감자

Brawls, adultery, murder, theft, begging, prison time — before Bok-nyeo and her husband came to the slum outside Chilseongmun gate, the wellspring of every tragedy and every wild act this world knows, the two of them had been (ranking second among the four classes — scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant) farmers.

Bok-nyeo had been a girl raised in good order in a poor but honest farm-house. The strict discipline of the old scholar-class had, they said, gone the moment her family fell to farming; yet somehow, just how it was no one could say, a strain of being a touch sharper and a touch more rule-bound than the other farming households still lingered in her home. Brought up in the midst of it, Bok-nyeo had taken it as ordinary, like the other girls, to bathe naked in the stream in summer and to walk the village in nothing but her drawers; and yet, deep within her, vague though it was, she carried a sense of awe before that thing called morality.

In her fifteenth year she was sold off to a widower of the village for eighty won, and went to what is called marriage. The man who was her new husband — old man might be the better word — was a good twenty years her senior, and although in his father’s day his people had been respectable farmers with several majigi of land of their own, by his generation it had dwindled, plot by plot, until the eighty won that had bought Bok-nyeo was the last of his estate.

He was a man of the most extreme indolence. When the village elders, by their good offices, would arrange for him to take on a tenant patch, he would scatter the seed and after that not so much as drag a hoe across it nor pull a single weed, but leave the field to itself; and come autumn, gathering whatever was to be had, “It’s a lean year,” he would say, and not even take it round to the landlord but eat it up alone. So it was that he never once farmed the same plot two years running. After a few years of this he had so utterly lost the goodwill and credit of the village that no one would let him a field at all.

For some three or four years after Bok-nyeo came to him as a bride they got by, somehow, on her father-in-law’s charity; but in time even her father-in-law — that tail-end of the old scholar class — began to look on his son-in-law with no kindness. They lost their credit even at the wife’s family.

After much consultation, husband and wife went, at last, into the city of Pyongyang, looking for day-labour. But to a man as lazy as he was, even day-labour came to nothing. He would carry his A-frame all day to the Yeongwangjeong pavilion and do nothing but stare down at the Daedong river — what kind of day-labour was that? Three or four months of this, and by good luck they got themselves taken on as a back-room servant household at someone’s house.

But before long they were turned out of that house too. Bok-nyeo did the master’s work diligently enough, but there was no doing anything about her husband’s idleness. Every day, with knives in her eyes, she would chivvy him on; but there was no breaking him of his idleness.

“Move them rice-bales for me, will you.”

“I’m sleepy, you go and move them.”

“Am I to do it?”

“Twenty years you’ve been eating rice and you can’t shift a bale?”

“Aigoo, I’d as soon drop dead and be done.”

“You wretch — what?”

Such quarrels never ceased between them, and at last they were turned out of that house also.

Where now to go? They had no choice but to be pushed out into the slum quarter outside Chilseongmun gate.

The people gathered together as one settlement outside Chilseongmun lived chiefly by begging; their secondary trades were theft and the prostitution they kept among themselves, and beyond that, every dreadful and filthy crime this world knows. Bok-nyeo too set out at the chief trade.

But who would willingly give a bowl of rice to a married woman of nineteen, in the prime of her looks?

“What’s a young thing like you out begging for?”

Each time she heard such a word, she would put about all manner of excuses — that her husband was dying of illness, this and that — but the people of Pyongyang had been hardened to such tales and her excuses won her no sympathy. They were among the very poorest of all those outside Chilseongmun. Among the gathering, the well-earning ones came home with as much as a won and seventy or eighty jeon in cash, all in five-ri coins; and at the extreme there had been one who, going out to earn money by night, had come back with over four hundred won in a single night and started a tobacco-stall in the neighbourhood.

Bok-nyeo was nineteen. Her face was passable enough. If she had only followed what the women of the quarter ordinarily did and gone now and then to the houses of the better-earning men, she could have made fifty or sixty jeon a day; but she who had been raised in the house of a scholar-line could not bring herself to such a thing.

So husband and wife went on living poor as ever. Often they went hungry.

In the pinewoods at Kija’s tomb the caterpillars swarmed. At that time the Pyongyang prefecture, by way of (so it was put) showing favour, took on the women of the slum quarter outside Chilseongmun as labourers to gather the caterpillars.

Every woman of the slum quarter applied. But only some fifty were chosen. Bok-nyeo was among the chosen.

Bok-nyeo gathered caterpillars with a will. Setting up a ladder against a pine, she would climb it, pick the caterpillars off with tongs and drop them into the can of insecticide; that and so on, and her can would be full in no time. Thirty-two jeon a day in wages came into her hand.

But within five or six days she came across a strange thing. It was nothing else but this: about ten of the young women labourers were always not gathering caterpillars at all, but standing about below, chattering and laughing and frisking. And not only that — the wages paid to those women at play were eight jeon a day more than what was paid to those who worked.

There was only one overseer, and the overseer not only let their idling pass without a word, but at times would even mix in among them and play with them himself.

One day she was at the caterpillars when the noon hour came round; she got down from the tree, ate her midday meal, and was about to climb up again when the overseer called her —

“Bok-nyeo! Hey, Bok-nyeo!”

“What’s it now?”

She set down the can and the tongs and turned around.

“Come here a minute.”

She went up to the overseer without a word.

“Hey, you, ah… let’s go round there a bit.”

“What for?”

“Just — when we get there…”

“All right then. — Auntie.”

Turning back, she shouted toward the labourers gathered together.

“Auntie, you come along too.”

“Not me, child. The two of you go off and have your fun — what’d I get out of it?”

Her face going crimson, Bok-nyeo turned back to the overseer.

“Let’s go, then.”

The overseer set off the other way. Bok-nyeo followed him with her head bent.

“Lucky girl, our Bok-nyeo.”

From behind, this jeering reached her ears. Bok-nyeo’s downcast face went redder still.

From that day Bok-nyeo too became one of “the labourers who don’t work and draw the higher wages.”

Bok-nyeo’s view of morality, indeed her view of life itself, changed from then on.

Up till then she had never once thought of going with another man. That, she had taken for something not human, but rather what beasts did. Or — perhaps if a person did such a thing, she had imagined, they would simply drop dead on the spot.

But where else would such a strange thing be found? Seeing that she, who was human, had done that very thing, it was hardly a thing a person could not do. And on top of that, no work and yet better pay, a keyed-up sort of pleasure, more dignified than begging… in the Japanese phrase, a real “san-byōshi” of a thing — there was nothing else like it. Could this not be the very secret of life? And not only that — from after this thing happened, she gained, for the first time, a confidence such as if she had become a person at last.

From then on she would put a touch of powder on her face now and again.

A year went by.

Her secret of getting on in the world advanced ever more smoothly. Husband and wife now no longer lived in such want.

Her husband, as if to say after all this was a fine thing, lay sprawled on the warm spot of the floor, grinning loosely.

Bok-nyeo’s face had grown the prettier.

“Hey there, uncle. How much did you make today?”

When Bok-nyeo caught sight of any beggar who looked to have made a good day’s haul, this was how she would call out to him.

“Today I didn’t make much.”

“How much?”

“All told, thirteen or fourteen nyang.”

“That’s a fine haul. Lend me five nyang or so, won’t you.”

“Today, I —”

If he tried to put her off with this and that, Bok-nyeo would dart over and hang on his arm.

“Once you’re caught by me, you’d best lend up.”

“Aigoo, when I bump into you, auntie, I’m in for it. All right, I’ll lend it — but in return, eh? You know how it is?”

“I don’t know about that. Hee, hee, hee, hee.”

“If you don’t know, I won’t give it.”

“Now look — even when I do know, you go on like that.”

— Such was the progress her character had made.

Autumn came.

In autumn the women of the slum quarter outside Chilseongmun would take baskets and go by night to the Chinese kitchen-gardens outside Chilseongmun to steal potatoes (sweet potatoes) and cabbages. Bok-nyeo too made off with potatoes by the basketful.

It was on a certain night. She had got herself a fine basketful of sweet potatoes, and was just standing up to start home, when behind her a black shadow came up and seized her fast. Looking, she saw it was Wang Seobang the Chinese, the master of the field. Bok-nyeo could not speak; she only stood blinking and looking down at her own feet.

“Come along to my house.”

Wang Seobang spoke thus.

“If you say go, I go. Hmph, what’s so hard about that.”

Bok-nyeo gave her hips a quick swing, threw back her head, and swinging her basket, followed Wang Seobang.

An hour or so later she came out of Wang Seobang’s house. As she was about to step from the field-furrow into the road, all at once someone behind her called her.

“That’s not Bok-nyeo, is it?”

Bok-nyeo turned sharply round to look. There was a woman from the house next to hers, basket on her arm, groping her way out along the dark furrow.

“Sister, is that you? You been in there too?”

“You been in too, then?”

“Sister, whose house?”

“Me? Yuk Seobang’s house. And you?”

“Me, Wang Seobang’s… Sister, how much did you get?”

“That stingy fellow Yuk Seobang, three head of cabbage…”

“I got three won.”

Bok-nyeo answered as if proud.

Ten minutes or so later she was at home with her husband, having laid the three won out before him, and was telling, with laughter, the story of Wang Seobang.

From then on Wang Seobang took to coming round to Bok-nyeo’s at every turn.

When Wang Seobang sat there for a while just blinking his eyes, Bok-nyeo’s husband would catch on and step outside. After Wang Seobang had gone, husband and wife would lay a one-won note, or two, between them and rejoice.

Bok-nyeo little by little gave up selling her smiles to the beggars of the quarter. When Wang Seobang was busy and could not come, Bok-nyeo would even go off, of her own accord, to Wang Seobang’s house.

Bok-nyeo’s couple were now one of the rich families of this slum quarter.

That winter too went by, and spring came.

It was then that Wang Seobang, with a hundred won in cash, came to buy a girl for his wife.

“Hmph!”

Bok-nyeo only gave a snort.

“Bok-nyeo, you’re going to be jealous now.”

When the women of the quarter said such things, Bok-nyeo would give a “hmph” and snort it off.

Me, jealous? — she would deny it forcefully every time. And yet there was no doing anything about the dark shadow that was rising in her heart.

“You, Wang Seobang. Just you wait and see.”

The day Wang Seobang was to bring his bride drew near. Wang Seobang cut the long braid he had so prided himself on. At the same time the rumour spread that this had been the new bride’s wish.

“Hmph!”

Bok-nyeo, again, only snorted.

At last the day came when the bride was to arrive. Decked out in her seven-jewel finery and borne in a four-bearer palanquin, the bride arrived at Wang Seobang’s house, set in the middle of the kitchen-garden outside Chilseongmun.

Late into the night, the Chinese gathered at Wang Seobang’s house, plucking strange instruments and singing strange tunes and carrying on with great noise. Bok-nyeo, hidden at the corner of the house, stood there with murder in her eyes, listening to the doings inside the room.

When she saw the other Chinese leave at about two in the morning, Bok-nyeo went into Wang Seobang’s house. On Bok-nyeo’s face the white powder lay thick.

The bridegroom and bride looked up, startled. Glaring at them with terrible eyes, she went over to Wang Seobang and hung on his arm. From her mouth a strange laughter came welling out.

“Come now, come along to my house.”

Wang Seobang could not get a word out. His eyes only rolled about uselessly. Bok-nyeo shook Wang Seobang again —

“Come, hurry.”

“We — tonight got business, can’t go.”

“What thing in the middle of the night?”

“Even so, our thing…”

The strange laughter that until then had been playing about Bok-nyeo’s mouth all at once was gone.

“Such a paltry thing as that.”

She raised her foot and kicked the head of the bride in her finery.

“Come on now, let’s go, let’s go.”

Wang Seobang shook all over. Wang Seobang flung Bok-nyeo’s hand off him.

Bok-nyeo fell. But at once she was up again. When she stood up again, in her hand was a sickle, glittering and sharp.

“You Chinese dog, die. You wretch, you struck me! You wretch — aigoo, somebody’s killing me!”

She gave herself over to weeping out loud, swinging the sickle. In Wang Seobang’s house — the house that stood alone in the middle of the field outside Chilseongmun — there broke out one act of furious violence. But the act too soon went still. The sickle that had been in Bok-nyeo’s hand had passed at some moment into Wang Seobang’s, and Bok-nyeo, with the blood pouring from her throat, had fallen in a heap on the spot.

Bok-nyeo’s body lay three days and could not get to a grave. Wang Seobang several times went to call on Bok-nyeo’s husband. Bok-nyeo’s husband too went, now and then, to call on Wang Seobang. Between the two there was some manner of business going on. Three days passed.

In the dead of night Bok-nyeo’s body was carried from Wang Seobang’s house to her husband’s. And around the body three men sat down. One was Bok-nyeo’s husband, one was Wang Seobang, and one was a certain herbal-medicine doctor — Wang Seobang, without a word, drew out his money-pouch and gave three ten-won notes to Bok-nyeo’s husband. Into the herbal-medicine doctor’s hand also went two ten-won notes.

The next day, on the certificate of the herbal-medicine doctor that Bok-nyeo had died of cerebral hemorrhage, she was carried out to the common burying-ground.