A Dream of Lights (4 page)

Time passed. Winter passed. Spring drew away and summer arrived with long days and short nights.

We left school, both of us, and while Sook was allowed an hour’s walk to the nearest town every day to work in an office, I was given a job on the land. And as summer came, we met later, waiting longer for the dark to come and for the house to be sleeping.

That night, the one I remember so well, the air was warm and humid, close around us as we walked. We pointed out things to each other that sparkled in the moonlight, watched it dance on our faces, still with not a touch, or a kiss, or a hold of a hand. We lay next to each other on the grass, and the sky began to lighten as the sun came back round, and the first glimpses of orange and red reached up from behind the trees.

Eventually, in our sleepy way and with no regard to the consequences, we strolled back towards the village with dawn at our back and the song of birds as they woke, and we said a goodbye to each other that lingered perhaps a little too long.

He had become my best friend. With him, I felt wanted and needed. I felt awake and alive. I felt invincible.

I had become careless.

I stepped through the door and straight into the glare of my grandmother’s eyes staring at me from her bed mat. I paused, my palm still resting on the handle behind me, watching as she shook her head, waiting for her to shout at me, or call my mother from the other room, or throw something at me, or jump up and hit me. She lifted a finger and beckoned me towards her, and I tiptoed across with my insides on fire. I crouched down, sure she’d be able to hear my heart trying to thump out of my body.

“Sook?” she questioned.

I didn’t say a word, but I felt my face flush and my eyes widen before I could stop them.

“You stupid child,” she hissed.

My jaw clenched and I lowered my eyes.

“What do you think his mother would say? What do you think she’d do? You think she’d approve? Wish you luck and welcome you into the family?”

I didn’t reply.

“Or do you think she’d be disappointed and angry that her precious son would want to spend time with someone like you? And want to get back at you, at us?”

Reluctantly, I nodded.

“Of course she would, a woman like that. She’d destroy you. And it’s not just your life you’re putting in danger – you know that, don’t you? It’s all our lives. Mine, your grandfather’s, your mother and father’s. The more, the better for her. Even if we’ve done nothing wrong, she’ll think of something, make something up, and she’ll be rewarded for it. For rooting out reactionary elements or destroying the bad blood.”

I didn’t move.

“Do you understand how selfish you’re being?” she spat, and even in the half-light I could see the ferocity in her eyes and feel it eating into me. I wanted to cry. “She’ll find out, if you keep seeing him, if she hasn’t already.”

“But we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not reactionary
.
”

She sighed, shaking her head. “Don’t you listen?
It doesn’t matter
. But anyway, of course you are – you’re seeing her son. In secret. And she’s the
Inminbanjang
. She’s only got to look at us and we could be taken away. What class are we, Yoora? Have you thought of that? We’re at the bottom, we’re the hostile class – we’re
beulsun
– tainted blood. Everyone already thinks of us as suspect; we’re watched by neighbours; parents tell their children to watch you at school.

“Why do you think you’re working on the land, a clever girl like you? We’ll never be allowed better jobs, never be allowed to join the Workers’ Party, never be allowed any of their privileges. Never leave this village. We are
nothing
to them. Or to anyone. And
nothing
will ever change. Not for you or your children or your grandchildren. This is it. There is no way for us to move up in social class. It doesn’t happen. You’re born into it, you can’t marry out of it and you die in it.”

“But Sook is—”

“What? What do you think Sook is? As low as us?” She shook her head. “Not quite the core class, not the best, or they wouldn’t be in this village. But not far off. And there is
no way
that she, Min-Jee, will ever let you and Sook have a relationship.”

“We could run away,” I breathed.

She laughed at me then. “Wake up to yourself and don’t be so ridiculous. You need government permission to move, a permit to travel out of the village. Where would you live? How would you survive? No one’s going to give you a job. They wouldn’t be allowed to. If she finds out,” she lowered her voice again, “she’ll destroy us. You know how it works: the sin, the crime, travels in the blood for three generations. Anything you do, three generations will be punished for it. She
will
find out, Yoora, if you carry on seeing him. One day she will. That’s if he hasn’t told her already.”

“He wouldn’t—”

“Don’t be naive. You have to end it. For all our sakes.” And she turned away.

I climbed back into bed, but sleep eluded me and I watched the sunlight grow brighter through the window and change my sleeping parents from vague silhouettes into real people, with worries marked on their skin in heavy lines and deep wrinkles.

All the while my grandmother’s words played over and over in my head and I thought about our family, how small it was, how we were
beulsun,
though no one had told me of it before. I wondered why. I wondered why no relatives were ever talked about, and no aunts or uncles, or other grandparents or cousins, ever visited. I wanted to know, I wanted to understand.

For the next few days I skulked around, avoiding Grandmother’s eye, avoiding Sook, putting off telling him the decision she was forcing me to take. The truth, the honest, painful, selfish truth, was that I didn’t want to stop seeing him. By that time, silently I loved him and, I believed, he loved me.

I missed those night-times that were a world away from my daytimes.

I saw him again a week later strolling towards me down the path with a spade in his hand and a smile edging his lips.

“Tonight? Same time?” he breathed.

I thought about telling him, thought about what I
should
do, but as I looked up and met his eye, as we watched each other for a second too long, I realised I couldn’t physically say the words. So I nodded.

I didn’t care about the threat. I didn’t care about the danger. Because by then I trusted him to keep me safe.

But, in a country where one person in five is a government informant, where, for a crime possibly not even committed, neighbour reports co-worker, pupil reports teacher and child reports friend, trust was a rare and reckless thing, a stupid and naive emotion. I knew that, but I didn’t think it applied to me.

My stupidity, my naivety and my guilt followed me over miles.

Winter arrived, and still I had not broken off my friendship with Sook. Then finally the night came when I had my dream, my impossible dream, filled with images of a city of lights, a place unimaginable, unseen and unknown to me.

And so too came the conversation with Father and all the worries I had for him.

Was he a traitor? Because if he was, then I should report him. But then all my family would suffer. Or was he ill? Delusional?

Nothing made sense any more. I felt tricked into having the dream. I felt soiled from the words Father had said. And I felt a traitor to my country for not reporting him. But more than anything I felt so very, very alone.

I wished I could share it with someone.

That night, a year after I first met Sook, when I could hear my father’s snores and my mother’s slow, steady breathing, when I knew Grandmother would be sleeping and I could creep past her, I pulled my clothes round me and slid from the house. The moon was the thinnest slip of a crescent, and the darkness of the countryside swallowed me as I moved through it.

There was barely a sound, an eerie stillness, the trees half dead, motionless with no wind, the earth dry under my feet, the dust slipping behind me with every step.

I saw his outline, saw him turn to me, smile, felt warmth in my chest, heard myself sigh. Then a sudden screech came from above us, and next to me Sook jumped, and I heard his intake of breath as he stifled a scream.

City boy
, I thought.

“It was only an owl,” I whispered. I stopped, and the smile on my face slipped as I felt pressure on my hand and squeezing at my fingers. I looked down – Sook was holding my hand. I stared at our fingers, blurry, indistinguishable in the half-light, and I looked up at his face so close and felt my cheeks flush.

Neither of us moved, or said a word, but so much passed between us as the moment stretched on: a conversation unspoken, an intensity in the air, an understanding somehow reached as it drew to an end.

“Let’s walk,” he breathed.

And we did, together, hand in hand, so close our shoulders brushed as we moved, so nervous that I didn’t dare move my fingers or acknowledge that we were touching. Something so simple and natural, but something I had never seen any couple do before. Not in public.

It was exciting. Rebellious.

“Are you hungry?” he whispered as we reached the village greenhouses. I nodded and reluctantly let go of his hand.

We sat with our backs against the glass and our legs tucked under us for warmth.

“Here,” he said, placing a bun in my hands.

“Your mother’s baking?”

He took another from his pocket for himself. “She won’t notice.”

I struggled to believe that was true, not with so much hunger, with people who could offer good money for this bun in my hands, money that she could use to buy more ingredients, to bake more, to sell more. We couldn’t afford the ingredients even if we had the contacts to get them, and even if we had, we wouldn’t be allowed a permit to sell them in the markets.

How would Min-Jee feel if she knew her son was giving them away? And worst of all, to someone
beulsun
like me? What would she say to him? What would she do to us?

She wouldn’t care that I was starving and so was my family. She couldn’t, just as I had to not care that my neighbours too were starving, that the baby girl next door died from malnutrition, not enough milk from her mother to see her into her second month. I only ever heard her cry the night she was born.

Too many people were starving for me to be able to care about any of them. Aid for them would have to form an infinite queue to stop them feeling hungry for just one night. One solitary act of kindness would make little difference.

So without thinking of them, I tore a piece off the bun and placed it on my tongue, watching Sook do the same.

“I can’t stay long tonight. My mother’s not well. I’m worried she’ll get up and notice I’m missing.”

“All right,” I replied. “I understand.”

We carried on eating, but said little. I was disappointed; I wanted to be with him, feel my hand in his again, see that smile on his face in the moonlight, have that excitement tipping my stomach.

“You want to walk back that way with me? Past my house?”

I hesitated. We had never gone that way before. He stood up and held out his hand to mine. For a second I stared at it, the long fingers, the short nails, the lines deep in his palm, and then I lifted my hand, placed it in his and felt myself pulled up from the ground.

I smiled.

We walked.

And too soon we were approaching his house. He pointed to the different windows, explaining what each room was, knowing, I suppose, that I would never be allowed inside. There was a kitchen for cooking in, with a sink to wash things, and taps that water came from. A room each to sleep in, with beds that stayed out all day. Another with comfortable chairs to sit on and a television to watch.

“No foreign channels though,” he joked.

I told him about our two rooms for five of us; our one table and five hard chairs; our one radio with, of course, its one government channel to listen to; one bucket to wash in, brush teeth in, wash pots and prepare food in. No taps. No running water.

We sat together around the back of his house, under a window pulled closed, the dead trees of the old orchard like crumbling gravestones before us, no use even for firewood.

“The apartment we had in Pyongyang was better,” he said. “There was more food too. Better conditions, people were happier, the streets and buildings were clean and tidy.”

He sighed. “There were big, tall buildings too. And underground trains, the deepest in the world, magnificent, with chandeliers in the stations and…”

He was describing my dream and I couldn’t believe it. Father
was
right, at least about that, there
was
a place like it. But he was wrong about our Dear Leader. I knew that. He must’ve been.

“And do the buildings stretch right up high?” I asked.

“Some.” He nodded.

“With lights in the windows that are orange or yellow or white. And there are loads of cars in the roads, one after another after another, all different shapes and sizes and colours.” My voice became louder and my words faster. “And bars where you can buy drinks, and loud music thumping out, and people dancing in clothes of all different colours and styles?”

He stared at me.

I closed my eyes and could see it again, just as if I was strolling down it in real life. “And there are restaurants with smells of food, and stalls that sell food already cooked that you can carry around and eat and… and… and my father says there’s enough food for everyone, and he says there’s medicine if you get ill, and he said that’s where I’ll live. That’s where my future is.”

My excitement flooded out of me. The relief that I could share this with someone, with Sook, my best friend, the person who meant so much to me. Who I wanted to be with, stay with, make a life with. And I could do it, couldn’t I? Maybe? In that place? That place that must’ve been Pyongyang. And Father was right – about that.

“No,” he said.

I opened my eyes.

“That’s not Pyongyang. Pyongyang is quiet; there’s government music through the loudspeakers, but nothing else. A couple of cars on the roads, but black ones mostly, police cars. And you know nobody wears clothes like that. What you’re talking about sounds like Chinese clothes, and they’re banned. Yes, there are restaurants, but not like that. And there are no flashing or coloured lights. That’s not Pyongyang.”