The man grins, seeming to enjoy our surprise.
“We are the resident foreigners,” he says. “All the other monks are Korean.”
“Oh?” I say.
“Yes. We’ve got hermitage duty this week, so at least we can avoid the tourist crowd at the main temple.”
I nod.
“The inn rooms are quite small,” he continues, “feel free to take as many as you need. The place is empty tonight. The couple brought a tent, and the ... other one left earlier.”
He shudders slightly at the mention of “the other one.”
“Thanks,” I say.
I am getting pretty good at single word replies.
He gestures to a small box by the door. “You may give a donation, if you wish.”
His face has that expectant look people wear when they’re seeking an opening to talk about themselves. Well, everybody has a story. Why not hear this guy’s?
I open with the standard question: “How long have you been in Korea?”
“About six months,” he replies, “mostly at this temple.”
He goes on to say that, after doing a lot of drugs in college (I’d been right about that) and nearly killing himself thereby, he decided to follow the path of Buddhist aestheticism. His quest took him first to the campus meditation group, then to Japan, and finally Korea. The first Korean temple he approached had not been very receptive.
“I’d like to go to the meditation hall this afternoon,” he said.
“What do mean?” a senior monk upbraided him. “Six years! You haven’t even read our sutras.”
“They’re written in Chinese,” he protested. “I can’t read Chinese.”
“Well, there’s a start.”
So, he came here where the attitude is more tolerant toward foreigners. I know what’s coming next – a lecture on Zen philosophy, maybe even an invite to a meditation session. Not that I object to Eastern religion, I’ve even made a study of it. But by trying to immerse myself in Oriental thought, I’ve come to realize what a Westerner I am. I interpose a change of subject.
“This other guy who was staying here,” I say, “he’s gone back down the trail?”
“No,” the monk replies. “He headed deeper into the mountains. He said he wanted to catch a glimpse of North Korea.”
Kathy is already edging toward the door, and I swiftly join her. We make a polite, bowing exit. I drop some cash in the donation box.
Outside is dark and clear, magical. Huge mountain peaks tower like cathedral spires, restricting the stars’ illumination to directly overhead. I take Kathy’s hand again, hoping for a romantic stroll and intimate conversation. For a while she seems to want this, too, but soon she turns our steps toward the inn.
“I’m really beat, Tyler,” she says. “I need to get to bed.”
The campfire is down to dying embers. The Captain and his wife have apparently retired, thank God. The inn rooms are scarcely more than cubbyholes, Spartan accommodation intended for a single person. We select adjacent chambers.
I am pretty beat myself and prepare to hit the rack. I squirm out of my clothes and spread a clean T-shirt over the rice-hull pillow. The place feels like a morgue drawer, and I leave the lattice door half open to help dispel my claustrophobia. I am almost instantly asleep.
Later, in the deepest time of night, I jerk awake – cognizant of a presence at my door. The Captain! A vision of him lunging upon me with a bayonet shoots through my terrified brain. I attempt to cry out, but a finger presses against my lips, silencing me.
I can’t see in the cold darkness, but I recognize Kathy’s scent, her long hair and soft body. She slips under the covers and cuddles up spoon fashion with her back towards me. She wears a flannel nightgown, unbuttoned in front. I slip a hand inside, and she turns towards me, shedding the gown in one smooth motion.
She presses above me, her body shielding me from the cold, and we move in perfect rhythm.
13: The Departure Begins
When did the unruly sea
Suddenly quieten down
And freeze into these precipitous peaks
Vast, sublime, imposing?
– Mountains Crimsoned with Flowers, Li Ying
Kathy is gone when I awake, and for a moment I wonder if I have simply dreamed her into my lonely bed. A trace of her cologne still lingers, though, along with a smudge of eye makeup on my T-shirt pillowcase. Her love fluids, dried to silky sweetness, attend my body.
She is already prepared to leave by the time I roll out to greet the day. The Captain and his wife are gone with their tent.
“Good morning, Tyler,” Kathy says. “Sleep well?”
Her voice carries an edge of forced cheeriness.
“Very well,” I say.
I almost add “thanks to you” but hold it back. It doesn’t seem proper for me to mention the night’s passions, somehow. Kathy will mention them herself when she thinks appropriate.
I almost say, “Is something wrong?” but hold onto that as well.
Kathy acts friendly and polite, but with a nuance that keeps me at a respectable distance. When I try to put an arm around her waist, she moves away – not in an offended manner, but more like she suddenly has to get someplace else, to check her luggage or something.
Of course I am disappointed, but what can I do? Our relationship can develop only on Kathy’s terms. I feel awkward, disjointed, as if I’ve just tumbled out of a hot romance novel into a humdrum travelogue.
Kathy leads the way down the trail, bounding with the surefootedness of a mountain goat. I lumber carefully behind, favoring my ankle. I realize that my departure from this phase of my life is now beginning. From this point on, every step I take is another one on the way out of Korea. I feel light, transitory, an en route person who isn’t really here.
About half way down, Kathy pauses and says, “Take my picture?”
“Sure,” I say.
She poses midstream atop a large boulder. I snap one picture of her standing hands on hips and another, much sexier, one of her reclining, fingers stoking her long hair.
We trade positions and she takes my picture. When she returns the Pentax, it radiates a curious warmth. I think it would be nice to use the self timer and photograph us together, but Kathy doesn’t suggest this, and I don’t want to make any presumptions, “get my expectations up” as she phrased it.
After breakfast at the little waterfall restaurant, we leave the park and get on a bus heading south. We part company in Kangnung where Kathy catches another bus for her town. I offer to accompany her, but she declines.
“Goodbye, Tyler.” She pecks my cheek. “It was really fun. Maybe we’ll meet again someday – you can give me the pictures then.”
“Sure, Kathy.”
She glances around, to see if anyone is watching, then gives me a longer kiss on the lips, pressing herself against me. Then she is gone.
I ride back toward Seoul through some of best mountain scenery in the country. I scarcely notice the vistas. Is this to be my fate, I wonder, to have one spectacular woman after another come into my life only to leave again – dumping me in a tea room, a bus station?
At least Yun Hee made a clean break of things, but why this mystifying warm / cool treatment from Kathy? Friends, antagonists, lovers, just friends again.
Another voice tries to surface in my thoughts, but I oppose it as it doesn’t confirm my self-pitying mood. Eventually, by the time I reach Ichon, I am ready to listen.
“Vife, children? Plenty of time later,” my Grandfather Alois says in his thick Hungarian accent. “See de vorld first, boy, haf some adventures!”
Much to be said about this philosophy, I have to admit. The loss of Yun Hee was very painful, and the fade out with Kathy has been a baffling, melancholy experience. Amidst my disappointment, though, I feel an undeniable sense of liberation. I am free to be my own man!
Obligations, the expectations of others – I am setting all this aside and striking out
to parts unknown. Kathy closed the door behind her when she’d entered my chamber last night, and the resulting sense of entrapment had been unpleasant, even during the most passionate moments. And when I’d been floating in the boat with Yun Hee, I couldn’t help measuring the distance to shore. If I jumped out, could I swim that far?
I smile at the recollection of Grandfather Alois – his almost comical accent, his old-world mannerisms. He truly is from another era. I’ll never forget the way his face lit up when he heard I was going overseas.
Mom and Dad grew up in an ethnic community, not learning English until beginning school. Yet, they never seemed foreign to me like Grandpa does.
Dad told once me, back when I was very young, that he wanted to travel the world “someday.” He never did, though – marriage and kids saw to that. Hell, he was only 44 when he died.
How many more good years do I have left?
I spend a couple days in the Ichon area, hiking the hills and rice fields, reprising my self-pity routine. Then I return to Seoul and check in at the Nam Goong. Bob West is there.
“Tyler!” he says. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Took a little side trip after the workshop,” I say.
Bob’s face takes on an expectant, worried expression.
“So ... what’s next, pal?” He asks.
“Capshida,” I say. Let’s go!
14: Pusan Sendoff
If you stay around a teacher too long, he starts to get worried about you. – Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident, by Alan Watts
I hand in my resignation the following morning. A few days later I take a final ride – on the freeway to Pusan in an air-conditioned bus.
I scarcely glance out the window as the soulless ribbon of concrete zips along. This isn’t the old Korea passing by out there, but a generic landscape that could be anywhere in the world, alongside any other freeway.
The seats are meant for slim Korean physiques, not hefty Americans, and Bob takes up too much room beside me. I consider telling him to sit the hell someplace else, but haven’t the heart. He is acting very subdued, a bit frightened, almost. The idea of finally leaving Oori Nara seems to fill him with apprehension, and he is clinging to me like a security blanket.
Maybe I need a security blanket as well. It isn’t so easy to suddenly leave a country that you have come to regard as home.
“Just think,” Bob says. “We are going from one end of South Korea to the other in a matter of hours. The country is so small you almost feel like ... you’re wearing the place.”
“That’s quite a figure of speech, Bob.”
He has a point. The compact dimensions of South Korea do feel rather comfortable.
“It’s different back home,” Bob says. “The U.S. is so huge that it can overwhelm you. At least I’m from Michigan, so it’s not so bad.”
“How so?”
“Michigan is a peninsula, two of them actually,” Bob explains. “It has definite natural boundaries.”
“Makes sense,” I say.
Bob holds up his hand and points to a spot below the base of the thumb.
“I live here, and – ”
“You live on your hand?” I interrupt.
“No, no,” Bob says impatiently, as if he is explaining something to a three-year-old. “It’s a map! Michigan’s lower peninsula is shaped like a mitten.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “It must get pretty cold up by the fingertips, eh?”
Bob ignores my smart assery.
“Wyandotte, where I’m from, is right here.” He says, pointing again to the spot between the thumb and the wrist. “It’s a Detroit suburb.”
“Wyandotte sounds like an Indian name,” I say.
“Right, the Wyandotte tribe once lived in the area,” Bob says.
Typical scenario, drive off the native people and then name the town after them. Don’t most of our states have Native American names? I wonder what the psychological term is for this particular guilt trip.
“If you go north, east, or west you bump into the Great Lakes.” Bob indicates these locations alongside his hand map. “Canada is right across the Detroit River.”
I become interested in spite of myself.
“Michigan feels manageable,” Bob says, “but if you live someplace like Kansas, there’d be this gigantic land mass spreading all around you.”
This is food for thought, I suppose. In any case, it constitutes the sum total of our conversation. We get to Pusan late afternoon and purchase tickets for the car ferry to Shimonoseki, Japan. The boat is scheduled to depart the next evening.
***
Ferry tickets in hand, we walk through a seedy waterfront section of town. Some young louts hanging around the sidewalk outside a pool hall make insulting remarks as we pass – something to the effect that our noses are bigger than our dicks.
I always try to ignore such street punks. Bob is not in a good humor, though. He advances on the leader, glowering ominously. The guy shrinks back, visibly intimidated, seeking protection from the others who are equally scared.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.
I take Bob’s arm and draw him away from the visibly relieved punks. They refrain from making further comments.
“I hate bastards like that!” Bob growls.
“I’m learning a lot more about you,” I say. “Geography expert, street fighter. I’m impressed.”
And I am impressed, even though Bob’s physical capabilities probably do not amount to much. His size is largely a flabby illusion, and I know from our experience in the Seoul demonstration that he possesses little by way of endurance.
We check in at a yogwan and go for a leisurely dinner at the restaurant next door. The place has a tank of flounder in the middle of the floor; you can order one of these flattened sea creatures on the hoof, to use a mixed metaphor. We relax over our seafood meal and listen to the chatter of the young waitresses.
They speak the lilting Southeast dialect. Every other syllable seems to be ‘yeh’ spoken with a downward intonation. This rather charming speech is quite different from the dialect spoken farther north.
The standard Korean we’d been taught is uninflected and can tumble out of your mouth in a monotonous stream. It seems a language well suited to barking out slogans and military commands – like the German you hear in war movies.
Once I’d witnessed some Korean soldiers undergoing training. The commander kept up a constant torrent of invective, punctuated with shoves and kicks. He ordered one poor guy to dangle by his hands from a beam and proceeded to whack him on the calves and thighs with a wooden pole. He didn’t seem like the sensitive type.
Outside the restaurant is dark and chilly with a hint of mist in the air.
“How about a last kettle of makoli?” Bob says.
“Sure. Let’s put on some warmer clothes first.”
We return to the yogwan and don our white woolen Cheju Do sweaters. Irish missionaries run a sheep and pig ranch down in Cheju Do island, along with a woolen factory. They market the ‘hand made’ sweaters at Seoul tourist hotels. Right, I’d thought when I’d bought mine – hand made by machine.
Yet, when I later visited the Isodol Ranch on Cheju Do, I saw a bevy of Korean girls sitting on the factory porch knitting away. The sheep were nice, not so the hogs – enormous pink monstrosities quite different from the dark little native hogs. One brute glowered at me with hate-filled eyes and chomped the metal bars of his pen. He would have much preferred to chew my leg.
We have barely left the yogwan when all the electric lights in the neighborhood blink out.
“Dang,” I say. “What now?”
We stand uncertainly in the dark, narrow street like two lost sheep in our woolen sweaters. Candles appear in the shop windows, and the hiss of gas lanterns adds a comforting note.
“The people seem well prepared,” Bob says. “This must be a common occurrence.”
We advance carefully down the pavement,
keeping an eye out for pot holes. No sense providing free entertainment for the locals. Screaming American flopping about with a sprained ankle – been there, done that.
“Where do you suppose the red light district is?” Bob asks.
“I’ll pass on that,” I say. “I’ve already had the ‘Frosty Virgin’ experience.”
“What?”
I do not elaborate.
We enter a sool chip dimly lit by gas lanterns. It is the usual type of wine house. In the outer area are upended fuel drums with built-in braziers. Standard clientele – soldiers, laborers, idle louts. Pretty much the same as the place in Choon Chun, except that everybody speaks the lilting Kyongsang province dialect.
Sliding paper doors conceal the private rooms where better off customers are being entertained by girls. We are drinking on the cheap, though, and plan to remain in the proletarian outer area.
“Hello there!” a friendly voice calls in English from one of the drum tables.
I turn to see a couple of foreigners waving enthusiastically.
“Let’s check them out,” Bob says.
A thin young guy with dark, curly hair stands up and grips my hand.
“Good to see you again!” He says in what seems to be an Irish accent.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“Don’t you remember us?” Even in the dim light, his face sports an alcohol glow. “I’m Father Patrick, from the island, and this gentleman here is Father Clarence.”
A genial, red-haired young guy sitting at the fuel drum offers his hand. “How have you been?”
“I’m pleased to see you both,” I say. “But I really don’t know who you are.”
“Ah, you’re right about that,” Clarence says. “I see it now. Sorry, we thought you were somebody else – this light, this fearsome makoli. It’s enough to addle anybody’s mind.”
“Since you’re here now,” Patrick says, “why not join us for a cup?”
“Or a ‘Glass,’ so to speak?” I say.
We take seats at the fuel drum. Father Patrick gives me a surprised look, then breaks into a grin.
“So, what might your names be?” he asks.
“I’m Tyler Lakatos.”
“I’m Bob West. We’re returning Peace Corps volunteers, former English teachers.”
“Excellent!” Patrick says.
“Speaking of excellent, try some of this,” Clarence says, handing us metal cups of makoli.