I Am the Clay Read online

  Light fell upon her face, and a searing cold. She opened her eyes to a dim white world and saw above her the face of her husband and heard beyond the flimsy walls of the shack a tide of wailing.

  She said fearfully, “What? What?”

  “The Chinese!”

  She rose to her elbows and swayed dizzily. He helped her to her feet.

  The boy woke and looked about with unfocused eyes and cried, “Amuni!”

  The old man and woman stared at him. Ashen beneath the brown skin of his emaciated features, eyes dark and rolling with terror; drawing away from them, looking wildly around, seeing the two dead old men, shrinking back, and crying out.

  The woman spoke softly, soothingly.

  The boy tried to climb out of the bed of quilts, lay back in exhaustion. He tried again, fell down in a faint.

  Murmuring an unbroken stream of comforting words, the woman wrapped him in a quilt. The man lifted him and carried him outside; like the dog the boy’s head and arms and legs limp and flopping. He placed him in the cart and the woman covered him with quilts and the sleeping bag. Quickly they took apart the shack and put on the cart the bits and pieces of flattened waste metal.

  The two old men lay in their undergarments, vacant faces turned to the winter sky. Beneath them the frozen earth had begun to melt. Muddy streamlets trickled from below their rigid heads and shoulders and stiffened legs.

  The riverbank was emptying: people eddied back and forth, scurried in frantic flight across the river. Deep ruts scarred the frozen mudflats and black ice.

  The old man and the woman each took one of the shafts of the cart. Pulling the cart and the boy, they started across the mudflats and the river toward the airfield and the main road.

  2

  They were near the outskirts of the city. Houses began to fall away; barren winter fields now on both sides of the road. Military police kept the refugees off the road, on a path between the fields and the drainage ditch. Along both sides of the road trudged foot soldiers, weary, blank-faced, heavy with defeat. Down the middle came jeeps and trucks, very fast. All were headed toward the sea.

  Outside the city the road ran parallel to the barbed-wire fence of the airfield. The old man saw men and women crossing the road and climbing the embankment to the fence and tearing at the brush that grew alongside it. The woman took both shafts of the cart and the old man slipped the A-frame over his shoulders and walked along the fence, stopping to break off branches, falling behind the cart and catching up, and again falling behind.

  Tank treads had kneaded the path to a rutted strip of earth. The jouncing of the cart woke the boy. Staring into the darkness of the quilts, he did not know where he was. He tried to move and found the quilts wrapped tightly around him. Pushing with both legs against the quilts, he felt reassured by their firm resistance. There seemed a rhythm to the motions of the cart and some comfort in the embrace of the quilts. He moved his arms and felt a knifepoint of pain in his chest. Frightened, he lay very still.

  The woman, her legs aching, pulled steadily upon the cart. She was hurrying away from the war but the war was catching up to her. Sections of the city were burning. A choking terror lay lodged in her throat. She pulled harder upon the cart. The man fell far behind. She thought she heard him call but she did not slow her pace.

  The noise of the bombardment grew louder. All around her were panicky men and women and children. In the brief pauses during the shelling she could hear their collective human noise: a kind of sustained high-pitched throbbing moan. She strained at the shafts of the cart. Away from the fiends of war. Away. Save the boy.

  Inside the folds of the quilt, the boy, now fully awake, was trying to remember his name.

  Days before, on the road to Seoul, angry and frightened South Korean soldiers had searched the refugees and taken away the old man’s knife and ax. When he protested that he needed the tools, a soldier pointed his weapon at him and shouted that he was a North Korean infiltrator. The woman wept and pleaded. An officer intervened and ordered them on. Now, with his bare hands, the old man broke branches from the brushwood near the airfield fence and piled them on the A-frame. The fence was tall, its top section angled sharply with rows of barbed wire jutting outward. On the other side of the fence lay a moatlike ditch, and then another row of barbed wire, coiled and not as tall as the first, and the runways beyond. Planes kept taking off. Jeeps circled the perimeter of the field.

  Men and women moved amid the brushwood along the road. His A-frame barely half full, the old man edged closer to the fence and was followed by others.

  From the airfield came the report of a single shot.

  A few of the men and women near the fence straightened and glanced briefly around. The old man thought: To die of a bullet or hunger or cold.

  Two more shots were fired, then another.

  The men and women near the fence gathered up their A-frames and scurried off. The old man crossed the road to the line of refugees, searching for the woman.

  He walked a long time and did not see her. The airfield behind him now and the A-frame little more than half loaded, he halted again for more brushwood. He had not yet eaten that day and was trying to ignore the hunger. We will need fire wherever we sleep. Somewhere near the sea? He had never before been near water wider than a river. A boat on the sea day after day like the winged ships in the air hour after hour. What spirits keep them from sinking or falling? He saw a vision of his village: firm fields, watery paddies, contoured earth, and the hills beyond. Solid sacred graves of ancestors to the fourth generation. The village now? Surely burned to rubble and ashes. Charred homes and sheds. Broken house-beams. Floors torn up in the search for stores of food. And the ox dead and roasted and in the bellies of the Chinese and the fiends from the North.

  The A-frame was full. He hoisted it on his back and began walking quickly along the line, searching for the woman.

  Behind him the sounds of the war were ominously loud. Chinese fight in strange ways. Grandfather once told me. After a meal of hot rice and hot soup and kimchi and broiled fish with vegetables and pepper paste with soy. Smoking his long-stemmed pipe. Grandfather sleepy, talking through the smoke: pictures of his words in the smoke. This I saw with my own eyes in Mukden, Grandfather said. After the battle of Pyongyang. Many many years ago. When I was a boy. Chinese cavalrymen advancing to the charge bearing fans and perfume bottles. Their servants marching behind them with Winchester rifles. The cavalrymen advancing according to proper military methods, putting on fierce faces like the god of war. Anyone seeing such faces should have fled. But the Japanese were savages, hopeless barbarians, unacquainted with Chinese ways, the wisdom of Chinese writing, the beauty of Chinese characters. The Chinese rushed upon them, breathing fire, and they did not move. It was therefore clear for all to see that the Japanese were paralyzed with fear. The Chinese general had given forth the cry of victory when suddenly a long line of Japanese rifles was raised up like a single arm, and there followed a dreadful rattle and the Chinese fell like dead trees. Grandfather’s dark watery eyes through the wafting smoke of the pipe. The sweet pungent smell of the tobacco. Grandfather. How could the Chinese devils and the fiends from the North defeat the big-nosed pale-skinned giants with the blue upside-down eyes? Their bombs and machines had driven out the uncivilized Japanese who had many years before defeated the same Chinese. Is it possible? Strong one year and weak the next? The spirits play with us. A river calm one year a wild sea the next.

  Where is the woman?

  As far ahead as his eyes searched through the throng of refugees he could not see her.

  Perhaps he had passed her, walking as he did with his eyes cautiously upon the treacherous rutted path.

  But surely she would have seen him. How quickly can she be walking, pulling the cart with the boy on it? A misfortune to have stumbled upon him. A burden sent by evil spirits. Did I not offer enough to my ancestors during the last New Year’s Day? Was there not wine in the cups, and chopsticks on the meat
and vegetables, and spoons in the soup bowls? Did the woman and I not stand and kneel, stand and kneel, and bow low and strike our heads three times against the floor? Did not the flames of the candles flicker as the cold drafts blew across the table, indicating the spirits were present and partaking of the food? Did I not feed properly the suffering ghosts of our village, those tormented dead who wander without peace, who haunt the trees from which they fell and the river in which they drowned?

  The thought that he might somehow have angered his ancestors or the ghosts of his village terrified him and left him feeling desperate and alone amid the press of fleeing refugees. What possible other hope can one have of being looked upon with kindness by the unseen powers behind the visible world, powers brutal one moment and caring the next, than devotion to the dead and belief in the unborn future grandchild? But this boy is not my child and he will not give me a grandchild and the woman has lost her mind because of this war and where is she, how can she have gone so far ahead?

  He felt a sudden great need for her presence: stronger than his feeling on the riverbank waiting for her to return with the boy. It was a suffering and a dread and a yearning all at the same time. He raged at her for not being nearby; he felt himself cold with the thought that he might never see her again. Twice in these few days she has made me feel this way. That angered him even more.

  He moved on, treading carefully, and feeling on his back the A-frame laden with brushwood. Still he did not see the woman.

  Weak and nauseated with hunger, he paused again and scanned the distance ahead. People brushed past him, silent, scuffing the churned earth. The lines of soldiers and refugees ran now through a town of charred and battered two-story stone buildings. Power lines down and tangled. Bullet-pocked signs over abandoned looted shops. Broken doors and windows and the helpless nakedness of rooms behind shattered walls.

  Immediately after the town, on both sides of the road, was a military base. Barbed-wire fences. Rows of deserted white-painted barracks. Starved dogs foraging for food, pissing on trees.

  The old man thought: They permit dogs to go inside. If I enter, they will shoot me.

  Beyond the military camp more fields, desolate, edged with tall winter grass. I will find something. There is always something. My ancestors will not abandon us to die of hunger. Unless this boy is an evil spirit.

  Where is the woman?

  He thought to retrace his steps. Perhaps he had gone past her after all. There was such a crush of people on this path.

  Stay with people, the carpenter had urged them before they had all fled the village. Always remain together with others. But they had lost the carpenter during the search by military police early on the first day. Now he had lost the woman.

  Then he saw her—a few yards off the road, on a barren field.

  His heart beating in his throat and ears, he went to her quickly.

  She stood bent over, her eyes fixed on the earth at her feet.

  He wanted to say, I looked for you, woman. Why did you go so far without me? He wanted to say, You frightened me, woman, leaving me alone. Instead he said nothing.

  Gray blotches stained her face. She stood unsteadily near the side of the cart.

  “I am tired,” he heard her say.

  His heart was stirred and he felt the arousal of long-forgotten warmth. He had a vision of the two of them when young, and their three days and nights together after their marriage were about to begin, and all things were again possible: sons and abundant rains and rich earth yielding rice and grain; and oxen for the plow, so that the woman would never have to harness herself to it; and his ancestors gazing down upon them considerately from their graves on the hill beyond the village, filling their home with earthly prosperity and protecting them from harm by wandering ghosts. Yes, all things were possible. All things.

  He asked her with deliberate coldness, “Where will we stay this night?”

  She coughed. “I heard there are many buildings beyond the next turn in the road.” She leaned against the cart, breathing shallowly. Spirit of my tree, return my breath. Father, give me your strength.

  He asked, “What of the boy?”

  “He woke once.”

  “Who is he? Where is his village?”

  “I don’t know. He looked at me in fear and put his head back under the quilts.”

  “The boy is a stone around our necks.”

  “If a stray dog attaches itself to you, do you send it away?”

  “We should leave him, woman. What have we to do with this boy?”

  She did not respond. After a moment she said, “We will not leave him to die. I am rested.”

  She picked up the shafts of the cart and started along the field toward the crowded path.

  The old man walked beside her, too weary and ravenous to give voice to his rage. Listen to her. How does she talk to me this way? This woman, this creature, this female, this what-you-may-call-her. She who failed in her one womanly purpose: to give me sons. She gave me no one to sacrifice to my shades when I am gone. And now listen to her! He walked trembling with anger, bowed by the burden of the brushwood on the A-frame.

  Beneath the quilts on the cart the boy had listened to the old man and woman talking. The sound of the old man’s voice—high and gravelly—frightened him. And the words he spoke were fearful. And the dread noises of the war nearby. He had remembered his name. Now, as he felt the cart moving again, he was beginning to remember his village.

  He lay still, remembering and trembling. For a long time the cart rolled across the path between the fields and the road. Then it halted and the boy, in the darkness of the quilts, heard voices raised in anger and a man ordering, “Not here! Away from here!” and a din of voices and suddenly a burst of gunfire and then screams and the cart moving quickly and after a moment the old man shouting, “Nothing but the knife for soldiers like that!” and the woman trying to quiet him.

  The gunfire and the voice of the old man terrified the boy. He saw again the killing in his village and burst into tears, his teeth chattering. The wound pulsed faintly; his stomach ached; he felt the hunger in his arms and legs.

  He put his head out of the quilts and the sleeping bag and saw an expanse of dull-gray twilight sky and the back of the little woman who was pulling the cart and the old man bowed beneath the laden A-frame. Who are these old people? How did I come to them?

  The cold wind forced him back beneath the quilts. He lay there remembering the village and cried himself into a dark sleep.

  The cart came to a halt and he woke. The pain in his chest and stomach: all the center of him hot with pain. Inside the darkness of the quilts he curled himself into a ball. Small, make myself small. Small saved me from the guns of the soldiers from the North. Small saved me from the anger of uncles after games of mischief. Small brought me into the arms of Grandmother after scoldings from the stern mouth of Father. Small, small, a bird held lightly in the hand. He fell into a dazed half-sleep. Sounds came to him as though filtered through water or high wind.

  The quilt was lifted from his face. Cold air surged against him and he shivered. Opening his eyes, he gazed up at a looming shadow that peered down at him from a vast early-evening sky.

  The shadow drew closer. He stifled a cry.

  The shadow leaned forward and a part of itself slid beneath the boy’s head and he drew back cringing and cried out. Small, very small. The dragon will disappear. Spirit of Grandfather, protect me!

  He was being lifted, the quilts still around him. An odor rose to his nostrils, sour and fetid, and his stomach tightened and lurched toward his throat.

  Seated now on the cart, propped against one of its sides, he opened his eyes and looked into the face of an old woman. Diminutive, brown, wrinkled; kindness shining in dark eyes set in valleys webbed and serried like earth in drought; her lips cracked, a sore in one of the corners; her nose flat; her chin pointed; her head covered with a dirty white scarf knotted in the back; in her bare hands a bowl from which rose t
he steam of hot food.

  He grasped the bowl and heard her murmured warning, “Slowly, eat slowly,” but could not heed her and gulped the soup, feeling it course down scalding inside him and his stomach momentarily recoiling—and then he remembered this woman had fed him before and he had vomited—and then he remembered she had carried him in her arms, yes, across an expanse of ice and snow to a place with a red cross—and then he remembered lying with his head upon her in snow somewhere—and then he remembered the bursts of earth as he had fled through the valley from the Chinese and the soldiers from the North and the odd thudding sensation of being struck in the chest; and stumbling along the road and the warm slippery trickling of the blood into his clothes and down his belly and between his legs.