Pearl Buck - The Living Reed

“Father!” Yul-chun exclaimed. “Do you say nothing?”

“What is there to say?” Il-han replied. He lay back and drew hard on the pipe and two streams of smoke came from his nostrils.

“Then I must go into the city,” Yul-chun exclaimed, more than a little angry with his old father. “I must get in touch again with the underground—”

“Calm yourself,” Il-han told him. “You will only get yourself killed. Do you think the Japanese are not watching for you? They are waiting to see what you will do.”

“Why do you say this?”

“Because they know everything, and nothing you can do now will save us. Pretend you are ill. Go to bed. Declare that you have a fever. I will tell everyone you are not expected to live. We must wait. Then when the Japanese surrender we must all be ready to seize the power.”

“But if the Russian troops—”

“There will be a brief moment, a few hours between the surrender and the arrival. Let us hope there will be the brief moment — the few hours—”

They were interrupted by Sasha bursting through the gate. His eyes were wide, his whole face exploding with what he had to tell, too impetuous for greeting his elders.

“A new bomb, a new bomb has fallen! The whole sky lit in Japan — a city burst into flames. This morning — it was early morning, just as schools were opening and men going to business—”

It was at this moment that Liang reached home and, following upon Sasha, heard what was said. “The military will not surrender, even though the Emperor wishes it,” he exclaimed.

Sasha gave a loud laugh. “They will see another bomb! Another bomb will fall!”

They were startled by his laughter, they looked at him and at one another, and none spoke. No one, not even his father, knew Sasha well enough to reprove him for such laughter, yet all were frightened by it.

Il-han spoke. “Russia will now declare war on Japan.”

“Let that war be declared,” Sasha said joyously. “What the Americans have begun the Russians will finish!” He laughed again, that loud cruel laughter, and the other three hearing it, could only be silent as he went into the house.

“How did Sasha know of the bombs before any of us?”

They looked at one another and none could answer.

… Two days later Russia declared war on Japan. The news leaked out. Everyone knew and no one talked. Still Japan did not surrender. Russia moved her troops into Manchuria, and still Japan did not surrender. On the third day the second bomb fell on the city of Nagasaki. How many bombs did the Americans have? On the fourth day Japan sent an offer of surrender, stipulating only that the Emperor be left upon his throne.

These blows fell, and the men in the house of the Kim — Il-han, his son and his two grandsons — prepared themselves. The orders from the secret Korean government were that all must wait for the coming of the Americans. Until then there must be no move from Koreans, no reprisals against the Japanese, no sign of rebellion. Let all wait quietly in their houses. Their hope must be in the Americans.

In obedience Liang did not go to the hospital and Sasha stayed, too.

“When will they come?” Yul-chun groaned.

He was the restless one. Il-han was calm with the deep philosophic calm of the old. He watched Yul-chun with something like amusement one day as that one walked from house to garden and garden to house, unable to sit or to read or even to put his hand to a useful task when Sunia suggested the mending of the roof where a few tiles had fallen in a windstorm a few days before.

“You should write a book,” Il-han said. He sat on a bench in a corner of the garden to catch the noon sun.

“A book?” Yul-chun repeated.

Il-han knocked the ash from the small brass bowl of his bamboo pipe.

“I wrote a book.”

Yul-chun paused before him. “When?”

“Years ago when I was restless like you. The Japanese had come, and I was a prisoner here, as you are now, and I wrote a book in which I put down every evil act of the invaders. Thus I made history and thus I vented my fury.”

Yul-chun was astounded and diverted. “Let me see this book, Father,” he said.

“Follow me,” Il-han said.

He rose and went into the house, Yul-chun following, and opening a chest of polished wood bound in brass, he lifted from it a thick manuscript wrapped in silken cloth.

Yul-chun received it in both hands. “What labor!” he said. “Am I to read it?”

“As you will,” Il-han replied. “There are good bits in it,” he went on. “You will even find yourself in it. I wrote down faithfully all about your trial, to the last detail of how you looked.”

“You shame me,” Yul-chun muttered.

He did sit down then, as his father returned to the garden and filled his pipe again, and forgot his restlessness as he read the careful polished sentences in which the elder had reported every evil of the times, murder and massacre and assassination, rape and looting and arson, chicanery and deceit. He read day and night until the book was finished, and he had given it back to his father.

Then his restlessness fell on him with double weight, for he knew beyond doubt that all his father had written was true. When would his people be delivered? He began to doubt the Americans, although Il-han remained calm and the two young men were confident, Liang because he trusted the Americans, Sasha — who knew anything about Sasha?

Only Yul-chun, the one between, could neither be calm nor confident. Hope and fear stirred him in equal measure and made him restless day and night, while the slow formal steps were taken between governments, the victor and the vanquished. Meanwhile the Russian soldiers were indeed already pouring into the north. It was no longer the secret of fruit vendors. Six days before the final surrender they had come on foot through Siberia and by sea from Manchuria. The people were too dazed to protest or to move. Only the few had heard that Russia would share in the booty of war, and now like hares before hounds, they stood stricken and silent as the rough soldiery crowded the country roads and villages and swarmed into the cities.

“Where will it end?” Yul-chun demanded. “Will they cover the whole country before the Americans come?”

But they were not to cover the country. Someone, some American officer, somewhere, who knew where, drew a line across a map. The Russians were to stop, the people were told, at the 38th parallel. Where was the 38th parallel? Some remembered that the Russians and Japanese had talked of dividing Korea there. In sickening foreboding men and women studied maps in old schoolbooks their children had once used, to discover whether their homes were to be under Communist rule. If the answer was yes, they gave themselves up to despair and many killed themselves. If the answer was no, they prayed for the Americans to come quickly. Where were the Americans?

“They are asleep,” Sasha declared with laughter.

“They will come,” Liang said steadily.

They did not come.

Yet more days passed, one after another while the people waited in agony, and the Americans did not come. What if the wild Soviet soldiers swarmed even over the boundary that had been set for them? Already there were stories of pillage and robbery and rape. In the grass roof house Liang cleaned and loaded two old rifles he had bought in the city. There were no young women here and for that let all be thankful, but it was well to be ready. How thankful, too, that Mariko was now safely in Paris! He had followed, through newspaper reports, her path of glory.

“Something entirely new from Asia, yet something we can understand. The tincture of her Western ancestry—”

Only Sasha was scornful. “I know the Russian soldiers,” he said. “They are bold and they are young like me, most of them, but they are not worse than other soldiers. If they come I will speak Russian to them and they will not harm us.”