by Bandi
“Even monkeys occasionally fall from trees, they say, but how could you be so careless? To bring such a thing into our house, and then to leave it lying around for anyone to see!”
“There are times the monkey falls, but there are also times it only pretends to.”
“But is it true? Is the family going to be deported?”
“Damn it, what did I just say about pretending? Put that back where you found it!”
Only then did Sun-shil realize that this was all a ruse of her husband’s, deliberately designed to gauge the level of Kyeong-hun’s affection for Kim Suk-i—and ideally to disperse it.
Sure enough, Kyeong-hun rose to the bait. A few days later, the three of them had settled down in front of the TV for an after-dinner film, Outpost Line. Not long in, Kyeonghun was heard to mutter something, apparently in response to the action on-screen. His words were muffled, as though spoken to himself, but Yeong-pyo’s sharp ears pricked up.
“It’s the same now as it was back then—class enemies are still cut from the same cloth.”
“So you do have some sense, after all!” Yeong-pyo exclaimed.
“Haha, father, do you really think I’m such a lost cause? It’s just that, you know, I tend to apply our Party’s policy of ‘benevolence and tolerance’ when I look at others.”
“Such a policy is all well and good, but it can’t just be applied indiscriminately; leniency is intended only for those who merit it.” Yeong-pyo’s reproof was mild, his tone sympathetic; such a harmonious conversation between father and son was almost unprecedented.
“Indeed,” Kyeong-hun responded, “and if the Bowibu is to be as effective as possible I think you have to be ruthless in determining who merits the opposite. A bad apple rots the barrel, isn’t that what they say? It’s not enough to crack down on a single individual; the entire family ought to be purged. Families, for example, like—well, it’s a little awkward for me to say this, given the relationship I was recently involved in, but like that of Big Kim Suk-i.”
“Now, now,” Yeong-pyo blustered, “whatever are you—”
“Don’t you think I have eyes in my head, Father?”
“Ach, how could I have been so careless? That document I left on my desk …”
In this way, the two men’s verbal fencing seemed to have ended with the elder on top. As far as Yeong-pyo could see, Kyeong-hun had as much as renounced any connection with Big Suk-i. Only Sun-shil was unconvinced by this apparent triumph. Her husband might have prided himself on his cunning in catching a slippery fish, but to her the fish seemed strangely eager to take the bait, even casting itself up onto dry land without waiting to be reeled in.
Now, judging by recent developments, it was clear that Yeong-pyo had been the one taken in that day—hook, line, and sinker. No matter how much Sun-shil wanted to believe otherwise, there wasn’t a scrap of evidence that might suggest it was the other Suk-i that Kyeong-hun had gotten mixed up with. Why, the pair had never been known to exchange even a casual remark! And yet, even while perfectly aware of this, Sun-shil and Yeong-pyo could not quite bring themselves to relinquish the possibility that it was indeed Little Suk-i. But they knew they were deluding themselves. If nothing else, Kyeong-hun simply wasn’t the type to cast a young woman aside like a bit of old rubbish because his parents were opposed to the match.
Sun-shil’s chest felt suddenly tight. This time, the scene that swam hazily into her head was that of her husband and Kyeong-hun’s eventual clash, which had genuinely threatened to end in a gunshot.
“Hand me my umbrella!” Sun-shil started at this barked command, jerked abruptly back to the present. She turned away from the window and moved to pass her husband his umbrella.
“Where are you off to now?”
“The factory altar,” Yeong-pyo snapped over his shoulder, already halfway out of the door. “The nation is in mourning, even if it that crazy bastard has forgotten it!”
Sun-shil had just finished preparing dinner when Kyeong-hun arrived home, his sopping clothes and squelching shoes making him look as though he’d been put through a wringer. He’d had to stop by each household affiliated with his factory, to distribute that day’s allocation of flowers. Yeong-pyo arrived home not long afterward, having had his own rounds to make—checking in on his agents, who were stationed at every local altar.
“Dinner’s ready!” Sun-shil seemed anxious to get the meal out of the way before a squall blew up, but Yeong-pyo had no time for such niceties. He looked over at Kyeonghun, who, after changing out of his wet clothes and running a comb through his hair, had promptly installed himself on one of the floor’s warm spots and buried his nose in a book. The boy was the picture of innocence, which only served to boil Yeong-pyo’s already hot blood.
“Close that book.” Yeong-pyo’s voice was cold as ice. Kyeong-hun glanced up, tilting his head to one side and widening his eyes in an affectation of puzzled surprise. “You ought to show more care when you go to pick flowers.”
“Oh, but I am careful. What with this recent spate of accidents—”
“Acting, again!”
“Why, Father, whatever do you mean?”
“I had to stand in the meeting room today and have my name dragged through the mud. And not just my name—my whole political career!”
“Really? But surely not because of me?”
“Oh, ‘surely not,’ is it? You worthless brat! You swan around plying yourself with alcohol in this time of national mourning, and have the gall to play the innocent!”
“There must be some misunderstanding; could you be a little clearer?”
“Clearer!” Yeong-pyo whipped the plastic bottle out from underneath the table and slammed it against the table with such force it might have been driven into the wood if it had been made of a harder material. “This seems clear enough! What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’m afraid I can’t think of much. It looks like a perfectly ordinary bottle to me.”
“So perfectly ordinary that you don’t remember drinking out of it? And how about the girl you were drinking with? I suppose you don’t remember her either? The same Kim Suk-i whose family you denounced in this very room? Have I jogged your memory yet?”
“I see. So you heard this from the Bowibu director?”
“You admit it, then!”
“That’s right, it’s all coming back to me now. This bottle … and the rest …” Kyeong-hun gulped, and the sound of his dry throat convulsing made his mother flinch.
“Kyeong-hun!” Sun-shil broke in, hoping to defuse the situation while there was still time. “If you were any other worker who’d stepped out of line, your father would simply punish you and have done with it. You know that, don’t you? It’s for your own good that he’s trying to make you see reason. Isn’t it time you put your shameful discharge from the army behind you and started making something of your life?”
“I understand, Mother, honestly I do. But can’t a man hold his female comrade’s hand when they’re walking along the edge of a cliff? A comrade whom he works with every day?”
“It was Big Suk-i, then?” Yeong-pyo’s lip curled in disgust.
“Yes.”
“So it was all an act, that spiel you came out with while we were watching Outpost Line?” Yeong-pyo ground the words out from between clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry. That was … Forgive me. But I wasn’t the only one acting, was I, Father? You were the one who began it, pretending to have accidentally left a classified document lying around in plain view. You, who’ve never made the slightest misstep in your whole career! How was I supposed to respond? I went along with the performance only because I wanted to reassure you, both of you. I didn’t want you worrying about Big Suk-i.”
“What is there between you two?”
“Well, I can’t see myself marrying her, so you can rest easy on that count. But I can’t just cast her aside, either. She’s someone for whom I feel a deep affection—proper comradely affection, you u
nderstand, all aboveboard—and a great deal of sympathy, too. She has so many talents, yet she’ll never be given the chance to shine. And after all, what was her father’s great crime? Only to say that Kim Jong-il had taken a second wife, which everyone knows is true.”
“Quiet!” The plastic bottle flew through the air and struck Kyeong-hun’s cheek. “You’re a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary! No wonder you get drunk when you should be shedding tears.”
For Kyeong-hun, this appeared to be the final straw. His hand had flown up to his stinging cheek; now it trembled as he held it there, almost imperceptibly mirroring his twitching lips, which he pressed even more firmly together as though battling to hold his emotions inside. Suffering under an equal strain, Sun-shil held her breath and wrung her hands as her gaze flicked nervously between the two men.
After a brief while, Kyeong-hun recovered himself sufficiently to be able to open his mouth and speak in a relatively measured tone, though one which hummed with an under-current of agitation.
“Father, this is too much! I might not be winning any medals for loyalty, but I know the proper conduct for mourning the deceased. Have you ever heard of someone drinking meths?”
“What?”
“Soaking your clothes in methyl spirits is proven to ward off snakes; that’s what was in that bottle I had with me. If you don’t believe me, you can call Mr. Park at the lab right now. He’s the one I borrowed it from.”
“Kyeong-hun!” Choking out her son’s name, Sun-shil pressed his hands between her own. Tears spilled like a shower of rain from her eyes, still bright despite the lines of age.
Witnessing his mother’s distress caused Kyeong-hun’s eyes to tear up in response. All that his “twenty-six years of drama school” had taught him to bury deep inside him now refused to be suppressed any longer
“Don’t you see how miserable it all is? How wretched? People who are so eager to catch others out, they’ll even scrabble around after rubbish like this.” He gestured angrily toward the bottle at his feet. “A sincere, genuine life is possible only for those who have freedom. Where emotions are suppressed and actions monitored, acting only becomes ubiquitous, and so convincing that we even trick ourselves. Look at all these people, sobbing over a death that happened three months ago, starving because they haven’t been able to draw their rations all the while. What about the mother of the child bitten by a snake while he was out gathering flowers for Kim Il-sung’s altar? Perhaps she finds her private grief useful for shedding public tears. Isn’t it frightening, this society which teaches us all to be great actors, able to turn on the waterworks at the drop of a hat?”
“Shut up, you little idiot! Enough of this reactionary nonsense!”
“But those who see forced tears as a sign of loyalty, of solidarity? Aren’t they the real idiots? Surely you know that whatever the play, the curtain always falls in the end.”
A strangled cry emerged from Yeong-pyo’s throat as he flew out of his chair, fumbling at his waist as though in the grip of some violent compulsion.
“What are you doing?” Sun-shil rushed to place herself between husband and son, staring at the former with a look of horror.
“Out of my way!” With one hand, Yeong-pyo thrust his wife aside, while in the other, the metallic gleam of the gun’s muzzle announced its venomous bite.
“Go ahead, shoot,” Kyeong-hun said, standing up and spreading his arms to bare his chest. “Kill me, if that’s truly what you want! But even if you fill this body with bullets, you’ll never kill my wish to live a life fit for a human being!”
A gunshot rang out in reply, and the room was abruptly plunged into darkness. There was a brief shocked silence, broken then by Sun-shil’s keening as she crawled on her knees to where she guessed her son had been standing. Flailing madly, she bumped her shoulder against the table, and something clattered noisily to the floor. The echoes had barely died down when the telephone’s harsh ring made her jump, the sound seeming strangely incongruous.
“Is it a blackout? The garage … Get to the garage! Send cars out to the altars and light them up! Hurry!”
Sun-shil couldn’t tell whether these words were coming from this world or the next. But then she felt a hand clutch hers.
“Mother!” Here he was, her son, bawling like a baby as she felt up his arm to check his shoulder, his head. There was the sound of the front door being flung open and footsteps racing out. The night was pitch-black, the sky free of even a single point of light. Though the rain had finally let up, the wind was howling with renewed vigor. The sound of a hundred whips slamming into the air filled the space between heaven and earth.
Yeong-pyo raced headlong down the stairs and out to the factory’s main gate, where an altar had been set up beneath a large oil painting of Kim Il-sung, adorned with the inscription “We will worship the Great Leader until the sun and moon go out.” It had been installed by the gate, as the company common room was far too small to accommodate the thousands of employees who made a daily pilgrimage of mourning. The cars that had been driven out—on Yeong-pyo’s directive—were already parked in a semicircle, arranged so that the beams from their headlights were best placed to illuminate the altar. There were five of them, lighting up the marble plinth so brightly that each petal on each bouquet could be clearly picked out. A drawn-out chorus of wailing was audible even in spite of the wind’s almighty din.
A fixed complement of mourners was guaranteed at any one time; when one left he or she would be instantly replaced, just as the water level is regulated in an artificial lake. Seeing the ebb and flow around the altar operating just as it should, Yeong-pyo ought to have felt sufficiently at ease to go and sit in one of the cars and get out of the wind. But there was no way he could sit easy at a time like this.
He needed to get a good look at the current crop of mourners. Was it true that they were merely actors, crying fabricated tears? Kyeong-hun’s words still rang shrill in his ears, whipping up a storm of confusion. He pulled the brim of his hat low over his eyes and slipped into the wailing throng. Almost immediately his gaze landed on the mother of Big Kim Suk-i, a painful shock to his already frayed nerves. That she, of all people, would be standing right in front of the altar … What kind of trickery was this?
When he’d had the impulse to conceal himself among the crowd, to assess the sincerity of their grief, wasn’t this woman from Haeju precisely whom he’d had in mind, her husband languishing in a political prisoners’ camp, always complaining that her family was on the brink of starvation? Now, faced with the sight of the real-life woman laying her bouquet on the altar with a heart-rending cry of “Great Leader, Father!” Yeong-pyo trembled. The tears were streaming down her cheeks! It was shocking, appalling, something that Yeongpyo would never have considered possible even if he’d read it in one of his agent’s reports. He felt as though he had stumbled into the presence of a nine-tailed fox, a cunning, treacherous creature who must be avoided at all costs.
Turning and stumbling back, Yeong-pyo was in too much haste to extricate himself from the crowd of mourners to worry about drawing attention to himself. Pain was radiating from his liver, yet he could not have been said to feel it. A shrill whine throbbed in both his ears, as though a flock of cicadas was trapped inside his skull. What he had just witnessed felt as unreal as a dream. Such tears were not to be believed.
If even someone like Big Suk-i’s mother was able to sob convincingly, to cry out “Great Leader!” in a suitably mournful tone … But how were they managing to squeeze out actual tears? Did they carry bottles of water concealed about their person, to splash on their faces when no one was looking?
It’s called stage truth.
Who said that? The voice had sounded like Kyeong-hun’s, but also like that of an old army comrade of his….
Stage truth … As Yeong-pyo dragged himself over to a corner, his feet seemed to move of their own accord, while his mind, unmoored, drifted further from the here and now. That’s right. Anyone who has that can
produce a few tears, even Big Suk-i’s mother. But it usually takes an experienced actor to really pull it off….
After all this time, have you still not figured out that that’s exactly what she is? That voice again—who was it? Could it be that Kang Gil-nam, who had insisted on performing the second improvisation? A woman like her, with forty-five years of acting school under her belt, forty-five years in which to master the only scenarios she’ll ever need: “It Hurts, Haha”; “It Tickles, Boohoo.” And no wonder she’s excelled, with you to train her up. Strict teachers are always the most effective.
Forty-five years? But she can’t be older than forty-five now. And I’m the one who trained her, who taught her the cunning of a nine-tailed fox? Me?
Yes, you, Father. You’ve had fifty-eight years of the same training, after all, and you’ve always been top of your class.
Kyeong-hun, you bastard! I ought to have put a bullet in you just now. I don’t know where you got it from, this insolence, this insubordination … but it has nothing to do with me. Nothing, do you hear me?
You’re too modest, father. You gave a display of your talent only this morning; how to produce a pitcher’s worth of tears from a cup of sadness.
What are you talking about, “this morning”?
In front of the Bowibu director. And it came in handy, didn’t it?
What? I, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know. I don’t …
Yeong-pyo caught his foot on something, stumbled, and fell. Groaning, he struggled to his feet, but seemed to have left his disordered mind scattered over the ground. He stood, his features blank and uncomprehending. The gusting wind tugged at his clothes.
“Eoi, eoi!”
That sound, threaded through the howl of the wind like the keening cry of some water sprite, making the hairs stand up on the back of his neck—could such a mournful wail really have come from Big Suk-i’s mother? Was it possible?