Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

left carrying bags and bedding.

The old man wept all the way, without shedding tears.

The little girl did not cry.

She stared down at the Soyang River below,

a river she would never see again.

At the end of June 1950

5th-year middle-school student Kim Myeong-gyu enlisted as a volunteer.

His regiment

kept retreating on the pretext of relocating.

While Dabuwon above Waegwan

was captured and recaptured dozens of times,

he survived.

How is it that he survived?

one of just nine survivors in his platoon?

His face was covered with pimples.

After Seoul was recaptured,

he came back home,

carrying his rifle.

His long-widowed mother

and his older brother Se-gyu

had been killed by the withdrawing communists.

The neighbours held a welcoming party for him.

He spent one day

at his mother’s grave

and his brother’s grave.

He even paid a visit to his father’s grave,

whom he had never seen.

Late that night, a shot rang out.

He had killed himself.

A couple of soju bottles lay beside him, toppled over.

Snow drove furiously down

onto the eight-year old.

Where are we?

Where are we?

Fields in a blizzard.

During the 4 January 1951 retreat,

behind a railway station near Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi province,

double-cropped barley fields were covered with snow.

Some eighty refugees wrapped in straw sacks

huddled on the ground in snowdrifts.

Among them

were Hyeong-mo, his father and mother,

with his two younger brothers.

How lucky they were to have survived together,

all the family.

How lucky they were, starving together and

eating together.

Toward nightfall, Hyeong-mo left to get firewood.

Boom!

A shell fell, fired in error.

The eighty went flying, vanished.

Hyeong-mo came rushing back.

Father,

mother,

brothers, gone.

Baek Seung-bok’s family, too,

who came south with them,

all the way from Jinnam-po, in South Pyeongan province.

Around the pit made by the shell

were a forearm,

a shoe,

a severed head,

a pair of glasses,

a corpse that was groaning then stopped groaning.

After that, Hyeong-mo, wrapped in a tattered blanket,

followed an orphan’s path, with no direction,

no north, south, east or west.

The blizzard stopped.

He shouted up at the frozen sky,

calling for mother, for father.

He called for his brothers, too,

Hyeong-jin!

Hyeong-ryeol!

In winter 1955 the whistles of Seoul-Busan trains could be heard faintly

in a remote village in Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province.

If there were train whistles to be heard,

the world was still the same world.

The hills were all bare together,

they would shiver at night.

Bare, the hills all looked the same,

no telling which was which.

Ocheon Mountain,

Mireuk Mountain,

Chotdae Peak,

the hill in front,

the hill behind Ssangbong village,

no telling which was which.

What the children drew were

always

bare, red hills,

hills of red clay.

Even the bellowing of oxen

was a red bellowing.

Over the ridge of one such hill, as the sun was setting,

a person was coming, slow and weary.

Who could it be?

Who other than a man

half insane,

half in his right mind?

Wife

and two children were killed

together by a mortar shell,

one ox was also killed.

He alone survived,

Yi Jong-su, a fellow with thick hair.

He had a high-pitched voice

like a wild goose.

Several millions died in the course of three years of war.

Among the dead

were Yi Jong-su’s family.

In the empty stable

all he could say was:

‘Hey Wife, hey Wife!’

and then

‘Jang-seop!

Cha-seon!

Cha-seop!’

Why do you know of nothing but your home village?

In Onjeong-ri, across from Daegwanbong village,

on the southern slopes of the Myeorak Mountain Range,

in Pyeongsan County, Hwanghae province,

out of forty-seven inhabitants

nine left with the People’s Army.

Onjeong-ri was a village with one mule,

five dogs,

and twenty-three rabbits.

Lots of mice, too.

Wild cats and badgers would appear by turns,

and a family of three wild boars used to come down

and trample the potato fields.

Sometimes a stately flock of ravens would alight.

When the mule neighed,

the chimneys that sent the suppertime smoke

soaring, soaring high

would listen to the mule’s neighing.

Fifteen-year-old Shin Hyeon-gu kept having mishaps.

He would get scratched bloody by holly leaves,

or hurt his hand while cutting wood.

He hoped one day to become a monk.

For that fifteen-year-old Shin Hyeon-gu,

the village he’d grown up in grew suffocating.

He was like a mule, like a baby wild boar,

that suddenly goes wild.

Luckily the war spared the village.

In his dreams, wings sprouted from his shoulders.

On a bitterly cold night

when ice nine centimetres thick was cracking,

hordes of Chinese volunteers

surged across the Yeseong River

after crossing the Yalu,

the Cheongcheon,

and the Daedong.

On that night Shin Hyeon-Gu

swam across the Yeseong River downstream from the ferry,

carrying two of his mother’s rings.

Her ancestor had been one of the leaders of the Donghak Uprising.

Air came through his nostrils, and water, too.

After fifteen minutes,

he reached Saemal on the other bank.

He pulled on the clothes he had rolled up and tied to his body.

They were clothes of ice.

When he turned around he seemed to hear his mother’s voice:

‘You alone at least

must live.

Off you go.

Off you go.’

Her words remained in his ears.

Mother!

He called out in the direction of the village he had left.

Decades of Armistice passed after he left home like that.

He was 63, had two sons, three daughters, and seven grandchildren.

One daughter was divorced, one not married.

In the darkness at the crack of dawn, those old rings,

at daybreak, those rings alone remaining from the past,

were the only strength left to him.

At heart he was always crossing rivers and going over mountains.

It was called a refugee camp

yet had not so much as an iron fence.

It was

simply a place, beyond Sut Pass,

where people put up second-hand tents

or built shacks with pieces of plywood,

to keep out the wind and rain.

We heard that Chinese troops would soon be coming

like a swarm of locusts.

We had to move again, from Songtan

to Jochiwon or to Daejeon.

Could be we might end up in Busan, the provisional capital.

Amidst all this confusion

Yu Byeong-cheol’s wife, from Sinanju in the North,

gave birth to a son.

Huddled in ragged quilted clothes, Yu Byeong-cheol

had it seems held on to a scrap of artistry.

He exclaimed with a laugh, ‘A migrant bird’s been born,’

and rejoiced, drinking a quart or more of cheap soju .

Over at last: the three months of the People’s Republic.