Notes.

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CHAPTER VIII

" We were the rebels, lone survivors

We were the cult of deep sea divers

We were young once then we grew old

We were shining, we were fool's gold

Hold me til I'm not lonely anymore

It's only the crashing of the ocean to the shore "

(The Midnight, american artists, "Lost Boy")

a. The weeping tree

Hui Seon stayed with him for a long time after chuksi. She put one hand on his, and said nothing as she waited until his tears dried up. Woon thought there was nothing to say. He had rarely cried when he was still alive : now he felt like he was filled with water, or that his body could never hold enough of it. Since his resurrection, he had cried so often and so silently that he might have been disturbed, if he had given it any importance at all. Sometimes Hui Seon had been present, but usually melancholy came over him in the middle of the night, when the Spring House was peaceful and the gisaengs lay in their rooms enjoying a merciful sleep.

The fact was that he could do nothing else. Talking was an hardship, and his muscles, unused for a decade, seemed awfully heavy. He even had trouble concentrating. His thoughts would go round and round, get stuck (Woon-ah), and then wander off into dark, confusing roads, which he didn't even try to fight. Sometimes he would see a scene, a face (Woon-ah), recognize a context or a voice, and then his rebirth was more unbearable, more atrocious, more painful than anything he had ever experienced (the sword in his heart).

He didn't remember well the moment when he emerged from the ground. Hui Seon had assured him that things would come back to him clearly in due time, but for the moment, everything was disjointed, unreal, like a nightmare or a very old reminiscence that was not his own. He remembered mostly chaotic impressions : his hands pushing away the cold, wet earth that entered his mouth, eyes and nose, a sharp sensation of panic, the indistinct breath of a cold wind on his face, and the vision of dark, sinuous branches above him, covered with red and ochre clouds.

He then shared with all the Gwihins a frightening feeling of not having been and being again, not knowing how much time had passed, who had put them there, or where they were. He felt without feeling : everything was distant, unknown, and hostile. His mind was spinning with an outburst of fear and inconsistency like he had rarely experienced before. A few weeks later, lying in the quiet and neat room that Gyô Hui Seon had assigned to him, he would think back and conclude that even dying had not seemed so frightening in comparison.

He hadn't found Hui Seon. His state of mind was such that he would not have been able to make that kind of encounter. Hui Seon was the one who had managed to get to him. When he woke up, everything scared him. The slightest movement alerted his senses. The colors were too bright, the textures indistinct. He felt the ground and was aware that his perception was disordered, mutilated, completely transformed. No immediate memory came back to him in the first minutes of his resurrection, but he knew that every single one of his sensations was deeply disturbed and changed by a process that was totally inexplicable.

He had perceived his body, and had not perceived it all at the same time. There was such an anarchy in his impressions that he literally could not think. His eyes recognized nothing. He could see, however. At first, everything had been blurred and sounds were muffled, a phenomenon that had persisted long after he had scratched the ground with his fingernails to extricate himself from his grave.

He hadn't understood at the time that he had just emerged from a grave. There was no sign, no stone, no indication, even a tiny one, nothing but a gaping hole in the dark, damp earth, and the traces of a crudely executed, time-worn wooden coffin that had been damaged by the tiny creatures of the earth's depths. It took him some time to realize who was inside and why the pit was wrecked. Associating ideas one with each other had seemed like a terrible, almost insurmountable task. He stood by the grave for more than an hour, looking at it tirelessly as if it would eventually give him all the answers he desperately needed.

When the idea of his death finally came to him, he took his eyes off the grave and looked at the tree under which it had been dug. It was a large tree, with a particularly massive black trunk with rough bark, which had the peculiarity of twisting violently into multiple extensions in its middle, resulting in the shape of a palm whose fingers appeared to be unfolding. To the left, Woon saw a thick, gnarled extension that rose high, split in half once more, and then separated into several sections of branches that were first large and then thinner as the tree extended its silhouette around the perimeter of the trunk. The branches on the lower part of the appendix fell heavily to the ground, as if attracted by the weight of the wood and the leaves, without touching it. The backward-facing right side had similar characteristics, and some of its longest and slender branches ended up in the ground.

Although the tree was not among the tallest, it nevertheless spread out spectacularly, occupying a remarkable volume of space and creating a colossal shelter, lengthened by a monumental canopy. It looked ancient and majestic. In the confusion that then drowned out the slightest of his reflections, Woon remembered feeling small but protected by the immensity of the tree and the harmonious way its leaves invariably tumbled down to the ground from the branches, creating a comforting veil of red and gold around the disorder of his questioning.

Some of the leaves floated freely in the air, unattached to any branch, and came to rest on the ground creating a fascinating contrast of colors. Woon knew the name of the tree, but was unable to remember it until Hui Seon offered him his first meal at the Spring House, far from chaos and fear. It was a weeping willow, he thought for perhaps the hundredth or thousandth time since the name had resurfaced in his memory, and its leaves were falling because it was autumn. Someone (Woon-ah) had buried him under a weeping willow tree, the largest and most imposing one Woon had ever seen in his lifetime, and he didn't know who. He felt echoes sometimes (Woon-ah). They never lasted very long, and always made him want to burst into tears.

Hui Seon had appeared several days after his resurrection, but he was still struggling to pinpoint the exact date. Woon had wandered for a long time, completely disoriented, in a forest that was completely unknown to him and whose arrangement of trees and dirt roads looked reassuring by day and oppressive by night. Fragments of memory that came and went in a totally random way showed him that he had already been forced to set up temporary camps in similar places while he was still breathing, and that none of these distant experiences had been accompanied by unpleasant consequences.

Nevertheless, he remained vigilant, driven by a very old instinct, and by the realization that his status could provoke violent reactions if he came across the living. For a moment he had wondered, like many Gwishins before him, like In Monchang, like Gyo Hui Seon, whether he had not simply come back to life following a miracle, but the loss of feelings of thirst, cold, fatigue, the milky color of his skin that his eyes had reflected back to him when they had adjusted to the light of day, the grave and especially the strangely painless burning of the wound that pierced his heart, and which revived haunting images and emotions (Woon-ah), tended to show him the opposite.

We are dead, Hui Seon would later tell him harshly, we are dead people walking and thinking, that's all. By advancing through the forest with an unsure step, like a newborn baby learning to walk, Woon had more than once allowed this possibility to creep into his dislocated reflections, and enabled it to be plausible, until Hui Seon definitively confirmed it to him.

On the first day, unable to consider moving away from his grave, he laid down against the trunk of the weeping willow, overwhelmed by a need to close his eyes and let the shock lull him to sleep. Sleep had never come, and as dawn shyly shone through the shadow of the night, he began to make a first examination of his immediate surroundings. The huge wingspan of the tree under which he had been resting the night before concealed much of the view, but Woon had distinguished water behind the weeping willow.

Using the trunk as a support to get up, he had staggered beyond the tree's boundaries, spreading the curtains of leaves that stood in his way and finally discovering a stretch of water large enough to be a lake. The weeping willow stood on one of its sides, surrounded itself by a density of taller, more slender trees, with incandescent colors. On the horizon emerged high mountains wrapped in morning clouds, whose silhouette was frighteningly familiar to him. Once out of the opulent foliage of the weeping willow, Woon had heard birds, accompanied by the creaking of branches in nearby trees. They don't care about what's happening, he concluded, they don't care that a dead man has risen from his grave, it doesn't make any difference to them. In a way, the idea helped to tranquilize him.

He truly began to move at the end of the day, realizing that he could not remain under the protection of his grave indefinitely. He was beginning to feel the first stirrings of hunger, and he had nothing, no money, no weapon, that could have satisfied his appetite. He decided to find a town or village, where he could possibly collect information about where he was, the date, and (to eat) a safe place to rest, preferably away from the living. Without presenting the reflex that Hui Seon had to hide in the woods in order to flee the repressive measures and lethal horror that the Gwishin inspired to the population of Joseon's kingdom, Woon had nevertheless considered it preferable to stay away from populated areas, as he suspected that his rebirth was not normal, and he had no desire to confront the crowds unless he felt more comfortable with his new status.

His hope was to find a place isolated from the others but close enough to a town, like some he had known in the past (his father's house), where he could settle temporarily and think without fear of thunder, wind or the cries of the animals that inhabited the forest. He remembered feeling completely alone in the world. Hunger had grown in his belly, to the point of becoming threatening enough to crush the slightest of his reasoning and to direct his every gesture. He tried to hunt with stones thrown at rabbits or birds, without any real success.

His reflexes seemed to have diminished, and he had difficulty judging distances. On the third day, he found the body of a boar that might have satisfied his appetite if it had not been in an advanced state of decomposition. Woon went on his way. At the end of the fifth day, his mind was slowly but surely drifting in a meandering swampy incoherence. He thought he saw a man, dressed in blue, following him between the trees. On the sixth day, he lost consciousness.

When he awoke, Hui Seon stood above him, surrounded by a bright-eyed old man and a very old woman with long gray hair.

b. Charon's boat

No one knew that Gyô Hui Seon was a gwishin, and no one knew that So-Ri was also one of them. It was the rule. Mistress Gyô had established discretion and secrecy as the best weapons of defense against the decimation policies put in place by King Yeongjo since the first wave of resurrection, and all the dead she had accepted in her establishment had to comply with this directive. For So-Ri, the task had an air of déjà vu : she was a young gisaeng finishing her apprenticeship when she succumbed to septicemia, caused by powerful pains on the right side of her belly, which could not be identified and treated in time by the doctors.

She was eighteen at the time of her death, and she had risen from her grave just one year later on the occasion of the Fourth Gwishin Rising. Her death had been so sudden that she had barely had time to realize it : sick, feverish, she had evolved in a solitary agony, barely disrupted by the remarks of the physicist who displayed an expression of disappointed resignation (she's going to die) and by the distracted care of her sisters, who had seen others exhaling on the bed where So-Ri had been laid and were no longer able to be moved by another death.

Back then, the young girl resided in the West House, located on the western borders of Hanyang, whose reputation, although well-earned, was overshadowed by the much larger houses of the Seasons or Elements. She came from a classical gisaeng training : she was completing her third year of formal education, and had entered the West House as an apprentice for several months, after having previously been welcomed at the North and White Tiger Houses, of which she kept a fond memory.

She sometimes remembered the beginning of the pain that led to her illness and death. She did not like to fall back into the shallows of her memory, like most Gwishins, but the melancholy of her status invariably brought her back to it. The pains had appeared on a casual day, in the late afternoon, when she was following her tutor in her usual routine. She was a very beautiful twenty-five year old woman whose colorful clothing and engaging personality had allowed So-Ri to quickly find her place among the rest of her sisters while distinguishing herself sufficiently not to be lost in the crowd.

So-Ri remembered her smile, and the worried face she had leaned over her when her pain appeared. At first, she thought it was simply a sign that her menstrual bleeding was about to start. But the pain had persisted, had set in, localized, to such intolerable proportions that So-Ri ended the day screaming and sweating on her bed, while the doctor barely dared to touch her belly in fear of provoking another exclamation of pain.

She died two days later, in general incomprehension and silence, her sisters having been removed by fear of a possible contagion. She was not given enough time to be afraid. After a while, she had lost all sense of time and space. She woke up in the fall of 1776 in an equivalent state, without knowing where she was or when. She was then buried in a small cemetery at the edge of the capital, where people were usually buried when they died of an unknown and potentially transmissible disease.

Around her, other Gwihins walked slowly, dazed, as if they were emerging from another world. In a sense, the comparison was not totally inappropriate, as So-Ri had felt as if she had come back from far away. She had looked around, discovered the simple wooden stele that marked her tomb, the gaping hole of cool, dark earth from which she had emerged. She remembered being happy about the presence of the others, and following them as they walked out of the cemetery, terrified of being alone in an environment she did not know.

Their luck had been to rise in the early hours of the morning. They had entered the capital in a dense group while others had headed towards nearby villages, and if they had been spotted at the city's busiest hours, either between myosi and jinsi in the morning or sulsi and haesi in the evening, they would probably all have fallen prey to the surveillance patrols deployed by the government to combat the resurrection phenomena. Moreover, they were the product of a fourth wave, and the underground network of Gwishin was established since several years, partly supported by the action of the Yeogogoedam, with the publication of the second clandestine volume of the Encyclopedia of the Dead and the more recent emergence of the knowledge of the « common consciousness », which had caused a great shift in the methods of survival of the dead and in their mutual ways of recognizing each other among the living.

At the gates of the cemetery other, older Gwishins who had already seen one, two or three successive waves of return and who may or may not have belonged to the network awaited. So-Ri also saw the bodies of soldiers lying on the ground, obviously belonging to the brigades responsible for capturing and destroying the newly revived Gwishin. They're neutralized during the time of the resurrection in the surroundings of the cemeteries, Hui Seon had informed her some time later, but we're doing our best not to kill them, as this could make us even more execrable to the living.

She was standing right in front of the cemetery gates, her elegant silhouette wrapped in a black jangot. She was accompanied by an old man, an old woman, and a younger woman who stood a little back. She interrupted the march of the new gwishins with a calm hand gesture, to which they all obeyed in a unanimous and strange way, and then she greeted them with a concise speech.

You were dead, she said solemnly, some of you for a short time, and some of you for many years. You are awake, but you are not alive nonetheless. You are known as Gwishins. All over Joseon, the dead are rising, just like you. All those you see here are like you and have gone through the same experiences : we are here to help you. She had very black eyes and a very white complexion. So-Ri saw her glance quietly through the small assembly of the dead, then she finally laid her eyes on her and motioned for her to come closer.

- What's your name ? she asked her.

Her voice was low and ancient. So-Ri had searched desperately in her memory, but nothing came to her.

- You will remember, Hui Seon had then reassured her.

She had revealed to her her identity as well as those of her companions. The man's name was Im Ji-Ho, he ran a bookstore not far from the entertainment house that Hui-Seon ran, and was the author of the second volume of the Encyclopedia of the Dead, which So-Ri would read the next day, curled up in a corner of the store, at peace and eager for knowledge and control. The old woman's name was Jae-Ji : she had died as a shaman, and had been the first to make the collective consciousness known to Hui-Seon, playing a crucial role in the development of the secret network of the gwishins and in their survival.

She sees things, and she makes us see other things that are deep inside us, Hui-Seon told her one evening as she left the bookstore to go to the Spring House. Their fourth companion was named Min-Su, and she was a gisaeng at Gyô Hui Seon's establishment. No one, except a few trusted Gwishins, knew of their status. Secrecy was the key. Secrecy meant survival.

So-Ri quickly became aware of her condition and of the transformations it had brought to her body. For the first two weeks of her resurrection, Hui-Seon sent her to live in Im Ji-Ho's bookstore, as she had done for other gwishins during previous waves of returns. The old man had a floor where he had an extra room, and regularly welcomed gwishin in need, who had learned his identity (the Historian) through the network or who had met him by chance. The room was comfortable and equipped with a small mirror, where So-Ri had discovered her inky eyes and waxy skin.

You're part of the fortunate ones, Ji-Ho had told her one day, while she was reading peacefully at her usual spot. She knew it, and she could have thanked the gods, if she hadn't felt that they had also played a dirty trick on her by forcing her to awaken from her supposed eternal rest. During her time at the bookstore, and later at Hui-Seon's, she heard more than once about the arrests and executions of Gwishins by the army, but also about denunciations by the living, or by other gwishins. The climate was oppressive and dangerous, despite a slackening compared to previous years due to the existence of the network and the quiet integration of Gwishins among the living. You must keep your status secret as much as you can, and trust no one, Hui-Seon told her when So-Ri moved to the Spring House.

By the end of the autumn of 1776, Gyô Hui-Seon came to find her and told her that she wished her to join her establishment.

- There is someone I would like you to take care of, she explained. And I would like to have another Gwishin Gisaeng with me, in addition to Min-Su and Su-Jin. Ji-Ho told me that you are studious and disciplined. These are qualities that I will appreciate more in today's context than your talent for poetry or gayageum. Given your young age, you will be able to pass for an apprentice. It won't take long, but it will provide you with credible cover in case of difficulties.

So-Ri was not afraid of Mistress Gyô, for she knew her to be kind and generous under her layer of severity, but she was terribly afraid of her anger. She had never worked with such a demanding and impressive director before. Moreover, Hui-Seon was the first Gwishin settled among the living whom So-Ri had met. This characteristic alone, combined with the point of reference and the figure of authority that she had represented from the moment she had welcomed the new gwishins resurrected with So-Ri, and which was later confirmed with her important place in the underground network, was enough to make her almost divine in the eyes of the young girl, and to inspire both anguish and veneration in her.

She had never ceased to experience this tangle of contradictory feelings towards her mistress, and she experienced them all the more on the day Hui-Seon summoned her and the two other Gwishin gisaengs to her apartments, long after she had entered the Spring House and begun her duties towards Yeo Woon, a Gwishin also originating from the fourth wave of resurrection, and whom Hui-Seon seemed to know.

Compared to her two sisters, So-Ri always felt small and uncertain, despite their gentleness and affability. Mistress Gyo was sitting upright in front of her work table, a complex looking document open in front of her. So-Ri glanced at it discreetly and discovered that it was a copy of the first volume of the Encyclopedia of the Dead, a book yet abhorred by Hui-Seon. She wore a rich hanbok in the colors of autumn, with a jacket embroidered with gold and a skirt of a deep crimson red, which highlighted her black eyes of gwishin reanimated since a long time.

- We have a problem, she taught them bluntly. It's about Yeo Woon.

The three gisaengs remained silent, knowing very well that their mistress' explanations would follow soon.

- According to what he told me, he was killed by one of his childhood friends, a military man named Baek Dong Soo. Some of you have already seen him over the past few years, if I remember correctly. He was quite a regular customer.

Su-Jin nodded briefly.

- He hasn't come for at least three years, she observed. He was training young recruits to strengthen the army against ours. He used to have drinking problems.

- I know, Hui-Seon replied quickly. He was fired from his position and had left Hanyang when his financial situation became precarious, but my government sources confirmed his return, as well as Yeo Woon's and Min-Su's account of their two meetings with one of his apprentices.

- He's still in trouble, Min-Su said. His apprentice told me that he continues to drink during training, and that Hong Guk-Yeong seemed to regret having intervened and asked the king to reinstate him to the instructor team.

- Try to learn more, Mistress Gyô ordered her. If Baek Dong Soo still drinks, he might come back to the Spring House, now that his income allows him to do so again. We must be ready. Go Hyang, who takes care of Yeo Woon as a living, holds Baek Dong Soo and Hong Guk Yeong responsible for the death of our host. She confided to me that she was afraid to see him execute Yeo Woon a second time. Both of them serve me different versions, and I am not sure about the exact sequence of events that led to Yeo Woon's death, but I incline towards caution, especially now that our guest knows that Baek Dong Soo was one of our clients and could reappear all of a sudden. He will want to see him again.

Su-Jin expressed her astonishment, asking if Yeo Woon would not rather hide from his executioner.

- It's not that kind of executioner, dear, Mistress Gyo said with a shaking of her head, her red lips stretched out in a secretive smile. We'll have to prevent them from running into each other. In case Baek Dong Soo starts hanging out at the Spring House again, I want you to do everything you can to keep them apart, is that clear ?

So-Ri remembered Yeo Woon's face when Baek Dong Soo's name had been pronounced, the turmoil that had passed through it, and Mistress Gyo's words reasoned with the same power as the rule of secrecy (it's not that kind of executioner).