‘Good! That’s taken care of then.’ The flames danced on Maeda’s face. ‘After all that time in solitary, the arsehole won’t think about writing a poem again.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sugiyama realized then that his throat had closed up and his eyes were wet.
Two weeks later, the poet limped out of solitary. Sugiyama was relieved to see Dong-ju walk out on his own, although he did so on shaking legs. His soul had been forever altered. Though weak, he became aggressive, skulking around gloomily. He picked fights with everyone and threw sloppy punches, even though he couldn’t actually beat anyone up. He limped towards solitary again, covered in blood.
A week later, he crawled out and became ghost-like. His blank gaze was fixed on the horizon, and he looked lost in time. The blue kite that had floated hopefully outside the prison walls every afternoon stopped appearing. Dong-ju’s depression tugged the entire ward into a deep slump. Sugiyama missed the young man with a ready smile. He remembered one of Dong-ju’s poems that he’d read in front of the incinerator before turning it into smoke that snaked up to the sky:
ROAD
I lost it.
Not knowing what I lost where
my two hands feel my pockets
as I go out onto the road.
The road snakes along the stone wall
Endlessly linking stone and stone and stone.
The wall’s steel doors are firmly closed
Casting a long shadow on the road
And the road goes from morning to evening
And from evening to morning.
When I look up after shedding tears along the stone wall
The sky is embarrassingly blue.
I walk down this grassless road
Because I’m on the other side of the wall,
I remain alive
Only because I am searching for what I lost.
It was a desperate confession. What had he lost? Sugiyama knew Dong-ju had lost everything — his country, his language, his name. Had he known long ago that he would be imprisoned, that he would be incarcerated on the other side of the wall?
Every night Sugiyama sat at his desk in his office, unable to sleep. He wanted to force the frail young man to write poems again. He wanted Dong-ju’s poems to survive these terrible times. Even if only a single person were to survive this war, he wanted the poems to be able to provide relief. It was all he thought about. He looked down at his desk, at the rough paper in his hands, his palms studded with calluses, his bent fingers, his broken nails. An old pen lay on the desk. An urge to write something came over him. He didn’t want to be a poet; he just wanted to write. He wanted to express on paper what was roiling inside him. He’d understood the world by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. He’d seen bloodied corpses, heard deafening explosions and screams, touched the upturned earth and dust, smelled the smokiness of gunpowder and tasted blood. But his eyes no longer saw, his ears no longer heard. He’d started to decipher the world around him, appreciating the human side of the prisoners through the postcards given to him to censor and obtaining war news from the dailies. The world now existed for him through letters. He’d obtained a sixth sense.
He recalled what Dong-ju had told him: ‘The most important is the first sentence. If you write the first sentence properly, you can write all the way to the last one.’ Sugiyama cautiously picked up the pen as though he were handling a sea creature with dangerous tentacles. He dipped the nib in black ink, but couldn’t get started. He couldn’t even place it on the paper. The blank page in front of him was as bleak as the prison yard. What was he doing? He couldn’t write. He was a torturer who knew only how to beat people. He was a half-literate censor who burned the writings of others. He shook his head, but he couldn’t put the pen down.
The wind rattled the thin tin roof. The words in his head glinted like pieces of broken china in the dark. He picked up the dictionary and sped his way through unfamiliar nouns, adjectives, verbs. He took the glistening words and carefully strung them together, then revised them. He couldn’t tell what his endeavour would become.
Ten days passed. Or was it fifteen? Each night he stared into the darkness. He could hear the waves, the restless sea tossing and turning. He couldn’t fall asleep. Dawn neared. A gloomy foghorn sounded from the navy ship in far-away Hakata Bay. Sugiyama folded the piece of paper and slid it into his breast pocket.
Dong-ju was sitting dejectedly at the top of the hill, his arms around his knees. His soul seemed to have burrowed deep inside the shell of his body, and his dark eyes brimmed with despair and resentment.
Sugiyama approached him with the kite and spool he’d made. ‘Yun Dong-ju!’ he called. ‘How long are you going to remain like this? Enough! Get up! Do you want a beating?’
He tried to push away the guilt he felt from knowing that he was the cause of the young poet’s sorry state. With his club he prodded Dong-ju to check that he was all right; his forehead was gashed, his eyes were swollen and his lips were badly cut.
Sugiyama’s gaze wavered. He felt short of breath. His fingers trembled. This silent communication was the most truthful conversation he could offer, more sincere than an overwrought apology.
‘I knew you would walk out of solitary alive,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘Now that you’re out, you need to write.’ He wanted to read Dong-ju’s words once again. He wasn’t alone; all the prisoners — even the guards — hoped to hear him whistle, fly his kite and write their postcards again.
‘How cruel of you,’ Dong-ju finally replied, in a voice as arid as though he’d been buried alive. ‘What right do you have to tell me to write poems? To risk my life?’
‘I don’t. That’s true. You can say I have no shame. That’s true, too. But don’t stop writing poems. You have to stop destroying yourself.’ Sugiyama was caught off-guard by the sound of his own desperate voice.
‘Why?’ Dong-ju spat back harshly. ‘Why shouldn’t I destroy myself, when the whole world is going insane?’
Sugiyama was stumped. That angered him. He couldn’t use his club to force Dong-ju to write poetry; nothing could do that. ‘Fuck!’ Sugiyama spat out. ‘Do whatever you want.’ He raged silently at the cruel god who bestowed on Dong-ju the talent for refined language while taking away his mother tongue. Dong-ju’s gift wasn’t a blessing, it was a curse.
Sugiyama knew he should do something about this state of affairs, instead of just hating it. He should try to repair this vulnerable soul he’d wrecked. He rummaged around in his inner pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Look! Look at this. It’s a poem.’
The words pulled Dong-ju’s gaze like bait. Sugiyama wasn’t quite sure if what he’d written was a poem. But if Dong-ju was right, if the truth could be poetry, then perhaps his scribbling could be a poem, too. His were a few unspectacular lines, but they weren’t a lie. He hadn’t been a guard or a censor when he wrote them; he had been true to himself. ‘I can’t believe it either, but I picked up a pen and wrote this. Do you know why?’ He spoke urgently. ‘I wanted to show that someone like me could write poems. What’s your excuse?’
Dong-ju smiled, fatigued, as though he’d just returned from a long journey. He shook his head sorrowfully, with the grief of a poet who could no longer write, the anguish of a singer who could no longer sing.