Yi Hyo-seok, When the Buckwheat Blooms

When the Buckwheat Blooms.hwp Download

A summer market is a bust from the very start; the sun is still high in the sky, yet the marketplace is already desolate, and the hot sunbeams scorch the spines beneath the awnings of the spread-out stalls. The villagers have mostly gone home, and woodcutters who failed to sell linger in the streets, but there's no reason to keep holding out indefinitely for these folks, who'll be satisfied with a bottle of kerosene or a strip of meat. The flies swarming wretchedly, and the prankish gnats, are a nuisance too. Heo Saengwon of the dry-goods stall, pockmarked and left-handed, finally hooked his partner Jo Seondal.

"Shall we pack up now?"

"Good idea. Have we ever once sold to our heart's content at the Bongpyeong market? We'll have to make a killing at the Daehwa market tomorrow."

"Tonight we'll have to walk through the night."

"The moon'll be up."

Watching Jo Seondal count the day's takings with a jingling sound, Heo Saengwon rolled up the wide awning from the post and began gathering the goods he'd laid out. Bolts of cotton and bundles of silk filled the two wicker hampers exactly. On the straw mat, scraps of cloth remained in disarray.

The other folks were already nearly done packing their stalls too. Some quick ones were leaving. The fishmonger, the tinker, the taffy seller, and the ginger seller were all out of sight. Tomorrow the market opens in Jinbu and Daehwa. The crowd would have to trudge through the night for sixty or seventy li, in one direction or the other, without fail. The marketplace was breaking up in disarray like the back yard after a feast, and a fight had broken out at the tavern. Mingled with a drunkard's cursing, a woman's shrill voice tore through. A market evening was fixed to begin with a woman's shouting.

"Saengwon, you can play dumb but I know all about it...... I mean Chungju-jip."

As if suddenly reminded by the woman's voice, Jo Seondal grins crookedly.

"A pie in the sky, that is. With young pups for rivals, how's a fellow to compete?"

"Maybe not. It's true enough the lads can't help themselves over her, but even so - that Dong-i, you know - it looks like he's slyly won Chungju-jip over."

"What, that greenhorn? Must've hooked her with goods. And here I thought he was a steady sort."

"Who can know about such things...... Quit puzzling over it and let's just go see. My treat."

He went along, though not much inclined to. Heo Saengwon was far removed from any affinity with women. He had neither the boldness to lift his pockmarked face and approach one, nor had a woman ever sent him affection; it had been a lonely, twisted half-life. The mere thought of Chungju-jip made his face redden childishly, his feet tremble, and left him startled on the spot. When he entered Chungju-jip's door and ran smack into Dong-i at the drinking table, some impulse made him flare up in anger. It was the sight of the fellow lifting his flushed face and brazenly carrying on with the woman that he couldn't bear. The lad's a regular philanderer, and an ugly sight at that. A brat still wet behind the ears, drinking from midday and flirting with a woman. Going around bringing shame on us peddlers. And he means to make a living alongside us, with manners like that. From the moment he planted himself in front of Dong-i, it was nothing but reproach. When he met the flushed eyes staring back at him as if to say, "Worry's your lot, is it," he couldn't keep from landing a slap on the cheek in the heat of it. Dong-i too flew into a temper and sprang up, but Heo Saengwon, not yielding in the least, spouted everything on his mind - Where you picked up such a wild manner I don't know, but you've got a father and mother too, surely. They'd be pleased to see that nasty sight. Trade's a thing to do in earnest; what's all this about women? Get out, clear off this instant.

But watching the fellow go out endlessly without a single word of retort, he felt, on the contrary, pity. He grew uneasy in his heart, wondering if he hadn't been too harsh, the acquaintance still being so new and awkward. Going too far, he is - though we're both drinking guests, fancy grabbing and thrashing and dressing down a lad young enough to be his own child, no matter how young the lad. Chungju-jip pursed her lips and poured the drinks roughly, but Jo Seondal smoothed the moment over, saying it was good medicine for the young ones. You've fallen for that fellow, haven't you? Sucking up to a greenhorn is a sin. After a good while of commotion. Having found his nerve, and somehow wanting to get thoroughly drunk, Heo Saengwon downed nearly every cup offered him. As the buzz came on, he grew curious not so much about the woman as, consistently, about what would become of Dong-i afterward. There was a corner of his heart bitterly reproaching his foolish state, wondering what on earth he'd meant to do, snatching a woman away at his age. That's why, when - some time later - Dong-i came rushing breathlessly to fetch him, he flung down the cup he was drinking and dashed out of Chungju-jip's, frantic and gasping.

"Saengwon, your donkey's broken its rope and there's a to-do."

"The gnats' mischief, no doubt."

Beast though it was, Dong-i's kindness struck his heart. As he ran down the marketplace after him, his bleary eyes felt as if they might grow hot.

"They're rough little brats, what can you do."

"Lads who torment the donkey so - I won't let them off."

It was a beast he'd spent half his life with. Sleeping in the same inns, soaked in the same moonlight, walking from market to market - twenty years had aged man and beast together. The bristled fur on the back of its neck had gone brittle like its master's hair, and its moist, rheumy eyes ran with gunk like its master's. Its tail, worn short like a stub-broom, no longer reached its legs no matter how hard it swished to chase off flies. There's no telling how many times its worn-out hooves had been trimmed and re-shod. The hooves were past growing any further, and blood seeped through the worn-down shoe. By scent alone it could tell its master apart. It brayed boisterously in a pleading voice and welcomed him.

When he stroked its neck soothingly as one would a child, the donkey flared its nostrils and blubbered its lips. Snot flew. Heo Saengwon had had no end of grief over the beast. The children's mischief seemed severe, for its sweat-soaked body was trembling and the excitement wouldn't easily subside. The bridle had come off and the saddle had slipped too. You wretched brats, Heo Saengwon roared, but the gang had already taken to their heels, and the few remaining children, startled by the shout, edged off unsteadily.

"Wasn't our mischief. He went into a frenzy all on his own at the sight of a mare."

A snot-nosed boy shouted from a distance.

"Why, that little brat's tongue."

"When Kim Cheomji's donkey left, he went and pawed up all the dirt and foamed at the mouth, leaping about like a mad bull. It was such a funny sight we just watched. Take a look at his belly."

The boy shouted in a peevish tone and cackled with laughter. Heo Saengwon flushed before he knew it. To block the many staring eyes, he had no choice but to stand shielding the front of the beast's belly.

"An old thing like that, in a rut - that beast."

At the boy's laughter Heo Saengwon faltered, and finally, unable to bear it, took up his whip and chased the boy.

"Chase me if you can. A left-hander, striking a person."

There was no catching up with a gnat scampering off at a run. A left-hander can't catch even a single child. He gave up and threw down the whip. The liquor too was working in him, and his body burned uncommonly hot.

"Let's just leave. There's no end to mixing it up with those brats. The gnats of the marketplace are scarier than grown men."

Jo Seondal and Dong-i each laid the saddle on their own donkey and began loading the cargo. The sun seemed to have sunk quite a way.

Though it had been twenty years since he started peddling dry goods, Heo Saengwon had rarely skipped the Bongpyeong market. He went to neighboring counties like Chungju and Jecheon, and wandered as far as the Yeongnam region, but apart from going to Gangneung or so to fetch goods, from first to last he made his rounds within the county. On market days every fifth day he'd cross from township to township more surely than the moon. He boasted that his hometown was Cheongju, but it didn't seem he'd ever once gone home to see to things there. The beautiful land and rivers along the road from market to market were, just as they were, his beloved hometown. After trudging step by step for half a day and drawing nearly close to a village with a marketplace, when the rough donkey gave one resounding bray - all the more if it was evening, when the lamplights flickered in the dark - though it was something he always met with, Heo Saengwon's heart, unchanged, leapt every time.

In his younger days he'd thriftily earned and saved up a bit of money too, but the year the baekjung festival opened in town he played lavishly and gambled at cards and lost it all in three days. It came to where he'd have to sell even the donkey, but with a heart-rending affection he ground his teeth and gave up that one thing. In the end there was nothing for it but to start peddling all over again, back where he'd begun. When he fled the town leading the beast, he wept by the roadside, stroking its back, saying how lucky it was he hadn't sold it. Once he started running up debts, any notion of amassing a fortune was off from the start, and he barely managed to wander from market to market just to put gruel in his mouth.

For all his lavish carousing, he'd never once managed to win a woman over. Women were rather chilly and heartless things. His lot grew sorrowful, thinking he was fated to be without such ties for life. The one thing always near to his person was the single donkey, ever unchanging.

Even so, there was one first encounter he could never forget. The single strange affair, with nothing like it before or after! It was a matter from his younger days when he'd just begun frequenting Bongpyeong, but it was only when he thought of that that he, too, felt life had been worth living.

"It was a moonlit night, but how it came to happen, I can't make it out at all even now."

Heo Saengwon means to bring up that story again tonight as well. Since they became friends, Jo Seondal had heard it until his ears were calloused. He couldn't well grow sick of it, but Heo Saengwon, playing dumb, repeated it to his heart's content.

"On a moonlit night, that kind of story suits the mood."

He looked toward Jo Seondal, not out of apology of course, but moved by the moonlight. Though waning, the moon, just past the full, was spilling its soft light abundantly. To Daehwa was a seventy-li night road, over two passes, across one stream, through fields and mountain paths. The moon now hung on the long ridge of the mountain. Perhaps it was past midnight; in a silence as if dead, the beast-like breathing of the moon seemed near enough to grasp, and the bean plants and corn leaves were drenched all the more green in the moonlight. The mountain ridge was all buckwheat fields, and the blossoms beginning to open, like sprinkled salt, were breathtaking in the lavish moonlight. The red stalks were faint as fragrance, and the donkeys' steps were refreshing too. Because the road was narrow, the three rode their donkeys strung out in a single file. The sound of the bells flowed cheerfully, ding-a-ling, toward the buckwheat field. The voice of Heo Saengwon's storytelling at the front didn't carry clearly to Dong-i bringing up the rear, but he wasn't lonely, content in his own refreshed mood.

"Market day was just such a night. The earthen-floored room of the inn was so stifling I couldn't fall asleep. It got to be midnight, and I rose alone and went out to the stream to bathe. Bongpyeong then was the same as now - everywhere you looked it was buckwheat fields, so the stream banks were white with blossoms everywhere. I could've undressed on the stony ground well enough, but the moon was so bright I went into the watermill to take off my clothes, didn't I. Strange things do happen. There, out of nowhere, I ran smack into the Seong family's daughter. In Bongpyeong she was the leading beauty."

"It was in your fate, I suppose."

Answering with an "of course," he merely drew on his pipe a while, as if sparing his words. The savory purple smoke flowed into the night air and melted away.

"She wasn't waiting for me, but it wasn't as if there was some other fellow she was waiting for either. The girl was weeping, you see. I had a notion of it, but the Seong family was then in dire straits, on the verge of packing up and clearing out. With the whole household in such a fix, how could the daughter have no worries? They'd have married her off if only there were a good match, but she said she'd sooner die than marry...... But is there ever a time a girl draws affection like when she's weeping? At first she seemed startled too, but when one's troubled the heart softens easily, so somehow it came to talk between us...... Thinking back, it was a fearful, breathtaking night."

"Was it the next day they bolted off to Jecheon or wherever?"

"By the next market the whole household had already vanished. The marketplace was abuzz with the rumor, and the talk behind the girl's back was rife - that the best she could hope for was to be sold off to a tavern. How many times do you think I combed the Jecheon market? But the girl was gone without a trace, like the spot where a pheasant's been roasted and eaten. That first night was the last night. From then on I took such a liking to Bongpyeong that I've gone there half my life. Could I forget it as long as I live?"

"You were in luck. Such a marvelous thing doesn't come easy. The usual lot is to get some homely creature, have brats, pile up worries - just thinking of it gives me the shudders...... But isn't it hard, too, to live out your days a peddler to the bitter end? I mean to do it only till autumn, then bid this life farewell. I'll set up some little shop around Daehwa and call my family. Trudging step by step year-round in all four seasons is no easy thing."

"Maybe I'd settle down if I met the girl of old...... Me, I'll walk this road and look at that moon till I keel over."

Coming off the mountain path, it opened onto a broad road. Dong-i at the rear came forward too, and the donkeys lined up abreast.

"You're young yet, lad - this is your prime time. You blundered at Chungju-jip and came to that sorry pass, but don't take it to heart."

"N-not at all. I'm ashamed, rather. What use is a woman to me now? Waking or sleeping, my thoughts are only of my mother."

Subdued at the end of Heo Saengwon's tale, Dong-i's tone had grown a notch gentler.

"The words 'father and mother' nearly burst my chest, but I have no father. The only flesh and blood I have is my mother alone."

"Has she passed?"

"There was never one to begin with."

"How can such a thing be, in this world."

When Saengwon and Seondal guffawed boisterously, Dong-i had no choice but to insist, sober-faced.

"I didn't want to say it for shame, but it's the truth. In a Jecheon village my mother bore a child before her time was full and was driven from the house. It's a laughable tale, but that's why I've never once seen my father's face, nor known the place he lives, to this day."

Because a pass lay ahead, the three got down from their donkeys. The slope was steep and it was hard even to open one's mouth, so the talk broke off for a while. The donkeys slipped at the slightest misstep. Heo Saengwon, out of breath, had to rest his legs again and again. Each time he climbed a pass his age told on him. He envied beyond measure the young set, like Dong-i. Sweat washed down his back in a sheet.

Just beyond the pass was the stream. Because the plank bridge, washed away in the monsoon, still hadn't been put back, they had to strip and cross. They took off their trousers, bound them to their backs with their sashes, and plunged into the water in the ridiculous figure of half-naked men. Sweaty as they'd just been, the night water pierced to the bone.

"So, who's raising the child, anyway?"

"My mother had no choice but to take a stepfather and started running a tavern. The stepfather, being a hopeless drunk, is a real good-for-nothing. From the time I came to my senses, the beatings began, and was there ever a single day at ease? My mother, trying to stop it, would get kicked and beaten and have a knife pulled on her - what kind of home was that? Since I bolted from the house at eighteen, it's been this work."

"For a lad your age I'd thought you bore up well, but hearing this, it's a pitiable lot."

The water was deep, rising to the waist. The current beneath was fairly strong, and the stones underfoot were slippery enough to send one tumbling at any moment. The donkeys and Jo Seondal had quickly crossed nearly all the way, but Dong-i, holding up Heo Saengwon, fell far behind the other two.

"Was your mother's home originally Jecheon?"

"Heavens no. She won't speak of it freely, but I did hear it was Bongpyeong."

"Bongpyeong? And the father's surname - what was it?"

"How would I know. I never heard it at all."

"Y-yes, that'd be so."

Muttering to himself, blinking his clouding eyes, Heo Saengwon carelessly set a foot wrong. No sooner had he pitched forward than his whole body plunged with a splash. The more he floundered, the less he could control himself, and by the time Dong-i shouted and drew near, he'd already drifted quite a way. Soaked clothes and all, he was a more wretched sight than a water-drenched dog. Dong-i could carry the old man easily on his back through the water. Wet as he was, his gaunt body was rather light on a sturdy young man's back.

"I'm sorry to put you through all this. I seem to have lost my wits today."

"Think nothing of it."

"So your mother shows no sign of looking for the father?"

"She does say she'd like to meet him once."

"Where is she now?"

"She split from the stepfather and is in Jecheon. I'm thinking of bringing her to Bongpyeong this autumn. If I grit my teeth and earn, we can get by somehow."

"Of course, an admirable thought. This autumn, was it?"

Dong-i's dependable back was warm enough to pierce to the bone. When they'd crossed the water, he rather wished, in a forlorn mood, to be carried a little longer.

"Blundering all day long - what's the matter, Saengwon."

Jo Seondal looked on and finally burst out laughing.

"It's the donkey. I lost my footing thinking of the donkey. Didn't I tell you? That sorry beast actually got himself a foal. With a mare at the Gangneung house in town. Ears pricked up, prancing along jingling - is there anything as cute as a donkey foal? There are times I go round the town on purpose just to see it."

"To dump a man in the water - that's some donkey foal indeed."

Heo Saengwon wrung out his wet clothes more or less and put them on. His teeth chattered and his chest trembled and he was bitterly cold, but his heart was inexplicably light and buoyant.

"Let's hurry on to the inn. We'll light a fire in the yard and rest snug and warm. We'll boil hot water for the donkey too. After the Daehwa market tomorrow, it's Jecheon."

"You're going to Jecheon too, Saengwon?"

"I feel like going for the first time in ages. Will you come along, Dong-i?"

When the donkey began to walk, Dong-i's whip was in his left hand. Heo Saengwon, whose eyes had long been dim as a night-blind man's, couldn't help but notice, this once, that Dong-i was left-handed.

His steps were light too, and the bells rang all the more clear and clear across the night field.

The moon had sunk quite low. [Source: Jogwang, no. 12 (Oct. 1936)]