Son of Man

by Yi Munyol

Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Chung Chong-Wha

Note: The text translated here is that of the 4^th edition, which was first published on June 15, 2004. The author has made many small changes—deletions, modifications and additions—to the text of the 3^rd (1993) edition.

After consulting with the author, it was decided to eliminate the 335 notes. Such an aparatus is not a usual feature of works of fiction published in English. In many cases, the information has been introduced by the translators into the body of the text, especially in the lists of gods and brief accounts of polytheistic mythology and other religious details. In many other cases, the information offered seems not to be needed for a full understanding of the novel.

With the author’s agreement, the translators have omitted the text contained on pages 211 – 219, which presents a series of notes on the life of Zoroaster and the main teachings of Zoroastrianism. They consider that this section interrupts the flow of the narrative to no purpose, and gives an over-detailed account of a religion which is not destined to play any particularly significant role in the novel as a whole. The same decision was taken by the translators of the French version.

The translators have deliberately sought to maintain the rhythms of the sentence structure of the original, although the resulting sentences are sometimes far longer and more complex than is usual in modern English. Stylistic editing, if it is found necessary, is best left to the publishing house that takes the book.

1.

Rain falling on accumulated layers of dust had left the windows of the criminal investigations office so mottled they were nearly opaque; beyond them roofs could be seen huddled grim beneath a lowering city sky. When the Dongbu Police Station had first moved here two years before, there had been nothing more than a hill on the city outskirts, recently zoned for development; then houses had sprung up, and now the area was completely built over. As he contemplated the brightly colored roofs aligned in a variety of shapes, seemingly indicative of their individual owners’ vain fondness for things western, or their pretentiousness, Sergeant Nam fell into the state of melancholy that was almost habitual with him. While those many houses stretched before his eyes, the fact that there was no house of his own among them, where his wife and children could live and take their ease, spurred him with a deep sense of failure.

Recalling the two rented rooms he would return to after work, unless something unexpected occurred, Sergeant Nam reviewed with no particular feelings his career, over which an increasingly dark sense of impending failure loomed. Nam Gyeongho. Born in 1945. His parents had been ordinary, run-of-the-mill folk but, since they had been subjected to the poverty of the 1950s, his childhood had not escaped the average degree of misery that other children of his age had had to endure. His middle and high school years, spent in a small country town, had left no memories, sad or happy. As he neared the end of his high-school education, there arose a growing lack of proportion between their financial resources and the enthusiasm for further education that his parents were beginning to manifest. That finally took him away from their small town and turned him into a student enrolled in evening classes at a second-rate university in this city, for a course of study he had finally given up half way through.

Even after dropping out of university, he had naturally kept trying to better himself, during the early years at least. The university he attended was so mediocre it had even been hard for him to get a part-time tutoring job; but still, he had been studying law. He had once shut himself up in a rural temple for several months with the intention of preparing the civil service exam. Another time, he had suddenly become fascinated by writing, burying himself under reams of manuscripts. Not one of his works ever got beyond the preliminary screening, but he wrote enough in the course of six months to submit to every newspaper that ran any kind of New Year literary contest. That extravagant passion for literature was perhaps ultimately a perverse way of working off the frustration he had felt on finally losing all hope of ever passing the civil service exam.

Poverty never allowed him to complete anything he undertook, as with his university studies. All the while, his elderly parents and his younger siblings, who had no one else to look to for support, were waiting. They were all gone now. His parents had died, one after the other, before he had even managed to escape from the single room they shared. His older sister had left home suddenly, fed up with being poor, and had given no news for the last nine years. Supporting his younger sister had made the start of his own married life harder; after graduating from commercial high school, she had married a colleague working in the same bank as herself some two years before; his younger brother had studied at a technical college before going to work in the Middle East as a technician in heavy construction equipment as soon as he had finished his military service the previous year. For their sake he joined the ranks of job seekers, who were having an extremely difficult time in those days, and taking the easiest way he joined the police, where he had settled. Promotion was neither rapid nor slow compared to the hard work he put in; the job afforded neither satisfaction nor regret, but his eight years in the criminal investigations unit had gone speeding by, making him feel as if each year was like a day.

‘So why did you kick a young lady on the backside as she passed, eh? Why?’

Sergeant Nam came to himself at the abrupt sound of someone shouting in a shrill voice, which penetrated his mind as if it had ruptured his eardrums. It was Detective Kim, who was sitting at the desk next to his. He was three or four years younger than Sergeant Nam, but he had joined the police earlier and was senior to him by a couple of years in his career with the crime squad. Judging by what he had just overheard, it seemed he was taking down a statement for some kind of assault case, but on closer examination he was looking thoroughly rattled.

‘Because of those damned leather boots . . .’

The suspect replied imperturbably, as if to say that Detective Kim’s shouting did not impress him; he was a youngish man, about twenty-four or five perhaps, with a completely shaved head. If he had not attracted Sergeant Nam’s attention before, it must have been because he had been brought in much too quietly for someone guilty of an assault.

‘What about her leather boots?’ Detective Kim asked, as if lost for words, after glancing in the direction the young man had indicated, pursing his lips. The long, slender legs of the victim, who was still crying to herself, were sheathed in brown boots high enough to hide her knees.

‘Because they’re too long.’

‘Are you drunk?’

Detective Kim burst out so loudly, as if unable to put up with the insolent way the young man was addressing him, that everyone in the office turned to look. But the youth did not so much as flinch.

‘Not in the least.’

‘This guy must be completely mad.’

At that, someone sniggered in a corner. Detective Kim turned and threw a furious glance in that direction, then went back to questioning the young man, as if he was trying to provoke a quarrel.

‘So you kick some girl on the backside because you reckon her boots are a bit too long?’

It was rather obscene, but from time to time Sergeant Nam had experienced an urge, if he came across a woman wearing long, fancy leather boots, to make love to her in extravagant ways after stripping off all her clothes, leaving only her boots. It was not so much an urge arising from the perverted physical desires of a man in his mid-thirties as the effect of scenes from a pornographic movie that had been confiscated the previous autumn. Under the pretext of taking a reference for an enquiry, one of the staff who knew how to use the video machine had played it through in a corner of the office, and in it the women never removed their boots or stockings while things were being done to them. Oddly, he had found that much more titillating than sex with a woman not wearing a stitch.

‘So you just felt like kicking her?’

Sensing something slightly strange, Sergeant Nam began to scrutinize the accused youth more closely. At first glance, he looked like a dim, stubborn kind of fellow, but the deep furrows between his eyebrows and the dark shadows round his eyes suggested intelligence. He felt there was a kind of detachment in his gaze, that was directed vacantly at a corner of the room’s plastered wall; that was not something you found in professional criminals with their bluff and bluster. Then, going on to examine his clothes, it was different again. A military jacket of a kind no one now wore, for fashion at least, dyed black and with sleeves shiny at the cuffs from use and accumulated dirt, was accompanied by trousers made of coarse, fawn corduroy, and plastic shoes so covered in dust it was impossible to distinguish their color; his dress was so completely at odds with his face, it was almost as if he had deliberately disguised himself.

‘One pair of boots like that . . . could keep several pairs . . . of frozen feet warm. Just beside the road where that woman was passing . . . a kid was begging, wearing nothing but rubber slippers on bare feet, lying on the ground, shivering . . .’

The young man began to speak haltingly, as if talking about someone else. Still crying, the girl fired back a reply as if she could not take any more:

‘Is it my fault if a kid’s begging in such a state?’

‘Of course, it might not be you personally. It might be your rotten dad who bought you such expensive leather boots but never gave so much as a penny to someone starving right beside him, or your old boyfriend crazy about your crotch. Anyway, it makes no difference. After all, the fact is that a kid was shivering with bare feet because you were using up all that leather.’

The young man spoke without once raising his eyes to look at the girl, as if to show that replying was a nuisance but he was doing it as a special favor. To Sergeant Nam, he seemed like someone who had committed a crime of conviction, but more than that, he felt he must be either a psychotic, or putting it on in order to irritate the person they were addressing. Growing increasingly angry, Detective Kim rebuked him on her behalf.

‘Shut up! You idiot! I can’t believe it. Who asked you to interfere in things like that?’

‘I did it because nobody else was interfering.’

‘You! The more you go on, the worse it gets. Here, do you want a taste of the national hotel?’

‘I’ve already been there several times.’

‘How many times? How many stars have you got, then?’

‘As many as the Milky Way in the night sky. I only came out the day before yesterday, after a full year.’

Detective Kim, whose quick temper and irascibility were well known in the office, seemed to be arguing with the accused, rather than taking a statement. In addition to Sergeant Nam, a few detectives relatively less occupied had been observing the scene for some time with amusement. However, Sergeant Nam found himself unable to go on watching for long. The sudden ringing of a phone attracted his attention. Lieutenant Lee, the head of the third division to which he belonged and who was sitting two desks away, could be seen picking up the receiver, turning away from the document he had been reading.

‘Looks like a robbery—two or three wounded,’ Sergeant Nam thought to himself as he watched him answer the phone. Because he had been working with him for the past two years, Sergeant Nam was roughly able to tell the seriousness of an incident simply by the expression and tone of voice he adopted while taking the phone call.

That day, too, his guess seemed not too far wrong. When he finally finished speaking, Lieutenant Lee called Sergeant Nam; his expression was grave, as always when he was faced with a violent crime.

‘Sergeant Nam, follow me, with Detectives Im and Park.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Looks like a murder.’

‘Where?’

‘Over in Yeongji county.’

In terms of administration, Yeongji belonged to the neighboring county, but the local police came under their responsibility. A well-known mountain rose nearby; the valleys were beautiful, the streams pure. Halfway up the mountain stood a large temple, called Donggak-sa. It was a popular picnic-spot for the people of Daegu in three seasons out of four—spring, summer, and autumn.

As far as the police were concerned, that area was a constant nuisance, one that inspired a strong sense of grievance among them. Since the place attracted large numbers of people, it was the site of a correspondingly large number of crimes of all kinds. The fact that it was located quite far away and they had not enough men made their work that much harder. Especially during the high season, in the spring and autumn, in addition to the regular staff stationed there, they were obliged to send extra staff from the main station.

Now it was winter, when the men at the small local station had time to breathe, and for a violent crime, a murder, to happen there was totally unexpected.

The body lay at the side of a mountain path a little way outside the village. When the head of the investigation team removed the sheet with which the corpse had been covered, the long, pale face of a man seemingly in his early thirties appeared. The face was unharmed, the eyes were closed in a natural manner, there was almost nothing to awaken the sense of shock or repulsion that a dead body usually provokes. However, even a brief glimpse of the rest of the body that then lay uncovered indicated plainly that this was a murder. Blood lay thickly clotted over the chest, seemingly from repeated stabbings with a sharp weapon.

The scene was relatively well preserved. The head of the investigation team questioned the officer in charge of the local station, who was already there.

‘Nothing new, apart from what’s already been reported?’

‘I found this lying on an oak stump down there.’ The man showed him a pair of bloodstained gloves wrapped in newspaper, as if he had been anticipating the question. They were ordinary gloves, made of white cotton. He then went on to repeat with additional details what he had already said on the telephone.

The body had been found about one hour ago, by someone from a neighboring village going into the town. The fact that the body had been moved a little way from the scene of the crime to a place more secluded suggested that the criminal had tried to conceal the crime. The time of death, which would only be known precisely after the autopsy, seemed probably to be some time very early in the morning. A fruit knife had been left lying beside the body, and given the sharpness of the blade the crime seemed to have been premeditated. Since the scene of the crime was some way from any houses, it seemed that the criminal had persuaded the victim to come there and, judging by the location of the wounds and the posture of the body, there were virtually no signs of any struggle.

‘The victim’s identity?’ The lieutenant’s question cut short the station head’s flow of words that seemed likely to go on. With an apologetic air, as if to say he knew everything but that, he replied: ‘Impossible to tell. He’s not got a single paper left on him. That could be the work of the killer, of course.’

‘No name inside the jacket?’

‘I looked, but there’s nothing there.’

‘Couldn’t any of the local people identify him?’

‘I called some of those who live in the nearest village, but they all said they’d never seen his face before.’

Just then the patrolman in charge of preserving the crime scene, who was standing nearby, spoke hesitatingly: ‘A while ago, after you’d gone somewhere, one of the villagers told me he felt sure he’d seen him in a prayer house.’

‘A prayer house?’ The lieutenant repeated the words, staring at the man. The local station head replied at once, glaring at the patrolman as if to ask why he hadn’t said so at once:

‘There are several prayer houses and hermitages around here. So which one did he mean?’

‘The one called the House of Eternal Life.’

‘I know the place; it’s just beyond this hill. It’s a comparatively clean place, with no problems.’

The head of the investigation turned to his team: ‘Is that so? In that case, Lieutenant Lee, you’d better send one of your men over there to enquire about the identity of the victim; the others can make enquiries in all the villages around here. I’ll set up a headquarters in the local station and that’s where I’ll be.’

He was looking utterly worn out. He had not been able to sleep properly for several nights on account of a series of violent crimes following one after another recently, waiting as he was for promotion.

The forensic unit had been as quick as it could, but it was a little after two in the afternoon when Sergeant Nam arrived at the Eternal Life prayer house, carrying a still damp photo of the victim. The prayer house was plainly built of cement blocks at the entrance of a valley on the far side of the hill to the spot where the body had been found. Everything was so quiet, probably because it was winter, that the sound Sergeant Nam made when he knocked on the door seemed to echo particularly loudly. A middle-aged man who might be a handyman opened the door with an unwarrantedly cautious air. Sergeant Nam, unsure of the hierarchies of a place like this, demanded randomly to see the director.

He found the director, who he discovered to be an elder at a church in the city, sitting by a stove with a youngster who seemed to be serving as an errand-boy. He checked with a look of surprise the police identity card that Sergeant Nam held out to him.

‘Is there anyone from here who went out between yesterday and today and hasn’t come back?’

‘I can’t be sure. We have very few people at present. And we don’t really control comings and goings here. Why do you ask?’ The director turned the question back on him. Sergeant Nam took out the photo of the victim.

‘Have you ever seen this person, by any chance?’

After gazing at the picture for a long while, the director murmured, almost to himself: ‘I have a feeling I’ve seen him somewhere. Is it that fellow who came for a while last autumn?’

He abruptly turned to the young man who was standing beside him.

‘Look at this. Who is it?’

‘What, him? Why, isn’t that Preacher Hwang’s friend?’ Glancing at the photo, the boy replied in a flash. The director immediately assented.

‘That’s right. Now you mention him, I’m sure that’s who it is. I only met him in passing, so I didn’t recognize him at once, but. . .’ He turned to Sergeant Nam.

‘But why does he look like that?’

‘He’s dead.’ Sergeant Nam replied in a toneless voice, for by now such deaths inspired no special feelings in him, whereas the director raised his voice in affected surprise.

‘What? How did it happen?’

‘He was murdered. What’s this man’s name?’

‘Let me see, now. Min something I think. Anyway, Preacher Hwang knows him well. He was the one who brought him here a short time ago, saying he was an old friend. I only spoke to him once, when we exchanged greetings that first day.’

Intuition derived from long years of experience in the police told Sergeant Nam that the man was not simply making excuses to avoid further inconvenience.

‘This preacher Hwang—where is he now?’

‘He ought to be in the house somewhere. He didn’t tell me he was going out today. I’ll have this young man go and fetch him.’

At those words, Sergeant Nam felt vaguely troubled. He suddenly wondered if this preacher was deeply implicated in what had happened, in which case he might already have disappeared. But before the boy could even leave the room, the preacher in question came in. He looked about thirty-one or two. His face had a fragile, vulnerable look to it but overall he somehow made much the same impression as the dead man.

‘Why, here you are. Mr. Hwang, let me introduce you to this gentleman, from the police.’ The director spoke in a deliberately calm voice, as if it would be a great help in the investigation. But Sergeant Nam, seeing traces of tears on the man’s cheeks, questioned him without bothering with formal greetings.

‘So you went to look before you came. Did you go because you’d heard rumors?’

The preacher nodded, saying nothing.

‘You must be very upset; you were friends.’ Sergeant Nam intentionally spoke words of comfort; at the same time he slyly observed his expression. But he took the words at their face value.

‘Everything is God’s will. But I felt so sorry for him . . .’

Once again, his eyes began to fill with tears. If pushed any further, the tears would turn into sobs, so Sergeant Nam deliberately adopted an official tone, drawing out his notebook with a rather exaggerated gesture.

‘First I am just going to ask some a few questions for information. His full name?’

‘Min Yoseop’

‘His age?’

‘He must have been thirty-two.’

‘His profession?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘His address?’

‘I don’t know that, either.’

‘Weren’t you friends?’ Sergeant Nam spoke in a somewhat harder voice. It was because something didn’t seem to make sense. The preacher seemed startled by the change but the tone of his voice did not vary.

‘Yes, a long time ago. But after nearly ten years without news, I only met him again about a month ago.’

‘What was your relationship before?’

‘We were classmates in our schooldays. He dropped out half way through but we were pretty close for a while when we were students. To tell you the truth, he was more than a mere friend; I used to respect him deeply.’

The preacher’s voice had so far sounded like that of a little schoolboy answering his teacher’s questions, but on reaching that topic it suddenly grew emotional. Vague memories of the old days seemed to be welling up. Pretending not to notice, Sergeant Nam continued with his questions.

‘So you know nothing of what he’s been doing recently?’

‘Almost nothing. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.’

‘But you say he’s been here a month. You must have been curious after not seeing him for such a long time?’

‘It was for his sake; I thought I might only rub salt in his wounds to no purpose.’

‘Then how did he happen to come here?’

‘I met him by chance in the street. He was dressed so shabbily that I enquired what he’d been doing. He made no reply, only smiled sadly. Then he asked me what church I was in charge of. I told him that so far I didn’t feel I was up to serving as a minister and that I was therefore praying here, and he suddenly said he’d like to spend some time here too. Obviously, although I’m only a guest here I accepted with pleasure. More than that, I was delighted.’

‘Delighted? Why?’

‘It was as if a lost sheep was coming home. In the old days, he had a deeper faith than anyone else and was a first-class theology student. He made such sincere efforts to put into practice the teachings of our Lord that it would have been hard for any of us ordinary folk to imitate him. He did not have so much as an extra pair of socks or underclothes for himself. During the holidays he used to do volunteer service in an orphanage or helped in a lepers’ village. Only he went a bit strange, in the fall of his second year, I think it was. It was not just that he distanced himself from us; he seemed to distance himself from God and the church. Then, after a big row with the teachers, we never found out what it was about, he quit the seminary. I heard that he had not only given up studying at that time, but had left the church and God too.

‘Right. Enough about the past. Did he have any money?’

‘So far as I know, he was practically penniless.’

‘What about his relations with women—his wife, or other women?’

‘I’ve never heard anything at all about that. If I were to hazard a guess, he seemed to have been wandering about completely alone before arriving here.’

Sergeant Nam found the reply deeply disheartening. In his experience, nine times out of ten incidents that were not connected with money or women turned into cases where he made no progress but only developed a headache. Sergeant Nam asked his next question as if he was seeking confirmation from the preacher’s memory.

‘In short, you’re saying you know nothing about his present life?’

‘That’s about it. If I’d known something like this would happen, I’d have questioned him, even against his will.’ The preacher muttered his reply, adopting an apologetic expression for no apparent reason.

‘What did he do while he was here?’

‘Endless prayers and reading the Bible to the point where he forgot about sleep, that was all. Even the monks in the Middle Ages would never have mortified themselves as he did.’

‘He never went out?’

‘Well yes; the day before yesterday he went out, saying he was going into town, and spent the night out.’

‘He didn’t say where he’d been?’

‘I asked him, but he didn’t answer, only smiled sadly. He seemed to be counting the days recently, so I reckoned he had an appointment with someone.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘Yesterday evening. We went to bed at the same time. But he didn’t read the Bible or say any prayers, and he seemed unable to sleep. That was about as odd a thing as could be, you know. At any rate, I opened my eyes from time to time almost until daybreak and could see him curled up on his bedding, but when I woke up in the morning, he was gone. But he often used to go for an early morning stroll in the nearby hills, so I didn’t bother to go looking for him, but . . .’

After that, Sergeant Nam tried asking a few more questions but none of the replies was of any real help to his investigation. There being nothing more he could do, he jotted down the necessary details in his notebook, then finally asked:

‘Could I see his room?’

‘He shared my room. Follow me.’

Preacher Hwang led the way without the least hesitation.

The room he was brought to turned out to be a wood-floored room, simple and clean, away from daily routine and suitable for solitary prayer. Some books were lying on a low wooden desk and on the opposite, plastered wall hung what seemed to be a charcoal drawing of the head of Jesus in a simple frame. Nothing else could be seen, no bedding, clothes or other objects used in daily life. Everything must be in the large closet that was built into the left side of the room.

Having once glanced around, Sergeant Nam set about looking for things belonging to Min Yoseop. As he had guessed, the preacher opened the closet door and produced a small, worn suitcase. Looking through the open door, he saw some neatly folded bedding and another, larger suitcase. That apparently belonged to the preacher, as did the clothes that were hanging on the wall. Sergeant Nam opened the case that he had pulled out. Except for a few tidily folded clothes, which seemed almost to have been prepared in advance, there was not a clue to reveal anything about the owner. The absence of particular signs was so total that it almost prompted a suspicion that he had deliberately set about concealing his identity in order to help the criminal.

‘Is this all?’ Sergeant Nam asked, looking rather disappointed. The preacher picked up a Bible lying among the other books on the desk. The book was new, apparently purchased recently, but portions were already darkly stained by frequent fingering. Sergeant Nam flipped through the Bible. There was no sign of the address he had hoped to find; but on the inside of the back cover he noticed a scribbled phrase in a foreign tongue that he could not decipher.

‘Desperatus, credere potes. Mortuus, vivere potes. Now you can believe. Having despaired. You can live. Having died.’

Such was the content of the phrase the preacher said was Latin and translated for him. Sergeant Nam found the phrase hard to understand, even in translation.

‘Despair here seems to signify despair concerning one’s self and the essence of one’s being. It is a compelling situation, one in which we cannot help but turn to the Absolute Being, God. Death, too, here suggests something spiritual rather than physical death. Intellectual pride, self-righteousness, prejudice, vanity, all the poisons that have to be banished from the heart in order to attain true faith. I can’t quite recall where, but I think you’ll find something like those words in the epistles of Saint Paul. In them, it looks as though Min Yoseop is confessing a sincere conversion and expressing a decision.’

To Sergeant Nam, who was still scrutinizing the Bible closely, the explanation sounded like a sermon. For him, whose life had long been spent among statements written in a clichéd style full of Chinese characters, the words were barely comprehensible. But even if he had understood them fully, they hardly seemed likely to be of very much help in his investigation. Finally, Sergeant Nam left the prayer house feeling rather discouraged.

Returning to the investigation unit, he found that the head of the investigation had been called to the main station and none of the others were to be seen, with the exception of Lieutenant Lee, who was going through a list of petty criminals from the neighborhood with the second-in-command of the local station. A few of those had already been called in for questioning and were quarrelling with the patrolmen over their alibis. The continuing inquiries of Detectives Im and Park in the nearby villages seemed not to have produced any clues.

Lieutenant Lee looked extremely disappointed on hearing Sergeant Nam’s report. He had intended to speak at length but the lieutenant hurried him up; after getting the main points, he muttered more or less to himself: ‘So we’ve got his identity, but there’s no knowing what he’s been doing for the past eight years . . .’

He remained sunk in thought for a brief moment, then gave Sergeant Nam orders in a manner befitting an experienced investigator with more than twenty years of service.

‘Sergeant Nam, go back to the main station and prepare to take a trip.’

‘Sir?’

‘Report to the chief, then go up to Seoul. To that seminary. If you search their academic records, you should find his old address at least. Try that first.’

It felt rather vague but Sergeant Nam likewise thought there seemed to be no other way.

2.

The seminary Sergeant Nam visited the next day on arriving in Seoul was a small, old building in antiquated style located incongruously in the very center of the city. Initially built on a modest scale on a hill outside the city limits marked by the four gates, the expansion of Seoul had resulted in its present appearance. The building could only have held about thirty classrooms at most and the front yard seemed no bigger than a large primary school playground. Still, the red brick walls of the main building, covered in leafless creepers, and the girth of the old trees scattered here and there suggested a particular weight of tradition and an antiquity demanding devotion and reverence.

It being the winter vacation, the place was so deserted that it provoked a melancholy feeling. Passing the empty janitor’s room, Sergeant Nam crossed the yard and encountered a student near a gnarled old tree in front of the main building, whether an undergraduate or a graduate assistant he could not tell, whom he asked to show him the office of student affairs. The student kindly led him to a room where a few clerks were chatting around a large oil stove. The office was so poorly furnished that as he came in Sergeant Nam wondered for a moment what on earth he could hope to find there. Yet the records on Min Yoseop that he found with the help of one of clerks were not only better preserved than he had expected, they yielded some interesting information.

Judging by his age, Min Yoseop must have been left an orphan while still a child, during the Korean War; he had been adopted by a foreign missionary called Thomas D. Allen. He had graduated from what had been in those days first-class middle and high schools, the names of which were immediately familiar, and for almost two years had studied philosophy at a university as prestigious as his secondary schools, before moving to the seminary. His grades there were equally outstanding. Those in the first year, in particular, amazed the clerk who found the dossier. He was nearly certain that no one had done so well since then. Yet in the second semester of the second year, his grades had dropped and soon after beginning the third year he took leave of absence, then left the seminary for good.

Sergeant Nam noted down what seemed relevant to his inquiries in his notebook, then asked if he could meet any of the faculty who had been teaching at the school in the days when Min Yoseop was a student there. There were several, it seemed, but not many had come in that day. Sergeant Nam decided to visit the professor whose room was nearest, and left the student affairs office.

It was in the same building, but in so secluded a corner that he lost his way briefly; he knocked on the door and was received rather reluctantly by a middle-aged professor. He barely recalled Min Yoseop and could remember nothing that might be of use in the enquiry. If there was anything strange, it was not so much that he had never had memories but rather there were signs suggesting he had deliberately eliminated them, as people often do with unpleasant or painful recollections. Apparently feeling sorry at Sergeant Nam’s disappointed air, he added: ‘If it’s that student, Professor Bae will know much more. He was very fond of him.’

‘Where could I meet Professor Bae?’

‘He’s probably in his office now. If you follow this corridor all the way back, his office is the second room from the end.’

Following his directions, Sergeant Nam arrived at Professor Bae’s room. The door was opened quietly by an elderly professor with completely white hair, who must have been well past retirement age. He gave the impression of having long been a pastor as well as a professor. This was because of the rather particular aura emanating from his old but respectable black suit, his voice that tended to grow increasingly soft, and his posture, that manifested such modesty it might be thought exaggerated.

‘Yoseop is dead?’ On hearing the news, Professor Bae fell into a heavy silence for a while. After Sergeant Nam repeated a number of questions, however, the professor gradually began to speak. His voice was oddly tremulous, possibly on account of the shock caused by the news of Min Yoseop’s death.

‘Yes, certainly I prized him; there’s no doubt about it. His adoptive father was someone I respected deeply ever since I was young; in fact we were graduates, many years apart, from the same American university. Besides, he was the brightest student I ever taught in the ten or more years I’ve been here. But I don’t think that I have the kind of information about him that the police would need.’

‘Still, tell me just one thing. For what reason did Min Yoseop leave the seminary?’

The professor peered at the police officer, who seemed to be hanging on his every word. It was as if he was weighing something up, probably his interlocutor’s intellectual capacity. He finally made up his mind and replied in a voice filled with sorrow.

‘Faith does not always go well with knowledge, you know. He was more fascinated by the pursuit of knowledge than by faith, and inevitably he ran out of energy. He went out with Kagawa and came back on the tail of the Ophites. We could not accept him under those conditions. Even if he was intellectually brilliant, we could not allow him to shake the foundations of belief. That angered him and he left, never to return.’

Sergeant Nam could only understand about half of what he said. Suddenly more keenly interested in Min Yoseop as a person than in the needs of the investigation, he asked: ‘What’s Kagawa? Ophites?’

‘To put it more simply, shall I say radicalism and heterodoxy—or something like that.’

‘It would be better if you could explain simply, so that I can understand.’

‘Kagawa Toyohiko was a Japanese practical theologian, a social reformer, a member of the workers’ movement, an evangelist and a writer, too. The scion of an aristocratic family, that disowned him when he became a Christian. Yet he did not yield but kept the faith. He graduated from Kobe Theological Seminary and went to study at Princeton Theological College. After his return from Princeton, still aged only twenty, he went to live in the Shinkawa slum in Kobe and began to be active among the workers, playing a leading role in the Kobe docks strike, as well as leading the farm-workers’ union movement and the co-operative movement. During the war he was imprisoned by the military police for having apologized to the Chinese for the Japanese invasion of their country and became widely known as a writer for his novel Across the Death Line. He was an extraordinary person in many ways. Min Yoseop appeared to have been fascinated by his practical theology.’

He closed his eyes wearily, then slowly continued: ‘The Ophites were heretics in ancient times who did not consider the serpent in the Bible as a messenger of Satan charged with humanity’s fall, but instead venerated it as an apostle of wisdom. The ideas of Min Yoseop did not correspond to theirs exactly, but his way of viewing Satan as a spirit of wisdom or as an alternative attribute of God was something we could never approve. Do you see now?’

‘Yes, a bit . . .’ Sergeant Nam replied in some confusion, having listened to every word with intense concentration. It had been better than the explanation he had heard a little before, but his long years in the police constituted a considerable handicap to understanding Professor Bae’s words fully. Professor Bae quietly stopped talking, as if to say that was enough.

‘I think you’d better go now. I am very tired. I do not think I have anything more to add.’

As words designed to dismiss a visitor without upsetting him, they could not have been more determined. Sergeant Nam still had points that were unclear, but he had no choice. After speaking, Professor Bae had closed his eyes gently and fallen into a deep silence such that it seemed no word could break it, no matter how strong. Just as Sergeant Nam was going out of the door, he heard him murmur: ‘Dr. Allen, it’s truly a great pity. But at least, he said he was on his way back.’

After a simple lunch near the seminary, Sergeant Nam went to the address where Min Yoseop had lived eight years before. It too was now in the center of the city, but the area must have been a remote suburb in those days. The single-story, flat-roofed house, scarcely more than a hovel, stood wretchedly amidst recently constructed, luxurious dwellings. Luckily, a person connected with Min Yoseop was still living there. She was an elderly woman in her sixties who said she had spent more than half her life as housekeeper for Doctor Allen. It turned out that it was mainly she who had raised Min Yoseop after his adoption while he was still just an infant.

On hearing the name Min Yoseop, she immediately burst into tears, although she knew nothing of his death. She clearly felt for him as if he were her own son.

‘And where is he now?’ Her voice was filled with the tender affection of an elderly mother longing for her far-away son. Even without knowing how much contact there had been between them during the past eight years, it was easy to imagine what profound shock and grief his death would cause her. Wishing to spare her, Sergeant Nam prevaricated:

‘He’s in Daegu now.’

‘What’s he doing? Is he well?’

‘Yes. But where is Dr. Allen nowadays?’

A gleam of doubt showed in the old woman’s tear-filled eyes.

‘Why, he went back home more than ten years ago, a year after Mrs. Allen died. At that time, he asked me and Yoseop to go with him but when the boy refused, I stayed here too. But who are you?’

‘A friend of his. How are you nowadays?’

Again Sergeant Nam avoided telling the truth, glad that he had not revealed his police identity. This time it was less for her sake than in order to do his job. He had so far only exchanged a few words with her, but he had a feeling that her strong attachment to Min Yoseop might end up hindering his inquiries. If ever she decided to stay silent, thinking she might harm him if she spoke, his visit would have been useless.

Apparently reassured by Sergeant Nam’s relaxed attitude, she replied with an expression slightly less suspicious: ‘Not too bad, thanks to the boy. Though things are not as they were before, of course.’

‘Before what?’

‘You call yourself his friend, and he hasn’t told you about it? But of course, he was always obedient to the Lord’s words: ‘Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’’

‘I haven’t known him all that long, you see. And he doesn’t talk very much, either. What happened?’

Recalling what he had heard from Preacher Hwang and Professor Bae, Sergeant Nam paid careful attention to her words. He seemed somehow to have overcome her doubts and she began to tell him everything, with an expression that showed she was quite glad to be able to talk about it.

‘Doctor Allen left him well provided for when he went back, all he had accumulated in the more than thirty years he had lived here. But once Yoseop moved to the seminary, he began to share it with others. Later, he even went so far as to sell the big house up in Seongbuk-dong. We wouldn’t even have kept this shabby little house, if it hadn’t been for me.’

‘Why, who did he give it all to?’

‘To those with nothing, of course. Isn’t that what there’s most of in the world—cold, hungry folk? To those in lepers’ villages, in orphanages and rehabilitation centers. You wouldn’t believe how many places there are to give money away! Once you start, it’s soon all gone. In less than two years he was obliged to work to pay his tuition. At first, I tried to stop him. But after all, it had been given to him, hadn’t it? I thought of letting Doctor Allen know, back in his country, but I might as well be blind as far as writing goes.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘When there was nothing more to give away, he left. He said that once you have nothing to give, you have to serve with your own body. Still, he never forgot me. During the past seven years he’s always sent me enough to buy food.’

‘Still, did he really give away all that money just to the poor? Might he not have spent it in other ways?’

Sergeant Nam’s question was a sincere one. He simply could not believe that such an act of charity, unlike anything he had ever read about in the social pages of newspapers, could happen in reality.

‘Don’t say such things! God might punish you. That kind boy . . . As soon as he was old enough, he went through the winters without ever putting on a pair of socks. It was from thinking of his poorly dressed neighbors. Once he came home shivering in his shirtsleeves, on a day when it was snowing hard, because he had given his jacket to a beggar huddled on the roadside. He went so far that even moderately tolerant pastors used to tell him off. It’s true. So kind a boy . . .’

The old lady looked thoroughly upset. Sergeant Nam felt a deep emotion surging up from his heart for no apparent reason. He suddenly recalled the long-forgotten Sunday school he had attended for years as a child for the sake of the maize flour and the powdered milk distributed there, and the noisy festivities on Christmas Eve. Later, after he had stopped going to church, he used to look up from time to time at the white cross on the pointed spire with a vague sense of longing, almost until the end of his youth. But at some point he had found himself thinking that the world those things symbolized was not part of life here, where the only things left were rituals and systems corrupted and debased by human greed and hypocrisy. As a result, the past life of Min Yoseop that the old woman was describing filled him with a kind of sense of mystery.

‘Ah! I knew he was good, but I couldn’t believe he went that far. Have you not heard from him lately?’

‘Some money came about a month and a half ago, from Daegu.’

‘But no letter?’

‘No. He rarely writes letters.’

‘You’ve got his address, though?’

‘No, I don’t have that. The boy never writes his address.’

‘Will you let me see the envelopes?’

‘I know I kept them, but everything’s so topsy-turvy, I wonder if I can find them.’

She burrowed into the drawer of an old dresser and pulled out a bundle of envelopes. They bore postmarks from almost all the main cities, beginning with Seoul, then Gwangju, Busan, Daejeon, Incheon. Only three were postmarked from Daegu, including the one she had mentioned from the post office near the Dongbu Police Station. Sergeant Nam noted down the names of all the post offices from which Min Yoseop had mailed more than three money orders.

Feeling that that was still not enough, he examined the letters inserted in some of the envelopes. There was one letter for every five or six envelopes, written, it appeared, each time that he was preparing to move from one city to another, though he hardly ever indicated any reason or purpose. In them he would ask how she was, specify how much he was sending, and indicate approximately when he was going to send the next. Sergeant Nam felt that if he had made any new discovery, it was that, corresponding to the maternal affection the old lady harbored toward him, Min Yoseop considered himself indebted to her, more or less duty-bound to support her.

‘Isn’t there anything left that belonged to Yoseop—books or notes, for example?’

After he had done with the letters, Sergeant Nam asked again. It might prove important for the investigation to understand what kind of a person Min Yoseop was. This thought occurred to him from his intuition as a detective, not merely from personal curiosity.

‘As far as books go, Doctor Allen left a lot but Yoseop got rid of them all. He sold them to second-hand bookstores for the money, I suppose. He took a few of his own books with him in a bag when he left. There ought to be quite a few notebooks somewhere, though.’

‘That would do. Can I see them?’

‘The box over there is full of his notebooks; but you’ll not have time to go through them all.’

Seeming to sense something out of the ordinary, she asked in doubtful tones again: ‘Why are you asking all this? Has something happened to our Yoseop? Who are you, anyway?’

She seemed to have become suspicious when Sergeant Nam began noting down the postmarks on the envelopes and scanning the letters. He thought for a moment of saying who he was, but instead, he made something up again, in the hope of hearing more.

‘Actually, Yoseop asked me to find him a job several months ago and yesterday I got good news. But there’s been no sign of him for a month now. I thought he must have gone to work somewhere else but I just wondered if he hadn’t come back here by any chance and that’s why I came. I examined the envelopes and letters because I reckoned I might be able to find him if only I knew what town he was in. As for the books and notebooks, Yoseop told me about them some time ago. He said that one day he would come and fetch them. I thought I could take them, since I’m here. I’m sure to meet him soon, one way or another.’

Even Sergeant Nam himself was amazed how naturally he was able to relieve the old lady’s doubts. The tale didn’t hold together very well when he thought about it afterwards, but it seemed to work. The old woman’s expression, which had suddenly hardened in doubt, gradually softened again. Noting the fact with a sideways glance, Sergeant Nam felt quietly pleased and set it aside for future reference.

‘But if Yoseop takes this job, he’ll have to travel a long way away. It’s a country called Saudi Arabia and it takes months to get there and back. It’s going to be hard for him to send news for quite a long time.’

‘I somehow guessed he might be going to leave for a far-off place, from a letter I received about two months back. But why should he go abroad? He resisted so stubbornly when Dr. Allen asked him to go with him.’

‘Still, that’s the way it is now. Look, I’ll just take what’s needed.’

‘Do as you like, if he asked you to. There’s nothing I need.’

She finally agreed, still looking rather reluctant although her suspicions had lifted. Sergeant Nam opened the box and set about examining the notebooks. It was a jumble of lecture notes, documents in files, a personal diary, and manuscript pages. Among all the rest, Sergeant Nam picked out the volumes of his diary that corresponded to the time when he left home, and a pile of manuscripts in a separate bundle.

‘I heard about what happened from some neighbors while I was looking for this house. Do you know if he’s kept in touch with that woman?’

As he was about to leave, he allowed himself to be greedy. He spoke in a low, natural voice, as if he knew all about something that was in fact blind guesswork. He invented a woman because, in the light of all he had heard, he felt sure that Min’s death had nothing to do with money. Sergeant Nam was no different from any other detective, in reckoning that every crime was invariably connected to either money or a woman.

The effect exceeded his expectations. Before he had even finished talking, the old lady’s eyes narrowed, and her face hardened more than ever.

‘Who dared repeat those worn-out old tales? I swear to you that Yoseop is not like that at all. Try to expose people’s stinking backsides, and they’re so wicked they’ll make up any kind of story. Besides, Elder Mun and his wife left the neighborhood years ago. Don’t talk to me about that again. And don’t say you’re any kind of friend of his, if you believe stories like that.’

Her reaction convinced Sergeant Nam that he had just discovered a definite clue that might shed some light on the cause of Min Yoseop’s death. Cowering before the old lady’s stubbornness, as she stood there staring into the distance with her arms crossed and her lips compressed, he left without asking anything more. After all, apart from her there were other old acquaintances of Min Yoseop he had to meet.

3.

With the help of the local ward office, and after a few enquiries, Sergeant Nam succeeded in finding a man who, eight years earlier, had known Min Yoseop quite well, and from him he was able to hear about a quite different side of Min Yoseop’s character from what he had just been hearing. Needless to say, quite often in the course of an investigation into someone’s past he ended up by bringing to light ugliness and baseness hidden behind gentle, noble appearances, but the case of Min Yoseop was proving to be rather unusual. The next person Sergeant Nam met was a deacon at the local church, an older man who had been living there for twenty years, who had no hesitation in calling Min Yoseop ‘that breed of Satan.’

‘He came into our church wearing a sheep’s mask. In the sacred church building, he committed adultery with the wife of another and struck God’s faithful minister on the cheek. More than that, he tempted the simple flock by the cunning wisdom of the Sons of Darkness, finally sowing division among them, setting people at each other’s throats, turning the church upside down . . .’

There was no end to his tirade, once he had started. The woman with whom he had committed adultery was no less than the young, second wife of one of the church’s elders; he had slapped the cheek of the minister, an outrage committed after he had surrendered to ‘heretical doctrines,’ when he dragged the minister down from the pulpit while he was preaching. He said he had tempted and divided the flock, because he had intervened in the church’s financial problems, accusing the minister and the elders so that some of the church members, taking his side, had risen up and demanded an enquiry into irregularities in building their new church, leading to a fight for control, against those who supported the minister.

‘On account of all that, our church was devastated. The shepherd left, abandoning the sheep, who then scattered. While Elder Mun, unable to show his face on account of what was said about his wife, left the area, a broken man. Later, fortunately, a shepherd and the sheep finally came together again and the church was restored to life. But God will never forgive that man, that cunning child of Satan. I don’t know what brings you here, but since you say you’re a policeman perhaps something bad has befallen him. That would be a sign that God’s judgment is upon him.’

In the deacon’s voice he heard faint echoes of a curse.

Whenever he discovered traces of ugliness and baseness behind gentle, noble appearances, Sergeant Nam usually experienced a feeling of pleasure on finding what he had been expecting, and an inexplicable sense of relief. In the case of Min Yoseop, however, it was different; he rather felt a kind of bitterness, as if he been betrayed by someone he had trusted. He even found himself wondering if Min Yoseop had not fallen into some kind of trap.

If Sergeant Nam set off to meet another of Min Yoseop’s former acquaintances, it was entirely on account of that personal feeling he had, almost unconnected with the investigation as such. This time, having deliberately searched in that direction, he met a former member of the church, whose memories were quite unlike those of the deacon.

‘I remember that student quite well. He had a radical streak to him, but he was a good churchman and a devoted Sunday-school teacher. As for his alleged adultery, I really don’t know . . . Everyone was talking about it at the time but there were aspects that were very hard to understand. He was, I suppose, barely twenty then—certainly not the age to know much about that kind of thing. Even if he had been so depraved at such an early age, why would he have seduced a married woman approaching thirty, with two children into the bargain? There were plenty of pretty girls of his own age he could easily have associated with if he’d wanted to. If there was someone fishy, she was the one. She was supposed to be the daughter of some church’s elder, but she didn’t seem to have much real faith. Besides, the fact of having married a man over forty who had already been married once, when she was only twenty-four, was enough to make you wonder. Her behavior after her marriage with elder Mun was definitely far from perfect. She had two children, but it wasn’t sure they were both his—at least, that’s what some people were saying. If ever something happened between the student and that woman, he’s not the one who should be blamed. The people who sympathized with him claimed he was the victim.

‘The fight in the church? I don’t know about other things, but as far as the minister goes, frankly I’m on the side of the student. I’m not sure what people will think of me talking like this to a stranger, but to all appearances, the minister seemed an extraordinary man. In those days, that neighborhood was a shantytown outside the city limits. The minister arrived with just an army tent that could hold thirty people, but within five years he’d succeeded in building the present church. I’ve been told that he had already built two other churches in the same way. If building big, elaborate churches is the only way for someone to be a faithful servant of God, then he was certainly the most faithful servant of all. The problem was that the new building and the land it stood on had been registered in his own name. He had bribed some of the leading members of the church in order to do that. Later we learned that he had registered the other two churches, those he had built before, either under his own name or that of his wife. Once he had built those churches, he had employed ministers to serve in them, then moved to our area with his rolled-up tent and started a new church here.

‘In other words, erecting a church offered him a fully legal way of making a fortune. He would take all the money offered by the believers in the first two churches, claiming to be using it for the costs of the new building, leaving only enough to pay barely sufficient living expenses to the minister in charge and to cover minimum maintenance costs. While at the same time he could demand, with all his authority, the maximum in offerings from the faithful in our church. Only think! When it comes to building a church, the house of God, what believer wouldn’t consider it important?

‘In a poor shanty-town like ours, the faithful were mostly ignorant, uneducated folk who did all they could to contribute to the construction of the church. People living from hand to mouth would labor without pay at least once a week to cut into the hill and level the ground for the new building. Since it was being done for God, there was no question of resting even on Sundays. The minister urged them to make the work go faster, even reducing the length of the services. And do you know how much he demanded in offerings? People who had just enough for that day’s evening meal gave the money for their next day’s breakfast to the church. Obviously, some people did that out of a deep faith, but most of them did it on account of the minister’s threatening descriptions of the wrath of God, with the fire and brimstone of Hell. Most of his sermons would begin, ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth’ and ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by the Word of God,’ and end with descriptions of the Last Judgment and the terrible punishments God had in store for those who did not obey those commands.

‘By the time that student moved into the neighborhood, the church had already taken shape. At first, he was extremely polite to the minister, as docile as could be. But as time passed he became increasingly critical; in the end, once he realized what was going on, he began to demand that he repent and that corrections be made. The minister probably viewed that as youthful rashness and did not take his demands seriously. Once the young man had denounced the minister’s behavior publicly to the faithful and begun to gather support, the minister reacted with every means at his disposal. He tried to control the faithful by asserting his pastoral authority; he tried to threaten them in God’s name, coaxed them with small advantages, anything to keep them on his side. The claim that he had tempted and divided the simple flock was an accusation the minister’s supporters made in response to the situation.

‘It was then that the incident occurred that I feel ashamed to talk about, since it involves our church. It happened one Sunday, shortly before the student disappeared from our neighborhood. That day, as usual, the minister was preaching in such a way as to put himself in an advantageous situation, quoting ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ That student, who had been sitting in the front row, rushed toward the pulpit, pointed his finger at him, and shouted, ‘Shut up! What can the Word give us? Misused by someone like you, the very bread is being snatched out of our mouths!’ Up in the pulpit, the minister cried, ‘Get thee hence, Satan!’ and the student, unable to take any more, climbed up to the pulpit, grabbed the minister by the neck, and forced him down while denouncing all his corruptions. The minister responded equally vigorously, accusing the student of adultery—that was the first anyone had heard of it—then those who supported the minister rushed up and tried to throw the student out while those who believed him and thought he was right rallied round him. The church found itself in utter turmoil.

‘Because of the fight, the police were brought in; since his actions were about to become public knowledge, the minister abruptly transferred ownership of the church and land to the church members, and resigned. Many, disgusted at the ugly fight, left to join other churches, far away but peaceful. I was one of them. At that time the situation in our church was absolutely appalling. It took four or five years to recover to the state you can see today. Seeing how the church was devastated, you could say that that student did not act in the best possible way. But it would not be fair to blindly take the minister’s side and blame no one but the student.’

He had spent nearly one hour listening and the short winter’s day was already drawing to a close. Sergeant Nam still hoped to meet Elder Mun and catch at least the night train back to Daegu. He had spent a long time listening to a story that did not seem directly helpful to the investigation, but he was feeling much relieved.

The idea that he had to meet Elder Mun was a quite commonsensical one, since he was included among the suspects. Elder Mun had opened a cereal company on moving to the city of Seongnam. Sergeant Nam felt rather disappointed as he pushed open the door of a run-down shop that might be more accurately termed a rice store than a cereal company, having imagined him to be quite rich. It took more than two hours for him to make the journey from Seoul and then have supper and it had already been dark for some time; there was nobody in the store, as if the owner had gone in for a late evening meal.

He called in a loud voice toward the door at the back that led inside. He was obliged to call several times before an old man with a gloomy face and of uncertain years emerged. It was Elder Mun. The moment Sergeant Nam saw him, he smiled bitterly to himself, because he knew his true age and realized how foolish his suspicions had been. Still, he had to be cautious because of the way crime often refused to follow the dictates of common sense.

Sergeant Nam asked him at once about his young second wife. Elder Mun replied calmly: ‘She left home a long time ago.’

‘Did you get a divorce?’

Feeling slightly tense, Sergeant Nam enquired. If she had lived with Min Yoseop after leaving home, it might not have been so foolish to suspect Elder Mun.:

‘No. How should men put apart those whom God has joined together? I even moved here for her sake, but still she left in the end. But what do all these questions mean? Why are you looking for her?’

His voice was full of gloom. After a moment’s hesitation, Sergeant Nam revealed the death of Min Yoseop in a few words. Elder Mun’s face hardened for a second.

‘I hate to say it, but he was already a dead man.’ Sergeant Nam offered the hint casually, without taking his eyes off Elder Mun, whose face quickly returned to its normal calm expression.

;No, I don’t hate him. Looking back, I reckon he too was merely a victim. I forgave him long ago, and forgot him.’

‘What do you mean, he too?’

‘She was Satan’s agent in all that. I did everything for her, but less than a year after we got here, there was already another man . . .’

His voice died away and his face creased with lines of deep anguish.

‘Another man?’

‘The man working in this shop. But God forgive me, I feel sure it would take more than the fingers of one hand to count the people she had been with in this street alone.’

It was the same story as Sergeant Nam had heard in Seoul. There was no reason why Elder Mun should have directed his resentment against Min Yoseop in particular. Besides, even if he had possessed such animosity, it hardly seemed possible he would have been capable, with his body like a withered old tree trunk, of using a knife to kill young Min Yoseop. But on the basis of what he said, he could not draw any definite conclusions regarding the young wife. He felt he had to meet her in person to confirm for sure that the unfortunate couple had had nothing to do with Min Yoseop’s death.

‘Do you know where your wife is now?’

‘I have no idea. I’ve not had any news of her for the past five years.’

‘How many children do you have?’

‘Two—a girl who’s just started middle school and a boy in the fifth year of primary school.’

‘Are they both her children?’

‘Yes, my first wife died without having any children. Why are you asking about them?’

‘No particular reason. You must have had a hard time.’

‘Please, I beg you, don’t let the children hear anything about their mother. To them she was a good mother. I’ve told them she died in an accident. Last autumn I took them to visit her grave; of course, it was actually that of my first wife . . .’

Elder Mun’s request sounded sincere. Yet the more he listened to him, the more Sergeant Nam felt a stubborn conviction growing inside him that he had to meet that wife who had left home, even if she turned out to have had nothing to do with the death of Min Yoseop. It was for that reason that he had asked about the children. He knew that, even if separated parents break off all contact, the children usually stay in touch with both. Especially if the first child was already in middle school, no matter how carefully Elder Mun tried to hide everything, he guessed she was bound to have at least a vague idea of what had become of her mother and have some kind of contact with her. Sergeant Nam nodded his acceptance of Elder Mun’s request as he went out, but felt he had to meet the children and ask their mother’s address.

Sergeant Nam’s guess proved correct. He spent the night in a nearby inn, then early in the morning went to wait at the corner of a cold alley, where he was able to meet Elder Mun’s daughter on her way to school at about eight, and obtained her mother’s address without much difficulty. She was living in Seoul.

Returning quickly to Seoul, Sergeant Nam found the house, which proved to be a neat, traditional-style house in the Insa-dong area. From the outside it looked like an ordinary private home, but once inside it seemed to be an unlicensed entertainment house. On the branches of the well-kept trees in the yard a number of sea-fish—cod and pollack—were hanging to dry to be served as snacks. In a large aquarium in the wood-floored hall were swimming flounders and squid, certainly not there for decoration. However, the clearest indication of the nature of the place came from the women. Although it was past ten in the morning, young women of a particular type were bustling around in their nightdresses with puffy faces.

Sergeant Nam enquired for Elder Mun’s wife, giving her name to a girl who was filing her nails at one end of the veranda, her hair wrapped in a towel, as though she had just finished washing. Without any special caution, she called toward the inner room: ‘Madam Jin, a visitor!’

Without any reply, a door slid back and a woman emerged. The wife of Elder Mun looked less than thirty, although he knew she was really in her late thirties. Perhaps because she had already applied makeup, to Sergeant Nam she looked more youthful and sensual than the other girls. But at her age she could not be an ordinary employee, she must be the manageress.

To Sergeant Nam’s surprise, at first she could not remember Min Yoseop at all. He reminded her of certain events and showed her his photo, at which she finally recognized him: ‘Oh, that student!’ She registered no more feeling than if she had been shown the photo of a not particularly close classmate from primary school. It was the same when she heard of Min Yoseop’s death. She not only displayed no surprise or sorrow, she did not utter a single word of regret.

As she later explained, Min Yoseop had not been the only man with whom she had had illicit relations at that time. It had been the same when she left Elder Mun, and judging by the overall atmosphere Sergeant Nam had the impression she was still involved in a giddy tour of the available men. If her relationship with Min Yoseop had been so scandalous for the members of the church, it was because he was a seminary student and a Sunday-school teacher in the church where her husband was an elder, and their secret meetings had mainly taken place in the course of church activities.

Sergeant Nam, although no churchgoer, was taken aback to hear her relate what had happened one evening during a revival meeting one year. When everyone was in the church engaged in all-night prayers, they had slipped out surreptitiously and made love in a shed behind the minister’s house so noisily that a neighboring dog had begun to bark in surprise. As a result they had been discovered by the minister’s cook, who must have told the minister; she related the events of that evening in considerable detail.

Sergeant Nam was lost for words on hearing her tell not only that, but a lot of other things women do not usually discuss, without any embarrassment. She struck him as being a mindless doll, the very incarnation of carnal desire. But strangely enough, in spite of the way she behaved almost like a born whore, he could not sense any indecency or depravity in her way of speaking and behaving. It all suited her so well, like a well fitting dress, and even served to highlight her almost bewitching freshness.

As time went by, Sergeant Nam increasingly felt that he was on the wrong track. Yet in one corner of his mind he stubbornly felt that something would come out. Therefore, although knowing the obvious answer, he asked a question: ‘Have you heard from him recently, by any chance?’

She looked incredulous and laughed to herself as she replied:

‘You really don’t believe me? Even now, I don’t leave anything behind with men. Once our bodies separate, I take my heart back. Why drag things out, once you’re apart? And in any case, with that student, it only got physical a few times. One evening there was a power cut and the sight of him praying under the oil lamp tickled my appetite, like a fresh fish, so I just took him once. He was a greenhorn; his talents were not so wonderful as to leave any memories . . .’

She pulled out a cigarette from inside her dress and lit it. The way she sat there with her legs crossed, carelessly exhaling the smoke, made her look like an arrogant queen. As he watched her, Sergeant Nam felt the hope he had so far stubbornly nourished of finding in her a clue for his investigation snap miserably. His intuition, resulting from the last ten years’ experience as a detective, told him that she had no direct relationship with the death of Min Yoseop. Sergeant Nam hurriedly parted from her. If he was to get to the police station before office hours were over, he would have to catch the midday train for Daegu at the latest.

4.

Sergeant Nam barely caught the train and once he was seated he closed his eyes for a moment, feeling dispirited. Then he set about examining one by one the notebooks he had taken from Min Yoseop’s house. As things stood now, they were the only hope he had. Sometimes, the personal notes or the diaries of a culprit or a victim could provide significant information for an investigation. But, on the other hand, he was equally beginning to develop a personal interest in Min Yoseop.

The first thing he opened was the bundle of diaries. The one he picked up happened to begin just after he had entered the seminary. The first parts were full of the ardent faith and an ambition to attain true goodness that had motivated his decision to quit university and enter the seminary. Soon, though, his interest shifted to the material conditions of human life and to social problems, and he went on to formulate doubts about the Christian religion itself. Particularly after returning from a lepers’ village, days had gone by filled with religious doubts.

‘How can misfortune befall humanity, indifferent to considerations of good or evil?’ ‘Words of Jesus declare that those who are rich, strong, and powerful are nothing. Then why are they everything in this world? According to the words of Jesus, the poor, the sick, and the rejected are everything. Why then are they nothing in this world?’ ‘The world is full of superstitions designed to foster belief. Religion is perhaps in some way nothing more than the most skillful form of superstition.’ Although the contents of the diary were almost constantly abstract and conceptual, Sergeant Nam was able to keep on reading thanks to such poignant questions inserted here and there.

The train was passing Yeongdong Station by the time he had finished perusing the whole diary. Although Sergeant Nam scanned quickly through the abstract parts, he paid close attention to the sections dealing with his daily life, but the diary ended on the day of his expulsion from the seminary, without providing any definite clues that could shed light on events afterward.

Sergeant Nam next opened the remaining bundles of manuscript. It was written in the form of a novel, but to Sergeant Nam’s limited knowledge, his rusty brain dulled by repeated daily routine and professional modes of thinking, it was just as hard as the diary. As the train approached Daegu, he would probably have given up before the end of the second page had it not been for the sense of frustration arising from the way he was bringing so little back from his trip, combined with the fact that he had nothing else to do except go on reading.

In the days of Octavius Augustus, in the early years of the Roman Empire, the Three Wise Men from the East must have been an immense disappointment to Yahweh, who had until then only been the God of Jacob and his descendants. Later generations invariably considered Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar to have been wise men, but it seems extremely doubtful whether they were truly wise and their actions were really worthy to contribute to ‘Glory in the Highest’ and ‘Peace on Earth.’

No matter how faithfully Yahweh may have been fulfilling the prophecies made by the servants he had sent previously, he must have been highly embarrassed when they arrived so noisily, seeking the birth-place of his son, bearing extraordinary gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. For Yahweh, the occasion was destined to be a lamentable mistake for long ages after. Because Mary was another man’s espoused wife, her son was later mocked as a god who ‘demolished the gates of the prescriptive law he had himself erected’ and had ‘come in by a short cut,’ and because she was a human being, controversies about the status of her son drove the early Church into conflicts so terrible that Arius, that lofty ascetic, was condemned to the humiliation of expulsion from the Church, while Nestorius, austere and faithful servant though he was, was obliged to succumb to the fatigue of exile. It would have been so much better if those irresponsible prophecies of Isaiah—‘Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son’ and ‘the Messiah will be born of David’s line’ and the rest—had been ignored. It would have far better if the Son of God had come down in a flash of lightning or sprung from a rock. He might even have fulfilled a prophecy of Daniel and arrived borne on a cloud.

Further doubts as to the wisdom of those men from the East arise from the immaturity of their words and deeds prior to the moment when Yahweh arrived in the humble stable that served as a delivery room for his son. Because they kept asking everywhere they passed where the King of the Jews was going to be born, Jerusalem was stirred, and the intention of Yahweh