by Bandi
“I declined politely, and began to question her about her condition. She told me that her stomach had been somewhat upset since lunch, and though I hadn’t yet asked her to, she slipped off her blouse, and even pushed down her underskirt a little. She was flaunting her taut breasts and white stomach; no doubt it was the abundance of flesh that had helped them retain a smooth, youthful appearance. I began to examine her with my stethoscope, but could detect nothing untoward. I examined her again by percussion, but the result was the same.
“So I began to put pressure on her internal organs, when she suddenly grasped my wrist with both of her hands, coiled an arm around my waist, and pulled me to her, panting out, ‘Oh Dr. Song, oh Dr. Song.’ I recoiled, shook her off as though she were a caterpillar clinging to my body, and took a step back. At that, she dropped the show. Why had I pulled back? she wanted to know. Because I was afraid of her husband? There was no need. I had no need to worry about that old man, who had eyes only for young girls.
“She panted my name again. With no time to think it through, I fled the room. I banged the gate closed, stethoscope still in hand, then was forced to bend over where I was and spit on the ground. It was her impudence, her haughtiness, even more than her animal lust that made me feel dirtied. Just because she was the wife of a high-up functionary at the redbrick house, she thought she could bend the whole world to her desires, as though she were God. Yunmo! Would I have been able to speak these shameful words to anyone else? So you see, when you came to see me about your son, I was busy dealing with that shame, alone…. I was convinced I had only a few days left before being dismissed from my post as doctor.”
Yunmo abruptly roared with laughter. Song’s eyes goggled in surprise.
“So what you’re saying is, as long as she’s from the red-brick house, a woman can make anyone her ‘comfort man’?”
“Leave off. I didn’t become her sex slave.”
“The redbrick house! That beats everything.” Yunmo pressed his hand over his heart. “How foolish I was when I came to see you then. Such a fool!”
“But haven’t I come to see you now on just such a fool’s errand? In fact, this fire burning inside me … I can’t put it out….”
“Song! Restrain yourself. Things are already in motion. What good does it do to keep tormenting yourself? Here, look at this!” Yunmo picked up the notepad from his desk and held it out for Song to see.
“What is it?”
“Don’t you have eyes in your head? The bean paste factory of N Town returns to normal production.”
“You’re nickname’s already ‘Mr. Bullshit Reporter’; are you really going to tarnish your reputation further by writing such nonsense?”
“But it’s true that, right now, bean paste is fermenting in the factory’s tanks. The redbrick house cooked up a scheme to make use of livestock feed for it. Since the factory’s chief technician, who was the direct cause of the shortage, has been removed, bean paste will have to pour out for all the people of the area to see, no? They have to prove that it wasn’t the Party’s mistake, that it was all the fault of the workers, you see?”
“I see. So that’s how things stand, is it?”
“Right. I only just realized it myself, hearing you say that the chief secretary had twice been summoned to appear in front of the provincial Party committee. The crow flies, and the pear falls, as they say; that’s exactly what’s happened to your uncle!”
“You’re right—it’s obvious.”
“So now where can we take our complaint to? The general court? The legal department of the Administrative Committee? Ha! Constitution, administration, legislation—we both know the redbrick house has all levels of the law tight in its fist.”
“Ah! Why did I ever hang this around my neck?” Song exploded, madly agitated, striking his side where the pocket containing his Party membership card was. “Why did I become a lady-in-waiting at the brick house, of my own accord?”
“Because you were deceived by a mask, a front, like me. Deceived by those slogans—‘Equality’; ‘Democracy’; ‘The People Are the Masters of History’—the ones that looked nice enough on the surface, but had the knife of dictatorship underneath.”
“You’re right. In all of creation, the rule is that the more toxic something is, the more pretty and friendly it’s made to look.”
“That’s the truth. Like poisonous mushrooms!”
“Ah, it’s too much! How can we be sitting on our hands like this, when an innocent man is being brought to harm right in front of our eyes?”
Song snatched at his clothes and tore the buttons off in a scatter. The image of Ko Inshik, who would at that moment be sitting in a cell in handcuffs, rose into Yunmo’s mind, and he hurled himself indignantly from his seat. He opened the curtains and struggled to blink back the tears as he gazed in the direction of the security services prison.
Dark inky clouds were veiling the sky—a storm might have been coming. The curtain fluttered in the strong wind, threatening to tear.
6
The hearing regarding Ko Inshik took place in a public sports ground at the foot of the mountain. From early in the morning, a steady stream of people began to file across the Seongcheon Bridge and into the stadium: a mix of officials, factory employees, and ordinary citizens. Similar crowds were always organized for such events.
Once ten o’clock came around, the judges filed out and took their seats on the specially erected podium. Up until then, the handcuffed Inshik had been made to stand by the vehicle used for transporting criminals, which had been parked to the rear of the podium; now, several security officers dragged him up next to the platform. Presently, the prosecution statement began to be read out. It was not particularly long.
In these difficult times, when the situation of provisions across the country is worsening owing to a cold front of weather, the establishment of a cultivation site to provide the soybean factory with raw ingredients was a matter of significance for the entire town. The municipal Party committee entrusted this task to Ko Inshik. In the early days of his carrying out these duties, Ko Inshik worked with such diligence that his name even appeared in the newspaper. However, his neglect of and irresponsibility toward his work has since become gradually apparent, as has the fact that his initial efforts were a hypocritical attempt to wipe his records clean. No measures whatsoever were put in place to cope with the storms which return each year, and ninety thousand pyeong of the cultivation site has recently been almost completely ruined. As a consequence, the soybean factory’s supply of raw ingredients was cut off, and the citizens of our town have been unable to receive their bean paste rations. Moreover, as the individual in question had hidden himself comfortably away at the cultivation site, the duties he ought to have been overseeing at the factory, including the development of new technologies, have been left to stagnate. The accused has been living in his “sweet kingdom” in the mountains, out of reach of the Party’s control, where his inability to manage even his own men ultimately led to an incident in which one revolutionary comrade died from eating poisonous mushrooms.
What cannot be overlooked is that, despite being sent down from Pyongyang for falsifying his family history, the accused failed to reward the Party’s trust, amply demonstrated by their assigning this extremely important position to an individual with such a record. Rather than displaying the greatest loyalty, which would have been the only appropriate response, the accused in fact harbored discontent and committed the crimes detailed above, thus bringing about hardships for our people which still cause the Party such pain to witness. For that reason, the punishment must be still more severe.
This was the full content of the prosecution statement. There was no defense. Any defense of an antirevolutionary element who had disturbed the tranquillity of the people would itself stand accused, next to the man it had defended. The crowd was perfectly familiar with the way judgments were passed in this country—no one expected a defense.
Seated on the podium
, the chief judge turned to Ko Inshik and began his questions.
“Accused! Do you acknowledge the charges brought against you, Ko Inshik?”
The crowd’s collective gaze shifted to Inshik like the mass surge of a swelling tide. The look on his face just then! His lips twitched soundlessly like those of an idiot, while his eyes stared blankly over the heads of the crowd, in the direction of the town’s central streets. But none could know the exact spot on which his gaze had landed: the municipal Party office—the red mushroom.
“He seems to have lost his senses!” A fluttering swell rose in the stadium, then subsided, like the shiftings of the nighttime sea, an instant later.
“Silence! Accused, are you listening?” No reply.
In spite of his efforts at self-control, Yunmo felt a rasping sound from inside himself push at his tightly closed lips. What answer could Ko Inshik make now? From those early days reclaiming the land, when his eyes had watered at the half-burned charcoal which was all he’d had to use by way of kindling; when he’d injured his hands by pulling up tree roots and rolling rocks away; that early morning when, with a heavy heart, he’d gone in pursuit of the wild boar, picturing the incense sticks his children would be lighting on their mother’s offertory table; that later morning when he’d had a narrow escape from death, opening his eyes on his wooden pillow after being struck down by poisonous mushrooms; those days and days on end when he’d gone out to gather acorns and replace the soil that had been washed away—on all such days, without fail, he had cultivated flowers of conscience unselfishly in his heart!
Those flowers had now been struck by a bolt of lightning, in broad daylight, flattening all their stems—how could Inshik now hope to make them stand upright? He would be lucky if his heart didn’t burst in his chest, causing him to faint in the face of such injustice!
Those who were sitting as close to Inshik as Yunmo was were able to hear him muttering, “There’s one, there’s one,” jerking his cuffed hands for all the world as though he were trying to uproot a weed. Then, seeming pleased at having accomplished some task, he tipped his head back to face the sky and let out a thrilling laugh.
Amplified by the microphone in front of him, that laughter boomed through the stadium, striking a chill into the hearts of the audience. They regarded Ko Inshik more closely, and found that the expression on his face had altered. That face was now frozen rigid, belying the laughter that had just burst from it. Inshik stretched his cuffed hands out in front of him as though trying to grasp something. This time, his voice was neither loud nor soft, a muttering that was also a scream.
“There it is … still there! Please go and pull up that red mushroom. That terrible thing—there! Please, can you hear me?”
The crowd stirred again, and someone on the podium rapped on a table to call for silence.
“What’s happened to him?”
“He must have gone soft in the head.”
“What’s that he said about a red mushroom? What’s he talking about?”
But there was no one in the stadium who could guess what Inshik meant, aside from Yunmo and a couple of Inshik’s fellow workers from the cultivation site. The voice of Inshik scolding the young man in the alpine cap, who had likened the municipal Party office to a ghastly red mushroom, rang out clearly in Yunmo’s ears.
Red mushroom! For Yunmo, those two simple words, though the product of a deranged mind, told of the hundreds and thousands of other words that must have been boiling inside Inshik at that very moment, consuming him like the fires of hell.
Now that Inshik’s snow-white conscience had finally recognized the poisonous mushroom that had put down roots in this land, he was summoning a desperate strength to pull it up from the ground, that mushroom stained with deceit and oppression, with tyranny and pacification.
The announcer went up to the microphone.
“You are hereby informed that owing to the accused’s apparently no longer being in possession of all his faculties, today’s trial is adjourned.” The announcer’s voice was still coming from the speakers when a roiling cry broke from among the crowd.
“Father!”
Inshik’s son and daughter pushed their way through to the front of the crowd in a mad flurry. Song, who had been sitting with them, had tried to restrain them, but in vain. The crowd, who had stood up to leave, all sat down again.
Yet though their father was right there in front of them, the two children still were denied their reunion. Struggling along behind the car for transporting criminals, choking in the black exhaust fumes it was spewing out, the children called helplessly for their father, their voices going to the hearts of those who were watching.
When the crowd had dispersed, one person was left standing beneath the white poplar at the front of the otherwise deserted stadium, a handkerchief clutched in his hand. Yunmo. The tears he had held back while in front of others could no longer be restrained. He cried for Ko Inshik, a man who had sacrificed everything he had, and been rewarded by having even hope taken away from him.
Yunmo’s gaze was directed squarely at the municipal Party office—the red mushroom—which Inshik had clearly been staring at over the heads of the crowd. How many noble lives had been lost to its poison! The root of all human misfortune and suffering was that red European specter that the lion-headed man with the tobacco pipe had boasted had put down roots in this land, the seed of that red mushroom!
Yunmo clenched his fists with crushing strength, unable to tear his gaze from the so-called redbrick house, his heart ringing with the gruesome cry which Ko Inshik had been unable to speak.
Pull out that red mushroom, that poisonous mushroom. Uproot it from this land, from this world, forever!
3rd July, 1993
Afterword
How The Accusation Came Out of North Korea Kim Seong-dong, writer for the Monthly Chosun
The South Korean publication of this piece of fiction, which sharply criticizes and satirizes the North Korean regime, and which is written by a man who still lives and works under that same system, is a historical first—nothing like it has emerged in the sixty-eight years since the peninsula was divided. Though memoirs and pieces of fiction by North Korean defectors, of a similarly critical tone, have indeed been published now and then, these have all been written after their authors’ escape to the free world. No work denouncing the oppressive, antidemocratic regime of North Korea, by a writer still living in North Korea, has ever before been published.
As a manuscript, The Accusation consisted of seven hundred and fifty sheets of paper, each holding two hundred characters. The indentations made by the pressure of the writer’s pencil are plainly visible, while the faded paper indicates the long gestation of the work. It is a collection of short stories, seven in total. Though each treats a different incident, with its own distinct cast of characters, the collection can be thought of as an omnibus, the stories yoked together to one overarching theme—criticism of the Kim Il-sung era.
Each time we come to the end of an individual story, we find a date—“1997.7.3,” for example, written in the Korean fashion with the month preceding the day. We presume that these indicate the date at which the writer completed a given story. “Record of a Defection,” which comes first according to this chronology, is dated December 1989.
Chronologically, the last story in this collection is “Pandemonium.” This story, which strips away the trappings of benevolence to reveal the brutality of Kim Il-sung’s dictatorship, is dated December 1995; it was completed after the death of the self-styled Great Leader. Thus, we can see that Bandi has for a long time been writing fiction criticizing the North Korean regime, which has changed hands from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il, and from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un, whose rule Bandi is currently living under.
Bandi is a member of the Chosun Writers’ League Central Committee, North Korea’s state-authorized writers’ association.* North Korea’s most significant instrument of control over the arts, literature as well as fine art
, is the Chosun Workers’ Party Department of Propaganda and Agitation, of which Kim Jong-il was made director around the time of his being named successor. Writers, for whom affiliation with the Chosun Literature and Art General League is obligatory, receive guidance on suitable topics from the Department of Propaganda and Agitation, a department that also censors their work. The Chosun Writers’ League Central Committee is a literature-specific subsidiary organization of the Chosun Literature and Art General League.
This tightly controlled system means that literary talent is far from the only criterion for becoming a writer in North Korea. As with all prestigious positions there, the most important considerations are family background and social standing. Opportunities for getting work published are few and far between, and there is only a small amount of space allotted for literature in newspapers and magazines, affording those writers who do manage to publish particularly high status.
Kim Sung-min, who now works at the Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio, made his South Korean literary debut by publishing twelve poems in 2004; before defecting, he had been active as a poet and playwright in his native North Korea, where he was also a member of the Chosun Literature and Art General League. The defector Jang Jin-sung, who came to prominence with his 2008 poetry collection Selling My Daughter for One Hundred Won, was another.
In North Korea, the traditional path to becoming a writer involves having one’s work published in a centrally issued newspaper or magazine. Bandi himself trod this path.
He was born in a northeastern province of the Korean Peninsula, Hamgyeong, which is bordered to the north by China and Russia. He was a child when the Korean War broke out, the war which South Korea refers to by the date of its beginning, 6.25, and which the North has dubbed the “Fatherland Liberation War.” Having gravitated toward literature from a young age, Bandi was in his twenties when he first saw his writing published in North Korean magazines and began to make a name for himself.