The Martial Law Troops
At three in the afternoon, Gijo gathered what strength he had left and rose. There was still work to do. The citizens had to be told that martial law had been declared.
Syngman Rhee had proclaimed it to wrench order back into a Seoul that had slipped beyond anyone's control. In the original history, Song Yo-chan, once he became martial law commander, refused the government's demand to open fire—but this time, something else might happen.
Word of the proclamation would take time to reach every band of protesters. The hard-line demonstrators were still raging. Even at four o'clock the Seoul Shinmun building and the hall of the Anti-Communist League were burning, and police boxes across the city were being stormed, half wrecked or put to the torch. On street after street, police and protesters were still trading stones and gunfire, and the declaration of martial law looked like so much empty paper.
Caught in the middle of it, the police—Syngman Rhee's own praetorian force—could hardly hope to escape the people's wrath. Some died in the exchanges of fire. Others were beaten until they were barely alive.
At the Sejong-ro intersection, Gijo was looking over the officers the citizens had seized when his heart dropped. Patrolman Kim, a man from his own neighborhood, was in the hands of the armed faction.
From everything Gijo knew of him, Patrolman Kim was not a man who would harm anyone. He turned to the men standing guard over the captured police, clubs in their fists and carbines on their shoulders.
"What are you going to do with these officers?"
"Do? They've got to face the judgment of justice."
It was the man with the carbine slung across his back who said it. The phrase snagged in Gijo's mind. He was afraid it would slide into something like a people's tribunal.
"Did these men fire their guns?"
"Some did, some didn't, I'd say. Witnesses will come forward later, so don't you worry."
Gijo's eyes met Patrolman Kim's. Blood was running from the swollen ridge of the man's brow where he had been beaten. With a look alone, Gijo asked, Did you fire too? Patrolman Kim shook his head.
The man with the carbine turned his face away, as if to tell Gijo to drop his interest in the prisoners.
"The government has declared martial law. Soldiers will be coming into Seoul. Wouldn't it be better to hand these officers over to them?"
"What?"
The man spun around and stared, startled. Gijo couldn't tell whether the shock was at the news that martial law had been declared and troops were coming, or at the suggestion of turning the police over to them.
"Where'd you hear a rumor like that?"
"I heard the official announcement."
At that, the armed men put their heads together. Gijo wanted Patrolman Kim spared—and every officer now in their hands—from private punishment handed down without real evidence. He stepped in closer to the men still arguing.
"How about this? Let's move the officers to Korea University. There are students there who study law, and the university is trustworthy, isn't it?"
After the April 18 incident, Korea University's standing among the demonstrators stood high. Fortunately, the men's eyes shifted toward agreement.
"All right. Let's do that."
They hauled the officers, bound in straw rope, off toward Anam-dong, and Gijo followed. He meant to keep watch over the anxious Patrolman Kim.
The moment they passed inside the campus, students glared at the police being dragged in. Bodies lay on the university grounds beneath the Taegeukgi, the national flag, and it was the police who had shot them. The hostility was inevitable. The students were anything but kindly toward the captured officers.
Gijo asked whether there was anywhere on campus the police could be held, and the students led them to a space that would serve. Before the officers were shut inside, he drew close to Patrolman Kim and whispered.
"Don't even think of escaping. Just stay quiet here. It will turn out all right. I'll be here too."
He kept watch outside the room where they were confined, in case someone came looking for revenge.
As time passed, people began to gather around him, and from the talk moving among them he caught something that sounded like hope.
"When those cop bastards opened fire in front of the Central Government Building, the college kids rolled big sewer pipes ahead of them. Dodged the bullets with those, they did."
"That's a mercy."
Another man chimed in on the first.
"And when they started shooting over by Gyeongmudae, too. You know those steel oil drums? Somebody had hauled in a whole pile of them."
"Who would've brought those?"
"Beats me. Anyway, they had them standing here and there, and fewer people died because of it. The moment the guns cracked, folks ducked behind the street trees and those drums."
"Aigoo. What a relief."
"A lot of them tipped the drums over and lay flat behind them. Standing up, they wouldn't have covered many. When the bullets came down like rain, that's how they hid. Plenty of them came through by the skin of their teeth."
Hearing it, Gijo let out a long breath of relief.
Night came at last. Armed citizens, driven before the martial law troops entering Seoul, began pouring onto the Korea University campus, and unease spread across their faces. The martial law commander had ordered a curfew from nine at night until five in the morning, so they could not go home and had come to the university instead—and now protesters carrying carbines were coming in with them. People feared the campus would turn into a battlefield.
Gijo listened carefully to which way the talk was turning, ready to cut off anyone who tried, early, to drive the crowd toward something extreme. Someone spoke to him.
"Hey. You all right? That blood on your clothes isn't yours, is it?"
"No. I'm fine. I got it moving the wounded."
"Aiyu, you've had a hard day of it. Where were you?"
"Near the Central Government Building, and around Lee Ki-poong's house."
"You went to Lee Ki-poong's house?"
The men nearby pricked up their ears. To take the edge off their fear, Gijo decided to spin them a tale with a little invention salted in.
"People were breaking down his door and going inside, so I followed them in. I started with the toilet."
"The toilet? Why?"
"I wanted to see what kind of shit a man who eats well and lives well would leave behind. Thought he might shit gold."
The men around him snickered.
"You're a funny one. Find anything strange in there?"
It was a man with a laughing face, a merchant by the look of him.
"A whole shower of switches came tumbling out of the wardrobe in Park Maria's room."
"Switches?"
"Yes. Seems Park Maria takes a switch to Lee Ki-poong's calves every night."
The men laughed. It was the henpecked-husband humor that had been all the rage through the fifties.
"Ah, that explains it. Lately Lee Ki-poong's done nothing but sit in his chair. Must've been getting a good switching from the wife. Hahaha."
When the laughing merchant tossed that in, the crowd guffawed, then turned their attention back to Gijo. Wondering what to give them next, he remembered the stories of the bribes Lee Ki-poong had taken and offered them up as if he had seen the thing himself.
"I found a notebook on Lee Ki-poong's desk. Opened it, and it was nothing but a record of the bribes he'd received."
"Is that so? Tell us what you remember."
"The gift list was enough to take your breath away. Ribs, fish, fruit, of course—and someone gave a whole case of Coca-Cola. Three drums of gasoline, three bolts of poplin, three tubs of ice cream. There was even a man who brought three chicks. Names and dates and all."
"Well now. The fellow who brought the chicks must've been hated for it. The one who brought three drums of gasoline would've been loved."
People laughed, and Gijo kept going.
"Assemblyman Kim Sung-kon showed up with quilts, salted shrimp, and salt, hardly ten days ever passing between visits."
"Well, a National Assemblyman isn't much after all. Just a peddler in and out of Lee Ki-poong's house. Hahaha."
The laughing merchant kept playing off every line. Thanks to him, Gijo could keep the story going like one half of a comedy duo.
"Rice, yeontan briquettes, charcoal, firewood—that sort of thing was so ordinary I don't even remember how much he took. I'll stick to the odd ones."
"Go on, then."
"He got a vegetable called asparagus, and a fruit called melon. An electric blanket, tiger bone, and something called Sinalco, though I haven't the faintest idea what Sinalco is."
Sinalco was a German fruit drink.
"Didn't that house have a refrigerator too? They say if you put a watermelon in the icebox in high summer, you can still eat it the following spring. Did you see one of those?"
"I did. Opened the refrigerator, and what do you know—a seedless watermelon sitting right there."
"A seedless watermelon? Isn't that what Dr. Woo Jang-chun made?"
"That's right."
"Ha... A seedless watermelon is Syngman Rhee himself—a man with no seed of his own. He'd hate a reminder like that, so they must have passed it along to Lee Ki-poong."
At the laughing merchant's words, the men roared and slapped their knees. They knew Gijo was salting the truth with tall tales. But a tall tale was fine. All they needed was a story that could carry them through the fear of the moment.
Once his joking opened the way, people began telling what each of them had witnessed that day. Gijo checked the time. It was well past midnight. Soon the martial law troops would come crashing in.
A man came in from outside and said the troops were approaching the school, and that they had to decide what to do. Gijo said nothing. The citizens had no need of any plan at all.
There had been a reason he had urged them to bring the officers to Korea University. Toward evening, armed citizens driven by the martial law troops entered the campus grounds, and the 15th Infantry Division pursuing them surrounded Korea University. The armed citizens even prepared to fight to the death inside the school. At a glance, the campus looked like a very dangerous place. But Brigadier General Jo Jae-mi, commander of the 15th Division ringing it, made the right choice.
Gijo trusted the weight of history. He trusted an army that had never once fired on the citizens hiding inside Korea University.
A short while later, Brigadier General Jo Jae-mi came onto the campus with his aide. People tensed, wondering if he had come to deliver an ultimatum. Instead, the division commander first asked where the dead were. When the students led him to the place where the bodies lay under the Taegeukgi, Brigadier General Jo Jae-mi knelt before them and bowed his head.
At the sight, protesters and citizens grew solemn. A few of the watching students wept. Even the armed demonstrators seemed moved by the division commander; the fight had gone out of their faces.
"I am sorry we entered Seoul so late. The army should have prevented a thing like this. We were far too late."
People looked at the apologizing general as if they could hardly believe him.
"You may go home. The army will see every one of you there safely."
When the division commander made that promise, the people cheered. At once the armed protesters began turning their rifles over to the troops, and the army and the demonstrators started talking through how everyone would get home.
Those who lived too far would remain at Korea University until the curfew lifted, then go home. Those who lived near Anam-dong would move under army escort all the way to their doors. That was the agreement. The armed protesters, however, could not simply go home. The army said it would take the armed citizens into custody for the time being—but it promised the greatest possible leniency, since theirs had been an armed protest with just cause. The armed bands pushed out of downtown Seoul had been ready to raid even the military armory in Chang-dong, and the army could not simply let them walk away.
Those who had come to Korea University because of the curfew gathered in twos and threes by the neighborhoods where they lived. True to its word, the martial law force attached an escort to each neighborhood group. Even if the decision was meant to break up the massed protesters and ease the pressure of the demonstrations, what was unfolding had gone beyond the original history. Watching the martial law troops behave this way filled him with a quiet pride.
Gijo quietly approached an officer, told him which room the police were locked in, and asked that they be released once everyone else had gone. Then he joined the people from the Jongno district and set off with soldiers of the 15th Division.
A man called out to the second lieutenant walking at the front.
"Hey. Lieutenant. If an order comes down from above to shoot us, will you shoot?"
The people walking with them applauded.
Heading home among them, Gijo thought that the army, too, had grown sick of the Syngman Rhee regime. The image of Brigadier General Jo Jae-mi paying his respects before the bodies under the Taegeukgi rose in his mind. Sincerity had shown through the man's bearing. Otherwise the protesters would never have been moved.
As people reached their own neighborhoods one by one and parted, they bowed to one another and urged each other on—you've been through so much. Somewhere along the way they had become comrades.
Before he knew it, Gijo was at his own gate. He said his goodbyes and knocked. As if she had been waiting for that very sound, the gate opened, and Sunrye threw her arms around him and burst into sobs.
He held her for a long time, until she began to calm. Sunrye could not speak. She only clung to his chest and wept as if her heart would break. When she had quieted, Gijo asked,
"Are the children asleep?"
"No... Yeongsu is still awake."
"Then just bring me a change of clothes. I ought to change before I go in. And don't tell Yeongsu I'm home."
While Sunrye went in for the clothes, Gijo stripped in the yard and washed the blood from his body. He put on what she brought him and scrubbed the clothes stained with the blood of the dead. So his family would not see, he washed the blood away in the dark.