The House of Mourning
September 20, 1960.
For the first time in a long while, Chang Key-young, co-president of DBC, came into Kijo's office.
"President Lee. Been a while. You keeping well?"
The moment Kijo saw his face, a smile rose of its own accord.
"Hyung-nim, have you been terribly busy? I haven't caught so much as a glimpse of you. I was starting to feel neglected."
He rose, took Chang's hand, and poured the tea himself.
"You've been busy too, haven't you? A fertilizer plant and a power-tiller factory going up at once—your head must be spinning."
"Even so, I can still manage to come in and do my work at DBC."
"Aigoo. You say a thing like that and it sticks me right in the conscience. I've dumped DBC on you and washed my hands of it, and I'm sorry. I had my reasons, mind you."
Kijo saw that Chang's face had grown somewhat leaner.
"Has there been a great deal pressing on you?"
At the question, Chang stuck a cigarette between his lips.
"The newspaper market these days—nothing but absurdities, one after another..."
"Absurdities?"
"When Huh Chung revised the National Security Act under the interim government, they struck out every clause that restrained the press. The aftershock has been brutal."
Nearly every restriction on the press, he said, had vanished in the interim government's time.
"They switched newspaper publishing from a permit system to simple registration, and the market has gone straight to hell..."
Chang shook his head, then asked, "President Lee, you know how many dailies there were before April 19?"
"About forty, wasn't it?"
"Right. Exactly. And now the dailies alone are past three hundred. That's not all. Weeklies went from a hundred to four hundred. News agencies, from fourteen houses to something like two hundred and fifty..."
He fell to lamenting his lot. "That's why I can't get into DBC as often as I should. The newspaper market is saturated, and it's chaos. I'm a newspaper president, and even I have to roll up my sleeves and go out hawking papers."
The complaint ran its course, and then he tossed in a joke. "These days, pick up a notebook and a pencil and you're a reporter. Ha ha!"
Kijo remembered what he had heard from Chae Myung-shin in Yeoncheon—that Yeoncheon alone had forty reporters. When he passed along the story Chae had lived through, Chang agreed with force.
"That's how it is now, I'm telling you. A press card has turned into a free railway pass, and a newspaper company gets to enjoy the army's privileges with vehicles. These days a press card is a license to blackmail. Phony reporters stroll in and out of government offices and companies and squeeze money out of them with threats. No wonder every Tom, Dick, and Harry is scrambling to call himself a reporter..."
Kijo nodded.
"And if there isn't some sensational exposé, people won't buy a paper and read it. So every paper writes its stories crooked. Dong-A, Hankook, Chosun, Kyunghyang—they're still a little genteel. The newborn papers aren't. I can't tell if they're writing articles or writing novels..."
Having said his piece on the chaos of the press, Chang turned his sharp tongue on the Chang Myon government, barely two months old.
"The Chang Myon government is still learning how to walk, but honestly, when I look at the Democratic Party tearing itself apart without end, I fear for the road ahead. I'm not even sure the Democratic Party of today is a single party."
He offered, as an example, what had happened in front of Seoul Station right after the July 29 general election. Freshman lawmakers elected in the provinces had arrived by train, and the core men of the New Faction and the Old Faction—each side desperate to haul the newcomers into its own camp—had booked hotels and gone at each other.
"These fellows, I tell you. Later they started going out to Suwon Station ahead of time and boarding the train there. So they could poach the freshmen right inside the cars."
Kijo could only manage a bitter smile.
"And that's all? Same party, and the New Faction and the Old Faction hold separate winners' rallies? The same day, in two different Chinese restaurants—if that isn't a comedy, what is it?"
With his own newspaper market turned into a free-for-all, the present government seemed to sit even worse with him.
"I heard a story. Word is the Democratic Party bought off the independent assemblymen. A bank loaned out two billion hwan, and they scattered it around—ten million hwan a man at the low end, fifty million at the high."
Chang put on a look that said there was no point saying more, heaved a long sigh, and went on. "I'd sooner we had more men like Kim Doo-han in the Assembly. That's what I catch myself thinking."
"You would?"
"I would. August 19, that man, out in front of the Assembly hall, passing out leaflets saying Chang Myon was a Japanese collaborator and must not be elected, shouting that if the man got picked he'd burn the hall down. Lately that keeps coming back to me."
Kijo laughed with him.
"Kim Doo-han—short on schooling, maybe, but he has an eye that can see a society. Better than the trash sitting in the Assembly. Maybe what Korea needs right now is a headlong leader like him."
Kijo agreed, up to a point. Unlike the assemblymen who thought of nothing but factional advantage and their own political gain, Kim Doo-han had a kind of romance in him.
"Look at the world now, and you start to wonder whether people rose up on April 19 for a sight like this. The Democratic Party these days feels like the factional politics of the Joseon dynasty, that's what I'm saying..."
Chang's words left a bitterness in him.
September 24, 1960.
Kijo made for Seoul Station to catch the train to Busan. Cheongsan Fisheries was sending its distant-water tuna boats out to sea, and he was going down for the ceremony. He packed a black suit as well. In the history he remembered, September 25 was the day Assemblyman Kim Young-sam's mother would be shot dead by armed spies sent from the North.
It was a pity, but the odds were high that she would lose her life to a murderer's bullet. Thinking that, in the seven years since his regression, nearly everything fated to happen had happened, he boarded the train.
Seated and looking back over what had passed, he found that the only real shifts clustered around Park Chung-hee. Most events had run on according to history.
Why?
He turned it over. Why did his regression bear down so hard on the events surrounding that one man? He had never wanted it, and he could not see why his fate and Park's should be bound so tightly together.
There was the time Park had nearly been purged by Kim Chang-ryong. There was the time Kijo, at Park's request, had lobbied Kwak Young-joo—only for Park to be relegated to command of the Logistics Command. There was Busan, where the two of them had answered Typhoon Sarah, and Park had been promoted to the 6th District Command for it. And there was Kim Jong-pil, out of uniform earlier than history and already circling the edges of power. All of it seemed to have come about because of Kijo himself.
He thought that if he staked his own life and his family's, he might still stop the coup. He could keep warning Hausman about the man, or carry a decisive tip to General Lee Han-lim, commander of the First Field Army. The only soldier with the force to crush Park was Lee Han-lim of the First Field Army, the finest fighting strength in the Republic.
But would it be easy? Would Hausman or Lee Han-lim hear him out and move to check Park? And could he be sure that stopping Park was truly necessary for Korea's future—that it would guarantee a brighter one?
He could promise nothing. When he remembered that, so far, what was going to happen had happened anyway, he could not stake his own life, nor the lives of Sunrye, Yeongsu, Yeongeun, and Yeongjun.
Whenever he met Park Chung-hee, he called to mind the man's light and his shadow. Looking at him, Kijo often felt the whole of that life flicker through his head. The Park of ordinary days—easily abashed, plain and unpretentious—and the dark figure history had recorded often refused to lie one upon the other.
He knew the man had been complicated from the start. The favorable record and the damning one collided, so that he could neither simply think well of him nor simply think ill.
At such times Kijo told himself the answer lay inside himself, and in front of Park he acted as he felt, and as he wished. Inside Park Chung-hee, he thought, what was right and what was not were whirling together in a storm. Not only in Park. In himself, and in every human being. He decided to accept that.
Carrying that heavy heart down to Busan, on the morning of the 26th he came upon the article in the Busan Ilbo reporting the murder of Kim Young-sam's mother. The headline alone made it a sorrowful case. Printed before the truth of the matter had been properly grasped, the story ran as follows.
Mrs. Park Bu-yeong, fifty-two, mother of Representative Kim Young-sam, breathed her last on the morning of the 26th. Gyeongnam Police have thrown an emergency cordon around the scene and are searching for the culprits.
Two robbers of ordinary height, wearing faded army uniforms, struck at about eleven o'clock on the night of the 25th, attacking the home of Mr. Jeong Dong-ji at No. 84, Precinct 2, Oepo-ri, Jangmok-myeon, Geoje Island. They threatened Jeong's wife, his concubine, and the maid as they slept. The concubine, Park Nam-i, thirty-four, tried to bolt and was shot through the thigh, collapsing where she fell.
From there the robbers forced their way into the home of Assemblyman Kim's father, Kim Hong-jo, in Precinct 3 of Oepo-ri, and demanded that two million hwan be handed over at once. In that gap, Mrs. Park, the assemblyman's mother, tried to slip outside. As she reached the front gate, another robber who had been keeping watch fired a pistol from six feet away. The bullet tore through her abdomen, and she fell.
Around one in the morning the robbers seized a radio, clocks, and other goods, then vanished into the dark.
Kijo read the article through with care, then changed into mourning clothes. The police and the press were introducing the North's armed spies as a pair of masked robbers. He took a jeep from Cheongsan Shipping and set out for Geoje Island.
On the way, the events of 1996 came back to him. While Kim Young-sam was president, armed North Korean infiltrators had come ashore at Gangneung, and a great operation had been mounted to hunt them down. Back then he had scarcely spared a thought for Kim Young-sam's private feelings. Now it was different.
How fiercely must a man who had lost his mother to an armed spy's bullet have wanted those infiltrators wiped out? The thought stayed with him.
Arriving at Oepo-ri, Jangmok-myeon, Geoje County, he paid his full respects to Kim Young-sam's father, Kim Hong-jo. Kim Young-sam was already there. Hollow-faced, his eyes swollen from crying, he received Kijo, and the two of them bowed to each other. They sat, and they talked. Kim Young-sam brought up what Kijo had said at the knife-cut noodle shop.
"I keep remembering you asking, back then, whether I ought to bring my parents up to Seoul. If only I had let them stay in the city, even for a few days..."
Young-sam bowed his head and hid his face in a handkerchief. But he soon gathered himself and spoke.
"I believe all of this is God's will. I will accept it."
Kijo comforted him and remained through the carrying-out of the bier, doing what he could to help. He felt the guilt of having known the mother's death was coming and failed to prevent it.
While he kept the house of mourning, he saw the funeral wreath sent by Park Chung-hee, commander of the 2nd District Command. Whether it had been so in the actual history was something he could not confirm.
And he witnessed another giant of modern history. Kim Dae-jung came to Geoje. He was not yet a man of any particular weight, and few people took any notice of him. Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung did not look especially close. In 1960 Kim Dae-jung was a planning committee member and spokesman for the Democratic Party, but he belonged to Chang Myon's New Faction. Politicians of the New Faction attended the funeral of Old Faction Kim Young-sam's mother in large numbers, yet even in the house of mourning they sat apart and kept their distance, as if they were strangers to one another.
Kijo watched with a heavy heart.
When the funeral was over, Young-sam thanked Kijo, who had stayed and helped him to the end.
"President Lee, when I go up to Seoul I will call on you. I am truly grateful."
Kijo returned to Seoul on September 30 and went on with his work.
Korea would keep lurching from one confusion to the next. In early October the first-instance verdicts on the March 15 rigged election and the April 19 shootings would come down and drive people to fury, and demonstrators would occupy the Assembly. The staff of the West German embassy near the Assembly would see that chaos with their own eyes.
So that construction of the fertilizer plant—the greatest undertaking of Kijo's 1960—would not be canceled, he would have to call often at the West German embassy. He braced himself, unbowed, for the events still to come.