by Sungju Lee
“Adeul,” I heard my mother say as I slipped in and out of waking and dreaming.
Then I remembered the day before: my mother’s plan to go to Nampo for food.
I remembered my vow not to fall asleep.
But I had.
My eyes popped open, and I sat bolt upright. My heart raced. I was perspiring, and my hands were clammy with nervousness. Light streamed in through the window, illuminating the dust and casting a long shadow across the floor. It was about midday.
I’d slept all morning.
I patted the bedding beside me where my mother’s mat was still laid out. It was warm, as if she had just gotten up.
But she wasn’t in the other room praying in front of her bowl.
I leaped up and ran outside.
“Eomeoni!” I shouted, heading first to the outhouse and throwing open the wooden door.
Not a sound. Not even the scampering feet of mice.
Barefooted, I walked around our tiny house and then down the dirt road. As my pace quickened, stones dug into the soft flesh of my soles. But I didn’t care. I searched the train station, peering into the haggard faces of people waiting for trains. Frantically, zigzagging, I crossed the Ha-myeon Bridge and searched the market. I walked up to several women, thinking that from the back they were my mother. But when I tugged on their sleeves and they spun around, they were someone else’s mother.
I then headed home, hoping that my mother had just gone to the fields to catch grasshoppers we could roast.
I pushed open the front door.
Inside was vacant.
Cold.
As the sky slid into twilight, I limped back to the road and collapsed on a small mound of earth off to the side. I then began to sob … I had lost Bo-Cho, my dreams of becoming a general, my schooling, Pyongyang, my piano, my doghouse, my father … my mother. I didn’t stop crying until the day songs of the cicadas faded and the cooler melodies of the night insects took over. That’s when I crawled back into the house, pushing open the front door with the palm of my hand and dragging myself to eomeoni’s bedding, where I wrapped myself in her scent.
¤ ¤ ¤
When I awoke, it was light again.
I didn’t want to move, but then a flash moved through me, a hope that my mother was there, doing her prayers.
“Eomeoni, Eomeoni …” My voice echoed against the bare walls. Then I saw it, a letter, poking out from underneath her prayer bowl.
Son, it started, there’s some porridge in the pot. Have it when you are hungry.
I pulled off the lid of our last remaining pot and, using my hands, began shoveling into my mouth the porridge made from ground vegetables and cornstarch. After I had finished and burped, I looked at the letter again.
Eomeoni had written more.
I’m going to Aunt’s house to get food, and I will return home in seven days. You must stay at home. If there’s no food, you must eat salt and drink water.
Mom
I skulked outside and drew enough water from the well to fill the empty pot. Then I put it and the small box of salt beside my mat. I lay back down and stared up at a daddy longlegs crawling on the ceiling. “For a week, I will not move—to save energy,” I told the creature, which paid me no attention.
I then closed my eyes and imagined eating pork and tofu fried with seaweed and the fried fish that eomeoni would make when she returned from Wonsan. I then thought of abeoji arriving home at the same time with bags full of new clothes and rice cakes. I would go back to school. Whatever abeoji had done, he would be forgiven, and we’d go back to Pyongyang, where I would return to the tae kwon do sojo. For the first time in a very long time, I dreamed of being a general, leading my unit in the Day of the Sun military parade.
On the morning of the seventh day, I awoke swimming in perspiration. I pushed off my covers and, desperate for some water, tried to open my eyes to find the pot. But my eyelids were glued shut. I patted my face and discovered that my cheeks and eyelids had swelled up like a puffer fish. I sat up quickly and screamed.
“I’m blind. Help. Help!” But of course no one came. No one could hear me, or if they could, as Chulho would say, “They have enough problems of their own.”
I crept toward where I hoped was eomeoni’s wedding chest. For a few seconds I fumbled with the lock, which I couldn’t see because my eyes were still glued shut. Finally, I got the chest open and felt inside. There was nothing left of the sheets, towels, and gowns—even my father’s army uniform that we had brought with us from Pyongyang was gone. We’d sold almost everything.
But the broken mirror I was looking for was there, on the bottom.
I took it out and lifted it toward where I thought my face would be.
I then used my fingers to jimmy open my eyes.
At first I saw shadows, and then streaks of light, and finally my reflection. Although I wasn’t blind, what stared back at me wasn’t good.
This time my scream was so shrill I scratched my vocal cords.
I was round and shiny like the balloons released on parade days. My face looked as if it were coated in candle wax. I realized with a jolt that the salt I had eaten for a week had made me retain so much water that I had become a beached whale. “I’m sick,” I moaned. “I can’t stay here like eomeoni asked me to do.”
I pulled myself up by digging my fingernails into the wall. My legs were wobbly, and blood rushed to my head. I was going to faint. “You can’t,” I admonished myself.
I knew I stank of my own waste as I finally made it out the front door and headed down the road. I knew I looked like something dug up dead from the river. I knew I scared the children, as their mothers draped them in their arms and hastened them into their houses. But I knew I would die if I didn’t press on.
My legs ached. I had chest pains, and my throat burned. An out-of-tune orchestra played in my head, bang, clonk, dunk, with the cymbal player as the soloist. Many times I stumbled and nearly fell, but something lifted me up, maybe those universal forces to whom I now prayed, and pushed me onward. Finally, I made it to Young-bum’s door, newly painted a light blue, like the sky the day after a summer storm. Before I pushed it open, I thought: How odd this country is. We’re all starving, but the government still forces people to paint their houses.
“What are you doing here?” Young-bum asked, his voice faltering when I fell into his house like a bouncing ball that didn’t stop until it hit the far wall.
“Help me,” I croaked as saliva dripped from the corners of my mouth. “I’ve had nothing to eat for a week but salt. I am carrying too much water.”
Young-bum’s lips trembled, and he eyed me suspiciously. “Who are you?” he asked, grabbing the shovel he and I used to dig up herbs. His hands trembled as he waved it in front of my face.
“It’s me,” I tried to call out, but I had little voice left from all my screaming. “It’s me,” I repeated. “We lift stones together as weights …”
“What happened to you?” Young-bum gasped, lowering the shovel.
I grunted. I moaned.
I tried to tell him that my mother had left and that I had nothing to eat. But before I could, I fell into his arms and passed out.
Young-bum held a cup of cool well water to my lips. I took a few sips, spilling more on my shirt than I managed to swallow. He then placed in my hand a soft-boiled potato. “I stole it from the storage box next door,” he explained. “I’ve got a pile.”
I sat in the corner and tried sucking on the potato, because, in addition to everything else, my gums hurt and my throat was so damaged that swallowing felt like nails scratching a blackboard. I looked around Young-bum’s house. I’d never been inside it before. The main room was smaller than mine, and it was just as sparse because most of his family’s furniture, dishes, and clothes had been sold, too. My eyes landed on a lump on the ground beside the cooking fire. It was shaped like a small person. But it wasn’t moving. I dug my heels into the ground and pushed my oversize body as far away fr
om it as I could, until my back was flush up against the wall.
“It’s my grandmother,” Young-bum said, sitting down beside me. “She’s sick. She’s not dead,” he assured me. “She has tuberculosis. She …” His voice trailed off. I stretched my swollen neck to look at him. He was crying. “She doesn’t sleep much. She has night sweats and coughs. But when she does sleep, she is so peaceful, and I don’t want to wake her,” he said.
I forced myself to eat the potato, knowing it was the only way I could get rid of my swelling, and then drank more water.
When I was done, Young-bum grumbled something about going out for a while and that I should rest.
Propped up against the wall, I listened to two women outside bickering over tofu. I could make out that one of the women had tried to sell it, but a kotjebi—a word I had never heard before—had stolen it. The way the women went on, I imagined this kotjebi to be some kind of wild, rabid dog with foam frothing from its mouth. “Kind of like what I must look like right now,” I said to myself. I then started chuckling. But it hurt to laugh, so I stopped. I heard crying followed by scuffling and then slapping sounds. The two women were fighting.
I pulled myself up and looked around. Young-bum had placed his old school uniform beside me. As I reached to touch it, Young-bum came crashing in through the front door, breathing heavily, carrying a black bag made from an old shirt. He slammed the front door shut and slid to the floor. “Shush,” he whispered to me.
The sound of running feet drew near. Then men’s voices calling out to each other: “He’s gone down this way!”
“No, this way!”
“What did you do?” I mouthed to Young-bum, who flicked his hand at me, which I interpreted as meaning that this wasn’t a great time to ask.
After the voices and footsteps disappeared, Young-bum crawled to his grandmother’s side and gently shook her shoulders. She moaned, then coughed up blood that splattered down her chin. Young-bum wiped it away with a towel. As he propped her head up on a pillow, she whimpered like a small child. Young-bum pulled some bottles from his black bag, clanking them together as he set them on the ground. He then poured some pills from one of the bottles and counted five in the palm of his hand.
Young-bum drew a cup of water from a pail and put it to his grandmother’s lips so she could swallow the pills.
I could hear liquid swimming around in her lungs as she breathed. When Young-bum set her gently back down on her mat, she coughed up more blood into a cloth. The room filled with the stench of her illness, sweet and sour at the same time.
Young-bum made some porridge by grinding together corn, rice, soybean paste, and a watery, almost rotten, cucumber. He spoon-fed his grandmother, as if she were the child and not he.
After Young-bum had washed her down with another cloth, he told her what his day at school was like.
“I’m so far ahead in math that teacher said I should enter a math contest,” he told her. All the while I was thinking that his school uniform was at the bottom of my mat and it seemed to me that he had spent the day in the market stealing instead.
“Teacher says if I keep up the good work, next year I might even become school captain …”
I didn’t want to hear anymore. I pulled myself up, which was hard because I was still so bloated it was like heaving a large boulder over my head to get myself even to a standing position. I then headed outside to the outhouse.
When I finally plopped myself down on the toilet seat, I sat and listened to the bugs scampering around me, the twigs falling on the roof, and the wind stirring the long grasses in the nearby field. Eventually I just dozed off.
I awoke the next morning to Young-bum’s punching my shoulder. “Get up,” he said loudly, hurting my eardrums.
“What is it?” I asked, clamoring to sit up straight, which was now even harder since my body was cramped in addition to being swollen from sleeping in the outhouse all night. “Is Joseon being invaded?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he hissed, pulling me up. “No one is trying to invade us. Look, I can’t tell my grandmother I’m not at school,” Young-bum explained. “It would kill her to know I’ve quit. Come with me,” he said.
I groaned. While I could tell the potassium in the potato had helped rid my body of some of its excess water, I was still pretty sick. My clothes were too tight, for one. I had torn the seam in the back of my pants, and two buttons had popped on my shirt. “I don’t feel well,” I moaned.
Young-bum helped me walk inside the house. “Here, put this on,” he said, passing me his school uniform.
“I’m not going to school,” I protested. “I quit last fall. I thought you had, too.” I was whispering just in case his grandmother was awake and could hear.
“You’re not going to school,” he replied. “But your clothes are ripped. Wear my uniform. It was from before we had food problems … Before, when I was fat.” He then began to tug off my pants.
I was too tired to even make a joke about his former weight or to protest his undressing me.
“Where are we going?” I asked instead as he zipped up the fly of my new pants. The length was okay, but they were tight.
“To your new kitchen,” Young-bum answered, slipping a pair of his sneakers onto my feet. He tried to do up the laces but couldn’t. I strained to look over my protruding stomach to see my feet, which seemed bigger than my head.
“Here, wear my father’s old shoes,” Young-bum said, handing me a pair of brown running shoes with holes in the soles. Before I could ask if there were any other shoes, Young-bum was heading out the front door.
For a while, we walked the road in silence, Young-bum having to slow his pace to match mine, which was not much faster than a turtle’s crawl.
“Why were those men chasing you?” I finally asked, more just trying to fill the air between us with conversation than wanting an answer. I kind of guessed already he had stolen those pills for his grandmother.
“I couldn’t afford grandmother’s medicine yesterday,” Young-bum said. “So I took it from the market.”
“You mean you stole it,” I said.
He grunted.
“What happened to your parents?” I asked next. He had never told me directly.
“My aunt took my mother away in an oxcart. My aunt said she was taking my mother to the doctor to fix her tuberculosis,” he said, his voice distant, as if he were straining to remember something he had forgotten or maybe wanted to forget. “But we couldn’t afford the medicine, and back then, I wasn’t stealing, so she died before she got there … Well, we all died a bit then, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and I really was.
“My father left to find food, said he was going to China, and he hasn’t come back yet,” he added.
“My mother went to Aunt’s house to get food, too,” I said after another long silence. “She told me she would be gone a week and to eat salt and drink water until she got back. That was, I think, about ten days ago.” I wasn’t keeping track this time. I guess, after my father, I was scared to.
Young-bum mumbled that he was sorry, too. I believed him.
“Are you taking me to the hospital?” I then quipped. “Is the hospital my new kitchen?”
Young-bum laughed. “What would be the point? The hospital doesn’t have any medicines anymore, either. You have to buy what you need or steal it, and then take it to the doctor, who will make you pay him to tell you how much to take. It’s just a waste of time. You get sick here, you fend for yourself—not like in Pyongyang, where I’m pretty sure they make sure their future generals never get sick. I bet your hospitals in Pyongyang are made out of silver, just like your metro’s escalators.”
I laughed then, too, not because what he said was funny, but because it was sort of true, except that our escalators weren’t made out of silver. “My maternal grandfather is a doctor,” I said in a weak voice. “Maybe,” I added after a short pause, “you can help me find a way back to Pyongyang to find him.
”
Young-bum stopped suddenly and turned to face me. “You’re joking, right?” he asked, studying my eyes.
I shrugged. “Yeah, maybe, kind of. No.”
“Chulho and I believed you were just acting dumb when we told you about things going on in Joseon. But really … you don’t know! Your family was kicked out of Pyongyang, fancy-pants,” he said, “because Pyongyang people don’t come here to live unless the government has told them to get out. And when Pyongyang fancy-pants people are asked to leave, they’re stripped of everything. Everyone knew about your family the moment you arrived in that train station, all polished like those shiny metal escalators in the metro in the capital. Everyone talked behind your father’s back about how a great star of the regime must have done something really bad to have fallen into a garbage heap like this.”
I felt the knot in my throat grow tight. My father hadn’t wanted me to know these things. I felt I was betraying him just by listening. But Young-bum was right. I had known everything he said all along, from the moment the light flickered and then went out and I saw the dead bird of prey on my way home from the tae kwon do sojo.
“You can’t go back to Pyongyang,” Young-bum continued, his voice light and soft as if he genuinely wanted to comfort me. “And even if you found a way, your grandfather isn’t there anymore. When someone does something against the government, the entire family is usually penalized. Your doctor grandfather has been kicked out, too. Or if he hasn’t been kicked out, he’s been stripped of all his things and likely left on his own to survive. You’ll never find him.”
“But what if my grandfather is looking for me?” I looked up, my heart racing as if the electricity had just come on inside me. I knew I had to find him. He would help both my sickness and me.
“Good luck with that, fancy-pants Pyongyang boy. Unless he’s looking for you, unless he knows you are here, you won’t find him.”
“But he would never abandon us. I know that.”
“Then how come he hasn’t come yet?”
Young-bum was right. We’d been in Gyeong-seong for nearly a year and a half. Hal-abeoji hadn’t come. I lowered my head, feeling all hope drain, like on a hot steamy day being given a glass of water with holes in it. I swallowed hard so as not to cry.