by J. M. Lee
“I will,” I whispered back. “I’ll look after her.”
“Remember, Gil-mo. The game continues even after I die. So keep playing it for me. Got it?”
“I don’t know what the game is,” I protested.
“You do. You just don’t realize it. The rules of the game are in the numbers. Remember what I told you about the most beautiful sequence in the world.”
I nodded.
His eyes fluttered shut. He whispered each number, pushing them out through his throat. “9, 6, 4, 3, 0, 5, 2, 1, 7, 8.”
I murmured the corresponding Korean alphabet.
“That’s right,” Mr. Kang said, smiling with effort. “The sequence lines numbers in order of the alphabet. Like a dictionary. And just like a dictionary, it will tell you about numbers you don’t know.”
Yong-ae walked in just then with a bowl of hot water. Mr. Kang struggled to open his puffy eyes. “Yong-ae, go bring the pliers from the toolbox.”
“What do you need pliers for?”
“They beat me for hours but I never opened my mouth. They never found my teeth. Now you’ll be able to leave this place, so take them.”
Yong-ae smiled, but tears rolled down her face. She pulled out the pliers. Mr. Kang’s eyes flickered and closed. We waited, but they didn’t open again. He had been extinguished. Yong-ae looked down at him, her mouth set. “Come here and open his mouth,” she ordered.
I pulled his jaws open. His stubble scratched my palms. Yong-ae shoved the rusty pliers in her father’s mouth and extracted his gold teeth. She smiled slightly each time a gold piece emerged from his mouth. With the last gold tooth out, the inside of his mouth turned dark.
I took a wet towel and wiped Mr. Kang’s face. I cleaned his swollen eyes, his bleeding forehead, his broken nose, his bloody lips, and his mangled ears. I pasted a stamp of prayer on him. His gold teeth sparkled in Yong-ae’s palm. She rested her forehead on my shoulder, and I didn’t mind. Her forehead became heavier and heavier, and then began to heave. My shoulder grew warm and wet.
Around noon the following day, three SPSD agents descended on us. They had come on bicycle. Workers from the undertaker unit shoved Mr. Kang into a wheelbarrow and carted him away. We were ordered to each get on the back of a bicycle. The agents began to pedal. Spokes spun, sunlight bouncing off them. We rattled down the stony path. Thirty minutes later, we arrived at the SPSD offices, and we were taken to the warden’s office.
“Comrade Kang Chi-u acknowledged his mistakes during our interrogations,” the warden told us. “Thanks to the mercy of the Dear Leader, the family is released when the offender dies. Comrade Kang Yong-ae, you’re free to go.”
A smile rippled across Yong-ae’s face.
“Comrade Ahn,” the warden addressed me. “You have quite a talent for numbers. You are now in charge of the books.”
Was this the game Mr. Kang mentioned?
“Was my father really guilty?” Yong-ae asked cautiously.
The warden nodded. “He was very calculating, your father. He was very good. Our earnings increased threefold based on his recommendations. But then, he went too far. He had separate books and funneled a portion of the sales for himself. Comrade Ahn helped him manage the accounts, but he had no idea what was going on. You just did as you were told, didn’t you?” The warden looked at me.
I didn’t answer.
“We found duplicate books detailing what he had siphoned over a year and a half. I was going to look the other way if he confessed, because he was so important to our foreign currency project. But he refused to talk. He only acknowledged his role after he was beaten, but he never said where the money went. What would he do with all that money, anyway? His efforts have been noticed by the Central Committee. I’m sure I’ll be given a different post soon. If he weren’t so stubborn, we would have seen better times together . . .” The warden trailed off.
That night, we sat in her house in the dark. Cold starlight filtered in through the gaps in the ceiling. Her eyes glistened. “I wish we could leave together.”
I did, too. “Where will you go?”
“Musan. Then I’m going to cross into China.”
“I will, too. I’ll be right behind you.”
Yong-ae took a small photograph of herself from her bag and handed it to me.
The next day, she left the camp. It was as if she had vanished. Everything was now dark and dreary. All day long, I talked to myself in Gilmoese. People murmured that I had gone mad.
The warden pushed books filled with numbers toward me. They beckoned. I added and subtracted, multiplied and divided, and found the square root and the log value. I calculated the output, unit price, and production rate of each work unit. The warden pulled the books toward him and grinned. He placed them in his office and handed me warm corn cakes. I stuffed them in my mouth. I was so hungry. He poured me some water. He promised me more corn cakes if I kept calculating like this. He tossed three small books in front of me. “Take a close look at these numbers,” he said. “I think you’ll find interesting things.”
The books were filled with Mr. Kang’s familiar, distinctive hand. He wrote the European way, crossing his sevens and zeros. Nobody in the republic wrote this way. “Are these Mr. Kang’s secret books?” I asked.
The warden shook his head. “No, he created these books for each item. You’ll be able to figure it out quickly. These have to be maintained every day. Remember, you’ll get corn cakes every day if you perform well.”
I worked hard, the numbers bumping and mixing together as they entered my head, revealing the output and unit price of specific items. Not too long after, I put my pencil down. “The sum of all 523 numbers is 1,274,690.”
The warden picked up the books.
“Why was I not freed after my father died?” I blurted out.
The warden looked at me appraisingly. “Comrade Kang suggested that he would watch over you and have you help him with the accounting. He said there was nowhere for you to go, and that you wouldn’t be able to survive out there alone. That’s why I decided to keep you on.”
“Why am I not freed now? Mr. Kang’s dead, too.”
“It would be too cruel to send you out into the world,” the warden explained gently. “You’re all alone. You don’t have anyone who could help you.”
Every day, I went into the office to poke around in the world of zeros and sevens and other numbers Mr. Kang left behind. My stomach was full for the first time in a long while thanks to the corn cakes, but my heart gaped from Yong-ae’s absence. My feet stopped still whenever I thought of her. Everything turned to zero when I multiplied it by her. I kept thinking of Mr. Kang asking me to look after her. I was breaking my promise to him for corn cakes.
I didn’t escape the prison camp, not exactly. I didn’t hatch a plot; I didn’t even have a plan. I just left.
Two months after Yong-ae’s departure, the warden handed me another book. “There’s definitely something strange about this book,” he told me. “Figure it out.”
I didn’t find anything odd about the calculations. Even if there were something that didn’t quite line up, Mr. Kang wouldn’t have made it easy to find. The warden was frustrated and threw the book aside. That was when I noticed something purple stuck to the back. It was a Swiss stamp from Yong-ae’s collection. I had to get it back to her; it was rightfully hers.
That night I put my belongings in my worn knapsack. I added the corn cake I had saved from earlier and the book of Mr. Kang’s calculations I had slid into my pocket when the warden wasn’t looking. I walked toward the entrance to the camp. Darkness shattered underfoot. Guards made continuous rounds and electricity crackled through the barbed wire fence around the perimeter. I walked up to the guard post at the entrance. A beam of light made me freeze. I shaded my eyes. I heard the click of rifle. “Hey, it’s the idiot,” the guard called. “Where are you going in the middle of the night?”
“I have to deliver this ledger,” I said.
The
guard pursed his lips and conferred for a long time with the shift lead. “You’re delivering a ledger this late at night? The warden’s asked you to do this?”
I just stared up at the watchtower. Finally, the head guard called down to another guard; nobody felt that he could call the warden in the middle of the night to confirm. “Take him into town!”
I got on the back of a bicycle. The guard pedaled hard, panting. Each push of the pedal brought one exhale and three-quarters of a rotation of the wheel, which had a diameter of 66.04 centimeters. One breath and one pedal pushed the bicycle 1.55 meters forward. The guard’s back grew damp. I thought about Poincaré’s conjecture. In 1904, Poincaré asked, “Consider a compact three-dimensional manifold V without boundaries. Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial, even though V is not homeomorphic to the three-dimensional sphere?” If we had a long cord, we could determine the shape of Earth without having to go into outer space to look down at it. You could secure one end of the cord to a single place and hold the other as you circled the earth; by the time you were back to the starting point, you could hold each end of the cord in either hand, creating a loop around the equator. You could pull on it, making the loop shrink until the whole cord is back in your hands, demonstrating that we do, in fact, live on a sphere.
But if the earth were shaped like a donut, you wouldn’t be able to retrieve the long cord; it would either stay on the inner circumference or be wrapped around one part.
Thinking about Poincaré’s conjecture reassured me. I knew I would be able to see Yong-ae again. Earth is a sphere; she had left our point on Earth, but we were connected by an invisible cord. If I could follow that cord, I would meet up with her.
Soldiers marched stiffly along the still, gray streets, past the crumbled walls, slumped people, and emaciated rats scurrying through holes in the walls. The dead and the dying lay in rotting gutters amid broken telephone poles. I stamped them with a short prayer. Electrical wires were draped so low that they nearly grazed the top of my head. I heard murmurings, sounds of a tussle, then shouts. I turned the corner and found myself in a market where vendors were selling fistfuls of rice; a few eggs; lettuce, cucumbers, and eggplants grown in their gardens; a mound of wild greens; hand-knit scarves and gloves; and Chinese-made buckets and pots, all on low display stands lining the narrow street. It seemed that people were selling anything they could get their hands on. The stands went for one, two, or five won, depending on the size, and grasshoppers—those who didn’t have enough to even rent a stand—sold their wares on the ground. The air was dense with arguments.
“Camp guards!” someone shouted, and the market erupted. Merchants packed up their goods and fled down the alley, upending display stands. Something heavy hit the back of my neck and I fell to the ground. Muddy, holey shoes began kicking me. I spotted some bare callused feet, some missing pinky toes. I plugged my ears and screamed. A rough hand twisted my arm. They had found me already. I had left the camp only yesterday. Suddenly, my back was lighter, and the beating stopped.
“My bag!” I yelped, realizing they weren’t guards, they were thieves. I looked around. In the chaos of shouting people and crying children, patrols were blowing their whistles, and I spotted a thin man dashing away with my knapsack. I ran after him. He scurried through the narrow alleys and a maze of empty huts, crumbled walls, and smelly sewers. My legs were wobbly. The thief led me around the neighborhood, as I began understanding the structure of the maze—two dead ends and three exits. I darted down a shortcut. The man was at a dead end, and I was now blocking his only exit. He turned around, panting. He wasn’t a man at all. He must have only been sixteen or seventeen, his hair shaggy and overgrown.
“It’s mine,” I mumbled.
He threw my knapsack at me, and I backed up, my hands outstretched, trying to follow the arc of my bag. It landed on the ground. A gang of small, thin, dirty kids, ranging from eight to nineteen years old, approached from the other side. One stood at the entrance to the alley and let out two long whistles and one short one, which caused everyone to run to a government building at the end of the alley and open the broken glass doors. Inside was a man with long sideburns sitting in a chair.
“We have a very important guest, I see,” he called out. He straightened his shabby suit jacket and sliced the air with his hands. The kids instantly split to either side of him, their backs against the wall.
He threw me a cold glance as he rummaged through my knapsack. He took a bite of the corn cake I’d saved and threw my bag to the side. “Where did you come from, the prison camp? If Dash hadn’t taken this useless bag of yours, you would have been taken back and hanged. Get over here, Dash!”
The thin boy approached and was greeted by a vicious kick to the chest. He flew a short distance and fell to the ground. I estimated the distance, the speed, and the arc of his flight and calculated the amount of pain he must have experienced.
“What’s wrong with you?” snapped the man. “You take this stupid bag, of all things, and get caught by this kid?”
Dash’s white, blistered lips were now crimson. “I didn’t get caught,” he mumbled. “He knows this alley. He was standing at the exit.”
The man snorted. “I’ve never seen this kid before. How would he know this place better than you?”
I went to my knapsack, took out a nub of pencil, and drew the diagram of the alleys in my notebook.
The man’s eyes bulged. “How do you know this area so well?”
I didn’t answer.
A grin crept over the man’s face. “Hey, Dash, you did good. You brought back something very interesting.” He tossed the boy the remaining bits of corn cake.
Dash leaped up to grab the crumbs, then savored them slowly. When he swallowed, all the kids, who had been watching his mouth intently, swallowed in unison.
“Dash, teach this kid properly, all right?”
Looking pleased, Dash wiped the blood off his lips with his grimy sleeve. Everyone looked at him with envy.
We were known as kkotjebi, which literally meant “flower swallow.” In Russian, though kochev’ye, meant nomad or wanderer. A beautiful thing in one language became something tragic in another. We orphans roamed the streets, rummaging through trash, scrounging for spoiled food, eating grass, begging, and stealing. Kkotjebi like us lived all across North Korea, with a strong concentration near the Chinese border, moving often in groups for ease of survival.
People had abandoned the maze of alleys we hung out in after an outbreak of typhoid fever two years ago. Our leader, whom we called Straw Cutter because of his violent tendencies, oversaw our activities and deployed us to various parts of town. Under Straw Cutter’s orders, Dash shadowed me. Or was it that I followed him around? Either way, he watched me but I also received his protection. “Just do as I say,” he counseled early on in our partnership. “When I say run, you run. When I say hide, you hide. Understand?”
When the merchants saw us approaching, they shooed us away, but we retreated before going back, persistently. We would do anything if it meant we could eat. Even though he himself had tried to steal my knapsack, Dash solemnly introduced me to the code of conduct. “We’re not thieves, remember. Don’t take something from someone. This is how you do it, okay?” He got up, his eyes focused. He sneaked up to a display stand across the way, bumping deliberately into a woman haggling with the shopkeeper over the price of sorghum cake; she dropped the cake in surprise when she was jostled, and Dash ducked, grabbed the cake, and shoved part of it in his mouth as he darted away. “Go!” he hissed.
I scampered after him blindly. Eventually, we came to a stop, panting, and leaned on a secluded wall.
“See?” Dash said. “We don’t steal. I didn’t steal this from that woman. All we do is pick things up when people drop or throw them away. That’s not a crime.” He grinned, showing me his broken front teeth, and tore off a small piece of sorghum cake. He handed it to me. Dirt and grit covering the cake crunched between my
teeth, and it tasted nutty. The cake disappeared into our gullets, and that one piece shook awake the hunger within. We went back to the other side of the market. Straw Cutter would be waiting for us at sundown, expecting us to bring him food we procured. We rummaged through the trash to pick out things that might be edible, but all we could find were a desiccated outer leaf of a cabbage and a corncob.
“If he finds out we ate the sorghum cake, he’ll kill us,” Dash warned.
We shoved each other as we leaped over puddles. When we got back, Straw Cutter and the other kids beat us just shy of death for not bringing anything back. Beatings and hunger were inversely proportional, I thought.
One day, we clambered into the forest, thick with exotic smells, colors, and silence. Hunger swelled in us, making us want to eat decomposing leaves, tough pieces of bark, and unfamiliar mushrooms.
“You can die if you eat the wrong thing,” Dash said. “But if you’re lucky, you won’t die, you’ll just get to have a full belly. There are tons of things to eat here.” He looked around excitedly.
The buzz of bees ferrying pollen surrounded us as water trickled between mossy rocks toward the waterfall on the other side of the valley. I thought I could hear the footsteps of ants as they scurried in and out of a rotting log. Dash crept forward, his bare, cracked heels stained green from the vegetation underfoot. He stopped and pointed at a bramble bush. Wild strawberries glimmered through the green leaves. Dash picked a fruit and handed it to me. It burst in my mouth. We dove at the bush, stuffing our faces. The sun warmed our skin. Thorns became embedded in our palms and scratched the backs of our hands, but we didn’t care. Finally, we flopped on our backs in the knee-high grass. Red juice stained our fingers, lips, tongue. Red, tart stars twinkled in our mouths. Why did hunger return so quickly? Why did we get hungry in the first place? Yellow pollen clung to legs of bees that buzzed past our heads. The breeze weaved through the grass. Our stomach muscles stretched out, loosening; the tart juice rumbled through and formed gas, and the sound exploded out of us.
