Notes.
And here comes Dong Soo. And some more context.
CHAPTER XIII
"No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away"
(Terry Pratchett, british writer, "Reaper Man")
a. The Eye
Old Jae-Ji liked to be nameless and she confidently relied on her age. She didn't care if she was called an old bag or an antique. She knew everything she needed to know, and she was perfectly fine with it. Rare were the men and women who could say the same and explain their role in the mechanics of the world. Jae-Ji had witnessed it more than once : back when she was still alive, or, as she liked to point out many times to the distraught Gwishin who spoke to her, when she had not begun her "non-life", she had received many visitors who were lost not so much in their journey as in their existence, and who had wished to consult oracles, cards and bells to know where to direct their steps and thoughts.
Jae-Ji knew that she had been a mediocre shaman, and didn't care any more than she would have cared about other obvious facts, such as the fact that she was a woman or that she had already seen many ages of the country. When she was completely honest with herself, she would think about what she was saying to her clients and thought she was relatively good at conveying divine messages, especially since she herself had never believed in anything.
She was a bad shaman because she had no belief in the gods and no hope in them. She was born in 1656, a little over a century before the first resurrection of the Gwishin in Joseon, and died of old age, at ninety-two years old, from a chest pain that she had been unable to identify. She liked to believe that she was one of the oldest resurrected gwishins in the country, but certain echoes perceived through the collective consciousness unfortunately tended to show her the opposite.
One day, she had seen in the reflection of one of Gyô Hui-Seon's mirrors the profoundly young face of a Gwishin who claimed to have died when the kingdom of Silla had just been unified. The very ancient gwishins were the ones who made the most noise in the consciousness : they cried out in despair, unable to understand where they were or why they were here. Jae-Ji had made them her priority, leaving the more recent dead to be dealt with by other Gwishin leaders, as she called them.
She had always lived as a shaman, walking the roads of the kingdom to the point of knowing them all by heart and constantly discovering towns and villages all over the country. She was almost certain that she could now locate any place based on a large city, and knew all the roads leading to Hanyang, where she had regularly been called to offer her predictions and messages. Sometimes she had joined a troop of itinerants with whom she sometimes traveled a bit, but more often than not, she had been alone with her questions and irony, and generally penniless.
Since she wasn't very gifted, she wasn't paid very well, and she didn't receive much. The great majority of her activity consisted of travelling all over Joseon to transmit the word of the gods and to interpret it. At one time, she had offered harvest blessing services. At another time, she had received men, a market tragically more lucrative than the one of the prophecies, and had been able to raise a large enough amount of money to live relatively comfortably for a few months.
She had never learned how to be a shaman. Her mother had died in childbirth with Jae-Ji's younger brother when she was three years old, and Jae-Ji remembered her face and eyes vaguely but fondly. Jae-Ji's father was essentially a crook, but a loving one who had given his daughter everything she needed. He had provided her with all the keys she needed to fend for herself and depend on no one but herself. He had taught her how to hunt, make fire, carve arrows, engage in barter, and sympathize with travelling troops to get her accepted in for a while.
Jae-Ji was grateful for his investment, which had saved her from an unwanted marriage or a more precarious slave situation. Although she was considered the bottom of society, she was at her own service, and that suited her. She had lived her whole life in roaming, sometimes wondering if, instead of her clients, she could be the one who needed a sign from the gods. At night, she had often felt lonely. She had taken companions, but never a husband. When she had begun to grow old, the children around her, who were never hers, began to call her "old Jae-Ji", or simply "the old one": when Gwishins came knocking at her door, led by the collective consciousness or word of mouth from the underground network, they called her that way (they called her the Eye, the one who sees), and she fell back everytime into the past for a second.
Alive, she had predicted to her clients the weather, the quality of the harvest, love or fortune. She had used general formulas that could easily be repeated as often as she liked, as long as you changed the form and knew how to use metaphors. Her father had always told her "look at people, listen to them carefully, and you will know more about them than what the gods can tell you". As a result, Jae-Ji did not have a divine ear, but a remarkable sense of observation and analysis, which could have put those of the royal spies to shame.
It was an asset that she had retained beyond her death, and even now she could deduce a Gwishin's region of origin, social class and occupation just by observing their gestures and listening to their tone of voice. Most of the time, she did not need to guess : unlike her clients, she had little desire to impress her peers in order to raise the price of her services. Gwishins came to her as children, as lost sheep. Now that her status had developed her initial faculties and given her a glimpse of the world beyond, she liked to take them under her wing and tell them what to do, while knowing, for the first time in her life, what was her own role.
She had found Gyô Hui-Seon and Im Ji-Ho through the collective consciousness. She had found the collective consciousness as soon as she woke up, where she had been assailed by the voices and thoughts and impressions and the overwhelming distress of thousands of spirits waking up at the same time. She was the product of the first resurrection, and she had seen everything from the moment her hands emerged from her grave covered with wet earth. The collective consciousness was one of the Gwishin's attributes, and she had explained it to everyone who had crossed her path, but few of them knew that their characteristics were much more extensive than a common spirit, a thirst for red flesh and night-colored eyes.
Jae-Ji had experienced four resurrections to discover her talents, refine them alone, and then use them. Now she knew. She didn't need more, she didn't need further explanations or to answer a possible "why". It wasn't her role. Everyone had their place in the scheme of the dead, everyone had their mission. Her mission, like Im Ji-Ho's, was to deliver. But Ji-Ho's knowledge was tangible, and hers had mystical roots. He was the Historian and she was the Eye. There resided all the difference and specificity of their respective functions. Hui-Seon was devoted to something else. And so was the young Yeo Woon. They would discover it in due time.
There was the collective consciousness, which connected all Gwishins to each other and allowed them to share common knowledge and thoughts. Gwishins could be found with consciousness, but few had dared to venture deeper into the nebula of ideas and abstractions that such a place represented. For the consciousness was also that of all the dead, regardless of their state, whether awake or not. Gyô Hui-Seon was particularly interested in this issue when Jae-Ji submitted it to her, just a few days after their first meeting. The young woman was strong-willed, ambitious, lively and controlled all at once. She had such a desire for life that she could almost burn those around her.
Jae-Ji already knew that she was eager to fit in and pick up where she had left her barely started life, just as she was eager to meet other Gwishins and help them settle down. You will be our Voice, Jae-Ji said to her as she looked at her, remembering her face, remembering a place that didn't exist, you will speak for us, that will be your role. She had already traveled in the years between the first and fourth resurrection, and had met and searched for the Gwishins who populated her consciousness in an indistinct, distant way (which she had been told to find). Those whom she had found she had trained and informed, extensively, of their position, the role they were to play, the measures they were to take.
For the most part, they had been alone and lost when she had stood in their way. Afterwards, she had perceived their echo in her consciousness as assured and determined. She sent more than one to Hanyang, to Hui-Seon and Ji-Ho. The latter was their story. You will write, she told him from day one, you will write and explain who we are. Ji-Ho had asked if he would also say where they came from and why, but Jae-Ji was adamant. No, she said, it's not your role. She had to place everyone, and she felt like she was running out of time.
The collective consciousness was like the low part of a woman's clothing : it had several layers. The majority of Gwishin, including the well-known ones, stood at the first one, the upper, puffy, visible chima, which was made to be looked at. Few had visited the floors below. The lower chima was the one that made it possible to become aware of the other dead, those who had not yet risen, but whose threads of thought sometimes crossed space and time to become part of the thread of their awakened counterparts. It also allowed access to deeply buried memories.
Hui-Seon was at this point, as were most of the other gwishin-leaders Jae-Ji had met : sometimes Jae-Ji called them "gwishin-princes" because their roles most often involved responsibility and power in the world of the living, totally distinct from the social status they had previously held. Then there was the last layer, the sokchima, which she was almost the only one to know, but which she had never used. For this layer was meant to be used : it pulled on a rope and awakened the dead, provoked resurrections that did not follow the traditional three-year cycle, and gave the power to control these populations. It was the domain of the Gwishin-kings.
Hui-Seon will be a Gwishin-queen, Jae-Ji thought when she was alone and sitting on the ground, listening to the rustle of the wind in the leaves of the trees and the whispers of other Gwishins in her head, and with her will be others, there will be the one who loves to fight, there will be the king's mistress, there will be the one who talks to his soldiers and the one who rides in the name of the dead. They will descend to the third layer and awaken the dead. Some were easily spotted, for she had seen and spoken to them, but others were more distant, still inaccessible, and secret.
The Gwishin had something else, something that Jae-Ji had struggled to understand and master, but which added another dimension to the range of their particularities. Jae-Ji had experienced it four years after her resurrection, when she had just been captured by a soldier and was trying to escape : inside her, something had moved, imperceptibly, and she had heard her own voice in her head, with accents that didn't belong to her, saying "Whisper". The command was imprecise, strange. She had obeyed almost in spite of herself, even though she had never believed in gods or possession.
She had whispered to the soldier, softly, and the voice that had come out of her throat was distorted, unknown, low and deep like a cave that had been dug into the depths of the Earth. It was her voice without being hers, it was a multiple voice, that was the voice of others and her own. The man had seemed confused, then he had left her there, free and amazed, never to return. It had taken her several years to get to grips with the mechanism and use it without fear, and she rarely used it, but experienced truly inexplicable and extraordinary successes. She had called it the "Dead Whisper", and compared it to a hypnotism of an outstanding, absolute and complete quality.
The living heard the Whisper and fell into a trance, became malleable and vulnerable. Her understanding had increased when she had heard other Gwishins testify to the existence of the phenomenon : more often than not, the use was involuntary and totally uncontrolled, but Jae-Ji thought (knew) that it could become so. Im Ji-Ho was aware of it. It's probably a hunting tool, he told her, reasoning as a scientist when she reasoned as a theologian. He wasn't wrong, but neither was Jae-Ji.
Hui Seon was to be told soon, as were the other Gwishin-princes and princesses in the country. It had to be done. The Whisper was another sign, another function, another role. Everything had to fall into place, the whisper and the consciousness of the dead, the power and the disequilibrium, the nameless place from which she kept incoherent bits of memories. The gods didn't speak to her, they had never spoken to her. The dead were the only audience she needed.
b. The Dead Whisper
Sometimes the soju carafe would talk to him. It didn't actually say anything, because the carafes had no mouth, and he found difficult to conceive how to articulate words and sentences without the whole proper system, but it possessed a completely different language, more subtle, more secret, which Dong Soo was still struggling to translate despite years of intense conversation. Sometimes she would whisper in his ear "just one more, just one, it can't kill you, one more". This was the most frequent command, and it constituted the vast majority of their exchanges.
It was also the easiest to follow : there was nothing complicated about grabbing a carafe and filling a bowl. More often than not, he only had to look at it to hear it sing. In the ports, people liked to talk about mermaids and enchantresses who called out to men with caressing melodies. Dong Soo was more pragmatic, and stuck to land, where alcohol played enough music to repatriate all the sailors. It was a sweet song, without words, which didn't need them. No one understood it. The people Dong Soo knew drank by choice and for pleasure, and none of them thought that a carafe could hold enough power to force you into pouring its contents into any container, over and over again, to the point where you didn't know who you were and why you had started drinking in the first place.
It wasn't that he hadn't tried anything else. At first, he had immersed himself in work, but work was petty, and it was sending him back images and sounds (Dong Soo-yah) that were unbearable, that seemed to want to tear the skin off his belly and open his chest to devour his heart. Work had been a very short-term distraction. At night, Dong Soo always ended up alone with himself, and those were the most difficult times. And then the work involved seeing Cho-Rip (Hong Guk Yeong), which tended to take away all forms of combativeness and willpower from him.
It was necessary to occupy his mind, to keep it from going around in circles, from throwing his grief in his face with guilty disdain. He no longer really remembered the chain of reasoning that had led him to such a conclusion, but the magkeolli had been a first option, and it had kept him busy for almost a year, until he found that his thoughts were becoming coherent again too quickly (Dong-Soo yah), and that his guilt was throwing itself back down his throat too fast. The only solution had been to aim for something stronger. Alcohol fogged his anger and sorrow in a way that satisfied him, burying them deeper than he had buried (Woon-ah). He had been taught that when a punch didn't work, you had to hit harder. Diligently, he had followed the old instructions of his upbringing, and attacked soju as he had once hit his comrades when they said things he didn't like.
Dong Soo was often drunk and always sad, but he was neither blind nor deaf, and he knew what others thought of his attitude without supporting their reproaches. He felt angry with everyone, including Sa-Mo. Sa-Mo didn't understand, any more than the king or his friends or colleagues, nobody knew, nobody had ever experienced anything like that (that was what the carafe said and he believed it because the carafe took away his pain and anguish and made them disappear). He did not remember ever being so hateful to the world, but he assumed that his youth had been quieter, and less pessimistic (Dong-Soo yah).
He knew he was exhausting himself against some wind, but it didn't matter to him. He would rather blame Cho-Rip, that gisaeng bitch, the prince (king) and the whole country than collapse and admit that he couldn't handle it (don't be sad for someone like me). He persisted in wanting to remain stubborn, despite the injunctions of his comrades and family. It was only with Yoo-Jin that he felt a little calmer sometimes. The boy was not judgmental, and he just wanted to spend time with his father, even if his father drank a little or his words became vaguely absurd. He tried to be careful with his kid. Yoo-Jin was not responsible for anything. Neither was his wife, but sometimes he had trouble looking at her, as he always had trouble crossing Ji-Seon's eyes or seeing Jin-Ju practicing when she wasn't busy negotiating ginseng sales with her business partner.
He felt that the king was beginning to doubt his return to the palace and that Cho-Rip was fuelling his mistrust with all the skill he could muster. War had been declared with his exile. He and Cho-Rip communicated almost exclusively for emergencies and obligations. They no longer drank together, did not go to the same entertainment houses, avoided each other in the corridors. One part of him was saddened by this and thought back to the boy who had told him that he couldn't swim with a desperate look on his face, but another part (try to survive on your own) was openly and shamelessly reveling in the mortification that was written on Hong Guk Yeong's face when Dong Soo arrived at recruit training, carafe in hand and uniform poorly put on, already drunker than he had been in the first twenty years of his life.
One day, Min-So had told him, as he came to visit her after the death of one of her babies, that she felt like she was running after the little girl she had been, but that she could no longer catch up with her, that she had become too slow, and that her bitterness was holding her down like chains. Dong Soo felt the same way almost every day from the time he got up until he went to bed, and nothing soothed him except the carafe. The carafe was a friend. It had never let him down, even if it destroyed him, but sometimes some destruction was better than others, and Dong Soo didn't want to face the one that threatened him as soon as he was sober.
One day, he had considered throwing himself off a cliff. The idea had been very serious and he had planned everything for weeks, thinking about what message he would leave, whether he would leave a message (maybe not just to make them understand just to teach them), where he could go, what day, and what time. The carafe agreed with him. It never said no to him, it simply suggested that he should continue.
It was a few months after what had happened in the fields. He felt as if he was in the dark and couldn't move forward. He had decided on a date, but he had drunk so much that day that he had completely forgotten about it. No one had ever known, not even Sa-Mo. No one had any idea that he was repeating the scenario every day in his head, armed with the thought that if things ever got too bad, he could always take that way out. In the meantime, soju did the trick.
He wanted to stay in the country. The life there had been particularly difficult, but it had kept him busy enough for him to reduce his alcohol consumption. His wife had been supportive : she always was, and although she was attached to a certain social prestige, she had rolled up her sleeves to learn how to handle a sickle and plant vegetables. That's how life is, husband, she had told him firmly. They had owned a small herd, which Yoo-Jin loved. He had cried when they had to sell their tiny farm to come back to Hanyang, in a quality trampled house that would have been better demolished.
Even Yun-Seo had seemed a little bewildered when Dong Soo read her the letter from Cho-Rip who was waiting for them in the capital. Are you sure you want to come back, husband ? She had asked him wisely, because she probably knew better than he did what he needed. He had answered that he wasn't sure of anything, but that he didn't think his return would be particularly successful. I don't think so either, she had told him, before adding : you're happier here.
Even the gisaengs had lost their appeal. For a time, they had nevertheless represented another escape from his suffering, and they still had carafes in profusion, but since the exile, their liberating radiance had clearly disappeared. It was the first time he had returned to see them since he had been back in Hanyang, and he had originally planned only to accompany his fellow officers, who often laughed at his condition and were more cruel than anything that could be said about the gwishins (Dong Soo-yah).
He had asked to be alone to avoid their comments. He was said to enjoy consuming women as much as hard liquor, but in reality he had more than once been content just to listen to a gisaeng playing gayageum while he drank in silence, unable to say a word for fear of saying too much. His nights with the courtesans had been filled with more silence and music than sighs. He found it difficult to touch his wife, and he loved her very much. He had no difficulty in touching a stranger, but always left with a bitter aftertaste in his mouth, and the impression that he was betraying someone. He possessed gisaengs while he was drunk. I
t was easier, more pleasant, and simpler to forget. Most of the time, he would surprise himself by engaging in the slightest carnal activity. The gisaengs didn't say no. Once, he had licked one of them between her thighs and she had assured him that he was full of kindness, that he was one of the sweetest and most respectful customers, and that she would have wanted to marry him. He had come home crying, his mind hazy with alcohol and sex, and longing that he couldn't tell anyone about (Dong Soo-yah).
Perhaps things would be like that with the gisaeng that was sent to him. She was a little taller than her sisters, and presented herself with her face completely veiled. He was surprised only for a brief moment, before returning to his carafe. Tonight it was particularly talkative. The gisaeng came to sit a little away from him. Under the veil, he guessed that she was watching him attentively to judge his tastes, preferences and appearance.
- I'm Yae Mina, she said, and her voice was strange, very deep and calm, but not unpleasant. I will replace Seo-Hyeon for tonight.
- Is she unwell ?
He liked Yeong-Ja, just as he liked many gisaengs (except one). She was able to play gayageum in a remarkably wide-ranging repertoire, and she never encouraged him to do anything else. She was one of the first gisaengs that he had encountered individually, after Yun-Seo.
- No, the other gisaeng replied, the one whose face he could not see. Just asked elsewhere. It's a very busy time of year.
- That's what I'd heard, he confirmed.
He wondered why she was hiding her face, what could possibly lie under the veil. Her voice was very soft, almost shy, and it had soothing accents of (sleep).
- Do you want me to call her back ? she asked cautiously.
Her hands were resting on her knee, in the usual way of gisaengs. They were very long, very white and very thin.
- No, Dong Soo answered shaking his head. No, sorry, that's not what I meant.
He hesitated, then added :
- I think this is the first time I see you.
- I've just been hired, she informed him, and her voice had taken a new turn (whisper). I hadn't been back in Hanyang for a very a long time.
Dong Soo took the carafe in front of him. It had been calling him for hours.
- Then you're like me, he said.
He felt her smile. No matter the veil, he thought, no matter. He became aware of the day's fatigue, and he realized that he wished she would have talked a little more (whisper).
She kept looking at him under her veil, peaceful and motionless like a statue. The corridors reflected the giggles of the other gisaengs and the fuss of the banquets taking place around the house. They were alone.