The Calligrapher's Daughter (46 page)

I shook my head.

“Then let’s go on.”

The mention of food brought the memory of the rice bowl scriptures, and I told her about the interrogations and Major Yoshida’s odd study of Christianity.

“Truly you were Jesus’s messenger, protected by his watchful angels,”
said Mother. When she delivered fervent thanks to heaven for my safekeeping, the relief in her tone made me see that I’d forgotten others would’ve been concerned about my safety and chastity, and because this idea felt strange, I understood that I was changed even if my body was unharmed. I said nothing to my mother about the nights, which I knew would stay with me like the itch of prison filth, pervasive and unreachable.

As we walked in the cold, I gazed a long time at a small crack in the clouds that exposed a pale strip of sky. I thought then that her steps seemed heavy beside me and felt a terrible remorse. “Umma-nim, you came so far every day.”

“You are my daughter.”

I held on to these words and let them sink slowly into the fog of my heart. I knew instinctively if I heard them wholly, they would pierce with the incomprehensible truth of too much love, too quickly received, and the gratitude given could never be enough.

We passed the snowcapped walls of other family estates on the narrow walkway next to gutters blanketed with clean whiteness, under which I knew was rank trash and frozen sewage. I listened steadily to the freedom of our cold footsteps shuffling in the snow.

We walked up the hill together in silence. The familiar columns of our home gate and the pleasing curve of the tile-roofed archway I’d passed beneath so many times gave me stabs of joy. Dongsaeng, Unsook and all the servants cried out to see me. I heard something splinter in Father’s study. Joong rushed in and out to say that Father, hearing us, had accidentally shattered a carpentry project. Byungjo let his tears fall shamelessly while Cook squatted and sobbed into her apron. Kira and Unsook reached out to me, but I warned them not to touch my infested clothes. I noticed the furnace chimneys smoking, the shuttered windows, the house sealed like a package. I had missed much of the winter season. How tiny everything looked, and how beautiful and precise. I was overcome with this blessing—to have all this familiar to me, to know it as home, to feel the mortar of blood and ancestry holding firm its walls. And it had been returned to me. I praised God then and thanked him for this in my life, this joy of belonging, this ability to recognize it.

Mother helped peel my clothes off in our rooms while Cook, Kira and
Unsook stoked both stoves to boil vats of water for an immersion bath and to make a medicinal soup: dried antler to strengthen the blood, simmered with ginseng to restore strength. Once again I became her child as Mother helped me bathe, spent hours on my hair and scalp, dressed me, urged me to eat and coddled me in blankets until, at last, I felt warm. Along with warmth came the weight of an exhaustion I hadn’t known I had, and I slept.

Evening approached, bleak and still. Mother lit a lamp, stoked the brazier and prayed quietly, steadily. Her voice rose and fell in and out of my consciousness. I heard fragments of modulating scripture and prayer, but my mother’s breaths between verses and her passionate tone restored me far more than if I’d been fully awake and able to comprehend the words.

Unsook brought steaming bowls, but I couldn’t eat and returned to the silent womb of dreamless sleep. When I next awoke, Mother still sat nearby, her table spread for letter writing, her tranquil profile outlined in lamplight. “You’re awake,” she said. “It’s evening. You should sleep until morning.”

I sat up and rubbed my head, appreciating her earlier thorough combing that had at last rid my scalp of nits. “I’m rested, Umma-nim. I’m grateful—” My voice broke and I wept while Mother held my hand and murmured, “Praise God, praise God.”

When my tears were finished I sat silently for some time staring at the coals in the brazier, feeling its heat on my face. I folded the bedding and said, “I’ll go and see Father.”

“Daughter, you should know— Najin-ah, there is bad news.”

I saw my father being struck by the rifle and waited to hear more. I remembered on nights of torture the visions I’d had of my father being hung by his thumbs, his lax body bloodied and broken, and when he finally came home, his deadened eyes. A cold gust rattled the windows. I shivered.

“We will move to Seoul in twenty days.”

I didn’t understand and looked at her.

“They came last night, waved papers at Dongsaeng. The government is taking this land, this house for officers’ quarters—Major Yoshida and his cadre.”

I saw the pain in my mother’s eyes and slowly understood that all I’d known of my childhood, my family’s entire world, was obliterated with this news. “Umma-nim,” I gasped.

“Yes, it’s true.” She spoke with a firmness I’d never heard before. “Father went to see Watanabe-san. He asked him how this could happen, after years of generous and regular gratuities. That man said he never claimed influence with the Japanese military. They give us twenty days to vacate. Father has yet to finalize his decision, but it’s likely that we’ll go to Seoul to live with Imo. Dongsaeng suggested trying to locate Father’s brother in Manchuria, but your father, rightly so I believe, refuses to leave the country. Besides, there isn’t enough time to learn where he might be, or even if he is alive. There is war now. We must trust God.”

I was overcome with the news, and through my exhaustion felt a hard kernel of unbearable remorse beginning to form.

“There is much to do. Your father is beginning to fall ill from the upset. We have to sell what we can and let the servants go.” My mother stopped to let me grasp this. “Your father is growing ill,” she repeated.

I looked blindly at the fire. “It’s my fault.”

“Najin-ah, there is no blame. Blaming is pointless. God’s will is not comprehensible at times. We are given the greater gift of faith.”

The words passed through me like a splinter, a meaningless prick in the heart of a terrible wound. I was responsible. Father would cast blame and he would be justified. I had escaped torture and my husband’s letters had doomed my family. Somehow I had failed the test of prison. I had never once considered taking my life, but perhaps I should have.

Mother touched my hand. “We have much to do.”

“Yes,” I said. This was my true punishment. I would suffer more from a lifetime of guilt than I had suffered the ninety days in my cell.

She talked about what we’d move and where the servants would go. With the exception of a handful of history books, Father had decided to keep his library buried, and would seal the secret pantry. “Who knows?” said Mother. “Perhaps one day …”

“I should see him now,” I said, and Mother nodded.

I combed and knotted my hair, put on a quilted top and went to his study. My father was packing books and scrolls, hand tools and art materials in a shipping crate. I saw a brushstroke of relief wash over his face
when our eyes met. He deliberately picked up a planer and wrapped it in a cloth. “Are you well?” His voice trembled, and I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or enraged.

“Yes, thank you, Abbuh-nim. This person is home.” I bowed fully. There was a long silence. I listened to the cloth being rubbed against the planer.

“Your mother,” he began, then silence. I remained low in my bow and smelled sawdust and pine tar in the old floor mat. He cleared his throat. “You’re whole and home.” His tone said I should rise. I saw his hands shake as he set the planer down.

“I’m grateful, Abbuh-nim, and ashamed. Forgive your worthless daughter.”

“You do realize what has happened.” He spoke slowly, intensity belying his softened tone. “Your father, your brother, your ancestors—all— can see only loss.” He laid his hands carefully on his knees. He continued, his voice husky. “The dust in this room is the same dust breathed by my father, my father’s father and his father. By all your ancestors. Numberless generations …”

In the silence that followed I could only breathe with him.

“Almost five and a half centuries of men buried in the Han mountain graves,” he said. “And now, a single daughter …”

In the ensuing silence, I thought about the two things my father had done over which I had often harbored resentment: he hadn’t named me and had wanted me married at fourteen. Yet he had come to accept my desire to learn and work, and had even allowed the thwarted dream of America. I had brought into his household contrariness, unwanted change, and now, immeasurable loss. “I am to blame, Abbuh-nim.”

He seemed to want to say something but instead turned aside, his face lined with pain. “Go. Your mother needs you.”

I bowed and left. It seemed too easy to get up and walk away, down the familiar hallway with its gleaming dark wood, and past the screen, now folded and tied, the winter air seeping through the walls. The screams of the tortured men surfaced in my ears and I shivered with the cold of the blackest nights in prison. I thought about how I had looked forward to seeing Major Yoshida, though I’d couched it in terms of being grateful for the warmth of the interrogation room. His clean orderliness and cool
demeanor were reassuringly civilized and seemed admirable in such a place. I had felt pride in describing Bible stories to him, in God’s choice of me to deliver his Word, and in God’s watchfulness that had kept me whole. It was because of me that Major Yoshida had noticed our estate. Because of me, Major Yoshida would take from my father, from all of my family, the markers of our ancestry, tradition and history that creaked in the ancient beams, lived in the mortar, the stones and soil, and sang in the trees and stream. And then I thought that man was small, so easily overcome by demons of pride and hatred, but I was less than small, and should have been among those who screamed in the night.

IN AN ICY DOWNPOUR, ILSUN PACED BENEATH A STREETLIGHT ON THE far edge of Poncheong, Seoul’s black market district. With hands shoved deep in his pockets, he watched his shadow grow and shrink in the bleak circle of electric light, aware that curfew approached. He had already walked half an hour in snow that had turned to sleet, and his leather shoes were soaked. Across the road, movement in the pink slits of the teahouse’s shuttered windows caught his eye. Earlier when he’d called for entry, the proprietor smiled at his familiar face and opened the door wide until he’d failed to slip the customary wad of won into her ready hand. Stung by the slammed door, he’d cried out, “How dare you! I am a Han!” Having welcomed him dozens of times before, she could have shown a hint of courtesy!

He knew it was pointless to trade on his father’s name. Nowadays, few knew and even fewer cared who his father was. Ilsun shivered and sighed. He’d have to start working soon. His father had finally acquiesced to the necessity of Ilsun selling his artwork to the Japanese and their collaborators, for they were the only ones who could afford such luxuries. They weren’t all heathen. Some were learned enough in art history to know that his father’s style would have lasting significance, and others saw that Ilsun’s work expanded and modernized his father’s breakthroughs. Ilsun enjoyed the attention he received for his work, and had discovered two interesting and ironic facts about his ability for art. The less he cared about the work he was painting, the more it was judged worthy. He was best when he wasn’t trying, and for that he knew to thank his ancestors who had cultivated the talent that had culminated in him. The other irony was how long it took to reach the point of not caring, of being free of worry about how the work appeared and to just be doing it. It was the buildup that was the hard work. He suspected that if he worked more at it, the easy part would come sooner, but the hard part was enough of a hurdle to discourage him.

He enjoyed the accolades and he certainly enjoyed the money his art garnered. It wasn’t about food—the women mostly took care of that somehow. The responsibility of providing for the household made him feel tired and less apt to work. It was about a man’s need for pocket money. The last time he’d seen Meeja behind those shutters had been thanks to Najin. This morning, though, when he’d asked his nuna if she had anything else to sell, the only thing she gave him was a hard look.

Weeks ago, Najin had given him a smoky topaz to buy medicine for his wife. The stone had been a gift from a delighted Japanese jeweler whose wife, assisted by Najin, had successfully delivered a healthy baby boy. Ilsun had accused his sister of hoarding from the family, demanding to know what else she had squirreled away. She ignored his queries and instead listed the medicines, herbs and rich foods needed for Unsook. Nuna told him to use anything left over to buy the manure-and-mud briquettes they used to stretch the coal. On this very street, he had quickly found his most lucrative contact and bartered the topaz for much more than his original estimate of its worth. When he handed his sister the
ginseng and goldthread root, cardamom pods, packets of other herbs and a handful of change, he reported that the pharmacist’s prices had doubled since medicinal trade from China had all but ceased. Najin said nothing, but Ilsun had never seen such coldness in her eyes. “It’s enough for several weeks!” he’d said, raising his voice to assert his authority over such matters. The cash he had put aside to visit the teahouse was none of her business. He did not voice his other thought: that one had to be realistic about Unsook’s illness.