by Alana Terry
The younger guard returned and unlocked the cell door to hand me a small tin cup full of water. I carried it over and sat down on the floor next to the Old Woman. I propped her head up on my lap and held the cup as she sipped at it. Water dribbled down her chin onto my leg.
“Thank you.” The Old Woman sighed as I felt her moist forehead again.
I looked toward the guards, who continued to hover by the door. “I think she went back to sleep,” I reported.
“Then that is all we can do for now,” said the senior guard. “We will keep water here for you to give her. If she needs anything else, you must let us know.”
An hour later, I was trying to pray when I heard the Old Woman. “My son,” she spoke. The words were slurred. Her eyes were still closed. “My son,” the Old Woman repeated, her body rocking slowly from side to side. “How does a good tree bear such fruit?”
“Grandmother?” I whispered.
“The sheep wears wolf clothes,” the Old Woman mumbled. Drool dripped from the corner of her mouth. “My son … a black sheep … not a wolf …”
I forced myself to sit by her side, but it sent tremors through my backbone to see the Old Woman, who had been a constant pillar of strength and refuge, reduced to such a delirious state.
The Old Woman muttered incoherently for several hours. Eventually, a third guard appeared and handed me an extra blanket and mug of hot tea. I took the gifts in terrified silence. My only friend was hovering at the threshold of death.
There would be no miracle worker to save her.
PART THREE
North Hamyong Province
North Korea
Furnace
“We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.” Psalm 66:12
“Hurry up, filthy prisoners!” the guard shouted at us. The Old Woman had been dead for eight months. Two months after her death I was released unexpectedly from underground detainment, but my eyes still stung in bright lights. The agent’s whip flicked against the back of my prison uniform and grazed my skin. The young girl at my side grabbed my arm.
“I can’t go in there!” She cried out as the flames lurched toward us. She was only a teenager, no older than I was when I first went to work in the garment factory. The guard’s whip snapped through the air a second time and landed on the girl’s back. She fell to her knees with a sob.
“Stand up,” I urged, dragging the prisoner by her elbow. Together, we shielded our faces with our arms and entered the blazing building.
“We’re going to die!” the girl yelled.
“No,” I assured her, “we’ll be fine. That guard’s not coming in here. He won’t hurt you anymore.” As I stared at the leaping flames before us, I knew that it wasn’t the guard the girl was afraid of.
“Hurry!” I called to her, shouting in order to be heard over the roaring blaze. Dozens of prisoners from the garment factory were dispatched with us to put out the flames in the train depot by Camp 22’s Chungbong mine. Eventually, the guards realized it was hopeless to save the building, so they ordered those of us still alive to enter the burning station to salvage the most important documents. I held the young girl’s arm and looked around for the metal file cabinets that contained the bills of sale, shipping orders, and production records that were more valuable to the National Security Agency than the lives of us prisoners.
The smoke burned my lungs, but I couldn’t gasp in enough air to force a cough. Above the howls of the inferno, I heard a loud crackling. A smoldering beam fell from the ceiling, nearly striking my companion’s head.
“We’re going to die in here!” The girl shrieked and dropped to the floor. I turned and knelt down to help her when another prisoner grabbed me from behind.
“There’s no time!” he shouted. “Move!” He jerked me up by my arm and pulled me forward just as the roof collapsed behind me. I turned around and saw a pile of debris, almost as tall as myself, right in the spot where the girl had been kneeling.
“Are you hurt?” questioned the man who saved me. I shook my head. There were no other prisoners in sight. “My name is Shin,” he said. “You better follow me.” The main entrance was completely blocked off by rubble so we crawled farther in. I longed for fresh air, wincing in pain with each short breath of soot and ash.
This was my first time in the train depot. Shin and I eventually made our way to a semi-enclosed tunnel. A current of fresh air howled through, and I coughed so hard that I vomited bile.
When my body stopped convulsing, I looked around and saw a single train track. Ladders and empty crates cluttered the wooden platform where we were lying. “What is this place?” I whispered, resulting in a second coughing fit. I hunched over as my lungs tried to clear out the black soot from the fire.
Shin made his way over to the far side of the station where long shadows hid a pile of crates in almost total obscurity. He turned several empty boxes on their sides and made a small enclosure against a corner of the building. As he worked, Shin beckoned me to come closer. Still too weary to stand, I crawled over and joined him behind the crates.
“What are you doing?”
Shin put his finger to his lips. “They won’t finish sorting through all this rubble for days. If we disappear on the morning train, wouldn’t they simply assume we were dead?”
My heart raced. “You can’t really be thinking of escape,” I hissed before another choking episode seized my body.
Shin patted my back in a feeble attempt to quiet my coughing. “I can’t stay here,” he explained. “I have a daughter. I need to find her.”
“They’ll send you to the detention centers if you get caught,” I warned Shin. “Do you have any idea what they’d do to you there?”
Shin cringed. “I know more about it than you could guess.”
I looked away. What right did this prisoner have to assume that he, or anyone else, had witnessed more heinous crimes than I in those underground torture cells?
I would have voiced my argument but froze when I heard footsteps. Shin pulled me behind the crates, and we both ducked down behind them.
“No one here,” shouted a man.
“Check around,” another voiced sounded from farther back. “Make sure nobody’s hiding by those boxes.” I held my breath, tried to swallow away another cough, and willed the shadows and darkness to cover us both. Our shelter of crates now seemed a shamefully inadequate refuge. Visions of torture back in the underground detainment center ran unchecked through my mind.
The guard approached our makeshift tower. I could glimpse portions of his olive-green uniform through the slats of the crates. He stuck out his toe and gave our structure a half-hearted kick when a gunshot sounded from nearby. Shin and I both jumped, and I’m certain that I gasped aloud, but the guard was already running back toward the smoldering building.
“Catch her!” a voice from within the depot shouted. “Prisoner, stop!”
Someone else called out, “She’s heading for the tracks.”
Two more gunshots rang out, followed by a warbled cry and a thud just a few meters away. I squeezed my eyes shut and begged my lungs to breathe evenly. For a moment there was silence, and then I heard boots approaching the end of the plank. I bit my lip to stifle another cough.
“Is she dead?” a man asked.
“I would say so,” answered the second.
“Should we clean it up?”
“Leave her there. The train will arrive in the morning. It should make her a pretty example for anyone else thinking of escape.”
Still trembling, I listened to the guards’ receding footsteps. I sat in a terrified daze for what must have been at least an hour, but nobody returned.
Eventually, the full moon began its nocturnal ascent. The hoot of an owl interrupted the stillness, and for the first time I realized how cold it was.
“You’re shivering,” whispered Shin. I didn’t say anything. Thoughts of freedom and escape intermingled with the dread of discovery and detainm
ent. “Please,” Shin continued, shifting his weight, “let me give you my coat.” Before I could react, Shin wrapped a makeshift burlap jacket around my shoulders. His hand brushed against my cheek, and he cleared his throat.
I thought about Shin’s words: “They won’t finish sorting through all this rubble for days. If we disappear on the morning train, wouldn’t they simply assume we were dead?”
Would they? It sounded more like wishful thinking than trustworthy logic to me. But if I went back to my unit at camp, wouldn’t the guards punish me? Wouldn’t they assume I tried to help the prisoner whose body now lay within a few meters of my handmade refuge? I thought about faking an injury from the fire, but the inner building was already searched. Who would believe me?
Fear kept me crouched behind the crates. I didn’t want to escape with Shin. I knew it would never work. But I couldn’t forget the Old Woman’s words that continued to beckon to me eight months after her death: “You have the seal of freedom upon your forehead.” The Old Woman had been so convinced that I would one day throw off my prisoner uniform and escape the confines of Camp 22. “God Almighty will himself provide you safe escort beyond prison walls.” In spite of the Old Woman’s confidence, my fear of punishment was just as strong a restraint as Camp 22’s electric fence.
I wasn’t willing to flee, but I knew it was too late to return to the dorm. The self-criticism sessions were probably halfway done by now. And so I waited.
Wishing I were safe with my unit, I begged the darkness to conceal me and the dawn to arrive quickly.
Light of Dawn
“The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.” Proverbs 4:18
There are some sounds that are so sweet, so sacred in the recesses of my mind, they will always remain with me: my father’s confession in the Hasambong precinct building, the Old Woman’s hymns of praise, the train’s whistle as Shin and I escaped Camp 22 crouched hidden in a coal car.
For the first time since I was a young girl of twelve, I was outside the heavily patrolled borders of the camp. Yet as I hid in the train car that raced me away from my prison of nine years, I knew the road ahead of me held many dangers.
It was just before dawn, and there was not enough light in the coal car to allow me to study my fellow runaway. I thought about our conversation last night, when Shin and I sat side by side behind our makeshift shelter of crates in the train station. Shin spoke briefly of his young daughter. He arranged safe passage into Yanji, China for her eight months earlier.
“My wife is dead,” Shin explained in the darkness. “My little girl is all I have left.”
Based on his appearance and speech, I tried to guess Shin’s age. He was skinny but not yet emaciated; in spite of his internment at Camp 22, he still appeared to have most of his health and vigor. I wondered about his past, but Shin remained elusive. I suspected he was well-off, both financially and politically, before his arrest. I figured that sending a minor to China safely required significant bribe money and appropriate contacts. Shin’s burlap coat revealed a resourceful survival instinct. Although he didn’t become a prisoner until sometime after his daughter’s escape, Shin seemed familiar with the train depot’s inner workings. When the train arrived hours before sunrise that morning, Shin knew the precise time that we could emerge from our hiding place, when both the conductor and the guards were preoccupied. Right before we slipped into one of the coal cars, Shin opened the door easily in spite of its complicated locking system.
Because Shin was risking detainment, torture, even execution at the hands of the National Security Agency in order to be reunited with his daughter, it was obvious that he was a brave and devoted father. Yet how he coordinated his escape with a fire in the train depot, how he became so familiar with the minute details of train depot procedures after only a few months of imprisonment, or why he chose to put himself in even more danger by inviting me to flee Camp 22 with him, I could only wonder.
Shin told me that the train ride to the Kimchaek steel mill would take about three hours. I was exhausted, but even once we were relatively safe in one of the coal cars heading away from Camp 22, I still couldn’t sleep. Shin and I sat side by side behind large crates of coal, with no room to stretch our legs. My neck and shoulders ached.
“You should rest,” Shin advised. “Once we arrive in Kimchaek it’s a long journey to the Chinese border.”
Although my body was exhausted, my mind raced as fast as our train to freedom. Yesterday, I woke up in the dorm with my unit, hoping to complete my twelve-hour shift at the garment factory with minimal discomfort. Now here I was, still wearing my prisoner’s clothes, preparing to follow a stranger all the way from Kimchaek to the northernmost region of North Hamyong, where we would try to cross the Tumen River into China.
“You can’t sleep, can you?” Shin finally asked.
“My mind won’t slow down,” I confessed.
“When I was a boy traveling to the coast with my family,” Shin began, confirming my suspicions that he came from a wealthy heritage, “my father would tell us stories. Perhaps you could tell us one to help the time pass more pleasantly.”
“I don’t know many stories.” I wished that my childhood included opportunities to learn the tales that a respectable lady might tell her traveling companion.
Shin cleared his throat. “You do know one story.” From where I sat, I tried to make out Shin’s face in the early light of dawn.
“Song Chung-Cha,” Shin implored, although I never told him my family name, “will you tell me who Jesus Christ is, and how it was that eight months ago my daughter was healed by his power?”
Haunted
“To what can I liken you, that I may comfort you, O Virgin Daughter of Zion? Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?” Lamentations 2:13
For some time, the only sound was the loud droning of the train’s engine and the protest of its heavy wheels over the tracks. Finally, I found my voice.
“That was you?” I squeaked, remembering the Old Woman’s nervous visitor the night before she died.
Shin nodded. His face, still covered in soot from the train depot fire, was now visible in the dim morning light. He took my hand in his. I recoiled from his touch.
“When did you become a prisoner?”
Shin lowered his gaze. “I never was a prisoner.” He spoke to the floor.
I stared at the detention guard, trying to understand his words. Little by little, what was at first enshrouded in mystery became clear: Shin’s relative health and strength, his familiarity with the mining depot, his knowledge of the train schedule.
“And the fire?” I didn’t mean for my voice to quiver as much as it did.
“I needed a distraction if we were to escape,” Shin admitted. “It was for my daughter.”
My empty stomach churned. “But those people …” I thought about the young girl whose body was probably still buried underneath a pile of burnt rubble.
Shin stared at me. I was shocked that he could raise his eyes to meet mine. He didn’t flinch or blanch. My body grew rigid in fear as I understood exactly who Shin was and at what price he bought our freedom.
“How could you?” I felt dizzy. Even though I was sitting, I reached out and held onto a crate of coal to steady myself.
“You don’t have a child,” Shin explained. Perhaps if I met Shin three years later, I would have understood his words. But that day, when the idea of having a daughter of my own to love and protect was as distant as the Chinese border itself, I found no sympathy to offer this blood-stained detention guard.
“You sacrificed dozens of innocent lives just so you could escape!” I protested.
Shin winced and swallowed so hard I could hear his throat working. “Please understand.” He reached his hand out toward me.
I slapped Shin away and tried to push my body as far from him as possible. “Don’t touch me!”
“Please,” Shin implored. “
It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there that day. I had no part of it.” The fact that Shin even knew the reason for my violent reaction only increased my panic. I began trembling as memories of bodies – so many bodies, all of them sweaty and filthy and defiling – reached out from my past and grabbed hold of me once again.
“I wasn’t there,” Shin insisted. “I was at home that day with my little girl.”
I knew what Shin was trying to do. He was trying to tell me that he wasn’t really one of them, that although he wore the officer’s uniform, he didn’t belong to that group of beasts in the detention center who mocked God, heaven, and everything holy the day the Old Woman died. Shin wasn’t the kind of officer who would defile a corpse just hours after death, tempting the Almighty to avenge himself on all of humankind right then. While Shin’s comrades swarmed and tormented me, Shin was at home, thanking an unknown deity for his daughter’s miraculous healing.
Trapped with Shin in the speeding coal car, I never felt so abandoned: by the Old Woman whose unexpected death left me alone and defenseless at the hands of boorish beasts, and by God who took her away and did nothing as I was mistreated in the same cell where I once found such refuge. I even felt betrayed by Shin, the man I imagined was my deliverer but who turned out to be no different than those creatures who abused me the day the Old Woman died.
I feared I might either kill Shin or die of panic before we ever reached Kimchaek. Shin’s hands that were trying to comfort and calm me were no different than the hands of the many officers who misused me one after another following the Old Woman’s death. I tried to push him away, scratching at his face, no longer able to separate the present from that morning eight months ago.
When the Old Woman died, a stagnant dread fell upon the entire detention center. Everyone, including myself, waited in silence for some supernatural display of power and vengeance. The Old Woman’s body was left untouched, and officers gathered around the door to our cell in rapt attention. I wondered if an earthquake would split the ground to swallow them alive or if lightning and heavenly fire might find its way to the bottom floor of the concrete structure.