The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea

by Bandi

  His eyes were burning with passion. When had her meek and mild husband ever shown such fervor before? But Gyeong-hee was too impatient to waste time wondering about this change.

  “That’s enough!” she snapped as soon as she had the chance. “I don’t know what went wrong at work that’s put you in this mood, but I haven’t the time to stand here and be lectured at.”

  “For goodness’ sake, how can you be so naïve?” Her husband stamped his foot in frustration. “‘A bad day at work’? I’ve just come from the department of information!”

  “The department of information?” Blanching, Gyeonghee narrowed her eyes and studied her husband more closely. Then she laughed, relieved, as it all became plain. “Ah! I get it. Because of the ‘secret code,’ right?” She laughed again.

  “What? You were called there too?”

  “No, but our street secretary was just here, telling me all about this report that had been filed against us. She did hint that it might have gone higher up.”

  “And what did you tell her? About the reason for the curtains?”

  “The truth, of course. You think that’s worse than being accused of spying? A ‘secret code’—ha!”

  “There’s nothing to laugh about, I tell you! I tried to explain that Myeong-shik must have inherited my feeble constitution, that that’s why he has this condition, and do you know what the department chief said?”

  “No, what?”

  “That our physical constitution isn’t all we inherit—that our mind-set comes from our parents too.”

  “He really said that?”

  “Yes! And what would it say about you or me, if we’d passed on to our son a fear of the Great Leader’s portrait? Well?”

  “But that’s ridiculous….”

  “Is it? It’s as simple as two times two.”

  Outside the window, something glittered like the flash of a knife, followed by an almighty clang, as though a metal barrel were crashing down all five flights of their building’s stairs. The wind slammed their front door shut, which Gyeong-hee’s husband had left open in his haste; no sooner had the echo died away than it was replaced by the gentle drumming of rain against the windowpane.

  The rain carried on late into the night, repeatedly dropping to a murmur only to return to a fresh crescendo. Myeongshik’s sleep was so fitful it barely warranted the name, and Gyeong-hee had to sit by him all through the night, soothing each bout of tears.

  It was the night before National Day, a day of celebration which the entire city had been anticipating for months, and Gyeong-hee was so exhausted that she nodded off time after time as she sat by her son. Each time the rain slackened, the electric lanterns festooning the streets flickered back on again, their light causing multicolored flowers to bloom on the windowpanes. Had it been a different holiday, the Lunar New Year or Harvest Festival, the sight would have lightened Gyeong-hee’s spirits, but these lights just seemed to mock her.

  As she’d drop off, then startle herself awake again, her hand would automatically feel for Myeong-shik. But then her head would resume its jerky nodding, like a pestle pounding rice flour.

  The surge of the rain, the sighing of the wind, the night lying otherwise silent in the streets—eventually, all these disjointed elements came together to formn a single dissonant chord, unfurling an alien cityscape in Gyeong-hee’s exhausted mind. A drawn-out cry blew in from somewhere, reverberating throughout the sleeping city. “Eo-bi”’

  “What are you doing hanging around when you should be asleep at home? Planning to spoil tomorrow’s celebrations?”

  But what was this? A monstrous, hairy figure straddling two of the tallest apartment buildings, a foot on each roof? It was! None other than the Eobi himself!

  So horrified that her wits deserted her, Gyeong-hee turned and ran for her life. But the tense little faces peering out of each window, as densely as the cells in a hive, scrutinizing the movements in the street below, belonged not to people but to rabbits! They were the rabbits from the fable, the one her husband had learned by heart as a child. But how had Gyeong-hee become trapped inside it?

  Frantically scanning her surroundings—she was back in her apartment now, but the nightmare was ongoing—she spotted another of the rabbits lying stretched out on the bed over there, a particularly pathetic-looking specimen. Its mouth formed a pitiful O of surprise, but it was fast asleep and snoring thunderously. It must have been the Eobi’s harrying roar that had left it so drained! But what was that row of small white teeth she glimpsed inside its gaping mouth? Why, it wasn’t a rabbit at all—it was her husband!

  “Ma-ma!”

  “Oh, oh! Sleep, sleep, Myeong-shik….”

  Even in the grip of her trance, Gyeong-hee had been mechanically going through the motions of soothing the restless Myeong-shik, but now her movements began to slacken again, little by little. She slipped into that same sleep in which, in spite of the howling wind, the exhausted city was readying itself.

  As soon as the next day dawned, people rushed to their windows to peer anxiously upward. Young or old, man or woman, there couldn’t have been a single person in the whole city who wasn’t examining the sky, trying to second-guess the weather. The signs were far from promising—the sky was covering itself with ink-black clouds, threatening an escalation in the already steady rain.

  Around six o’clock in the morning, though, it appeared that this was a false alarm—the rain petered out, and the sky showed its face as though nothing had ever happened. In the barracks, schools, and factories, the hundred thousand ceremony participants began to stir themselves, all according to plan.

  But not even thirty minutes had gone by before the sky put on another bombastic display. This time the rain went well beyond a mere shower, pouring down in great, vigorous sheets, enough to throw the whole city into turmoil. Sewers overflowed into seething gutters, and people sought refuge anywhere they could—in subways and apartment buildings, in underground stations and bus stop shelters, beneath the awnings of public buildings or the lintels of front doors—watching the raging torrent with dismay.

  Eight o’clock went by, then nine o’clock…. Only when the clock hand showed a scant forty-five minutes remaining before the ceremony’s scheduled start time of ten o’clock did the rain abruptly cease, as though the sky were giving its reluctant permission for everything to go ahead as planned. A rainbow strung itself between Yanggak Isle and Moran Peak, like a banner that might have read “Impossible to Hold Ceremony at Scheduled Time.” Patches of clear blue began to show through, and all the signs pointed to a day of glorious sunshine.

  Now the ceremony would be able to go ahead as planned, with the cleanly washed city as a stylish backdrop—if the hundred thousand people scattered throughout the city center could manage to converge on Kim Il-sung Square within the next forty-five minutes. But that would have been like expecting new leaves to sprout from withered trees. In place of the rain, the sky began to crackle with innumerable radio broadcasts, including transmissions from the chief broadcasting offices of certain Western countries. “North Korean National Day celebrations, three months in the planning, postponed due to torrential rain!” Thus the foreigners displayed their ignorance of Pyongyang.

  “Citizens, your attention. The ceremony will proceed as planned. All participants must, without exception, present themselves at their designated assembly point.”

  This broadcast on radio channel 3 shrilled its message into the city’s collective eardrum. From the subways and apartment buildings, underground stations and bus stop shelters, beneath the awnings of public buildings or the lintels of front doors, people dashed out like bullets fired from a gun. Only Gyeong-hee remained where she was, alone but for Myeongshik in her hushed apartment. She heard the broadcast along with everybody else, understood the emphasis implicit in the words “without exception,” but she knew she was exempt from her unit’s roll call—she had a sick child to take care of. At least her apartment’s enviable location meant she’d
have a prime view of the ceremony. Moving to the window, she looked out over the vast expanse of the square—still deserted, despite the repeated broadcasts, and with only thirty-five minutes left on the clock.

  Thirty minutes, twenty-five …

  And then a miracle began to unfold. One by one, columns began to form in the square, neatly divided like blocks of tofu. Each column accumulated new blocks in rapid succession, as though the phrase “without exception” were a long steel spit pushing through the city, skewering people in bunches and delivering them promptly to the square. Eventually, with only five minutes to go, the entire square was a sea of color, with columns stretching out on both sides of Department Store 1, passing in front of the Children’s Palace, and continuing all the way to the Yangcheon crossroads.

  Senior state functionaries began to make their way out onto the VIP platform. A hushed silence descended on the square, which quivered with palpitations like the sea after a storm has just subsided.

  “Informing the citizens. We have created a miracle here today, which has made the people of the world shudder with awe. One hundred thousand citizens have assembled here in Kim Il-sung Square. One hundred thousand citizens within forty-five minutes …”

  Unbeknownst to herself, Gyeong-hee pressed her hands together in front of her chest at this new broadcast from radio channel 3. For some reason, her heart began to shudder.

  “Shudder”! Yes, that was the exact word for it. What had just taken place in front of Gyeong-hee’s eyes was a spectacle inducing the awe of terror rather than the wonder felt in witnessing a miracle. Not even the threat of immediate death could have induced such unconditional obedience. What terrifying force had caused this city to give birth to such an incomprehensible upheaval?

  As it turned out, Gyeong-hee did not have to wait long for an answer.

  The postceremony review went on for a week in various cities throughout the country. At each unit’s review hall, the Party secretary’s sharp tone was punctuated by a strike of the hand on the rostrum. Those on the receiving end of this tongue-lashing would stand with their heads bowed, pressing their lips together to swallow stinging tears and stifle their cries of despair.

  Anything deemed to have marred the celebrations, even down to a so-called lack of fervor, was exhaustively accounted for. The most severe punishment tended to be expulsion from the capital—“banishment” was the official term. This was effected with ruthless efficiency. The banished were not even permitted to pack their own belongings. Once the verdict had been handed down—“Comrade, your behavior at the time of the celebrations has been judged as unacceptable; according to Party regulations, your household will be relocated to the countryside”—the punishment was discharged immediately.

  Under the careful scrutiny of a representative from the department of information, several officials arrived with straw bags and knotted rice sacks, into which belongings were packed so swiftly that the offenders never had time to react. Things were arranged so as to leave as little time as possible before the train bound for their new home departed. The representative stayed by the offenders’ side the whole time, in the truck to the station and then onto the train, so deeply concerned to see them to their destination—which was so far from Pyongyang in every sense that it seemed an alien land—that he never once let them out of his sight.

  All of which was exactly what happened to Gyeong-hee and her family. The verdict was just as her husband had predicted: “Neglecting to educate their son in the proper revolutionary principles, with a negative effect on the National Day ceremony; further, making coarse remarks about the portrait of Karl Marx, the father of communism, and comparing the portrait of our Great Leader to a manhole cover. The accused are therefore guilty of jeopardizing the preservation of our Party’s ideology….”

  There were four passengers in the truck, which left close to midnight, the icy chill of mid-September biting down to the bone: Han Gyeong-hee, her husband Park Sung-il and son Park Myeong-shik, plus the representative from the department of information, crouching in the cargo space among the family’s belongings. The seat next to the driver was free, but the representative, ever solicitous of his charges, had elected to stay next to the family.

  The baby cried and cried. His exhausted, monotonous sobs, and the hemp hood that had been tied under Gyeonghee’s chin, created a vivid picture of the family’s suffering. Her husband chain-smoked throughout the journey, and when a spark from his pipe landed on one of the bundles of clothes, burning a small hole through the fabric, no one moved to brush it off.

  Before he left, the driver had to bend over the engine, coaxing the sputtering machine into life. Even that brief space of time was enough for a multitude of thoughts to come piling into Gyeong-hee’s mind. They popped up one after another, a bewildering procession of disjointed fragments. There were the potsherds she’d used to serve up a meal of sand, when she was still young enough to play at keeping house, and the time she’d scrapped with the neighbor’s son, who’d dared to call her a tomboy. Or that winter vacation in her first year of college, when she arrived home after taking the night train alone across the country, a distance of some thirty ri. “Look at this girl!” her grandmother had exclaimed. “Does she know no fear? She must be possessed by the spirit of some general!” And it was true—with a martyred father to give strength to her own inherent daring, up until now Gyeong-hee truly had lived in ignorance of what it was to fear.

  Yet now fear seemed to govern her entire existence.

  The door to the driver’s cab banged shut and the engine roared into life. The sound scattered Gyeong-hee’s thoughts, and her field of vision narrowed to take in only the window to her side, brightly lit as though someone were seeing them off. Gyeong-hee shifted and coughed as the vehicle jerked forward, trying to dislodge the column of water vapor that seemed to burn behind her breastbone.

  Was it the knife-sharp glance of the representative that made her feel that burning sensation inside her? Or the decorative lanterns strung from the roof of the state department building, which seemed to command her to marshal her thoughts along the proper channel? Her blank gaze shifted, and the square’s two portraits loomed into view: Karl Marx, his features buried in a bristling sea of beard; and Kim Il-sung, his lips set in a stern, disapproving line. Two red “specters” bellowing at Gyeong-hee: “Stop this useless brooding, Comrade! You dare to think your punishment unjust? When you’re given an order you follow it, without exception. Without exception, do you hear? Don’t you know to whom this city belongs?”

  Those menacing, pitiless specters kept Gyeong-hee’s grief inside her and crushed any hope of a reprieve.

  Her limbs began to tremble, and not only because of the September chill. Fear swelled inside her—fear, something which had to be instilled in you from birth if you were to survive life in this country. Now, at last, she had the answer to the riddle, understood the force that had moved a hundred thousand people like puppets on a string. If her husband were to quiz her now on Marx’s most significant theory, how much more seriously, rigorously, confidently she could have answered.

  The truck raced on to the station. On both sides of the road, the clusters of apartment windows mysteriously recalled to her her dream from the night before National Day: the “Rabbit with Three Burrows”…. Though it was close to midnight, Gyeong-hee sensed hundreds of figures hovering at those windows, peering out like rabbits from their burrows, eyes narrowed in accusation. If the Eobi were to give the order, the figures said, they would flock to the square in even less time than before, without exception!

  April 1993

  Life of a Swift Steed

  A cold morning. The hard glint of snow lay over the landscape, while the sky was threaded with billows of smoke, shivering up from the chimneys in brisk puffs.

  Fumbling in his haste, Jeon Yeong-il unlocked the door to the office and rushed inside, straight over to the radiator, where he held out his shaking hands as though in supplication. The telephone was shriek
ing, but he could deal with that after he’d got himself warm. If that was even possible—he’d known corpses to give off more heat than this radiator. The boiler, intended for coal, was now having to run on whatever mix of damp sawdust could be scraped together, clanking and juddering as it strained to fulfill its function. Supplies of coal and firewood had also been cut off for the workers’ housing, meaning the factory’s sole sawdust conveyor was having to feed their fireplaces too, fireplaces that had once seemed heaven-sent, a privilege reserved for those lucky enough to have secured a position at the factory. Now, with the situation growing graver by the day, it was a job which pained you to the marrow of your bones.

  “Damn it!” Yeong-il muttered to himself, feeling sorely put out. On top of the phone’s incessant demands, his hands were stubbornly refusing to thaw; if anything, he was giving off more heat than that damned radiator, his own breath darkening the frost on the window which it had failed to shift. They were getting near to the point when the office would be thankful for the warmth of its workers, as opposed to the other way around. And if the supervisor’s office, reserved for those factory employees with a star on their shoulder and a gun at their belt, had been reduced to this sorry state, what on earth were the rank and file having to cope with?

  “Ah, damn it!” Cursing again at the obstinate telephone, Yeong-il snatched up the receiver.

  “Hello, is this the factory supervisors’ office?” a man’s stentorian voice blasted out of the handset when it was still only halfway to Yeong-il’s ear.

  The man’s severe speech impediment made him instantly recognizable: Chae Gwang, the military police’s chief of communications. Not a man to be kept waiting; and yet, Yeong-il was too damned cold to be bothered with producing a response. Hopefully he could just keep mum, and Chae would get on with whatever he had to say.