WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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Chapter 149: The Story of the Brothers 【Classic of Mountains and Seas】 (1)
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I. July 1934, Older Brother Nineteen, Younger Brother Nine
It was some day in July 1934...
The place where Middle Hamlet in Sebeom Valley had stood was desolate. There was earth. Stones lay upon the earth, and trees were embedded upside down between the stones. A roof floated there, and beneath it was a mudflat instead of a house.
Two brothers were in that mudflat.
“I'm cold... Hyung, I'm cold...”
The younger brother was crying. Nine-year-old Han Bada clung to the side of his older brother, Han San, shivering.
July.
In the hottest weather on the peninsula, the younger brother shivered.
“Hyung... I, I miss Mom. I miss Mom and Dad...”
Han San sat blankly.
He thought of his father. His father, who had lifted Bada onto the roof. His father, who had lifted Mother up, then him.
And the nineteen-year-old thought of his father, whose time had run out.
‘Why me?’
Of course Bada had been lifted up. He was nine. Of course Mother had been lifted up. She was his wife.
But Han San was nineteen.
‘Why me?’
He thought back to that time.
He shouted that the water was coming. While Father lifted Bada up, he climbed onto the roof by his own strength. Father below and he above lifted Mother up together. Then they reached down for Father. The whole family joined forces to pull Father up.
Before his time ran out.
If they had done that, Mother too...
His thoughts stopped there.
He looked at the site of their home to think of something else.
But Mother was there too. Mother going to fetch water. Mother pushing open the kitchen door. Mother lifting and moving an earthenware pot with her bare hands. Mother, whose hands were large and thick.
[ Be careful. It's hot. ]
Weren't Mother's hands hot too?
He had never asked anything like that.
His cheeks became wet.
“Raise your head.”
A person's voice reached him.
Han San looked up. White hems fluttered before his eyes.
The man wore a durumagi. In this world yellowed by mud, that durumagi was strangely white.
He held a folding fan painted with a landscape in one hand. In the other, he held a cigarette.
That cigarette was placed between Han San's lips.
Nearby, someone struck a match. Someone lit the cigarette.
Han San inhaled.
“Cough!”
The smoke went down, and his throat tore inside as he coughed. His chest hurt every time he doubled over.
The man in the durumagi looked over the empty plot and asked,
“Who was the one who looked after Lord Han?”
A man dressed in animal skins stepped forward.
“That would be me, sir.”
“Was this how he lived?”
“As you know, sir, Man-seok hyung's stubbornness...”
The man in animal skins spoke at length. Something about his leg. How he had brought money and rice. This and that.
Han San only watched the cigarette between his lips. Every breath made his chest burn with pain.
It was because of the cigarette, Han San thought.
He knew that was not true.
The man in the white durumagi said,
“So this was how he lived.”
Then he said nothing more.
Han San said nothing either.
The cigarette grew shorter. He did not think to remove it. His lips grew hot.
The man in animal skins took the cigarette from his mouth.
“Will we take them?”
Their gaze went from Han San to his younger brother. Bada still would not release his brother's clothes.
“Let us respect Lord Han's wishes.”
The men left.
Han San did not watch their retreating backs. He did not ask who they were. At the time, he could not even properly process the fact that they knew his father's name.
He merely touched his lips.
The skin burned by the cigarette peeled away.
“Hyung...”
Han San turned around. Bada was shaking.
His younger brother was crying.
I have to do something.
He had already seen what he needed to do. Father had shown him. Not with words, but through his actions. With the hands that lifted his family onto the roof. With the back that had carried home a swollen roe deer.
He had to protect his family.
If he was a man.
His father had been a man of few words.
“Bada, let's go.”
“Where...?”
“Anywhere.”
His younger brother looked up at him. His older brother was smiling.
Only the younger brother saw what kind of smile it was.
Carrying Bada on his back, Han San walked for fourteen hours to Inje town.
They entered an empty barn whose owner had died in the flood, and he repaired its roof. He did not know how to do that either. The first pile of grass he laid down slid away before dawn even came.
When he changed its direction and weighed it down with stones, the wind finally eased somewhat.
“This is our home.”
That was how the older brother became the head of the household.
There was no qualification exam for becoming one. If there had been, Han San would have failed.
He did not know how to cook rice. He did not know where to get rice.
The hardest part was that even if he managed somehow today, tomorrow would still come.
Had Father been like this too?
Since his father was gone, the older brother had to find out.
He had no choice but to learn the things he did not know, one by one.
He was lucky while he learned. He found grain flour that had washed in. Though it had been carried by the flood, it was completely dry and could be eaten at once.
Han San did not know the connection between that luck and the distant sight of the white durumagi and animal skins passing by. He would need another lifetime before he learned it.
The flood submerged half of Inje. That gave the other half work to do.
Shoveling out mud, tearing down collapsed houses, building new ones in empty spaces.
Work required people, the authorities directed those people, and in those days, the military was quickest at putting people to work.
Sawada Kazuo, commander of the Inje military police detachment.
He was a one-eyed man. He used people like dogs and gave more food to dogs that barked well and bit well.
“Commander. I'll do anything. Please, give me work.”
“Chosun[1] bastard.”
Sawada's one eye swept over Han San from head to toe. Crunch. The walnuts in his hand ground harshly against each other.
“Pull it out.”
Sawada pointed with his chin at a bloated corpse in the muddy water.
A sign for some sort of medicine shop was stuck in the mire, so the dead person seemed to have been a herbal medicine dealer. Now, after rotting in water and softening beneath the blazing sun, the body was mushy like a pile of shit.
No matter who someone had been in life, after death they became a pile of shit.
After three attempts, Han San pulled it all out. The softened corpse had come apart in his arms, dripping down in pieces. He vomited the first time. The second time, he had nothing left to vomit. The last time, he did not vomit.
While the military police and constables covered their noses and their assistants fought back nausea, Sawada Kazuo snorted again.
“You're a Chosun bastard with some use, at least.”
Han San bowed his head. From that day on, Han San was Sawada's dog.
He recovered corpses. He shoveled mud. Every night, he polished the military policemen's boots. He did twice as much as everyone else, and three times as much whenever Sawada passed by.
He was given that much more food.
Han San returned to the barn and set the food before his younger brother.
“Eat.”
“What about you, Hyung?”
“I ate.”
His younger brother ate. His older brother watched. Then he fell asleep.
People cursed the older brother.
“Look at that bastard. He's happily licking Jap boots.”
“Why's a young man living like that? Doesn't he have any shame?”
“Ptooey. Son of a bitch.”
The older brother paid them no mind. He had no strength for it. He spent all his strength working. Work brought food. Paying attention to what others said did not.
The younger brother grew up watching his older brother.
Sawada did not treat Han San as a person either.
“Chosun bastard! Get over here.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“You're late.”
A boot flew at him. The older brother took the blow and smiled.
“I'm sorry, Commander.”
“Don't smile.”
“Yes.”
The older brother stopped smiling.
Sawada instead despised the Chosun bastard who changed his expression at his command. A man without guts. Yes, sir, I am rather gutless, the older brother said with another smile and a bow.
If he groveled, there was work. If he worked, there was food. If there was food, he could feed his younger brother.
So the older brother paid no mind to people's scorn and mistreatment.
There were exactly two things that he did pay mind to.
“His mother and father probably died licking Jap asses too.”
“His little brother will grow up to be a son of a bitch just like him.”
On those days, the younger brother saw his older brother throw punches.
Those who had been hit flew into a rage. They said they would report him to the police constable post they normally cursed. They said they would inform the military police and cut off his source of food.
The older brother paid them no mind.
No. In truth, he did.
When night came and his rage cooled, the older brother trembled with his head in his hands. What if they called him to the police constable post? What if they threw him in a cell? If something happened, his younger brother would go hungry.
He should have endured a little more.
The younger brother watched him like that. At first, he was anxious too, but soon he put his arms around his older brother's shoulders.
“Hyung, it's okay.”
By then, his older brother had fallen asleep.
“Everything will be okay.”
And it was.
The man in animal skins who had come to their home site walked arm in arm with the people Han San had beaten and spoke to them about something. The beaten people no longer talked about the constable post.
The older brother did not see it, but the younger brother who remained in the barn did.
He watched while looking at his older brother.
II. 1938, Older Brother Twenty-Three, Younger Brother Thirteen
Four years passed.
Han San had more or less learned how to live. If he took the qualification exam for being head of a household now, he would probably pass.
He moved from job to job.
As it turned out, Sawada could not even take care of himself. Looking after that failure who could not get promoted was not enough to make a living.
A Chosun dog needed side work, and fortunately, there was no shortage of jobs.
His younger brother was largely responsible for helping him discover that.
“Hyung, they're looking for laborers over there.”
One day, Bada said this after reading a noticeboard.
Han San, who could still only read a little Hangul, was surprised.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Here and there.”
Bada gathered in his head the letters he picked up from newspapers, signs, and scraps of paper. After getting hold of a book somewhere, he went around asking people about what was inside. He paid no mind when people said a little beggar was putting on airs.
“You can read that too?”
“Yeah.”
Bada could do arithmetic too. Han San was cheated less often.
Whenever his younger brother read Japanese for him or worked out numbers, Han San rubbed his head hard.
The older brother wanted to send his younger brother to school.
He took whatever work he could find.
He worked in town, and when he had free time, he went into the mountains. The knack he had gained by following his father as a child returned to his body after his father vanished.
He dug up medicinal herbs and picked fruit. Sometimes, he encountered animals.
When he returned to town and mentioned this while polishing military police boots, Sawada's adjutant said,
“Can you guide us?”
That was how he sometimes led idle military policemen into the mountains.
One day, before a herd of wild boars, Sawada's adjutant scratched his head.
“When I shoot, I can't hit a thing. Chosun man, why don't you try?”
“Is that all right?”
“We came all this way. We can't go back empty-handed. Go ahead.”
It was an age when people lived very carelessly.
There was a reason Sawada, who tried to do things properly, was called an oblivious bastard and a failure who could not get promoted.
“Keep it secret from the Commander.”
“Of course.”
Fortunately, that failure was not there. So the Chosun dog was not especially loyal either.
Han San took the gun the adjutant handed him. A Type 38 infantry rifle. It was then that Han San realized it was the same kind of gun his father had fired at a tiger.
The gun quickly became familiar in his hands.
The military policemen Han San guided on hunting trips increasingly returned with game. In time, he also learned how to prepare it.
Many military policemen hunted purely for sport, so Han San was often able to keep everything other than the trophy pieces and the most tender cuts.
The older brother came to like the mountains. He could feed meat to his younger brother there.
Whenever he had time, he pulled a rickshaw[2].
Han San possessed natural strength. Among rickshaw pullers, people said, “That Han bastard's rickshaw feels like it's being pulled by an ox.” It was not a compliment.
An ox that worked the fields ruined its bones. The more someone used strength beyond their limits, the more those limits wore away.
The younger brother silently watched his older brother grind his body down to dust to survive and feed him. He barely spoke as he watched.
The younger brother who had run through mountain villages with bright eyes, fascinated by everything he saw, grew into a quiet child.
That only made Han San want more to send him to school.
Han San met Ham Byeong-cheol again when that desire reached its height.
“Byeong-cheol hyung?”
At an inn by a crossroads in Chuncheon, Han San spoke as he set down a guest's luggage. A man in a suit examining a pocket watch outside the inn raised his head at the call.
The man who had come on Chuseok in 1933 and borrowed five won. His mother's relative who had said he would certainly repay this kindness.
His older cousin, Ham Byeong-cheol.
“Hyung! Byeong-cheol hyung! It's me, Han San!”
He fell to his knees before people and said that his mother had died.
Above all, because he was an older brother, he said he wanted to send his younger brother to school.
After a long while, his older cousin sighed.
“Right. Auntie helped me too. I have to repay what I received.”
Ham Byeong-cheol opened his wallet.
It was filled with ten-won banknotes. Han San had never seen so much money. Even Sawada's wallet had never been that thick.
Ham Byeong-cheol flipped through the money with his fingers.
Han San's heart beat faster. At last, he thought, he could send his younger brother to school. The more ten-won notes Ham Byeong-cheol flipped past, the more respectable the school his younger brother would attend became.
Ham Byeong-cheol selected different money from beyond the notes he had flipped through.
Four one-won notes.
He placed two fifty-jeon coins on top.
“Here. I borrowed exactly five won from Auntie back then. I've repaid every last bit.”
The wallet snapped shut.
“Live well.”
Ham Byeong-cheol, relieved to have cleared the debt, spoke in a refreshed tone and entered the inn.
The inn door closed. It did not open again.
The older brother could not send his younger brother to school.
It was night when he returned to Inje. The younger brother saw his older brother come back.
After hesitating briefly, he approached and embraced his shoulders.
“Hyung, it's okay.”
With his head lowered, the older brother opened his clenched fist. Together, the older and younger brothers smoothed out the crumpled banknotes and coins.
“Everything will be okay.”
They believed it would be.
Footnotes:
[1] Chōsen was Imperial Japan's official name for colonial Korea, and the term often carried contempt when used by Japanese authorities.
[2] A rickshaw is a light two-wheeled passenger carriage pulled by a person.
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