Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

she left her remote village,

left her home town

shouting, Long Live Korea! Manse!

She was determined to live for the independence of her country

She worked in the kitchen for the Independence Army

in western Manchuria

across the Yalu River.

She quit the kitchen,

made a plan secretly to assassinate the Japanese governor-general.

She failed.

She went to Jillin in Manchuria and continued to work for the Independence Movement.

She planned to rescue General Kim Dong-sam

while he was being transported after being arrested in 1931.

She failed.

In 1932 she cut off two fingers

and wrote an independence petition

in her blood,

addressed to the League of Nation’s fact-finding commission.

Attempting to murder the Japanese ambassador in Manchuria, she was arrested

then tortured severely.

She died in Harbin in 1933.

She was buried in one of the White Russian cemeteries.

No one knows where her child lived or died.

At dawn on 28 June 1950,

the bridge across the Han River was blown up.

That ear-splitting boom!

Pandemonium.

Silence.

Screams. Groans.

About a thousand

of the Seoul citizens who fled hastily over the bridge

after the war began

died in the explosion.

Among them

a man who lost one arm

grabbed a drifting box with the other hand

and held on to reach the bank at Noryangjin.

He survived,

became One-armed Park, gang-leader of Nampo-dong, Busan,

in 1951, while Busan was the provisional capital.

‘Those goddamn bastards escaped first.

After they made broadcast announcements

telling the people of Seoul to stay and not worry,

those goddamn bastards themselves escaped.

The goddamn President,

those goddamn ministers.

‘Goddamn military, goddamn whoever.

What?

They were serving the nation?

They called themselves the nation’s bulwark?’

One-armed Park spouted abuse as he snuffed the lighter.

The cigarette smoke drifted off. Goddamn!

Truly his home was poverty itself.

This five-year-old

had moved his lips for half a day.

Does he have a sweet

in his mouth?

Is a sweet melting

in his mouth?

‘Say “Ah.”

You little rascal, what’re you eating?’

He opened his mouth, ‘Ah.’

On his little tongue

was a pebble.

He was hungry and wanted something to eat,

so he’d picked up a stone,

put it in his mouth

and was moving it around.

At sunset, as goose-flesh spread wide,

a wind came down from the hills.

After the three months of the People’s Republic,

everything in Seoul was destroyed.

Empty houses and

the houses of those who hadn’t left yet,

all of them,

on every rainy day,

echoed with the endless sound of raindrops falling from the eaves.

Those who collaborated during the occupation numbered 400,000.

Sentenced to death,

imprisoned for life,

30 years’ hard labour,

15 years,

5 years.

People were arrested after anonymous tipoffs,

rounded up on false accusations.

Ancient enemies

were denounced on concocted charges of being reds.

Kim Cheong-nang in Seodaemun Prison,

sentenced to life in prison,

had a black wart between his two eyebrows

that made him look most solemn.

All he had done was attend one rally

organised by the city communists during the occupation.

He was indicted as the vile instigator of a rally

thanks to the scheming of Yun Min-u, who owed him money.

Tortured, he was dying

of malnutrition,

of depression.

Finally, he died of a stroke

after he’d served only two years of his life sentence.

No one came forward to claim his body.

He was buried on the slopes of Mount Geomdan, Gyeonggi province

in the cemetery for prisoners with no known relatives.

The more remote a village was,

the more the people there used the lunar calendar.

People’s birthdays were lunar dates,

ancestral rites were lunar, too.

The year’s farming was done by lunar dates:

when to plant barley,

when to plant buckwheat,

when to plant rice

in terraced paddy fields.

In people’s memories

every day was a lunar date.

He spoke with a running nose.

His breath

spilled out and dispersed in clouds of steam.

So, on the twelfth day of the sixth lunar month

the People’s Army

passed through this mountain village

Someone said they were from the North’s Fourth Division.

They reached the hills of Geochang in the north

via Hamyang from Namwon.

Soldiers who looked very young

were carrying submachine guns the wrong way up.

There was no doubt we were in trouble.

Thinking I should escape somewhere

I took the ox from the stable

and went to my in-laws’ home in Sancheong.

The Communist army passed through there, too.

I took the ox and came back home.

I swept away the cobwebs,

warmed the room,

dried out the green mildew.

While I was living like that

someone came down from the hills and took me with him.

I carried food up and down mountains until I was caught.

I was sentenced to twenty-five years.

My knee got broken in jail, my teeth fell out.

I tossed the fallen teeth through the bars.

Sometimes I cried.

I was a commie.

I was no commie.

One day I met my kid’s schoolteacher

and bought him a drink

in the tavern at the junction.

As we were drinking a measure of makgeolli , then another half-measure,

the school teacher

praised my kid saying

his grades were so-so

but he was good at stopping kids fighting.

Then, pinching the wrinkles between his eyebrows,

Mr Kim said:

‘In future,

the time will come when everyone lives equally well.

The land will not belong to landowners

but to all who farm it.’

I lost all taste for liquor and opened my eyes wide.

Inside the tavern

there was an old woman

and two other drinkers.

A few days later I heard

that a plainclothesman was coming to arrest me.

The village head shook his head:

Strange,

strange.

You’re no commie.

I was scared.

I escaped to my wife’s home several miles away,

then moved to another house.

I kept moving around,

as I hated being a burden to other people.

Then a man told me he was on his way up into the mountains,

so I followed him.

I was no commie.

Then, eventually,

I became a commie.

From Jiri Mountain I used to look toward home,

longing to go back down.

Longing to go back down.

When I was six,

my maternal uncle

set me behind him on his bicycle

and sped along the new road with poplars on both sides.

That uncle

was my ideal.

Uncle was a university student in Japan.

Uncle passed the higher civil-service exam.

Everyone in the village came to the congratulatory party

at my mother’s parents’ house.

But my uncle rejected official positions,

went roaming

all the way to Seoul,

to Buan,

to Daegu.

He was arrested at Suwon Station in 1943.