by Bandi
He put the receiver down and began to herd the people out of the hut.
“Come on, move, the lot of you!”
“Aigo, Officer, Comrade!”
“Please sir, my son’s father-in-law passed away, he only lives in the next village….”
“I did have my papers with me, I swear it, but I lost them on the way, ….”
In the midst of this hive of commotion, Myeong-chol seized the officer’s arm.
“Comrade Officer!”
For someone like Myeong-chol, awkward and indecisive by nature, this was an act of quite extraordinary bravery, going far beyond anything he had ever dared before. But he was forced to it, by the memory of all the trials he’d had to battle just to get here, and by the urgent voice inside his head reminding him of how his mother must be suffering, clinging painfully to life in the hope of a final reunion with her son. To have come all this way only to be turned around and sent packing before even setting foot in his childhood home was simply unbearable.
“Please, Comrade Officer, consider my situation!”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the officer barked, snatching his arm away. He glared at Myeong-chol as though he were a piece of trash offending him by its very presence. “The crows can caw all they like, but you shut your mouth! You deserve to be thrown into prison, do you hear me?”
But even that ghastly word “prison” could not intimidate Myeong-chol now. He would pay any price, run any risk, to see his mother one last time. What did it matter then if they jailed him? It would be like being hit in a dream.
But it was not to be. The sentry with the gun came running over, and the whole group, Myeong-chol included, was forced up into the truck, like pigs being sent to the slaughterhouse. There were no exceptions, not for the old woman who clung to the officer’s ankle, not for the bent-backed man who walked with a cane. The truck roared into life, belching out a round of black exhaust fumes as it shunted forward.
Mother!
Myeong-chol’s breath rasped in his throat. His eyes grew misty, and when the old ferry came into view he couldn’t hold back his tears. He pitied his poor mother, waiting in vain for a stupid, good-for-nothing son, and he grieved at his own cruel fate, which had him stuck like a fly in a web.
Mother! Forgive me. Your idiot son, your idiot son …
An opaque cloud of dust billowed up in the wake of the truck, obliterating the fields and mountains of his home. A moment ago he could have reached out and touched them; now, he might as well have been separated from them by a distance of ten thousand ri.
Their son had woken up and begun to grizzle. Myeong-chol lapsed into silence, taking a few more drags on his cigarette. It was the first he’d smoked since returning home, after the past few days recovering from his ordeal, and it was making his head spin. Jeongsuk shook herself.
“Look, Yeong-min, your dad’s awake! Here, look. Look at your son!”
“Son? Ha!” Myeong-chol’s laugh was strained. Though he could see that Jeongsuk was trying to put on a brave face, adopting a deliberately bright tone that did not match her puffy eyes, he seemed unable, or at least unwilling, to do the same.
“Yeong-min, you’re happy to see your dad, aren’t you, hey?” Jeongsuk bravely battled on, tickling their son under the chin.
“What good is a son in this country of ours? When a mother is lying on her deathbed, and her son can’t even show his face? Sons!”
“Don’t be like that, please. It’s done with now, there’s no use going back over it. You’ll apply again for a permit, and this time it’s bound to be approved. Your mother’s health will hold out that long, I’m sure of it.”
As much as Jeongsuk wanted to support her husband, the account of his ordeals had left her badly shaken, and she naturally tried to bury the memory with these words of empty comfort. After all, she thought, wounds never heal if you keep tearing them open. But there was one rather more pressing worry that she felt she needed to get off her chest.
“But what’s going to happen about your job? You’ve been absent without leave for over twenty days….”
“Ah,” Myeong-chol said with a strange smile, “but I have a good reason. One that even the factory won’t be able to argue with.”
He picked up the notebook that was lying on the desk, extracted a folded slip of paper from between its pages, and handed it Jeongsuk. She read it through hastily.
Name: Kim Myeong-chol
Confirmation that the above-named comrade will undertake labor discipline for the period stated below, as penalty for violating travel regulations. From 2nd July 1992 to 24th July 1992.
South Pyongan Province, Military Security Department Labor Discipline Office
“No!” This cry escaped from between Jeongsuk’s lips as she wrenched her gaze from the note to her husband.
This time it was Myeong-chol’s turn to adopt a cheerful tone.
“As you said, what’s done is done, right? And it was only twenty-two days, after all. Twenty-two days I had to spend as an ox, muzzled and bridled.”
“Don’t—don’t tell me any more,” Jeongsuk shouted, clamping her hands over her ears. She pictured the bruises and welts her husband’s shirt must be concealing, remembered the lice-infested underwear she’d had to wash. Her chest ached.
Outside the window, a skylark cried, and Myeong-chol sat up in surprise. Turning to the window, he saw the cage hanging from the eaves, just as it had always used to.
“How can that be?”
“The very next morning after you set them free, they came flying right back again. So I put them back in their cage.”
“Pitiful, domesticated creatures!” Myeong-chol muttered as though chewing and spitting each word.
The larks chirped again as though to counter Myeongchol. He could imagine what they might be saying: “Aren’t you just the same? You came back too, after all….”
That’s right, what am I but a caged animal, for whom the shortest distance might as well be a thousand ri? A pitiful, domesticated creature!
Myeong-chol sprang to his feet. The line of his lips looked firm as a rock, while a raised rope of muscle pulsed over one cheek. He leaned outside the window and unhooked the cage, holding it out at arm’s length. Something like a moan leaked from his mouth. With oddly unhurried motions, and as though operating independently of his body, each hand began to wrench at its side of the cage. There was a loud crack, and the cage split in two. Calmly and without hesitating, as though he had rehearsed all these movements, Myeong-chol let the two halves clatter to the floor. The larks turned a single circle inside the room, then darted out of the window swift as arrows.
“Why did you do that?” Jeongsuk’s voice quavered with fear; she had never known her husband to behave like this.
“There’s no ‘why.’ I needed to break the cage, so I did, that’s all.”
As Myeong-chol gazed quietly at the larks enjoying their freedom, his face was eerily self-possessed. From outside, there came the sound of footsteps and the rustling of paper, and then a postal worker thrust a telegram in through the open window. Myeong-chol and Jeongsuk both reached out to take it, and their eyes fell on those four small characters, gouging into them like a knife into a gut.
“MOTHER DECEASED.”
There was no wailing, no sobbing, no falling to the floor. The two hands holding the telegram merely trembled, silently, shaken by something far more powerful than tears.
7th February, 1993
Pandemonium
On the mountain behind the village, a cuckoo crowed, crying out as if it were choking on a clot of blood. So Mrs. Oh wasn’t the only one for whom sleep was proving impossible.
The drawn-out sigh her husband made spoke of his own discomfort. Then, as though it was a chain reaction, their granddaughter started up crying.
“Baby, does it hurt?”
Mrs. Oh’s trembling hand fumbled in the darkness for her granddaughter’s bandaged leg. Her fingers bumped up against a squa
red-off wooden board, hard and chill to the touch. A shiver ran down her spine.
Though she tried to sigh out the ache inside her, it remained stubbornly lodged in her chest. Her five-year-old granddaughter’s broken leg was obviously painful, but Mrs. Oh had her own sufferings to contend with, the bandage around her lower back forcing her to lie rigid in the same uncomfortable position. A few days ago, when the elderly couple had visited their pregnant daughter, whose due date was fast approaching, they’d thought that by bringing the little girl home with them for a spell they were doing a good deed, allowing the mother to focus on taking care of herself. If Mrs. Oh could have foreseen that such a calamity would befall the child …
“Mama …”
“Little Yeongsun. Now that your leg’s better, let’s go and take the train to see Mum, hey?”
“Don’t want to, don’t want to, don’t want to go on the train …”
Her whimpered cries, which up until now had been as faint as the sound of a trickling stream, exploded into a full-blown howl. Shredding the dark interior of the house to pieces, the sound was one of despair and protest.
“What are you doing, mentioning that awful train in front of the child? It’s enough to give anyone the shivers,” Mrs. Oh’s husband complained. The child’s cries doubled in volume, as though her grandfather’s remarks had swelled her sorrow even further.
“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Oh muttered, “I’m a foolish old woman, it’s true.” She got up and searched for the light switch. Once the room had brightened, she moved to embrace the tearful girl.
“Eh, our little Yeongsun, will you give Grandma a hug?” Overwhelming pity swelled up inside her and she slid her arms beneath her granddaughter’s body, being careful of her bandaged leg, and lifted her up. Carrying the little girl in her arms, she went over to the window bench where she’d spent the past few hours, and sat back down again.
Feel better, feel better
Our little one’s hurt
Let your nice grandma
Soothe it for you….
Though Mrs. Oh made every effort to comfort the child in her lap, the little girl was unable to quell her tears. Her sorrow seemed not to have subsided at all, so deeply had it pierced her innocent self. How to undo the hurt inside her, how to heal the wound inflicted when her soft knee had snapped, like the sparrow who fell afoul of evil Nolbu?
“Yeongsun, your grandma made a mistake.” The words seemed to split Mrs. Oh’s throat in two. “We won’t take the train again, okay? Never again!”
Never! There it was again, that hellish din, ringing in her ears as though reminding her to keep this promise. And that dreadful train station, the source of the commotion, appearing in her mind’s eye like a scene from some nightmare …
“There are people dying here!” screamed Mrs. Oh, seized by the despairing conviction that she was about to breathe her last, buried in this jumble of people. Her head and back were being steadily crushed by this mass of contorted, entangled limbs, while heavy blows knocked the wind from her chest. Throbbing heat, the stink of sweat, the gooey mud under her feet … these things were already growing faint for her, receding into the background. Only one single thought hung clear and sharp in her mind—that this was how she was going to die. Perhaps it was all her long years as a history teacher that gave her the illusion, now, of being caught up in a mass of starving slaves, in one of the grain riots she’d taught her pupils about.
And Mrs. Oh would have truly met her end in that spot, were it not for the fact that the bread supplies ran out just in the nick of time. As soon as all the bread from the handcart was sold, the maelstrom subsided. Mrs. Oh managed to buy three packs just before the chaos reached fever pitch, and kept them clutched safe to her chest the whole time. Holding in her mind the thought that they had been bought with their last ration coupons, that without them the family would go hungry for however long it now took to make it to their destination, Mrs. Oh kept a tight grip on these precious packets.
“Hey! Even grandmothers are crawling around in this mess?” a sweat-soaked young man cried in surprise when he spotted Mrs. Oh. Concentrating on finding her other shoe, which had come off and got kicked away from her in the melee, she gave no sign of having heard him. She found the muddied shoe and put it on, but there still remained the task of getting back into the waiting room to rejoin her husband and granddaughter. The room was rammed to the gills, so much so that even the window frames had disappeared, gotten rid of in a bid to free up some space. Whatever had previously been a window was now used as a door, and the water bottles people had brought with them for the journey were transformed into chamber pots. If only it could have just stopped raining, they wouldn’t all have had to cram into such a tiny space. But as it was, the waiting room was their only refuge against getting soaked to the skin.
People lying down or sitting on the concrete floor, in spite of all the mud that had got trailed in from outside; people lacking even the space to sit, who instead had to stand stiff as posts—almost all of them were people who, like Mrs. Oh and her family, had been intending to change trains here at this station, only to find themselves imprisoned because a Class One event was being held.
The station itself wasn’t particularly large and was far away from any built-up areas, but it was one at which various branch lines converged, meaning that even a small change in the service was enough to cause a severe backlog. That would have been bad enough in itself, but as the station had now been completely locked down for thirty-two hours and counting, crowds and confusion were only to be expected. The would-be passengers had all exhausted whatever provisions they’d brought for the journey, and the scant handful of basic restaurants were unable to meet their demands. Even buying a packet of bread involved the kind of ordeal which Mrs. Oh had just suffered through, and the difficulties in then getting back to the waiting room were no less of a strain. People’s nerves were on edge, leading them to kick up a fuss over the least perceived slight. Faces blackened with dust from the railroad were screwed up in irritation; people grumbled that someone had jogged the backpack they were using as a pillow or had elbowed them in the ribs while shoving past. And even when these petty spats had run out of steam, the same angry expression remained on everyone’s face.
What bastard’s Class One event takes this long? What bastard’s Class One event kills people like this? Of course, these words of discontent could never pass their lips. The Class One event taking place just then involved Kim Il-sung traveling along that same railroad—Kim Il-sung, whose sacred inviolability meant that even if he announced that a convicted murderer was to be allowed to live, anyone who dared so much as hint at disapproval would be sealing his or her own fate, with no more recourse to reverse it than a mouse faced with a cat. Indeed, the “cats” would be all around the station just now, even inside the waiting room, scattered among the mice like the seeds in a squash.
In all likelihood, the cats would pretend to share the sufferings of the mice right next to them, even producing the same pitiful whimpers whenever they happened to be bumped or jolted … and the wretched mice, suspecting this, could only divert their anger onto the most trivial incidents, like the bride who takes it out on the family dog when her mother-in-law gives her a tongue-lashing.
With so many people looking for the family dog in this situation, it took Mrs. Oh a full ten minutes to get back to the place where her husband and granddaughter were waiting, though the distance from the yard in front of the station was no more than thirty-odd steps. The family had installed themselves in one corner of the waiting room, the ideal spot from which to avoid “attacks” from behind or to one side.
Yeongsun was the first to spot Mrs. Oh. “Bread!” she exclaimed.
They’d had to skip only one meal since setting out on their trip, yet the girl looked happier to see the bread than to see her grandmother. Her husband, though, was the same as always.
“Look at the sweat on you! That’s why I said I should go….”
&n
bsp; He reached up to take a packet of bread and turned to the young woman who had borrowed Mrs. Oh’s place. Her clothes marked her out as a recent bride. She had fallen asleep where she sat, her head lolling forward onto her backpack. “Excuse me, miss,” he said to wake her, and shifted aside so she’d still have room now that Mrs. Oh was back. Tearing open her packet, Mrs. Oh held out a piece each to her husband and granddaughter.
“I’m all right,” the old man said, pretending not to be hungry, though in truth he was holding back. Before Mrs. Oh had gone out to the yard, he’d given her the last ration coupon from his wallet. Each packet it had bought contained five small pieces, fifteen all told—and this was all they had to last them until they reached their destination.
“Go on, eat. Don’t worry about the child. The train will set off any moment now, you’ll see. Do you really think they’d let us starve to death here?” Mrs. Oh forced a piece of bread into her husband’s hand.
“Well then, you have some too.”
As it seemed the only way to get her husband to follow suit, Mrs. Oh took a bite of their precious stash. In reality, the couple were both on edge, worried that the little they had wasn’t going to last and Yeongsun would end up going hungry.
“Wow! You look like you’re enjoying that….”
The young woman who had given her place to Mrs. Oh, and who was now sitting crammed up against them, laughed at the sight of sweet-faced Yeongsun devouring her bread in great gulps.
“Ah, what was I thinking? Here, have a piece.” Genuinely apologetic, Mrs. Oh handed the packet of bread to the young woman.
“Yes, have one,” her husband insisted.
“No, no,” the young woman said, firmly pushing the packet back and smiling warmly at the couple’s concern. “I have some food of my own in my backpack. But have you got far to go? After all this …”
“Oh, we’ve come a fair way already, but there’s not much farther left now. As long as we can get out of this awful situation …”
“For goodness’ sake, when on earth will this train—oh!” The young woman moaned abruptly, seemingly taken by surprise. Both hands instinctively went to her lower stomach, and she buried her face in her backpack.
