Securing Coal (2)
The next day Kijo set out on foot for Jeongok Station with Kim Seogwang, who had been waiting in front of the house.
Winter fog lay thick over the plain of Eundae-ri, so dense a man could scarcely see a step ahead. Walking that blank white world beside the limping Seogwang, Kijo found his thoughts slipping back to the years before his return. A few years after the war, when he was settled in Busan, he had once brought Sunrye and Yeongsu up to Yangju. There had been no stationmaster at Deokjeong Station then, and no Kim Seogwang. Ask after the stationmaster and no one knew a thing; as for Seogwang, he had heard the man was killed when the bombs fell on the station. No one could say whether the family left behind had lived or died. He was living this twelfth life now alongside people who had vanished from the last, and the poignancy of it was still fresh.
"Brother Kim."
"Yes, Chief."
"If I hadn't come back to Yangju, what do you think you'd have done?"
"Haha. Me? I'd have grown old hauling freight at Deokjeong Station. Same as ever."
"Where were you during the war?"
"Ah, well. Who was going to bother about a lame cripple like me? The People's Army took one look and passed me by. Our own boys looked and pretended they never saw me. I just sat at Deokjeong Station. Communists told me to do a job, I did it. Our army told me to do a job, I did that. That's how I lived."
It was strange. In the eleventh life Seogwang must have done the same—so why had he died then, and why was he alive now? Like the world lost in the fog, the answer would not show itself.
"Brother Kim. How do you see the years ahead?"
"Haha. Me? Raise our Yeongbae proper—two good legs on that boy, thank heaven—and so long as we don't starve, that's living enough."
"You might travel by automobile. You might even board an airplane and go see foreign countries..."
"Hahaha. Chief, now you're pushing a joke too far. The likes of me, on an airplane? Don't be ridiculous."
Tell him that in a mere thirty-six years even an ordinary man would take such things for granted, and he would not believe a word of it. Kijo shifted the talk and began to speak of where the two of them were bound.
"Brother Kim, the Juan we're headed for in Incheon wasn't always written as it is now. The old name used the characters for red and for a bank. Juan—the red shore."
"A red hill, you mean?"
"Yes. There's a mountain there. When the sun sets in the west that face of it turns red, and that's how the place came by its name."
"Ah..."
"Under the Japanese, Mitsubishi kept an arsenal at Bupyeong, and the coal piled at Juan was what fed it. There was an enormous coal yard there."
"A coal yard... Don't tell me you're going to buy the land."
"I am."
"Those Japanese bastards must have stacked it high, running a factory like that. But Chief—Liberation was a good while back. You think there's any coal left? They'll have picked the place clean..."
"Which is why I have to get there and buy it before the coal runs out."
Kijo smiled.
They changed at Cheongnyangni onto the Gyeongin Line, stepped off at Bupyeong, and walked another hour before they reached Juan. Kijo halted before a bleak stretch of wasteland.
Seogwang looked it over.
"Aigoo. The ground's rotted black. Who let a piece of land this wide go to ruin..."
"This is the coal yard I told you about."
"What?"
Startled, Seogwang rubbed his eyes and looked again. On the ground that had once been the yard, not a single heap of the coal that ought to have been standing there remained. There was only earth, buried under a thick black dusting of coal.
"Well... would you look at this..."
The groan broke out of him.
"Chief. You're honestly going to buy this land?"
"I have to."
"There's no coal left. What would anyone do with ground like this..."
"I'm buying it. No matter what."
The words threw Seogwang. Kijo had asked him to play a part and oppose the purchase come what may, but even without that request he would have objected on his own. Years of coal heaped on the spot had poisoned the soil past using. You could not farm it. Put houses on it and you still could not draw the water: rain falling for decades onto stockpiled coal became leachate, seeped downward, and fouled the groundwater, and in the 1950s, with no proper waterworks, the water under a house lot was no small matter. Seogwang shook his head.
"Chief, I don't know what's got into your head, but you must not buy this land. Not for anything."
It was no act. He meant it. Watching Seogwang try, in all sincerity, to talk him down, Kijo was well pleased. This was exactly what he had wanted.
"I am going to buy it."
Kijo grinned, and a knot pulled tight in Seogwang's chest.
"You want it, then buy it. But how much are you figuring to pay?"
"I made four thousand dollars selling bricks."
"Four thousand dollars? What's that come to in hwan?"
Kijo answered by the official exchange rate the government had fixed for 1954. As of that January, the rate stood at one hundred eighty hwan to the dollar, which put four thousand dollars at seven hundred twenty thousand hwan.
"Seven hundred twenty thousand hwan?" Seogwang cried, startled.
"You're spending money like that on a dog-shit piece of ground?"
The Sibal, the first automobile Korea would build for herself, was due out in a year at eighty thousand hwan. Seven hundred twenty thousand would buy nine of them. The poorer the country, the dearer the car; right through the 1980s a single top-grade domestic sedan still cost as much as an apartment in Gangnam. Kijo nodded.
"I hope the owner lets it go without a fight."
"Chief... this is land a man wouldn't take even if you handed it to him..."
"Whatever price he names, I have to have this land."
"What are you even saying..."
Kim Seogwang was sick over it. Whether his heart ached or not, Kijo went looking for the owner, and a few questions at the property brokers nearby turned the house up easily enough.
Before a large tile-roofed place, Seogwang spoke.
"Chief, you heard what the man at that office said, didn't you?"
"No. I didn't."
"He said that land is finished. They've stripped off every bit of coal that was stockpiled there. Nothing left worth a look..."
"That remains to be seen."
"What?"
Fuss or no fuss from Seogwang, Kijo knocked on the gate. It opened, and a man came out—short, in traditional dress, the hair gone thin across his crown. Told why they had come, he showed them in, and the three sat down to talk in a room made over the old wooden hall, glass doors set into it so the place might pass for a Western parlor.
"So. You've come all the way from Yeoncheon to buy my land?"
"Yes. That's right."
"And how much are you offering?"
"Twenty thousand hwan!"
Kim Seogwang, seated at Kijo's side, blurted it out.
So the act was starting at last? Early, but Kijo let him run.
"Aigoo, my ears. You the one here to buy?"
"Can't you tell at a glance? I'm this man's older brother."
"I can see well enough you're the older one... Funny, though. The younger fellow looks like the one with the money..."
The owner said it, looking from one of them to the other.
"My kid brother makes his living as a gigolo, so he swans around like that even without a coin on him. I'm the one with the money. I'm after land to farm."
A gigolo?
Kijo stared at Seogwang. Is that how I usually come across? For a moment the outrageous part his friend had written for him left him blank.
"Ah. A farmer. You look the part."
The man said it with a smirk. Seogwang, taking the glance at his shabby clothes for a slight, flared up.
"Twenty thousand hwan for that rotten ground. Hand it over or don't. Suit yourself."
He kept talking nonsense and pitching a fit. To Kijo it looked as if he were saying whatever came into his head, bent on wrecking the deal.
"Now look here. That lot is forty thousand pyeong. Better than thirty acres."
"Forty thousand or eighty, you can't farm it and nobody can live on it. Twenty thousand hwan is cheap."
"Hold on. A minute ago you said you wanted land to farm, and now you're telling me it won't grow a thing..."
"That's my affair. Let me have it for twenty thousand. I'll see to the land myself."
"Will you listen to this fellow. You think land is only good for a field and a house? That ground sits close to Incheon Harbor and close to Seoul. A man could put a factory there, and you're talking rubbish..."
Stung past patience by Seogwang's bullheaded answers, the owner let his true mind show. At those words Kijo set his teeth, just slightly.
This isn't what I knew.
He knew who the man was. His name was Lee Seong-sun. Before his return, Kijo had once read with interest a piece in a provincial paper called The Land Barons of Incheon, and Lee Seong-sun had been among them. In a word, the man was outrageously lucky.
Under the Japanese he had dealt in coal, and on the day of Liberation he went to a Japanese coal wholesaler in Juan to recover an advance he had paid on an order. The proprietor told him this.
"Forget the money. Take all the coal that's here."
The Japanese owner had been neither a friend to Lee Seong-sun nor particularly well disposed toward him. He simply had to flee to Japan in a hurry, and since he could not carry the coal, he handed it all over as if he were doing the man a kindness. For Lee Seong-sun, what people would later call a Liberation lottery had come up.
A Liberation lottery meant the disposal of enemy property—the goods and the land Japanese nationals had owned under colonial rule, seized by the government and sold off by official lot. It was a windfall. A good many of the firms that became chaebol were simply those that had taken over, cheap, factory works the Japanese had been running. Flush with that windfall, Lee Seong-sun saw the company's Japanese staff and their families safely down to Incheon Harbor.
After Liberation he sold the mountain of coal in the yard a little at a time and made his money. Then the Korean War broke out without warning, and he too had to leave the coal behind and flee. When the fighting ended and he came back, the great heaps were gone. The People's Army that had occupied Incheon had hauled it off; ROK troops passing through had hauled it off; neighbors had hauled it off to get through the winter. Little remained. Even so, he scraped together what was left and kept earning through the end of 1953.
Had the story ended there, no one could have called him lucky. Lee Seong-sun decided his luck was spent, and he meant to sell the land he had used as a yard. It was never going to sell well. As Kim Seogwang said, ground fouled by coal found few takers. So in the spring of 1954, once the earth thawed, he set about turning it over. He would make the place look like ordinary land and unload it on some outsider who did not know its history...
And then, of all things, the more he dug, the more coal kept coming up. When the ground was opened, he found that here and there across those tens of thousands of pyeong, coal lay buried as deep as ten meters.
The reason was simple enough. In the last stage of the Second World War, imperial Japan had prepared for a decisive battle with the Americans on the home islands, and for a last stand on the peninsula. So the coal yard would look smaller even if American aerial reconnaissance caught it, the army had dug into the earth and hidden coal underground. Finding that buried store, Lee Seong-sun went back to selling coal and making money. He did especially well supplying a brickworks nearby called Bupyeong Brick. He squandered a good part of what he earned on gambling and women, but even so...
That was as far as Kijo's knowledge of the man went. And yet here was Lee Seong-sun, thinking of selling the yard as a site for a factory? Something had shifted from the history he remembered, and it did not sit quite right with the common sense of the day either. In the 1950s almost no one was putting up new factories, so land changed hands mostly as fields or house lots. Selling a parcel as industrial ground was several times harder than dressing it up and selling it for farming, simply because a buyer was so hard to find. After the war, short of both capital and machinery, people were busy setting the factories they already had back on their feet. Raising a new plant on empty ground was absurd. If Lee Seong-sun meant to sell it as factory land all the same, a buyer must already have appeared.
"Is there someone who wants to buy this land for a factory?"
"There is, yes. I felt sorry for the pair of you, coming all this way for nothing, so I was holding my tongue—and then that one goes and gets my blood up!"
Bringing Kim Seogwang had been worth the trouble. Worked up by the needling, Lee Seong-sun had let the truth slip. Shabby as he looked, Seogwang had a gift for putting a man at his ease until his guard came down.
"How much did he offer?"
"There's a man who'll pay eight hundred thousand hwan for that land."
Eight hundred thousand hwan? More than Kijo had. Seogwang seemed hardly able to credit it either; he studied the owner's face, half believing and half not. But Kijo sensed at once that Lee Seong-sun was telling the truth, and he had a fair idea who had made the offer.
The history he had known had shifted, if only by a little.