by D. B. John
Jee-min chased these questions around in her head, constructing and discarding endless scenarios for what had happened on that beach, hardly sleeping, until the morning came when she realized she would go insane if she didn’t act on her hunch. She herself would go to South Korea. She mentioned nothing of her motive to her parents, not wanting them to go through the agony all over again if she was wrong, but she did not think she was wrong. Soo-min was alive. She knew it. Instead, she told them it would give her comfort to see that beach with her own eyes, and Han agreed to take her. The visit to Inspector Ko, however, Jee-min contrived to make alone.
Inspector Ko’s wife had opened the door. The house was in a leafy residential street on a hill overlooking the port at Incheon, not far from where the ferries to Baengnyeong Island departed. Jee-min was shown through to a veranda fragrant with jasmine and tomato vines. A hibiscus looked extravagantly purple against the azure sky. Inspector Ko was sitting in a cane chair. Jee-min bowed to him.
He expressed his sympathies and condolences. It had been his final case before retirement, he said. “Your poor sister, and that boy, with their futures ahead of them …” He poured her a cup of jujube tea. He had a tough, melancholic face. His hair was fine and white, and cropped very short, like a lawn after an early frost. “To drown like that, although …” He paused, stirring his cup. “I admit that even I had my doubts at the time. The sea was calm. They were both strong and fit.”
“They didn’t drown,” Jee-min said firmly. I believe they’re alive. I feel my sister’s presence. I’m not imagining it. I want the case reopened.”
Inspector Ko studied her over the rim of his cup.
“You … think they might have been abducted?”
A shadow crossed Jee-min’s face. This was a possibility she had tried not to think about.
He fell silent for a while, watching his tea cool, weighing what he was about to say. “Sadly I can’t even offer you that hope, small comfort though it would be. Your sister and that boy never boarded the ferry back to Incheon. Nor did they leave in another boat. Baengnyeong Island lies in a sensitive area—just twenty kilometers from the coast of North Korea. Very little shipping is allowed near it and the coast guard reported no boats in the area on the evening your sister disappeared.” He sipped his tea and squinted into the horizon. The port of Incheon, sparkling under the noon sun, was dotted with container ships. “If someone abducted your sister and the boy, they’d have to have done it right under the noses of the coast guard.” He looked at Jee-min with pity. “And I think that’s unlikely. I am deeply sorry to say it, but my conclusion hasn’t changed. They drowned.”
Before Jee-min could speak, the veranda door slid open. Inspector Ko’s wife was handing him an envelope.
“Ah. Yes.” He passed the envelope to Jee-min. It was sealed and marked with a case number. “The island’s local pastor found this on Condol Beach last week. Spotted it in the mounds of seaweed that wash up there. He handed it in to the police station. It matched the description you gave.”
Inside the envelope was a clear plastic evidence bag and inside that was a fine silver chain. The tiny tiger was corroded to green by seawater. The clasp was broken.
When Jee-min came to, Inspector Ko was fanning her face with a newspaper. She felt the wooden floor of the veranda hard against her ear, and had a sideways view of a glazed plant pot. She turned slowly over onto her back and stared at him, feeling a noise rising inside her chest, which emerged through her mouth as a howl. Her body began to tremble and refused to stop. She felt a crippling, agonizing wound, as if her heart had been torn and one half wrenched from her. Nothing had prepared her for the pain of the world she was now in.
Her twin was dead.
Jee-min returned home hollowed out, utterly changed. Seeing that necklace without its owner shattered her belief in the most shocking way. She was forced to confront the fact that she had deluded herself into believing the impossible.
She had no true identity separate from her twin. Soo-min had been the completed half of Jee-min’s being. The “we” that formed her self was destroyed. There was no real concept of “I.” She was now a half person with no idea how to navigate the world. Soo-min was dead, but she remained imprinted in Jee-min’s body, in her heart, in her soul. She would forever be living with a ghost.
In September the following year she enrolled in her first semester at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but she was now disembodied from her own life and from those around her. She was overtaken with tiredness and unable to engage with anyone, or to care. She stayed in her dorm and skipped lectures and meals. She was never seen in the hall cafeteria or the common rooms. People who tried speaking to her saw a young woman whose mind was far away, sweeping the rippling surfaces of something dark and fathomless. She had no grounding. She was weightless, floating in black empty space. Gone was the open personality that made people instantly smile when they saw her. She had lost her curiosity, her friendly manner, her positive attitude. She withdrew deep into herself. Her friends drifted away. She had given up hockey. She had closed the lid of the piano and wouldn’t open it again for years. Even her name, Jee-min, seemed to fade like a memory, until she no longer thought of herself by that name. To the outside world, and to herself, she was Jenna.
By Christmas of her first semester, her tutor had referred her for psychiatric counseling.
Jenna spent two months at an institution secluded among the hills and oak woodlands of West Virginia. The psychiatrist diagnosed a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The numbness and disbelief and survivor’s guilt she was feeling, the man told her, were a vital part of the grieving process and needed to be experienced, stage by stage. “Going over and over an event beyond your control is a normal reaction. It shows that your mind is trying to come to terms with a massive change.”
Every night she was present with Soo-min on that beach. She held her hand and walked through every moment with her in exhaustive detail. Every heartbeat, every blink of the eyes, every footstep in the sand down to the water’s edge. She changed the dialogue, the timing, the angles, but no matter how many times she hit Replay and went through it all over again, the end was always the same. Soo-min drowned.
“It may take many years, but time will heal,” the psychiatrist told her. And when he said this Jenna regarded him coldly. She knew it was a lie. Time was simply a sentence she would serve until she died.
Her supervising professor was surprised to see her again before the end of the spring semester, but Jenna had already decided that work would be her coping strategy. The prospect of a long leave of absence—free time for her mind to implode—filled her with dread. Work was her refuge and her salvation. She began insulating herself from her pain through study, ignoring the world unless it concerned her studies. She studied from the moment she sat down for breakfast until the books and papers slipped from her hand as she fell asleep in bed. She straightened her hair, and with her weight loss looked quite different from her former self, Jee-min. When it was pointed out to her that she was neglecting her fitness she took up endurance running, which required no team or company, and bought a new loose-fitting white dobok for taekwondo. She trained alone in the early morning when the gym was deserted, practicing her palm strikes on the standing bag and working up a sweat with her side kicks and spinning kicks, stretching and focusing between each form. She liked what she thought of as the “tao” of taekwondo, where power came from speed and strategy, not strength and aggression.
By the time she had graduated summa cum laude she had already been accepted for postgraduate doctoral research. Her thesis was so organized that by the time she had completed it early she had already published several well-received papers on East Asian geopolitics in academic journals. Her peers were taking note of her talent. When she applied for a teaching position at Georgetown, the college indicated to her, without actually saying so, that she had no real competition for the post: it was hers.
That year Douglas
died of liver cancer. He had ignored calls to stop drinking; his health had declined sharply and he hadn’t seemed to care.
“Just you and me now,” Han said to her in the strange girlish voice she had adopted. She and Jenna had swapped roles. Her mother had become infantilized by the losses. It was Jenna who had to keep an eye on her and check on her every week. Han developed an obsession with finding Jenna a match, as if this were a final maternal service she had to fulfill before she, too, faded away.
That day on Inspector Ko’s veranda marked a boundary that divided Jenna’s life as distinctly as geological time in layers of rock. Before it, events had sequence and clarity; after it, everything blurred together. Slowly she carved out an existence. She saw Dr. Levy once a week. She visited her mother once a week. Seasons changed; semesters, students came and went. She took prazosin to alleviate the nightmares, but mostly they continued, the same dream, over and over on an endless loop. The boy plays his guitar for her sister. The two of them are bathed in a golden light. Darkness falls and they walk hand in hand toward the sea. The waves rise, black and viscous, and then one enormous wave, monstrous, crushing. Soo-min opens her mouth to scream, but the sound that comes out is a ringing bell. It sounds again and Jenna awakes to realize the hotel telephone is ringing next to her bed.
For a moment she has no idea where she is. Dazed, she answers it.
“Dr. Williams? I’ve called at a bad time?”
“No.”
“This is Mrs. Akiko Ishido.” The voice is Japanese and as clear and thin as porcelain. “Could I trouble you to meet me at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in twenty minutes? I don’t have much time, and I know you’ve traveled far to talk to me.”
6
Hyesan
Ryanggang Province, North Korea
It was still dark when Mrs. Moon left the village. The open truck was crowded with women muffled against the cold, and was stuck in first gear. The thing was Soviet made and older than she was. She clenched her teeth as they descended agonizingly along hairpin bends, squeezed her eyes shut when they swung out over pine-clad precipices. Soon the road wound through foothills pimpled with graves that made long shadows in the dawn’s light.
They turned another bend and she had a sudden, steep-angle view of Hyesan, spread out along the valley basin like some vast cemetery. Hundreds of squat houses were separated by dirt alleys and dark streets. Smoke from thin flues mingled with a white mist coming off the Yalu River. Mrs. Moon shuddered. To the north she could make out the bronze colossus of the Great Leader standing with his back toward China. She squinted at him through the morning sun. From here you’re only as big as my thumb. Her cataracts were getting worse.
Hyesan was the only city she’d visited in years, and it looked like the ass-end of nowhere, even to her. Cratered roads, an ox pulling a cart. A few shabby apartment towers with cracked walls rising above the houses. Men sitting peasant style on the edge of the road doing nothing, waiting for nothing. A silent, once-famous factory.
She walked the last block to the city center, stopping to wash the dust from her face in a ditch at the side of the road. She was drying herself with her apron when she saw sudden movement in the corner of her eye. Two children, one in a filthy army coat many sizes too large, were right behind her. “Off with you!” she yelled, and grabbed her basket before they could swipe it. She would have to keep her wits about her. There were kotchebi on every corner, the vagrant children who flocked like swallows at planting time, picking pockets and snatching bags. For protection she joined the end of the line of factory workers marching to work.
The city center was a broad square on which were located the main train station, the state bank, a beauty parlor, a pharmacy, a hard-currency store where illegal money-changers hung about like flies, and one imposing colonnaded edifice, the city bureau of the Party, decked with a slogan in massive red letters that dominated the square. KIM JONG-IL IS ALL-EMBRACING OF THE PEOPLE, LIKE THE HEAVENS!
She entered the gates of the train station, and immediately found herself in another world. The goods yard buzzed with activity. Merchants shouting in Mandarin heaved huge sacks of goods. Weather-beaten ajummas stood about gesticulating over prices. Two teenage soldiers patrolled with rifles on their backs. About fifty stalls, some with awnings made from blue Yankee rice sacks, were arranged in aisles, with the cries of swooping birds joining those of hundreds of women traders.
“Sassayo!” Come and buy.
Mrs. Moon covered her nose and mouth. Her boots felt tacky on the concrete. She passed tarpaulin mats glistening with dog meat, pork cuts, poultry. Mounds of potatoes reached as high as her waist. Anything that wasn’t food was covered in Chinese script. Detergents, crockery, electrical appliances she couldn’t name. Money was changing hands everywhere she looked. Faces were lit by money. There was an edginess, too, an urgency, as if all this enterprise could be banned at any moment on a whim from Pyongyang. A couple of street informers loitered, watching, eavesdropping. She could spot them a mile off.
At the end of an aisle she found a noisy open-air canteen where customers sat hunched over bowls of hot rice soup. Yellow steam rose from pans simmering on portable gas burners, and she suddenly realized she was hungry. She would eat something first, then find a buyer for the Choco Pies.
A voice behind her said, “Ajumma, something for those wrinkles?”
She turned to see a grandmother gesturing with a paper fan to a display of putty-colored Koryo remedies. Bottles of dried fungi, deer’s placenta paste, every kind of useless goatshit. Wrinkles indeed.
“How much to rent a stall?” Mrs. Moon said.
“Five thousand won, dear,” the woman said, fanning the canteen’s steam away.
“A month?”
“A week.” She smirked at the shock on Mrs. Moon’s face. “There are cheaper spots nearer the loudspeaker.”
As she waited for her bean-paste stew Mrs. Moon’s mind was working. Five thousand won! Who had that kind of money? Tae-hyon earned more than she did, but his wage was two thousand won a month, and that was when he was actually paid. He hadn’t worked since the coal mine flooded, and the ration coupons they gave him weren’t worth a bird’s fart.
A steaming bowl was slapped down on the table in front of her. She sniffed it. It smelled tangy and fresh. She took a mouthful. It was good. Across the crowded area she noticed two other makeshift canteens like this one, run by traders competing for customers. Good food in a place like this … A small girl in filthy rags darted under the table, snatched up a string of gristle, and ran off.
“One hundred and fifty won, ajumma,” said a young woman with a money belt, taking Mrs. Moon’s empty bowl. Mrs. Moon felt in the pocket of her apron and froze.
Her money was gone.
Frantically she checked another pocket. Empty.
“Kotchebi,” the young woman said with feeling. “Those kids are everywhere …”
Mrs. Moon delved into her basket, pulling the cloth away with her heart in her mouth, but then breathed easily. Her treasure was still there.
“I can pay with this,” she said, holding up a Choco Pie.
The young woman’s eyes widened at the sight of the red wrapper. She pushed Mrs. Moon’s hand down, out of sight.
“Are you sure?” she said, furtively accepting the Choco Pie and slipping it into her money belt. She lowered her voice. “If you’ve got any more of those, ajumma, I’ll give you twenty yuan each for them.”
Hard currency? Without blinking Mrs. Moon said, “I was thinking thirty yuan each.”
In truth she had very little idea how much a Chinese yuan was worth. But the young woman had an honest face and Mrs. Moon had a talent for reading faces.
“How many’ve you got?”
“Ten.”
The young woman put down the empty bowls, ignored a man shouting an order for food, and did a quick sum on a scrap of newspaper. She was small and slender, with large, attractive eyes marred by a slight cast in one of them. Her hair was permed
in curls and tucked into a sunflower-yellow headscarf. Her feet were so small she wore girls’ shoes.
“It’ll take me a few minutes to get the cash. Here …” She went over to the kitchen area and returned with a portion of soondae dipped in chili flakes. She smiled sweetly at Mrs. Moon and gave a small bow. “Have this while you wait, ajumma. My name’s Ong, but everyone calls me Curly.”
Mrs. Moon vacated her place on the bench and sat in the sun against the iron column of the bridge. She could see this was the low-rent end of the market—the traders had no stalls. They arranged their goods on straw mats on the ground. She ate the soondae slowly, savoring the burn of the chili, the way it made the blood sausage edible. Above her head a quavering voice issued from the loudspeaker, to a background of stirring music. “… Fighting against thousands of enemies, braving snowfall and starvation, the red flag fluttering before the rank …” To her right, she watched crowds gather on the platform to meet a train from Kanggye, which was clanking in, couplings bumping, trailing sparks from the overhead cables and bringing a reek of latrines and scorched copper.
Curly returned, out of breath, and put three red notes into her hand. The Choco Pies were sold. “If you have anything else from the village below,” she whispered, “you know where to find me.” She winked and left. Mrs. Moon stared at the notes in her hand.