Notes.

Warnings. Mentions of cerebrovascular accident.

The sentence "so goes the court, today everything, tomorrow nothing" is from the 1995 TV film "L'allée du Roi" (The King Path), which is about the life of Madame de Maintenon, one of Louis XIV's favorites (and his last wife). The sentence is said by Madame de Montespan, another favorite, and I find it absolutely formidable to summarize the whole thing.

The name "Jae Oh-Da", is some kind of transposition in a korean name of the world "Jehovah" (#subtility), in reference to our dear Witnesses.

The Chinese really did called Korea "the land of the wisest, where hibiscus flowers bloom".

Next chapters may take more time to be published due to the fact that I've resumed my teaching at university.


CHAPITRE XLIX


"All my friends are heathens, take it slow
Wait for them to ask you who you know
Please don't make any sudden moves
You don't know the half of the abused"

(Twenty One Pilots, american artists, "Heathens")


a. The Lernaean Hydra

On November 16, 1781, at the second hour of osi, Baek Dong Soo pushed open the door of the individual office assigned to him as deputy governor attached to the Royal Investigation Bureau, in order to consult the last reports sent to him and to fill out documents, or to sign those that required his signature. The office, if one could call it so, was such a cramped room that Dong Soo could barely stand in it, and had to bend over backwards almost every time to make his way, in a short but intense way in terms of physical contortions, to his work table where he had been sitting for three years now reading and writing pages to and from the other instances of the government.

The adjective that until now seemed to him the most appropriate to skillfully describe his small private space of reflection was "shabby". He had been assured, at the time he had been granted the office, that it was perfectly comfortable and suitable for the noble tasks that would be his, and that the king himself had insisted on providing him with a good situation so that he could concentrate on his new duties.

In fact, the wretched state of the office when he had discovered it had turned out to be a revenge, not subtle enough and consequently tremendously vicious, on the part of the bureaucrats whom his decadent behavior as an instructor (and the king's right-hand man) had shocked and tensed, and who also happened to be those whose ranks he was now joining. In a sense, Dong Soo was almost surprised that he hadn't seen it coming.

Another part of himself, perhaps the most pragmatic or realistic, had also pointed out that he could have been worse off. He had been given the office, after all, and the room had all its walls and furniture. The cracks were numerous, the location catastrophic since it was in a busy corridor, the insulation disastrous since he could hear everyone talking about anything at any time of day, and the furniture, if not rustic, barely solid, but he had an office of his own, and the thing, considering his liabilities, was a victory rather than a deterioration.

The office consisted of a table, a chair, and a shelf full of documents of all kinds that Dong Soo did his best to classify according to themes and urgency, sometimes with the help of his young assistant, a twenty-two year old kid who looked permanently terrified, but who had shown remarkable skills in filing and solving some very specific administrative problems. The room's furnishings were unquestionably old, sadly sober, and completely out of fashion compared to other more renowned offices occupied by government officials whose conduct had not been marked by a slightly too strong attachment to soju.

When his wife had come to visit him the day after his official assumption of duties, an event which he had relentlessly postponed since 1776, when the king, following the solving of the coup d'état perpetrated against him by norons holding stubborn grudges, had appointed him deputy governor as a reward for his service (and probably, he had sometimes said to himself, to maintain appearances, those which required a monarch to grant a gratification commensurate with the duties accomplished by his subjects), she had been somewhat dismayed to discover the conditions under which he was devoting himself to his new job, and had since then done her best to brighten the atmosphere, encouraging him to decorate the walls, initially frightfully naked and sullen, with tapestries and drawings, most of them signed by Kim Hong Do, going to Yoo Ji-Seon and Hwang Jin-Ju's store to find all these decorative objects which at first sight were of no use, but whose presence contributed to embellish any place and to make it more welcoming.

She had also advised him to use flowers, both for their perfume and for his own concentration. As a result, he possessed a formidable bouquet of hibiscus placed in a large vase on the floor of the office, which Yun-Seo had found perfectly appropriate, the flower being one of the unofficial symbols of the country, so much so that the Chinese had designated Joseon as "the land of the wisest, where hibiscus flowers bloom".

His days were usually repetitive and routine, which he was not displeased with, although he would have been more prone to inconsistency in his youth ("Don't be ridiculous, Dong Soo-yah, you're far from being an old man, and besides, you insult us all when you say such things," Jin-Ju regularly lectured him whenever he referred to himself in these terms) : they usually began with his missions in the royal palace office, handling urgent cases, reading those that were less urgent, studying reports and making decisions that were both quick and thoughtful, just like on the field.

Then came lunch, either alone, bent over his paperwork, or accompanied by his assistant, who was one of the few who seemed to be unaware of his reputation, or not to attach the slightest importance to it, and with whom he discussed government policy, the latest measures and, when the boy brought it up, because Dong Soo never did, the question of the gwishins (my love it was never your fault). Then he would tidy up, file, quickly sign documents that couldn't wait if necessary, and leave the palace to go to the barracks, to be with his men, for the patrol.

Sometimes there was one patrol a day. Sometimes he wasn't called up for two, three days, or even a week. The shifts instituted by the War Ministry meant that the brigades weren't always mobilized on a regular basis, both in terms of schedules and days of activity. Dong Soo had a greater chance of stability due to his priority duties as deputy governor, but there were times when he had to postpone reading his files in the morning to patrol with his men in the nearby forest.

After having put down his hat and sword and rolled up his sleeves in a gesture that had become a reflex, but which was of no interest in itself since the sleeves of his uniform didn't roll up, he opened the first file he had to deal with, and conscientiously reread the numerous annotations he had written in the margins of certain pages, in order to be able to make his decision more easily. He had learned it from Cho-Rip, who himself had blacked out whole pages of files when he was still a counsellor.

Since he had been dismissed from the government, the latter had sent him several tearful letters, which Dong Soo had read, reread, kept for a while, before throwing them into the fire. He thought that getting rid of the correspondence of what was (had been) one of his best childhood friends would have caused him remorse or pity, but in fact, he had just watched, not without a morbid fascination, the paper and the words twist in the fire, and Hong Guk Yeong's plea disappear.

To the king, who sometimes asked him some news, just as he used to ask his adviser about Dong Soo, the latter answered him relentlessly that Hong Guk Yeong was well, that he had gotten accustomed to his new home in the Jeolla province with his wife and daughter, and that he was hoping one day to be able to reiterate in person his forgiveness to His Majesty. Dong Soo never said anything else.

He didn't talk about the burnt letters, he didn't mention the icy brevity of his own answers, which enjoined Cho-Rip to submit and accept his fate, adding that the king wasn't going to feel sorry for him and that it was better for him to be as discreet as possible. He spoke even less of the terrifying lack of compassion he felt when he saw his comrade, a previously valued friend, who had grown up with him, fought with him, falling from his privileged position, and into a misery equal to that of Dong Soo years before.

Another adviser, much quieter and even colder than winter, named Kim Kyung-Ho, former chief secretary under the administration deployed by Hong Guk Yeon, had already taken his place near Jeongjo, and the court functioned as it had always done, under the terrible maxim which said "so goes the court, today everything, tomorrow nothing" and which was confirmed every day, as heads bowed under the weight of accusations of corruption, of fraternization with the enemies of the south, in Japan, or of the north, in the Qing, of debauched behavior.

The Royal Investigation Bureau was receiving a dozen new files a day, and additional material was accumulating in a frightening pile between the first hour of the morning and the last hour of the night. Before the appearance of the Gwishins, King Yeongjo had requested their intervention in a way that could be qualified as relatively moderate, despite the affairs related to Crown Prince Sado (Woon's eyes when Dong Soo had believed he was the murderer), but since the ascension to the throne of his grandson and the coup d'état of 1776, the requests had multiplied and everyone had become suspicious. Dong Soo was almost certain that he had a file with his name on it, somewhere on the shelves of his colleagues. He didn't care, knowing full well that the problem wasn't his loyalty (are you sure about that ?) but his attitude with alcohol.

He plunged back into his file, his throat suddenly dry. Ten years of excessive consumption of wine and liquor couldn't be erased in the blink of an eye, and every day, since he had promised Yun-Seo to control himself, since Woon had left Hanyang, he felt the bite of thirst coming back, almost every hour, demanding, insatiable, tyrannical in its imperious tone, and even cuddly, like a former lover, which it was, in the end. His wife had advised him to gradually reduce his consumption, believing that a too brutal withdrawal could be counterproductive.

- I've seen men stop drinking one day, promise they'll never make the same mistake again, and end up even more drunk than usual the next day, she had told him when he had informed her of his decision.

The first few weeks had been abominable, not to say agonizing, and Dong Soo had fallen back exactly twice into his old habits, mainly because of the difficulty to stop, which he had judged insurmountable. Each time he had reduced his alcohol dosage, he had experienced unbearable tremors, fever, monstrous anxiety (Woon never came back, you imagined it all), and he had been sick several times at work. These conditions put him in torment, undermined his will and efforts, and tirelessly pushed him towards the easiest solution, which was to take back his carafe. It had given him visions of Woon in the past. The smoke did that, too, but the smoke was another problem, and strangely less pervasive than alcohol.

The interruption of his drinking had also had its share of illusions, among which one that had deeply disturbed and marked him, where he had seen Woon appear in a corridor of the palace, dressed only in white, in a long vaporous and milky coat that spread around him like a (cloud), and his skin was pale, his eyes completely black, and his hair completely white, and he looked like a sickly deity, like death incarnate. Dong Soo, sweaty, feverish, his throat on fire, had fallen to his knees, terrified, dazed, panic-stricken with anguish and love, just as Woon, barefoot, had approached him very slowly, had surrounded his face with his cold hands, a cold of immeasurable gentleness, and had whispered in a hoarse, tombstone-like voice, "my dead love".

He had received his letter from Sokcho, before he had left for Qing with presumably another gwishin, whose identity he had not specified for safety. The letter had been read by the police, as it had arrived in the beautiful Baek house unsealed and marked with the military verification seal. Yun-Seo was outraged by this, speaking of invasion of privacy, disrespect for fundamental rights, and raging paranoia.

Dong Soo, while sharing his wife's opinion, had preferred to concentrate on receiving the message, and had reread it at least a hundred times. He knew the turns of phrase and words by heart, as he used to do with the letters he received from Woon from the training camp, when he had been sent with other comrades on a mission in the high mountains.

He had kept it, as opposed to Cho-Rip's letters, very preciously in a box filled with a multitude of other objects and documents, which his wife knew existed, but to which she had no access. This box, very simple, barely carved with a few ornamental motifs, was under a chest of drawers in his bedroom, hidden from view.

Often he would take it out, and thus lose himself in its contents, under the painting of tigers that adorned the walls of his quarters, and then the thirst that had previously overwhelmed him every time he lifted the lid of the box would fade as he thought of the Gwishins, and of the fact that Woon's tomb was now only a huge, muddy, and wonderfully (empty) gaping hole.


b. The Preacher

The man had no name. If he had had a name before, a set of syllables placed next to each other, with a special meaning, given by a father or mother who had held him in her arms as a fidgeting and chirping infant, he had no memory of it, and cared relatively little, if at all. In one of Hanyang's main central streets, which ran straight from one end of the city to the other, bringing together stores and crossroads, curious residents and visitors, whom the controls at the city gates had not yet discouraged, and who admired their surroundings with an air of blissful felicity, as if they had never seen anything like it, he moved forward without stopping, with a slow, resolute but wobbly pace, reflecting his state of mind.

To say that he had been thinking would have been inappropriate : in reality, the inside of his skull and the swirling that it contained was more like those swamps, of which you couldn't see what was stirring beneath the surface, but which you could suspect were unwelcoming and potentially impassable. Things were swimming under the murky water, shadows, abnormalities, with powerful jaws and expressionless, empty eyes, ready to grab you if you inadvertently decided to venture into the mire.

These mental monstrosities, these aberrations, were legion in the head of the man, and yet, in spite of what all the walkers he encountered presumed, and who each time moved aside as if they had smelled a pestilential odor coming up to them, they had not always existed in that conceptual, metaphysical place which was the temple of his thoughts.

He had forgotten it, but his name had once been associated with a loving and lucid personality, a married man and a father, with a job and a house in one of the small streets of the capital. He was born in Hanyang under the name of Jae Oh-Da in the year 1739, during a very ordinary summer when the crops had suffered from lack of irrigation, and the entire population of the kingdom, both aristocrats and peasants, had flocked to the water points, mountain rivers, the banks of the Han River, and the soothing shadows cast by the branches of the trees.

He had lived uneventfully for twenty-eight years, specializing in pottery and the making of decorative vases, before marrying a local girl with whom he had exchanged only two sentences, but whom his parents (and her own) had deemed a good enough match for their son. He had two brothers and a sister, about whom he had no news today. His parents had been gruff people, in ways more often crude than delicate, but they had done their best in bringing up their five children, and Oh-Da, if his memory hadn't been so bad, could have said that they had been good parents, preparing him well enough for life outside the family home and for all its splendid cruelty.

For the first forty years of its existence, nothing out of the ordinary had happened to him. He and his wife weren't passionate about each other, and after some early marriage incidents that had opposed their two characters head-on, with no possibility of escape since they were now united for better and for worse, the last option encompassing a whole host of possibilities that people didn't always imagine very well, or deliberately underestimated until proven otherwise, they had managed to get along and function together, especially after the birth of their eldest daughter, followed by a boy and another girl.

The wife of Oh-Da had been known, if not for her pretty face, for her cheerfulness and generous curves, and it was true that she knew how to receive and animate encounters wonderfully, for she could talk at length about everything, while her husband was considered more shy, more evasive. Their children had grown up without a blemish, without any particular difficulties.

Their income, although modest, had nevertheless allowed them to own a respectable home of their own, in a city where prices were often compared to a vast swindle. Oh-Da worked in collaboration with many local merchants, providing them with custom-made items, as well as individuals who had heard of his talent and wanted to put it to use. In short, he lived simply and correctly until 1779.

Even the appearance of the gwishins didn't at first disturb his habits or his professional activity. Pottery was one of those areas in which there was always a demand, and if his orders had been a little less numerous, they had not however ceased definitively, allowing him to keep a reasonable income without having to take on another load. Some of his fellow potters had been hit more severely, but Oh-Da's wife had pointed out to him that it was primarily because they hadn't been able to establish themselves as well in their profession as her husband, and hadn't managed to find such a wide variety of clients, which was indeed one of the reasons he had been able to maintain his position.

In addition, he had been ordered, as all able-bodied men, to join the army to validate his compulsory military service, which he had fulfilled quietly and as soon as possible, at the age of nineteen, and the time he had spent as a soldier had earned him a nice pension. Ironically, he had completed his service at the very moment of the first wave of the resurrection of the Gwishin.

He had continued to do so until the day the accident occurred. He was then forty years old, was in good health, had a supportive family, and was in high demand as a professional. He had registered his name on the army's emergency lists, and had sometimes interrupted his activity to join a brigade from time to time, but the early accomplishment of his military service had protected him from forced integration, unlike the men who had not yet done so when the Gwishins had appeared, modifying the internal status of the country, tipping it from a time of peace to an unexpected time of war, at once unprecedented and frightening.

On July 13, 1779, he was on his way to the barracks, not as a reinforcement, but to deliver a white ceramic carafe to one of his clients, who happened to be a brigade chief and whose container was to be used for drinks. In the distance, he could see the dark roof of the buildings where the soldiers gathered, and the high walls of the enclosure, when it happened. For several days already, he had noticed deficiencies, problems, symptoms, which had left him astonished and perplexed.

He sometimes had difficulty articulating certain words, which had never happened to him before. One of his eyes seemed to see less clearly, and part of his face had become numb. As the day progressed, some of his symptoms had worsened, preventing him from working properly. A headache had been twisting the inside of his skull since late morning, and seemed to completely disrupt his internal balance.

Halfway to the barracks, on a fairly sparsely populated street, he suddenly experienced a total lack of sensation in the entire left side of his body, so much so that he had been unable to keep on walking. The carafe, carefully wrapped, had slipped from his hands. After that, there was nothing.

He didn't even remember being scared, not understanding what was going on, wanting to take a break in his walk to the barracks. He had regained consciousness long afterwards, more exactly one year after his blackout. Residents had found him on the ground, eyes rolling back, drooling, and initially thought he was drunk because of the fragments of the carafe next to him. They had called the police, who, after two days of unconsciousness on his part, finally brought in a doctor.

His heart was beating, he was breathing, but didn't wake up. He had been returned to his family, distraught, lost, after having had his description spread in the city according to the procedure applied when the authorities found a complete stranger, unable to give any answers about his identity. He had spent days, weeks, in the bedroom, lying on the marital bed, inert but still breathing, fascinating the doctors and frightening his wife and children.

After five months, the physicists who had examined him had suggested the possibility that he would never open his eyes, and that he was stuck in that nebulous space between life and death, between consciousness and nothingness, that only human action could abolish. But his wife had refused, having received contrary advice from closer doctors who had assured her that he would eventually wake up, because they had already seen similar cases, even though they were unable to predict any date. Nevertheless, his family had waited, plunging into appalling misery for having lost their main source of income. The children had been sent to work to earn a living. Oh-Da's wife had become a servant for yangbans. He had remained deaf to their prayers until the winter of 1780.

He had certainly woken up, but those around him were quickly disillusioned to see how different the man who had opened his eyes after his coma was from the one he had been before the accident. First of all, his memory was a blank page, a virgin canvas. He no longer remembered his wife and children, let alone his friends. He had forgotten everything about his profession, his techniques, his clients.

Even more frightening, he had no memory of his childhood or adolescence. It was as if he had been reset from scratch, restarted from the beginning, like an infant. The doctors who had seen him couldn't explain the phenomenon any more than they could identify the origin of his loss of consciousness. Attempts had been made to stimulate his nerves, to trigger a return to normal through tricks, speeches, objects, visits, but Jae Oh-Da had remained impervious to all attempts.

On the other hand, he spoke, but his speeches now terrorized those who met him, because they had taken on an implacable and religious inflection that had never been known to him before, and that no one had been able to justify. He had begun to talk about events, entities, cataclysms, eyes in the dark, and all his conversation was limited and unbearable. He was unable to eat properly, to walk straight, or to articulate well, which made it even more terrible.

The physicists had advised his wife not to disturb him, and to let him act according to his taste, hoping that time would eventually bring him back to his senses. In the beginning, he always went out accompanied by someone, who tried to make themselves tiny every time he launched himself into mystical harangues in the middle of passers-by, calling them randomly.

After a year, he had escaped the vigilance of his family and left home to roam freely in the streets of Hanyang. Part of him felt that he was not supposed to leave the city, although he was unable to say exactly where he was or why. His wife following the recommendations of the doctors, he wasn't bothered in his quest, and he was now walking the streets to perform the same task as usual. He knew he had to do it. He didn't know why, but it didn't matter. He had to.

In the chaos of his reflections, there was sometimes this image that made his hair stand on end, that made him want to wet his pants, that terrified him so intensely that he felt he was going even crazier than he was already. This image was that of thick darkness, of emptiness, and in the middle of this emptiness always opened up, enormous, intolerable, alienated eyes, which multiplied all around Oh-Da, and these eyes stared at him, these eyes swallowed him up, tearing his reason out piece by piece, crumb by crumb, and he feared them more than anything else in the world, and was their slave in all things, for the eyes were the masters, the eyes were the absolute (the hundred eyes), the eyes were death, and death reigned over his desolate and barren lands, waiting, preparing, reflecting, its eyes wide open in the nothingness of things that only a man who had been trapped between the two worlds could know.

The eyes were saying "speak for us, say the words for us, show them for us". They commanded him to announce their coming loudly, to talk about the deserts, the ruins, the other place that awaited them all, the fires in the trees and the rust-colored sky.

The eyes spoke, whispered, warned, and the Preacher, as he was now called, not really alive, not really Gwishin, transmitted their word to the living and the dead.