Unlike other inmates, I cannot beg or bargain, so I crawl on the floor, studying every inch of it. If there is a spot where the wooden board is loose or jutting out, I keep pressing with my two feet. After about an hour, I find the head of a nail protruding a little. I lie down on my side and grab it with the tip of my fingers and do my best to pull it out. Sometimes they come out easily, but sometimes it takes a day or more. No matter what, the time passes, and pulling a nail out of the floorboard becomes more important than changing history. And then I get it. This little piece of metal is the key to turning me from a beast into a human being who can think.
It is almost dinnertime. The ray of sunlight has gradually moved to the left, and gotten shorter and shorter until it becomes a little spot right next to the ventilation hole before it completely disappears. The smell of soup with bean paste travels throughout the building, as does the sound of dinner carts wheeling down the corridor. My hands are still cuffed behind my back. I do not think this will be undone until the administrative office decides to see me, which usually takes three or four days. The key turns, and instead of the meal window, the whole door opens wide. The guard places a tray with three white plastic bowls right in front of the door.
“Eat your food, dog,” he says.
If I was still on hunger strike I would kick it straight back into the corridor, but during winter I need to swallow my pride and eat in order to keep my body temperature up. I kneel in front of the tray with my arms and hands tied behind my back, and I bend over the tray and use my mouth to take a few grains of rice into my mouth. The food gets stuck to my nose and chin, but after a few tries I figure out how to do it. I push the rice into one side of the bowl with my tongue and pick up a small morsel with my teeth. As for broth, I pick up the bowl with my teeth and tilt it slightly by applying a little pressure, and I suck it through my teeth. Other dishes can be consumed with just my tongue and teeth as well. My jaw and clothes get wet, but I can eat everything. I wipe my mouth by rubbing it on my shoulder. The door opens again and the tray is taken away, and the guard confirms that the inmate is adjusting well by looking at the empty bowls. If the inmate is continuing with the hunger strike, they will get ready to force feed him. When this happens, the infirmary guard and his assistant arrive with a few other guards, then they open the door without warning and pounce. They put thin porridge in a rubber container and force a hose down the inmate’s throat, and they continuously pump the rubber container to make sure that the porridge goes down. The pain of the tube in your throat, the feeling of porridge stuffing your throat and overflowing out your nose, is not the worst thing. You cannot help but feel violated, and you cannot help but cry because you are so humiliated. As soon as the door is closed you try to throw up everything in your stomach, but you cannot forget the silky texture of rice in your throat and the warm taste still lingering on your tongue. The line has been crossed.
The torture cell takes away from the inmate the very basic essence of human beings, the freedom to think. You don’t have the luxury to think about anything. You need to have a goal, whatever that may be, and concentrate on accomplishing it. That is the only way to be sure that you are still alive. But I have a tool. I have to open the handcuffs. I fumble for the nail, which I have hidden in between the wooden boards on the floor, and I pick it up. With two hands bound behind and two arms trussed up with ropes, I cannot feel anything there, and my fingers are weak. First, I need to practice and relearn how to use my fingers by drawing a circle and a line and an x with the fingers holding the nail, getting used to the tiny details. Then, I am ready to push it through the keyhole and explore the complicated mechanism of the lock. I still remember the click—I would push and pull and twist it hundreds of times. I learn where to go, when to apply more pressure, I repeat it again and again as my fingers become more skilled. As I keep moving my fingers, my eyes are closed, and my thoughts wander away.
In the immense open field, tall barley plants roll like waves. Across the field is a little hill where gnarled pine trees stand, and the road I am walking on continues around the hill and across a bridge, where it bends behind another hill. Tall willow trees stand guard along the road, and I think I can hear them giggling as the leaves flutter in the wind. I am walking, but I do not feel anything uneven or jagged under my feet. The dirt road is moist enough to be soft like a pillow and it tickles my feet. As if in a dream, I walk soundlessly, sliding along the road.
Click! With a clear metallic sound, the latch is undone and springs up. Gently, I extract my hands. Now, it is the rope’s turn to be undone. My fingers wriggle around the loops and knots and study them. At first, the knots are so tight that they feel like little stones, and it seems impossible to loosen them. I grope at them with my fingers, I try to pinch them, but my fingers keep slipping. After a while, it finally occurs to me that instead of untying them I should try to pull the rope from underneath the knots. As I wiggle around and struggle, the knot loosens a little. With one hand I pull the rope, while the other hand works on the knots. Finally, the knots begin to loosen, at first stiffly, but soon smoothly. The rope is knotted several times, but once the first knot is undone the others loosen automatically. It is so long, wrapped several times around my wrists, and I keep pulling it. It takes about an hour to undo the first knot, then it takes another hour to work on the rest. As the rope around my arms loosens, I tug it repeatedly until my wrists are free, leaving the coiled rope behind like a shed skin. I am exhausted by the time it is done, but I can lie down on my back. I open and close my hands, I scratch my nose, which I have been wanting to do for a long while, I lie down. There is a rectangular shape imprinted on the wall, the faint moonlight which has slithered in through the ventilation hole.
Somehow I fall asleep. Now it is time for the night guards to do the last inspection before their shift is over. I wake up to the sound of an iron gate opening downstairs and the quiet voice of a guard reporting, All clear! My eyes are wide open; I hide the handcuffs and rope under my body, put my hands behind my back, and pretend that I am sleeping on my side. It always takes forever for the footsteps to reach my cell. The sound stops in front of the door, and I hear the viewing window opening. As I lie down there, I open my eyes just a little to see the cap of the guard pass by. The footsteps go away again.
I am completely awake now, and I put my handcuffs back on. This time I lock only one side and leave one hand free, and I put the rope back on and tie it around my arms with my free hand to make it appear as close to as it was before. Finally, I put my free hand back into the loosely closed cuff. From now on, I can be free whenever I want. And I have the nail, too, which has been placed back in the floorboard where it came from. I feel victorious knowing that I can untie myself whenever I want to. The darkness in the windowless cell and the tightening walls do not worry me anymore. The first time is always the most difficult. After about a week, you get used to even the worst conditions. But if you are taken to the administrative offices for what they call counseling, you have to walk in the bright sunlight, and you suffer the aftereffects. The moment you leave the torture cell building to walk outside, you cannot open your eyes. Even with your eyes closed, the yellow light fills up underneath your eyelids, your head swims, and you stagger. The guard knows exactly what is happening, so he neither shoves you forward nor urges you to walk, he just sneers.
“So, does this feel good? Why don’t you rot in there for a couple of months? I bet you’ll turn into a model prisoner.”
As I open my eyes and walk again, the white light gradually darkens, as if the light has faded away. Gradually, everything looks normal again. By the time I return to my torture cell everything looks beautiful with vivid and lustrous colors, from the trees to the sky, even the cement walls painted white. And now I dread going back to the windowless cell. Dragged back there, I am isolated in darkness, just like on the first day. The heavy iron door shuts behind my back with a loud bang, and the despair that sets in is that of a man who has lost everything. The
re are a number of phases in a windowless torture cell. The first ten days or so are spent struggling like an animal, trying to get used to your surroundings. The next phase comes when you return from the first outing, which confirms that your situation is as bad as it can be. And after hours of stagnation and tedium, the administration placates you by offering to undo the handcuffs or the rope, and offering conditions for your release, which is usually the writing of a statement of acquiescence and regret. You may think it is unjustified, and you still have enough hatred left inside that you do not want to consent, so there is a phase of resistance. Your administrator can impose the earlier conditions of punishment again, or he can try to placate you by prolonging the counseling period and therefore the walk outside. If the two sides clash for a long time, you may really lose your mind or be transferred to an even worse place. You acclimate one way or another no matter what. In the end, days such as these are dissolved in the modest eyes of a long-timer.
Most inmates try to rise through the prison hierarchy every chance they get. They try to find each guard’s weakness, they act violently, and they nitpick at everything to annoy the guards. If they do not break during their first stay in a torture cell, they go back and forth for the next six months or so, making themselves the designated troublemakers. The best way to attract attention is by injuring oneself. Some swallow sharp objects like a needle, a nail file, a nail, or a piece of broken glass, or they slash their belly with a knife made out of a can lid. One prisoner I know of sewed his perfectly healthy eyes shut with a needle and thread, saying he did not like what he saw, and there was another who sewed his mouth when he was told to shut up. Most guards give up at that point and let the prisoner be, unless he is at the beginning of his sentence. In this case, they will crush him until he changes his attitude, or transfer him somewhere else. But if it is at the end of his sentence, the guards overlook this sort of behavior, even if it is a hassle. Once the prisoner is allowed to grow his hair out, he is elated. And what does he get after all this? He may be assigned to slightly easier jobs, he may find more solid things in his bowl, or he may sleep in a cell with fewer inmates.
Imprisonment begins over and over again, as you get transferred to another prison, as your cell changes, as the administration changes. No matter how peaceful and logical the previous phase was, it all goes back to square one whenever something changes.
A political prisoner may start a hunger strike in prison because of what is happening outside socially or politically, but sometimes it is because of an issue related to prison life. A basic rule is that it has to concern other inmates as well, not just the political prisoner himself. What is considered inconsequential outside can be something worth fighting for, something worth risking everything for inside. You are willing to starve for days because you think the quantity of pork, served once a week, is not enough, or because you are demanding the warden’s apology. All you have is your body, so you fight with your body.
My hunger strikes lasted one week at the shortest, three weeks at the longest. The how-to for hunger strikes has been passed down for decades by seasoned political prisoners. For example, it is better to do a short one during winter or to wait until spring, because you waste too much energy in cold weather. And you must gradually decrease the amount of food you eat for days before the actual hunger strike begins. What is even more critical for your health is that after the hunger strike is over, you have to be very careful what you eat. You usually declare at the beginning of the week, because the guards wait at least three days before they report it to their superiors. By Thursday or Friday there will be a response from the top, a compromise offered. If you go past the weekend, the guards will be rebuked by their superiors.
During one of the harshest winters, I started a hunger strike to protest against the censorship of books and letters. A week before, I began collecting salt and put every bowl and dish and any food bought from the prison store outside my door. First I drank salt water, then plain water. The first couple of days passed by quickly. An empty stomach minimized the effect of withdrawal, so I administered an enema to myself at night. I filled up a plastic bag with lukewarm water and secured a straw to it with a rubber band, and I filled myself up with as much water as possible. No matter how my stomach rumbled, no matter how weird I felt, I waited until the last moment. It seemed that things came out of my body endlessly. After repeating it three or four times, my stomach felt comfortable and the desire to eat gradually faded away as well. The problem is the third or fourth day—that’s the toughest phase. There is a proverb that says no one can resist stealing after going hungry for three days. By the third night, every thought, every sense was directed toward food, and I could not do anything. Holding a book, no words could enter my mind. Around dinnertime I could hear the food cart approaching my door, and my sense of hearing and smell became very sensitive. The smell of cooked rice and bean paste soup wafted in so vividly. I could guess what the other dishes were simply by their smell.
The cart is traveling around my building, each cell buzzing with bowls and dishes clattering and inmates bustling to receive their dinner. I hear them eating and laughing together. I make sure that the little slot is closed and turn my back to the door. It feels just like it did when I would get sick as a child. After lying down in bed all day with a flu or a stomachache, I would hear the dinner table being set up on the other side of our house, and everyone except me would sit there to eat and talk, getting on so well with their lives without me.
The meal slot opens.
“Here’s your meal,” the prison assistant announces.
“Take it away.”
“Why, are you sick or something?”
“Just take it away.”
The slot is closed mercilessly. The rickety cart moves away. Since I already took salt in the morning, I drink plain water, just as I did at lunch, rolling it around my mouth as if I am chewing before I swallow. After about three bowls of water, the hunger fades away again.
The fluorescent light is so old that black spots appear at each end, and the buzzing noise I usually do not notice gets louder and louder. I am unable to sleep late at night. The metallic noise slices through my skull. This dim light that is always on becomes a sound that occupies my brain. My body disappears slowly, but my mind is more lucid than ever. This is the borderline phase of the third and fourth day, a blank page. After that, demands from my own body settle down and dissipate. I excrete nothing, not even the white water that came out before. All food smells revolting now. My body odor is fishy and fermented, and it soaks deep into my underwear and bedding.
I dream. Of all things, I always dream of an open field of grass and trees. Like the dream I had in the torture cell, I am walking on a dirt path across the field, I am grazing it like a wind or a cloud. After a couple of weeks I begin to feel cold all over my body, but it is not unpleasant. It is so warm and comfortable to lie down, just like lying in my bed at home after getting wet from rain. As the day passes by, I sleep less and less. In the middle of the night I wake up and spend hour after hour blankly sitting there. And like an old man, I reminisce. I sit there on my mattress and walk back into my past.
I see my little brother. For no reason, I think of the summer when I was about eleven years old. I am going fishing near an inlet with my friends, and my baby brother, who is four or five, wants to come with us. If I do not take care of him my mother will be angry at me, but I cannot trust him to keep the secret, that we are going to the inlet where we are not allowed to go. He is too little. I run away from him. I look back, and I see my little brother in the distance, flailing on the ground and wailing. I spend the day fishing by the river, and I only remember him when we return home, around sunset. Ah, my poor baby brother!
I think of the day I try to sneak out of the house to go see a Western movie, and he follows me again. If he cries I may get caught, so I have no choice but to take him with me. I grab his wrist and walk through the marketplace to the movie theater. In the dark my
brother is scared and uncomfortable, so I offer him candies and soft drinks. He sucks down the sweet liquid as if he is drinking mother’s milk. Still, he keeps fussing until I cannot take it anymore, so I drag him out of the theater and shout at him, kick him away and tell him to go home. His face is wet with tears, he disappears into the crowd of the marketplace. When the movie is over, I stand at the spot where I shouted at him, and my heart aches when I think of the sad little boy. His cry is still vivid to me today. At home, I find my brother sleeping in the corner of a room, his back to me and his face stained with tears. His bent knees and ankles are chubby. The memory stops with the face of my sleeping brother.
I remember journey I took by train to the end of the southern province. The long sound of a steam whistle is interrupted by the deafening roar of the wheels as it crosses a bridge. The sound still lingers in my ears, along with a sudden silence as the train reaches the other side and begins traveling on wooden rails. The abrupt change is like the unexpected arrival of death. The train is a passenger car converted from a freight train, with a very high ceiling and wooden benches. Heat comes from cast-iron stoves that use brown coals. The tin chimney pokes out through the window. As we travel through the plain, we stop at numerous stations, many of them so small that there is no attendant. People get in and out, going to and from the market. A chicken cackles and flaps her wings, unfamiliar dialects fill the air, and villagers brush snow from their shoulders as they climb into the train. Some people are roasting sweet potatoes and cuttlefish on the cast-iron stove, others open a bottle of soju. Somebody offers me a glass, too. The train does not skip a single tiny station; it crawls along the plain while the whistle screams loudly. A burning smell mixes with snow, and an old man who just came in and sat close to the stove to warm himself carries with him the odor of cattle dung and decaying straw. They never end, the little villages and frozen streams and rolling hills, and crows flutter like little pieces of black cloth on every tree we pass. As we get closer to the last stop, more people get off, and the train looks more like a marketplace or a public house at the end of the day with its empty chairs and the traces of people who occupied them. There is a series of iron bridges as the estuary widens, and the air on the other side of the river is hazy, enveloped in night fog. Snow is still coming down, but thinly, like pine pollen in the spring. The sun is still lingering above the ground, but inside the passenger car is dusky, and the yellow light is on in the little station where we stop. The carriage I am in is empty. Someone climbs onto the train. He is hugging a bundle, his head is wrapped in a cloth like a woman’s headscarf, and hanging from his shoulder is an old military coat. He sits by the cast-iron stove, although the fire has died down by that point, and he peers at me every once in a while. His eyes seem so shiny, but I cannot tell if his face is dirty or tanned. I wonder where he is going. We are nearing the port city, the end of the land. I wonder where he is going. I wonder if he is returning to his hometown after losing everything in the big city. He finally opens his mouth, only when it is completely dark outside, to ask if I can spare a cigarette. I find a crumbled pack in my pocket and go to him. I offer him a cigarette. There are only two fingers left on his hand, enough to hold a cigarette. His nose is crumbling away, and he has no eyebrows. A leper. He gazes back at me without speaking. I strike a match and light his cigarette for him. He nods, still without saying anything. His perfect silence comforts me. I walk away from him but not too far, and I sit by the window and stretch out my legs. We can see the ocean now as the train moves slowly toward the port. After he finishes his cigarette he hums quietly, almost inaudibly. I cannot remember which song it was.
The Old Garden Page 36