The Pocket Bible
Just then the old women came inside and took the children away. They brought in elderly people abandoned by their families, gave them work, and in effect protected him. It might look like the weak licking one another's wounds, but for a welfare system with a limited budget he thought it was efficient enough.
Why?
Why did the sight of it sour Se-geon's mood? Through the people bustling about, the pastor walked in. He looked at Se-geon and Rat sitting on the floor sorting blocks, then asked Se-geon in particular.
"Could we... talk for a moment?"
"Yes."
Here it comes, Se-geon thought. He had carried guns and blades and even struck the man himself; it would have been strange if there were no questions at all. How far should he go? What lies should he tell? He had prepared that in advance. So Se-geon followed the pastor to make his excuses.
"We'll talk here."
It was the shoe rack, shoes lined up in dense rows. There was no pastor's office or anything of the sort. No grand private space that set the pastor apart from the people housed in the welfare facility. In a warehouse of a building like this, the presence of such a room would have been stranger. Still, for a conversation that was bound to turn rather confidential, talking here made no sense.
"Hm."
Why was Se-geon even listening to this pastor while fretting that his identity might be exposed? He could have beaten the man down, stolen a taxi, run up the rear mountain, recovered his weapons, and killed that Black vampire. Problem solved, right?
Yet he could easily imagine what would become of the people here if he did. If the meal they set before guests was nothing more than two packets of bag ramen boiled in an enamel pot...
He couldn't do it?
Se-geon realized that the value called goodness still lived inside him, and the discovery filled him with wonder. If the opponent was a vampire, he killed. Child or adult, woman or man, good or evil—to mete out death equally to all of them, he had no choice but to abandon his own righteousness.
Once righteousness was abandoned, only the rationality of the means remained. And if he could not even seize that rationality of means, a human was too weak to hunt vampires.
"So..."
If it had nothing to do with hunting vampires, he was free to claim righteousness? Then Se-geon could take a proper attitude toward these people. There was only one thing he hoped for: that this pastor would not suddenly decide to preach. If the man called the police or launched into a sermon, Se-geon would have a hard time restraining the urge to shatter his jaw.
"Here. Take this..."
But what the pastor held out was a pocket Bible. Se-geon stared at him, anger giving way to sheer disbelief.
"Take it. It's made of words, so someday when you're terribly bored it might be worth reading."
"...I don't think that day will ever come."
Se-geon was studying languages, machinery, demolition engineering. His high-school foundation was weak, so he was relearning mathematics as well; the sheer volume of study was enormous. From time to time he even emailed university professors for advice, and he trained his body on top of it all. He had no time for a pathetic book like this.
"Are you angry?"
"Tch."
Perhaps because the expression had risen so easily to his face. The pastor's expression darkened. Se-geon reluctantly took the book. Something like this—he could just toss it in the trash later, so there was no need to dig in his heels openly. Come to think of it, the convictions Se-geon held did not stand in opposition to religion. He could at least go through the motions of accepting it.
"Well, you hear stories often enough of Bibles stopping bullets."
Se-geon accepted it and shot the pastor a sidelong glance. The pastor was smiling from ear to ear.
"Is that so? Protecting a life from bullets—I'm sure the Bible itself would be glad."
When someone was this good-natured, there was little left to say. It might be amusing to show people like him the darkness of the world and watch them suffer, but the darkness of a vampire hunter was something only the residents of the moonlit night could share. Ah...
Don't talk about goodness when you don't know a damn thing!
In the end, that might have been what he wanted to say. But Se-geon had no right to say it either.
"Truth is, I used to have a terrible temper myself. Even now I'm a complete washout as a minister."
The pastor said it so casually. The idea that this man had ever been bad-tempered was hard to imagine; it sounded like every old man who boasts he used to run with Kim Du-hwan or Sirasoni. And even if his temper had been bad, he surely had never shot a fellow biker dead, or emptied two drums of shotgun shells into vampires inside a trailer until it looked like a slaughterhouse, or carved a vampire into six pieces with a Japanese sword and then crushed the crawling thing's occiput with a Walker boot while it still dripped blood.
Even so, he looked at Se-geon and said:
"I came out of a welfare home myself, you see."
He gave a bitter little smile. Remembering childhood, perhaps.
"I was full of complaints from the time I was little. Welfare homes are usually run by religious institutions, so there were Masses and prayers... that alone irritated me. Forcing religion on me just because they fed me. Expensive missionary work, I thought."
Which meant he had been a child with a fairly strong will of his own. Ordinarily such things amounted to brainwashing carried out on the defenseless. Yet looking at the pastoral clothes he wore now, it seemed the brainwashing had eventually taken hold after all.
"Well... do you want to hear how I became a pastor?"
"A little."
In truth the man himself seemed desperate to tell it. The pastor beamed and continued.
"So that was how I ended up wandering. I fell in with some bad friends..."
At that, Se-geon thought of Silvester and Kenneth Yang. Hmm. By that standard they were definitely bad friends. Bad friends, if you could even call them friends.
"I even made money doing the kind of work you do."
"..."
Of course this pastor, no matter how you looked at him, did not fit the mold of a vampire hunter. He must have mistaken Se-geon for some sort of thug. Otherwise he would never have brought an unidentified vampire like Rat Gernip into a secluded place perfect for murder. Lucky the creature was a good vampire; if not, a massacre would have broken out.
Those powerless humans who, only moments ago, had watched Se-geon's block-pulling technique with their mouths hanging open, drooling without even noticing—those same people would have been slaughtered without mercy, their blood drunk dry.
"Ugh..."
His chest hurt. A good vampire? Hah, had he actually thought that? And what was so wrong if those idiotic imbeciles died? They were just beggars living off society's pity!
No.
"Oh dear... your condition still doesn't seem good."
"No. I'm fine."
Se-geon answered the pastor who was fretting over his body. The soft-hearted pastor then returned to his own story.
"All I wanted was to earn money fast and get out. No—by then I had already gotten out. Even if I was running around collecting loan-shark interest for a gang office, I was eating and sleeping there, wearing tailored suits, living well."
The classic experience of a hanger-on who idolized gangsters and signed up. Se-geon thought as much but kept his mouth shut. The man was enjoying the telling; Se-geon had no intention of interrupting.
If he was in this man's debt, the least he could do was listen to the story. And the story wasn't that dull either. There was plenty of fun in sneering and tearing into it. Just living well enough to wear a tailored suit, was that it...?
"I lived like that for about two years, I think. At the time our pastor was a foreigner... somehow he found out, came straight to the office, and dragged me out."
"Heh?"
Se-geon made a polite show of surprise, and the pastor was delighted. Of course. A foreign pastor who could barely communicate walks into a nest of vicious, empty-headed gangsters and hauls one kid out—who wouldn't be surprised?
But looked at the other way, a complete stranger of a Yankee drags one organization member off and everyone just stands there watching. You could tell how little weight he had carried in the group. Well, the guys who ran around collecting interest were a dime a dozen; even a madam coming to collect a teahouse debt would get one handed over.
Yet the pastor showed no desire to climb out of his reminiscence. At least one thing was clear: how sincerely that foreign pastor had approached him. While Se-geon mocked the pastor's pathetic life, a small jealousy stirred in him over that sincerity.
Ah, so there really were people who loved someone unconditionally. That was how a thug's errand boy had changed into this...
"I got angry. Why are you trying to drag me back there? I hate being poor enough to die. If I stay here I eat three meals a day—just give the kids here as much money as I cost! So I yelled. Truth is, I'd been sending part of the money I earned, regularly."
"..."
Se-geon had nothing to say. Foolish man. If you earned money by doing bad things, you should have eaten well and lived well yourself—why dump that money somewhere like that? Using money earned by selling your soul to save someone else's soul was absurd... Could one person's sacrifice really let another person live? And if it could, who would volunteer for the sacrifice? Foolish man. Foolish people. But Se-geon, who had not even managed to become a fool and instead wandered the nine heavens like a vengeful ghost, was in no position to say so.
"Truth is, I never hated the pastor. No matter how much I wanted to do something else, no matter how little I could achieve here, he was my father. The only person in this world who treated me well. Only him. He came all the way from a distant country, gave food and clothes and a house—gave a family—to children who had nothing to do with him. When we were sick the pastor was always with the children. We couldn't even talk, though by the end he spoke Korean pretty well... still, even when we couldn't communicate he kept stroking the children's heads by the bedside... I don't know how many times, how many times he did that. When the kids went wild with typhoid. You know what kind of disease typhoid is? When it spreads like a plague and no one will come near, he took the children and... changed their clothes with his own hands."
"..."
He could no longer sneer. He could no longer protect himself by regarding that foolishness with a cold, contemptuous eye. Even if it sprang from some religious fervor Se-geon could not accept, Se-geon himself would never be able to do such a thing.
Ah! No matter how many people sneer at social work... not one of those thousands actually throws himself into welfare work. Most of them will not even spare a single coin, even for packaged goodwill. So what right did they have to sneer?
Does ugly reason defeat compassion and mercy, then stand atop them glorying in a splendid war and savoring victory? Ah, so it is. May compassion and mercy never make you foolish! But how clever are you who refuse to be foolish? How much have you gained by discarding an upright heart?
Damn it!
How clever are you, and what profit have you made, that you dare mock the foolishness of those who sacrifice for others? Become Bill Gates first and then sneer! Build a castle of banknotes and declare that no matter what anyone says, you have been wise and clever and magnificent in your own life—then go ahead and mock someone simply for having been merciful! Commoners mocking commoners!
"Ah..."
"But even after that I kept fretting him and still sent money to the church regularly. Then one day the pastor handed me a bankbook."
The pastor closed his eyes.
"Not a single penny of the money I had sent had been used; it was all sitting there. At first I was angry. Of course it wasn't money earned by legitimate means, but why hadn't he taken even a single coin? This place was always short of money, always drowning in poverty—why refuse it? Was I that filthy a person... but the truth is I was a filthy person."
"I don't think that was the reason."
Se-geon muttered and turned his gaze to the shoe rack. Plastic slippers and rubber shoes of the kind sold for a thousand or two thousand won in market stalls stood in rows. Among them was one with a Pikachu skillfully drawn in magic marker. Merchandise with characters on it was expensive, but the kids here at least watched television, so they seemed to substitute ownership this way.
"The pastor said that money... because I had earned it by committing sins, it had to be used for me. When he handed it over together with the paperwork for the high-school equivalency exam, I was honestly flustered. Studying at that point didn't suit me, and the idea of spending the money on myself..."
Ah, of course not. Se-geon agreed. He had money rotting away, yet there was almost nothing to spend it on for himself. If he had a wife and children, a family to feed and support, that would be different—but for a man alone in the world it had no use. In a harsh world the idea of living for others might seem hard to grasp at first... yet because a human cannot see himself, he has no choice but to confirm his own existence in another's eyes.
Even the strongest self-love can only be realized through others. Because even loving oneself requires dependence on others, human beings may be even lonelier creatures.
"I've heard enough."
Se-geon turned his head. But the pastor kept telling his story.
"In the end, this is what working for myself became."
That was how the pastor put it. Well, no one could have surpassed a man like that. The only way to repay his grace was one: to give to others the way he had given. Because there is no way to repay the gratuitous love of a great person of ability, one gives to others instead. Was that one of the basic doctrines of Christianity?
"...I'm sleepy. Good night."
Se-geon said it and fled from the pastor. So what exactly was he supposed to do? Become a pastor himself? For a moment Se-geon pictured himself in pastoral robes.
"Silvester would go ballistic."
A Protestant pastor? The idea was so absurd that Se-geon laughed. He kept laughing with an expression that looked as if he might cry.