by Bandi
To bring your son to his senses …
But the voice wasn’t that of the Bowibu director; instead, it belonged to the director of military security, who’d spoken those same words—To bring your son to his senses—almost a year ago when Kyeong-hun had been demobilized.
Strictly speaking, your son should have been packed off to political prisoners’ camp, but I invented a “Fault 1 Demobilization” instead. We’re colleagues, and I wanted to give you the chance to bring your son to his senses. I’ve enclosed his written statement with this letter; once you’ve read it, you’ll understand that further leniency simply wouldn’t have been possible, under the circumstances. This young man is more canny than he’s letting on.
Yeong-pyo had raced through the letter, then unfolded his son’s statement with a trembling hand.
I have been accused of a heinous crime against the Party and our Great Leader, General Kim Il-sung. My comrade from the security department claims that my brain has been rotted by the South Korean puppets’ anti-Communist broadcasts that parrot ideas of “freedom.” I acknowledge the truth of this. It was while stationed as a border sentry on the 38th parallel, where I had been assigned in order to prepare for the military arts festival, that I was subjected to this constant barrage of “freedom” propaganda. These broadcasts hounded me every hour of the day; there was nowhere to go to escape them, and nor was it feasible to go around with my hands over my ears. The crime of which I am accused was committed on Saturday evening. We had held a dress rehearsal in the presence of the director of the political department, and then received criticism for our performance.
“Today’s rehearsal was extremely mediocre. I pride myself on being a man of culture, and I’ve attended enough plays and recitals to know what is meant by ‘stage truth.’ You might not be familiar with the term, but you should at least understand the concept, how actors perform a given play as though it were real life. To lie, in other words, but convincingly, so the audience will believe it is the truth. But was there anything convincing about the awkward, stilted performance I just witnessed? No, Comrades, there was not. Stage truth can be achieved only with complete mental and physical control. Has your training taught you nothing more than how to pipe a few tunes on a tin whistle?”
This was the comrade director’s evaluation of our performance. As punishment, we were ordered to do practice drills, and though there was a lot of grumbling at this, because the drills are exhausting, and we were already hungry, still we set to it in earnest. At ten o’clock the comrade director returned, apparently to check that we were doing the drills properly. It just so happened that my storytelling troupe were the ones on stage, while the rest were waiting their turn in the audience seats. The director watched us for a minute or so, then told us to take a break. Seeing us throw ourselves into the drills so wholeheartedly must have appeased his anger at our shoddy acting.
“How do you find the drills?” he asked. “Tough, no?”
“It’s nothing!” the troupe cried out as one. The only ones who remained sullen and silent were myself and Comrade Oh Haknam, whose father is a jidowon in one of the provinces.
“You must be hungry, though?”
“Not at all!” came the answer. As if that wasn’t enough, Comrade Kang Gil-nam felt the need to yell out, “We aren’t gluttons obsessed with filling our bellies!” and the rest of the troupe then bellowed their assent, drumming their heels. I was genuinely taken aback. This was the same Kang Gil-nam who, only a few moments ago when he’d stumbled during one of the drills, had been griping about how it was no wonder we were so weak, “living off chicken feed.” And not just him; back then the rest had been perfectly quick to join in, even cracking jokes about their navels being in love with their spines, as the two were clearly hankering for a kiss.
So how were they now contradicting themselves so convincingly? Might this be the “stage truth” that the comrade director had talked about? I couldn’t say; unlike him, I’m no connoisseur of the arts. And wasn’t it even more bizarre that only Comrade Hak-nam and I, whose fathers are both high-ranking cadres, had been unable to join in this display of acting talent, instead presenting the comrade director with expressions more suited to a constipated dog?
In any case, after briefly exhorting us to carry on, saying we’d do well to apply the same effort to our rehearsals, the director disappeared back inside, out of the cold. He’d said he would be back again at 11 p.m. to settle up, but 11:30 p.m. and then midnight both went by with no sight of him. By this point, we were too exhausted and strung out to carry on drilling.
And so we all—storytellers, singers, and accompanists—huddled around the drum stove, which was a tight squeeze for forty-odd people, and which in any case was producing more smoke than actual heat, as we had only unseasoned firewood to burn. Some tried to make the time go faster by cracking jokes, but they ended up being pretty damp squibs; we were just too cold to be properly funny. Not that this mattered; as usual in such a situation, where gut-wrenching rage had to be forcibly suppressed, we were ready to fall about laughing if anyone so much as coughed a bit strangely. It was almost like some kind of laughing sickness.
Someone hissed at us to be quiet and we all pricked up our ears, thinking he’d heard the director’s footsteps; then a drawn-out fart ripped through the silence and we all roared our heads off. Though I laughed with the rest of them, in spite or perhaps because of our sorry situation, I could feel something boiling inside me. First, I couldn’t help suspecting that we wouldn’t have been abandoned for so long if it hadn’t been for foolish bravado. My feelings toward those comrades of mine who’d pretended to be immune to hunger and fatigue weren’t exactly benevolent. On top of that, it really was bitterly cold.
But worst of all was that I’d been assigned a skit called “The Bottomless Mess Tin,” meaning I’d had to spend half the night pretending to be devouring all manner of delicious things while in reality my stomach was as cold and hollow as an empty cellar. It really stuck in my craw, I can tell you. I whipped out a cigarette in a fit of pique, but no sooner had I stuck it between my lips than the drill leader decided we’d sat around for long enough and ordered us to “resume, starting with the comedy skit.”
Why that damned skit first, of all things? I thought, and before I realized what I was doing I was on my feet. “Never mind the skit,” I shouted, bounding up onto the stage, “I’ll improvise something that’ll have you in awe of my stage truth.” This was what had been building up inside me, straining to get out, and there was just no way to hold it in any longer. “Hmm, what shall I do about a title? I’ve got it! ‘It Hurts, Hahaha,’ to be followed by a second act called ‘It Tickles, Boohoo!’”
While the others laughed at my antics, I slipped behind the stage curtains before turning around and poking my head out, making sure that only my face was visible. Even now, I can’t understand how something I’d dreamed up on the spot managed to flow so seamlessly. “Ladies and gentlemen!” I cried. “At this very moment, behind the curtains where you cannot see, I’m being pricked with a whole host of needles. But the director commands me to laugh! Go on, one of you lot be the director.”
“Laugh!” someone shouted obediently, and I instantly responded by contorting my face into a grotesquely exaggerated mask of pain, stretching my mouth as wide as it would go before parodying, to the best of my ability, the spectacle of sobs gradually transforming into laughter, crying first “Boohoo” and then “Haha.” The others were in stitches. They were still wiping away the tears when I popped out from behind the curtains and announced the second act. But I was interrupted by Kang Gil-nam, leaping up to join me on stage.
“I’ll do Act Two!” he announced, darting behind the curtains and poking his face out just as I had.
“You, Comrade? Very well! Right, so this time … Got it! Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Comrade Kang, a budding actor in his twenty-third year of drama school.”
“Nonsense, how can anyone be a student
for twenty-three years?” a female comrade called out.
“Ah well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you! This second act, as previously announced, is a piece by the name of ‘It Tickles, Boohoo.’ Right! A soft set of fingers begin to inch their way up to Comrade Kang’s armpit … one step … two steps …”
“Hahahahaha! Uh-uh … boohoo.” As an actor, Comrade Kang was head and shoulders above me. The others were clutching their ribs and begging him to stop.
They say laughter is the best tonic, and the others did indeed appear all the better for our comic interlude. Once they were sufficiently recovered, it was back to the drills, and this time there were no complaints.
This account is a full and detailed explanation of my crime, a crime for which I humbly beg forgiveness. The broadcasts of the bastard South Koreans must genuinely have rotted my mind.
As to why I chose those particular titles for my improvised performances, something which the comrade director has asked me to clarify, surely it is not such an uncommon idea, having to laugh at something to stop yourself from crying, and vice versa? Those were just the first titles that popped into my head, seeing how Comrade Kang and the others refused to admit to their hunger, and thinking of myself having to perform “The Bottomless Mess Tin” while my stomach felt as though it might devour itself.
Second, as to why I described Kang Gil-nam as a twenty-third-year drama student, again, it was the first thing that popped into my head, as Comrade Kang is twenty-three years old. This is the honest truth. I never would have dreamed that this foolish clowning of mine would be a matter for the security department. Again, I can only beg forgiveness.
“You louse!” The same exclamation that Yeong-pyo had spat out on first reading that statement now sprang once more from his mouth, awash with the taste of rainwater. It stood to reason that as the son of someone high up in the Bowibu, Kyeong-hun had had a sheltered adolescence, but how, at his age, could he still not have grasped the workings of the world in which he lived?
A year ago, Yeong-pyo had been willing to turn a blind eye to the incident of the comic skit, but for the same misdeeds to be repeated today was too much. Any action, any utterance, was observed and documented, not only in the military theater or the foothills of Mount Baekryeon, but even a thousand ri underground—was it conceivable that Kyeong-hun could be ignorant of this? Could he really be so idiotic? No. Just as the military director had written, though Kyeong-hun had clearly intended his written statement to come across as the account of a naïve, wide-eyed young man, in reality he was “more canny than he’s letting on.”
That louse of a son has his head on backward, and it’s those damned liberalization broadcasts that have spun it around for him—180 degrees, until he can’t tell north from south. Would there be the slightest blemish on his record otherwise, would he even cast his eyes at this Kim Suk-i? Kim Suk-i, who everyone knows is the daughter of a political prisoner!
Recalling all the trouble he’d had extracting a promise from Kyeong-hun to break off the relationship—like getting blood out of a stone—Yeong-pyo swore under his breath and dashed the rainwater off his chin. To his surprise, he found himself already home; he’d been too preoccupied to notice his surroundings.
“Is Kyeong-hun here?” he snapped, only halfway across the threshold.
“Not yet, and with this rain …” Unable to gauge her husband’s mood, Kim Sun-shil had no way of knowing her words would only provoke him further. “I’m getting quite worried, you know.”
“Hah! Don’t waste your time.”
“What? How can I not worry? Only today, two people from the food factory were killed in a landslide while picking flowers in the mountains, and the little boy who got bitten by a snake yesterday died this morning.”
“Yes, yes, all right.”
Nothing irritated Yeong-pyo so much as having to listen to someone tell him what he already knew. Though it was less than a week since the official mourning period for Kim Il-sung had begun, anything that passed for a flower bed had already been stripped bare. It was impossible to find even a single bloom in the small gardens attached to residential blocks, let alone in the public streets and parks.
Though this hadn’t been made public, a day or two into the mourning period people had cottoned on to the fact that their visits to lay flowers at one of the newly erected altars were being secretly tallied. Not only had one such visit per day become a hard-and-fast law, but there were even people who went once before each mealtime, morning, noon, and night. There were hundreds of altars all across the city, in local Party offices, factories, even schools, and what with each of the five-hundred-thousand-odd inhabitants requiring a steady supply of flowers to take there, there was nothing for it but to send workers and pupils out of the city to gather wildflowers. In Yeong-pyo’s unit, the daily task of picking enough flowers for each member to lay a bouquet at the altar was delegated on rotation.
Children and adults alike roamed the mountains, and with the monsoon season making the ground treacherous, frequent accidents were only to be expected. Yeong-pyo’s wife’s anxiety was far from baseless. But this wasn’t enough to smooth the edges of his temper.
“If that damned louse dies in the mountains, good riddance!”
“What?”
“Look at this.” Yeong-pyo tugged the bottle out of the pocket of his sodden trousers and threw it onto the floor.
“What’s that?”
“What does it look like? Alcohol!” Yeong-pyo took himself off into the next room, sliding the door roughly closed behind him.
Kim Sun-shil narrowed her eyes in annoyance, frustrated by the conversation’s having been cut short before it had properly got going. That husband of hers, so conservative and uptight that even today, after their more than three decades as man and wife, he would only ever get changed behind closed doors!
“Well, what about it?” she called through, her curiosity tinged with alarm. “What’s it got to do with us?”
“Don’t you know a piece of evidence when you see it? Evidence of debauchery, lasciviousness, self-indulgence …” Yeong-pyo interrupted himself with a groan; he was clearly having difficulty removing his wet clothes. “He was supposed to be picking flowers, but it was a different young bud he was after.”
“Kyeong-hun, you mean? And who was the ‘young bud’?”
“Kim Suk-i.”
“What?!” Sun-shil swept the door open, causing her husband to hastily yank his trousers up. He needn’t have bothered; his wife’s vision was entirely filled by the faces of the two Suk-is, who were known at the factory as Big and Little. “Which Kim Suk-i? That Big Suk-i again?”
“Would I be here now if I was sure of that? I would have gone to hunt down that louse of a son and put a bullet in his head!” Yeong-pyo gripped the belt of his trousers near the holster and shook it so violently he threatened to do himself an injury. His matchstick waist sticking out above the belt looked narrow enough to have fitted down a single trouser leg. “In fact, we’ve had a stroke of luck. Whoever the agents were, they were too dim-witted to do a thorough job of it. Their report didn’t clarify which Suk-i it was.”
“It must have been that Big Suk-i. He must have started up with her again.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’m guessing, of course. I know you did everything to separate them.”
Biting her fingernails in a nervous reflex, Sun-shil let her gaze stray to the sunflower outside the window.
Somehow those resplendent petals had managed to keep their shape even while being battered by the rains, and perhaps it had something to do with this impressive appearance, as well as the plant’s towering height, that led them to be overlaid in Sun-shil’s mind’s eye with a dazzling face. It belonged, of course, to her son Kyeong-hun, a strapping lad whose wavy hair undulated like grass in the wind. His broad, open forehead gave him an air of intelligence, while his slightly upturned eyes denoted keen perception. In other words, he had a face that seemed well
suited to being buried in a book, as Kyeong-hun’s so frequently was.
At some point early on in their marriage, her husband had made what she’d assumed at the time was a joke, though this was out of keeping with his serious, somewhat po-faced character: I’ve always been regarded as a stickler, my heart as gnarled and knotty as an old tree, and I’m determined not to pass such qualities on to my offspring. That’s why I made such heroic efforts to win your hand—I wanted your height, your fine features, your artistic talent. And so, if I’m to see my wish come true, you must bear me a son who takes after you….
And Yeong-pyo’s wish had indeed come true, though in this case he would have been wise to heed the old adage “Be careful what you wish for.” After all the effort he’d made to rid himself of those ugly traits, he now had his own son to thank for a whole new set of pains. When it came to personal conduct and an understanding of the ways of the world, Kyeong-hun would be found sorely lacking if measured against his father.
It hadn’t been that long ago that Yeong-pyo had forced Kyeong-hun to promise to break off with Big Suk-i. Sun-shil had been giving the house its evening tidying when she noticed something out of place—an official document lying casually unfolded between the neat stacks of filed papers on her husband’s desk. No sooner had she scanned the heading, “Order for the Deportation of the Family of Kim Sung-bin,” than her puzzled frown transformed into a look of horror. Wide-eyed, she skimmed down to read that, for various reasons, the wife and children of Kim Sung-bin were to join him in a labor camp for political prisoners. There was only one Kim Sung-bin she knew of to whom such an order might apply—Big Suk-i’s father. Sun-shil swiftly tucked the paper into her jacket pocket, glancing around nervously as though she might have been being watched. She hurried off in search of her husband, and thrust the document in front of him with a trembling hand.
