The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “I was wondering if you were home. The world has turned upside down. Haven’t you heard?”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “East Germany has called for the fall of the Berlin Wall and declared free movement.” He began to sob into the phone.

  I was overwhelmed by the news, even as I felt the grief of my old artist friend. “We, too, will be as one. You see? No power can keep a nation divided.”

  Yun told me that scenes of national reunification were playing out on television at that very moment, that the Berlin Wall was coming down and Germans were pouring into either side.

  I tossed aside my pen and got to my feet. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Everyone found it hard to contain their tears. A Korean student brought a newspaper with the headline “THE BERLIN WALL HAS FALLEN,” and underneath, in red: “Berlin is Berlin again!” Uh Soo-gap called me, sounding excited, and said he was at the Korean European Council for Democratic Activism offices but would come and pick me up. First he went ahead and took photos of Brandenburg Gate for the newsletter. Kim Sung-kyung and Yang Young-mi arrived to take me to the site.

  We had seen some advance signs. Countless East Germans had requested asylum in the West over the summer, and groups of asylum-seekers kept arriving to the West via Hungary. There had been a demonstration demanding free movement in Leipzig, and just a month before, another march of hundreds of thousands in East Berlin.

  The street, usually empty in the middle of the night, was backed up with cars trying to make their way toward the city center. Kim Sung-kyung skillfully drove through back alleys, trying to get as close to Tiergarten as possible. The cars were filled with young people cheering and tooting on horns like at a soccer match. The whole city seemed awake. Waves of Berliners moved toward the city gates. Whenever the cars stopped, the people in the vehicles smiled and waved peace signs at each other. These were not the cold, staid Germans we’d grown used to. We decided to park the car and join the tide of people instead.

  The thin fog soon turned into a light rain. We passed the Reichstag, which still bore traces of the fire in 1933, and came upon a section of the Wall that had been torn down. People and vehicles from East Germany were pouring through, to the loud welcome and applause of the West Germans who made way for them. In the churning crowds were people handing flowers to each other, young couples with children on their shoulders, lovers holding each other close, and old people looking around with amazed smiles on their faces. The boxy cars of the East mingled with the sleek sedans of the West amid echoing cheers.

  Some impatient West German youths were attacking the Wall with sledgehammers, taking turns, crowds of them perched on top of other sections like birds on a wire. The people brought out wine and champagne, pouring glassfuls for each other and sprinkling them over the Wall. I looked around. We three were the only Asians in the crowd. I kept wiping my eyes with my sleeve; like the song goes, I couldn’t tell if my eyes were wet with tears or the misty rain. Why did I weep? Any Korean with a heart would have wept in that moment. The three of us walked for hours among the intermingled West and East Berliners flowing through the streets, all the way to Breitscheidplatz where Europa-Center was. Kim Sung-kyung didn’t worry about his car abandoned in the street. Who cared about that stupid piece of junk right now? We came to Kurfürstendamm in the middle of West Berlin around three in the morning. The plazas and roads were still crowded with people, and every café was full to bursting.

  Walter Momper, the mayor of West Berlin, was broadcasting a moving speech. “Today is the very day we have dreamed of for twenty-eight years. Borders can no longer divide us.” He praised East Germany for opening its borders to both East and West Germans. “No one needs to travel to a third country anymore. Many of us will now visit East Germany, and there will be much to discuss. That is why I beseech all citizens of Berlin to extend a warm welcome to our East German guests. We are now going for the first time to a country we have only seen on television.”

  We got to the bar where we had promised to meet Uh Soo-gap and shouted over the noise as we discussed what had happened. Everyone said they had started crying before realizing what they were feeling. East Germany was not an ideal society, but at least it served as a counterweight for West Germany, and now wouldn’t the West lose its caution and do whatever it wanted? No, hadn’t the West patiently put in the effort over the years toward changes in the East? But look at what South Korea was doing with the National Security Act, whereas West Germany’s government had allowed its citizens to visit East Germany and to meet as much as possible with East Germans, in a bid to encourage East Germans to gradually change and find it impossible to continue without opening their borders. The arguments went on and on. In any case, watching the limits of humanity crumble is always a wonderful thing. If flowers are blooming in the valley over there, might they bloom in this valley, too? But East Germany was not North Korea and West Germany was not South Korea. I had a lot to drink that night and ended up quite tipsy.

  Berlin DAAD’s Barbara Richter said we needed to meet, as she had something urgent to discuss with me. Barbara was a cultural administrator in her fifties, a heavyset woman with a kind smile, your typical German auntie. She visited me when I first moved into my apartment to check whether I needed anything, and even took me out to dinner to congratulate me. The moment I stepped into her office, she began talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall in her accented English and said that change was sure to come to Korea as well, her eyes pink and welling with tears. She said that the Korean president was going to visit and that there were things we needed to discuss. The gist of it was that their invitational program normally included the family of the invitee, meaning that my family should come to Berlin and stay with me. They, along with the Academy of Arts, had tried to invite them, but the Korean embassy responded that they were forbidden from leaving the country. They therefore wanted to ask the German president, Richard von Weizsäcker, to mention my family’s situation to the Korean president. Their proposal and my petition would be sent to both the South Korean president’s chief of staff and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was deeply moved by her offer. I wrote down the names and birthdates of Myoung-su and our son, and promised to write up a petition.

  President Roh Tae-woo, who was on a European tour, was visiting Germany from November 20 to 22. His North Korean policies were being put into effect. After the visit, I received a letter from President Weizsäcker’s office: the German leader had been informed of my situation and had asked President Roh to allow my family to leave the country, which he had agreed to. I called Barbara. She shouted with joy that her offices had received a similar letter. She said the German embassy in Korea was going to begin the process of bringing my family to Germany.

  In Korea, the Manhae Prize ceremony for my novel The Shadow of Arms was held without me. But the very day before, the ANSP announced that they had arrested, searched, and were interrogating the poet Lee Si-young, publisher of the Quarterly Changbi that had run my North Korea travelogue in its winter edition. Intending to quash any further publication of my travelogue, they even arrested my editor Kim Igoo along with Lee Si-young. The ANSP also carried out a search of the Changbi Publishers offices. This raid deployed seventeen agents to confiscate my manuscript pages and galleys, contracts for the book version and receipts, the airmail envelope I had used to send the manuscript from Germany through Professor Takasaki Sōji, and my acceptance speech for the Manhae Prize that I had faxed over.

  Changbi published a statement that said: “This investigation is a gross interference with the people’s right to know and with freedom of expression”; many newspapers published op-eds about the North Korea travelogue and the arrest of my editors. They opined that the South Korean people had the right to know the objective truth about life in North Korea and that the freedoms of the press and academia could not be interfered with by the one-sided judgment of the government. The Association of Writers for National Literature, which had entered prote
st mode with the imprisonment of the poet Lee Si-young, also put out a petition saying that sections of the travelogue had already been published by Shindonga and that to arrest Lee was an inconsistent application of the law. The ANSP retorted that the first and second parts in Shindonga had heavily edited out the positive aspects of North Korea, but the third part “praised North Korea” to the point of Shindonga refusing to publish the travelogue. The newspaper op-eds were suspicious of how much a work can be altered by mere editing, and asserted that it was difficult to tell whether the Quarterly Changbi was being prosecuted for bad editing or for threatening the security of the government and the survival of the nation simply by printing and selling a North Korea travelogue. The press also highlighted the fact that arresting Lee Si-young for “aiding in the creation, distribution, communication, and contact of works that benefit the enemy” was inviting controversy regarding freedom of expression and equality under the rule of law.

  To make matters worse, I learned that my son, Ho-jun, had been arrested and interrogated by ANSP agents for trying to organize a “politically impure organization” at his high school. I had worried that my visit to the North might have consequences for my ex-wife and children but was hoping against hope that their lives would remain peaceful and that they would not be affected by my political activities. When I phoned her to find out exactly what had happened, Hee-yun burst into tears, and my own emotions became so intense that I could not find the words to speak. The National Association of Teachers for Democratic Education, which had started in Gwangju when teachers had entered the democracy movement, had inspired high school students to create a high school student representatives association and elect nine national representatives, of which Ho-jun was one. It emerged that all of the organization’s officers had been taken in for interrogation and some of them arrested. All had been expelled by their schools. Ho-jun was in second year at the time. He took his high school equivalency exams after his expulsion and entered university but, like his father’s, his teens became his lost years.

  I discussed Ho-jun with Barbara Richter and she suggested adding him to the invitee list, as it would be better for him to study music in Germany. I talked it over with his mother, but he was not allowed to leave the country anyway, and he did not want to be a burden to me. Maybe it was because he had grown up among Gwangju activists, who were constantly in and out of the house, but Ho-jun was always deeply considerate of others and was, as they put it, a conscientious soul.

  I began to see many visitors in Berlin as the year ended and the dismantling of the Cold War gathered pace with the fall of the Wall. First came a call from Chung Kyung-mo. Lonely in a strange land, my heart stirred at the prospect of his visit, as if I were about to be reunited with family. Choi Young-sook drove me to Schönefeld Airport to pick him up. Chung wore a thick coat and a dashing beret. He carried no luggage. He had taken the Russian national carrier Aeroflot but his bags had not arrived at the Moscow transfer. They did not arrive in Berlin for the whole time he was there and, in the end, he had to make arrangements for them to be sent on to Tokyo. Choi and I showed him around Berlin, taking him to the broken Wall and East Berlin, and in the evening held a welcome party with the Korean European Council for Democratic Activism and the Women’s Group members.

  After Chung returned to Japan, I received a call from someone speaking carefully into the phone. To my surprise, it was Yeom Mu-ung, the critic. We had been close friends ever since we were young. Yeom was two years older but a decade ahead in terms of patience and consideration for others, qualities entirely absent in myself. As good a friend as he was, it had taken a lot of courage for him to ask if he could come out to Berlin to see me. For one thing, this was right after Lee Si-young had been arrested for publishing my writings, under the crimes of meeting and corresponding with and giving comfort to the enemy. He was joining one of the many university professor groups who were coming over to witness the changes in Moscow and Eastern Europe. He was only passing through Berlin but made sure to obtain my phone number through Lee Si-young because he really wanted to see me. I immediately agreed to meet up when he was in the city for two days.

  We met in a second-floor café at Berlin’s Zoo Station on the first day. I was so excited I couldn’t remember anything we talked about. He came to my apartment the next day. When I opened the door, we awkwardly shook hands as if we were meeting for the first time. He looked around my room, sat down on a chair, and said, “It’s a bit like prison.” Of course, he didn’t mean just the room but the fact that I was cut off from the outside. He brought out a bottle of whisky that he had purchased duty-free for the express purpose of drinking it with me. We were able to talk in more relaxed terms than the day before, when we’d met at the café. He asked me when I was going to come back, and I said I had three more years left on my passport and planned to return before it expired. Yeom Mu-ung mentioned the prison sentences handed down to Moon Ik-hwan and others, saying that I had achieved my goal and shouldn’t go about making more trouble. We agreed, at least, on the fact that so long as democratization didn’t advance further in South Korea, we would never obtain the capacity to bring about reunification. He got up when it was time to go. I saw him off only to the bottom of the stairs, where we threw our arms around each other at the same time. He patted my back and bade me stay healthy. I tried to wish him a safe journey home, but my throat was closed with tears.

  Professor Itō Narihiko contacted me a few days later to tell me he was in Berlin. I was so happy to hear from him after seeing him off in Hamburg that I immediately went downtown to meet him. He was well acquainted with the Korean Germans thanks to their solidarity work with Japanese civic organizations, which was why Choi Young-sook came out to see him as well. Professor Itō was waiting with a professor who worked at Humboldt University in East Germany and his wife. To think that an East German professor could now take the train to West Berlin really brought home how much the world had suddenly changed.

  Over dinner, the East German professor, who had apparently heard about my North Korean visit, asked me about Kim Il-sung’s fight for political power. He wanted to know how I felt about the purge of Pak Hon-yong and the Workers’ Party of South Korea. I said I was only interested in how today’s North and South Korea could meet as one; I was totally uninterested in the past internal politics of the North. In truth, I regretted the faction-related disputes within the left in North Korea that had once been unified in resistance against the Japanese, and I was also critical of how Rhee Syngman had gotten rid of his competitors in the South. This was not some phenomenon unique to Korea. Stalin killed countless political rivals such as Trotsky. As we had just seen in the East German example, sociopolitical change does not come about because a dictator gives permission but because the people take action. I asked him whether the East Germans would want reunification. He replied that the Honecker administration had succumbed to the will of the people, there could be no going back, and the only possible future pointed to reunification.

  I tried to suppress my disgust and changed the subject. Throughout our conversation, I detected a typical European sense of superiority over Asian society in his cynical take on not only North Korean socialism but also South Korean capitalism. Thenceforth I felt a strange reactionary vibe from East German intellectuals that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. This was, in part, a matter of disappointment in the East German Communist Party and also an allusion to their own ideologies. At a symposium I once looked through the biographical notes of a German presenter who was harshly critical of North Korea. It turned out that he had once studied there. They seemed to be radically veering right. Years after Germany was reunified, these same people would again express feelings of alienation from and disharmony with West Germans.

  Itō Narihiko had come to Berlin to look for new Rosa Luxemburg manuscripts and said he would soon travel to Moscow for the same purpose. He would go on to write a book based on these rediscovered manuscripts. He brought with him some royaltie
s, payments from magazines, and my contract fee for the Japanese edition of Jang Gil-san, all of which were of great help to my life in exile. Professor Itō said before he left that I was a “lucky guy,” that the world was changing dramatically, the Cold War was ending, and we would soon be free of the burden of the National Security Act. His prophesy, however, stopped short of coming true where Korea was concerned. Our political situation would seem to improve, only to turn out to have been a false hope or something even worse.

  The DAAD offices contacted me with the news that my family was set to leave South Korea. I wanted to call home, but I didn’t know what the situation was like over there and decided to wait until they called first. I believed that it would happen, as it had been promised by both the Korean and German presidents.

  Then one day in December I received a call from a woman in Korea who told me that she worked for the German embassy and that my family had left that day on a Lufthansa flight. I gave a Korean student in Berlin the flight number and my wife’s name, asking him to find out her booking details. He managed to obtain her arrival time in Tegel Airport and the information that she was transferring from Frankfurt. I got to the airport on time. I didn’t see the intelligence official from before, but I did recognize a Korean restaurant owner standing there with a camera. I pretended not to have seen him and kept my distance. I’m sure he took photos of me being reunited with my family and sent them to the South Korean government.

  Soon a crowd of passengers emerged, and I saw Myoung-su holding little Ho-seop by the hand as he toddled out. I lifted him up, but the little guy must not have remembered me because he twisted away toward his mother. We acted like we hadn’t been apart for a long time and calmly made it back to my quarters.

  DAAD had promised from the beginning that they’d come up with a different apartment more suitable to our needs once my family arrived. The current one was fine as an artist’s studio, but a little bare for a family to live in. Ho-seop, unused to the new surroundings, kept telling his mother, “I want to go home, I want to go home.” It hurt my heart to say to the little one, “This is our home.” Myoung-su said that the ANSP had taken her in for questioning for a few days and that her younger sister had cared for the child during that time. Her sister said he had turned to the bedroom wall and cried for a long time after Myoung-su was taken away. That was only the beginning of Ho-seop’s troubles. The child would continue to undergo separation from his family for years to come.