A Novel

Episode 6: Whispering to Their Sad Ears



Andong City was a big place compared to the previous places I had stepped on. One major attribute of a big place, though it could not be the only one, was that it had a river on, around or in its periphery. When I got to Nakjeong Naru, that was that.

The creeks of Sun Valley sounded melodious from one point of place to the other, and thunderous at a particular site. The creeks hankered for a big place, missing a river, and getting together at tributaries.

I now envision water drops, that is, the fate of water drops. I sometimes do. As a country boy I had watched the ill-fated water drops kept stagnant on a small water basin made by cow footprints, which were destined to go on a road to reeky desiccation.

I pity the state in which the water drops had to be kept stagnant. How much they would envy the lucky streak of the peer drops which were to hit the journey for the rivers and the seas. They had made a spontaneous start from the sky onto earth with the utter different landing.

You stand by the river, and you'll appreciate its past, present and its future. You'll also have a moment to ponder over your past and future: You ask yourself whether you'll go along, against, or across it. That is, rivers always something to do with remembrances.

This writer and narrator now (September 11, 2010) stands by a small stream river which goes into the Han River. It rained steadily here last night, but not cats and dogs. The Weather Bureau said that it rained really hard upstream. People sometimes say it poured just with bucketfuls of water.

Setting a side talk aside, coming back to a river port called Nakjeong Naru, I have to decide whether to cross this river or not. The sun is in the middle of the sky, a warm ray of an early autumn afternoon sun is shining on the wide expanse of the river bed, a bus with its passengers from Euiseong gets aboard a wooden ferry boat bound for Sangju.

All is set except one person to cross the river: a boy teacher of 19 who has been appointed as an elementary school teacher to serve at Nakdong, about 12 kilometers from Nakjeong Naru. He wavers between his dutiful responsibility and personal conscience--a guilt feeling that he isn't fully prepared for the job.

Although I as the boy teacher had been appointed by the local Education Board in September someday, 1961, the year the military coup had taken place, the appointment had been one of a supplementary character because the original appointment should have been done at the time of the graduation. I had originally been opted out at the Graduation Assessment Board because my classroom activities and imperative pedagogical activities had been evaluated as too low.

I knew much later that Mr. Kim, the homeroom teacher of my senior class had played a Samaritan, who had done extraordinary efforts to save the poor student of me from having been opted out. So I had barely been able to be listed as one of the graduates of 1961 at the bottom pit.

I am now balking at the idea of crossing the river and sending my boy to the town in which he had been appointed to serve. Since my boy had bungled a lousy mess of not a few things during his service of 18 months there at Nakdong Elementary School, I have second thoughts as to the reiteration of his previous follies unveiled once again for all to see. (cf A Civilized Report:www.textore.com)

I have from time to time my cerebral land trespassed and violated in which I am still standing in front of the black board at my class room of my initial service, facing the class, talking something and worried about something, I am an elementary school teacher who is 20-some years old. Yes, I am not getting old.

Students are so few about which I am worried. I wonder where they are gone anyway. The room floor of the class is so dirty. I am a little stressful about the condition of the classroom. I have some things left to do. I've not checked attendance yet. I look out the classroom window at the playground where they're playing around. They choose not to notice their teacher that's me.

I feel it a little necessary for me to give my readers a modicum of insight on the improvement of the teacher-recruiting system of South Korea. The 19-year-old elementary school teacher just like me might have been an idiosyncrasy. The system of three-year high school training of elementary school teachers had ceased to exist in 1963, from which a new sophisticated four-year university training had been needed for the elementary teaching profession.

Which does not suggest that the then boy teachers had been misfits for the pedagogical profession. I had been a misfit yes, but I am sure my peers had been superb teachers. The major ground for such assertion was that the curricula had been well organized, the teaching staff of Andong Normal School had been excellent and almost all the students had been hard at work and well adjusted.

It'll be a decent reminder to you readers that I had been greatly indebted to the residents in general and the parents of the dear students of my class who had bestowed a great benefaction of generosity and tolerance on me. I also had owed my colleague teachers who had gone to great lengths to wink at my personal follies as teacher.

I am going to introduce my love that I'd come to know there at my first service. I'm excited and thrilled on the one hand, but I am nervous on the other because I know that you want to know about the numerical orders of the love I had once been enthralled in or enslaved by. I find myself plummeting into a labyrinth of self-doubt, that is, a question about the validity of an attempt at a forced familiarization of a lady who might have been leading her own decent and peaceful life.

Though it might be a little too much presumptuous of me to do that, but if I, who had been terrorized by the witness experience of the summary execution of the Communist partisans, scared to death by the sudden disappearance and secret interment of my brother by my parents, and traumatized by mom's mishap and a spontaneous target experience by a sniper or two with red eyes, were to be allowed a modest opportunity nonetheless to present my girl that is not getting old just like me in my cerebral land, to the global readers of mine, I'll do that gladly.

Now here is a 14-year-old elementary school girl at a small rustic town who is to graduate her six-year compulsory course at a graduation ceremony which is attended by about one hundred and twenty students and a modest faculty of twenty-some teachers who I had been one of.

In due course of the ceremony there comes a time when the graduates sing in unison the farewell song, in which the graduating girls almost always burst out crying, hiding their faces among one another's backs. So much so that it occurs a considerable minutes have to pass and the teaching staff of the graduating classes used to have a hard time trying to calm down the perplexing emotional eruption.

There had occurred an eye-opening scene, the excitement of which could be compared to that I as a mountain valley boy had first seen purple iris in the deep valley beside the pine trunks. The thing is one of the girls, smiling, had started comforting her crying friends, whispering to their sad ears and patting their sad shoulders.

She was familiar to me because her younger sister was my student Iris somebody. Let's call the two girls Iris Sisters. Yes, they were pretty like iris. They were more than pretty: Their physique was so fit, their gaits were steady, and they had a low and shyful voice.