메밀꽃 필 무렵

A summer market is a hopeless thing from the outset, and though the sun still hung high in the sky the marketplace had already grown desolate, while the heated rays slipping in beneath the canopies of the open stalls scorched the men's spines. The villagers had nearly all gone home, and what was left of the woodcutters' lot was loitering about in the lanes, but no peddler in his right mind was going to sit there forever for the sake of fellows who'd buy a bottle of kerosene or a measly cut of meat and call it a day. The flies were unpleasant, swarming in their slovenly way, and the gnat-like brats too were a nuisance. Heo Saengwon — pock-marked and left-handed, of the drygoods stall — finally pulled at his fellow peddler Cho Seondal.

"Shall we pack it in?"

"Good thinking. I doubt I've ever once turned a fat profit at the Bongpyeong market. We'll have to make our killing tomorrow at Daehwa."

"Means we'll be walking through the night, then?"

"The moon will be up, won't it?"

Watching Cho Seondal jingle his coins as he counted the day's takings, Heo Saengwon set about pulling down the wide canopy from its post and gathering up the wares he'd laid out. The bolts of cotton and the bundle of silks filled the two wicker hampers right up. On the straw mat a clutter of fabric scraps was left behind. The other peddlers had also nearly finished folding up their stalls.

There were those nimble enough to be already moving on. The fishmonger, the tinker, the candy-seller, the ginger-seller — none of them were anywhere to be seen. Tomorrow the markets would open at Jinbu and Daehwa. Whichever way they were headed, the peddlers had to plod through the night for sixty or seventy ri. The marketplace was strewn about now like the back yard after a wedding feast, and a brawl had broken out at the wineshop. Mixed in with the cursing of the drunks, a woman's shrill voice ripped through the air. Market evenings always began, sure as the calendar, with a woman shouting.

"Saengwon, play dumb if you like — I know what's what… I'm talking about Chungju-jip."

As if the woman's voice had reminded him, Cho Seondal cracked a sidelong grin. "A flower in a picture, that one. With those young pups for rivals, what hope have you of a turn?"

"That mayn't be quite the case. The lot of them are weak in the knees over her, true enough — but even so, did you hear about Dong-i? It seems the rascal's slipped clean in with Chungju-jip, neat as you please."

"What, that whelp? Must've reeled her in with his goods, then. And here I'd taken him for a steady sort."

"Who can tell, on that score… No use brooding — let's go and see for ourselves. I'll stand the round."

He went along, though his heart was scarcely in it. Heo Saengwon had little to do with women. He had neither the cheek to set his pock-marked face before one, nor had any woman ever sent her affections his way; his had been a desolate, twisted half-life. The mere thought of Chungju-jip would set his face flushing in spite of himself, his feet trembling, and freeze him on the spot.

When he stepped through Chungju-jip's gate and ran smack into Dong-i at the drinking-table, in some fit of pique he found himself flaring up with fury. It was when he saw the lad lifting his red face above the table-top, carrying on with the woman as bold as you please, that he could no longer endure it. The fellow was a regular rake, and a sorry sight at that. A whelp not yet dry behind the ears, soused since broad daylight, fooling about with a woman. Going about disgracing the name of every itinerant peddler. And in such a state he means to throw in his lot with us. Squaring up in front of Dong-i, he laid into him.

When the boy, his face flushed, looked up at him plain as if to say what business is it of yours, Heo Saengwon couldn't help but slap him hard across the cheek in his temper. Dong-i, his color rising, sprang up sharply too, but Heo Saengwon, without yielding so much as an inch, ran on with everything he'd been meaning to say.

"I don't know what loose-end farm-boy you were picked up from, but you've got a father and mother somewhere, no doubt. They'd be proud to see this rough business. Trade's a thing to do properly — what's all this with women? Get out, take your sorry self and clear off."

Yet when the lad slunk off without so much as a word of answer, looking dispirited, Heo Saengwon felt rather sorry for him instead. We're still hardly acquainted, he thought; was that not too much? — and his heart misgave him. Out of all proportion, too: another customer at the same wineshop, and even granting his youth, what business had a man to lay hold of one near his own son's age and box him about, no less? Chungju-jip had her lips pursed, and her hand was rough at the wine pouring; but Cho Seondal smoothed it over by saying that's just the medicine these young ones need, and the matter passed.

"Smitten with the lad, are you? It's a sin to fawn over a whelp."

It was after a great deal of carrying-on. With his nerve up now, and somehow a wish in him to get good and drunk, Heo Saengwon downed nearly every cup that was poured. As his head grew heavy, his thoughts ran less and less to the woman and more and more, persistently, to what would become of Dong-i.

One side of him scolded his foolishness sharply: what was a wretch like me thinking, snatching a woman from another's hands — what did I mean to do with her? And so it was that some while later, when Dong-i came bursting in, breathless and frantic to fetch him, he flung the cup he'd been drinking from down where he stood, and stumbled witless out of Chungju-jip's after the boy.

"Saengwon, your donkey's snapped his rope and gone wild."

"It'll be the gnat-brats up to their tricks, sure as anything."

It was the beast that mattered, but it was the kindness of the lad that struck him in the chest. Trotting after Dong-i across the marketplace, he felt his bleary eyes turning hot.

"They're a wild lot, those boys — there's no telling what to do with them."

"Anyone who knocks a donkey about that way won't be let off easy, that's certain."

It was a beast that had been with him half his life. Sleeping at the same wayside inns, soaked in the same moonlight, walking from market to market, twenty years had aged man and beast together. The ragged tufts of mane on the back of its neck had gone brittle as its master's hair, and its watery eyes were as gummed with rheum as its master's own.

Its tail, worn down short as a stub of a broom, could be flicked at the flies for all it was worth and never reach so far as its legs. There was no telling how many times the worn-down hooves had been pared back and reshod with new iron. The hooves now were past growing any further, and from between the worn-out shoes blood was seeping. It knew its master by the smell alone. With a piteous, clamorous bray it greeted him, glad to see him.

When he stroked its neck the way one quiets a child, the donkey worked its nostrils and let its lips flap loose. Snot flew from its nose. The beast had given Heo Saengwon no end of grief in his time. The boys' tricks had clearly been bad: the sweat-soaked body was trembling all over, and the excitement seemed slow to subside. The bridle had come off, the saddle had slipped down. "You wretched brats," Heo Saengwon thundered, but the gang had already taken to its heels, and what few children remained, startled by the shout, edged off in a sidling shuffle.

"It wasn't us up to anything — he caught sight of a mare and worked himself into a frenzy all on his own."

A snot-nosed boy shouted from a safe distance.

"Listen to that one talk…"

"Once Kim Cheomji's donkey went off, he started kicking up the dirt and slobbering at the mouth, leaping about like a mad bull. The sight of him was so funny we just stood and watched. Take a look at his belly."

The boy crowed it out in a smirking pitch and broke out cackling. Heo Saengwon felt his face grow hot before he knew it. To shut out the staring eyes he had to plant himself in front of the beast's belly to screen it from view.

"Old as he is and still in heat. Look at the brute."

At the boy's laughter Heo Saengwon faltered, then at last unable to bear it any longer he snatched up his whip and went after the brat.

"Try to chase me, then. The left-hander's going to come at a fellow."

There was no catching a gnat-brat at full pelt. A left-hander couldn't lay hold of so much as one boy. He let the whip fall. The drink had come up in him too, and his body was burning, oddly hot.

"Let's get on then. Mixing it with that lot you'd never have done. The gnats of the marketplace are worse than any grown man, you know."

Cho Seondal and Dong-i each set the saddle on his own donkey and began loading the packs. The sun, it seemed, had got pretty far down.

Twenty years, he'd been a drygoods peddler going from market to market, and Heo Saengwon had rarely missed the Bongpyeong market. He went too to neighbouring counties like Chungju and Jecheon, and even, on occasion, wandered as far as Yeongnam, but apart from going up to Gangneung or thereabouts to lay in stock, he kept to the county from start to finish. On the market days that came round every fifth day, he crossed from township to township more dependably than the moon. He used to brag that his home was Cheongju, but it didn't seem he'd ever once gone back to look the place up.

The fine country between market and market was, just as it stood, the home he longed for. Half a day of trudging, and just as he'd come within reach of the village where the marketplace was, if his shaggy old donkey gave one full-throated bray — and all the more if it happened of an evening, when the lamplights were beginning to flicker in the dark — though it was a thing he met with always, Heo Saengwon's heart never failed to leap, time after time.

In his younger years he had earned diligently and even put a little money by, but one year, around the Baekjung festival in town, he played about lavishly and sat down at tujeon and lost the lot in three days. It came to the point of selling even the donkey, but his heart-tearing fondness for it made him grit his teeth and hold off from that one thing. In the end, back to square one, he had nothing for it but to start his peddler's rounds again.

When he led the beast out of town in flight, he stroked its back beside the road, weeping, and said how glad he was he hadn't sold it. Once he began running into debt, the notion of building up any sort of property was hopeless from the first, and he ended up going from market to market just to scrape enough together for his daily bowl of rice.

For all his lavish playing about, he'd never managed to win over so much as one woman. Women were cold things, and pitiless. The thought that he was a man with no luck in such matters, ever, made his lot seem the more wretched. Always close to him, near at hand, was nothing but the one donkey, unchanging. And yet, for all that, there was the one first time he could not forget. That single, strange chance such as had never come before nor since! It had happened in his younger days, when he'd just begun coming through Bongpyeong; but it was only when he thought of it that he felt his life had been worth the living.

"It was a moonlit night, but how it came to be I can't make out, even now."

Tonight too, Heo Saengwon was about to bring the story out again. Cho Seondal had heard it, since the start of their friendship, until his ears were sore with it. He couldn't well show himself sick of it, but Heo Saengwon, not letting on that he knew, would always tell it through to the end as often as he chose to tell it.

"On a moonlit night a story like that's the very thing."

Glancing toward Cho Seondal — not, of course, by way of apology, but moved by the moonlight.

Past full though it was, the moon, just turned a day or two from its roundness, was pouring down its soft light in a soaking flood. Daehwa was eighty ri of night-walking away — two hills to cross, a stream to ford, plains and mountain paths to walk. The moon now was hung low along the long flank of the ridge.

It must have been past midnight: in a stillness as of death, the moon's breathing, beast-like, could be heard as if one might lay a hand on it, and the bean-stalks and corn-leaves were soaked another shade greener under the moon. The whole hillside was buckwheat field, and the flowers, just beginning to open, lay there in the soaking moonlight as if salt had been scattered, until one could scarcely breathe. The red stalks rose plaintive as a scent, and even the donkeys' steps were easy.

The path being narrow, the three rode their donkeys in single file. The bell on the lead donkey rang out cheerfully, ding-a-ling, drifting toward the buckwheat field. The sound of Heo Saengwon's voice, telling at the head of the line, was not quite plain to Dong-i bringing up the rear; but he was easy enough in his own quiet good humor, and felt no want of company.

"This was on a night just like this, see. The mud-floor room of the inn was so close one couldn't get a wink of sleep. Round about midnight I got up alone and went out to the stream to bathe. Bongpyeong's the same now as it was then. Buckwheat fields wherever you looked, and along the streamside white blossoms everywhere. I could have stripped off on the gravelly bank, but the moon was so bright I went into a watermill to get out of my clothes. Strange the things that happen. Right there I came face to face — out of nowhere — with the daughter of Seong Seobang's house. Reckoned the prettiest girl in all of Bongpyeong, she was — must have been written in my fortune."

Cho Seondal answered with an "is that so" or two, and as if hoarding what came next, drew at his pipe a good while in silence. The fragrant purple smoke flowed out and melted into the night air.

"It wasn't me she'd been waiting for; nor was there any other lad she might have been waiting for, neither. The girl was crying. I'd guessed already — Seong Seobang's house was at its worst just then, on the brink of moving on; for all under one roof, how should the daughter not be in a fix herself? They'd have married her off if a good place had come up, but she said she'd sooner die than be married off…"

"Now is there any time a girl draws a man's heart so as when she's crying? She seemed startled at first, but trouble has a way of softening a body, I suppose, and one way and another we got to talking… Thinking on it now, it was a fearful, wonderful night."

"And it was the next day they slipped off, was it, somewhere round Jecheon?"

"By the next market-day the whole household had vanished. The marketplace was in an uproar over the news, and they were all of them clucking that the best the girl could hope for was being sold off to a wineshop. How many times d'you think I combed through the markets at Jecheon? But of the girl there wasn't a sign — like a hen's place after the bird's been roasted. The first night was the last. From that day till this, the love I have for Bongpyeong — could I forget it in half a lifetime?"

"You did well by it. Such a turn of luck doesn't come easy. As a rule, a man takes some plain creature, has children, frets the more — even thinking of it puts you off. But you won't tell me carrying on as a peddler into your old age is anything to be done lightly, will you? I'm minded to give up this trade as soon as autumn's in. I'll set up some little shop somewhere round Daehwa and call my family in. Trudging about year-round is no light matter."

"If I were to meet that old girl again, I might settle down with her — but as for me, I'll walk this road and look at that moon till I drop."

Out from the mountain track and onto the high road. Dong-i, who'd been at the rear, came up alongside, and the donkeys ranged abreast.

"You're a young one too, lad — these are your prime years. You stumbled at Chungju-jip and got into that fix, but don't take it too hard."

"D-don't say so. I'm ashamed, rather. As if women suit the likes of me just now. Waking or sleeping, it's nothing but my mother, in my head."

Sobered now by Heo Saengwon's tale, Dong-i had pitched his tone a notch lower.

"That talk of father and mother nearly broke my heart, but I haven't a father. The only blood I have is my mother, that's all."

"He's passed, then?"

"There never was one to begin with."

"There's no such thing in this world…"

When Saengwon and Seondal both broke out laughing in great hearty bursts, Dong-i had no choice but to put on a serious face and stand by his word.

"I was minded not to say it, out of shame, but it's the truth. Out in a Jecheon village, my mother bore a child before her time and was driven from the house. It's a comical tale, but that's the reason I've not so much as seen my father's face to this day, and I don't even know what village he's in."

A pass lying ahead, the three got down off their donkeys. The slope was rough, and opening the mouth on it was hard work, so the talk broke off for a while. The donkeys slipped at the slightest thing. Heo Saengwon, out of breath, had to stop and rest his legs more than once. Each time he climbed a pass, his years told on him. He envied young fellows like Dong-i past all measure. Sweat ran in a wash down his back.

Just past the crest was the stream. The plank bridge, washed out in the rains, hadn't yet been put back, so they had to take their clothes off and wade across. Stripping off his trousers and binding them to his back with the sash, half-naked in a comical figure, he plunged into the water. He'd just been sweating, but the night water bit to the bone.

"And who, then, brought you up?"

"My mother had no choice; she took up with a stepfather and started a wineshop. The man was steeped to the gills, a stepfather and a regular good-for-nothing. From the time I knew right from wrong I was getting the beating, and there wasn't a day I had any peace. My mother, when she'd try to stop him, was kicked, struck, and threatened with a knife, and what kind of household would that be? Eighteen years old when I broke away from home, and ever since it's been this trade."

"I'd taken you for a steady sort, young as you are; but to hear you out, that's a sad lot you've had."

The water was deep, up to the waist. The undertow was fairly strong too, and the stones underfoot were slippery enough to send a man over in a second. Cho Seondal and the donkeys were nearly across by then, but Dong-i, holding Heo Saengwon up, had fallen well behind with him.

"And was your mother's family from Jecheon, originally?"

"Hardly. She won't speak of it openly, but I've heard at least it was Bongpyeong."

"Bongpyeong. And the father's family name, then?"

"How should I know? I've never been told a word."

"Th-that'd be so." muttering to himself, Heo Saengwon, blinking at his blurring eyes, missed his footing in his agitation. Headlong he went, body and all, with a great splash. The more he thrashed the less he could right himself, and by the time Dong-i, shouting, came near him he had drifted a fair way along. Soaked to the skin, clothes and all, he was a more sorry sight than a wet dog. Dong-i was able to take him up easily on his back in the water. Wet though he was, his frame was thin enough to be light on the back of a strong young man.

"It oughtn't to have come to this. I must be out of my wits today."

"There's no need to fret over it."

"And so your mother has no notion of looking the father up?"

"She does say she'd like to meet him once."

"Where is she now?"

"She's parted from the stepfather and is in Jecheon. Come autumn I mean to bring her over to Bongpyeong. With teeth set and a will to earn, we can scrape by somehow."

"Aye, that's a kindly thought. Come autumn, you said?"

The dependable warmth of Dong-i's back went through to the bone. By the time he'd been carried across the water, he was visited with a sad sort of wish to be borne a little longer.

"Blundering all day long — what's got into you, Saengwon?"

Cho Seondal looked over and at last burst out laughing.

"It's the donkey. I lost my footing thinking of the donkey. Did I never tell you? That sorry beast, of all things, fathered a foal. On the dappled mare at the inn in town, you know. Ears pricked, dancing along on quick little hooves — was there ever anything as dear as a donkey foal? There are times I make a special turn into the town just to see it."

"And to drop a man into the water on top of it — a remarkable foal, indeed."

Heo Saengwon wrung out his wet clothes as best he could and put them back on. His teeth chattered, his chest was shaking, and the cold went through him cruelly; yet, somehow, his heart was floating, light and buoyant, beyond all telling.

"Let's hurry along to the wayside inn. Build a fire in the yard and warm ourselves. Boil up some hot water for the donkey, too. After tomorrow's market at Daehwa, on to Jecheon."

"Saengwon, you too — Jecheon?"

"It's been a long while; I've a mind to go. Come along, will you, Dong-i?"

When the donkeys started to move, Dong-i's whip was in his left hand. Heo Saengwon, whose eyes had long been dim as a night-blind man's, this once could not but notice that Dong-i was left-handed.

His step too was light, and the bell rang out the more clear and sweet across the night plain.

The moon had sunk a fair way down.