side, and he became an unhappy man who had lost half his spirit.
All at once he remembered the Liberation Day ceremony of 1974. When Yuk Young-soo was struck by a bullet from no one could say where and collapsed, Park Chung-hee had been crouched beneath the dais. Ki-jo thought the man hiding under that platform must have seen his wife fall. In that instant he must have known she was dead.
Before he lost Sunrye, Park rising with composure to finish the address had seemed magnificent. Years later, watching it again on YouTube, the feeling was different. He only looked grief-stricken.
Ki-jo had learned something on his travels with Syngman Rhee. However politics might dress a man up, a politician was human in the end. Rhee had been nothing more than a lonely, covetous old man.
And Park Chung-hee? Some people packaged him as a god, but he too was human. The Park of the present had already struck the ceiling of promotion over the matter of his ideology, and was nothing but a forlorn general waiting on the discharge that would find him before long. A middle-aged man of forty-three who, once he left the army, would not even know what he was supposed to do. That was Park Chung-hee now.
Ki-jo cast the weight of it cleanly aside and told the sentry at the residence why he had come. He gave his name, and the sentry waved him straight through.
The entrance of the quarters where Park was staying. He knocked, and a moment later Park came out as if he had been waiting.
"Let's go out. I know a Chinese place run by an overseas Chinese. We'll go there."
Ki-jo walked the streets of Yangjeong-dong beside him. Around the logistical command there were a fair number of restaurants and cookhouses that did their trade with soldiers. Park, who had walked without a word, stopped in front of a shabby Chinese restaurant.
"Here."
They went in together. The owner, as if Park were a regular, recognized him, greeted him warmly, and showed them to a private room where they could talk quietly. Sitting on the edge of the wooden floor to take off his shoes before going in, Park's face was bright. When his eyes met Ki-jo's, he even grinned.
Ki-jo knew that smile. There had been a time when he lived wearing one like it himself. A widower from the age of fifty, he grew lonely when evening came. Now and then a neighborhood friend would stop by and suggest a drink at the local bar, and nothing in the world could have been more welcome.
A widower's smile......
Park's was exactly that.
When they had sat down, a waiter brought the liquor first. Without a word Park held an empty glass out to Ki-jo, poured for him, and filled his own as well.
"One drink first."
He knocked the soju back at a gulp, without so much as a side dish. Before he could pour for himself again, Ki-jo caught the bottle.
"Allow me."
Park drank what was poured for him without a word. He seemed the sort who needed a little drink in him before he could meet another man's eyes and let the words come easily. Ki-jo, who held his liquor poorly, held back as much as he could, and Park did not press him to keep the same pace.
By the time the food arrived, Park had already emptied a bottle. With the drink taking hold, and only then, perhaps, finding the spirit to speak, he urged Ki-jo to eat.
"The cooking here is quite decent. Have a try."
Ki-jo took a bite and said it was good, and Park grinned.
"Everyone I bring here likes it."
"I can believe it."
When Ki-jo chimed in, Park smiled and poured for him.
He was very different from the Park Chung-hee of the newsreels and the television. The uprightness was similar, and the lack of pretension, but he did not seem a great man for all that. Spare with words, a little frustrating—and yet not someone who put his companion ill at ease. Still, his speech and his movements were deliberate, with a soldier's economy, and sitting across from him one grew careful.
Watching him drink in silence and let the time pass, a man might wonder what on earth he was thinking. At the same time, Park himself seemed to be turning over what he ought to say.
"My thanks, for '54."
He dropped the words out of nowhere. Silence, and then a short sentence tossed onto the table—that seemed to be his way. Ki-jo had no wish to say anything, one way or the other, about having helped when Kim Chang-ryong tried to tie Park Chung-hee and Paik Sun-yup together and drive them out of the army. It would only make the air more awkward. He smothered the thanks with a look that said he had heard, and dropped a short sentence of his own, the way Park had.
"I used to live beside the railroad."
Park grinned. That kind of talk seemed to please him.
"So did I."
Ki-jo had expected as much. He knew the house where Park had lived as a child had stood beside the tracks as well.
"Hear the first train in the morning, and you knew the hour."
"That's right."
Park nodded. He seemed to be remembering his own childhood.
"My niece tells me something."
This time he brought up Park Young-ok out of the blue.
"That you live in Jongno."
"Yes. My wife and your niece have grown quite close."
"I heard it from my niece's husband as well."
"I went out to Noryangjin and was treated to baeksuk."
Ki-jo found the talk enjoyable. It was like a game of Go. In the early opening the stones fall one by one with space between them, but black and white are bound, in the end, to draw tight against each other. His conversation with Park had begun far apart. With time, the distance was closing.
"I hear you suffered a hard time on my account."
"I took a slap across the face, and we only grew closer."
"Did you grow a great deal closer because of me?"
Park slipped in a joke about what had passed with Kwak Young-joo, and Ki-jo answered in kind.
"One more from that man, and I think we'd be blood brothers."
Park laughed, a rough bark of a laugh. He was quick. Leave out the incident and the names, toss out a fragment, and he still hit both exactly.
"Why are you doing all that in Busan?"
Since Park was curious about the work, Ki-jo turned the question back.
"General—if you thought Busan was going under water, what would you do?"
"Busan, underwater......"
Park stroked his chin as if sinking into thought, then went on.
"I'd have to move the logistical command's supplies somewhere safe."
Ki-jo nodded.
"When Typhoon Agnes came through, we nearly took heavy losses."
"I see."
"I got worried about what would happen if a typhoon came again this autumn, so I ran a rehearsal ahead of time."
"Hm......"
Park kept a long silence. Then he held out his empty glass.
"I ought to run a drill of my own."
Filling it, Ki-jo said,
"If the drill needs trucks, you have only to say so."
He urged Park to hold the exercise before Chuseok.