Skull Water


 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover Page
 Skull Water
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Contents
 I One Big Word
 One Big Word—1974
 Five Arrows—1974
 The Milkman—1974
 II Crows 
 Crows—1950
 Front toward Enemy—1974
 Heaven & Earth—1974
 III The Train to Pusan
 The Train to Pusan—1950
 The Fort—1974
 Skull Water—1975
 IV Three Days That Summer
 Three Days That Summer—1950
 The Dog Market—1975
 Looking for Miklos—1975
 V Twilight
 Twilight—1975
 Holly Golightly at the Bando Hotel—1975
 Cherry, Cherry, Bar—1975
 VI Time & the River 
 Time & the River—1975
 The One-Eyed Cave—1975
 Collateral—1975
 Paisley—1975 
 Meetings & Farewells—1975
 River of Light—1975
 Forsythia—1975
 A Note on the Hexagrams & Pictograms
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 
 
 
 
 Cover Page
 Skull Water
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Contents
 I One Big Word
 One Big Word—1974
 Five Arrows—1974
 The Milkman—1974
 II Crows 
 Crows—1950
 Front toward Enemy—1974
 Heaven & Earth—1974
 III The Train to Pusan
 The Train to Pusan—1950
 The Fort—1974
 Skull Water—1975
 IV Three Days That Summer
 Three Days That Summer—1950
 The Dog Market—1975
 Looking for Miklos—1975
 V Twilight
 Twilight—1975
 Holly Golightly at the Bando Hotel—1975
 Cherry, Cherry, Bar—1975
 VI Time & the River 
 Time & the River—1975
 The One-Eyed Cave—1975
 Collateral—1975
 Paisley—1975 
 Meetings & Farewells—1975
 River of Light—1975
 Forsythia—1975
 A Note on the Hexagrams & Pictograms
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 
 
 Skull Water
 
 
 
 Spiegel & Grau, New York
 www.spiegelandgrau.com
 Copyright © 2023 by Heinz Insu Fenkl
 All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission from the publisher.
 This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, incidents, and places are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 Jacket design by Strick & Williams; Jacket illustration by Carson Ellis;
 Interior design by Meighan Cavanaugh
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
 ISBN 978-1-954118-19-5 (HC)
 ISBN 978-1-954118-20-1 (ebook)
 Printed in the United States of America
 First Edition
 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For Big Uncle,
 and for my family,
 past, present,
 &
 future
 Contents
 I
 One Big Word
 One Big Word—1974
 Five Arrows—1974
 The Milkman—1974
 II
 Crows 
 Crows—1950
 Front toward Enemy—1974
 Heaven & Earth—1974
 III
 The Train to Pusan
 The Train to Pusan—1950
 The Fort—1974
 Skull Water—1975
 IV
 Three Days That Summer
 Three Days That Summer—1950
 The Dog Market—1975
 Looking for Miklos—1975
 V
 Twilight
 Twilight—1975
 Holly Golightly at the Bando Hotel—1975
 Cherry, Cherry, Bar—1975
 VI
 Time & the River 
 Time & the River—1975
 The One-Eyed Cave—1975
 Collateral—1975
 Paisley—1975 
 Meetings & Farewells—1975
 River of Light—1975
 Forsythia—1975
 A Note on the Hexagrams & Pictograms
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 
 i
 One Big Word
 
 One Big Word
 1974
 The shadow of the 707 rippled like a giant black egret as the hilly contours below us became the flat green expanse of the rice paddies around Kimpo Air Base. I could not imagine what power it took to keep these tons of alloy and steel in the air, to keep the plane from simply plummeting like a stone into the fertile earth below. We were falling at more than two hundred miles an hour, and yet the landscape moved lazily until the plane slowed, just before touching the runway, and then everything seemed to accelerate with a dizzying speed. The world lurched and the air grew suddenly thick with the roar of the jet engines, and we could feel the sudden roughness of the tarmac through the landing gear, right through the bottoms of our seats, as the earth ground itself up into our spines. 
 As the airplane braked to a near stop, everything outside looked at once too large and yet oddly too small. I glanced over my little sister’s head to the aisle seat and saw my mother’s eyes brim with tears of joy at being back in our homeland. 
 Korea. 1974. Early summer in the Year of the Tiger. 
 The taxi driver from Kimpo said he could take the new highway, but my mother asked him to take the old road that had been the route for the U.S. Army buses we used to ride. Through mile after mile of chain-link fences, the American and Korean military posts we drove past were just as I remembered them. Where the road used to turn to gravel, the odd Purina Chows sign in English was still there, its red-and-white checkered squares faded, the lower right corner burnt—scars of a year’s weathering.
 We were going to live in Kisu’s house, in the same neighborhood where we had lived before leaving for Germany, and when the taxi pulled up outside the wooden gate with its faded tri-color t’aeguk symbol next to the tailor shop, I felt a strange mix of ease and fatigue.
 At first, Kisu’s house appeared exactly the same as when I had last seen it a year earlier. And yet during our first day back I realized that the house had aged just as Kisu’s grandmother Halmoni had; she had grown lighter and more shriveled, like a dried gourd that will rattle in the wind. It was a ramshackle house nearly a hundred years old now, built decades before the Japanese occupation, and since then, as the tiny village by the stream had grown into Pupyong, it had sheltered four generations of Changs. The original building was wood and whitewashed plaster, but now the roof beams were full of dry rot and the kidung posts were warped and tilted. When I walked across the wooden maru with the added weight of my year away, the floor creaked in spots I didn’t recall, and the compacted dirt of the courtyard, which had always seemed as hard as baked clay, seemed to have become softer, dustlike. The black dirt floor of the kitchen was special—people from the neighborhood would visit from time