“The Leper”

. . . to survive, to hang on,
waiting for the new world to dawn,
what can you do but become a leper
nobody in the world would deign to touch?

—From “Windy Evening,” by Kim Seong-dong.

Before I knocked, I took a moment to calm my breathing. But even a couple of deep breaths did nothing to lessen my anxiety, and, to the sound of voices on the other side, I carefully pushed open the thick door.

A female clerk sat at a desk just inside. “How may I help you?” she asked. The room wasn’t as large as I’d imagined. Directly in my line of sight from the door, I could see a man in his forties sitting with his back to the window. He seemed to be the boss of this office.

“I’m here to see the prosecutor,” I said.

“May I ask your name?”

“Uh . . . my name is Kim Youngjin. I got a phone call yesterday.”

“Ah, please have a seat and wait over there.” Instead of the clerk, it was a man sitting next to her who spoke. He appeared to be the prosecutor’s secretary, and perhaps for that reason I found him very blunt and harsh, though I was too preoccupied to take offense at his tone of voice. I sat myself in the chair facing them.

The prosecutor was talking to someone on the phone. Leaning back in his seat, swivelling this way and that, he spoke in a soft voice, as if he were chatting with a close friend. “Legal procedure,” “execute the warrant,” “keep the case open”—those were some of the phrases he used as he discussed the relationship between senior and junior colleagues, interspersed with observations about the quality of service provided by the madam at a certain bar. Aside from the prosecutor’s voice, it was quiet in the office, so quiet that the place felt oddly solemn.

“Are you Kim Hakgyu’s son?” the prosecutor asked as he stood, hanging up the phone.

“Yes, sir. How do you do? I’m Kim Youngjin.” Bowing much lower than necessary, I took his outstretched hand. I noticed that he had just used my father’s name without prefacing it with the title “Mister” and I was struck with the terrifying realization that those three syllables—Kim Hak Gyu—were already being treated as the name of a criminal who did not deserve respect.

“I hear you teach at a school out in the countryside. Sorry to inconvenience you, having to come all the way up here.”

“N-no . . . not at all. I should thank you for meeting with me. It’s been frustrating. All this time, wondering what’s going on and not knowing who to ask.”

Before I sat down, I politely accepted the business card he handed me. His hair was neatly combed back, and he wore glasses, but other than that there was nothing special about the prosecutor’s appearance—at least at first glance. He had an ordinary face, and yet his plain looks did nothing to mitigate my uneasiness and anxiety.

“So—a family of fighters,” he said, looking up from the thick file he’d been leafing through for some time. “Do you often hear from your sister?”

“I’m not sure what . . .”

“Your younger sister, Hyoseon. Would you say she’s made quite a name for herself in the labor movement? The police are looking for her now, and it’s been quite a headache.”

“Is that so? I live out in the country. I haven’t seen her in more than a year. I really had no idea she would get caught up in something like that. She couldn’t go to school because of the family circumstances, but she was always a kindhearted, good girl.”

As the prosecutor listened to my awkward response, a mysterious smile appeared on his lips. “That’s all fine and good,” he said. “But I didn’t ask you to come in to talk about Hyoseon.”

He looked back down at the file and said, “Mr. Kim, it says here that you have two names. Is that correct? In addition to Youngjin, you have another name, Maksu.”

“It’s not another name. That was the name I had when I was a kid. I changed it later.”

“Why did you change it?”

“It was . . . Maksu just isn’t a good name to call someone, is it? My friends would make fun of me because of it when I was young.”

As I made that poor excuse, I had the helpless feeling that this was what everything had inevitably come to. I had tried, all that time, to distance myself from my old name, but now I realized that it was no more erasable than the problems of my father’s past—I couldn’t distance myself from it one bit.

I had first heard about what happened to my father two weeks earlier, when my aunt, his sister, had called the school where I worked. “Kim . . . who? There’s nobody by that name here. It’s not just one or two Kims here, you know. Ah, Mr. Kim Youngjin? Why didn’t you say so the first time? Just a minute.”

It seemed that my aunt had asked for me as Maksu, and it had taken the vice-principal, who answered the call, several tries to finally get my proper name out of her.

Even after I was handed the phone, the voice on the other end was still urgently shouting in a thick Gyeongsang accent.

“Hello? May I speak to Mr. Kim, please? I mean Mr. Kim Youngjin.”

“Kim Youngjin speaking. Who is this?”

“Aigo, Youngjin . . . no, Maksu. Is that really you, Maksu?”

It was only then that I recognized the old woman’s familiar, heavily accented voice.

“We’re getting our money’s worth out of this coffee table.”

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“Auntie? What’s the matter? Where are you?”

“Where am I? In Seoul, of course! But what are we gonna do, Maksu? Your father . . . they came and took him away.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“They came and took him away. Aigo, what are we gonna do? What in the world . . . it’s been more than thirty years . . . it’s like a bolt out of the blue.”

“Calm down, and just tell me what happened. My father went away . . . where to?”

Even in the excitement, I managed not to use the words “took him away.” I’d realized that there were other teachers in the staff room listening, and the vice-principal had been staring at me for a while over his horn-rimmed glasses, blinking his beady little eyes.

“It wasn’t the police, but some agency. Intelligence or National Security or something. It’s been days already, but I didn’t know about it until today. I think he’s finally finished. What are we gonna do now?”

“Just a minute, Auntie. I can’t explain everything right now. Why don’t we talk later, all right? I’ll give you a call this afternoon after school,” I said, and hung up.

“Is she a relative of yours, Mr. Kim?” the vice-principal asked. “She was looking for you by a different name—Kim something or other—at first. In any case, she sounded pretty upset. Did something happen at home?”

“Ah, well, yes. It’s nothing serious,” I replied vaguely.

I returned to my desk and collapsed in my chair. As I took out a cigarette, my chalk-covered fingers were trembling. I’d hated the name Maksu when I was a child. There was something strange about it, and the neighborhood kids would make up nicknames for me, like Moksu, meaning carpenter, or Makgeolli—rice wine. But I didn’t truly begin to loathe that name until I was older, after I learned why my father had chosen it. I couldn’t bear the fact that he had branded me with a connection to his failed past. In my sophomore year of college, before I enlisted in the Army, I went through all the bothersome red tape and finally changed my name.

“How much do you know about your father’s past, Mr. Kim?” the prosecutor asked.

“His past . . . What past are you referring to?”

“Your father was a Communist active in the old South Korean Labor Party. You know at least that much, don’t you?”

So that’s what this is all about, I thought. I focussed on staying alert, on not letting my guard down.

“I don’t know the details,” I said. “But generally. I also know that he was in prison for a while after the war.”

I deliberately gave the prosecutor a little more than he’d asked for.

“You seem to know quite a lot,” the prosecutor said, looking me in the eye. “So then, Mr. Kim, what do you think of his past activities or his ideas?”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry.

“I was born after the war,” I said. “The generation in this country that grew up with a strict anti-Communist education. If I were given a choice between the North and the South—though that’s not going to happen, so I’m saying if—I will obviously choose the South. Why? Because my consciousness, my way of thinking, my life style—everything my life is rooted in was formed under the current system. Most importantly, I’m a schoolteacher who actually gives my students an anti-Communist education, aren’t I?”

I felt a cold sweat run down my back. There was no way to know how acceptable my answer was to the prosecutor. His face still showed nothing. I looked up at him, my mouth parched.

“By the way, what on earth is my father being charged with?”

The prosecutor stopped looking through the file.

“You don’t know yet?”

“No. The person who called me yesterday only said that it was a violation of the National Security Act and that he’d give me the details when we met in person.”

The prosecutor’s secretary, who had been writing something, lifted his head slightly and looked at me. I assumed he was the one who had called me at school, speaking to me in a hard and officious tone. The prosecutor examined my face for a moment in silence and then said, curtly, “Espionage.”

I suddenly forgot what I was about to say. The prosecutor, still expressionless, kept his eyes fixed on me, as if he didn’t want to miss my reaction to what he’d said.

“A-are you telling me . . . my father’s a spy?”

The prosecutor spoke without emotion: “Your father’s been charged with espionage. Spying under orders from the North Korean puppet regime to conduct clandestine operations to agitate against the South.”

I still couldn’t believe my ears. From the moment I had got the news from my aunt about my father’s arrest, my intuition had been that it had something to do with his past. But it had never occurred to me that he might have committed an actual crime. I had assumed that, at most, he might have said something he shouldn’t have while drunk at a bar, or that a detail about his past might have surfaced and now required investigation. I didn’t know, but perhaps, unconsciously, I’d been admitting the possibility that his subversive ideas and past activities might get him arrested or taken in for a few days’ questioning, even now. But espionage? Like everyone else born and educated in this country, it was a word I had seen or heard used all the time since childhood—in the classroom, on posters and banners, in newspapers—but I had never imagined that it would somehow directly relate to me. Until today, it had been a word that had no sense of reality to it. But now I could envisage a newspaper article in the national section, under the gigantic headline “Spy Ring Busted!” It would feature diagrams with arrows pointing this way and that, pictures of my father’s haggard face, and evidence of his spying: coded columns of random numbers, shortwave-radio transmitters. It was terrible even to imagine. I could barely open my mouth to speak.

“Th-that’s . . . just not possible,” I said.

“What makes you say it’s not possible?” The prosecutor reclined in his high-backed swivel chair, his eyes peering at me over the top of his glasses.

“Even if . . . my father had leftist ideas in the past, that was more than thirty years ago. . . . And he’s not the kind of person capable of such a thing.”

“Is that so? Well, then, Mr. Kim, what kind of person do you think could do such a thing?”

“Well . . . it requires a strong personality and a fierce determination, doesn’t it? My father is weak-willed and . . . also pretty much a failure in life. Anyone who knows him will confirm that.”

I remembered the last time I’d seen my father. It was during my winter break. For the first time in months, I had gone to see him in Jongam-dong, where he was living in a single rented room on top of a hill. I’d found him crouching down under the faucet by the kitchen door, his back hunched, washing his underwear by hand. The previous summer, I had hightailed it out of Seoul after finding a position in Gangwon Province at a middle school in the countryside. My little sister, Hyoseon, had been the only one left to take care of my father in our tiny rented room the size of a rabbit hole. But sometime that fall Hyoseon became wanted by the police. She couldn’t return home, and so there was no one left to cook my father’s meals or wash his clothes. I had offered to pay the landlord some money every month to cook and do his laundry, although I didn’t really expect her to take good care of him. With my sister gone, the place was in shambles—it looked abandoned. Blankets left on the floor, clothes scattered here and there, empty soju bottles rolling around in the corners. My father was living alone in that dark, filthy room like an old animal wallowing in its own excrement. There was a foul odor of something rotting. When I realized that the stench was coming from my father, I thought he had started to decompose.

“Earlier, you mentioned your childhood name, Maksu, didn’t you?” the prosecutor said. “I bring this up because it’s what Kim Hakgyu—that is, your father—also said during his questioning. I mean, as proof of his strong ideological convictions. He was so devoted that he named his son after Karl Marx.”

“I know that story, too,” I said, “but don’t you think it was just some foolish dream he had when he was young?”

“Dream?”

“You might say it’s something that he did to make up for his failed life. Don’t you think his impulsiveness and self-importance are proof enough that he’s not fit for something as daunting as espionage?”

“Mr. Kim,” the prosecutor said, a subtle smile on his lips, “that’s a very cold and objective analysis of your father you have there.”

“It embarrasses me to say this, but from the time I was a child I’ve never had any respect for my father. My father never once showed any authority or competence as the head of a household. In our eyes, he was completely incompetent and destructive.”

My face was red. I was filled with an unbearable sense of shame and, at the same time, an anger directed at no one in particular. I realized I had fallen into the wretched position of having to describe all my father’s shortcomings—in my own words—in front of the prosecutor to attest to the fact that he wasn’t cut out to be a spy.

“In any case, the truth will come out in the course of the investigation,” the prosecutor said. “But more importantly, Mr. Kim, how about meeting with your father? I’ll make arrangements for a special visit.”

I looked at the prosecutor, bewildered.

“Actually,” he said, “the real reason I asked to see you was to get you to meet with him. He’s being detained at the moment in a place where no visitors are permitted. But I can set up a special meeting for the two of you.”

“Th-thank you, but . . . ”

“I guess you’re wondering why I would bother to arrange a special visit like this.”

Then the prosecutor summarized for me the incident that related to my father. Recently, an entire North Korean spy network had been exposed and rounded up by the A.N.S.P., the Agency for National Security Planning. The network had been activated by recruiting former members of the old South Korean Labor Party and North Korean partisans, most of them now in their sixties or seventies. Using these feeble old men only proved, once again, that the North was an evil regime that would stop at nothing to unify the Korean Peninsula under Communism. About a decade ago, that network had started gathering and reporting intelligence according to plan, and during the arrests a large amount of irrefutable evidence had been seized—coded number tables, operational money, shortwave radios.

“But . . .” The prosecutor paused. “The problem is with your father, Kim Hakgyu. In every other case, the evidence is conclusive, but for him there’s some ambiguity.”

“Ambiguity?” I said. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

“In other words, there’s no evidence. This current group was making use of local assets that are a legacy of the old South Korean Labor Party, and the suspects are all friends of Kim Hakgyu, but there’s no concrete evidence. What’s more, all the other suspects have singled him out as being the only one among them who had no involvement with this case.”

“Then that means my father is clearly innocent, doesn’t it?”

“But that’s not the problem. The problem is that your father keeps claiming he was also involved.”

“H-how could that be?”

“When the agency first detained your father, they considered him at most to be an important witness. He himself seemed not to know what was going on initially. I can’t talk about the details of the investigation, but as he began to get a general sense of the situation your father suddenly started to claim that he was also a participant. He’s demanding to be charged with espionage.”

It was an entirely unbelievable story. If what the prosecutor had said was true, then my father was voluntarily giving himself up as a spy. But how could that possibly make any sense? I looked at the prosecutor, confused.

“I’m no legal expert,” I said, “but, if the only evidence you have is my father’s own confession, that doesn’t seem to be enough to establish his guilt.”

“That doesn’t necessarily apply to anti-Communist cases,” the prosecutor said. “Just saying ‘I’m a Communist’ is enough to make you guilty. Besides, can you imagine why anyone who’s not a spy would claim to be one? Unless he’s crazy? Anyway, Mr. Kim, do you understand why I’m making special arrangements for you to pay a visit to your father?”

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The prosecutor seemed to think that—whatever the reason for my father’s insistence that he was involved in espionage—a father would at least tell the whole story to his son.

“Th-thank you,” I said. “I’m sure there’s been some mistake. Like I said before, my father’s not the type of person who would be capable of such a thing.”

“That will require further investigation. There’s nothing to thank me for. I just want to know the truth.”

“When will the visit happen?”

“We’ll do it tomorrow morning. Come back here by nine. You’ll go to the detention center with me.”

I left the prosecutor’s office. As I came out of the building, the choking tension in my gut was relieved, and I was overtaken by a wave of vertigo. A mix of snow and rain was coming down, unseasonable for February, and I stood there for a moment, looking blankly, right and left, at the dizzying scatter of snowflakes.

“Maksu! Over here. This way!”

Someone was shouting, waving her arms, by the security guard’s office. I remembered then that I had told my aunt to wait for me at the coffee shop across the street from the public prosecutor’s office building. She must have been standing there in the snow for a long time—the shoulders of her coat were wet and her face was blue from the cold.

“You should’ve been waiting inside the coffee shop,” I said. “Why did you come out here?”

“I was burning up inside with worry. How could I just sit in there?” my aunt said nervously. “You had a hard time. Let’s find someplace quiet and go inside.”

She pulled me along by the arm, glancing everywhere, as if someone were following us. Seeing the degree of her unease and anxiety, I felt inexplicably irritated and angry.

“What are you so afraid of?” I asked. “It’s not like anybody’s coming after us. We haven’t committed any crime.”

“No? And why not? Just staying alive in the country’s been a crime. It’s shameful.”

My aunt was one of my only close relatives. When she was younger, she had been tougher than the average man—there was no business she didn’t try her hand at in the local market—suffering all sorts of ills to raise her three children by herself without their father. Now she was just a pathetic old woman who could no longer hide the signs of age and sickness.

We went up to the second floor of a Chinese place on the street. There was a yeontan stove in the middle of the restaurant, but it was still chilly inside. My aunt avoided the people sitting around the stove and pulled me to a corner.

“So what happened? What did the prosecutor say?” she asked as soon as we sat down. “What crime did they lock your father up for?” Of course, she spoke in an anxious whisper, constantly looking around the room in case people were listening. I briefly conveyed what I had heard from the prosecutor, and the moment I said the word “spy” she turned pale.

“How could this be happening? Aigo, I’m shaking. Your father must have been possessed by some evil spirit.”

“It isn’t time to despair yet,” I told her. “From what I can tell, the prosecutor is determined to see this through properly. Anyway, when I meet Father tomorrow, I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“All right. You go and try to talk some sense into that father of yours. He can’t be so stuck on himself that he’d do something like this and ruin his own son’s future. All my faith is in you, Maksu.”

“Auntie, please don’t call me Maksu anymore. You know I changed my name.”

“Oh, that’s right. Young . . . Youngjin. That’s your name. I used to call you by your old name all the time, and it’s stuck on my tongue. But how can you be so calm, quibbling about your name with all this going on?”

My aunt dabbed at her swollen eyelids with a handkerchief tightly balled in her hand. Her eyes had grown bloodshot.

“Your father’s got such horrible luck. I feel sorry for him. When he was young, he had to be a leftist or some such. He could never rest easy at night, and then he even spent time in prison.

“He’s been living out in the cold for thirty years with that brand on him. I was thinking all that would just be old memories to talk about once you and your sister grew up, but . . . now he’s near seventy and living all alone, no one even to do his cooking for him. Who’d know if they came and took him away in the middle of the night? Before he could even shout out for help? What if he just died where he’s laying? Who’s gonna know?”

My aunt’s words carried with them a sense of bitterness and disappointment regarding me, as usual. To her, I was the bad nephew who’d abandoned his old father to live by himself. Even a fortnight ago, when she’d first delivered the news about my father, she had expected me to respond immediately, but I hadn’t come up to Seoul then.

“How can you be so harsh and unsympathetic?” she’d said.

After that, she had called me again and again to come to Seoul, but I’d kept putting it off with this or that excuse, and now my aunt was finally getting to vent her feelings of disappointment.

“Hate him or love him, he’s still your father, ain’t he? You wouldn’t even ignore an old next-door neighbor like that. The man who gave you your life and name gets dragged away. There’s no word from him in days, and you don’t care if he’s dead or alive? Hyoseon wouldn’t be like that. At least that girl is kind and cares about her father. Even animals recognize their parents and children. How can you be this way?”

Contrary to what my aunt said, I clearly hadn’t been indifferent to my father’s problems. The truth was that I might have been cultivating that concern myself. Sometimes, alone after the school day, I would be reading a book, my ear bent to the silence of the night around me, and I would suddenly be plunged into an unbearable sense of fear and despair.

In the past two years, I had enjoyed peace and quiet in a mountain village too small even to appear on a map. The villagers eked out crops of garlic and peppers on the terraced mountainside, and the settlement was very windy and often covered in dust. The dust was truly awful there. My toothbrush, hanging in the kitchen of my tiny place, was always coated in black grit and had to be rinsed several times before I could use it to brush my teeth in the morning. When I looked out the window during class, I could see dust clouds blowing in over the stream in the distance. They would engulf the schoolyard in a single breath. When I came back to the staff room after class, the first thing I did was use my hand to wipe away the grains of sand that had settled in a thick layer on my desk. Then I went to the sawdust stove—a cylindrical thing made of galvanized steel, with tiny holes punched in the bottom, which allowed the sawdust to slowly trickle down through the holes, as in an hourglass. I always lit my cigarettes by sticking them into one of those holes, and after I’d sucked in the smoke the cigarette would leave an aftertaste, like the persistent powdery smell of sawdust, on the back of my tongue.

I didn’t have a special commitment to being a teacher at a rural school. I had half given up on teaching the unruly country children anything in my classes, and to the locals—mostly farmers with sunburned faces—I was nothing more than part of the dull landscape that surrounded them anyway. But what I enjoyed was the boring and redundant tranquillity that settled on you without your noticing, like the silent trickle of sawdust in the stove. I wanted nothing except that my life not be shaken up by anybody.

The house I had rented was like a poor farmer’s house. It had a shabby, old-fashioned outhouse with a crumbling slate roof and a ceiling so low you couldn’t stand up straight inside. Each time I had to pee, squatting like a woman, I felt a masochistic pleasure, as if I’d been castrated. And yet, somehow, it was all no big deal. There, I was insulated from everything, from the annoyances and clamor of Seoul, from the sting of past memories that I didn’t want floating up again. Most of all, it was a place far away from my father.

“In any case, don’t worry so much,” I told my aunt. “He’ll be out soon, and he’ll be fine. You have to trust that and try to stay calm.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be nice if I could do that? It’s been more than thirty years gone by—what kind of karma is this? All those years living in fear that the ground might collapse under him, and now, finally, this happens.”

My aunt quietly burst into tears in the corner of the Chinese restaurant.

It’s been more than thirty years gone by . . . My aunt’s hoarse voice was still ringing in my head after we’d left the restaurant and said goodbye. In her words was the legacy of fear, of the long years of suffering she was unable to escape, and the scars of trauma that could never be erased. She firmly believed that what was happening to my father now was linked to his past of thirty years ago.

Thirty years ago, my aunt had been abruptly separated from her husband. Immediately after the Korean War, when the order was issued to round up all leftists, my uncle had suddenly disappeared without a trace, and his whereabouts were still unknown. We didn’t even know if he was dead or alive. The other man she had depended on in the world, her only brother, had lived under a stigma for thirty years.

In the past, my family had existed day by day, each one as precarious as the next. Weighed down by debt, short on food, and late with rent and tuition, we always despaired about tomorrow and yet were somehow always able to put that despair off for another day. But my father had no interest at all in his family’s daily struggle for survival, and so the burden of supporting the four of us, including him, fell entirely on my mother’s shoulders. But she never once brought up the issue of money in front of my father.

If for some reason, even unintentionally, she worried about money in front of him, my father’s temper flared, and he would go into a rant, as if he’d gone insane. “Money! Money! Money! Don’t ever say that word to me. What is money, anyway? Money means nothing to me. I’m not a money-grubber. Not on your life! I, Kim Hakgyu, would rather die than live for money!”

If he didn’t want to be a money-grubber, then someone else had to be. I never understood how he couldn’t grasp that simple fact. That someone else was my poor mother. And, of course, the children he had irresponsibly cast into this world, into the wretched underbelly of society, had no choice but to become yet another kind of money-grubber.

Only after I’d grown up did I learn the truth about my father’s past: his embrace of Communism, his devotion to the leftist movement, his three and a half years in prison. But I could not, for the life of me, imagine that someone like him could possibly have devoted himself, even for a day, to fighting for a cause—any cause at all. Even so, my father went out of his way to defy social norms and institutions. When I was about to enroll in college, he opposed it with an anger so fierce it was hard to believe.

“I want to study literature,” I had answered, when my father asked me what in the world I was going to do in college.

“Literature?” he thundered. “You punk! You think you need to go to college to study literature? College or not, what kind of literature are you gonna study if you’re just reading books? That’s for fat asses and their bullshit.

“Literature is something you do while you’re sweating at a factory or at a construction site—anywhere you work for a living. That’s real literature. Maxim Gorky wrote while he was washing dishes at a restaurant. He’s a thousand times better than those writers or professors these days who go on and on about what’s literature and what’s art. Bastards like that aren’t worth the dirt between Gorky’s toes. You punk, we can hardly afford one meal a day, and instead of stepping up to join the struggle of life you talk about college? What are you gonna do with that rotten consciousness, you crazy bastard? Why don’t you just go crawl off somewhere and die?”

At that time, I didn’t know who Maxim Gorky was, and I wasn’t interested. But I found it quite absurd that phrases like “anywhere you work for a living” or “the struggle of life” would come out of the mouth of someone like my father. Of course, I knew it was unrealistic for me to expect to go to college in those circumstances, but the reason I didn’t give up on the idea was my mother. From the time I was little, she had always said to me, as if it were a refrain, “Maksu, I wish you’d become a schoolteacher when you grow up. I don’t want you to be a rich businessman or a famous celebrity. Just be a good schoolteacher. It won’t make you rich or famous, but being a schoolteacher is the best job in the world. Always remember what I said.”

My mother believed that the most secure way for me to survive and succeed in society was to become a teacher. That was the kind of wisdom she had gained as she endured a long life of pain and poverty in a society that treated my father as an incompetent and was hostile to her. It was also her last hope. The best way to submit and conform to this society would probably have been to become a government employee, but for my mother working for the government would have felt not only unsafe but even dangerous. In the end, I went to a teachers’ college in keeping with her wishes. My literary dreams had yet to be realized, but that actually didn’t matter all that much. I had loved to write when I was young because it was a way of escaping my painful reality, and until now being out here in the country, teaching at a no-name middle school, was also a way to keep me more than far enough from reality. My mother, who had so much looked forward to her son becoming a schoolteacher, left this world the spring I started college.

That night, I could not sleep easily. I thought about the small mountain village that I had left. I recalled the familiar scenes as I rode the intercity bus: the mill with the rusty tin roof, the shabby town hall with its peeling paint, the sawmill with piles of red sawdust in the yard—all of it buried in the bleakness of the falling sleet and receding into the distance. Seoul had felt unreal to me while I lived in that village, and now it was the village that felt like a distant and unreal place I could never return to. I was still imprisoned in the painful reality of the past. I thought of my sister, whose whereabouts I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard from her in months. And the last thing keeping me awake was my memories of my mother. She had been tortured for more than ten years by stomach pain. It was so bad that, each time it flared up, she would stagger around the room tearing at her clothes as if she were having a seizure. It would happen several times a day, but she never once went to the hospital and never once took any medicine. The only thing she had for it was baking soda. I didn’t know how the chemistry worked, but that strong powder somehow helped temporarily kill the pain of what was destroying the walls of her stomach. When the pain started, my mother would open the lid of the tin and put a spoonful of baking soda in her mouth. I could still vividly remember, even now, the sound of the tight metal lid of the can opening and my mother’s grimacing face, her eyes tightly shut, swallowing the terribly bitter baking soda.

Eventually, that stomach pain was the cause of my mother’s death. At the hospital, after viewing her X-rays, the doctor said that it was already far too late for anything to be done. A simple ulcer had been neglected for so long that it had developed into stomach cancer. The doctor said it was almost a miracle that she was still alive. My mother was bedridden for two months before she passed away. Every day during those last two months of my mother’s terrible suffering and her desperate struggle for life, my father was continuously drunk, as if he had resolved not to be sober for even a single moment. Smelling my father reeking of liquor as he lay asleep after falling down drunk in a corner of our tiny room, hearing the sounds of my mother’s groans ever increasing in frequency, I gritted my teeth all night and swore to myself a thousand times that I would never forgive him.

The door opened at the detention center, and a guard entered, escorting a prisoner. I almost did not recognize him. It didn’t seem possible that the haggard old man in the baggy, ill-fitting blue prisoner’s uniform, with his hands cuffed in front of him, was my father. The number 32 was printed on the left side of his chest. It wasn’t until the guard practically shoved him in front of the table that he finally noticed me. His stony face twitched with surprise, and after a while he said, “You . . . what are you doing here?”

The prosecutor motioned to the guard to remove the handcuffs. Once they were off, my father sat down.

“How . . . how’s your health?” I barely managed to ask.

“Um . . . I’m all right,” he said.

I had no idea what I should say next. His cheeks were hollow, and a grizzled beard, which hadn’t seen a proper shave in weeks, made his face look older and all the more haggard. But most surprising was my father’s bearing. He was so calm and dignified that he seemed not to belong in the unsightly prison uniform that was draped over him. Instead of his usual hunched and undisciplined posture, he now sat with his chest out and his back deliberately straight. To me, seeing him so different from his usual self was like watching a performance by a bad actor.

“Mr. Kim. Your son is very worried,” the prosecutor said, breaking the silence. “You’re getting up there in years now. Shouldn’t you be thinking of your children instead of filling them full of worries?” His voice was soft, as if he were correcting a child, but it did not mask the coercive tone he would have used to interrogate a suspect. Then he said, “Guard, please pretend you didn’t see this,” and offered my father a cigarette. Getting the guard’s coöperation might just have been in keeping with protocol, but on the other hand it also seemed to be a gesture of kindness and generosity far beyond what my father deserved as a prisoner. But my father didn’t show much gratitude as he took the cigarette and put it between his lips.

“I specifically asked your son to come,” the prosecutor said. “So why don’t you say what you need to say now? Just tell the truth. Lay it all out. Even if it’s something you couldn’t tell us, you can say it in front of your son, can’t you?”

But my father said nothing. He just puffed cigarette smoke into the thick silence.

“Father,” I said, speaking first, “how the hell did this happen?”

Only then did he slowly turn to look at me. “It just did.”

That was all he said. I was speechless, but I also felt something beyond my control rising up from within me.

“I’ve almost cracked the case of where my mom goes when she covers her eyes with her hands.”

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“I was told you’re charged with espionage, but I think there’s been some sort of mistake. If you had to confess for some reason because you were under duress during the interrogation, you can tell me everything now. I know you’d never be involved in anything like that. Something is wrong here. Very wrong.”

“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Not a thing.”

My father spoke in the same tone of voice. He was unwavering, almost arrogant.

“So are you saying you actually were a spy?”

“I was.”

“Even when there’s no evidence, according to the prosecutor?”

“Why would there be no evidence? Everyone they brought in with me is evidence.”

“But even they’re confirming that you’re the only one who wasn’t involved. So why are you insisting all on your own?”

“Can’t you see they’re doing it on purpose? They can see there’s a way out for me, so they’re trying to save at least one of us.”

I was at a loss for words. My father had clearly changed. I had never seen him so confident and self-assured. His tone of voice and his eyes were those of a man full of conviction, so much so that he might have been a martyr ready to suffer anything for his cause. But as far as I could tell this was all ridiculous and laughable. I stood up from my seat. I walked up to my father’s chair and took his hand. “Father, why on earth are you doing this? You can tell them you’re innocent—even right now. The prosecutor will ask for leniency in your case. Is it your loyalty to the others that’s stopping you? If that’s not it, what other possible reason could you have?”

I pleaded with him, holding his hand, but my father kept his mouth shut. Meanwhile, the others—the prosecutor, his secretary, and the guard—were watching us like a cool audience, and I felt terribly ashamed that my father and I were playing out what seemed like a pathetic comedy in front of them.

My father finally opened his mouth to speak. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know what?”

“You just don’t.”

At that I leaped up. I could no longer suppress all the impulses that had welled up in my heart.

“I don’t even want to know what it is. I don’t know what you believe in, but could it really be that important? Don’t you think you caused enough pain and suffering for your family? Why should we have to go through it all over again now because of you? For that wonderful ideology of yours? You can’t possibly have forgotten how Mother lived her whole life and died in misery. Because of what? Why did Hyoseon have to slave away at a factory—and now she has to live on the run? And now you’re saying you want her to wear a brand on her back? The daughter of a spy? Is that what you want?”

“For you and her . . . I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I don’t believe it. You’ve never once thought about your family. You’re an absolute egotist. Even the ideology you said you followed was just some mirage that had no connection with your life. So do whatever you want. Do whatever your convictions and history tell you to do. Go ahead and be a spy, be whatever!”

My legs were shaking. I felt so dizzy that I thought I might collapse on the spot. But the thing I couldn’t bear was the shame. What kind of disgrace was this? My father sitting there in a blue prisoner’s uniform, and the best I could do in front of him was expose myself in such a childish way. Disgusted at myself, I felt an urge to kick open the door and run outside.

“Lepers . . . ,” my father said, his voice hoarse. “It could mean madmen or just people cursed with leprosy. Either way, they’re untouchables. They’re outcasts who can’t mingle with normal people or healthy people. . . . ”

He went on slowly, staring into space, as if he were delivering a soliloquy.

“When the war ended, suddenly there were lots more lepers. Used to be treated worse than animals, and now they roamed in bands out in the countryside and in the cities. Why their numbers suddenly increased like that after the war, I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure—there were some among them who chose to become lepers. When you think about it, I was one of them. . . . ”

Then my father paused for a moment. He was still staring off into the distance, and there was a strange unapproachable kind of dignity about him. And for some reason the longer he did that the more uneasy I became.

“In the old days, we fought for the revolution,” my father continued. “Then the war broke out, and in the end the Party was defeated, the revolution failed, and the organization fell to pieces. Where did all those people go to and what became of them afterward? Did they become partisans and all die fighting in the resistance—every last one of them? If we wanted to serve the ideology we believed in, we were supposed to stay here and start another long, long fight to prepare for the revolution while we remained alive. But I couldn’t do that. And I couldn’t make a lot of money or provide a comfortable life for my family in this system. Couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that. . . . Just ended up living the life of a leper.”

He paused again and let out a deep sigh.

“How much longer have I got to live? I know it’s a terrible thing to do to all of you . . . but I made up my mind. Not to die having lived my last days as a leper. That’s all I’ve got to say. . . . ”

He didn’t open his mouth again, and so the room was left in an oppressively heavy silence.

“S-so what are you saying? You’re going to stop being a leper now? By letting yourself be charged with espionage? That’s your idea of escaping a leper’s life? You think that’s the only way to redeem yourself for the past? But what does that even mean? Would it really change anything about your past? Isn’t it just some stupid attempt to deny your whole life? I think it’s plain insanity! You’re just turning into a different kind of leper.”

I abruptly stopped my rant. In disbelief, I saw tears flowing down my father’s face. He was still staring off into space, his face gaunt and wrinkled. I couldn’t say anything more. Instead, I felt something like a lump of sadness about to burst upward through my constricted throat. I collapsed into the chair as if all the strength had left my body.

My father didn’t say another word, and I left the room. The prosecutor must have had more questions to ask him. He told me to leave first, and so I had to walk out of the detention center by myself. Before I left, I could have pleaded with the prosecutor to reconsider my father’s case, but I thought better of it. My father was serving time in prison for espionage, a crime of which he was innocent, but in the end I couldn’t say that that would make him any more miserable than he already was.

As I walked alone toward the front gate, I stopped and turned around. I spent a long time looking at the high walls of uniform gray, the watchtower, and the huge boulders and cold gleam of snowy peaks on Inwangsan in the background. And then I continued walking, but suddenly stopped again. Murmurs and mumbling, groans through clenched teeth, someone screaming at the top of his lungs—all manner of sounds, all mixed together, came roaring out toward me like the crashing of waves. But it was only a momentary hallucination. When I looked back, the massive building was still buried in silence, like a tomb. I slowly walked toward the exit I saw in the distance. ♦

(Translated, from the Korean, by Heinz Insu Fenkl.)

This is drawn from “Snowy Day and Other Stories.”