The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (20 page)

The evening had nevertheless been spoiled. They had fallen into the old argument, and had parted early with formal bows and with mutual impatience, and after she was gone he had sent for a palace lady of pleasure.

Now, the morning after, he heard the announcement that the son of his old friend and recently dead adviser waited for audience, and was ready to step into his father’s place. He knew Kim Il-han to be an adviser to the Queen, and he did not hurry himself. Let the man wait! It was fully two hours before he sent his chief chamberlain to the Hall of Waiting to say audience was granted. The delay would calm his subject’s possible arrogance, he told himself, and then, to mitigate or merely to confuse, he would himself be informal and friendly upon meeting.

At high noon he strode into the audience hall and seated himself upon the throne, which here was scarcely more than an ornate chair, set low to the floor so that he could draw up his feet in the Japanese fashion. Instead, he sat down and crossed his knees in the western fashion. He had never seen a white man, but he was told that they sat on seats and let their legs hang or crossed their knees and he knew that subjects observed every detail of a monarch’s behavior, anxious to catch any straw in any wind.

Il-han entered now and knelt before the King. He placed his hands together flat on the polished floor, thumb to thumb. Then he bent his head until his forehead touched his hands and waited.

“You may stand,” the King said pleasantly.

Il-han stood, his eyes on the floor, and again he waited.

“You may speak,” the King said in the same kind voice.

Without raising his eyes, Il-han then spoke. “Majesty, I come as the son of my father, now deceased. I come, as he did, only as a private citizen, but as one responsible, with others, for the people, and therefore ready for service.”

The King listened and then directed by a gesture of the hand that Il-han was to seat himself on the floor cushion before the throne.

“Let us forget ceremony,” the King said when the ceremonies were finished. “I trust you because you are your father’s son. He was a wise man. He told me once that the three nations who surround us are like the balls a juggler must keep in the air and in motion, and we must be the juggler. Do you agree?”

“Majesty, I would even add more such balls,” Il-han replied. “The western nations are eying us across the four seas. How many balls there will be for us to juggle, I cannot tell. But there will be more than three, and some may have to be cast aside.”

The King uncrossed his legs impatiently and crossed them again. He did not wear his garments of state today, but about his neck was a heavy chain of jade pieces strung on gold. At the end was a jade circle, carved with the emblem of cranes under a pine tree, and with this emblem his right hand was now busy. He had a full underlip, a sign of his passionate nature, and he pinched it now between thumb and finger, in deep thought.

“Will you accept office?” he asked at last. “Will you be, let us say, prime minister? Chancellor? What you will—”

Il-han raised his eyes to meet the royal gaze and was startled by the boldness he saw. The King’s eyes were narrow, the corners sharp and the pupils very black under wide short black brows. They were not the eyes of a poet or a thinker but of a man accustomed to act. His hand, fingering the full lower lip, was dark and strong.

“Majesty,” Il-han said, while he let his eyes fall again to the embroidered cranes and the pine tree on the King’s breast, “forgive me if I decline office. I wait for your command, day and night. I am your subject. But if I am more, I shall not be free to speak, to move, to report, to observe, to ask for audience, to be of use to you, I hope, as your own hand is useful, obedient to your brain and heart.”

The King laughed. “What you mean is that you prefer not to owe me anything! Well, that is rare enough.”

He clapped his hands and servants entered.

“Bring us food and drink,” he commanded.

While the servants obeyed, he went on, “Now, let us discuss the position of this jewel you call our country. I do not deceive myself as to why Li Hung-chang wishes us to receive an envoy from the United States. It is his weapon against Japan, who threatens war. In such a war we would be their point of departure for China. Tell me, what is the United States?”

He put the question suddenly to Il-han, who was embarrassed because he did not know the answer.

“Majesty, I shall have to inquire. I recollect that the sailors shipwrecked on our shores some fifteen years ago were Americans and I have heard that they were very savage. They molested our women, and our people, outraged, put them to death.”

“Not immediately,” the King reminded him. “The sailors were at first only arrested. Then others came out from ships to rescue them, and these men seized their shipmates from us, and with them certain of our men, as hostages. It was only then that our outraged people attacked the ship, killed eight of the Americans, and captured the others and burned the ship—all of this deserved, I was told.”

Here the King paused and thought awhile and Il-han was amazed to hear such detail.

“Perhaps the truth does not matter now,” the King said at last, “but I may as well tell it to you. It was my father who commanded that the ship be attacked. He feared that it brought more Catholic priests to avenge the death of those whom he had ordered beheaded in earlier years. My father believes, has always believed, that western religions disturb the peace wherever they go. This he has observed from such foreign persons in China and in Japan and while he ruled he forbade all foreign priests to set foot on our shores, and if they did so secretly he had them killed. Alas, some of our own people have been beguiled by them, and have themselves become Christian. I will not speak of this.”

Here he paused, and Il-han knew the King was reminded of that Kim ancestor of Il-han’s who had been killed because he was Catholic.

“I have followed my father,” the King continued. “While I was very young I refused to see the American, surnamed Low, who arrived in our port with a fleet of ships. But today I do not know …”

The servants brought the food now and set it on the table and stood by to serve. But the King sent them away again.

“They stand there like images,” he complained to Il-han when they were gone, “but they are not images. Their eyes see, their ears hear, and their tongues carry tales. Proceed!”

“Majesty, I am honored that you tell me your thoughts. I am your subject and I ought only to listen and not to speak.”

“Speak,” the King commanded. “I am surrounded by men who will not speak. Sometimes I think everyone in the palace has cut out his tongue except the Queen. She has no fears! I daresay if Buddha himself were reincarnated here she would tell him how to behave and what to think.”

The King spoke willfully, aware that this was no fit talk between himself and a subject and he enjoyed it the more for that reason.

Il-han made a small smile and did not reply. Instead he went on thus:

“Majesty, your father, the Regent, has done what he believed right in his time. For example, he resisted the Japanese as stoutly as he did all others. I must even say that he seemed at times to devise insults for them, hoping they would leave our shores. They did not leave. I beg you, Majesty, not to follow your father. I beg you to think for yourself, to decide for yourself what must be done to preserve our nation and our people. Of all the western peoples, the Americans seem the least vicious. They are young, they have no experience, and they know what it is to fight for independence for themselves. I have heard that over a hundred years ago they fought the country that ruled them, and won.”

“What are you saying?” the King demanded.

“I am saying that we must accept the Americans, as Li Hung-chang advises,” Il-han replied.

The King clenched his fists and pounded the table so that the dishes jumped. “By a treaty which takes still more from us!” he shouted.

“By a treaty,” Il-han agreed.

The two men looked straight into each other’s eyes. It was the King who yielded. He got to his feet. “I can eat nothing,” he declared, and he turned his back on Il-han and strode from the room.

How then could Il-han eat? He also rose, and putting on his outer garment, he went away. The servants saw him go and came into the empty room. The dishes of delicacies had not even been uncovered, and the servants took them to the kitchens and there with great relish and high laughter they ate the meats prepared for the King.

In the night, when Il-han returned from the long conference with the King, he told Sunia that he had been offered a high post in government and that he had declined. He did not regret his refusal, yet he wondered if she, perhaps, being more simple than he by nature, or so he imagined, might secretly envy other women whose husbands were publicly known. He had a certain fame as a scholar, a thinker, one who did not fear to do what he liked or refuse to do what he disliked, but was this enough? When she replied, he perceived that he had been wrong, and again he marveled, as he had often before, how it is that a man can live with a woman and have sons by her and still know very little of what she is. For Sunia spoke at once when he finished what he had to tell.

“You did very well to refuse a post,” she said.

It was night and they lay on the floor mattresses. A candle burned on the low table at his side. The house was silent and beyond the drawn screens the night was dark. He had talked for a long time, and she had listened.

“Why do you say so?” he asked now.

“For one reason,” she said. “You always forget small things. You are a great man, but only in great things. You speak to kings and queens as though you were their brother, but you do not know one servant in this house from another, except your own man. And I wonder sometimes if you would even know your sons, if you saw them in a crowd of children. Now you will have time to know your sons—and me, too, I daresay!”

She broke off to laugh, and she had ready laughter, but he was surprised at what she had said.

“You describe a very foolish fellow,” he complained, “and I think I am better than that.”

She turned on her side then and leaned her head on her elbow and looked down into his rebellious face. “You are only foolish, I say, in small things. If you were clever in small ways you would be foolish in great ones and I am satisfied with what you are. More than that, I know very well that I am a fortunate woman, a lucky wife, a blessed mother.”

“Now, now,” he said, laughing in turn. “You blame yourself too much. A woman gets what she deserves.”

This banter went into sudden passion between them, he aroused by the sight of the lovely face so near, her eyes lustrous and dark in the candlelight. In this way he knew her very well, for when she was ready a peculiar fragrance came from her body. He had learned, but not easily, that while without this fragrance she could submit, it was without response, and then he was robbed of half his joy. While he was a bridegroom, a husband too young, he had not been able to restrain his passion, or suit its timing to hers, even though he cursed himself because, if he did not, they were further apart afterward. But with the fullness of manhood he learned, and he was rewarded. Better to have her whole, at her own time, than resisting when she was not.

Now her fragrance came sweet and strong, and he held her long and close. When they drew apart, they were closer than ever before, and they lay in peace and silence, she thinking while he fell asleep.

He woke after an hour or so and was thirsty and she poured a bowl of tea and then came out with what she had been thinking.

“While we are in mourning, you can do nothing outside, and you must promise me to learn the difference between our two sons. I feel each is different from the other, each not ordinary, but I have not the wit to know what the difference is. This is the first thing I have to say.”

He drank the tea and held his bowl for more.

“Then there is a second? And a third, doubtless! When a man has a little time to be idle, be sure his wife will fill it for him.”

She pretended to snatch the bowl away from him.

“Dare to think I am like other wives!”

“Fortunately you are not.” He was suddenly wide awake, relaxed, amused, and wondering whether, if he indulged her, her fragrance would flow again. She had changed her garments, he could see, and the odor was that of clean freshness.

“You are to stop thinking your own private thoughts,” she retorted. “You are to listen to me, if you please! Il-han, I say you should know some of these Americans before you advise the King again. You are in a high, responsible place. You advise rulers. Yet how do you know if Americans are good or evil? What if you lead the King into wrongdoing and our people suffer because you know too little of what you are talking about?”

This was the surprising woman. While he could have sworn she had no concern for anything beyond her household, she came forward with this simple wise conclusion. Unpleasant though it was to consider consorting with foreigners, what she had said was true. Chinese he knew, and Japanese, and a few Russians, but he knew almost no Americans.

All inclination for renewed lovemaking ebbed out of him.

“Go to sleep,” he told Sunia. “You have said enough to keep me awake the rest of the night and for many nights to come.” And he pinched out the flame of the candle between his thumb and forefinger.

In these days of mourning for the one dead, Il-han devoted himself to the living. Each morning he sat near while the tutor taught his elder son and he was pleased by the boy’s quickness where he was interested and then displeased because where he had no interest he idled. Nevertheless he did not interfere and as the days passed he saw that the tutor understood the child well, and when the child looked away from his books he did not reproach him. Instead he bade the boy run in the garden or he gave him a brush and colored inks and let him paint a picture.

“In a picture,” he told Il-han privately, “I discover the child’s hidden thoughts and feelings.”

“What does he paint?” Il-han asked.