Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Author:Heinz Insu Fenkl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2022-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

He had seen the lieutenant’s map enough times over the past few days to know that the Kum River stretched west and east, west to its mouth at the coast and east to the hills, where it widened and expanded into what looked like the body of a contorted dragon made of long lakes. To the east of the city was Kyeryong Mountain, where the terrain would make it safe for him to hide but might be too difficult with his foot. Water dragon or Earth dragon—which way? He could not decide, so he did what a child would do—he took off a boot and tossed it into the air, and when it landed, he resolved to go in the direction it pointed—north.

Damn it, he thought. North was the direction from which the People’s Army was approaching, the direction from which the refugees were pouring southward. If there was any doubt that his life was in danger, it was gone now. The very fact that he had run away would confirm his guilt, and if they found him now he was surely dead. He could imagine it quite clearly—the sergeant shooting him, claiming it was in self-defense.

They would be looking for him in the south, knowing he couldn’t get far because of his foot, and that would also make him easy to remember and identify. The childish game was right in the same way the I Ching oracle was right, even when you could rationalize its advice away. They would look for him in every direction but north, and so that was the direction he would go.

When he was far enough from the house, he followed the buzzing of flies, knowing they would lead him to something—an animal’s den, a fertilized field, even a dead body that he might pilfer from—and found a badger’s hole in an acacia grove. He buried the North Korean uniform there. That night he would have to eat one of the C-rations he had hidden in his knapsack, and he would have to sleep in the open unless he found an abandoned house.

It was a while before sunset, and he was still uncertain about the advice of his boot, so he gathered small, flat pebbles until he had three of approximately the same size. On one side of each, the yang side, he chipped a small white spot with a sharper, harder stone. He cupped the three prepared stones in his hands, shook them up and down, rattling them like dice in a cup, and tossed them onto the ground. He did this six times, producing the forty-first hexagram: son, mountain over marsh, representing restraint, diminishment, disadvantage.

It was a reading of his current condition, his location near Kubong Mountain, which rose over a winding river and a marsh. In Korean, son also sounded like the word for monkey—those GIs, and also the Monkey King, who would journey to the west, as did the Kum River. Son was also the fragrant iris, humbleness, and simply to sit down and eat supper.

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