A Dream of Lights (9 page)

I wished I could take the thought of him out of my head. Wished I could stop the conversations we’d had and decisions I’d made from replaying over and over in my mind.

For days it didn’t stop, not as I pulled at logs and branches and my fingers began to blister, or as I clambered up the mountainside with my legs aching and my muscles screaming. And I’d cringe at myself for things I’d said, torturing myself as memories, still so fresh, came again and again, of the last morning at home, my father’s expression when he realised I’d betrayed him, my mother’s voice as she told me to run and hide.

And even though by the end of the day I was so tired I could barely lift a hand or keep my eyes open, and my body screamed at me for rest, my mind would repeat it all, and sleep would stay far from me.

In those first few long, tired nights, when everything was still new and daunting and strange and shocking, and despite the thousands of people in huts and buildings around me suffering just as I was, I felt so isolated and so alone, and the only way I could stop my anger and frustration for long enough to fall asleep was to imagine myself killing him. To see the glint of the blade in my hand, the look of pain spreading across his face, his eyes growing dim, growing heavy. Hear the words I whispered to him, the last words he would ever hear –
That’s for my family.

So many times I thought it, imagined it, that when finally sleep did take me it sneaked into my dreams too, but playing tricks on me, and as I said those words and looked down at the blood on my hands and seeping through his clothes, and the light in his eyes turning dim, I felt nothing but sadness, a terrible draining sadness, and I watched as he shook his head, and I listened as he whispered back to me –
But I love you.

I woke, sitting bolt upright, covered in sweat and staring at my hands, rubbing them together to make sure they were clean. And I felt so ashamed and so full of guilt and confusion.

In silence I cried for everything I’d lost, and everything I’d caused. And I waited for the sharpness of that pain to dull, and the clarity of that memory to fade.

Through trees showing the first buds of spring on their branches, and over grasses looking a little greener, we struggled up the hillside, a herd of us, my work unit, silent but for our heavy breathing and our trudging feet.

Time, I realised, was disappearing around me, days blending into one another. So quickly, I realised, years would pass, and how easy it would be to forget how long I had been there, how much older I had become, how I had had, before this, a home that was decent, if sparse, a mother who loved me and a boy who lit up my world with his smile.

And how easily it had gone.

My arms ached and my legs were heavy. My back creaked and my fingers clicked. I could move, though barely, but I carried on because I had to. Because exhaustion or hunger or pain were no excuses. There
were
no excuses. How quickly would the day pass? But then there would be another. And another. And another.

I stepped forward one step, and again, and I thought about the people around me, what they had done, how long they had been here, what names they had, what they were thinking then, at that very moment. If they were thinking at all.

I watched their feet shuffle in their split shoes and worn-out boots, one or two barefoot, and I lifted my eyes, though not my head, to look at the girl to my side, her uniform old and torn, the arms too short, the legs frayed and with holes at the knees. I looked at her face, her skin stretched over her bones, her hair a tangled mess. I looked to the next person and the next and the next: they were all empty, their humanity, their personality, their heart and warmth and their very being missing.

All obeying because there was no choice. Because if you didn’t, you would be tortured or beaten. Unless you were released. But this was so unheard of, so rare, it was like a myth.

Much less rare was death. I wondered how welcome its arrival would be, if it came for me.

The girl next to me glanced my way, then back again, ignoring me. I wished I could talk to her, ask her questions, find out more about life here, what you could do, what you couldn’t, how to find extra food, how to keep warm, which guards were worse, how to live, how to survive.

But I knew that behind me was the guard, listening and waiting maybe for a chance to prove he was in charge, that him we had to obey. What if he heard me talking? What would he do? Would it hurt, his punishment? Would I make it back to the hut? See my grandparents again?

I glanced back at the girl and took a breath. “How long have you been here?” I whispered.

Her eyes shot to me for a second, her face tense and stern, warning me without a word, and from the corner of my vision I saw the guard marching towards me, lifting his gun, pointing the muzzle towards me, resting his finger on the trigger.

I dropped my head back down, waiting for the bang, staring at my feet, waiting for the pain, my face burning, my heart racing, waiting to fall to the ground, for blackness to cover me. His footsteps came closer, his breathing louder as he neared me, and I felt the gun jab me in the shoulder. But there was no bang.

“No talking,” he barked.

Was this truly fear? Every second of every day living in the anticipation of pain and suffering and death?

I could feel the guard, right behind me, his breath on my neck, his eyes boring holes into me. I wanted to slow down, to look around or up, to stop, or to shout at him. Instead my eyes focused on the ground and my feet kept their rhythm. Because I didn’t want to know what he would do, because obedience was hard but less painful, because survival was my instinct and so rebellion was no option.

And so throughout the day, the hard, physical, demanding labour, I spoke to no one. I chopped down trees with an axe so blunt it was rusting without saying a word. I stripped branches from trees with hands sore and split, not making a sound. I sawed up wood and carted it, blisters cracking open on my palms, back down the mountain, with not a moan or a gasp, a cry or a complaint.

I was too scared, not just of the guards, but of saying something in the wrong tone, or in the wrong way. That the other prisoners, whoever they were, would hate me or judge me or ridicule me. Report me. And while I wanted a friend or an acquaintance to be able to talk to and ask questions, I didn’t want to owe anybody even a smile.

I would do my work and I would go back to the hut. As I would the next day and the next. For as long as it took. Whatever
it
was.

At the bottom of the mountain I dropped my pile of wood and, trying to forget my shoes rubbing on my ankles and squeezing at my toes, began the walk back up again, realising as I stared off into the distance, that the treeline would be for ever receding the more we chopped down, that the walk would lengthen and lengthen as the months stretched by.

I was thinking of the wood when I heard it, the shout. I was wondering, in my head, what happened to all the wood because it certainly wasn’t to keep us, the prisoners, warm, when I heard the scream that followed. My stomach turned and my step, for a second, paused in the air; then my feet carried on, back to the trees, and towards the shouting.

I didn’t want to know what was happening. Not to see it or hear it or let it into my dreams to wake me through the night. But as I neared, as I went to collect my axe from the ground, it was in front of me and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t move away.

The boy. So small. Younger than me and smaller than me. Skinnier, bonier and weaker. His arms trying to lift a log that was so big and so heavy; the skin where his muscles should’ve been stretching and tautening; his face grimacing as he struggled in pain and frustration. And fear.

The guard stood over him, shouting in his ear. “You’re lazy. You’re weak. A disgrace to our country. Kim Jong Il and His father before Him have given you so much and this is how you repay Them.”

The first blow hit and I froze. That terrible sound of knuckles on skin, banging on cheekbone, and the thud of his body on the ground.

I watched the boy reach a hand to his mouth, blood on his fingers, saw his eyes full of fear look up at the guard towering above him, and then away, whatever it was he saw staring back at him too shocking, too harsh to bear. I could’ve cried for him.

The boy struggled back to his feet, reaching down, his fingers scrabbling at the log, pulling it towards his chest. But his body and his arms and his legs trembled and shook, and the log fell back to the ground.

“You’re useless!” the guard shouted. “And weak. A waste of my time and the air you breathe.”

He swung the gun from his shoulder. I watched. Unable to move. He flicked off the catch. The boy’s mouth fell open, his lips quivering, his eyes silently pleading.

The guard lifted the gun to his shoulder, leant his head to one side and peered with one eye down the sights. Horror stretched and contorted on the boy’s face. Fear, shock and disbelief. His eyes wide, his hand lifting up. I heard the guard draw a breath, and I saw his finger on the trigger, squeezing, squeezing.

“No,” I whispered.

Then a click. Not a bang.

And I saw the boy’s shoulders droop as I felt my own do the same. But he didn’t move or try to run; he just stared at the guard. As did I. Until the guard moved, turned and stared at me.

I thought at first he must be watching someone else, someone behind me or to my side, someone watching this scene as mesmerised as I was, though not wanting to be, wanting to look away, walk away, but unable to do so. Watching not with curiosity, but with a feeling of responsibility.

I needed to remember this. For the boy, I needed to remember. But the guard
was
looking at me, and at the axe still in my hand, and I knew he must’ve heard my whisper. He strode over to me, and at first I thought he was going to shoot me instead. But he didn’t – he seized the axe and tried to pull it from my grasp.

Suddenly, horrified, I understood what he was going to do. For a second, only a second, I held on, struggling to keep hold of the axe. I looked at him as I strained to stop him taking it. Straight at him, and I felt so small and insignificant. So useless. He slapped me hard with his other hand. And I let go.

I let go.

I listened through my own sobs as the boy begged and cried, and I watched through eyes blurred with tears as the one blow struck. The one blow with my axe.

I hope shock kept him from feeling it. I hope he was unconscious before the pain registered in his brain. I hope he was dead before his body hit the ground. But I don’t think he was. Because as a scream left my lips without even thinking it, as the guard’s head flew round to me, as he grabbed his gun and strode towards me again, I looked into the boy’s eyes as he lay on the floor, and I saw the life still in him and I didn’t look away until it had faded. And all the time I muttered silently in my head,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Suddenly the guard was in front of me, a grin stretched over his face, and the muzzle of his gun under my chin, and nobody was watching, nobody would see me killed and remember it, nobody would watch the life fade from my eyes.

“Shall we see if it misfires this time?” he asked.

I thought of my father, his courage in those last moments.
Are these mine?
I thought.

Somewhere inside me I felt angry. And I felt that rebellion again that I had tasted when meeting Sook in the darkness. Something I couldn’t resist, that burned and itched inside me. Something, I knew, I was bound to regret. But…

I took a deep breath and then I spat in his face. I felt the adrenalin and the anger and the rebellion and the hatred course through me. I stared at him, straight
into
him, then I slowly closed my eyes and I waited. And behind my eyelids my imagination didn’t show me the guard’s face; my memory instead showed me Sook’s.

As I looked at Sook, into his brown eyes, across his face, down on to his lips, I felt the click of the gun close to my chest, and felt the muzzle taken away from my skin. I opened my eyes and Sook’s face was gone. The guard stared at me still as he threw the gun to the ground, and I saw a hint of triumph behind his eyes, and the specks of blood on his face, and I felt the wooden handle of the axe touch my fingers, then my palm. I held it as he turned away from me, my fingerprints replacing his, the stickiness of blood on my hand, and I looked over at the boy’s body.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I stood waiting for something, although I didn’t know what, and there was nothing I could do, and I asked myself –
Was there anything I could’ve, should’ve done to keep you alive?

A girl’s hand touched my back and her face looked down at mine, the girl I tried to speak to before.

“What was his name?” I asked.

But she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You have to turn away.”

And she did, she turned away from me.

Is that it?
I asked myself.
Is that how you survive this place? You turn away from compassion and humanity? From empathy? From caring?