The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (3 page)

“I know why you did it, my son,” he said gently. “You were angry about something. You forgot what I have taught you—a superior person does not allow himself to show anger. But you were angry and you did not dare tell your tutor that you were angry and so you came here, alone, where no one could see you, and you destroyed the young bamboos, which are helpless. Is that what you did?”

Tears flowed from the boy’s eyes. He sobbed.

“Yet you knew,” the father continued with relentless gentleness, “you knew that bamboo shoots are valuable. Why are they valuable?”

“We—we—like to eat them,” the child whispered.

“Yes,” the father said gravely, “we like to eat them, and it is in the spring that they can be eaten. But more than that, they grow only once from the root. The plants these shoots might have been, waving their delicate leaves in the winds of summer, will never live. The shoots crack the earth in spring, they grow quickly and in a year they have finished their growth. You have destroyed food, you have destroyed life. Though it is only a hollow reed, it is a living reed. Now the roots must send up other shoots to take the place of those you have destroyed. Do you understand me?”

The child shook his head. Il-han sighed. “It is not enough to learn your letters or even enough to learn the odes of Confucius. You must learn the inner meanings. Come with me to the library.”

He lifted the child from his knee and led him in silence to the library again. There he took from the shelves a long narrow box covered with yellow brocaded satin. He unhinged the silver hasp and lifted from the box a scroll which he unrolled upon the table.

“This,” he said, “is a map of our country. Observe how it lies between three other countries. Here to the north is Russia, this nation to the west is China, and this to the east is Japan. Are we larger or smaller than they?”

The child stared at the map soberly. “We are very small,” he said after a moment.

“Korea is small,” his father agreed. “And we are always in danger. Therefore we must be brave, therefore we must be proud. We must keep ourselves free, we must not allow these other nations to eat us up as they wish always to do. They have attacked us again and again, but we have repulsed them. How do you think we have done this?”

The child shook his head.

“I will tell you,” Il-han said. “Time and again brave men offer themselves as our leaders. They come up from the high-born yangban as we do, or they come from the landfolk. It does not matter where they come from. When the need arises they are here, ready to lead us. They are like the bamboo shoots that must replace those you have now destroyed. They will spring from the roots that are hidden in the earth.”

The child looked up with lively eyes, he listened, stretching his mind to understand what his father was saying. Whether he did understand Il-han never knew, for at this moment he heard the cry of the newborn child. The door opened and the old midwife appeared, her face wrinkled in smiles.

“Sir,” she said. “You have a second son.”

Joy rushed into his heart.

“Take this child to his tutor,” he said.

He pushed the boy into the midwife’s arms, and heedless of his son’s calling after him he hastened away.

… In his wife’s bedchamber they were waiting for him, the maidservants, the women who had come to assist, and above all Sunia, his wife. She lay on the mattress spread on the warm floor and the women had arranged her for his arrival. They had brushed her hair and wiped the sweat of childbirth from her face and hands and had spread a rose-pink silken cover upon her bed. She smiled up at him as he stood above her and his love for her rushed up and all but choked him. Her oval face was classic in beauty, not a soft face, and perhaps more proud than gentle, but he knew well her deep inner tenderness. Her skin was cream white, and at this moment without the high color natural to her. Her eyes, leaf-brown, were drowsy with weariness and content, and her long dark hair, soft and straight, was brushed and spread over the flat pillow.

“I am come to thank you,” he said.

“I have only done my duty,” she replied.

The words were a ritual, but through her eyes she had her own way of making them intimate.

“But,” she added with a touch of her daily willfulness, “I enjoy having your sons. How can it be only a duty?”

He laughed. “Pleasure or duty, please continue,” he said.

Had they been alone, he would have knelt at her side and taken her hand between his hands to cherish and fondle. As it was, he could only bow and turn away. Yet he paused at the door to leave a command with the women.

“See that you do not keep her awake with your chatter and make sure that she has chicken broth brewed with ginseng root.”

They bowed in silence, and he returned to the library where in a few minutes, as he knew, his second son would be presented to him. He knelt beside the great desk and then rose again, still too restless to read or write. Once more he walked to and fro across the tiled floor, across the squares of sunlight from the open doors. He turned his face to the sun. It fell upon him warmly and he welcomed the warmth. His white garments shone whiter, and he enjoyed the sense of light and cleanliness in which they wrapped him. He was fastidiously clean and Sunia saw to it that every morning he put on fresh white garments, the loose trousers bound at his ankles, the long white robe crossed from left to right on his breast. His ancestors were sun worshipers, and he had inherited from them his love of light. White was the sacred color, a symbol of brightness and of life. True, it was also the color of mourning. Yet so closely were death and life intertwined here in his troubled country that he could not think of one without realizing the other. This too was his inheritance, now given to his sons.

He paused on the thought and stared down at the pool of sunlight in which he stood. It occurred to him that he had not asked his elder son why he had been angry, so angry that he had rushed into the grove and broken the tender bamboo shoots. It was important to know why a son in this house should be angry. He clapped his hands and as a servant entered the room he took his place on the floor cushions behind the desk. Casually, as though he had no other interest, he spoke to the servant.

“Invite my son’s tutor to come here and for a short time take care of the child yourself. He is forbidden to enter the bamboo grove.”

He did not explain why the child was forbidden. In a house of many servants everything is already known. The servant bowed and backed out of the room and closed the door silently. He busied himself as he waited for the tutor, pouring water on the ink block and rubbing the stick of dried ink into a paste upon the wet block before brushing Chinese letters on the sheet of thick white paper, handmade from silk waste. He moistened his brush in the liquid ink and smoothed the fine hairs dexterously to a point. Then, the reed handle between two fingers and thumb, he held the brush poised above the paper. Four lines of a poem shaped in his brain to announce the birth of his second son. Ah, but what language should he use? If his father were to see the poem it must be written in the ancient Chinese.

“No true scholar can stoop to use hangul,” he declared whenever he saw what he called “the new way of writing.”

It was true that men liked to write in Chinese to show that they had received the education of a cultivated man. Sejong the Great himself had been a man learned in Chinese, but he had been also a wise ruler. A king, he had declared, if he is to govern well, must know what his people think and want, yet how can they write to their king if the letters they use are so difficult that years must be spent merely in learning them? That communication between himself and his subjects might be possible, he had then devised, with the help of many scholars, an alphabet so simple that it had no resemblance to the complex Chinese characters.

The book of Sejong’s life lay open now on the desk for Il-han had reflected much, of late, upon this noble king. Oh, that there were a ruler today as great as Sejong had been, one who, though he was the highest, could think of the low ones, the people, those who worked upon the land to produce food for all, who built houses for others to live in, those who only serve! Il-han himself, growing up the beloved and only son in a great house of the yangban class, had never thought of these folk. It was his own tutor, the father of his son’s tutor, who had first told him of the stir among the multitudes, the speechless revolt of the silent Sejong the Great had been well named. He was great enough to know that no ruler can ignore the discontent of his subjects, for discontent swells to anger and anger to explosion. Alas, again, where was such a man now? Was the young King ever to be strong enough?

The door slid open and his son’s tutor stood there, bowing, white robes spotless.

“Sir, forgive me for delay. I was in the bath.”

He bent low again and waited.

“Enter,” Il-han commanded. “And close the doors behind you.”

He did not rise, the man being his inferior in age and position, though the years between them were only three. His father had complained that the tutor was too young, but Il-han had persisted in keeping him, saying that his old tutor was too old, and he did not wish to entrust his son to a stranger whose forbears he did not know.

The young man came in and waited again.

“You are permitted to seat yourself,” Il-han said kindly.

The young man knelt opposite to him on a cushion before the low desk and looked down modestly. He was agitated, as Il-han could see and, he supposed, prepared for reproach because of the child’s destructive anger. Therefore he spoke mildly, aware of the anxiety on the sensitive youthful face which he now examined.

“I wish to consult you about my son,” Il-han began.

“If you please, sir,” the young man replied in a low voice.

“It is not a question of blame or punishment,” Il-han went on. “It is only that I must be told about my son. He is with you day and night and you understand his nature. Tell me—why should he be angry here in his own home?”

The young man lifted his eyes to the edge of the table. “He has fits of anger, sir. I do not know what causes them. They come like sudden storms at sea. All is as usual, we are without quarrel, and then with no warning, he throws his book on the floor and pushes me away.”

“Does he hate books?”

“No, sir.” The young man lifted his eyes a few inches higher so that now they rested on Il-han’s hands, folded on his desk. “He is very young, and I require nothing of him in the way of study. I read him a story from history, then a legend, a fairy tale, something to amuse him and please him so that he may understand the pleasure to be found in books and later will seek them for himself. This morning, for example, I was reading the story of ‘The Golden Frog.’”

Il-han knew the story from his own childhood. It was the tale of King Puru who, because he had no son, prayed to God for a male child. On his way home one day, for he had ridden horseback to a place called Konyun, he was amazed to see a weeping rock. He ordered his retinue to examine the rock, and under it they found a golden frog which looked like a baby. He believed his prayers were answered and he took the frog home. It grew into a handsome boy, and he named the boy Kumwa, that is to say, Golden Frog, and this son succeeded his father and became King Kumwa.

“At this point,” the tutor was saying, “the child tore the book from my hands and dashed it on the floor. Then he ran from the room. I searched for him and when I found him in the bamboo grove he was wrenching the bamboo shoots with both his hands and all his strength and throwing them on the ground. When I asked him why he did so, he said he did not want a golden frog for a brother.”

Il-han was amazed. “Who put that in his mind?”

The young tutor lowered his eyes again. A red flush crept up from his neck and spread over his cheeks. “Sir, I am miserable. I fear it was I who did so, but unwittingly. He had heard of his brother’s approaching birth and he asked me where this brother would come from. I did not know how to reply, and I said perhaps he would be found under a rock, like the Golden Frog.”

Il-han laughed. “A clever explanation, but I can think of a better! You might, for instance, have replied that his brother came from the same place that he himself did. And when the child inquired where that was, you could have said, ‘If you do not know, how can I know?’”

The young man forgot himself and raised his eyes to Il-han’s face. “Sir, you do not understand your own son. He is never to be put off. He pries my mind open with his questions. I fear sometimes that in a few years he will be beyond me. He smells out the smallest evasion, not to mention deceit, and worries me for the truth, even though I know it is beyond him. And when in desperation I give him simple truth he struggles with it as though he were fighting an enemy he must overcome. When he comprehends finally and to his own satisfaction, he is exhausted and angry. That was what happened this morning. He insisted upon knowing where his brother came from, and how could I explain to him the process of birth? He is too young. I was driven to use wile and persuasion and so I fetched the book. But he knew it was only a device and this was the true reason for his anger.”

Il-han rose from his cushion and went to the door and opened it suddenly. No one was there and he closed it again and returned to his cushion. He leaned forward on the low desk and spoke softly. “I have called you here for another purpose, also. Your father, as you know, was my tutor. He taught me much, but most of all he taught me how to think. He grounded me in the history of my people. I wish you to do the same for my son.”

The young tutor looked troubled. “Sir, my father was a member of the society of Silhak.”

He lowered his voice and looked toward the closed door.

“Why be afraid?” Il-han inquired. “There is good in the teaching of the Silhak that learning which does not help the people is not true learning. It is not new, mind you. It is made up of many elements—”

“Western, among them, sir,” the tutor put in. He forgot himself and that he was in the presence of the heir of the most powerful family in Korea.