by Bandi
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Oh asked. “But of course—you must be expecting.” Perhaps it was due to embarrassment, or perhaps simply because of the pain, but in any case the young woman couldn’t manage an answer. Mrs. Oh decided to be more direct. “How many months?”
“Eight … Everything was fine, but I got jostled in the crowd just now, trying to get my ticket stamped….”
“Whatever can we do?” Mrs. Oh exclaimed. “Here in the middle of nowhere …” Her anxiety was genuine, as much as if the problem concerned her own family. Why, this woman could have been her own daughter, whose pregnancy was similarly advanced. In this day and age, when young women found it every bit as tough as men to get by, who could say that some similar calamity hadn’t befallen her own daughter in the few days since they’d seen her last?
“Here, make yourself comfortable.” His own thoughts in tune with his wife’s, the old man tucked his legs in to give the woman a little more space.
“Oh my …”
But as for what happened to her after that, there was no way for any of them to know. No sooner had the old man encouraged her to lie down than a rumor sprang up that tickets were finally being checked for anyone traveling north, and the waiting room suddenly sprang into action. The upheaval was so great that by the time it subsided, the entire place had gotten so topsy-turvy that complete strangers now found themselves practically in each other’s laps. But though the young woman herself had disappeared, the thought of her plight continued to haunt Mrs. Oh, strengthening her resolve that something must be done.
When she’d found out about her own daughter’s pregnancy, one of the first things she did was to send a letter to her younger brother, who lived far away in the mountains, asking him if he could get his hands on a wild boar’s gallbladder. Everyone knew boars’ bladders were packed with nutrients and were just the thing to help a woman get her strength back after childbirth.
Her brother’s home was only four stations away from the one they were currently stranded at, back in the direction they’d come from. Surely she could walk that far…. And with one mouth less to feed, the four ration coupons would last so much longer! This wasn’t the first time Mrs. Oh had had such thoughts. Just now, when her husband had handed her the final coupon, she’d sounded him out upon the matter, only to be roundly scolded. But now, with the young woman’s fate a clear warning in her mind, her intention had grown firm. There was no space for hesitation.
“Yeongsun’s grandfather! There’s nothing else for it; I have to go through with my plan.”
“Ah, you’re not back on that again?” Her husband had been sitting awkwardly hunched over their sleeping granddaughter, trying to shield her from the jostling crowd. Now, he straightened up and looked his wife in the face.
“I have to do this. Have you forgotten that young woman already?”
“Pfft! Forgotten, indeed!”
“If a woman meets with an accident in childbirth, she can suffer from the effects her whole life. Her whole life!”
“…”
“I’ve thought it through, and this is the best way. We can kill two birds with one stone. Please, you’ll say yes?”
“Oh, I’ve thought it through as well, you know. How can you expect to make it safely all that way? On your own, and at your age.”
“Well, don’t you worry yourself about that.”
Eventually, Mrs. Oh got ready to set out. But when it came down to it, parting from her husband and granddaughter felt uncomfortably like leaving them to fend for themselves in a patch of thorns. Her feet were like lead as she took the first step. Slowly, constantly turning to look back, Mrs. Oh began to walk away from that station waiting room, which would remain seared on her memory like a brand.
As the child on her lap resumed her soft weeping, Mrs. Oh was pulled back to the present.
Though Yeongsun’s sobbing had now died down, the sense of fate’s cruelty that had grown up inside her was apparently refusing to disperse. With a trembling hand, Mrs. Oh stroked the soft, downy hairs by the girl’s face. Even her husband hadn’t escaped unscathed from the chaos at the station; that was how serious it was. But there would have been nothing she could have done even if she’d stayed behind.
All the same, she couldn’t help reproaching herself. She might fall to her knees in front of her granddaughter and beg the girl’s forgiveness, but even that wouldn’t entirely get rid of her guilt, her feeling that she, who called herself Yeongsun’s grandmother, had brought the child to this sorry state by running away when she needed her most. Of course, the child’s injury was nothing compared with what her husband suffered, his pelvis twisted badly out of joint. But the girl was just a tender young bud, in the springtime of her life! Even more than the damage to her leg, which had to be encased in a stiff bandage, the fear and agitation this suffering had caused were surely deserving of pity.
“How about another of Grandma’s old stories, Yeongsun?” It was impossible for Mrs. Oh not to try to comfort her granddaughter, to make up for the pain she felt she’d caused, in whatever small way she could. The girl merely nodded in answer.
“Right then, let me see. Once upon a time on a certain seashore …”
“There lived a kind old fisherman, right? You already told me that one. Back at home.”
“Ah, so I did! In that case … I’ve got it. Once upon a time there was a merchant who sold pots …”
“Who was scurrying down the road with his pots on his back … Hee-hee …” It appeared that Yeongsun had forgotten her pain, at least for this little while. “You told me the pot merchant story too. The same day.”
Mrs. Oh was lost for words. All of a sudden, she felt as though her heart were wandering in a distant field, leaving behind only her mumbling mouth, trying and failing to think of another story.
“Hoho … Seeing our Yeongsun laughing with Grandma has made this old man’s pain all better.” Her husband was lying rigid as ever, his eyes boring into the ceiling. His warm affection was palpable in the unusual softness with which he spoke; to Mrs. Oh, it was clearly an attempt to make her see that her granddaughter bore her no grudge whatsoever.
“Quickly, Grandma.”
“Yes, yes, it’s coming to me now.” But though Mrs. Oh had found her voice, she didn’t seem able to produce another tale, so moved was she by the depth of her husband’s affection.
“Looks like you’ve used up all your grandma’s stories, Yeongsun! How about one from me instead?”
“Okay.” Yeongsun’s cheerful, matter-of-fact answer showed how utterly ignorant she was of the effort this was costing her grandfather.
“Cock-a-doodle-do, do you know the one about the rooster, Yeongsun?”
It was this that finally moved Mrs. Oh to tears: her husband imitating a rooster’s call, an attempt to help their granddaughter recover her child’s innocence, in which she too could detect a plaintive note. The more strenuous his efforts, intended to assuage his wife’s guilty conscience even more than to lighten their granddaughter’s heart, the less Mrs. Oh found herself able to conceal her emotions. All this for her sake!
He was a teacher at the same middle school as his wife, and his lessons were known to be tough and rigorous, but pupils and close acquaintances alike received great affection from him, and gave nothing but love and respect in return.
Cuckoo, cuckoo.
Midnight had passed, and the cuckoo still didn’t know how to quit…. That sound stitched the nighttime stillness, punctuating Mr. Oh’s telling of Aesop’s fable, in a pain-filled voice….
Even if I hadn’t left the station that day, perhaps this kind of calamity …
Against her wishes, Mrs. Oh’s thoughts once again turned back to the event of a few days ago, which she could not shake from her mind.
Only once Mrs. Oh had left the station and made it onto the newly constructed highway did she realize that it, too, was caught up in the Class One event. The road seemed to play hide-and-seek with the railroad, the former huggi
ng the coast while the latter sometimes ducked away inland. And the road was utterly deserted; no vehicle dared to cast a shadow there, much less individuals on foot. All traffic had met a blockade farther up; Mrs. Oh had managed to smuggle herself on only by coming via the station. What on earth was this Class One event, if both road and rail traffic had to be suspended? Were there two Kim Il-sungs paying a visit? One thing was for sure: There would be “cats” stationed at each key point on the route.
And indeed, Mrs. Oh was stopped and questioned four times before she’d even gone fifteen ri. Aware that her age was her only shield, each time she tried to use it to her full advantage. How could she have done otherwise? How could she be frank or sincere when there was no knowing what might happen if she let her guard down? Using wiles that she’d never known she possessed, she even feigned a touch of deafness, repeating “Yes? Yes?” when in reality she could hear perfectly well. She was just an old woman going to that village over there, yes, just over there, why, she was practically there already. ID? What ID were they talking about?
She dragged out her griping as though this were all just some terrible inconvenience. A few times they glared down their noses at her as though she were a criminal, while at others, though their speech and actions were kind, their wildcat eyes would rake her up and down, striking a chill into her heart. Each time, though, presumably judging that Mrs. Oh was unlikely to be a criminal mastermind intending to plant a bomb, nor a crack-shot sniper planning to conceal herself in the woods, they would eventually tell her to be on her way, adding a raft of warnings before she’d even had time to obey:
“But go along by the side of the road, not on it, and as soon as you hear a vehicle, no matter how far off it sounds, get out of sight. Understand?”
“Yes, yes.”
Having made it through those four rounds of questioning, Mrs. Oh was picking her way along the stony road that lay between the railroad and the sea and dealing with intermittent bursts of rain when from behind her came the blare of a car horn. Glancing back, she saw a convoy of black cars moving along the new highway; the dense stand of pines that screened the highway from the sea must have kept her from hearing the vehicles’ approach.
Mrs. Oh was utterly horrified, and dashed off the road. Up until almost that point, she’d been careful to keep off the road itself, mindful of the cats’ orders, struggling along instead on the verge, where her feet kept getting caught in grass thickets or slipping into the churned earth of the paddy fields. But then she had reached a point where there was no verge to walk on, neither on the railroad side nor on the coast side, so there’d been nothing else for it but to get back on the road.
Why did these extraordinary vehicles have to be overtaking her here, of all places? Mrs. Oh’s heart began to pound, anticipating an imminent crisis. Two of the cars had already swept past her when a whistle shrilled in her ears. She whipped her head around automatically, and her field of vision was instantly filled by a long line of cars stretching into the distance. She jerked her gaze away, as though seeing something she ought not to, leapt across the ditch that bordered the road, and fled into the pine wood. But the sound of a car door opening, and the voice that followed it, stopped her flight as effectively as a hand seizing her ankle would have.
“Grandma, the Great Leader, Father of Us All, wants to see you.”
Mrs. Oh turned around. Her head felt heavy and dull, as though a blunt blow had struck her on the back of her skull, and everything grew dark in front of her eyes.
“No, no …” she muttered repeatedly, barely aware of what she was doing, pawing the air in front of her chest as though trying to push something away. Her vision gradually cleared, and the person facing her began to pull into focus. The man, whose clothes and general appearance were as flawless as a rod of steel, slipped his fingers lightly around Mrs. Oh’s wrist, his expression one of amusement.
“Come along.”
Under this man’s guidance, Mrs. Oh was brought, reeling, up to the parked car. She barely managed to keep control of her legs, which threatened to collapse beneath her and dump her on the ground. The men standing around the car were as neat and smart as the first, equally calm and collected.
Among them, though, one stood out, a dignified figure shielded by the open car door. A man whose pale golden clothes seemed to shed a soft veil of mist, enveloping him from his shoes to his fedora; a man who was gazing in Mrs. Oh’s direction from behind gleaming dark brown lenses; a man who was unmistakably “the Great Leader, Father of Us All, Kim Il-sung,” a visage Mrs. Oh had known all her life, though only ever as one that gazed out at her from portraits or the television. His bulging paunch bent his arms into the shape of the Cyrillic letter ф, while the face that rose above, perhaps enjoying the refreshing sea breeze through the pines, perhaps amused by the sight of the diminutive Mrs. Oh tottering forward and held by the wrist as though she might fly away, was beaming.
Feeling as though her body had suddenly withered to the size of a dried jujube, Mrs. Oh dropped to her knees about five paces in front of Kim Il-sung. As she did, words slid as smoothly from her mouth as a coiled spring being released.
“I respectfully pray for the long life of our Great Leader, Father of Us All.”
No matter who you were, if you lived in this land, beneath these skies, you would have memorized these words time and time again ever since you learned to speak; hence they flowed without a hitch even from Mrs. Oh’s mouth.
“Oh, thank you.” This cheerful voice came from somewhere above Mrs. Oh’s head. “Adjutant, get her up. Up!”
The man grasped Mrs. Oh’s arms and raised her up. Several other men got out of their parked cars and gathered around.
“Where are you going on foot like this?” Kim Il-sung’s voice rang with deep sympathy.
Tape recorders whirred and cameras flashed. Filming equipment clicked and clacked in all directions. All this left Mrs. Oh even more flustered, but she fought to steady her wits and answer Kim Il-sung’s question. Briefly, her mind fumbling for the right words, she informed her superior of her situation—though, of course, she did not forget to conceal that the root cause of all her woes was the present Class One event.
“Ah, I see.” Kim Il-sung smiled broadly at Mrs. Oh’s answer, his head bobbing as vigorously as a mortar pounding grain. “If this boar’s bladder is all you’re in search of, we can take you in our car straight to your daughter’s house. We were going in that direction anyway.”
“Oh no, no, I couldn’t possibly, Great Leader!”
“You don’t need to worry about your daughter. We will help her get to the maternity hospital in Pyongyang.”
“No, but I couldn’t, something like that, for the likes of me …”
“It’s no trouble. I too am a son of the people. Just the thought of past days pains me, when our people had to walk everywhere on foot; why should they walk now, when all the conditions are in place to ensure a pleasant journey? Come, ride with us.”
Mrs. Oh was truly stumped; to ride in the same car as Kim Il-sung would put her utterly out of her wits, but to refuse would be discourteous. But then someone came to her rescue—a curly-haired man standing by the car to the rear of Kim Il-sung’s, a flat briefcase tucked under his arm.
“Great Leader, it seems riding in the same car as yourself might be a little too much for this humble grandmother; I’ll follow along with her in mine.”
“That seems like a good idea,” the steel rod said approvingly.
“Really? Well, perhaps that will set the old woman’s mind at ease. In that case, Grandmother, come along in the car behind.”
No sooner had Kim Il-sung finished speaking than he put his hand on Mrs. Oh’s back and gave her a gentle push in the direction of the other car, still beaming at her all the while. Mrs. Oh herself could not have said how she ended up installed in the car, after another round of flashing and clicking which the curly-haired man guided her through. The scenery beyond the car window, whose glass had seemed blac
k from outside, was brighter and more animated than Mrs. Oh could have imagined, like the world looked at from underwater. It seemed as though her whole body would sink into the soft, yielding seat.
Some faint scent, redolent of luxury, hung in the car’s interior. The background music was as discreet as that scent, barely there, and with no hint as to where it was coming from. Mrs. Oh couldn’t even tell when they began to move. The car’s passage was so smooth it seemed to glide over the ground. It was like a dream. To have been plucked from the thorny path that had been her life so far, and placed in such unexpected splendor! And she wasn’t the only one—now they were telling her that her daughter would be able to give birth in Pyongyang’s maternity hospital. How could such a thing be possible, unless it was a dream?
“How are you feeling, Grandma?” said the curly-haired man, smiling and turning to look back from the front passenger seat.
“Well, you know, I would have been fine just walking…. I really don’t want to be putting you out.”
“Never mind that, just sit there comfortably and enjoy your journey, as the Great Leader said. Our convoy will accompany the train until we stop being able to see the coast. But the Great Leader has said that this car is to take you right to your daughter’s door.”
“No, but surely … not on my account.”
“Grandma! Is it not higher than the heavens and deeper than the seas, the Great Leader’s love?”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Oh replied, giving several deep bows. For a short while afterward, she struggled to remember what it was she had just agreed to. The car was speeding along. Pine trees and telegraph poles whisked past the windows in twin columns, like guards lining a processional route.
They had been traveling for around twenty minutes when it happened. A steam whistle sounded, and a glorious train procession appeared to the car’s left. Mrs. Oh had never seen a train like it, with white curtains at each window and each door shining as dazzlingly as the long roof. She recalled the curly-haired man saying that the train would be used when the route ducked away from the coast. This was the special train that Kim Il-sung, riding in the car at the head of the convoy, would now transfer into. Only now was Mrs. Oh able to grasp just what kind of Class One event could shut down both road and rail. Kim Il-sung was traveling along a route where both options were possible, so they took the train when that was most convenient, then switched to the car whenever there was an opportunity to enjoy the coastal scenery….
