소낙비

Sullen black clouds were gathering thick in the sky as if at any moment a single shaft of rain might fall — and yet, mean as ever, the sun beat down, scorching this lonely village hidden among the folds of the mountains as though it would consume the place whole. Now and then, as if remembering itself, a wild squall ran riot through the trees about the paddies and fields.

In the inner village, with all the farmhands gone out far across the hills on shared labour, the air was forlorn. Only from a slim grove of poplars came the cicadas' aching song — as though chanting for the country slowly going to ruin.

Maeum! Mae-eum!

Chunho, sitting on the doorsill of his own house — a worm-eaten little hovel he'd bought this past spring for five won — was propping his chin on his right fist and silently glaring at his wife, who was washing potatoes for supper out on the packed-earth threshing-floor. He'd worried himself sleepless three or four nights running over this matter, and his face, already drawn from the toils of farming, was paler still.

Once again he tried to press his wife. But this time in a threatening tone:

"Look here. So — you really won't see your way to coming up with two won?"

His wife answered nothing as before. Like a new bride freshly fetched home, she only kept on washing the potatoes she was washing, silent. Whether yes or no, since she said nothing one way or the other, Chunho's anger boiled over and he was fit to die. He'd come drifting in from another village; there was no one who'd trust him for a grain loan, and even were he to try to sell that wretched little house, no buyer would come forward at even two or three won — front and back, every door was shut to him. Yet his wife was young and her face passable enough, so something like two won, surely, could somehow be managed — that was why he was asking; and her not so much as listening was a piece of impudence past bearing.

Thumping his belly, he tried once more —

"Won't you do me the money or what?"

— and roared it out at her.

But the answer, as before, was none.

Chunho, his fury boiling up into the heavens, all of a sudden shoved aside the door-frame and sprang up. Eyes glaring, he caught up the A-frame stick that leaned against the wall and came at his wife like the wind.

"You wretched woman, what's the good of a wife? She's to ease her husband's worries too — or are you only the kind a man tucks under his arm at night?"

The A-frame stick came down hard across his wife's tender waist. Her crumpling cry escaped beyond the cruelly twisted wattle fence. Without pause, the stick took the heel of his wife where she'd toppled from her seat and brought another blow down on her buttocks.

"You wretched woman, since when have I ever been at you to do this?"

As the husband, roaring like a tiger, lifted the stick once more into the air to throw his whole weight into the next blow, his wife —

"Mercy on me!"

— let out one short cry. Twisting her body about, she went stumbling out, all but pitched on her face, beyond the brushwood gate. Tears streaming on her face, with a flailing step she ran down the slope before the house, crossed the brook, and turned into the path that ran through the bean field on the far side.

"You — where do you think you'll go to get away from me?"

At that pointed shout, which seemed to bar her very feet, the wife on her flight checked herself. She turned her head and looked at her husband, who still stood inside the brushwood gate with the A-frame stick in his hand. Like a child caught in a wrong before its elders, her mouth only worked silently a moment, then for fear he might spring out at her she barely got out the words —

"I was just going over to Soedol's mother's, that's all."

She faltered out the excuse and then went hurrying along the way she had set out. It wasn't that the wife herself didn't know how badly two won were needed just then. But for one of her station, by any honest labour, two won was a sum she dared not even dream of touching. Her earnings amounted to nothing — first thing in the morning, before anyone else could get ahead of her, she'd run off up into the mountains as if her life depended on it.

With a small basket tied at her waist, she'd go searching out the bellflower roots and deodeok roots that grew here and there scattered through the great mountains. Down into the deep ravines, in among the sombre crevices of stone, with her frail body and her bare feet dragging in their straw sandals, she'd traverse the steep ridges, and the very strength she'd had at her mother's breast seemed to melt away in the sweat that ran from her head down to her feet.

The single thin layer of an old skirt wrapped about her lower body would catch in folds about her legs and waist, hindering her steps. Her sweat-swollen calves were scratched in the rough underbrush till the smarting was past words. Add to that the heavy reek of earth, choking the breath from her chest. Yet in her simple head, fighting and struggling for life, no resentment ever rose.

Like beans sown in drought, when by some chance she found a single bellflower shoot poking up among the tangled woods, she would still let a smile of sheer joy come over her face. At times she would scramble up the very rocks. Where she truly couldn't climb, she would even hang from arrowroot vines. Her grimy cotton singlet she would pull off and stuff hard into her waistband, and then, in the Gangwon mountains so famous as tiger country, she would cling on and scratch and tear with all the strength she had.

Each time the valley wind passed, it lifted her bare-bodied skirt-hem high into the air. The arrowroot vines, looking down each time she artlessly bared her dusky-red buttocks, would have split their sides laughing if they could. But mercifully, deep in the hollows of the hills as it was, the only one to mock her was the cuckoo.

By making a day's work of it, the bellflower and deodeok roots she'd dug came to a bowl and a half, or perhaps two bowls' worth. Then she'd come down to the village, take them to the tavern crossroads, and barter them there for a measure of barley. But of late, even that has gone out of season; there's nothing to gather. In its stead she pounds barley for others all day long, and bringing back a bowl of barley rice, she shares it at home with her husband, who, having got hold of no farmland, sits idle and shameless. Such was her day-by-day living. So between her and two won, even were her throat cut on the spot, you doubted whether so much as blood would come.

If two won really were to be raised, the only way was to borrow a measure of barley from some acquaintance and sell it. And among the village women, the only one with any free hand at making money was Soedol's mother — whom the village wives all whispered about, saying she'd "changed her fortune by her skirts," and whom they secretly envied. But — as the proverb has it, the thief's own foot tingles — feeling herself unworthy, she had no wish, dead or alive, to go to that finely-living Soedol's mother.

Soedol's mother too was, at first, just like herself, the wife of some lowly farmer; but having by some heavenly chance struck up an understanding with Master Yi, the rich gentleman of the village, she now made up her face, dressed in fine clothes, never worried about her meals, and was rolling along in a fortune that might as well have been a cushion of gold. And Soedol's father, as if to say what a windfall it was, with one eye gently shut to his wife's affairs, ate the rice and wore the clothes that came from Master Yi, while taking his hand year by year off his own miserable farming and putting on grand airs!

In truth, the deeper reason Chunho's wife dared not, on her life, go to Soedol's mother lay just here.

Just this past late spring, on a certain night when the moon hung piercing-bright, Chunho had gone out around the foot of the mountain to look in on the full-moon gathering, and when, though it grew late, he didn't come home, his wife — thinking he'd be sleeping over — had just lain down and was about to drift off when out of nowhere some great brute of a man, like a yellow ox, sprang in upon her. He came pawing at Chunho's wife in a hurried, headlong fashion, and at her startled scream of "Aagh!" had gone bolting off. As is the way in the artless countryside, no particular gossip ever came of it and the matter was hushed up; only several days later did she at last guess that it had been the doing of Master Yi, the village rich man.

For that reason, even though Chunho's wife had no direct connection with Soedol's mother, whenever she came face to face with her, her own face would burn for nothing and she'd grow mortifyingly awkward — as though she herself had committed some sin…

And worse, when Soedol's mother chattered cheerfully on, "My dear, I've got three sets of underclothes, four pairs of stockings, and so on — " feeling so pleased with herself, that very sight made the wife wonder, with a knot of self-suspicion, whether she wasn't being sneered at on her own account, and she could not even raise her face for shame.

On the other side, the regret and lament for having let slip the precious chance — had she only played her hand a little better, by now she might be living in luxury like Soedol's mother — these too were no small smarting in her heart. Yet whatever shame she might suffer, anything would still be lighter than her husband's wild beatings, growing crueller by the day. So today, with one set heart, she was on her way to find Soedol's mother.

Chunho's wife, anxious that this errand too might come to nothing, fretting at the thought, turned into the path that ran along the paddy bank between the rows of weeping willows.

For a country wife, her looks were uncommonly pleasing. The slightly thin shape, slim and graceful, was — to use the village's own phrase — "a face that might do its share of mischief"; but the shabby clothes and the sour smell would have shamed even a beggar. With her left hand and her right by turns, she folded her skirt-hem close, picking her way with anxious care lest the very flesh show through. Brutish-looking masses of cloud were spreading clear across the heavens, sinking lower and lower, until at last they hung tangled on the mountain peaks and the whole scene grew bleak. From far off, a dog barking sounded forlorn against the hills around. Drops of rain began, one and two, and grew thicker, until in great handfuls they came pouring down.

Chunho's wife darted in under a chestnut tree by the path, took shelter from the rain, and looked across at Soedol's mother's house. The house — set against the high northern slope, surrounded all about by a tall fence, snug and trim — was the one. But seeing the brushwood gate fast shut, it seemed Soedol's mother had gone over to the labourers' shed to take out the afternoon meal and was not yet back.

She kept watch for Soedol's mother, standing wooden and waiting.

Drops fell from the leaves and ran down her cheek and into her bosom. Each time the wind went by, it drove the cold and the heavy rain together against her body. The skirt, soaked clean through, clung tight to her so that the contour of her flesh — at the waist, at the buttocks, down the legs — showed plain.

She waited a good while, but Soedol's mother didn't come. Worn out at last, yawning, standing there in a daze, she heard footsteps coming from the rise to her left. She turned her head — and quickly slipped behind the trees. It was Master Yi, paunch round as a jar, his oil-paper umbrella raised, swinging his backside as he made his way down toward Soedol's house. Short though he was, with his thick beard and his fine horsehair cap — the only one of its kind in the whole village — he made as fine a figure as you'd find of a gentleman of fifty or so.

He went up to the brushwood gate and, as if at his own house, shoved it open without ado and walked straight in. Seeing this, Chunho's wife felt her heart unsettled all over again. She herself was a wretched creature buffeted about and beaten without rhyme or reason, like a dog or pig. Soedol's mother, doted on within doors and without, was, she could plainly see, of a different cut of human being altogether. The reaction to the envy with which she gazed up at Soedol's mother's good fortune turned to a vain hope and regret — that she too, had she but managed it — and pierced her heart now several times more bitter than before.

Looking blankly across at Soedol's house, before she knew it a long sigh rolled down. Water sliding from the rise covered her insteps with mud, sounding as it ran. Her body, soaked to the skin, began to shiver and shiver.

She gave a small shudder. And with anxious eyes she looked round about, on the alert. No one was to be seen. Turning her gaze back, she fixed her eyes upon the house and reasoned to herself. Inside, surely, there was no one but Master Yi. The brushwood gate that had been shut all this while, and the laundry still hanging on the fence — by every sign and oath, there was no one inside but Master Yi alone.

She set her mind, braved the rain, and dashed for the house. Hopping smartly up onto the packed-earth floor —

"Soedol's mother — are you in?"

— and made her presence known.

Of course, no answer came from the woman herself. Instead, no sooner had her voice sounded than Master Yi's head shot out from the inner room like a flash of lightning. As if it were beyond all his expectation, his eyes darted this way and that, then slid sneakily over Chunho's wife — over the swell of her bosom under the wet cloth, the underbelly, the thighs, all the way down to her insteps — and his face, half-flushed already, broke into a slow grin. And edging out himself onto the packed-earth floor —

"Soedol's mother, you say? Why, she's only just stepped out. She said she'd be right back — won't you come into the inner room and wait a bit?" — and he shuffled and hummed as if it were truly a great pity.

"Where could she've gone, in this rain?"

"She just stepped out a minute ago — but she'll be right back…"

"And me thinking she'd be in…"

Chunho's wife murmured this to herself as if disappointed, hesitated a moment with a forlorn face, and stepped down off the packed-earth floor as if to leave just as she'd come.

Looking up at Master Yi, light as a swallow flicking water from its wing,

"Then I'll come back another time. Keep well, won't you?" — and made her parting bow.

"But she's just about to be back — won't you wait a bit…?"

"I'll come again another time."

"No, no — wait a moment. Hey — hey, you there, hey!"

At the woman's making to leave, Master Yi, regardless of his dignity, took fire. Floundering about, with all the skill he had, he tried to hold her back, but it seemed past doing. That Chunho's wife had come here at all was a great wonder; that with the thunder, and a quiet corner — such a ripe chance was not to be had twice in a lifetime. His eyes turning over in his head, he yanked the long-stemmed pipe from his mouth and flung it inside the room, then with both arms flung round the woman's waist from behind he hauled her up willy-nilly onto the packed-earth floor.

The woman, frightened violently —

"Why are you doing this — let me go!" — and struggled to wrench herself free.

"No — just one moment."

Master Yi, all the same, would not let go, and with greedy darting glances tried to coax the woman.

Hitching up his slipping under-trousers with his left hand again and again, gripping the woman tight with his right arm, faltering and floundering, he barely managed to bundle her into the room. The latch was thrown swift and sure on the inside.

Outside, the cruel rain striking the cabbage leaves, and the wind shaking the trees, were a great noise. From time to time a deep peal of thunder, as though someone were rolling a tin drum down the slope, rang along the floor-flue, and the day grew darker and darker.

Some time passed. Reckoning that by this she'd been broken in, Master Yi let out a long puff of relief. Looking down with satisfaction at the woman, who, thanks to the kindly rain, had been unable to scream or to put up any fight and lay slack and submissive across his knees, he smiled gently. The woman's whole body was running with sweat — she seemed quite hot. Master Yi took down Soedol's mother's singlet from the wall and began to wipe the woman's body clean, from the toes right up to the face…

"You're nineteen, aren't you?" Master Yi asked vacantly, his face flushed as if drunk.

"Yes." — a dull-tongued reply.

The woman lay pinned under Master Yi's hand, unable to rise, still as one dead.

When he had wiped the woman all over, Master Yi let out a sigh and, with an air of importance, lit himself a pipe.

"And so — does that husband of yours still beat you to within an inch of your life these days?" — when no answer came at all,

"How on earth are you to live like that, day in, day out? Who can foretell what may come? If by chance you were beaten to death, there'd be nowhere to go even to file a grievance. So, if you mean to spare your own life, you'd better simply break the household register without more ado." — fretting on for the woman's safety, and then a thing he'd been curious about came suddenly to mind.

"Oh, and — they say you bore a child and lost it?"

"Yes."

"Looking at you, you wouldn't think you'd ever borne one."

The woman's face went red as a carrot, and unable to say a word she turned her face aside.

Master Yi did not press the question further. But just then, what fellow's stink it was he couldn't say — a sour, pickled-radish kind of foul reek struck his nostrils, and he could not help knitting his brows. At first he'd quite missed it; but having noticed it, his stomach rather turned. Pointing with the long-stemmed pipe he was smoking, sharply at the woman's belly-button, he said,

"Hey, just look at this filth on your skin. With water about you in plenty, can't you so much as wash this?" — and as if put out at having his fine mood spoiled, he clucked his tongue with distaste. But when the woman, out of utter shame, at length got up to put on her skirt, he was instantly furious. He snatched her clothes away, flung them into a corner, and dragged her back down to her place. Then, as if scolding his own daughter, he chid her with great loftiness.

"Why are you so jumpy, woman? Have a little dignity about you…"

It was about an hour after she'd entered when Chunho's wife came out of that house.

The rain was coming down as heavy as ever. She had come out drenched through with cold sweat, every drop. But beyond all expectation — no, by sheer heaven's mercy — today's errand had succeeded.

She squared her body and a smile came over her face. Such humiliation and such shame — the worst calamity of her whole life, a vile mishap among mishaps — but a success was a success. To win blessing one must, the saying goes, suffer; this kind of thing, were she to endure it a hundred times over, so long as she could escape her husband's beatings and live at peace with him, she would not begrudge it. Master Yi she now revered as the very heavens, as a benefactor.

That he would give her husband farmland to work, in return for her being his concubine — that word too she had received with deference; but more than anything else, the word that he would give her two won, on condition she meet him at Soedol's house this same hour tomorrow, was the most welcome of all, and her heart felt eased as if a heavy load had been lifted. The only thing that gnawed at her was that, if her conduct ever came to her husband's ears, he would beat her to death with one stroke. Half rejoicing, half fretting, she ran lightly homeward through the fierce, slanting rain.

Chunho was still nursing his anger and sat alone, sulking.

It had been three years now since he'd turned his back on Inje, his hometown. Year on year of bad harvests had reduced his crops to nothing, and the threats and abuse of his creditors had grown sharper by the day.

In the end, helpless, he had abandoned his household goods just as they were and run off in the dead of night with nothing but his own skin. Looking, he said, for a place where one could live, he had dragged his young wife by the wrist over this hill and that, drifting and wandering. But the place he'd at last sought out was no more than this village; in the mountains, things are everywhere the same.

In whatever mountain valley he set hand to a hoe, no warmth attached to him at all; there only cold unease and starvation lay open-armed to greet him. They called him a stranger and would not let him have any farmland. With no opening for work he could not even hire himself out by the day. There was no rice. In the end, by the strange gambling fever that drifts among peasants gone to ruin, his blood was set on fire.

Of late, for several days running, he'd caught wind that night after night a great gambling round was being thrown up in the back of the hill just over the way. He'd hung about in hopes of taking a hand himself, but a stake he could not, by any means, manage to put together. Two won! With even a little luck, who could say outright that two won, deftly handled, might not bring him good fortune in a flash? Win thirty or forty won, settle the village debts roughly, get a decent set of clothes made up, and quit this teeth-grinding mountain hollow for good — such was his calculation.

Up to Seoul they would go: the wife would put herself out as a live-in maidservant, he would take labour, and the two of them, scraping hard, could lead a comfortable life. Beats starving to death in this corner of the mountains. So when he'd told his young wife to scare him up some money, she'd dodged this beating and that beating and refused to give him a hand — and her conduct in this was no small piece of impudence.

When his wife came running for the house looking like a drowned rat, before she could so much as open her mouth, the husband, gritting his teeth, brought a fist square across her cheek.

"You wretched woman, dodging the beatings and going off to lie down where, I'd like to know?"

Taking the slap, the wife was speechless with sheer outrage. And when even that failed to satisfy him and the husband reached for his switch again, she took fright and, hands raised in plea, faintly opened her mouth.

"It'll be done… tomorrow. The money — tomorrow." — her voice telling him that the money would be raised, half-broken with weeping. The husband, half-believing, half not, narrowed his eyes —

"Tomorrow?" — and raised his voice.

"Yes, it'll be tomorrow."

"For sure?"

"Yes, tomorrow for sure."

Country-wise as he was, the husband did not press to know just where two won out of nowhere were to come from, or how. With a face somewhat at ease, he sat down on the doorsill again and put a flame to his pipe. Only then did the wife, easier in her mind, make to go into the kitchen to boil the potatoes — at which the husband came over to her and, almost tenderly, held her back.

"You'll fall ill. Get into the room and dry off your clothes. I'll boil the potatoes."

A night thick as ink came down. The rain beat ever louder, ringing on the bare walls of their room, both at front and back. The roof did not leak from the ceiling, but the house was so old its ondol flues had nearly given way; and on the unpapered floor the damp seeped through, leaving it cold and clammy. On top of which, just two woven straw mats laid flat — that was their bed. There was no kerosene lamp and the dark was a very hell. Fleas crawled and crawled from every quarter.

Yet, well used to sleeping rough, the two of them lay placidly side by side, listening with care to the steady drumming of the night rain. They two, for whom poverty had snuffed out all knowledge of marital tenderness and whose days were a swelter of beatings, complaint, and bitterness — even they, on this night, were oddly at peace. Only because of the two won which lay safely now in the husband's arms.

"When are we going up to Seoul?"

The wife, lying with her head pillowed on her husband's left arm, asked half-wheedlingly. From her husband she had heard many times of Seoul's brilliant streets and the warm-hearted ways of its people, and had often pictured it longingly in her mind, but had never set eyes on it for herself. To slip out of this hardship soon and go up to easy-living Seoul was a wish that gnawed at her.

"We'll be off soon enough, if only the debts were a little lighter."

"Pay the debts off later — let's just go quick."

"No worry. Within this month for sure we'll be on our way."

The husband consented heartily. Truth be told, he was reckoned in the village a fellow with a hand for it — a man who could pluck the gabo from a turn of cards as easily as one plucks bean sprouts from a steamer. The thought of taking the two won tomorrow night and falling on the gambling round like a thunderbolt, scooping up every coin in play, gave him no small private joy. And to himself he kept on prizing his own neat skill of hand.

"It'll be your first time in Seoul, eh?" — at which, putting on grand airs as if he himself had taken a fair turn through Seoul's air, he shook his wife's head with his arm and asked. He was hot-tempered by nature, and from now on he wanted to lay all the preparations for Seoul, step by step. What worried him most was that, taking with him a wife who had grown up in the back of beyond, the Seoul folk would make sport of her, and there would be no end of awkwardnesses. So the rules to be kept on no account in Seoul, he had to set out for his wife one by one.

First began the warning about her dialect. The reason peasants are looked down on in Seoul under the nickname of "country bumpkin" lies above all in the dialect; therefore she must never use the dialect, but must change "happse" to "hasimnikka," and "haegeyu" to "hao," and not let her sentence-endings rise; and again, dawdling about in the streets only marks her as a green country girl, so she's to walk briskly where she's going and look about her with a sharp, bright eye — such were the rules. The wife listened attentively to the dread sermon, and in a voice no louder than a mosquito's said, "Yes. Yes."

For a good two hours the husband, without leaving a chink, drove his cautions home, and from there spread out, as he saw fit, the customs and the manner of life of Seoul, until at length the talk worked its way round to the matter of cosmetics. He had once heard tell that a country girl who served well as a live-in maidservant in Seoul could, after a few years, even come to own her own house, and for that the face had to be pretty — that was why he was talking of it.

"And so, every day, oil your hair, powder your face, put on stockings, and set yourself well in your master's good graces…"

For a while he was warming nicely to his theme, when there came a soft, even breathing from beside him; he turned his head and his wife had already fallen sound asleep.

"Wretched creature — falling over asleep while a body's talking to her."

The husband mumbled to himself, and lifting his right arm, brushed the hair on his wife's brow back over her temple. The most precious thing in the world — his own wife! That, calling himself a husband, he hadn't to this day put one decent set of clothes on her back and had only worked her into hardship — that wrong felt to him so great he could scarcely bear it in his chest. With his rough thick arm he caught his wife about the waist and drew her snug up against him.

The rain that had drummed on through the night ceased at last by morning, and by midday a lively sun even came out. The roar of running water sounded loud everywhere. From the brook, the shouts of children catching fish, and the lusty harvest songs of the farmers, came back full of spirit. The rain seemed to have washed Chunho's worries away too, and on him today there was a sign of cheer.

"Must be near the time for the afternoon meal at the labourers' shed — comb your hair quick and be off…"

In his impatience, he kept urging his wife on.

"There's still time."

"Time, my eye!"

The wife, as her husband bid, was already at her hair, but her hair, which hadn't been parted for a month or more, was a tangled mess and took good time. After her long while of feeling lately the rough side of her tiger of a husband, her face today carried a flush such as had not been seen in a long while.

At times she even slipped out a soft, secret little smile.

It was hard for him to bear watching the wife fumbling at it. The husband pulled the wide-toothed comb clean out of her hand and went sweeping it down her hair himself. When he'd done combing, dipping his palm into the bowl of water beside him, he kept smoothing the water over her hair until it lay glossy. After which, gathering the strands from above, he twisted her hair smartly into a married woman's chignon; and the straw sandals he had been at such pains to plait that morning he slipped onto her feet and pressed the rims down with his fist, working out the kinks.

"Off you go now —" he said, and then —

"Come straight back, won't you?" — the husband, that he might have those two won safe in hand without a hitch, without a slip, sent his wife off in her finest looks.