He seemed not to hear her, absorbed in his task, his mind busy. He had to think far ahead now. The revolution must never fail again. Nothing must be wasted in petty effort, and that it might not, he and his fellow rebels must join with others like them in every country. The mistake had been that here in Korea they had thought they could win alone against their own aggressors. He knew now that they could not. Revolution must be worldwide. Wherever the most immediate need was, there all must attack, until country by country the people were free. Divided, the revolution would always be crushed by the stronger foe. Nothing could be done now in Korea.
“Never hit a Japanese, even in retaliation.” Yul-chun had sent the advice into every part of Korea, and he had watched it obeyed. Now was not the time to strike, he had said, and he had seen his fellow patriots tortured and some of them die, but had not lifted a hand to strike back. How long it could go on he did not know. Six thousand fresh soldiers had been sent from Japan. Yet less than two months after the Mansei Demonstration, through his printed sheets he had summoned representatives from every province and they had organized again a secret Korean government. They had elected a president, a young man surnamed Yi. There had been meetings in China and in Siberia, too, to support the secret government. Then Yi had gone to America to meet with Koreans there, but Woodrow Wilson had forbidden his State Department to issue a passport to the Korean, saying that a passport to such a person would disturb the Japanese whom he did not wish to disturb now, since he planned to build peace in Asia upon the foundation of Japanese power.
When this news was brought back to him, Yul-chun had bared his teeth in grim laughter.
“Peace? Can peace be built upon Japanese power politics? War is certain — another world war! It will begin in Germany as it did before, but next time Japan will strike at America.”
At this moment he felt her hand on his shoulder. She stood beside him, but he went on working. The sheet was coming through at last.
“When you go to China, take me with you?”
“I am going to Russia.”
“I will go to Russia.”
“Perhaps I am going to China.”
“China, then.”
He shook off her hand and stopped the press. “Where I am going you cannot follow,” he said bluntly.
“Where are you truly going?” she demanded.
“To many places.”
“Where first?”
“To Kirin in East Manchuria. Is that a place for a woman?”
She knew Kirin as well as he did. When the Korean soldiers were disbanded by the Japanese years ago, thousands of them went to Kirin. There they had built a military school to train guerrillas. Since then some had come back, one by one, few by few, to fight in the mountains of Korea and in the city byways. Not only soldiers but many Korean landfolk had gone to Manchuria, a million and more, and these supported the army. Besides these men were those who had gone to China when the Manchu dynasty ended, and they were not a few millions. In every country in the world he supposed there were at least some Koreans in exile.
“I am as woman what you are as man,” she was saying.
He ignored this. She was always stressing their difference — she a woman, he a man.
“From Kirin I shall go on foot through China to the center of the revolution now shaping itself in the southern provinces.”
“I can walk,” she insisted.
“I may even go into Russia, to see what their new techniques are for training the landfolk.”
“I have always wanted to go to Russia.”
He struck his hands together in desperation. “Hanya!” he exclaimed. “You know that I have sworn never to marry. I have no life to give a woman. I have no home.”
“I have not asked you for marriage.”
“Well, then love, if that is what you mean! Such love always ends in quarrels and hatred. I have no time for women, I tell you!”
“I am only one woman,” she said stubbornly.
He exploded. “I will not have myself weakened and distracted by emotions!”
“You are a man. You have desire—”
“I am a man, yes, but not an animal! I can control my desires and I do.”
He looked at her, his eyes hard. “What sort of woman are you that you would force a man?”
She returned his look, her eyes as hard. “I am the sort of woman you men have made nowadays. You tell us we must take our share in the struggle for independence. You say that we cannot be soft, or think of childbearing, or living safely in houses. Yet I am still a woman.”
“Is it your need to pursue me?”
“If you do not pursue me, I must pursue you.”
“I have told you I will not allow myself to love a woman. If a man loves a woman, whether he marries her or not, he loses his freedom.”
“If you cannot love me, then—”
“I am not saying I cannot. I am saying I will not.”
He went back to his work. She stood in silence, watching him.
“When are you going away?” she asked after a while.
In the rattle of the machine he pretended he did not hear her, but she knew his silence intentional and she came close to him.
“If you are going away, when will you go?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Perhaps.”
She stood looking at him, again in silence. She let her eyes linger on his body, on the straight shoulders, the bare brown arms, the strong neck, his clipped dark hair, his thighs, his brown legs bare beneath his upturned rolled trousers, his feet in sandals — how many miles those feet had walked! She loved even his feet and she could have cradled them in her arms. She yielded to the strange sweet enchantment of his body, the attraction of his flesh. She longed to spring at him as once she had seen a female tiger in the mountains spring at her mate, forcing herself beneath him, but she dared not. He was capable of such rage that he could throw her on the ground and trample her. A deep rending sigh shook her and she turned and went away.
He knew when she had gone but he continued steadfastly at his work. When it was finished he bound the sheets into bundles and hid them behind a corner of the wall. With them he left a printed message, unsigned, that he was going away. He needed to say no more. Someone would take his place. Then he took up his knapsack and strapped it on his back and walked away into the darkness, heading north for Siberia.
He had not been in Russia before but he would be no stranger there. When the Japanese occupied his country many Koreans and their families in the north had crossed the short boundary between Korea and Siberia. They had been welcomed and had settled on lands allotted to them, or if they were scholars they had gone to Moscow and Leningrad. Koreans had taken part in the Russian October Revolution and in the Civil War and through the disturbances of the intervention. Lenin himself had taken advantage of the Korean struggle against the Japanese invaders, declaring that in Korea the people understood better than the Chinese the necessity for learning the methods of revolution. Yet Yul-chun had never been to Siberia or to Russia. It was his intention now to go there first and to discover for himself at the purest sources what the new Communism was and how it was succeeding. He would learn the techniques and master the logic. In his knapsack he carried Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and Lenin’s State and Revolution, all translated into Korean. This was not to say he had any love for Russia or Russians, but simply that now when Japan was the enemy, it was time to make Russia a friend. Long ago Taiwan-gun had played the same game, hating both countries meanwhile. Reflecting upon history in the long days while he walked and in the lonely nights when he slept in a village inn or under a mountain rock, Yul-chun remembered well that twice in his lifetime Russia and Japan had met in secret to divide his country between them at the 38th parallel, and they had been prevented from announcing such division only because they feared the Americans and English.