by Bandi
“Are you any different?” Yeong-sam countered. “If you hadn’t been ‘broken in,’ as you put it, would you have managed to live so long?”
“Ha! Isn’t that the truth…. Gah, Myeong-chol! Let’s have a song, come on.”
The train’s whistle piercing the starless sky
Stirs the insides of the unfortunate man
Perhaps because one of the songs had been about a skylark, when Myeong-chol eventually staggered home his footsteps stopped outside his door rather than carrying him straight in. A birdcage hung from the eaves of his roof, containing a pair of larks. The birds were native to Myeong-chol’s village, and his wife’s brother had made her a gift of them on one of her visits home, having heard how intense Myeongchol’s homesickness was.
Though he had buried the placenta of his own son here in this mining town, to Myeong-chol these larks were the long, golden grasses and impossibly blue skies of the village that would always be his home. In the mornings and evenings when they struck up their song, he could swear that he heard that distant stream, the familiar tones of his mother’s voice. That evening, as he stood and stared at the birds, his heart swelled with a passion intensified by his drunkenness. He unhooked the cage and held it in his hands, but it wasn’t the larks that his dazed eyes saw; instead, it was the face of his mother, hovering on the brink of death.
“Mother! You’ve got one foot in the next world, and your son still can’t come to you. I can’t come. Mother!”
The front door opened and his wife ran out, disturbed by the commotion. Seeing Myeong-chol reeling where he stood, she linked her arm in his and encouraged him to lean on her.
“Come in and lie down. It’s not your fault you can’t go and see your mother. Do you hear me? It’s not your fault. This society is too much sometimes. To tear a person up like this!”
But Jeongsuk’s tears only fanned the flames.
“That’s right, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault…. I’m in a cage, just like this bird…. Damn it!” Gnashing his teeth, Myeong-chol unlocked the cage and flung the door open wide. The larks chirped in unison, as though to thank him, then stretched their wings and flew out of the cage, clumsy at first after their long confinement.
“That’s right!” Myeong-chol muttered. “Go, go. You must have a hometown somewhere, too, and a mother who gave birth to you….” He stared after the larks as they diminished to black specks, then vanished entirely into the blue. A spasm passed over his face, and he threw the empty cage to the ground. Seeing them soar so free, so far, had roused a burning envy in him, and a courage he hadn’t known he possessed. “They’re going, and I’m going too…. Yes, that’s right, I’m going too!”
He slipped his arm from his wife’s and dashed into the house, making a beeline for his backpack, already packed just in case the decision at Department Two was favorable. As well as a change of clothes and sundry necessities, it contained a package of dried fruit which was said to be good for his mother’s heart disease, and which his wife had gradually gathered together from mountain foraging all through the autumn.
“What are you doing?” Jeongsuk cried in alarm, but Myeong-chol shook off her restraining hand and charged straight out of the door.
After that, Myeong-chol’s memory was blank. According to Yeong-sam, it was pure luck that he and Myeong-chol had ended up in the same carriage. As soon as the younger man had spotted him and hurriedly helped him to a seat, Myeongchol’s head had tipped back and he’d begun to snore. Claiming Myeong-chol as the second traveler listed on his permit, and apologizing profusely for the state for he was in, Yeong-sam had managed to see them through four inspections without their ruse being discovered.
Now, though, he frowned, and brought his mouth right up to Myeong-chol’s ear.
“I have to get off at the next station. What will you do? From now on you’ll be on your own. You’ll need to go ‘underground,’ like a real guerrilla.”
Myeong-chol nodded his understanding, but the prospect of going it alone struck fear into his heart. He could feel the net closing around him, and a shiver ran down his spine. He would be caught; he was sure of it. Yet he never suspected just how soon he would find himself in that net.
Around twenty minutes after Yeong-sam had alighted at his station and the train had got back on its way, the voice of the attendant shattered the sleep of those who had finally managed to drop off after the latest batch of passengers had thrown the carriage into a commotion. “Permit inspection for all passengers. Please have your permits ready.” As Yeong-sam had it, this would be the fifth such inspection since they’d both boarded the train, but to Myeong-chol, hearing the words for the first time, it was like a gun was being pressed into the small of his back. Two railroad security officers had already entered the carriage, one at either end, their blue uniforms making them look like venomous snakes as they shone their flashlights up and down the car. Myeong-chol’s heart was hammering so loudly he felt sure his fellow passengers would hear it. His chest and back were slick with cold sweat.
“Hey! Wake up! Move, you filthy rat.” At the sound of people being dragged from their seats just a few rows away, Myeong-chol’s vision went dark. His rational mind lost any interest in dignity or shame, and his body took over, seized by the instinct to avoid discovery in absolutely any way he could. He dropped to the floor and began to wriggle his way beneath the seats, between the other passengers’ legs, like an eel burrowing into the mud.
A fetid stench, undetectable from higher up in the carriage, now sat in his nostrils, and a spider’s web snagged on one of his eyebrows. He contorted himself like a snake, his knees practically touching his chin, and cursed his unusually tall frame, which was protesting this treatment. Though he kept bumping his nose against shoes and trainers, in actual fact he was grateful for this thicket of legs, which screened the way both in front and behind. That gratitude, however, was fleeting. His blood seethed again. What crime have I committed? Am I a thief or a murderer, to have to degrade myself like this? In this country of mine, is it a crime just to go and visit your sick mother? He had a sudden urge to stand up and bolt straight out of the carriage. But just then, the flashlight’s beam scythed right in front of his face, and he curled up as tightly as possible, even screwing his eyes tight shut.
“Permit!” That single word was like an iron hammer clanging down on Myeong-chol’s head. Holding his breath, he opened his eyes just a crack and found himself looking straight up at the security officer’s belt, visible beneath the bottom of his jacket, as he held his flashlight close to the permit in his other hand. That belt loomed over Myeongchol, threatening to transform into the taut rope with which to bind a criminal. His spine broke out in gooseflesh. The officer had two guns. Might he not then also be carrying that same rope which Myeong-chol had seen all those years ago, stained with blood as it had been back then? The incident had been seared into his mind, and came back to him now in all its vivid clarity in spite of his present peril.
It had happened one spring day when Myeong-chol was still a lad, in his fifth year at school. Those pupils whom the school had decided were displaying counterrevolutionary tendencies had been marched out to a farm, lined up in the threshing field, and ordered to sit down. There, a condemned criminal was bound to the trunk of a peach tree beneath the glorious profusion of its blossom.
As the prosecutor began to recite his argument, recounting how the man had smeared feces on supplies that were to be exported to the Soviet Union, the criminal began to squirm frantically. Though he appeared to be yelling something, attempting to wave his arms in some kind of protest, the fact that his limbs were pinioned to his sides and a rag had been stuffed into his mouth meant that all that could be discerned was his desperate writhing, which grew gradually more and more violent. All of a sudden, his movements appeared to become much freer, as though one of his bonds had snapped, and a helmeted officer ran over to the tree. Grabbing a looped rope from his belt and stretching it out in a swift, practiced mo
tion, he used it to bind the struggling criminal even more tightly.
Not long afterward, deafening gunshots rang out in quick succession. The metallic scents of blood and gunpowder soaked through the crisp spring air. A truck rumbled into the field and backed up close to the peach tree. Two security officers used their hand knives to cut the ropes around the tree. But the helmeted officer used his bare hands to untie his rope, stuffing its surely blood-soaked length roughly into his pocket. This made Myeong-chol’s limbs tremble even more than the gunshots had.
Afterward, the memory of that rope had haunted Myeong-chol’s days, an inevitable image in his dreams on nights when he’d been unable to finish his homework, when he would feel himself pinioned to the bed as tightly as the criminal had been to the peach tree. This period in his life marked a change in Myeong-chol; he began to feel ever more cowed and docile, rushing to obey whatever task his teachers or Boy Scout leader might set him.
That rope, which had inculcated a rigid obsession with obedience in the mind of Myeong-chol when he was a young boy, sought him out again when he was a man, on the day he was discharged from the army and packed off to the Geomdeok mountains. That day, when an escort officer climbed up into the truck with them, tasked with ensuring that there would be no attempts at desertion, Myeong-chol had glimpsed that rope hanging from his belt, next to a gun holster. Now, as he crouched on the filthy train carriage floor, his fate hanging in the balance, the idea that he might have to encounter that horrifying object yet again seemed the most terrifying aspect of the entire situation. It was as though he were being given a hint of a power that bound him tightly in its grasp, never slackening no matter how he tried to shuck it off….
Even once the two officers had left the carriage, pushing and shoving a small line of those whose permits had not been in order, Myeong-chol barely allowed himself to breathe. He might have lain there beneath the seats for the whole duration of the journey, safely past the moment of crisis but afflicted by a fresh sense of needing to “save face,” had it not been for a stroke of luck—a blackout inside the train.
With the interior of the carriage now as black as the fields outside, Myeong-chol lost no time in crawling out from beneath the seats and slipping farther along the train, in the opposite direction from that of the security officers, still clutching his backpack, with its precious parcel of dried fruit, which his fingers had refused to relinquish even at the very peak of his terror.
Over the course of the night and the day which he spent on that train, Myeong-chol seemed to become a different person. The hollow cheeks and staring eyes looking back at him from the carriage window were like those of a person wasted by disease. Which was understandable, considering that he’d had to dodge two further inspections, one by hiding in the foul-smelling toilets and one by lowering himself outside the wagon, through the window set into the upper part of the door, then holding on for dear life as the train clattered over the tracks. Dirty and dangerous as these options were, they were infinitely preferable to the moans and wails of those who failed the inspections and were forced off the train at the next station.
But all that was done with now. Now, with the stop for his village coming next, Myeong-chol had his sights set firmly on home, and forgot his own troubles for the first time since Yeong-sam had shaken him awake. Glancing at the window, he fancied that he saw his mother’s face there rather than his own, and his hand strayed to the backpack in his lap as he thought about how glad he would be to see her, even on her sickbed.
Just as the morning sun was pushing above the ridge of Mount Seokda, Myeong-chol got down from the train, concealing himself in a small stream of passengers, from which he slipped away as soon as the coast was clear, clambering over the station wall without being spotted. It niggled at his conscience to be sneaking into his own hometown like some common thief, but his lack of a permit meant there was no other option. As the streets of the town petered out he began the ascent to Maldeung Pass, and there, at the top, he was able to look down on the broad course of the Soyang River, its sinuous contours so achingly familiar. Once he was across the river, it would be only a mere ten ri, crossing a single plain and skirting a single mountain, before he found himself finally home once more, in his own village of Solmoe!
Myeong-chol’s pace quickened as he imagined setting foot in his childhood home; in his mind, he could already hear the snick of the latch lifting. Though the sun was now high enough in the sky for the heat to have built in intensity, the cool breeze off the Soyang River cut through it even at this distance. Myeong-chol could have sworn he could already hear the lapping waves, the piping of the waterfowl. To someone from Solmoe, hemmed in by mountains on its three other sides, the river was almost a maternal presence, and the scene of many happy memories.
Myeong-chol had been six years old when he’d first crossed the river, on a visit to his grandparents’ house for the autumn harvest festival. No sooner had he and his mother alighted from the ferryboat than Myeong-chol had started pestering her to let them cross it again. His mother did all she could to dissuade him, reminding him that they’d be coming back that way later, but Myeong-chol insisted that they get back in the boat at once. In the face of such a stubborn passion, there was nothing his poor mother could do other than hold out another fare to the ferryman.
“Hang on,” the old man said, frowning, “didn’t you just pay me?”
“Yes, but my son wants another ride on the boat, and if I don’t let him have his way I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“You mean you want another round trip? Back the way you came, and then back here again?”
“Yes, that’s right. I’m sorry, I know it can’t be easy for you at your age, but …”
“I never thought I’d see the day—a kid telling his mother what to do! Never you mind about any fare, just hop in. You too, my lad!”
And so, they ended up taking another trip across the river, back and forth, Myeong-chol giggling in delight. As soon as this jaunt was over, though, his mother had to stoop to vomit on the riverbank. The ferryman shook his head, regarding her with deep sympathy.
“Even in your condition you still gave that kid of yours his wish….”
Myeong-chol had never forgotten those words, or the sight of his heavily pregnant mother smiling weakly through her nausea, one hand on her bump. It was such a precious memory for him that whenever he dreamed of his mother, as he had done on the train, a riverbank or ferry crossing would be sure to make an appearance.
Wait just a little longer, Mother! Soon you’ll be the one who thinks she’s dreaming, when this son of yours pokes his head around the door!
A fresh burst of energy gave wings to Myeong-chol’s feet, and he flew down the path which led to the bridge, a cloud of dust in his wake.
“Halt!” Jolted out of his reverie by this abrupt command, Myeong-chol belatedly realized how reckless he’d been to approach so openly, heedless of the toll bar and checkpoint. Still, those were really only for vehicles; surely they wouldn’t bother themselves with a single man on foot?
“ID papers.”
The man who stepped forward from the sentry post looked to be around Myeong-chol’s age. He was smartly dressed, holding a rifle pressed up to his shoulder, with small, downward-slanting eyes that resembled those of a crow-tit. Myeong-chol was rooted to the spot. He stood there blinking dumbly for a moment, then hurriedly fished out his papers. The sentry’s eyes narrowed even further as he scanned each page of the document.
“Travel permit.”
“I … don’t have one.” Myeong-chol had entered the road to unavoidable checkmate.
“What?” Those crow-tit eyes glared at him. “You’ve traveled here from Hamgyeong Province without a permit? When our district is about to host a Class One event? Unbelievable!”
The sentry blew a shrill blast on the whistle that dangled from his wrist, and the door of the checkpoint hut was flung open.
“What is it?”
“This guy’
s come from Hamgyeong without a travel permit.”
“Well well, how intrepid! Send this hero in to me.”
Confused by the tone of admiration, Myeong-chol walked tamely over to the hut and ducked inside the door. As soon as he did so, he realized his mistake. The man who’d called him in was a security officer, with a dark blue T on his epaulet; he was sitting in the hut’s only chair, a line of men and women with pale, strained faces in front of him. He seemed to have been busy instructing them in the error of their ways, and seized on Myeong-chol’s arrival as a helpful example.
“Look here. Travel between one county and another is controlled as tightly as possible, yet this goblin came crawling through in broad daylight!”
He jabbed a finger at the unfortunate Myeong-chol.
“From where in Hamgyeong Province?”
“T County.”
“What do you do there?”
“I’m a miner.”
“Indeed! And how is T County supposed to obtain its production goals with men like you running off? This is the chaos we end up with!” Still waving his hand in Myeong-chol’s direction, the officer turned back to his captive audience. “Now, do we or don’t we have to control citizens’ movements? I mean, travel permits aren’t only useful for catching enemy spies. Understand? I’m asking you, grandma.”
“Yes, of course, but there’s only one bridge between Hadong County and our Sangdong County … and my grandson got ill, all of a sudden. Well, at first it was just a cold—”
“Quiet, that’s enough.”
If a truck hadn’t pulled up just then, there was no telling what further humiliation Myeong-chol might have been made to suffer. The security officer glanced out of the window, then picked up the telephone receiver.
“Military security operations division? A vehicle just arrived. Yes, yes. I’ll send them all to you.”
