Chapters 32.33: The Story of A Miss Pigeon

32
"Forgive Me, Father!" 1993

Someone or something is oriented toward someone or something. Just like bees are guided by airstream, just like salmon are guided by sea stream, just like ocean cruising needs a compass and a navigator, and just like foreign travellers need maps and tourist guides, do those, who go the faraway place of death, need guides of some sort? Since I had missed the one day alloted for the early morning prayer session the previous day, I prepared myself to take part in that day's "morning ritual for the terminally ill parents."

I kept awake through the night for the event. When on daybreak I went up to the ritual building, I found that several applicants for the event had already been there. I filled in the application form with father's name, age, relation, and address. The presiding monk of the ritual stood six feet with strong build, brilliant eyes and resonant voice.

He later introduced himself as Monk Yonghwa, Dragon Fire. His ritual proceedings took on the mode of a premature report with the King of the Netherworld (the Paradise after death). With all the ritual proceedings of the offerings, bows, and mantra chanting done, Monk Dragon Fire gathered me and the others around and gave some pieces of advice.

The few minutes before and after one's death were very important in that the surviving people would have to take some special heed so that the deceased would not be ambushed in the traps of diversion. Yonghwa said that a person who just died had to take a long travel to the Nether World. He compared the journey of a deceased to a mountain climbing, that is, climbing up a steep hill. He looked at me Dano and said, "The bereaving people will have to stop crying for a few minutes and to cheer him up, instead, by whispering to his dying ears, 'Don't be distracted, Father. Go straight, Father!'"

Exiting the portal of Guinsa Temple, I was lighthearted. Like a boy on a picnic, I was thrilled at the reunion with my father in half a month. The intercity traffic transfers were irritating, and his feet were fidgety on the slow buses. After a five-hour bus ride, I was virtually racing the stairs to the sunny sick room my father had been using. When I got into the room, father was sitting up, with Ilseo and his wife before him, surprised by my appearance.

With an elliptical greeting with only knelt postures and no bows, which meant that one's offspring was not supposed to give deep bows to the gravely ill elderly, he threw himself before his father and burst out crying, "It was all my fault, Father!" He kept on crying. He was wrong. He did wrong. He pained him. He hurt him. He begged him to forgive him. Perplexed were all of them present in the room. Don said weakly with sunken eyes, "Stop crying, son. I was not always right. Don't blame yourself so bitterly!"

How sad it would be that the person himself was forced to decide on a place at which he himself would be buried. Don had his intention conveyed to his sons, Dano and Ilseo that his burial place should be prepared in a hurry. He had made sure that he would not be buried at a certain hilly site of Sun Valley, Andong-gun, because it was so far away that he wouldn't be able to "see" his children and grandchildren, and even if they could come from time to time, they wouldn't get to the resting house of his.

When mentioning this, Father indicated his oldest son me Dano offhandedly. He said that "a certain fella with a problem of weight" would balk at the idea of the call at his father's place, because it would be a hard job to do, so he would try to greet from far down at the foot of the mountain hill, instead, excusing himself, "You can see me from here, can't you? Please think that your son's showup here at this spot will suffice." So with the aid of a jiguan, a geomancer, who had been arranged by my best friend Mr. Paragon at Euiseong, Dano and Ilseo took a sunny low-lying place at a stone's throw from the orchard as their father's resting place.

"This place is better than all the other places," the jiguan had said at the time, "in terms of the peace of the deceased and the prosperity for his descendants, protected by the power of hills surrounding it." The comments of "the judge of the earth" were hollow and useless, though, because the place was not a private property of his on which to lie down and rest but belonged to the county property, so in a considerable time the leaser would have to move to another place or something.

Like an elementary school boy, who dawdles on his vacation homework, Don appeared to be under pressure. He had had his "parting plan" with his family suspended by his wife Boolim's sincere request that he put off the occasion in consideration of his sons' inconveniences. Now his grand reconciliation with the oldest son, who had sought forgiveness over wails, was made. And as if driven by a premonition, his first daughter, who, born during Sun Valley days, had turned a Buddhist nun as a young maid by the Buddhist name of Awakening, returned a few days ago to observe and consecrate her secular father's final days on earth.

The date was set for the sad occasion. On the morning of the 15th of March, 1993, by the lunar calendar, Don said weakly, "It is time to go!" He was as light as a bird. Deprived of nutrition and hydration, he might have weighed less than 40 kilograms. He had emptied every bit of nutritional residue from his system. His eyes were sunken deeper than ever. He looked to be the skeletal type of a body. Some secular provisions had been made. Boolim had made him a clean new clothes. Don had made no wills except that he had handed down the apple farm of 6,000 pyong which equals about 20,000 square meters to his second son Ilseo who had been taking care of his parents and doing farm works, with the consent of the other two sons and the approval of heir Ilseo himself.

Don climbed into bed which had been elevated on the head. Like almost all the ordinary seculars, he did not grandsit nor grandspeak at his dying moment. He was not a Buddhist believer, either. He was just calmly waiting for the moment. He had been endowed with an extraordinary encounter, a few years ago, with the Grand Buddha, though, which had been made in the middle of the East Sea, of all the places, in front of Naksansa Temple, Gangneung.

The cerebral fantastic scene, which had been developed on a grand scale, had been conveyed later to his immediate brother under him, Chull, who had framed it up with its saga: The Grand Buddha, materializing himself in the middle of the East Sea, had opened his grand mouth and solemnly pronounced a wise phrase consisting of seven Chinese words meaning in effect, that "After all the concerted efforts of yours with one clear and clean mind, you can rest assured."

A man was dying and the other surviving families were watching him die. For a long, long time he had been a strong supporter of a small decent family with his steely legs and arms. Now he was lying powerless, left alone with all the others waiting to part with him. He was taking last breath very heavily as Awakening kept reciting the mantra for the dying father, pounding the moktagg, a wooden vase sounder. At one moment Awakening pronounced him dead. Dano, who kept standing with the others, felt an awakening chill running his spine. It was around 11 o'clock in the morning, with the April sun racing toward the middle of the sky. The sky fell down.



33
The Story of Miss Pigeon, 1995

Awakening didn't cry. On her face, she didn't show tears nor made a crying sound. But I knew that she was also crying. I knew she was all tears. That is, she was crying with all her face. All face muscles of hers were crying. It seemed, to me Dano, as if minute particles of tears had been oozing out of her muscles. On top of all that, Awakening did all the filial piety she had not done since she had left her mundane father, and she did more than the rest of the family had done through their lives.

Awakening did, on behalf of all her secular family, did observe 49-day condolence prayers at Eunhaesa Temple, Youngcheon. The prayer ritual, which was held after all the secular funeral procedures had been done, was followed by more sophisticated procedures which needed patience.

Don's funeral at his worldly house took five days from start to finish. Because he was not pronounced dead in a hospital bed, his dead body didn't have to be frozen away in a dark hospital freezer. It was on the first half of April and the air was so aptly cool that he could also get away with lying through the condolence visits in the room, behind folding screens and in a cozy coffin with covers, though.

The bereaving relatives also took advantage of the geographical advantage of the rustic community. They put up tents in the garden orchard and treated the visitors who had just left the condolence room with meals, meats and drinks. The condolence visitors from the neighborly rustic towns made ant lines all through the funeral period, paying tributes to his life of honesty, integrity and diligence.

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Whereas the rest of Don's offspring got more involved in the after-death ritual and the management of the grave mound, Dano got preoccupied with the "reconciliation and reunion with his father." Ilseo planted lawns and watered them, and manicured them. Divinist Odagaga had once told Dano that he had been able to "meet" his deceased father.

"How is it possible for one to meet one's parents again after death? Dano had once asked him. Mr. Odagaga had only beamed. Dano once had gotten a wind, at around the time when his father Don had been digging the family well, from a celestial tip (from cerebral images during sleep) that his father would work as a site supervisor of the Celestial Work Place. So his dead father might not have been in the grave; His father might have been nowhere, or he might have been everywhere.

Dano's dead father once or twice might have "come" to his first son's Mokdong Apartment, but he might have been disappointed at what he had seen. One of his nephews, or, Ilseo's second son said in the presence of the relatives that "I saw grandfather in white durumaggi, (*Korean man's traditional garment which is loosely outfitted) one day at dawn." Innocent young men might have been able to have the opportunity of seeing the dead spirits. Ilseo once asserted that he had seen white ghosts dancing on the rooftop of the water mill plant. Dano's third son Kyo (First, Tai; Second, Hua) would later admit to spotting "the white human shape" at his room of Eunma Apartment Complex at the very night of the move.

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In secular financial terms, my wife's accessory store was doing well while my book copies were not lucrative. My new book on "the conversion approach" as well as his old ones only got the contract money of about 500 dollars. There had been no more phones, faxes, emails or something from the publishing houses. There always had. The scant letters of recognition and praise for the author's principle of the interpretation of the English prose showed that his readers were scattered yet unorganized.

There was an intermission type of episode in my journey from savagery to civilization: From a flint man to an online netizen. It was just like an experiment, accidentally made, though, with which to verify the efficacy of communication with an animal species classified as avian class. Say, a ship was in distress, with sails broken and blizzards blowing. A poor creature, shaken by terror, starved and frozen, sneaked into a Mokdong apartment house of mine, seeking haven. Spotting a small pigeon, which had flown in, on a snowy day, from an open glass window on the veranda of the 8th floor, I approached him with a great care, with a sound of cooing and a gesture of feeding. A wet pigeon walked toward me with a grudging and suspicious gait. Returning from the Daechi-dong store at eleven o'clock at night, Tschai, sighting a strange visitor, expressed dismay at my idea of keeping it at home. After some exchanges, she O.K.ed the guest's conditional stay: Come spring, it will have to leave.

The avian guest turned out odd. As if to have a right to do so, the busy body who would later be named Goosoon issued a noisy wake-up call at five in the morning. It was not the same kind of a severe din made when cicadas alarmed their villagers. Tschai showed irritation at the noise and the droppings, of all the nuisances. She had some knowledge of the avian droppings. She said the droppings of the pigeons were the most virulent in that they contaminated and eroded soil, and even the concrete pavement. Like the rest of the other world cities, Seoul had the enormous pigeon population around the city, mostly around the subway stations and city parks. Tschai was spreading the waste papers wide under the pigeon's nest.

What the uninvited guest irked the hostess more than the excretion of it was that it expressed its overt emotion toward me Dano and Tschai too obviously. That is, it expressed familiarity toward me Dano to an exhilarating degree whereas it revealed hostility toward Tschai to the extent that she pouted. It cooed rhythmically and literally necked me Dano whereas it pecked at Tschai's hands fiercely.

Once a provisional lodging was permitted to the poor pigeon, Tschai suggested that they name the maverick. She wanted to know first how a biedulggi is termed in Chinese words. As Dano said 'Goo' (鳩), she named it Goosoon (鳩順) by adding a feminine suffix 'soon'. On what grounds she judged the small avian invader a female but not a male? Because the animal liked me Dano so much.

Goosoon liked to be inside the room. Very presumptuous. When I was noticed to be moving inside the room she approached the glass window and pecked at it with its bill and asked to be let in. I was wondering whether it was wise of me to destroy the border between the animal however small, and a human, such as he is. In fact, millions of pets had been allowed to be inside the human living quarters. Once let in, Goosoon liked to sit beside me, and appeared flattering when I was reading, and obsequious when typing or writing something. She didn't eat much. Goosoon didn't get scandalized by rapacity. She ate a minimal amount of grain and drank a few drops of water. She liked to bathe, say, in a small plastic water basin. I dried her after that and let her warm herself on the ondol room floor.

Goosoon liked to be touched. Dano liked to keep her company by keeping her inside the parka or something during the early morning stroll. She seemed to enjoy the warmth there inside. Getting to the Mokdong Park, I used to let go of him and walk freely on the park. She was flying here and landing there and seemed to enjoy watching the folks stroll and play shuttlecocks. At times she disappeared in the peer throng. Then I called her out "Hey, Goosoon," then she came flying to me. When going back home I opted to go first, saying "Goosoon, I'm coming home." When coming back home I found her already in her nest.

On the wee small hours of an early spring, Goosoon returned with mud all over her and exhausted. I wondered what had happened to her. Was she violated? Or raped or something? She did not croon nor alert in the morning. The next time I knew Goosoon appeared to be incubating eggs or something. Once she alighted on the nest, she did not come down unless when she was sipping some liquids. She hardly touched grains. Tschai and me discovered that there were two small eggs in there. Tschai was so touched by her sincerity that she gave a pledge that if she were to hatch eggs into kid birds she would allow them to stay for an extended period of time.

When three weeks or so were up, I found Goosoon got agitated: The eggs remained as it had been. It was a sad Sunday afternoon. The weather was warm; The afternoon sun ray of spring was shining through the glass window. All were gathered there: the Dano-Tschai couple and the poor Goosoon. I sought an expert opinion. A human voice from the receiver of a related authority advised me Dano that I shake the eggs. "If you found the eggs in a liquid state, that means it would not be hatched," he said. I tiptoed and took the eggs and calmly shook them. They were full of liquid. Before I knew, just out of the blue Tschai shouted with rage: "What a useless brazen creature not to bear young!" Her shouts would have sounded thunderous to the ears of the poor creature. Goosoon went flying out never to return.