Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

The next day after this meeting the general sent for him. He stood before the desk and saluted smartly.

The general threw an order over his shoulder while he sorted papers. “A senator on a fact-finding trip arrives day after tomorrow. As if we didn’t have enough to do with meetings now every few days with these damned Reds! My wife called me to send you to our quarters today—she needs some sort of help about something—better go over there for an hour or so and see what it is she wants.”

“I will, sir,” he said.

When he reached the general’s bungalow, however, there seemed little for him to do and, vaguely uneasy, he left as soon as he could.

The next day the general invited him to a dinner party being given for the senator and he attended, feeling he must accept an invitation from the general. The night after the dinner party he wrote:

“Am I imagining this nonsense? I swear I am not. The general’s wife put me at her left at the dining table tonight. The senator, a lanky fellow from some western state, sat at her right. She said to me, laughing when I hesitated to sit down, ‘I’m putting you where you’ll be handy in case I need something.’ So I sat down. The table was crowded and her left knee touched my right knee under the table. I moved immediately, but in a few minutes I felt her foot pressing between my feet, her leg against mine. I could not believe it. I moved again, and again she moved against me. And all the time she was chattering to the senator. But as I moved she turned her head toward me and gave me a coy little smile and pressed her foot further between my feet, her leg almost over my knee. I moved my chair and was out of reach. She did not speak to me again. It’s nothing, but I don’t like it.”

The next morning he was on duty in the general’s office. When he entered, the general gave him a frosty look. He saluted and stood at attention, awaiting orders as usual.

“At ease,” the general said.

He dropped his hand and stood waiting.

“Sit down,” the general said.

He sat down, surprised.

“I’ll be frank with you,” the general said abruptly. “I like you. I’ve counted on you. You’re old for your age. You’re officer material. Have you ever thought of a military career?”

“No sir,” he said.

“Well, think of it, because I’m going to kick you upstairs, Colfax. I’m going to see that you get promoted.”

“I’m quite happy as I am, sir,” he said.

“I’m going to promote you anyway,” the general insisted.

He was a kindly man, his blue eyes friendly under his graying hair, a handsome man, his face, the features clean-cut, was kind yet somehow sad in unsmiling firmness. He went on speaking, leaning back in his chair, his left hand playing with a silver paper knife, its handle studded with Korean topaz.

“I have to move you out on my wife’s demand, but I’ll move you up, at least.”

Rann was astounded. “But what have I done, sir?”

The general shrugged. “I understand, of course—you young men are here for months on end and nothing but these Korean girls around—you are men, after all—” The general paused, flushing slightly, and pressed his lips together. The silver paper knife slipped from his fingers, and he took it up again and gripped it in his right hand.

“But I still don’t understand,” he said, bewildered.

The general put down the paper knife. “Bluntly, Colfax, my wife told me that last night you made obscene gestures to her under the table during dinner.”

“I? Obscene—” He broke off, the blood rushing to his head.

“Don’t apologize—or even explain,” the general said. “She’s still a pretty woman.”

Silence fell between them, intolerable silence. He could not endure it.

“Be silent,” the general commanded. “You will get your orders tomorrow.”

“Yes sir.”

The next day, as the general had told him, Rann received his orders. He was distressed that he had been unable to argue the accusation made by the general’s wife, but to argue with a superior would have been to lose, and perhaps it was best to take his orders and let matters rest. He had been promoted and transferred to Ascom, a base southwest of Seoul, and was put in charge of the supply station there. It was the main supply station for the American military forces in South Korea and his position was responsible and detailed enough that it kept him busy for a few weeks until he discovered all that was expected of him. Then he found he had even more time than before for pursuing his own unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

He began to speak Korean, a strange guttural language, unlike anything he had ever heard or spoken before, unlike even the little Chinese he had learned from Stephanie. He asked questions of all Koreans he came in contact with during his daily work, and read books on Korean history long into each night. He began to realize how little Americans knew of these strange people in their geographically strategic country and how, unknowing, his own people had seriously affected their history, indeed were affecting it now, with the American military in South Korea and the truce, American-imposed, at the 38th parallel. He had watched the UN group, including American and South Korean delegates, at the peace talks as they read long lists of infractions of the truce agreement at the meetings there, and had watched the North Korean delegates and their Chinese advisors completely ignore all that was said. Indeed, more than once he had seen these enemy delegates, with their haughty bearing, sit and read comic books throughout the entire proceedings.

In his job in supply he became aware, also, of the well-organized black-market operations, with some Americans getting rich passing out supplies to Koreans to sell on the black market long before the supplies could reach his own warehouses. Rann saw all of this and much more. He saw the American men, many of them officers, involved with Korean girls and he saw the inevitable children who were born. Beautiful children, half-American, and yet doomed to live on the lowest level of Korean society because of their racial mixture. He had never heard of any of this before he came to Korea though he had read the daily newspapers and all of the newsmagazines.

Months passed and yet Rann could not learn enough of Korea, and while he wrote something each night, in the form of a diary, he still felt he had not exhausted the wealth of knowledge he gathered. Then a strange phenomenon began to take place in Rann’s fertile imagination—at least, strange for him as it had never happened to him before. From all of the Koreans he knew, a man well known to him, a composite, came to Rann in his imagination. He was no one person, actually, and yet he was all Koreans and all of Korea was his background. He began to speak to Rann and he told Rann the story of his life. He was a very old man, his life beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through the Japanese occupation of Korea, World War II, and the Korean War. He told of the four sons he had, two of them killed in the war, one of them now in the government, and the other, the youngest one, deeply involved in the black market.

Soon after the old man began to speak in his imagination, Rann carefully wrote down everything he said. He reported every conversation exactly as he heard it, each detail in the long life of the old Korean. Page after page he wrote, night after night, until he saw in his imagination the old man as he lay dying, his two sons standing by his bed, and Rann wrote what he saw and heard. After this night the old man never came upon his imagination again, and Rann felt somehow satisfied in his knowledge of Korea, his thirst quenched for the first time in his life that he could remember. He bundled the pages carefully and mailed them to his mother, thinking that in this way she could share some of his life here. He had not written to her often while he was writing these pages, and perhaps she would be less concerned when she saw all he had learned.