“Why should you build a house?” Sunia demanded. “Our ancestral house is empty of children. When we die it will be yours.”
Yul-han and Induk exchanged looks. How could they explain to his mother that they were different in this generation? Sunia had come to her husband’s house when she was a bride, the house was the home of their ancestors, and where else could she go, or indeed where else would she want to go?
She continued, addressing herself to Induk. “It is because you think I will not have a Christian in my house?”
“Surely not, Mother,” Yul-han said quickly.
But Induk reflected. “Mother, you are right — and wrong. Being Christian does indeed make me different from other young women. You are kind, but you would find me irksome in your house.”
“How are you different?” Sunia demanded, doubtful but determined still to have her own way.
Induk turned to Yul-han. “How am I different?”
He stroked his head, considering. “I have not had time to find out, but different you are.”
Sunia yielded then, complaining privately to Il-han. “She wants to take care only of her husband. Is that a good daughter-in-law? Who brought her precious husband into this world? Who but me?”
“You forget that I—” Il-han began thus but Sunia stopped him.
“Oh you men,” she cried, “you never think whether what you do will produce a child. Yes, yes, you are necessary, else why would a woman spend her life taking care of you? But it is we who create the child and with no more from you than a few drops of water upon an open flower.”
“Peace,” he said with dignity. “Tell me what you want and I will see if it is possible, but do not make me promise that they live with us under our grass roof. These are new times. And I myself do not know whether I want a Christian under the same roof with me.”
The compromise was that Yul-han was to build a house attached to his father’s but with a separate entrance. During the summer months of his great happiness with Induk thereafter Yul-han began the building of his own house. With the help of the one man servant he brought gray stones from the mountains and he cut cedar trees from the forest lands for the pillars to holdup the roof, but to his father’s annoyance Yul-han employed a Japanese roof company to make the roof of tile instead of thatch.
“What,” Il-han exclaimed one day when as usual he walked into the garden to see the new house, “do you buy tiles of the enemy instead of using the good thatch grass from our own fields?”
“Father,” Yul-han replied, not pausing in the work of making a window, “the thatch must be renewed every three or four years, whereas this red tile will last for a century.”
“You are too hopeful,” Il-han retorted. “It is enough to look ahead for a few years. Who knows whether any of us will be alive beyond that?”
“You are too hopeless,” Yul-han retorted gaily.
The house-building was only for the summer until such time as the schools were open after harvest. He must continue his teaching and so must Induk, she at least until she had a child, and in this summer he and Induk lived in a part of the ancestral home, and it was during this time that they both began to understand the sufferings of their people. In the village near which they lived Yul-han heard one night a great wailing of a woman screaming and crying for help. He was working late and alone and was about to break off his labor, for the mosquitoes were singing about his ears, when this voice came to him in waves of agony, borne upon the rising night wind. He put down his plastering trowel and listened.
What he heard were the sobbing words repeated again and again, “O-man-ee, O-man-ee, save me!”
Someone, a girl, was calling on her mother. He listened and then he went to find Induk. She was in the small porch outside the kitchen, pounding his clean clothes smooth on the polished ironing stone. Beside her was a jar of heated charcoal, upon which rested her small, long-handled, pointed iron. He paused to enjoy the picture she made, kneeling on the wooden floor in the light of a paper lantern, the wind blowing her hair as she pounded with two wooden clubs, one in each hand, the folded garment, his shirt as he could see. This wife of his, when she was about her housewifery, could seem the simplest of women. The sound of women pounding the garments smooth was the rhythm and the beat of the Korean countryside.
Without seeing him, Induk lifted the iron from its bed of hot ashes and he spoke.
“A woman is wailing in the village. Something is wrong.”
She put aside the hardwood ironing clubs and the iron. “Let us go,” she exclaimed.
Here was her difference. Where a usual woman would have said it might be dangerous to interfere in another’s troubles and thereby bring down trouble on one’s own house, her thought was only to go and help.
They walked down the road quietly but quickly. The screams had subsided to low moans and these came from one of the village winehouses. Small as the village was, there were three winehouses in it where, before the invaders came, there had been none. These winehouses were places where men came to drink and to seek women. In the deep poverty of the landfolk it was easy to buy girls for such places and few indeed were the girls who dared to rebel when such employment was all that kept their families from starving.
“Let me go in alone,” Induk said when they reached the door of this lowly house of pleasure.
“I will not let you enter such a place alone,” Yul-han declared.
Together then they went in. A slatternly old woman came toward them from behind the gate.
“We are neighbors,” Induk explained, “and we heard someone wailing and we thought you might need help.”
The old woman peered at them from smoke-blinded eyes and replied not a word. Before Induk could go further a young girl ran out of the house, her garments half torn from her body, her hair in disarray and her face scratched and bleeding. A man ran after her. Induk put out her arms and caught the girl, and Yul-han stood between her and the man.
This man did not at first recognize Yul-han since he had lived in the city for the later years of his life and the man pushed up his sleeves and made as if to attack Yul-han.
“Take care of yourself,” Yul-han said to him with calm. “I am her husband.”
The man was taken aback by this and he stared at the two of them.
“Then why are you here?” he demanded.
Induk stepped in front of the girl and it was she who answered. “We heard a cry for help.”
The man looked at her insolently. “You must be Christians!”
“I am a Christian,” Induk said quietly.
The man sneered at her, showing his teeth like a dog. “You Christians! You are everywhere that you should not be. One of these days something will happen to all of you.”
“Are you Korean?” Yul-han demanded. “How is it that you speak like a Japanese?”
The man looked at him sullenly. “I paid money for this girl. She belongs to me.”
The girl now spoke for herself. “I belong to no one. I was cheated! You told me I had only kitchen work to do — not that — ha, I spit on you!”
With this she spat on the man full face, and he bellowed at her and lunged for her but Yul-han pushed him aside and he fell to the ground.
“Do not forget that I am the son of my father,” he said sternly.
The man clambered out of the dust and stepped back. “One of these days,” he muttered. “One of these days …”
He brushed his clothes and turned his back on them and Yul-han led the way out of the gate and to his own house, in silence. He was too prudent not to inquire of himself what they should do with this girl. She was the daughter of a farmer, he supposed, perhaps even of a man on their own land, and he knew that this incident might bring trouble down on him from the capital. The Kim family was too famous to escape notice, whatever they did. Only his father’s continued absence from the city and from the King had made them safe. Now he, Yul-han, had married a Christian, and it could not be imagined that this was not known to the authorities, for they knew everything and penetrated to the smallest village and to the last corner of every house. Even the man at the winehouse might be in the pay of the authorities, for there were many spies among the Koreans, low fellows who would do anything for money.