Pottery and the Cipher (2)

45.

“What?”

“You looked like you were listening to everything we were saying, so I was wondering who you were.” He was the sort of person who came on with complete force, the kind who tossed words at people without hesitation and wore his curiosity in the open. I’d met plenty of artists in my line of work, writers included, but he gave off a different kind of energy altogether.

“I’m here from Gyeongseong Publishing.”

“Ah—so you’re the writer?”

“The writer is that gentleman over there.”

I pointed to the outsourced writer seated in front. He gave us a slight bow, then immediately returned to typing up our conversation on his laptop. As these things went, if this ever made it into a book, it would probably amount to a single chapter.

“Then you must be the managing editor?”

“That’s the person sitting next to the writer.”

The editor from the Korean literature department was asleep at the wheel, snoring away as if the world had nothing to do with him.

Lee Hee-so stared at me. If you weren’t the writer or the editor, then what exactly were you?

“I’m here to read the work. I’m a literary critic.”

“Ah—so you’re the one they said Gyeongseong Publishing sent over, the big-shot critic! That was you, then? I saw the article in the paper. The one saying you’d debuted at, what, a hundred places?”

Just then, the two professors addressed me as if they already knew me. “Oh. You’re Mr. Mok Hyunsun? I’d heard there was a Mr. Mok at Gyeongseong Publishing, but to think we’d run into you here.”

“So you’re the Mok Hyunsun critic we only ever heard about? A pleasure, really. An honor, hah.”

I shook hands with the professors one by one.

But Lee Hee-so still wore the expression of a man who hadn’t quite solved what I was for. “Well, I’m meeting all kinds of famous people here.” He held out his hand with a politeness that didn’t quite reach his eyes, so I took it anyway.

…Good grief. His face was refined enough, but his hands were covered in calluses.

“But if you’re here to read the text, does that mean you can interpret the cipher too?”

“No. I’ll have to leave that to Professor Tak. The Classical Chinese reading will be Professor Lee’s job. What I do is… dig into the text itself.”

“Dig into the text?”

“Yes. I thought there might be something in it that pure academic research wouldn’t uncover. Of course, there might not be.”

“You’re being awfully vague. I’m not educated enough to pretend I understand that side of things, but all right—let’s do our best.” Lee Hee-so leaned back in his chair. “A critic, huh… I know a few art critics myself, and they’re all bookworms to the core. You seem different, though.”

“Different how?”

“How should I put it… you’ve got more of our smell. The eyes of an artist, maybe?”

Was that a compliment?

He had enough smoothness to make it impossible to tell what he was really thinking.

Then he snorted and waved a hand. “If that offended you, sorry. Still, artists are artists and critics are critics.”

It was a strange way of drawing a line, as if he wanted the distinction kept firmly in place—not because one side was better, but because he liked the categories to stay separate. I didn’t think he believed I needed that distinction either, since Lee Hee-so didn’t seem like the sort who spent much time worrying about what other people thought.

He just seemed to have a rather oversized artist’s pride. In several ways, he was an interesting man. Well, I could leave the slippery eel to his own devices.

What mattered was the jar’s story.

Even now, it was an intriguing piece of writing. That odd imbalance hidden inside it, and the contradictions that sat beneath the surface.

At last, an official from the National Heritage Service called out, “We’ve arrived—everyone, please get ready to disembark.”

The place we got off was a temple called Yongbeop Temple.

They said the jar unearthed near the temple had been kept there for safekeeping. We all fanned out and looked around the excavation site.

Lee Hee-so kneaded the sandy soil between his fingers, then said, “If it was made here, then even cheap glaze would’ve held up. The joints all line up, so it doesn’t seem like a fake.”

He was already certain it was authentic before he’d even seen the jar.

A little later, the abbot greeted us as soon as we stepped into the temple. “Welcome. Thank you for making the long journey.” We followed him and awkwardly pressed our palms together in greeting.

He began with the story of the jar and the temple. “Yongbeop Temple hid a great many independence fighters during the Japanese colonial period. Back then, the temple had a kiln, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and it seems one of the fighters in hiding secretly slipped the pottery in and fired it along with the rest. As for why it stayed buried so long… the fighter who was supposed to dig it up later probably forgot, or died, or both. Come this way for now.”

We followed him in a clump to the main hall.

From beneath the Buddha statue, he pulled out a large wooden box. When he opened it, there was a jar wrapped in white cloth.

The jar was only about as tall as a shinbone, so several of us had to put our hands under it to lift it out without risking a crack. “It’s exactly like the photo.”

“There are a few hairline cracks, but for something this old, it’s been preserved remarkably well.”

“I’m glad the inscription is intact.”

Everyone had a comment or two as they gathered around it.

I merely stared. It was written in Classical Chinese, of course, but in my eyes it had already been translated into Korean.

More precisely, it had already been deciphered.

I frowned. Fine—everything else made sense.

But the last line refused to fit.

“Professor Tak.”

“Yes, Mr. Mok.”

“The line about farming your land when spring comes—doesn’t there seem to be a cipher for that part?”

“As for the season, you can take it quite simply. Right now it’s winter, which means the Japanese colonial ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠period—then when that winter is over and spring comes, we take back our land and live in peace. Isn’t that the standard interpretation?”

“Yes. At a basic level, that’s the right reading.”

Professor Lee added his voice, though his expression was tinged with disappointment. “But seeing it in person is a little disappointing. We’ve found plenty of ciphers like this before. Aside from the fact that it was engraved on a jar, there’s nothing especially unusual about it, so it may not be something worth reporting to academia in any meaningful way. Right, Professor Tak?”

“Yes. To be honest, the independence fighters’ ciphers weren’t all that sophisticated. Hm—then the artifact itself would at least need to have artistic merit. What do you think, Mr. Lee Hee-so?”

Lee Hee-so sniffed. “Hmph. It doesn’t have much artistic value either. It was made from ordinary clay, and the shaping is only amateur-level. For jars and earthenware like this, you’d normally use a more functional clay suitable for storage, but that wasn’t done here, so it can’t have been made for practical use.”

“Then what was it for?”

“A souvenir. In a way.”

A souvenir?

That made it even worse.

“So, to sum it up,” I said to them, “it has little value from a cryptographic or literary standpoint, and no real value from an artistic or practical one either.”

No one—not a single person in the room—contradicted me.

And just as that silence was beginning to harden into emptiness, the writer who had been taking notes shook his head slowly, his expression saying everything: We’re completely sunk.

Still, we did our best to examine the jar carefully, in case there was some hidden peculiarity we had missed.

But even with every specialist in the room huddled around it, nothing came of it. By around midnight, Professor Lee finally gave up. “Let’s stop here and take it back to Seoul to continue.”

That was just a polite way of saying we’d keep at it in Seoul.

It was obvious that after spending a little more time looking at it in the institute, it would end up in some museum or another.

At least a museum would have been a decent outcome.

It could just as easily have been displayed in a forgotten corner of a museum corridor at the Independence Movement Memorial Hall.

The job had gone to hell, so what was there to do but drink? People quietly raised their glasses.

It was a temple, so alcohol was prohibited, but a few people had somehow managed to bring some in anyway.

In the middle of the gathering, Professor Tak grumbled in visible regret. “I knew it would turn out like this. The moment I saw the photo, I knew this wasn’t anything special. That’s why I told them not to make such a big fuss over the research, but the National Heritage Service seems to have gotten fixated on it for some reason, and now…”

“It’s not like we came because we wanted to. The higher-ups pushed it through, saying that since this was the first time anyone had found an independence-fighter cipher engraved on pottery, it had to amount to something. Ugh—what am I supposed to report ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠back now?”

Professor Lee shouted toward me, “Mr. Mok! Stop staring at it and get some rest. You too, Mr. Lee.”

That was true.

Lee Hee-so and I were still sitting in front of the jar.

We kept staring at it as though we could bore a hole through it with our eyes. I didn’t know what Lee Hee-so was thinking, but what kept snagging in my mind was still that final sentence.

Why was that?

Every other line looked a muddy brown to me, but that last one alone was a blue-green, like a rice field in the height of summer.

I asked Lee Hee-so, “What are you thinking?”

“Mostly that something’s strange.”

“How so?”

“You can tell at a glance. Sure, an amateur made it, but they poured an absurd amount of effort into it. From their perspective, they must’ve thought this was the masterpiece of their life.”

“That is strange. Independence fighters wouldn’t have had the leisure to enjoy pottery for its own sake. And if the goal was to leave a message, a jar that could break at any moment is far too inefficient.”

“Exactly. You’re pretty sharp for someone who studies literature.”

We fell silent again.

But silence didn’t mean I’d stopped thinking.

I kept turning Lee Hee-so’s words over and over in my head. They had made something inefficient in the middle of their circumstances. This was a novel, a letter, and a souvenir all at once. Then what, exactly, were they commemorating?

Independence? They hadn’t achieved it yet.

The independence movement itself? They didn’t seem like the sort to celebrate that out of sentimentality. You used the word “commemorate” for something worth celebrating. So in this situation, what could they possibly have been celebrating?

“You’re staring so hard it’s like you’re trying to bore a hole through the jar. It’s going to crack.”

Whatever Lee Hee-so said, I kept staring at the inscription. And then, all at once, one word leapt out at me.

“Ah!”

“?”

A single word rushed straight toward me: you. The second-person pronoun. A word that cannot exist without a listener.

Without a listener, it simply doesn’t hold.

I understood.

The answer was you.

“Why?”

“You.”

“I asked why, didn’t I? …!”

Lee Hee-so seemed to understand for a split second—realizing I hadn’t been calling to him.

He looked around and called the others over. “Looks like Mr. Mok has figured something out.”

People set down their glasses and came over to us. “What is it?”

“Did you find something?”

They asked the questions, but none of them looked especially hopeful.

The writer, looking mildly put upon, opened his laptop again.

I pointed to one spot on the jar. “This part is a novel.”

“But from here, it suddenly becomes a letter.”

“In other words, the earlier part isn’t actually a message to another independence fighter. If they truly needed to pass along that information, they would have left it somewhere easier ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to write on—paper or cloth, for example.”

“Then what exactly is this jar?” Professor Lee asked.

“You said it earlier, Mr. Lee Hee-so. It’s a souvenir. Up to this point, everything has gone well—and the future will go well too. In other words, this is about pre-celebrating independence before it arrives. A kind of hope.”

“Hope….”

And this was the important part.

“And the identity of this story’s reader—and of the letter’s recipient—is hidden in the last line. You. Unlike paper or cloth, a jar can survive for a very long time. And the person who would be lucky enough to dig it up later…”

Professor Tak clapped a hand over his mouth. “Good heavens… don’t tell me—”

“Yes. This is a letter sent to us.”