Reclining on a Roadside Grave

15
Lying on a Roadside Grave, 1959


Dano was bizarre. He was abnormal sort of a student at a normal school whose major function had been to produce all-around students equipped with the pedagogical capabilities to teach elementary school pupils. He was an odd man out at Andong Normal School. He could neither catch up with both required and elective subjects at school nor could stand the run-of-the-mill classroom activities. He was distracted, absent-minded and obsessed with something else: reading and illusionary thoughts.

Dano knew very well that he was indebted to many others who had molded him up to that time: particularly the boarding and lodging conveniences during his education. He owed the kindnesses and considerations to his homeroom teacher Mr. Tschiang at the senior class of the middle school who had arranged to board Dano and two other students at his father's house during the entrance exam period. He also owed the boarding amenities to his immediate uncle on his mother's side.

Uncle Lee and his wife were financially pinched themselves, but the spouses were generous enough to help Dano out by allowing him to board at their house, such as it was, for nearly a year. Uncle Lee had lived a meager life as a low tax official at Andong County Office, with his residence of two rooms rented from Mr. Kwon, a local rich.

Dano's room, which was attached to the uncle's like conjoined twins, had two first cousin brothers as his room mates. The immediate next-door room had one man and wife and their three daughters as room members. Any member of the adjoining rooms was able to get to the other room through a wall slot by crawling.

Andong-eup, the capital of Andong County at the time, was the greatest place Dano had ever stepped on. There were no bullying pranksters or ijime anymore. Two hundred co-ed peer students of Andong Normal School, of whom there were 50 girl students, were friendly and cooperative. The school had no boarding system, so the students used private boarding houses at a monthly payment, or had to cook on their own at rented rooms.

The husked rice and barley, which Dano had brought from his house for his own cooking, were always in short supply. Dano was always hungry. He more often than not took a few friends of his--The Virtuous Chang and the Prosperous Park, etc-- for ransom to pay his gourmet, the red bean chrysanthemum breads. "Haben Sie Geld?" Dano would ask mischievously of Chang, in clumsy beginner's German, then Chang took Dano by the hand to a roadside shack baking the chrysanthemum breads.

Dano made efforts to bail himself out of financial troubles. He started delivering morning newspapers, but the delivery office chief of a vernacular newspaper showed him the door on the grounds of his tardiness and misdeliveries. Some of his friends went to great lengths to give Dano the job of teaching English, whose suggestion Dano himself snubbed because he was not so versed in the language that he could teach the others.

Dano was well aware that he himself was reputed or rumored to be very good at the language in the town, which was a small one in a strict sense of the word, probably because of Dano's vainglorious and presumptuous habit of grab holding the TIME magazine with him for ever. He loved the magazine, its design, its brilliant headlines and enlightening stories indeed, but his long-lasting accompaniment of the magazine during his high school years was deceptive. Which meant that the grab holding of the prestigious magazine did not guarantee his versatility.

The dandy place, on which the Time magazine did pride itself on its presence, used to be School Book Store. The book store, lined with banks and fashion stores, was located in the central quarter of the riverside town of the Nakdong. The bookshop boasted tens of thousands of glamorous books, the covers of which Dano used to grope with lusty eyes.

He then used to leave the place and head second-hand bookstores, located on the outskirts of the town, where he shuffled through the covers and content pages. The one proprietor of the place, whose plump body wedged itself between disheveled piles of dusty books, was especially curious about and amenable to Dano's frequent visits. He was always willing to lend his books to Dano for an extended period of time at a meager price. He would say to Dano, "Normal is O.K."

Dano had restless nights. Red eyes would throw him curseful blood-shot stares at him, getting him awake startled. He would then sit up absentmindedly for a while or get out of the bedding and pace around, concerned about the wellbeing of his parents.

With no means of electronic communication at the time, Dano, so missing his parents and worried about them, on a certain summer Saturday afternoon, with the last train heading south for Danchon stopped, an intermediary train station for his home, hit the road for home just on foot, for the distance of about 30 kilometers. It was far into the night, almost past midnight, when Dano got to Gowoonsa Temple. It was mildly drizzling. The valley trail, low and shallow, which was past the temple and bending toward Jeomgok, was shrouded with misty fogs.

Graves were lined on both sides of the valley hills from across the trail. It was right time ghosts would come out at their haunts. Dano felt short of breath, with sweats welling down the cheeks, and felt himself restrained by the one. He could not move a step further, so he naturally had to turn around and get to an immediate grave. He then reclined on the grave mound, as if the quiet resting place of a certain silent soul had become a big human pillow of his. He felt so comfortable and so relaxed. "Hello, there!"

Awoken by their son's unexpected small time appearance, Dano's parents couldn't be more astonished. Flabbergasted was the right word for the scene. They got flabbergasted at the shape Dano had been in. Drenched to the skin mixed with sweats, exhausted with hunger and dehydration, their son looked like fainting in any moment. Dano's grandma Mrs, Euiseong Kim hollered and issued orders, and the rest of the family raced. Dano said, "I am fine." He went to the house well, got undressed and cleaned. After a little while he got nourished, too. "How come?" they wanted to know. "I missed home so much!" Dano said, beaming mischievously.

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Bright boys and girls from ten more counties came to the Normal and Tiang Huon was the best and brightest of them all. He was from a northern county of Yeongju. He was tall, shapely and handsome. He was such a handsome kid on the block that the pretty coeds could blush. He was a brilliant student, too, so brilliant a student that he started and finished first of the entire class. Dano, who isolated himself on a bench of the school pond and on the stairs leading to the music room, used to throw an envious glance toward Tiang Huon who, surrounded by his supporters, went by chattering away. On the Fourth of July, 1959 on his second year, Tiang Huon, then the President of the Student Body, came to Dano one day before the occasion, asking him to read the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the United States, for the students. Dano mounted the school pulpit and read the famous address beginning with, "Four score and seven years ago..." That was the first and only occasion that he had talked to the Normal School students in public.

Dano thought to himself that the coed girls in school uniform were handsome, but he was averse to the female human species in general. Afraid of them might have been the right word. Whereas he was somewhat curious about the adult women who had once called on him in another virtual reality called dreamscapes, hankering for the union with him, saying, "Live with me," he in actuality shied away from any contact with the girls whenever he ran into them. There was not a girl who Dano talked to during his school term. The only two extreme prototypes of women, who were the whining and weeping mother type and the hollering and nagging grandmother type, rankled in him. He was virtually ignorant about the human condition that there existed benevolent categories of women in between.

Dano might have heard the whispers ("There goes English!") traded behind his back and he might have savored every minute of them. And it might have been the self-awareness posing as pride that his shallowness of the linguistic capabilities could be bared in the course of his tutorship when he had declined the job opportunity. And he might have been hiding and running from any chance that his vulnerabilities would be exposed. He might have been the very person of mean-spirited cowardice which caused his vainglorious snobbery.

His extreme escapism from women found expressions in misogynistic interpretations of their considerations toward him. The one otherwise clinical episode of his mistaken notions was that one of his high school landladies had once seduced him into "sleeping beside her", taking advantage of the "god-sent" opportunity that her husband and the rest of her family had been away from her home. "Come over and sleep here. Your room is not aptly heated," she had said, with her voice trembling. Dano had found himself grabbing the doorknob, with cold sweat running down and shaking all over. A lone flashback was that he was not sure whether it had been a reality or a nightmare.

His tardiness of classroom activities and loose financial practices incurred him the disaster that Dano could be suspended from graduation. The last grade at the senior class had been rated "out of consideration", which meant that he had been marked at the dangerous bottom which would make his graduation impossible. However, his homeroom teacher Mr. Nine had pleaded with the Graduation Assessment Board to bestow mercy on him on condition that he would pay the default balance amounting to tens of thousands of won to the school stationery office.