It was a hot day so I decided to take the bus out of the city. The countryside was hot, too, and it made me think of Chekov's story in which a man comes into town for the day only to hurry out again to his dacha his arms full of useless things, birdcages, presents, and special foods for his wife, things she couldn't get in the countryside. The story felt hot. The apartment in the city, where the man complained to his friend, was stifling and you felt that the heat never left him, even when he was in the country. He spent sleepless nights on his bed with mosquitoes buzzing around his head and the heat dwindling to a light cool in the early morning. Then before he knew it morning approached and he was leaving, again, for the city.
I had none of his sense of urgency in collecting things I would not use or need. I was simply going out of town but it was hot. Here the countryside suffers under the heat. The rivers run shallow and brown blue over hot white stones sticking out like broken bones, a cemetery aflood. The mountains drink in the heat. Leaves shimmer green from the light. The earth, scorched from the heat, has its revenge in August, giving back everything, burning children's soles, preparing for the cool which will lash the forests beginning with September evenings.
I sweltered on the way to the island, roasted on the lakeside walkway and baked in the shade of the Ethiopia Cafe. The sad blue plastic chairs, feeble in the shade of the cafe, bleached white by the sun and wear, surrounded little white tables from which I had the view across the parking lot, which was really no more than a few meters across, of the memorial to fallen Ethiopian soldiers of the Korean War. It sits there, a foreign tri-domed building, round and smooth. Its ribs are dark brown. They glisten in the sun. Haze rises off the ground like water and the building appears in front of you, out of the heat, like a vision.
Chuncheon was one of the first places the North Korean army attacked. It's the perfect town to shell. The town lies on a flat expanse around two lakes, dotted with pretty islands, and surrounded by hills, high and close. The North Koreans must have bombed this place to hell.
The town itself isn't attractive.
When the Americans recovered most of the peninsula Syngham Rhee went about building his villa on the east side of the peninsula. His life and reign is glorified in pictures and I blanched at the lack of information on this one and same autocrat who ruthlessly cracked down on opposition and riots. Princeton trained - oh yes - with a head for economics and tough love. How else would they have pulled out of a post war slump? Certainly, he was their man. His villa is simple. I went early one morning when no one was there. I looked into his office, his phone where he probably barked commands, the one room where he might have made love to his wife. Are autocrats able to make love?
The wind blows gentle there, the same way it does at my window, rustling the willows like feathers and the pines like clouds.
His villa sits on a rise above a lagoon and overlooks a spreading lawn with several trellises. He certainly had a splendid view. I took shade under the trellis and watched the water ripple. I traced the edge of the lagoon and followed a rocky headland up until my eyes met the sun.
He had his villa built here, within shooting distance of Kim Il-Sung's old villa. The latter's is now nothing at the top of that rocky headland across the lagoon. The only thing that remains are some steps up the hill. The view from the top is impressive and I imagined Kim Il-Sung climbing up the stairs to his retreat when this part of the country was still North Korea, before the 38th parallel moved for the last time. How he must have writhed at knowing that Syngham Rhee built his own personal retreat not far away! Perhaps the pain of knowing your enemy was in your land was a bit like feeling your wife a mistress, and her knowing that you knew she was unfaithful. Maybe that was the cause of the growth on his neck which became so obscene in his later years that bodyguards were positioned strategically around him so that even those who came close saw no more than what might have been a glimpse at something that may have been malignant growth, on the back of his neck.
The land here is magical.
The road runs straight, through Hwajinpo and north to Daejin. It is lined with tank traps and after passing the military checkpoint, razor wire. The Unification Highway appears from the woods, itself secure behind a double fence, barbed wire and invisibly placed dynamite in case of an invasion. It is thick, grey and beautiful. Its light posts feature small metal engravings of the full Korean peninsula, reunited as one country. Hope contained. The forest falls away quickly and the hills look as if they are covered in grass. They are not. The land is methodically razed kilometers before the observation post, which is still a kilometer and a half from the border.
This land, the contested land, I see as if through gossamer.
The road stretches towards the border. The rail line curves towards the checkpoint. Into the distance they both go, towards the mutual place where they disappear. Look into that distance beyond the border where the hills are exposed rock behind a veil of cloud.
