The Lake

I flew in as soon as I heard that he had passed away. Grandfather was 82, and had died in his sleep. The funeral was small, kept to close family members including myself and my parents.

He was a modest man and the will was brief. The house was left to my father and my uncle. His checking account only had a few thousand dollars left. He had been living on a pension toward the end of his life.

“And to my grandson, Henry, I leave my travel savings,” the notary said.

We were all taken aback. None of us had any idea that Grandfather had been planning to travel. He was not really the type of man to do so, nor did his frail health allow for it. Until now, for many Thanksgivings and Christmases we came to him, not the other way around.

“How much is that?” I asked the notary, who promptly replied, “$20,000.”

Dad nodded in approval. “Lucky you son, that’s gonna be useful.”

He was right. $20,000 could finally go toward the down payment I had been saving for, or a sorely needed new car.

The notary then continued, “And in addition, I leave him my war diary.”

This came as even more of a surprise particularly to me, because I knew exactly what this was. This was his small black notebook, his journal from the Korean War.

***

During a stage in my life when I was far too young to be by myself and my parents were both working, it was my Grandfather who took care of me. He was a retired architect, and a veteran. I was familiarized with the little notebook, because he would flip through it at least once a day. Gradually, my curiosity had gone to a point where I began to ask him about it, and he kindly told me what it was all about, but never showed me anything from it.

Though, of course, he obliged in satisfying my interest when I kept asking. He would tell me about his time in the peninsula when he was a teenager, barely out of high school. He told me he had volunteered with pride and excitement, which faded into begrudging disillusionment, assuaged only by the thought of returning home. I would listen to these stories he would tell, and my young self wondered if I would ever get to see the inside of that notebook.

Back in my own apartment, I began to sift through the notebook. The handwriting in rough cursive was difficult to read; but, as I went along, I could follow the journal closely to the stories he had told me from before. Like the time he threw himself over a grenade to protect his squad, and it turned out to be a dud. Or when they were miraculously saved by a passing fighter-bomber, when his unit was pinned down by an enemy tank.

However, what intrigued me the most was a sketch of a lake view. It was beautifully drawn, with two mountains rising above the far edge of the water, trees surrounding the lake’s shores on either side. Just below it, a text that read, ‘I’ll be back for you, Robbie.’

I was never one to be able to keep down curiosity, so I inquired at the National Archive and requested Grandfather’s service records. There, I found that he went missing after a battle, only to turn up at a base near a city in the Northeast region of Korea called Wonju.

I fortunately had some vacation days I could spare, and I decided that I would use the travel fund for its intended purpose. I got on the plane to Korea the next day.

***

Grandfather once told me of a story where he and his fellow soldiers were surrounded on top of a hill and needed to find an escape. Their supplies were running low and they were down to their last cans of food. They had already been melting the snow for water. When they had grown desperate enough, the battalion commander decided they would make a break for it one night.

During this, Grandfather had gotten lost, cut off from the rest of his unit. He trekked through the mountains and managed to later rejoin his friends.

However, in the actual journal, that was not entirely true. He was helping a wounded comrade named Robbie, presumably the same one from the sketch.

‘We’re lost. We don’t know where we are right now, but only that we’re somewhere in the mountains. Robbie is hurt and he needs medical attention soon. I don’t know how long we have left to go. I pray we make it back in time for him.’

Grandfather was never one to lie. He always put integrity above all else in his life, and he found it his utmost priority to do the right thing, to tell the truth. He stuck by that his entire life, and that was one of the most significant lessons he left me with when I was a young boy.

Yet he had never told me about Robbie.

***

Once I arrived in the city of Wonju, I booked a hotel there for a month and managed to wriggle a discount out of it. The city itself was quite ordinary, with its copycat apartment blocks surrounded by mountains densely covered with trees.

‘I buried him under a rock, so that I could at least leave a gravestone for him. There, I promised to him that I would bring him home one day.’

That was a passage that came after the sketch, and in my heart I wondered if this was his idea all along, that I would be compelled to complete his journey. In fact, I did feel as if Grandfather was passing his journey onto me, so that I could keep the promise for his sake.

In the first week, I began to go to any lakes that I could find around Wonju and tried to see if the sights matched. On the ninth try, looking over a lake with a pair of mountains behind them and surrounded by trees, I thought I had found it. I held up the sketch, and things seemed to line up quite nicely.

There was an information placard that had an English translation next to the Korean component. For the sake of investigation, I read it, and realized that I had made a mistake.

This was an artificial lake, only built five years ago.

***

It turned out all of the lakes I had visited were man-made reservoirs built much after the war. Fortunately, after ruling out every single one of them in the area, the candidates narrowed down to very few.

In the evenings, I would visit a local eatery, a different one each time, and the Korean hosts were always so nice to attempt to speak to me in English. Regardless, I struggled to understand them, and always ordered by looking at the pictures on the menu, and pointing to the one I wanted.

Each time I visited a lake, I would go around, trying to find anything that looked like a grave; but, of course, it could have looked like anything. The biggest problem though was finding the exact view that matched the sketch. That never happened.

Then one night, after I had visited another wrong lake, I reached the end of the diary. There, while chewing on fried chicken at a bar, I read his last remarks from his time in the war.

‘With great wish that nobody ever reads this, I must write it down now, because at the end of it all, I cannot bear not having let this off my chest. I let Robbie get killed. It was my fault. We had reached the lake, and I was carrying Robbie on my back then. He had grown far too weak to move, so I leaned him against a tree and went to the lake to fetch some water. I took my time, and drank plenty before filling a flask. But when I came back to where he was, I saw that several North Korean soldiers had surrounded Robbie. They were slapping his face around, trying to see if he was alive or dead. I should have done something. I know I should have. But I hid behind a bush and watched it all happen. One of them then suddenly stabbed him in the chest with the bayonet at the end of his rifle, kicked him once, and then left. Only when they were out of sight, I went to him. And by then, he was gone for good. I write this because if I end this diary without the truth, I know I will be tortured. I’m sorry, Robbie. I’m sorry.’

***

“Honor, Henry, honor is what counts the most,” he said to me once. “You always do the right thing, no matter the cost.”

I imagine that it was shame that prevented him from making the journey all these years, despite his abundant travel fund and all the time he had. It was the haunting memory of wretched cowardice that had held him back.

In the second week, after having gone to four separate natural lakes, I finally found it. It had the two mountains and the trees on either side that the sketch had. Though I knew by this time that what I was looking for was not simply scenery.

I walked along the edge of the lake, until I came across a large rock upon which a coarse but clear sentence was carved.

‘Rest in peace, Robbie.’

From there, I turned around and held up the notebook with the page to the sketch open. The view was practically identical save for a few pencil strokes.

I imagined that this was the first view he had taken in after he had lost his friend, having found himself at fault for his death. And from that, the view became etched in his memory as a photograph.

All I could think of then was how I wish he could have told me sooner. I could see how he had tormented himself with this until the end, and I would have told him that it was no dishonor to have survived, and lived a good life, which, amongst all that came after, included me being here.

I turned back to the stone, crouched down, and took the notebook out. I looked down at where he, with malnourished hands caked in soil and dried blood, buried an old friend. I put the black notebook next to the rock so that it was leaning against it.

“You kept your word after all, Gramps.”

And at his journey’s end, I sat down and looked upon the quiet lake as the sun set.