Money and Revolution
On the night of Saturday, May 7, Kijo had come home, eaten his supper, and was resting when Sunrye came to him and broached the matter with care.
"Dear, the people next door seem to be having a hard time of it lately."
He had spread the bedding and was lying there, giving little Yeongjun an airplane ride. He set the youngest down gently and asked,
"Did something happen?"
He could not help being uneasy. The house next door was no ordinary household. It belonged to Kim Jong-pil, the man who had sworn he would stake his life on a revolution.
"It seems Sister Young-ok's husband hasn't been giving her enough to run the house."
"I see..."
Kijo had expected as much. Kim Jong-pil was bound to be short of money. He was spending a great deal of it in the name of the revolution. Not all of that money was his own, of course, but it was still a sum no mere army lieutenant colonel could ever have dared to raise.
What they had already spent preparing the April 19 coup came to more than three million hwan. To set off demonstrations on the first anniversary, the coup faction had laid out a fortune recruiting university students. Park Jong-gyu, who had taken the operational funds from Kim Jong-pil, had been running an April 19 Demonstration-Incitement Operation since early March. He had gone into Seoul National, Korea, and Konkuk Universities, meeting students and recruiting them himself. A major at the time, he had passed himself off as a reporter—common enough in those days—and done everything he could to win their favor and stir them into the streets.
Before the anniversary ceremony they had printed twenty thousand leaflets urging a demonstration and scattered them through the city. The leaflets read:
Students! Rise!
The blood of April 19 was shed in vain!
Did we spill our blood to make a society like this?
But the operation, for all the money and time poured into it, never bore the least fruit. On the evening of April 19, at eight o'clock in front of Seoul Station, some thirty prostitutes and their procurers staged a protest demanding that prostitution be legalized—and that was all.
Kim Jong-pil and Park Chung-hee had not known. They had not known that another force existed, one able to commit far greater money and manpower. Rumor had it that Chang Myon, rattled by the talk of an April crisis making the rounds and by the steady warnings of a coup from those around him, had turned two thousand plainclothes police loose in the city and scattered two hundred million hwan to buy off the students. It had been an unwinnable game from the start. The gap in capital and manpower between those trying to start a demonstration and those trying to stop one was simply too wide.
The story that Chang Myon had spread two hundred million hwan was never precisely confirmed, but Kijo found it highly credible. In April, Peer de Silva, chief of the CIA's Korea station, had warned Democratic Party lawmakers, Chang Myon, and his inner circle more than once that a coup was possible. Chang Myon trusted the United States deeply and depended upon it. Kijo did not believe he would have ignored an American warning.
Nor was it only the Americans. In early April, Chang Myon's secretary, Seonu Jong-won, had obtained a list of the coup faction that included Park Chung-hee and Kim Jong-pil, and had delivered it to him. Chang Myon had put on a show of ease in front of Seonu, but even if the sum had fallen short of two hundred million hwan, he would have done everything in his power to keep the government steady.
Kijo thought Kim Jong-pil must have had plenty of other places to spend money besides the demonstration work. He and Park Chung-hee were also drawing in other factions that dreamed of a coup. Chief among them was Kim Dong-ha, a retired Marine major general. Like Kim Jong-pil, he had voiced his discontent with the military and the regime and demanded reform of the personnel system, and had been forced into retirement under the interim government of Heo Jeong. Around Kim Jong-pil were men who had lost their posts in the army and, with no livelihood left to them, clung to nothing but the revolution. The key conspirators still inside Army Headquarters had to be met often and looked after well, lest their hearts turn. The money was bound to run dry.
Hearing Sunrye out, Kijo nodded.
"You want to help them, don't you?"
"Yes. She hasn't said anything to me, but she looked terribly pressed. She's worried about Ye-ri's parents' association fees, too..."
"All right. Tell her she can run a tab as freely as she likes at the Cheongsan Store in our neighborhood. I'll speak to the shopkeeper."
"Thank you, dear."
Sunrye was glad she could help Young-ok. Still bright with that pleasure, she asked him, almost offhand,
"Dear, do you think you might be able to give Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-pil next door a job?"
The innocence of the question pulled a laugh out of him before he could stop it. He smothered it at once.
"Tell him that if he wants one, I can offer him a mid-level post anytime."
"Really? Would that really be all right?"
"Yes. It would."
Watching her delight, Kijo felt a corner of his heart turn bitter. To Kim Jong-pil, already given over to the revolution, a job at Cheongsan would never so much as catch his eye. His mind had already climbed to something far larger and higher than Cheongsan—to the scale of the nation itself. If he wanted it, Cheongsan could give him work. Kijo did not believe that day would ever come.
He spent the evening with his family and fell asleep, and opened his eyes at dawn the next day. In the quiet of a Jongno alley at daybreak, listening to the birds, he stepped out into the yard and came face to face with Kim Jong-pil, already out in the yard next door.
"You're up early."
It was the dim dawn of early May, the air still cool. Kim Jong-pil stood smoking with bloodshot eyes, and there was something cold about him. Kijo could see the grim resolve that comes off a man who has made his peace with death. At the same time he saw the face of an ordinary man—a father and a husband—worn thin with worry.
"You're up early yourself, Colonel."
"Oh, me. After all those years in the army, my eyes fly open the moment it's morning."
He said so, but he had the look of a man who had tossed the whole night without a wink of sleep. With the uprising only four days off, how tangled his thoughts must have been. At the time, Park Chung-hee and Kim Jong-pil had fixed on May 12 as the day.
"On your way to have film developed?" Kim Jong-pil asked.
"Yes, that's right."
Kijo supposed that, having served in Army Intelligence, Kim Jong-pil would have learned his way around a camera. Sure enough, he spoke of photographs.
"Before June 25, I took a great many pictures up in the North. We should have stopped the war then. Because we couldn't, the country has come to this—this wretched state."
To a man unjustly stripped of his post and buried alive by society, the world as it stood seemed a very dark place. Kijo, too, agreed that the war had left Korea with a wound that would not wash clean, and had set its development back.
His eye fell on the crumpled pack in Kim Jong-pil's hand. It was not the Kents he had favored on active duty, but Arirang, a cheap domestic brand.
Kijo excused himself, went into the room, and brought out five cartons of foreign cigarettes he had laid in for guests. He handed them over.
"I've been meaning to give you these for some time, but I never had the chance."
"This many?"
Kim Jong-pil was startled, and pleased. Conflict flickered in his eyes—whether to sell the foreign cigarettes and turn them into funds for the revolution, or smoke them to his heart's content and quiet his unease. He looked very much as if he were weighing exactly that.
They sat together on the low wooden platform in the yard, smoking and talking. In the midst of this and that, Kim Jong-pil said,
"The truth is, last night I dreamed I died first, and left my family behind..."
He blew out a thick stream of white smoke, scratched lightly near his brow, and went on.
"It's a shameless thing to ask, but if something should happen to me, would you let my wife and children stay on in this house for a while?"
Having said it, he looked sick with himself for having sunk so low as to say such a thing. Kijo understood, and answered with a smile.
"Colonel, let me ask something of you as well. If I should go before my family in some unforeseen accident, would you look in on my sons and daughters now and then, and see that they're growing up well?"
When Kijo took the request as if it were a joke, Kim Jong-pil smiled.
"My wife tells me you often say you love your children. I want to say things like that as often as you do, sir, but the words don't come easily..."
"It's because I fall short as a father. So when I look at the children, I want to give them the words, at least. At first I was too shy, and my mouth wouldn't open."
Kijo, too, was a man born in 1930. In his previous life he had rarely told his family that he loved them. But because he was living his last life, he said it always.
"That's true. It isn't easy to say. The heart is more than willing, and yet..."
Kim Jong-pil laughed softly, then glanced up at the brightening sky over the yard.
"Ye-ri said something. She said that even when she grows old, she won't leave her father's side..."
The thought of his daughter was written across his face.
"So I told her, once you marry you'll belong to another house. When you marry you follow your husband, not your father. And she said that even if she marries, she'll live right beside me."
Thinking of his daughter seemed to ease him a little, and he went on.
"At the height of the war—in 1951, when I was promoted to captain—I was chosen for a group of officers sent to study in the United States. I finished the course at Fort Benning in Georgia and came home, and that was when Ye-ri was born."
Kijo listened quietly as Kim Jong-pil unburdened himself of his life.
"When I got back, my wife and daughter were going hungry. I had trained hard in America, but I had eaten well and slept well, and all the while my wife and my newborn girl had suffered to that degree. I was so shocked, and so grieved, that for a long time I cried a great deal where no one could see."
Kijo thought he was talking so much because he believed he might be dead before long.
"Sometimes, when I remember those days, I think that even living as we do now is living well enough, set beside then—so why can't I be content? And sometimes I wonder whether I'm living as I ought."
"I have thoughts like that too."
At that, Kim Jong-pil looked surprised.
"You do, sir?"
"Yes. Now and then. I fall into those thoughts, and they torment me."
Neither of them said what the thoughts were. They could not even begin to.
"Mr. Lee, is it that the world you dream of and the world as it is are so far apart that it pains you?"
Kijo shook his head.
"No. I'm afraid the future I foresaw will come to pass exactly as I expect it. And at the same time I fall into the hope that it might turn out better."
"I see..."
Jong-pil nodded, taking in that Kijo's torment was not the same as his own.
As they talked, Kijo thought about the man beside him. It seemed to him that Jong-pil followed Park Chung-hee because their lives, and the painful histories of their families, resembled each other in so many ways. The United States regarded both Park Chung-hee and Kim Jong-pil as communists, or at least as men of the left. As a university student Kim Jong-pil had been deep in the leftist movement, and among his six siblings there were those who had worked for the Workers' Party of South Korea or cooperated with the People's Army during the war, and who were later beaten for it. Both men had taught school and walked away when teaching proved a poor fit, and neither had ever been treated as part of the mainstream in the army. In the end, lives and careers so much alike must have made them lean on each other all the more, and gather their strength together.
Park Chung-hee, soon to be driven from the army, and Kim Jong-pil, already forced into retirement, had refused to accept their fate, and so had resolved upon a last resort. And yet, for all the grand cause of saving the nation, Kijo saw a Kim Jong-pil who was afraid, because he was human.
People said of him that one could never quite tell what he was thinking. In Kijo's eyes the anguish was plain. The human fear that the coup might fail and he might die, leaving his family behind, seemed to be what tormented him. And so, with four days left, he could not sleep; his thoughts multiplied, and he wandered the yard at dawn.
Kim Jong-pil, who had been smoking one cigarette after another, stubbed one out.
"Mr. Lee, when better days come, someday we'll be able to laugh over the things we've said tonight, won't we?"
"We will."
Kijo believed that better days would surely come—even if the world he pictured and the world Kim Jong-pil imagined turned out to be slightly different ones.