To this Sasha made no answer. The thong of his sandal broke and he stopped to mend it while Yul-chun waited.
And again on another day Yul-chun spoke. “My mind in those days when I was young was altogether engaged in the sorrows of our people. I thought only of our freedom, of our independence as a nation, and I wished not to yield any part of my being to our family or to any claim from the past.”
He said this and waited for Sasha to say that he too had such feelings, but Sasha did not say so. He looked at his father as though he did not know what had been said, as though he heard a foreign language, as though he listened to a dotard.
Yul-chun gave way then to silence. In silence they went except for the small necessities of daily life, and the questions of food and drink and a place to sleep at night were all that passed between the two. Yet every day they walked side by side, or one following the other if the path were narrow, but still together, and every day they saw the same landscapes, the magic of the unchanging beauty of blue sky and sea and gray rock and green field, and the stately procession of the tall and handsome people to whom they belonged. Even the poor, even the beggared, had beauty, and Yul-chun himself saw his people with new eyes. He had lived long among the squat dark people of southern China and he had forgotten how different his own people were, different in the very build of the bone, in the fairness of skin, in the eyes brown, not black, in the hair softly dark, not stiffly black. He longed to tell his son how proud they could well be of their people, how gay they were, in spite of all hardship, witty in their talk, lighthearted singers and at the same time hardworking and thrifty and brave, but he bit back such words, knowing that this, too, the son must discover for himself.
Soon, to his joy, Sasha did one day speak of his own will and not in answer to a question.
“I have grown so used to the flat plains of Russia that I did not know how fine the mountains are. As for the sea, what I have heard is not the half of what I now know by my own eyes.”
They were never out of sight of mountains and seldom out of sight of the sea. They walked nearer to the west than the east, and when they lost the sea for a while suddenly they came upon it again in bay and cove, for the western coast was deeply indented with bay and cove and these were narrowed between cliffs so steep that the tides ran always high.
This that Sasha said revealed to Yul-chun that his son’s heart was alive somewhere in the depths of his being. He could feel beauty, and he was observing what he saw and not walking without seeing. If Sasha could not be won by the natural feeling of father for son, then it might be that he could be won by the strong beauty of his country. Perhaps through love of country other loves could be aroused. For the ability to love, though a natural gift, may be stifled before it can grow, and what had there been in Sasha’s life to teach him love? His mother had died when he was a small child, he had grown up one of many children in an orphanage, and until now his father was a stranger. As for women, he had yet to know more than the clamor of his male impulse. He did not know how to love, or even that he needed love, and his ability to love human beings could only develop when he came to know them.
At night, therefore, when they stopped at some inn or in a landman’s house, Yul-chun did not allow himself to sleep early. Instead he sat with the others and led Sasha to do so with him. In this way Sasha could learn something more about his people than he had by mere trading. More than this, Yul-chun too could learn of what was taking place in the underground in Korea and elsewhere. Thus he learned that Kim Yak-san, the terrorist, was still alive and in China, and he had gathered Koreans in the central part of that country into a volunteer corps against the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists feared this group as revolutionary, and sent them to the front to face the Japanese. Yet many Korean conscripts deserted from the Japanese armies, and helped the Chinese. And he heard that in the heart of China, in Chungking, the city to which the Chinese Nationalist leaders had fled, Koreans had united several factions into one independence society, and Korean exiles came from many countries to join that society and fight the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists welcomed them at last, and a Korean Independence Army was formed.
In Korea itself, Yul-chun heard, the Japanese rulers were using every means to change Koreans into Japanese. With his own eyes he read in newspapers that the new Governor-General, a military officer of high rank, insisted that “Japanese and Koreans must blend to make one harmonious whole.”
“It is impossible,” Yul-chun exclaimed to Sasha.
He threw down the newspaper he had been reading. As he did so he caught a strange secret look in Sasha’s black eyes.
“Why do you say impossible?” Sasha asked.
Yul-chun exploded. “Ask yourself! If it were possible, why do the Japanese need twenty thousand regular police here in our country, and two hundred thousand auxiliaries? Why do Korean workmen get paid only half what Japanese are paid? Why do Koreans cross the Yalu River again as brigands to attack Japanese?”
Sasha shrugged his shoulders. “You make yourself too hot.”
Heat went out of Yul-chun and he felt suddenly cold. “Why do you never call me Father?” he muttered.
When Sasha did not answer, he hid his hurt, saying, “Never mind. It is better that you are honest. It will come. I can wait.”
… They continued their journey southward day by day and there were times, now and then, when Yul-chun felt some hope that he and his son could some day come together in heart and spirit as he took pains to guide their path through those places famous for beauty, the tombs and temples, the castles, and ancient fortresses. Thus while they traveled along the western coast Yul-chun turned aside often to see the ancient tombs, and while they were still in the north he showed Sasha the dolmens made of great flat stones set on rude stone pillars so that they looked like tables for giants. In reality they too were tombs and within each vast structure was the tomb chamber. While he showed the treasures Yul-chun told of the great men of the past who were buried here, and he told of their great deeds and their high dreams and how their lives too were spent in the struggle to keep their country independent and apart from those who sought always to enslave its people and seize its wealth.
Temples Sasha would have none of, nor would he so much as step over the threshold of any temple. The guardian gods in the entrance hall only made him laugh in derision.
“There are no such beings as gods,” he declared, and if a monk came out from the temple he would shout at him rudely. “Are you a man? Or are those women’s robes you wear?”
Yul-chun passed all temples after this without stopping, and soon he found that the fortresses were where Sasha lingered, the stone fortresses of the early days when the hordes of Manchuria invaded and were driven back, the fortresses attached to great old castles, the fortresses of old palaces, all these Sasha studied with lively interest and he asked many questions of wars and victories and when he heard of defeats he scowled and swore that once the present invaders were sent out, never again must other invaders be allowed.
“But how?” he demanded one night when they stopped for the night in a village inn, “how shall we rid ourselves of these invaders?”
He talked easily now with his father, never of himself or of the past, but always of the present and always of their country. The country was winning him, the beautiful country that he was coming to believe was his own. He was still shy with people, but he was ardent with love — yes, perhaps it was love — for the land and the sea and the sky.