What Only Kijo Knows
The morning after the wrecked truck had been hauled in, Kijo called Ma-ryang and his wife over to the house, and the four of them ate breakfast together.
Family, for Kijo, came down to the faces around that table and no further. But every time he looked at them, the strength came back into him.
"I'm going down to Gyeongsang. Look after Cheongsan while I'm gone."
Every eye turned to him.
"You goin' alone?"
"That's the idea."
"And where are you off to, brother-in-law?"
"Near Daegu."
"Daegu?"
Soon-young looked to her older sister. Sunrye already seemed to know; the look on her face was halfway to resignation.
"They say there are still plenty of Reds out that way, brother-in-law."
Soon-young was not wrong. Until the Korean War broke out, Daegu had gone by the name of Korea's Moscow—a place thick with communists. Even after the fighting ended, those communists had joined hands with what was left of the People's Army and were carrying on as partisans in the country round about. In later years people would call Daegu the holy ground of conservatism. It was not that. Not yet.
"I'm not walking into any danger, so don't sit there fretting. Folks say Yeoncheon, close as it sits to the North, is more dangerous than Daegu—and we manage to live there well enough, don't we?"
He did what he could to set them at ease. Ma-ryang was uneasy all the same at the thought of Kijo covering so much road alone, but he trusted the man to see to himself. He always had.
With the family there to see him off, Kijo boarded a train at Jeongok Station and rode for Seoul. At Seoul Station he bought a ticket through to Daegu, stepped back outside, and made for Namdaemun Market nearby. There he bought a serviceable secondhand leather bag, and into it he laid, with care, the memorandum of understanding Division Commander Martin had given him. That single sheet of paper was the only weapon he possessed. Bag in hand, he returned to the station and climbed aboard the train for Daegu.
He took a seat by the window and watched Seoul slide past, his mind settling into business. Bricks, of course. There were always bricks filling his head.
How was he to grow Cheongsan Brick? No—how was he to keep Cheongsan Brick alive in the cracks between Seoul's big five?
That the trade had a bright future was beyond argument, and Kijo remembered the figures exactly. In 1953, the year just past, the whole country had turned out 14,702,000 bricks. This year, 1954, production would more than double, to 35,000,000, and next year it would break fifty million. The surge would run on unbroken, until in 1957 the kilns fired 148 million bricks—ten times the output of 1953. The market was about to swell into the hundred millions, growth loud enough to make a man gasp. A boom like that would lay enormous chances before any number of firms, and at the same time call down a competition as savage as war.
The principal battlefield would be Seoul. Anyone of the 2020s would take that as given: the city with the most people would sit at the heart of the brick trade. In 1954, not a soul expected it.
Why should they? Seoul had never been a crowded place, nor a place where people gathered. It held five percent of the nation's population. Twenty-one million lived in the Republic, and Seoul accounted for a bare million of them. Gyeongsang Province had seven times as many; Jeolla, five. There were more people in Gangwon than in Seoul.
After the war, that city exploded. Next year alone the population would leap by half, to a million and a half. Two million in 1959. Three million in 1963. Four million in 1968. Five million in 1970. Six million in 1972. A million more souls, on average, every 2.6 years.
And this was no small matter. Add half a million people in a single year and a city can no longer carry them. Water and sewers, electricity, the roads and the rails—enlarge the works every year and you still live inside a shortage that never ends. In a city swelling at that pace, the trouble that turns sharpest is housing. People who have poured into Seoul looking for work find there is nowhere to live, and the scramble grows desperate. Those without money for a house throw up a shack on a hillside and endure. Those who have the money run, all the same, into a famine of building materials.
No one had seen it coming. In all the world, only Kijo knew.
This was why he had meant to raise a brickworks: Seoul, expanding with a violence no one else had measured. Follow the line and it ran true—population surging, the demand for houses blowing up like a balloon, and after that, inevitably, a great boom in brick, each turn feeding the next. The potential in Cheongsan Brick had no limit. And he already owned the one truck that could set that potential alight.
If I can sell the land at Jeongok-ri to Harvard for a proper price...
He was drawing ten trucks in his mind when someone called to him.
"Say... is that Kijo?"
He turned toward the voice, and a welcome face was standing there. Oh Yang-soo.
"Brother Yang-soo!"
"It is you! I wasn't sure I had the right man!"
Kijo was on his feet, and the two of them caught each other up in an embrace.
"You vanished on me last year. Worried me sick. What happened?"
"I'm sorry, brother."
He had been in such a hurry to secure the land at Eundae-ri that he had never found the moment to tell Yang-soo he was leaving.
Oh Yang-soo had been a benefactor to him in that eleventh life, a man who had helped him more than he could easily reckon.
The first day Kijo reached Busan with Sunrye and little Yeongsu, a hard rain came down. They sheltered as best they could beneath the eaves of a stranger's house, and there, holding the sleeping child, Kijo said to his wife:
Thinking of it now, the words were a pitiful thing. But it was the first life in which he had brought his family safely through the flight, and they had come out of a heart too full to hold.
Even as he spoke, Oh Yang-soo happened to be passing along that road. Yang-soo was a Suwon man, from Gyeonggi Province. Under the Japanese occupation he had come through the Jinhae Higher Merchant Marine Institute, and he was working as a harbor pilot at Busan Port. At the sound of a Gyeonggi accent he had not heard in a long while, he turned—and there were a young couple and a newborn, shabby as could be, huddled out of the rain. Their plight was plain at a glance, and it was Yang-soo who spoke first.
"You there. What are you doing under those eaves with a family?"
"Keeping out of the rain."
The face of the man who answered was bright to the point of absurdity. For a moment Yang-soo thought he must be mad. But the child was asleep in the drip falling from the eaves, and Yang-soo held out the umbrella in his hand.
"Cover the little one with this. He'll catch a summer cold that way."
Kijo did not refuse. He took the umbrella in both hands, almost greedily.
"Thank you. I'll bring it back once the rain lets up. Where should I return it?"
Yang-soo gave his address with no real expectation of seeing the umbrella again, and went on his way. The day after the rain cleared he came home, and his wife told him some family had been by to return it.
"Sounded like Gyeonggi people to me. They looked so hard up. I gave them two rice balls, and they wolfed them down right there and left."
Yang-soo nodded. A few days later he came across Kijo again, hanging about the docks, found him work, and so the bond began. It was Yang-soo, too, who secured Kijo's family a patch of ground for a shack.
"The family well?"
"Yes, they're well. And yours, brother—everyone safe?"
"They're fine."
Yang-soo's eye fell on the suit Kijo wore, and something in him eased. Whatever the man was doing these days, his circumstances had plainly improved.
"Where are you bound?"
"Daegu. I'm looking for a partner."
"So you've gone into business."
"Yes. Small as it is—bricks."
"Good. I'm glad of it."
It pleased him that Kijo, who had left Busan like a man slipping off in the night, had come up in the world.
"And you, brother? What brought you to Seoul?"
"I want to get into the Korea Shipping Corporation. I'm on my way back from seeing a man I know."
"What about the piloting?"
A harbor pilot was a respected line of work in Busan—guiding the big ships safely in and out of the port, and known to pay handsomely.
"The money's good, but I'm penned up beside the harbor and it chafes. There was a time I wanted to take a great ship and roam the ocean. Give me the chance, and I'd like to command a trader."
Yang-soo had made a good deal of money as a pilot during the war, and he seemed to be dreaming again a dream he had lived without.
"It'll come right, brother."
"And if it doesn't, it doesn't. A man with mouths to feed only has to feed them. I just wonder if I've let some vain notion run away with me."
"Not at all, brother. A man shouldn't give up a dream."
"You think so? Heh."
For a sailor, Oh Yang-soo was a shy man, and the color rose in his face.
For the eight hours down to Daegu they talked of a great many things—the work Kijo meant to push forward, the prospects of the brick trade, even his plans for the years ahead, which he had told to no one else. Oh Yang-soo was that close-mouthed, and that much to be trusted. Hearing him out, Yang-soo judged the whole of it entirely possible.
"It'll work. Listening to you, the thing hangs together. I don't know that Seoul will grow as large as you say. But where else are the refugees out of the North going to go? There's no work in the provinces. They'll try Seoul."
Before he stepped off at Daegu, Kijo wrote down a way to reach him. As he rose to leave the train, Yang-soo spoke.
"When this business of yours gets big, you'll have cause to come to Busan, won't you? Look me up when you do. I'll help you however I can."
"Even if they take you on at Korea Shipping, will you go on living in Busan?"
"For the time being, yes. If I move, I'll be sure to tell you. I won't skip town in the middle of the night the way you did. Ha ha."
The joke left Kijo sheepish, and he scratched the back of his head.
"Thank you, brother. Wherever you end up, I'll come and find you."
He stood on the platform and waved to Yang-soo as the train carried him on toward Busan.
Meeting Brother Yang-soo again doesn't feel like chance. This life, I mean to pay back the help I took from him in the last one.
Promising himself that the bond would run differently this time, he walked toward the ticket gate at Daegu Station. Passing through it, a thought struck him out of nowhere.
Hold on. How old is Brother Yang-soo, again?
Oh Yang-soo had been born in 1922. Thirty-two, by the Western count. By a curious chance, Jang Ma-ryang, Kim Seogwang, and Oh Yang-soo were all the same age.
All three of them born in 1922—the year of Imsul? The heavenly stem of that year stood for black, and the earthly branch for the dog. Imsul was the Year of the Black Dog.
Strange. What tie do I have with dogs? Kijo himself had been born in the year of Gyeong-o, the Year of the White Horse. Does a black dog get along with a white horse? Both creatures were loyal and honest, he decided. The match could hardly be a poor one.
All the same.
Seen again now that he had come back, Oh Yang-soo looked remarkably young. In the eleventh life, a man of means, gentle and generous of heart, he had seemed an elder. Returned to this moment, Kijo found him in the full vigor of his working years. Well—in those days you were middle-aged once you passed thirty, growing old past forty, and simply old at sixty. The people he met again looked so much like children that it unsettled him, and more than once, in the middle of talking, he had nearly let the courtesy drop and spoken to them as if they were boys.
He came out through the gate, and a Daegu so rustic it startled him filled his eyes. Not that the provincial cities were any different, in those days...