Before the War Ends
On July 8, 1953, Lee Ki-jo and his family arrived at Seoul Station. Fifteen days remained until the armistice—a fortnight still to go.
Ki-jo stepped down from the train and set off north with Sunrye and their son, Yeong-su. He was calm. She was nothing but afraid.
Thanks to her husband she had gone down to Busan early and been spared the worst of it, but the stories of neighbors who fled later made the war sound unbearably cruel. Now he meant to take them toward the 38th parallel, where the South Korean Army and the People's Army were still fighting fiercely, and the thought terrified her.
Yeong-su, as if they had merely come on an outing, held his mother's hand and peered about at Seoul in delight. Ki-jo bought a piece of candy from a roadside stall and tucked it into the boy's mouth, like a promise of the bright future ahead.
The road from Seoul to the northern edge of Gyeonggi Province was as hard as the flight from Yangju all the way to Busan. At Panmunjom the armistice talks were in full swing, yet the war itself had not ended, and it was no easy thing for civilians to draw near a battle zone. The trains that ran that far were not open to the public. That fact, however, pleased Ki-jo. The emptier the road, the smoother his work would be. He had his reasons for moving toward a battlefield no one else cared to seek.
In a single day they passed through Yangju, where they had once lived, and decided to spend the night in Dongducheon. They washed the sweat from their bodies in the stream that ran through the heart of town and settled into a field shelter nearby.
Ki-jo did not sleep. The first step of the great plan he had laid lay scarcely ten miles off, and all night he burned mugwort and fanned away the swarms of mosquitoes that came at his wife and child.
Early the next morning he led his family on toward what he called a land flowing with milk and honey. Little Yeong-su was only four, and yet through two days on the march he never once complained. At the Hantan River, Ki-jo met his last obstacle. Soldiers had closed the bridge and were turning civilians back.
"Are you in your right mind? Where do you think you're taking a family? Turn around and go back."
A sergeant rebuked him at the head of the bridge.
"The war's nearly over. We're only trying to go home."
Sunrye started at her husband's lie.
"Is that so? And where's home?"
"Eundae-ri, in Yeoncheon County."
"Eundae-ri? You mean that wide plain between Jeongok-ri and Yeoncheon?"
"Yes. Our house is there."
The sergeant nodded at the lie.
"I understand how it is, but it's too dangerous now. We've pushed the People's Army past Sintan-ri, but there's no telling when we'll be driven back."
"Couldn't you look the other way, just this once?"
Ki-jo went so far as to sink to his knees and plead.
"Go on back. When the war's over, then you come in. For your wife and the child, if nothing else..."
The sergeant would not let them through.
Ki-jo turned away with his family, a sorry sight—but he had not given up. Once the checkpoint on the Hantan bridge was out of sight, he led them back toward the river, circling wide of the bridge and pressing on upstream. After some two and a half miles of slipping past the army's eyes, he hid his wife and son in the hills and went searching for wood. By the time night fell he had gathered enough, and he turned to Sunrye.
"Even if you can't swim, you won't sink so long as you hold this bundle of logs. I'll carry Yeong-su on my back. You just hang on tight, and kick for the far bank as hard as you can."
His plan was to use the dark: catch the wood upstream and let the current carry them diagonally across.
Sunrye went white.
"And what if we get swept away from each other...?"
There was sense in that. Ki-jo lashed the logs into a single bundle, then tied himself, his wife, and the child together with rope.
"This way, if we die, we die together. If we live, we live together."
Tears rose in her at his words. She could not turn him from his course.
Ki-jo started them across. The river was cold. They were carried a mile and a quarter downstream before they finally dragged themselves up onto the opposite bank, and there, spent from the crossing, they lay on an unusually fine stretch of sand along the Hantan and waited for their strength to return. The sand was warm. Ki-jo looked up at the stars the way Columbus must have, coming into a new world, and smiled, well pleased.
"Dear."
"What is it..."
They had made it across, but Sunrye was still prickly with the man who had wagered his family's lives, and her answer came out short.
"You've suffered enough. As far as I'm concerned, your hardships ended when we crossed that river."
She could not understand his optimism or his confidence, but she prayed, all the same, that it would be so.
Cloud hid the moonlight, and the three of them moved without drawing notice. Yeoncheon did not look nearly so dangerous as the sergeant at the Hantan had made it out to be. Ki-jo kept walking north until at last they reached the plain of Eundae-ri.
As they arrived, the clouds that had covered the sky broke apart, and under the moonlight the barren fields—abandoned for three years because of the war—lay suddenly bright and open. Ki-jo was so moved his throat closed. He caught his wife's hand.
"Dear. All of this land is going to be ours."
Sunrye was stunned.
Surely this man hasn't lost his mind...
Together they went looking for an abandoned farmhouse. Yeong-su slept on his father's back, his breath soft and even. When at last they found an empty thatched cottage, Ki-jo laid the boy on a pile of straw, stepped outside, and smoked a cigarette beneath the moon.
"Dear, since when have you been smoking?"
Relief at having found the empty house still in her, Sunrye had come up behind him to ask.
He could not tell her the truth—that he had begun to smoke in his eleventh life, and that he had learned the habit only after she was gone.
"I'm going to be a little different from the man I was."
The words felt ill-omened to her.
"They say when a person changes, they die young..."
All she wanted was for him not to change. She could not bear even to dream of that gentle, steady, capable husband—the good man she knew—becoming someone else. Poor as they had been, drunk as he sometimes got, he had always thought of her first, and he had always been kind.
Seeing her face in the moonlight, Ki-jo broke into laughter.
"Why are you laughing...?"
"Because your face just changed, as if I'd said I was taking up gambling and meant to drink myself into the ground."
His laughter carried across the yard. Sunrye pressed herself into his arms.
"Don't you ever change. Even if all that wide land becomes ours, just as you say, I've loved you exactly as you are. So much."
She began to cry. Ki-jo stroked the back of his young, good wife, his heart full.
"Dear, when I said I'd be different, I only meant we're going to be rich from here on. Don't go worrying over nothing."
They held each other for a long while, then went into the room where Yeong-su slept and closed their eyes.
Once the two of them set to cleaning and tending the neglected cottage, it soon looked like a house where people lived.
As July 23, 1953 drew nearer, Ki-jo's spirits rose. The moment the armistice came, better than eight hundred acres of prime land would fall into his hands.
At last, on the twenty-third, word arrived that the armistice treaty had been signed at Panmunjom.
Every day Ki-jo went to the ground where the Yeoncheon County Office was to be built. The instant it opened, he meant to register the land of Eundae-ri in his own name.
Yeoncheon had been territory north of the 38th parallel. No cadastral maps or title registries remained in the government offices. Before the war the North Korean authorities had nationalized every parcel, and nearly all of Yeoncheon's original residents had died or fled and never returned. Almost no one would come back while the risk of another war still hung over the place. People in those days did not believe the fighting would stay stopped for long, and so it was no great difficulty to make ownerless land, recovered from the North, legally one's own.
Lee Ki-jo, who had been shuttling endlessly between Eundae-ri and Yeoncheon Township, asserted legal title to the Eundae-ri plain on the very day the county office opened its doors.
"Hold on. You're telling me all of this was your land?"
"To be exact, it belonged to my grandfather."
The clerk who kept the land register let out a dry little laugh.
"Proof. Let's see some proof."
Ki-jo answered, perfectly steady.
"Then produce proof that it was not my grandfather's land."
The clerk had nothing solid with which to answer him.
It can't be his. I'm sure it isn't. But I've got nothing to refute him with... What am I supposed to do...?
He took the matter to his superior. After bargaining with Ki-jo, the man agreed to vest forty percent of the Eundae-ri plain in his name.
"That's some appetite you've got."
The registration finished, the clerk had stepped outside with him for a smoke.
"Is it greed to take back my ancestors' land?"
"Be honest. You know that isn't yours."
"Then show me the evidence. I mean, really."
The clerk found him preposterous, and yet, strangely, he could not bring himself to dislike the man.
"And what are you going to do if the real owner turns up and files suit?"
"I keep telling you it's my grandfather's land. There's no way I'd lose."
Ki-jo was certain that land without a legal register would never reach a courtroom—and that if it did, he could not lose.
"The nerve on you. Heh..."
The clerk laughed. Ki-jo drew one last pull on his cigarette, let the smoke out, and spoke.
"Rather than fussing, why don't you claim a share for yourself? I'll manage it. All you'd have to do is push a pen at the county office."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Register the land in your own name. No one's paying this ground any mind. Who's going to care about land where war could break out again any day? Out there, whoever takes it first owns it."
"Well, I never... Is there anything you won't say?"
Even as he said it, the clerk turned the offer over in earnest.
Ki-jo read the greed that came into his eyes.
Get close to this man, and the rest will come easy...
He had his sights set not only on the plain of Eundae-ri, but on the choicest ground in Jeongok-ri—the land in all of Yeoncheon County that would rise the farthest. Watching the official smoke and brood before him, he felt certain the man would become a steadfast partner.
That day, Ki-jo laid the foundation for all the growth that was still to come.