A Dream of Lights (5 page)

“But it must be,” I said. “It must be Pyongyang. There are signs for cinemas and shops and rooms to let in hotels. People, loads of people, all sorts of people, wandering around, smiling and chatting, some on phones that they carry, some with wires in their ears for music.”

“Where did you see that? How do you know about it? It’s
not
Pyongyang. It’s not this
country.
It can’t be.”

“But…” My face fell.

“Your
father
told you about it? Said you were going there? Going to live there? But that would mean… that would mean… he’s thinking of leaving the country. He’s planning an escape. That would mean he’s a traitor, that he disrespects our Dear Leader. Yoora…”

I shook my head. What had I done? What had I said? “No, no, no, he’s not. It was Pyongyang, it must’ve been. Maybe it was a part you weren’t near.”

“Yoora, what you described is not Pyongyang. I lived there all my life until I came here. That place that you’re describing, however you know about it, is not in this country, it can’t possibly be. And if your father—”

“He loves our Dear Leader. He bows to Him every day. He… he never says anything against Him… ever… he… he’s a good citizen, my father. He’s loyal… and devoted and… and…”

We both fell silent, and I realised how loudly we’d been talking. I felt my eyes prickle and I was scared, wished I could take back what I’d said, wished my stupid mouth hadn’t emptied out all of that rubbish. But he was my friend, Sook, my best friend, and I could trust him not to say anything. Couldn’t I?

I felt sick.

“Yoora.” He lowered his voice, leaning close to me. “Tell me the truth. Tell me what’s going on. What’s your father planning? What’s he told you? Maybe it’s something you should report. You’d be rewarded.”

I stared at him. I thought of what that reward might be. Food? A better job? Living in that city? I thought of my father, my mother, my grandparents. “Don’t do this to me,” I whispered. “Don’t make me choose.”

He shuffled closer and rested his hand on top of mine, and his eyes, so deep, stared at me as if they were looking right into my soul. “You know, I wish we didn’t have to hide away, only meeting at night, an hour here and there. I wish we could have a future together…”

I smiled at him and all thoughts of Father were gone. “I try not to wonder what will happen to us any more,” I replied. “You know, if this will all have to end, us meeting like this, because I don’t want to think that it has to. I want to believe in it and ignore that your family are a better class than mine, but… but really it can’t happen… not even friendship. It wouldn’t be allowed, Sook. I know that. So do you.”

“But maybe,” he said, squeezing my hand, “maybe if you tell me what your father said, then it could change things for us. We could tell my mother, she could help you…”

“What?” I stared at him, shaking my head. “No. That’s ridiculous,” I spat. “There’s nothing to tell anyway. And even if there was, your mother would never do anything to help me or my family. She’d just have an excuse to get rid of me.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”

I lifted a hand to dare to touch his cheek. “She would,” I whispered.

And I knew she would. Honestly. Truthfully.

And I knew that one day this would have to end. I just never wanted that day to arrive.

“You should go in. Check on your mother. But please, Sook… please don’t say anything… not about my father… he’s not what you’re thinking… he’s just…” But I couldn’t find the words.

I looked up to a lightening sky, morning approaching, and we motioned our silent goodbyes with no hint of a smile, but with the briefest touch of hands, and I turned away.

I headed home feeling sad and scared and worried. The conversation playing over in my head, what I’d said, what I hadn’t meant to say, what he thought, what he might do. And then, through the silence of the village, I thought I heard something behind me and I stopped, listening, turning towards the noise. It came from Sook’s house. Voices strained and mingling together, or early morning birdsong? Was that Sook standing at the window, watching me? Should I wave? Or shadows playing tricks on me in the half-light?

I turned and walked away. I didn’t know I would never be back.

I woke to the same noises as always, and I peered out of the window at the same scene that greeted me every morning. As I ate my porridge, I glanced around at the faces of my family: my grandfather with his wonderful smile and his marvellous stories; my grandmother, quiet and drawn nowadays; my mother who worked so hard to feed us all; and my father, my dear father, who could take away my nightmares and make sense of my dreams.

All their kindness for me.

I remembered the warning words from Grandmother just a few months ago, and I replayed my conversation with Sook from the night before. Over and over I heard my voice echoing and shouting through my head, telling him secrets, betraying my father, my family. Words we could be arrested for. Words we could die for.

I wanted to cry, wanted to tell them what I’d done and for them to make it all better again. They could do that, couldn’t they? Take me in their arms, sway me back and forth, whisper in my ear while they stroked my hair, tell me everything would be all right, really it would.

And I would explain that I hadn’t meant to tell Sook, it just came out, and came out wrong. Because Father wasn’t planning an escape because that city
was
Pyongyang, and Sook must’ve been mistaken. But Sook had lived there for fifteen years, and he had sounded so certain. And why would he lie?

I swallowed a spoonful of porridge, lifted my eyes back to my family and opened my mouth to speak. I felt sick again.

“Are you all right, Yoora?” my father asked.

“I feel a bit dizzy,” I whispered, bringing my shaking hands to my head, watching his eyes, full of concern, looking at me; his thoughts, his most secret thoughts that he’d shared with me that night in confidence, hanging between us, the secret I should’ve kept.

Escape?
I thought.
Really, Father? Is that really what you’re planning? Is that really what you think of our Dear Leader?

Escaping, or even plotting to escape, even thinking about it, was a crime against the state, against our Dear Leader. A crime punishable by prison or death. And not just for Father – badness runs in the blood for three generations, and so does the punishment.

I had seen it before, maybe five years ago: a radio, broken away from its preset government station, tuned in to a Chinese one instead. No malice intended, no reactionary thoughts or plans, just curiosity about what else existed, and an appetite for music with guitars. But his intentions were irrelevant – his actions went against our country’s teachings.

He was older than me, the boy who did it, but I remember standing close to him at school, hearing his feet pattering out a rhythm I didn’t recognise, the involuntary hum of a song in his throat. I wasn’t the only one who heard it, and I probably wasn’t the only one to report him.

They arrived early one morning and the radio was found; that was all that was needed.

I remembered his family – his mother and father, his uncle, his grandfather, his sister; seeing them thrown on to the back of a truck. I remembered the boy’s eyes staring down at the watching villagers, eyes full of fear and desperation and guilt and disappointment.

I wondered if he still remembered the song. I wondered if he hated it now.

“Get some fresh air,” Father said, his eyes looking up at the smoke from the fire that had settled in a layer under the ceiling.

On trembling legs I stood and wandered to the door, stepping out into the biting cold, my body shivering as claws of ice reached round me. I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep, rasping breath. I exhaled long and slow, my shoulders sagging and my face relaxing, and I opened my eyes.

And there it was. Staring at me with its beady black eyes and cocking its head to one side, like it was trying to tell me something. A crow. No more than a few metres away.

He’ll be looking for food
, I thought to myself.
He’ll start digging through the earth with his beak. You won’t find worms there
, I wanted to tell him.
They’ll be too far down in winter. And the insects will be huddled together in dark places under rocks, or crevices behind loose pieces of bark, waiting for spring to come and wake them properly.

“You’d make a good meal yourself,” I whispered. “My grandmother would strip the feathers from you and put you in a pot. And you’d taste good. And I could stick your feathers inside my clothes to keep warm.”

But he just carried on staring – a black stain, a threat, an omen.

He hopped sideways, stretching out his wings, the feathers glistening oily blue and green, and he flapped upwards, veering towards me and cawing, a raw, harsh, grating noise that stripped through the air and screamed in my ears. His wings were so close to me that I could hear their beating and feel the change in the air as they blotted and flickered out the light, my eyes squinting against the flashing, my arms raised to protect my face.

I crouched down, tucking my face into my chest and stretching my arms over my head. For a moment I thought I felt his claws on my head, pulling at my hair, and I imagined him lifting off into the sky and taking me with him. And for a moment I didn’t feel threatened by him or scared of him. I felt something entirely different. Like an understanding, or a need, a sense of urgency.

But as suddenly as he had arrived, he was leaving again, and I stood up, stared into the blue sky scattered with dark clouds, watched his black form and his flapping wings ease away from me, his voice cawing out all the while, like he was screaming at me.

I stepped back inside. “Did you see that?” I asked. But four sets of eyes met mine with blankness. I sat back down. “There was a crow.” I waited for some reaction, a question from Mother maybe, or an intake of breath from Grandmother. But nothing. And I realised the stares were blank because of the silence they had thrown themselves into as I came back into the house.

They had wanted me out of the way. They had needed me out of the way. But what had they been talking about?

I slurped the last few spoonfuls of thin porridge from the bowl, and still nobody said a word; the silence was as frosty as the air.

Had they been arguing? Shouting at each other in hissed whispers? Maybe, I thought, they knew, somehow, that I’d told Sook about my dream, about what Father had said to me. Maybe they were too angry to speak to me.

But
, I reminded myself,
Sook sneaks food to me, he meets me, he cares about me. He won’t say anything. And I can tell them that, when they start shouting at me. I can trust him
.

As I took my empty bowl to the bucket at the window where we washed the pots, I thought I heard something like a vague growl in the distance, and my eyes searched past the grime on the glass and away across the countryside and hills surrounding us. I turned my head to Grandfather and caught him staring at his wife, my grandmother. I looked to Mother and Father, neither moving, just listening. The sound grew louder.

I leant closer to the window pane. “No,” I whispered, shaking my head, my skin prickling, my chest tightening and my head spinning. “There’s a car coming,” I muttered.

“Not here?” Mother whispered.

I turned to Father, his eyes filling with disappointment as he looked at me, his head shaking.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed to him, but he wasn’t looking at me any more, and he wasn’t listening.

He was on his feet with Mother and my grandparents, staring through the window to the car that had now turned towards the village, clouds of exhaust fumes belching out behind it.

“It can’t be coming here,” Mother whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak, to explain what I had said to Sook, about my dream of the city with the lights and the food and the music, Father saying he would take me there, his plan to live there. But I clung still to the belief that Sook wouldn’t have done that, wouldn’t have betrayed me like that, and I didn’t dare say the words that proved how much I’d let my family down.

So I stood. Just stood. Watching the car. Knowing it was heading to us.

“Get rid of everything quickly,” I heard my grandmother say. And I turned round, wondering what she could be talking about, catching a look between the adults and realising I was missing something, that some secret was being kept from me.

“Father,” I whispered, “I need to tell you something.”

“Not now,” he replied and the worry in his voice made me gasp, and I watched dumbstruck as he knelt at a cupboard, pulled a drawer out at his feet and stretched an arm into the space it had left. With my mouth open, I watched him draw out handful after handful of papers, and saw my grandparents grab them from him, toss them on to the fire and poke them into the flames as they shot looks back and forth to Mother at the window, then to the door and then back to the jumble of things spread out across the floor.

“But—”

“I said not now, child!” Father shouted.

I moved around them all, trying to make sense of what they were doing, staring at the papers: handwritten letters, photographs, some black and white, some colour, magazines, postcards, newspapers. I stared without understanding at the flames licking round the faces smiling out at me, devouring the words before I could even try to read them.

“Not that one… please… not that one… let me keep that,” my mother begged, grabbing an envelope from the floor, a flash of colour peeking out, sheets of paper covered in scrawled handwriting. I watched her gulping back tears as she stuffed the envelope inside her top.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “What is all this stuff?” I bent down, picking up a postcard of a city at night-time, the sky a beautiful deep, velvet blue, the streets alive with colour, buildings stretching up into darkness, the windows lit different colours, shop signs flashing neon symbols.

My stomach turned. “This… this is the city I dreamt about.” I felt breathless and dizzy, staring at the neon signs on the card in my hand that I didn’t understand and couldn’t read. “This isn’t North Korea,” I said. “It’s not Pyongyang. Sook was right.”

Everything stopped. They stared at me.

“I didn’t… I didn’t…” But I couldn’t lie. Father knew, of course he did; he knew the second he heard the engine and saw my face. I had betrayed him. I dropped my eyes away from them, the pain of the guilt too much to bear, and I stared at the floor scattered with the secrets they had kept hidden from me for so many years, secrets I had ruined without a thought.

I saw my grandmother’s feet stride towards me and I looked up. Her face wore an anger that was indescribable, venom I thought no one could ever feel for me. I didn’t see her lift her hand, but I felt it across the side of my face, and I felt the floor as I landed in a heap.

I stayed there. My face stinging, the car engine louder, the shuffling of paper around me, the crackle of the fire as it destroyed their memories. My mother’s sobs.

What had I done?

I could smell the car’s exhaust.

I felt my grandfather’s hand on my shoulder, a gentle squeeze, and I was so very scared. And I realised how stupid I’d been. How thoughtless and selfish and naive. Of course I couldn’t trust Sook. Of course he would tell his mother. How could I have thought anything else? I wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor and disappear.

The flames destroyed the last of the papers and dwindled low to leave ashes, the delicate remains of destroyed memories, of knowledge and evidence of something I had never even been allowed to share. My father snatched the postcard from me and threw it in the fireplace.

Outside, the engine stopped. I heard the doors open. Heard them slam shut. Heard voices. Deep and male.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. And they all stared at me. All, that was, except my grandfather.

“You should’ve told her the truth years ago,” he said. “They’ll take her too. Think what they’ll do to her.”

My mother turned to me, her eyes raw, tears streaming down her face. Her hand lifted to me and touched my cheek. “Go, Yoora, go quickly and hide. Anywhere you can. Keep away from these men. Don’t let them see you.”

I stared at her, wishing she would hold me and hug me. “You have to go
now
,” she hissed. “Out of the back window.”

I stumbled backwards, watching the faces of my family, the pain I had caused with a few thoughtless words in the dark, and I clambered through the back window, pushed it closed and collapsed on to the ground below.