Princess Bari

by Sok-yong Hwang

  I was so engrossed with the puppy in my arms that I forgot anyone else was even there. When I finally looked back, Mother, Grandmother and all my sisters were standing in a semi-circle around me, staring silently down at the puppy and me. Even Father was standing at the edge of the twenmaru in a daze, but then he broke the silence.

  “Don’t tell me they’re all girls, too.”

  “Hey, hey,” Grandmother shook a broom at him. “Don’t ruin the morning with your grumbling.”

  My sisters went back to arguing and crowding around the doorway to the doghouse, but Hindungi growled and blocked them with her body. Jung raised her hand as if to hit the dog.

  “You stupid dog, why are you playing favourites?”

  Hindungi got angrier and started to bark loudly. I put the puppy I was holding back in the doghouse.

  I’ll keep you safe, I said inside my head.

  Hindungi went back into the doghouse, tucked her babies between her legs and lay with her body curled around them. I could hear Jin, my oldest sister, muttering behind me: “Bari is so weird. Now she’s talking to dogs?”

  No one had anything to say to that; at some point, they had all caught on to the fact that there was something different about me. But no one, not even Mother and Father, ever said anything out loud about my behaviour, because Grandmother would glare at them and take my side. That day stands out in my memory, but how I met Chilsung – the youngest of Hindungi’s litter – is only part of the story. You see, that was also the day our mother’s brother came to town.

  Hyun and I were playing marbles in the courtyard when the wooden gate cracked open and someone stuck their head in and peered around. We took one look at that grown-up head, with its shaved hair on top of what had to be a very tall, gangly body, and we flung the marbles away and drew back to the far end of the twenmaru. Hyun was so scared that, although she refused to admit it later after we were all grown up, I was sure I saw pee trickling down her calves.

  “Hey kids, where’s your mother?”

  Undaunted, I took a step forward and demanded: “Who’re you?”

  He peered around the courtyard some more and then stuck his whole upper body inside the gate.

  “Assuming this is the right house, I might be your uncle.”

  Mother, who’d been preparing dinner, stepped out of the kitchen as if on cue and ran over with her arms open.

  “Aigo, look who’s here! When did you get into town? Are you on leave?”

  At last our uncle stepped all the way into the courtyard, clasped our mother’s outstretched hands and gave them a shake.

  “I’m out of the army now. How’s my brother-in-law …?”

  “He’ll be home soon. Come sit.”

  He was dressed in an old, faded work uniform and carried a canvas rucksack and an accordion. Before following our mother into the house, he gave each of us, still cowering in fright, a rough tousle on the head. He probably meant for it to be an affectionate pat, but it made me angry. Much better were the gifts that came out of his rucksack later, but first he stuck his hand in his pocket and snickered.

  “I picked up something for you on the way here.”

  Our uncle opened his hand and a black something or other leaped out at us. I took a few steps back, but Hyun fell right on her butt and shrieked.

  On the ground next to her was a huge toad the size of a grown man’s fist. Its eyes bulging like brass bells, it inflated its throat and let out a loud gwaak! gwaak!. I grabbed Hyun under the armpits and dragged her away – her eyes had rolled up inside her head, and the whites were showing. Mother ran over and scooped Hyun up into her arms.

  “Just got here, and already you’re causing trouble! When’re you going to grow up?” Our uncle snorted with laughter and tousled my hair again. Later, when he handed out the military hardtack and jawbreakers he had stuffed in his rucksack to us as a show of apology and reconciliation, Hyun refused to eat any of it and sat as far away from him as possible. Even when he gave an exciting performance on the accordion in a second attempt to befriend his little nieces, Hyun would only watch indifferently from the other side of the door.

  Our uncle lived with us for several months until he found a job, and I got to know him a little better. He was good at the accordion. He was well known back in secondary school for his performances in the school band, and even in the army, instead of having to do labour, he was sent from base to base to perform propaganda songs for the soldiers. Every time he leaned up against the wall of the house and played his accordion, one leg splayed and stamping out a rhythm against the ground, all the neighbourhood kids came swarming. His eyes would flutter as he lost himself in the music, shoulders rising and falling as he filled the bellows with air and pushed it out again. Our father would take one look at that and grumble to Mother:

  “He’s got no sense. Who’d want to employ a joker like him?”

  “Someone will. Everyone says he’s bright and has a good personality.”

  With Father’s help and the recommendations of several members of our neighbourhood unit, our uncle got a job at a trading company.

  During my second year in school, things started to go downhill. It wasn’t just our family but the entire city of Chongjin. The grown-ups whispered among themselves that even Pyongyang was worse off than it had ever been. The cookies and candies that had been distributed to children on every holiday and at every memorial were, of course, cut off, and our rations of white rice were mixed with chopped-up corn until the rice gradually ran out; there were more and more months when we received only corn.

  Oh! I have to tell you what happened to Hindungi, her puppies and little Chilsung. I told you that Hindungi had seven babies. Well, despite our attempts to stop her, our mother couldn’t stand the sight of those squirming pups, so she put them in a basket to take to market. I happened to be coming home from school just as she was leaving, and I clung to the basket with both hands and shook my head and cried.

  “No, you can’t!”

  “Child, how are we supposed to raise seven dogs? I’ve got my hands full already trying to keep you girls fed.”

  “Grandma, stop her!”

  Grandmother came running out and tried to calm us down: “How about if we keep just one dog and sell the others?”

  I chose Chilsung because he and I had been friends from the start. Mother tried to snatch him back, but Grandmother put her arm around my shoulders and turned me away from her. The whole time our mother was collecting the puppies, Hindungi lay slumped in her doghouse and didn’t budge. They were ready to be weaned, after all, and besides, Hindungi knew it was coming.

  One day, around the time that Chilsung’s legs had just grown long and his ears were standing up, Mama Hindungi disappeared. Of course, by that I mean that Mother and Grandmother gave her to someone, not that she left on her own. Hindungi was moving sluggishly with age and had some kind of skin disorder: the hair on her rump had fallen out and the pink skin underneath was showing. Bathing the dog in water used to boil adzuki beans was supposed to help, but by then we were well into the days when rice cakes piled high with the sweet mashed beans were a thing of the past, so how were we supposed to find so much as a single adzuki bean? I no longer resent my uncle, but back then, after hearing that he was the one who’d dragged Hindungi away, I stopped offering him any nice words in response to anything he tried to say to me. (That wasn’t the only reason. It didn’t happen until much later, but he was also the reason our family got split up.) Grandmother told me what happened when Hindungi left.

  “Your uncle said he would give her to some men he works with. She must be at least fifteen years old now – that’s a long life for a dog. How can we bear to watch her suffer? So I told him to take her. When your uncle put the rope leash on her, she fought it and dug in her heels. I stroked her head to calm her down and told her: ‘You’re sick. He’s taking you somewhere to make you all better, so go on.’ That’s when she gave in and tottered after him. But she kept looking back at me aft
er every few steps.”

  When we heard that Hindungi had followed our uncle because Grandmother told her he was taking her to get healed, but still had to be dragged away because she suspected it wasn’t true, my sisters and I turned our backs on our grandmother and burst into tears. There was no mystery about what middle-aged men planned to do with an old dog. They would gather on a riverbank somewhere, pass around bottles of cheap soju, light a bonfire, fill a big iron pot with water and get it boiling as they laughed and cackled …

  Fortunately, we still had Chilsung. Grandmother had named him after the seven stars in the Big Dipper, because he was the seventh pup, just like me. He took his mother’s place in the old doghouse, and from then on luck began to smile on us. Of course, it wasn’t all good news: our uncle got out of the army and came back. Jin got married and moved to Wonsan, and Sun enlisted in the army, which was good – but the best thing by far that happened to us was that our father got promoted and we moved into a new house. Mother and Grandmother were so delighted that they never once got annoyed while packing our things. They went along with whatever Father wanted and didn’t raise their voices at us either.

  Chongjin had always been known as the best city to live in. The high mountains that surrounded the city like a folding screen blocked the cold north winds and kept us in firewood, wild greens, and all kinds of fruit; delicious rice grew in fields fed by the Suseong Stream, which never dried up even during the worst droughts; and the waters were rich with seafood, which was why, whenever I told people from other parts of the country that I was from Chongjin, they said: “Ah, you grew up in Paradise.”

  But best of all, it wasn’t too far from the border, which meant there was a frequent exchange of goods, and even ordinary citizens could easily get their hands on things from the outside world. Sons and daughters who’d moved to other parts of the country after getting married used to send word to their families in Chongjin asking them to buy various things for them from over the border. But once rumours started going around that the Soviet Union had collapsed some years earlier, the grown-ups began whispering about the poor shape the Republic was in. Chongjin had it better than other cities, though not as good as Pyongyang, of course; even so, there were times when rations were cut off for two months and then three months, and shabbily dressed people who’d left the countryside in search of food began showing up in the market streets.

  Father became a vice chairman in Musan. The city of Musan produced a lot of iron ore and coal and various minerals, and our mother boasted proudly over and over that there was no one better suited than our father at trading the seafood that came out of Chongjin and the minerals that came out of Musan with China in exchange for food. That was probably because Father had worked in the trade sector since he was young and, as Grandmother liked to brag, Chinese and Russian flowed from his mouth like water.

  The Party chartered a truck to haul our belongings to Chongjin Station, but in fact our luggage was minimal given the size of our family. All we had packed was bedding, a big bundle of clothes, pots and pans and the like. As the company housing came furnished with cupboards and wardrobes, we gave those items to our neighbours and asked our uncle to sell the electrical appliances, such as our fan, refrigerator and black-and-white television. According to our uncle, Father would be posted right on the border, so we would be able to buy the latest models very cheaply. The truck was necessary simply because there were so many of us.

  A bit of trouble arose when we put Chilsung in the back. The young Party worker sitting with Father in the cab of the truck objected: “What’re you packing the dog for? You should give it to your neighbours. It’ll go good with some alcohol.”

  “You’re right. But the kids have been raising it like it’s part of the family …”

  I was crouching right behind the cab, holding on tight to Chilsung, so I heard everything they were saying. Judging by the worried looks on their faces, my sisters heard them too. Our mother shook her finger at me, and Grandmother pulled a skirt out from the bundle of clothes and tossed it over. She meant for me to cover Chilsung up with it.

  “There are a lot of starving families in the mountains. How is this going to reflect on you, Comrade Vice Chairman?”

  “I understand what you’re saying. Once we get to Musan, we’ll decide whether to keep it or give it away.”

  I had not forgotten the promise I’d made to Chilsung the day the puppies were born – that whisper inside my head when I said I would keep him safe.

  The truck pulled into the train station, and we were directed by a station employee to board the empty passenger car first while our belongings were loaded into the open-air freight car at the front of the train. Travel was still strictly regulated then, so it was an orderly process. Fewer travellers meant more available seats. Later, everything would fall apart: the aisles would be packed with people and the windows would all be smashed out.

  As soon as we sat down, I pushed Chilsung under the seat and told him several times inside my head: People will get angry if they see you. I know it’s stuffy, but stay still under there. Of course, Chilsung and I had been communicating with each other through our thoughts since he was a pup; he understood, and lay flat on his belly with his limbs stretched out and his head tucked down, just as if he were lying beneath the porch. Each time I leaned down to see how he was doing, he hadn’t budged in the slightest except for his gently wagging tail.

  *

  Musan sat at the centre of a wide plain, surrounded by hills on all sides; across the Tumen River to the north, a steep mountain on the Chinese side rose straight up like a wall. We unpacked our belongings in the company housing, which was at the northern end of the city near the government office.

  One day – probably in the early summer, the year our Great Leader died – we returned home from school and my sisters and I followed Mi down to the river to wash clothes. Freight trucks were leaving the customs office and heading across the plain for downtown Musan.

  “Ya, ya! A Chinese car!” Mi yelled. “A Chinese car! Pack up the laundry.”

  We gave the laundry we were swirling around in the water a quick wringing and stuffed it in the basket, and then we all took off running.

  “Here comes Uncle Salamander!”

  Jung clapped her hands and skipped. Although Sook couldn’t give voice to it, she was so excited that she ran ahead of the pack. I kept stopping to wait for Hyun and to help her up each time she sank to the ground, too winded to keep up.

  “Can’t you run any faster?”

  “My heart feels like it’s going to explode.”

  When our house was finally visible in the distance, we all slowed to a walk and caught our breath. Uncle Salamander was a department head for a Chinese company in Yanji. He was short, chubby and had a potbelly, and his eyes were big and round like a startled rabbit’s, so you couldn’t help but laugh just to look at him. His real name was Pak Xiaolong, and he and our uncle had gotten to know each other while doing business in Chongjin. Chinese companies both big and small would bring over things like corn or flour or even the occasional rice or clothes and sundry goods, and trade them for seafood or minerals.

  Mr Pak got the nickname “Salamander” because of a joke our father had made. A few days after we’d moved in, Mr Pak had come to our house, saying that he wanted to meet his comrade, the vice chairman. He’d brought a case of kaoliang liquor and two sides of pork ribs, and he must have heard there were a lot of kids in our family because he also brought two gift boxes filled with all kinds of cookies and candies. His visits, which reminded me of Grandmother’s tales of club-wielding dokkaebi – goblins that sometimes surprised people with gifts instead of pranks – also inspired Mother and Grandmother to go on and on about how great it was to live near the border and praise our father all the more for his promotion.

  People came from the maritime customs office and the People’s Committee, and an oil drum with the top cut off was filled with charcoal and used to barbecue the ribs in t
he courtyard. After a few rounds of drinks, Mr Pak seemed to take an instant liking to our father, because he went from calling him “Comrade Vice Chairman” to “Father Vice Chairman” and then, after they’d talked some more, simply “Elder Brother”. At any rate, it was true what people said about Mr Pak: he had an unusual knack for getting close to people he’d just met.

  “Don’t worry, Elder Brother. I may not look like much now, but I was an officer in the Chinese army. I served in Kunming, right on the border of Vietnam. There’s no part of China I haven’t been to. So if you need anything at all, just say the word. I may not be able to find you monkey horns or girl testicles, but I can bring you things that North Korea at least has never seen or even heard of.”

  Father cocked his head, shot glass in hand.

  “You say your name is … Xiaolong? That means ‘Little Dragon’, right? But you’re built more like a toad than a dragon …”

  “Ah, what’re you talking about, Elder Brother? Nowadays I spend all my time going back and forth across the Tumen, but in my younger days, I was stick-thin and so good-looking that I almost became a movie star!”

  “Oh, now I know. Since your name means ‘little dragon’, that makes you a salamander!”

  Everyone at the party had a good laugh, and the word salamander spread through the crowd. After that, Mr Pak lost his real name and became known as “Uncle Salamander” to everyone from the customs clerks and officers right down to us kids. Whenever we saw him loading and unloading goods with those bulging eyes of his, we couldn’t help but burst into giggles, even when the situation demanded that we maintain decorum.

  While stocking the warehouse behind the company housing, Uncle Salamander also stocked our house full of gifts. He brought our family sacks of flour and rice, and mooncakes, candy and chocolate snack cakes for us kids to munch on. Mother tore a dried pollock into strips and served it with soju, and Uncle Salamander and our father poured each other drinks while we got one chocolate snack cake each.