Star of the North

by D. B. John

  Cho had no idea where he was. The truck had been driving for many hours. He was the sole prisoner. It was very dark; dawn was hours away. He was ordered out and told to kneel on the ground. In the dim yellow lights he saw a squat gray prison complex spread out before him. He heard dogs barking. Bright searchlights swept across the forecourt area from high guard towers. The walls were topped by coiled razor wire. He was in the arrivals area of a large penal labor camp.

  This he had not expected at all. The only reason he could be here, the only reason he wasn’t buried with a bullet in his heart, was because he had given no confession.

  There was no telling how vast this place was beyond the blinding lights, but he had the sensation that he was entering another universe, where the laws of nature were different.

  “Eyes on the ground!” one of the guards screamed.

  Terrified, Cho bowed his head. He heard someone approach, accompanied by a barking dog. From the honorific register the guards used to address him, Cho guessed this man was a senior prison official, maybe the Deputy Director himself. The man was handed a form to sign and he chuckled as if given a surprise gift.

  “An American spy?” The shadow of his head inclined to Cho in mock respect. “Welcome to Camp 22.”

  Cho almost laughed out loud at the irony. The camp whose existence he’d denied to Jenna over dinner in New York—how distant and unreal that world seemed—was now swallowing his life into its black heart.

  His hands and ankles were unchained. Just as he was being led through the gates a distant rumble sounded, a low bass, like heavy artillery fire, from somewhere far away to his right. He assumed it was thunder, until he saw a fiery orange flare rising toward the clouds and trailing a column of smoke, turning night into day, and realized it was a rocket test. The guards stopped to watch.

  He was locked in a holding cell for arrivals, where he could hear the guards dining in the next room, speaking in the coarse accents of North Hamgyong Province.

  Soon afterward he was given a plate of leftover food and told to change into a uniform of coarse blue nylon that stank of corpses and congealed pus. Then the same senior official entered the room, cast him a crafty look, as if memorizing his face before it was marred forever, and glanced at an open file. He said to the guards, “Family sector, village 40, hut 21.”

  Cho’s heart contracted and he felt his legs buckling.

  My family is here? My wife and son?

  In this awful hell? What words of hatred would they have for him, for bringing this upon them? For ruining their lives? He felt such agony and despair he almost fainted. All this time he could have confessed! It would have made not the slightest difference. He could at least have given them the satisfaction of his own death!

  Nothing escaped the state. Its brutal mechanism would reunite him in prison with his own relatives, regardless of the consequences.

  He heard the noise before he knew what it was. A demented wail had arisen from within him. He began punching his own face.

  “What’s the fuck’s up with this one?” the guard said, and kicked him hard in the knee so that he fell to the floor.

  In the back of another truck he wept bitter tears. He was resolved now to end his life at the first opportunity. He did not care how. That decision calmed him a little as he contemplated the confrontation ahead. The reproach and anger of his wife. The incomprehension, the trauma of his son. What physical state would they be in? His wife was a beautiful woman. She’d be at the mercy of guards who’d use her in any way they wanted.

  Oh, how he could not bear to live another hour.

  The ride lasted at least thirty minutes over rugged, bumping tracks, enough for him to gauge the sheer scale of the camp. Eventually he was ordered out. In the light of the guards’ lanterns he saw a row of rough shacks made of crumbling mud bricks and straw roofs. An odor of excrement pervaded the place. There were no shackles or manacles now; none needed in this new universe. He was shown to a semicollapsed hovel partly built of corn stalks, with the number 21 painted on the wall. The single window had gray vinyl instead of glass. It flapped in the icy wind. One of the guards pushed him to the door of his new family home, and Cho opened it with a heavy heart.

  A lone candle in a jar cast its flicker across a floor of packed earth, which was unexpectedly warm. A bundle of rags occupied one corner, which, to Cho’s surprise, looked up. The woman was about sixty, with silver hair, and regarded him with flinty, suspicious eyes. In the dim light he saw a prison face of ruts and shadows.

  Cho was too confused to speak.

  The guard shoved him into the room.

  “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you pleased to see your own mother?”

  44

  Camp 22

  North Hamgyong Province

  North Korea

  August 2011

  “Move it, you whores. On the double or there’ll be trouble!”

  The kitchen was deafeningly noisy, even though no one talked. Guards barked, the radio was playing the same speech on a loop, and from amid the clouds of sour, acidic steam came the constant clamor of metal ladles, pans, and mess tins.

  The girls worked the infernal pace of the camp. No one shirked, or they’d lose this cushy number faster than they could fall to the floor and beg before a guard. In the universe of the gulag, a kitchen job was the most coveted. You could pilfer grains from the floor and slops from the pigsty, you weren’t breaking your back in a field or a mine, you even had corn leaves to wipe your ass. But the girls had paid a price. Some had been awarded the position for snitching. Or worse, they’d won the protection of a guard, who could do with them what he wanted, in the storeroom, behind the pigsties, in the forest. Girls who became pregnant were taken away and not seen again.

  Mrs. Moon avoided eye contact with them. She’d got the job because her police record gave her occupation as “cook.” She prepared meals for guards, not prisoners, so she was given soap and hot water to wash with, and wasn’t covered in filth and fouled rags like the girls. She ate leftovers from the guards’ mess, and could smuggle food out for her son, to keep up his strength.

  My son.

  For thirty years she had called to her boys in dreams. Sometimes, in the moment between sleep and waking—at dawn, when the channel to the spirit world was clear—she’d feel their presence so strongly she could reach out and hold their hands if she kept her eyes closed. She had never dared to hope that she would ever see either of them again in this world.

  But, oh, what a cruel and capricious turn fortune had done her, bringing one of them to her here, to this place.

  The night he’d arrived, when she saw him standing in the door of the hut, her incomprehension had taken only seconds to crystallize into recognition. In the candlelight she’d seen her own face in his. Then she knew who he was, and received one of the greatest shocks of her life. They’d stared at each other as if across an expanse of decades. Finally she said, “I am Moon Song-ae. I am your mother.”

  He was mute with surprise, but as this new reality crept over him, his face filled with conflicting emotions. She got up and tried to embrace him, but he turned away from her. The pain that clenched her heart might have killed her there and then.

  For days he did not speak, even though they had to share the hut’s single blanket. He was repulsed by her, and made little effort to hide it. Her fear of him was surpassed only by her guilt. And she was eaten up by guilt. It was because of her that he was here. It was the only explanation. She had failed to cover up the family past. She had failed him. What a crow of ill omen she was to him, a stranger from a past that had doomed his life. But they were family and had therefore to share a hut. The fact that they were total strangers to each other was of no interest to the state.

  So she spared him, her estranged son. She did not cause him shame by speaking to him. She did not even know what name he went by. She turned over and pretended to sleep when he returned to the hut caked in coal dust, shaking from hunger and fatigue,
and left food warming for him in the steel pan. They studied each other when the other wasn’t looking. She could feel his gaze. She’d known the moment she’d seen him that he wasn’t accustomed to hard labor, and straight away she’d begun to fret. How would he survive mining tiny tunnels, pushing those leaden carts, the ferocity of the guards? How soon could he bring himself to eat the rats and snakes and maggots to stay alive? She worried about this even more than she worried about Tae-hyon trying to feed himself at home without her. Men were useless without their wives.

  So she began taking risks for her son. Cabbage leaves and potato peel were easy to smuggle from the kitchen in layers of her clothing. Meat was dangerous, if the guard dogs smelt it, but she succeeded in bringing out small, gristly cuts of pork, which she cooked in a stew and left out for him after she’d gone to sleep.

  About a week after he’d arrived she was awakened in the small hours by the sound of his moaning. It was early summer and the sky was already light. He was lying on his side with his back toward her. She bent over him and saw that his eyes were puffy and purple, and his body badly bruised and cut. The guards broke in all newcomers this way. Without a word she lit the stove to heat water and put her arm around him. He did not push her away. She began wiping his wounds, and cleaning him with the hem of her apron. When he fell asleep with his head resting on her lap her tears fell onto his hair.

  In the morning he looked her in the face for the first time, and she saw in his eyes the glimmer of acceptance, if not yet a bond.

  Another beating a few days later and she nursed him again and dressed his wounds as best she could. She gave him her own food, saying she wasn’t hungry. That night, as she lay down to sleep he tried to say something to her but choked on the word Omma. She heard him begin to weep quietly. She would give him time. She couldn’t rush this.

  The following night, he addressed her for the first time. Very stiffly, he said, “Be so kind as to tell me about my origin.”

  And so, over the following nights she told him. He learned that he was born in the western port of Nampo. His father was a shipbuilder, his mother a cook. His birth name was Ahn Sang-ho.

  “Your father was a kind man,” she said. “And handsome. You strongly resemble him. He had a talent with boats and repaired the fishing fleet at Nampo. Just after we were married he was proclaimed a model worker. The shipyard held a ceremony for him. Soon afterward, your brother was born and our future looked secure and happy. Model workers were urged to join the Party, so your father applied.” Mrs. Moon’s eyes drifted to the stove. “Then they ran the class background check, which took months. Your father was born during the war, when many birth records were lost or scattered. When they eventually found his, the shock was tremendous. He had been separated from his family during the war. He had only the faintest memory of his own father. An American spy? Who knows if it was true or not? It was in the record, so that was that. It couldn’t have been worse. Your father was dismissed from the shipyard. Overnight we sank to the lowest caste. We had no future. He knew he’d be an outcast doing menial work for the rest of his life. He’d be watched day and night. So he made a plan to steal a motorboat to take us to the South. It was October. We waited for a morning of thick fog, one of those fogs that lasts all day, so that we could slip past the sea patrols. We would make that fifty-mile journey south without even a compass, but your father was a skilled sailor. When the morning came the fog was like broth. It was perfect. The port was dead quiet. He went first; I followed separately with your brother in my arms, to make it look less suspicious …” She sighed and her face became bleak with memory. “As I arrived at the port I saw five agents run out of the fog and arrest him next to the boat. They’d had him under close surveillance. He didn’t stand a chance. If I’d been a few seconds earlier they’d have got me, too. He was hanged a month later at a people’s trial in front of the same crowd that had honored him as a model worker. I was eight months pregnant with you but they forced me to watch from the front row. To protect us I had told the Bowibu that my husband had deceived me about his class background and told me nothing of his escape plan …” She gave a snort of disgust. “They’re always ready to believe explanations like that. But from that day on I was living under a cloud, and I faced a terrible choice. If I kept you and your brother you’d face a life in the lowest caste, with no chance of happiness, a good marriage, or rewarding work. And I was struggling to cope. So I had your birth record changed. I bribed a state registry official in Nampo to make it seem that your real father was from a local heroic family, the family of a veteran we knew well before your father’s trial. Then I placed you and your brother in the Nampo Orphanage.” Tears rolled silently down her cheeks. “It was the hardest thing I ever did …” Cho put his arm around her, his mother, absorbing her soft tremors. “… but your future depended on it. I had to hide your background. To make doubly sure, I waited four years, then I tried to have the cause of your father’s death changed to ‘accident,’ and the deadly details removed. I figured that by the time you and your brother were young men, if anyone checked, the truth would have been long forgotten. This time, the registry official denounced me and I was exiled to the northern mountains, a penal farm in Baekam County, where I lived for twenty-eight years.” They cried together, their faces glistening with tears, holding each other’s hands.

  For a while, the miracle of her son made life at Camp 22 bearable for Mrs. Moon. When most families returned to their huts after work drained and wrung of all hope, she and Cho lay awake for hours. She learned of her daughter-in-law and her grandson. She marveled that he had traveled to America. Cho learned that he had a stepfather, Tae-hyon, a collier she’d met and married in Baekam County.

  She told him that her own parents had died not long after she was exiled. She thought they had been Christians who met other believers in secret—a memory she’d buried for decades. “There are Christians in this place,” she murmured. “They are forbidden to look at heaven, and must keep their eyes lowered.”

  “And you, Omma?” Cho said. “Do you look at heaven?”

  Mrs. Moon stared at the walls. She had no answer.

  Very quickly, Cho was making her feel human again, and in Camp 22 feeling human could be fatal. It made a prisoner vulnerable. She’d learned early on that to survive this place you had to forget you were ever human. You had to become an animal. Now, in this hell, her feelings were no longer numbed, her conscience was reawakening, and as July turned to August she felt herself sliding into a black depression. She hid it from him at first, putting on a cheerful face, but soon it was impossible to hide, and she became a serious worry to him. She talked of wanting to die in her sleep, of ending her life. She didn’t understand why her body went on living when she didn’t want to. He said to her, “Keep hoping, and we’ll survive. We have each other. What would I do if you died?” That alone nearly broke her heart.

  But it wasn’t the privations or the filth or the brutality that was depressing Mrs. Moon.

  She stirred the cabbage leaves in the pan, imagining she saw something diabolical in the bubbles of boiling water, and calmly drained them as the kitchen girls scurried about her in a frenzy.

  Like the girls, Mrs. Moon had also paid a price for her kitchen job. And what she did was worse than any snitching.

  Before Cho, her will to live had banished all feeling. Now the horror reached out to touch her from the shadows, it followed her, whispered her name, brushed the back of her neck, and vanished the moment she looked over her shoulder.

  She carried the pan of boiled cabbage out of the kitchen, accompanied by an armed guard. It was a different guard every time. She’d heard them draw straws for this task in the mess room.

  She walked the short path through the orchard toward the new laboratory complex, nestled in the head of the valley. Apple trees grew in rows to the right, plum trees to the left, but she avoided looking at them, even when they were in blossom and made the air fragrant. The shallow graves of executed pr
isoners lay beneath these trees, and the soil they fertilized yielded fruit that was famous. Apples enormous and sweet that fetched high prices in Beijing. Plums so tender and aromatic they were exported to Japan.

  Behind the main gates a short concrete drive led up to the complex main entrance. The guard tapped a code into the keypad next to the door, which opened automatically, and they stepped into another world. Clean, brushed-steel surfaces, gleaming white floors, bright overhead lights, filtered air. Scientists in breathing masks and blue overalls passed them in the corridor.

  They reached the reception area of the vast laboratory that could be seen behind thick glass and a vacuum-sealed door, in front of which stood a special machine visitors walked through to have contaminants blown from their clothing. The guard asked the receptionist for Chief Science Officer Chung. After a few minutes Dr. Chung appeared, a brusque, balding man with a soft face and lips, also with a respirator mask hanging around his neck. “I need your prisoner today,” he said. He spoke in a high, clear voice that was almost feminine. “Will you wait?”

  The guard hesitated. “Sir.”

  Mrs. Moon was holding out the pan of boiled cabbage leaves with both arms straight and her head lowered. He took it from her.

  “What’s your name, grandmother?” He asked her this every time.

  Mrs. Moon raised her eyes. “Moon, sir.”

  The look he gave her was not a look between fellow human beings. “Let’s go, prisoner Moon.”

  45

  Chilmark

  Martha’s Vineyard

  Massachusetts

  The Secret Service men stationed outside the windows wore dark polo T-shirts and Ray-Bans, like coaches at some upscale athletics club. A trim young man with a radio earphone put his head around the door. “Evergreen just left the clubhouse, ma’am. We expect the cars in a few minutes.”