A Novel

Episode 3: "Mind if You Become My Brother?"

For quite a long while, and even after many months and years had passed, from time to time, I was wondering about the women visitors, that is, the cerebral visitors. My memory is blurry, that is, it is not certain today that they had visited me only once or many more times after that, whether during the nightly hours or even during daylights, when I had been nodding the idle afternoons away among the hilly bushes or on the grass sniffing the iris.

I was wondering how they had gotten to me. On what route and how? By riding on the wind, riding on the creek, or on a boar's back? And above all, why me? Then why in groups? Had I met them before? Then where? I wondered at the time what they had meant by their solicitation of cohabitation, to begin with?

Despite their sincere entreaties, I was not in a mood to favor a specific girl or two because to me women, that is, girls had belonged in two categories: the victimizer and the victim. My grandma had been a dominant, insistent, and haggling one and My mom an obsequious, low-profile, and whining one.

Grandma had never allowed an instant's break for my mom, that is, with her poor daughter-in-law getting grilled on every gamut of house chores from keeping fire seeds unextinguished, cooking, and thrashing the bean trees, to cleaning the house and husking the barley by grinding it on the wooden treadmill.

My grandma had been domineering, and her son, that is, my dad, by having acted a silent neutral, had opted not to intervene, and I, her grandson as her " darling puppy," had made my lonely mom lonelier by opting to side with my grandma and by opting to ignore the plights of mom because the coward in me had taught me that grandma was so fearful and I would be nutritionally better treated by joining grandma's dining table whereas my mom had eaten on the room floor or from the kitchen outside the room. My belated wakening is that I should have faced up to grandma.

To me, there had been two extreme categories of women: yelling and whining, demanding and ingratiating and masterly and subservient. There had been no women in between, and I had despised both of the two kinds of women populace I had virtually never talked to any girl of my peers until high-school graduation, as a result.

Years had passed. We the family members weathered the eight full years at the valley of which each year had consisted of four distinctive seasons. My great-grand mother had died after returning home from the refuge camp in Cheongdo of malnutrition and intestinal malfunction during the Korean War, and my second younger brother had also died from the aftermath of the evacuation during the Korean War.

Dad withstood the beatings by the Korean police who had been plodding him to snoop on the partisans, who he had not met and who of course he had not collaborated with. Mom survived, and of course my grandma survived, too. The persistent juvenile harrassment, which had been imposed on me by my elementary school peers, did not end, which was to continue far into the first year class of the middle school. But I survived. I had not been consumed by tigers. I also withstood the seasonal floods and knee-deep snow heaps during my elementary school commute of three final years.

On the day of the move I had a lot of things to do. I didn't actually like what had to be done by me confidentially to be watched by the other members of the family so I got up earlier than the other days and toured the place as if nothing had happened or as if II had been to the privy or to the family well to freshen up in front of the yard.

I liked the place. It's more like I had come to like the place. Actually I didn't like to leave the place. But I had been afraid to say and it had been a shameful thing to say that because the move to a great place had been planned sorely for the sake of me personally, that is, for the sake of my education from the middle school upward.

I liked the place. I did like every bit of it--the sounds, the colors, the flavors, the breaths the fruits and the crops of it. I listened to, watched and conversed with all that. I wondered loud if there could be any other way I would be able to stay at the valley, on the hills and live longer ever after with the iris, lying on the grass and looking up at the autumnal sky studded with clouds.

The unfortunate part about me was that my class performance was good enough to have been placed on top, making me the reader of the farewell address as representative of the graduating class of 80 in the year of 1956 at Oksan Elementary School. Grandma had attended the commencement ceremony, crying over the litany of my school day memories (actually written by my teacher) by her grandson.

On the day of the move I paced around the yard, touching the trunk of the pear tree, saying goodbyes to the persimmon tree, and giving the deep bows to the hills surrounding the house. We packed light. The moving troops have made a detraction of two members since we lived at the valley (great-grandmother and my brother) and an addition of one (one sister who would later leave the house to become a Buddhist nun.)

The sky was clear with no clouds. The early spring weather was fine, not too cold, not too hot, either. Contrastingly enough, the day of the transfer eight years ago, when my parents had moved in, had been a cold winter day. Though my memory having been blurred, and though it seems that I had heard the footsteps of the moving people, feeling some warmth wrapped in a bedding or something, carried on somebody's back, they might have hit the snow-heaped mountain trails.

A family group of pedestrian moves of ten kilometers or so distance were progressing smoothly with one small incident. An old cat of ours, who had been strutting along leading the silent march, had dropped, before we all knew, out of the moving caravan, straying into a village which first appeared at the end of the descending trail. We had taken the feline betrayal with stride at the time: She must have been bored of dozing off the heated clay fireplace all alone.

Hardly had we the family members downloaded the moving package from the backs of dad, me and a cow, and from the backs or heads of grandma and mom, they were busy unpacking and arranging them in the new house, which was attached to the mill. The mill was run by water, so the people called our house the water mill house.

Grandma was busy moving in a new house but she was not so busy carping on mom as she had been at the Sun Valley. Her grip on mom was getting loose, that is, her intervention with mom's daily routines less frequent because grandma was getting to commute between her first son's and second's, and her first daughter-in-law was added in her list of inventory.

I was busier than before because I had my leisurely laziness lying on the hilly grass looking up at the blue sky, sitting among the bushes or nodding off beside the iris at Sun Valley deprived once and for all, which was replaced by the chores of a mill house.

A bright day nightmare was that my bullying peers were not getting loose on me a little bit. Their pranksterism was reaching a fever pitch, and the worse part was that a real nightmare was lurking around the corner.

The water mill house was erected by the initiative of Great Uncle Bin (the elder brother of my father) and by the carpenter's craft work of my father. An original paddy field was transformed into a water mill house, taking advantage of an established water channel.

The water mill house became a major source of a family income which provided all the resources for life as a family and which financed the schooling fees of me and my brothers. But I and the rest of the family members didn't realize that the mill would turn out to be an origin of a tragic family accident in later years.

What an unfair world it is that the one party, that is, the predator party enjoys or seems to enjoy the variety in the option of methods of harassing, harming, and killing the other party, that is, the prey party. How absurd it is that the one side, that is, the prey side is ambushed, trapped, and killed, or is inclined to be by the other side, that is, the predator side, with no recourse to any other means.

The scarcity or non-existence of defense methods or tools on the side of the prey, contrasted with the variety of and profundity in offense methods and tools on the predator, forces the poor prey to opt for the utter way of self-destruction. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the South Korean society saw hundreds of middle- and high school girls, who had been trapped in the mire of ijime or something, and lots of the starlets in their 20s or early 30s, who had also been trapped in the mire of hatred and curse of the Internet portal sites, commit suicides.

There should be just a moment you're bound to think that all the world is ganging upon you. In hindsight, that time of the water mill house in the first or second year of my middle school days might have been just the time or the moment, when, the boy, who had been a mere teen age boy, got old and the rest of my family members, some of whom had died and some others of whom got separated far apart with their own families, having the glimmers of memory that we had once been the same family living at the same place.

I close my eyes for now and put myself in some perspective on some elevated place, say, on the rooftop of the mill house, commanding some overview of the house in which mom, dad, grandma, and me are housed. Before I know, I see mom coming down from the nearby hill of the walnut trees, which had been located on the left shoulder side when I was stepping off the house toward the middle school. I see her with so pale a face and with unsteady steps, overshadowed by dusk. I was wondering at the time why she had been to the hill by herself at such bizarre hour with bare arms and hands, and now, almost fifty years later, I am shuddering to my horror.

Some invisible forces, whatever you call them by the name of ghosts, spirits or something, were ganging upon mom and me. I see now decades later that some super-natural forces seemed to be acting on mom and me. Mom was screaming, and me, too.

Mom was a bruised woman, physically already. She had one arm of hers severely smashed, with her loosely worn garments wrapped in belts and cog wheels of the milling machine, while working on it during my dad's absence, who had been on his purchase tour for the seasonal ritual of the clan.

Mom had no allies about her, but had enemies around. Though grandma's tongues became less tart. she did not turn totally friendly toward her poor daughter-in-law. Sharing one room attached to the mill with fully grown sons, my father took nightly visits to a village widow, which might have riled mom to no little degree.

Let me make another painful mention of invisible forces that had troubled my family, mom and me particularly. Hundreds of miles apart here in Seoul, and decades later in August, 2010, even on some moments' reminiscence, it had been a horrible nightmare. I am still wondering why the invisible forces, or the ghosts or something had taken on mom and me particularly.

Envision one horrible scene in which some ghosts had been taking on mom in loose garments, at a mill house under dim-lit kerosene lamp, not in sweat shorts she should have worn, with one ghost taking a grip on one arm of my mom's, and with the other pushing it under the rolling belt, with the other ghosts clapping and giggling away.

Envision the other nightmarish scene in which a 14-year middle school boy had been sleeping. Some ghosts had conspired to make an inception of the cerebral cave, called skull, of the subconscious boy who had been me, making it and setting up the sniper's tripod. I had been able to see to my horror one of the snipers take aim at me.

Now the camera car is rolling along. The audience is ready to watch. Camera one, take scene one, The woman, whose right arm is wrapped in the belt of the milling machine, tries to pull her arm from the rolling belt and wiggles like a worm scared, screaming.

Camera two, take spontaneous scene two. The boy, who is me, sleeping, finds himself aimed at by a sniper or two in some distance, who, in half disguise and mask, is about to pull the trigger. The boy, startled, sits up, screaming.

“Cut off the water!" mom yelled at an invisible person in the room, who must have been me. I was screaming, too at myself and at the cerebral sniper who had made an inception into me and been aiming at me, Scared at myself, and scared at the yell from mom, I ran to the water gate tightly shut on an elevated bank of the water channel and pulled up the hand rope linked to the square slot pegged in the wood-paneled water way.

The fact that the water mill house had been a haunted house was attested to by a word of mouth testimony of my immediate brother, who, having been to my home in Seoul, in the year of 2009, for the yearly memorial service of my late father, after having heard from me about the mysteriously spontaneous mishap of mom and me and about my later traumas, told me to the effect that he had seen, at that time, the people in white, that is, the white-robed ghosts, dancing on the rooftop of the mill house.

The nightmare of the sniper's assassination attempt on me did not recur, which was a really great thing. If the horrorful incident had occurred continually and repeatedly thereafter, my nerve cells, which had gotten extremely taut, might have broken loose. It was not certain whether the white human shapes, or the ghosts, had been dancing on the roof every night of the winter year, that is, I did not certify the frequencies of the ghostly choreograph from my brother.

But the bullying of the peers had continued. What had been their joy in life? That is, what had been the joy of those bullies who had been harassing me, even in the changed places and in the changed days. Had it been their joy of life to plague me. The persistent bullies, recognizing that their prey had not been consumed by tigers or torn to pieces by mountain boars, had taken on me with messier and lousier means of harassment.

The predator group, who consisted of three or four bullies, had elected a stooge, or an errand boy, who had done me various kinds of physical harms, representing the group. The stooge went on a bullying spree, nudging my waist without warning, kicking me from behind. or jabbing the ribs, with me getting down with pain, with the rest of the guys gathered in one place, throwing a sidelong glance toward me, giggling and giggling.

Though mom's mangled mass of arm muscles had surgically been treated and repaired to a considerable degree, with the swift first-aid treatment by a local doctor, and the well-timed vehicular transportation of the patient to Uiseong, the county capital, there had been no way to discover, even to notice the depth and width of invisible wounds, that is, my disrupted mental landscape which had been laid to waste, trampled by the intruders.

An epiphany had troubled me to no end that the red eyes of snipers were staring at me from any direction, the bushes, or from the foliage of the roadside trees. An obsession had overwhelmed me that one mishap or the other might overtake mom and dad at any moment. I had been taken ill with an anxiety disorder!

The bad boys, who had taken to a great liking to scare and terrorize me, had been sticky and tenacious like leeches. They had had the same routine as mine from going to school, sitting at the classroom, and coming back home.

But something was different between the bullies and me. They might have risen from their bedrooms, pondering over the joy of riding roughshod over me, over the joy of talking behind me giggling, and over the joy of finding me getting down on the ground with pain, whereas I used to rise from bed feeling anxious how I would be able to withstand the day.

Days passed and passed I pondered from time to time and later very often and very seriously over how to get out of the trouble I had been placed in. Appeal to their mercy? That will have to incur more ridicule and mockery of me. Visit their parents to seek their discipline? That will also have to deteriorate the course of the problem solution.

The day and the place were set offhand to rescue myself from the chaos. I can't exactly recall what day it had been, but I remember it as a warm day, probably a late spring or an early summer's day. The homeroom teacher had called it a short day, and we had been on our way home.

The bullies' paces were not so brisk, leisurely walking as ever, talking to each other garrulously. I was following them at some distance, catching them up, making a feline measurement enough to step up and attack the stooge from behind.

Getting over an embankment, the gang of bullies were walking down on a gravel road which had been built on the parched riverbed. Before they knew, I stepped up, overtook and felled the stooge from behind, mounting the fallen body punching the face right and left, left and right.

Bullying disappeared overnight! Everything disappeared from my eyes--mockeries, ridicules, nudges, kicks, giggles, and getting down with pain. Everything. It was just what I had vaguely intuited. I had cut off the Gordian knot of being bullied once and for all by knocking down the stooge--the puppet errand boy.

Why hate? I couldn't understand a specific feeling of hatred about a specific person or persons, to begin with. As a lonely boy at a remote valley, I'd missed people. that is, people of any kind. I used to approach them, actually dash to them who used to get over the hill top.

I used to drop by the house of an uncle who'd later been known to be suffering from Hansen's Disease, who'd waved me off, which was so sad. In the annual autumnal ritual of the ancestor worship which had been observed on the valley hill, when I used to meet with the brothers, uncles, and grand dads of the clan, had been a happiest time of my life as a boy.

Had the boy of me reached the puberty at that time? I vaguely recall a note or something, which had been scribbled on a shyly folded paper and sent to me, via a classmate of mine, from a girl or two of a senior class in the coed middle school, conveying coy wishes of an encounter as sister and brother.

I wish I had met the girls at a late hour after class, once or twice , or many more times, escorted first by my classmate, later through the secret exchanges of appointments, on a shady clearing surrounded with tall pines, or deep on the nearby hills or on a river bank far from the town, and had had long heart-to-heart talks.

I had run from all that. I was afraid of the girls, of the chance encounters that I should have to stammer all along. I was afraid of the red eyes which had been glaring from the roadside foliage, and frightened by the mangled arm of mom's, and the bruised face of the stooge's, who had been taken along by his father, protesting to my dad, "See what your son had done to mine!"