Princess Bari (5 page)

Uncle Salamander returned and started overseeing the haulage of leftover ore, and cargo trucks filled with food arrived. Musan slowly returned to life. The number of workers from other parts of the country also grew. The food situation improved greatly, but most of what came in was taken away by train to Chongjin. Then, one day, right around lunchtime, we had all gathered at home and were just about to enjoy a pot of
sujebi
soup made with dough flakes from the wheat flour we'd received, plus big chunks of potato that we'd sliced up, when we heard someone clearing his throat in the courtyard outside. We looked up to see two men's heads peeking over the windowsill at us. Grandmother nearly dropped her spoon in surprise.

“Who are they? What do they want?” she said.

Their heads lowered back into the courtyard. Father took a look around and then called to them from the windowsill.

“How can I help you, Comrades?”

I heard one of the men say: “We're from Chongjin. You're the vice chairman, correct?”

“Yes, that's correct.”

“You need to come with us. Please step outside.”

Father went outside without stopping to respond to the wide-eyed, searching look Mother gave him. We all crowded around the window and watched our father's strong, hunched-over back retreating from us with the two men. One of the men wore a grey, short-sleeved Mao suit and carried some kind of ledger behind his back. The outfit, along with the square flag pin, showed that he held a high position. The other man wore a worker's cap and serge jacket like the Great Leader's.

Late that night Father returned home, exhausted. We were sitting around in gloomy silence, not having had the heart to eat dinner, but we poured out onto the wooden veranda upon his arrival. Of course Mother didn't dare ask him what happened. Not even Grandmother could bring herself to ask.

He glanced around at us and asked weakly: “They eat?”

“How could anyone eat at a time like this? Tell us what happened,” Mother said. Father sank to the ground.

“Let's eat,” he said.

Grandmother couldn't wait any longer either and asked: “
Ya
, who were they?”

“They said they're from the Ministry of State Security. I figured they'd show up sooner or later.”

Even as children, we all knew what that meant. We silently wolfed down our dinner of hard-cooked cornmeal. As soon as the dinner tray was cleared away, Grandmother confronted Father again.

“Out with it already. This was because of their uncle, wasn't it?”

“Yes. Charges were raised against him for causing a deficit and then taking off. I swore I knew nothing about it. Because I really don't.”

“What'll happen,” Mother whispered, “if rumours get out that he ran to the South?”

“Hush! What are you talking about? That rascal went searching for food and died in the streets.”

“So, then, it's over?”

Father stopped replying. That night, neither of our parents seemed to get much sleep: we could hear them murmuring in their room until late into the night, sometimes raising their voices at each other. We tossed and turned, and Grandmother didn't get much sleep either because she kept tucking the blankets back around us and whispering to us to go to sleep. The next morning Father left for Chongjin with the two men.

This was the start of the misfortune that visited our family.

Three days passed, and then five, and still Father didn't return home. Mother went to the train station every day to wait for him. Then one day, a group of soldiers and a familiar-looking Party official came banging on our door. The official handed our mother a slip of paper.

“You've been issued a summons,” he said.

“What does this mean?”

“You must vacate. New tenants are arriving. Report to the district office right away.”

Mother left at once for the office, which wasn't far from where we lived. The soldiers came into the house without bothering to remove their boots and began opening all of the doors. They started carrying out the refrigerator and television set. Grandmother tried to stop them.

“What are you doing? You think you can just take other people's things?!”

“Out of the way.”

The Party official tried to pacify her: “Ma'am, there's no point arguing with us. Now that you've received a summons, your property is being seized, and you're being relocated.”

Later I learned that Mother and Mi, who'd finished secondary school, and Jung and Sook, who were still in school, were told to go to Puryong, where they would be assigned jobs. So what was to become of Grandmother, Hyun and me? No slips of paper came our way; our names weren't even mentioned. I don't know how the days and hours passed after that. We spent that first night clinging to each other on the floor of our emptied room, clothes and blankets strewn all around us. When we awoke the next morning, Mi was gone. Our mother seemed completely unruffled by it.

“That sly girl … She kept saying she was going to cross the river one day and flee to China. Well, she's all grown up now, so she'll make it on her own, wherever she is.”

Mother kept trying to reassure Grandmother: she'd asked the chairman to keep an eye on them; Father would only be gone for another month, two at the latest; he'd done so much for the country that, of course, this was all just a minor misunderstanding. She also made a point of adding that Grandmother would be assigned to a collective farm, so she would receive food rations in exchange for helping out there. But no one knew better than Mother herself that this was all just talk.

The day my mother and sisters left I stood off to the side and refused to cry. They each carried a small bundle of rations. As they walked away, they kept glancing back. They were looking at us, of course, but they were probably also engraving the image of our beloved home in their minds. None of us knew it was the last time we would ever see each other. At some point they started showing up in my dreams. They stand beside each other, Mother, Sook and Jung, looking at me from a distance, smiling gently and not saying a word. Perhaps these are their ghosts.

Grandmother decided it was best for us to stay put until the new tenants arrived, just in case Father returned in the meantime. Unable to turn on the lights, we were eating some boiled potatoes for our dinner when we heard footsteps outside. Then we heard someone clear his throat and mutter, as if to himself: “I wonder if anyone's home?”

Hyun recognized Uncle Salamander's voice and called out: “Uncle! We're here!” Grandmother rushed out to greet him. She fell to the ground and clung to his legs.

“
Aigo!
Our family is ruined!”

“Grandmother, please stand up. I heard what happened.”

He lit a cigarette and let out a deep sigh. Grandmother filled him in on everything that had transpired, punctuating the story with complaints.

“I should've gotten here sooner!” he said. He paced back and forth, deep in thought, and then turned to Grandmother. “Pack your things. And dress the kids in warm layers.”

“Are we going somewhere? It's the middle of the night …”

“Let's cross the river. We'll figure out a way for you to survive once we're there.”

“But what about the others?”

“Elder Brother's a resourceful man. I have no doubt he'll be back, so I'm taking you across the river to wait for him there. When he returns we'll get the others back from Puryong too.”

Grandmother had no reason not to go along with his plan. To her as well, Uncle Salamander must have seemed our only hope. The moment he'd arrived we were happier and more reassured to see him than if it had been Father. Grandmother went into the shed, pulled up the floorboards, scooped out all of the grain that our mother had saved for us when she left and filled three large sacks, one for each of us. Uncle Salamander lifted Hyun's sack and mine in one hand like they weighed nothing.

We stayed off the main roads and travelled along a wooded path toward the riverbank. Chilsung followed close behind. Uncle Salamander knew, as well as the rest of us, the location of every guard post and the places where the river was narrow and shallow. We headed upstream and chose a spot where the Tumen swept, in a big semi-circle, around a large patch of gravel. It was where my sisters and I used to go in the winter to play on the ice. The water was cold, but Uncle Salamander tucked my sister and me under his arms to help us across. Grandmother slipped and fell twice.

Our little group made it to the other side, onto Chinese soil. The cold air barrelling down from the slope of the mountains seemed to penetrate our clothes. We walked late into the night, for over thirty
li
, and arrived at a small village outside of Chongshan. We could see a few lights in the darkness.

“Stay here and take care of your grandmother,” Uncle Salamander said. “I'll go check it out first.”

He warned Grandmother to stay away from the main road, and instructed her to wait for him in the forest. After a long while, he returned and took us to a farmhouse just past an orchard where a farmer, his mother, his wife and their daughter (who was the same age as our sister Jung) all lived. We felt much better once we were resting on their warm, heated floor. The house was divided into two rooms, but one was occupied by the husband and wife. The farmer kept calling Uncle Salamander “Elder Brother,” so we figured they were close; later we learned that, before he was married, the farmer had worked in a restaurant next to Uncle Salamander's office.

Grandmother, Hyun and I offered to sleep in the small shed they kept at the end of the orchard. It was filled with fruit boxes, farm tools, wheelbarrows and other things, but Uncle Salamander and the farmer shoved all of it over to one side and covered the floor with plastic sheeting and a blanket to make it more comfortable for us.

“Elder Brother will come to join you in no time,” Uncle Salamander reassured us. “I'll give instructions to a friend in Musan that I trust, so don't worry. In the meantime, I'll look for Mi, as you said she's already on this side of the river. I hope she hasn't run into any problems.”

With that, he left. The farmer's daughter was delighted by Chilsung. She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him for so long that I started to feel jealous. The rest of her family must have felt it was good to have a dog around, as wild boars and rabbits would come down from the nearby mountains and damage the crops. The next morning the family was already making a racket and calling the dog by name the same way we did: “Chilsung-
ah
! Chilsung-
ah
!”

*

We scraped through the rest of that autumn by stretching the grain we'd brought and the
renminbi
currency that Uncle Salamander had slipped into our hands before he left. We were also given some rice as payment for helping the family to bring in their harvest.

One evening, when the first snow had fallen, an ethnic Korean farmer from a neighbouring village dropped by. He told us that a North Korean man had showed up at his house with the name and address of the orchard owner written down. Our grandmother burst into tears and clapped her hands.

“
Aigo!
That has to be my son!”

It was dark by then, so the farmer got up early the next morning and went alone to the other village. How can I possibly describe the thrill of seeing my father's familiar, lanky slouch appear on the path between the snow-laden branches of the orchard? Grandmother, Hyun and I raced over in a knot to greet him. He was much thinner than the last time we'd seen him, and he reminded me of an old lattice door – as though he might break in half and fall over at any moment. He let out a strange sound, something halfway between a laugh and a groan. His shoulders drooped, and he wore a padded winter army coat with the cotton batting sticking out here and there. The soles of his shoes flapped open like a dog's tongue. Grandmother went outside to our little kitchen, which was just a wooden box set up in the corner of the shed with a bit of roof for cover, and came back with rice, salted vegetables and some
dwenjang
soybean-paste soup boiled with sliced potatoes. Ah, it had been so long since we'd all sat down to breakfast together! Though he was the only one who'd returned to us, we felt like we finally had our family back. He would take care of us and keep us safe.

“Rice!” Father exclaimed in wonder, digging his spoon into the heaping metal bowl.

“We get to eat rice everyday here,” I bragged.

Grandmother, Hyun and I were surprised by what he did next. Without any word or gesture to us to go ahead and start eating, he picked up the pot of soup that we were all supposed to eat from, poured over half of it onto his own rice and started shovelling the food into his mouth. He had his face down close to the bowl. We could see the top of his head: the hair had fallen out, leaving sparse clumps, and the grey had turned nearly all white. Grandmother turned to us as we sat and stared at him, our spoons motionless in our hands.

“You two, go on now. Let's eat.”

I could tell that Father had changed. He'd never been much of a talker, but Grandmother murmured to us later, with damp eyes, that his experiences in the labour camp had changed him. He slept like the dead. Night and day, he lay curled up in the innermost corner of the shed, sleeping until the next mealtime, when he would slowly rise, eat some more and fall back to sleep. After about two weeks of this, he finally seemed to come to. He started hanging around outside the shed, and would go out to the orchard in search of firewood to help Grandmother with the cooking. Once we went with him across the main road to the edge of the forest, where we could see the Tumen River. He stared for a long time at the mountains stripped bare on the other side and at the houses clustered along the edges of the fields like grey mushrooms.

“Sons of bitches!”