Chapter 17:Lying on the Roadside Grave

17
Lying on a Roadside Grave, 1959


Dano was bizarre. He was an abnormal sort of a student at a normal school whose major function had been to produce all-round students complete with the pedagogical capabilities to teach elementary school pupils. He was an odd man out at Andong Normal School. He could neither catch up with both required and elective subjects at school nor could stand the run-of-the-mill classroom activities. He was distracted, absent-minded and obsessed with something else: reading randomly and possessed of illusionary thoughts.

Dano knew very well that he was indebted to many others who had molded him up to that time, particularly to those who had been providing the boarding and lodging conveniences during his education. He owed the kindnesses and considerations to his homeroom teacher Mr. Tschiang at the senior class of the middle school who had arranged to lodge Dano and two other students at his father's house during the entrance exam period. He also owed the lodging amenities to his immediate uncle on his mother's side.

Uncle Lee and his wife were financially pinched themselves, but the aunt and uncle were generous enough to help Dano out by allowing him to lodge at their house, such as it was, for nearly a year. Uncle Lee had lived a meager life as a low tax official at Andong County Office, with his residence of two rooms rented from Mr. Kwon, a local rich.

Dano's room, which was attached to the uncle's like conjoined twins, had two first cousin brothers as his room mates. The immediate next-door room had five residents--uncle, aunt, and their three daughters as roomers. Any member of the adjoining rooms was able to get across to the other room through a wall slot by crawling.

Andong-eup, the capital of Andong County at the time, was the greatest place Dano had ever stepped on. There were no bullying pranksters or ijime anymore. Two hundred co-ed peer students of Andong Normal School, of whom there were 50 girl students, were friendly and cooperative. The school had no boarding system, so the students used private boarding houses at a monthly payment, or had to cook on their own at rented rooms.

The husked rice and barley, which Dano had brought from his house for his own cooking, were always in short supply. He was always hungry. Dano more often than not took a few friends of his--The Virtuous Chang and the Prosperous Park, etc-- for ransom to pay his gourmet, the red bean chrysanthemum breads. "Haben Sie Geld?" Dano would ask mischievously of Chang, in clumsy beginner's German, then Chang took Dano by the hand to a roadside shack baking the chrysanthemum breads.

Dano made efforts to bail himself out of financial troubles. He started delivering morning newspapers, but the delivery office chief of a vernacular newspaper showed him the door on the grounds of his tardiness and misdeliveries. Some of his friends went to great lengths to give me Dano the job of teaching English, whose suggestion Dano himself snubbed because he was not so versed in the language that he could teach the others.

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I was well aware that I myself was reputed or rumored to be very good at the language in the town, which was a small one in a strict sense of the word, probably because of my vainglorious and presumptuous habit of bringing the TIME magazine with me for ever. I loved the magazine, its design, its brilliant headlines and enlightening stories indeed, but my long-lasting accompaniment of the magazine during my high school years was a hoax. Which meant that grab holding the prestigious magazine by the hand did not guarantee my true love.

The dandy place, on which the Time magazine did pride itself on its presence, used to be School Book Store. The book store, lined with banks and fashion stores, was located in the central quarter of the riverside town of the Nakdong River. The bookshop boasted of tens of thousands of glamorous books, the covers of which I used to grope with lusty eyes.

I then used to leave the place for second-hand bookstores, located on the outskirts of the town, where I shuffled through the covers and content pages. The one proprietor of the place, whose plump body wedged itself between disheveled piles of dusty books, was especially curious about and amenable to my frequent visits. He was always willing to lend his books to me Dano for an extended period of time at a meager price. He would say to me Dano, "Normal is O.K."

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I had restless nights. Red eyes would throw me curseful blood-shot stares at me, getting me awake startled. I would then sit up absentmindedly for a while or get out of the bedding and pace around, concerned about the wellbeing of my parents.

With no means of electronic communication at that time, I, so missing my parents and worried about them, on a certain summer Saturday afternoon, with the last train heading south for Danchon, an intermediary train station for my home, no more in operation, took the walk for home, for the distance of about 30 kilometers. It was far into the night, almost past midnight, when I got to Gowoonsa Temple. It was mildly drizzling. The valley trail, low and shallow, which was past the temple and bending toward Jeomgok, was shrouded with mists.

Graves were lined on both sides of the valley hills from across the trail. It was right time ghosts would come out at their haunts. I felt short of breath, with perspiration welling down the cheeks, and felt myself restrained by the one. I could not move a step further, so I naturally had to turn around and get to an immediate grave. I then reclined on the grave mound, as if a quiet resting place of a certain silent soul had become a big human pillow of mine. I felt so comfortable and so relaxed. "Hello, there!"

Awoken by their son's unexpected small time appearance, my parents couldn't be more astonished. Flabbergasted was the right word for the scene. They got flabbergasted at the shape I had been in. Drenched to the skin mixed with sweats, exhausted with hunger and dehydration, their son looked like fainting in any moment. My grandma Mrs, Euiseong Kim hollered and issued orders, and the rest of the family raced. Me Dano said, "I am fine." I went to the house well, got undressed and cleaned. After a little while I got nourished, too. "How come?" they wanted to know. "I missed home so much!" I said, beaming mischievously.

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Bright boys and girls from ten more counties came to the Normal and Tiang Huon was the best and brightest of them all. He was from a northern county of Yeongju. He was tall, shapely and handsome. He was such a handsome kid on the block that the pretty coeds could blush. He was a brilliant student, too, so brilliant a student that he started and finished first of the entire class. Dano, who isolated himself on a bench of the school pond and on the stairs leading to the music room, used to throw an envious glance toward Tiang Huon who, surrounded by his supporters, went by chattering away. On the Fourth of July, 1959 on his second year, Tiang Huon, then the President of the Student Body, came to me Dano one day before the occasion, asking me to read the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest speeches of the world by one of the greatest presidents of the United States, for the students. I mounted the school pulpit and read the famous address beginning with, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition, that all men are created equal..." That was the first and only occasion that I had talked to the Normal School students in public.

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I thought to myself that the coed girls in school uniform were handsome, but I was averse to the female human species in general. Afraid of them might have been the right word. Whereas I was somewhat curious about the adult women who had once called on me in another virtual reality called dreamscapes, hankering for the union with him, saying, "Live with me," I in actuality shied away from any contact with the girls whenever I ran into them. There was not a girl who I talked to during my school term. The only two extreme prototypes of women, who were the whining and weeping mother type and the hollering and nagging grandmother type, rankled in me. I was virtually ignorant about the human condition that there existed benevolent categories of women in between.

I might have heard the whispers ("There goes English!") traded behind my back and I might have savored every minute of them. And it might have been the self-consciousness posing as pride that my shallowness of the low linguistic capabilities could be bared in the course of my tutorship when I had declined the job offer. And I might have been hiding and running from any chance that my vulnerabilities would be exposed. I might have been the very person of mean-spirited cowardice which caused my vainglorious snobbery.

My extreme escapism from women found expressions in misogynistic interpretations of their considerations toward me. The one otherwise clinical episode of his mistaken notions was that one of his high school landladies had once seduced him into "sleeping beside her", taking advantage of the "god-sent" opportunity that her husband and the rest of her family had been away from her home. "Come over and sleep here. Your room is not aptly heated," she had said, with her voice trembling. I had found myself grabbing the doorknob, with cold sweat running down and shaking all over. A lone flashback was that I was not sure whether it had been a reality or a nightmare. Sure, it had been a bad dream.

My tardiness of classroom activities and loose financial practices incurred me the disaster that I could be suspended from graduation. The last grade at the senior class had been rated "out of consideration", which meant that I had been marked at the dangerous bottom which would make my graduation impossible. However, my homeroom teacher Koo had pleaded with the Graduation Assessment Board to bestow mercy on me on condition that I would pay the default balance amounting to tens of thousands of won to the school stationery office.

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On retrospect decades later, on the recurring scenes, chapter by chapter, I feel I am indebted to hundreds of folks who've showered me with all the gamut of considerations, hospitalities and benefactions ranging from lodging and boarding conveniences to the salvation of a pathetic lot from the pit of despair and doom.

They'd extended hands. Generous, indeed. I appreciatively recall like yesterday the warm soft hands which had taken me to the roadside bakeries to feed a starving friend. I extend millions of thanks to my friend Jonghua at Yecheon who had stopped by at the right time.