All Woman and Springtime Read online

  It was generally known that times were hard, and yet a person could disappear just for saying so out loud. That had happened to Il-sun’s older brother; or at least she believed so. She could never be sure. He had been an angry young man who tended to say whatever dangerous thought was on his mind. Their mother tried punishing him, reasoning with him, and then finally pleading with him to change his thoughts; or, at the very least, to keep his heretical ideas to himself. He never listened. One day he simply did not come home. During Il-sun’s more upbeat moments, she liked to think that he had made a run for the northern border into China. Late at night, when their mother was asleep, he had whispered tales of people who braved crossing the frozen Tumen River, risking their lives for the opulence and endless feasts awaiting them on the other side. Il-sun had idolized her brother, even if she thought his ideas were a little crazy. He was the only person she ever heard speak that way. It was known that Chosun was the wealthiest, most prosperous nation—the envy of all the world. Why would anyone want to leave it? In her more realistic moments she knew that her brother had been picked up by the police and taken away forever, as so many other people had, and nobody ever talked about it. Why else had the authorities not come asking for him when he did not show up for his Party Youth meeting? She missed him terribly.

  Her brother’s disappearance had been too much for her mother to bear. It first broke her spirit, and then it broke her body down. It was not the grief of losing him that did it; it was having to pretend that he had never existed. It was having to get up the same way each day, doing the exact same routine, trying to convince herself that she had never had a son, had never suckled him, had never watched him grow handsome and strong. Neighbors and friends likewise pretended, as if by unspoken consensus, that there had never been a son, a brother, a friend. They never asked about him, never offered consolation, or even a knowing nod. To acknowledge him would be to acknowledge some guilt by association. Such smudges were hard to polish off a person’s badge of loyalty.

  Il-sun watched it all with the clear eyes of childhood.

  Shortly afterward, her mother became ill. It came on gradually. At first she became clumsy, dropping things and tripping over nothing. Over months it became increasingly difficult for her to stand up and walk across the floor, which she eventually had to do using a cane. Then her body trembled uncontrollably and she could no longer operate chopsticks, or even a spoon. Il-sun had to feed her, and help her bathe and use the toilet. A doctor came and went, shaking his head and avoiding Il-sun’s eyes. A year and a half after the symptoms appeared, her mother could no longer move from her sleeping mat. She could not speak, but only roll her eyes and make helpless grunts. Her mother ached, and Il-sun tried with all the force of her imagination to bring the affliction into her own body instead. Her mother suffered all the same.

  The hardest part was knowing that her mother was still aware inside her broken and useless body, looking through the scuffed and milky windows of her eyes, aware that it was the futile end of her life. The Chosun were not allowed an afterlife—it was against the law—and nor was there any solace given to the survivors. Life was service to the Republic, and nothing more. Life was service to the Dear Leader, and everything outside that was forbidden. The very words for those things were rubbed out of the language until all that was left of them were impressions under the eraser marks where the first pencil had originally scratched them into being. Only the brave or the stupid dared to exhume them. Truth was an agreement, in Chosun, not an absolute. For the first time Il-sun fully understood her brother’s anger.

  One by one, her mother’s organs shut down. Her skin became a sickly, pale green and her breath came in short gasps. Her body jerked in uncontrollable fits, with less force each time. She was a tire deflating. In one moment she took her last breath, and then gave up the thin tether of control over her lungs. Il-sun watched, powerless, as her mother slowly suffocated.

  The jerking stopped. Il-sun had thought they had been fighting a disease—an unseen, unknowable enemy—but then realized they had actually been fighting against death itself. Unavoidable, inescapable death. It was then she realized that, no matter what, death would always triumph; and that death’s victory, after the struggle of life, is liberation. Il-sun had not allowed herself to cry since her mother had fallen ill: She had needed to stay strong. Sitting in front of her mother’s empty shell, as understanding came to her in waves, she wept—not from grief, but from relief. The sweet release of death. An insupportable weight had been lifted from her, and, in spite of herself, she was glad that it was over. And she hated herself for being glad: It felt like betrayal. With nowhere else to cast her blame, she blamed . . .

  No. There would be no talking about who she blamed.

  THE HOME FOR Orphan Girls was not a comfortable place to grow up, especially after having lived in a private apartment with her family in a nice part of the city. Still, it was better funded and less crowded than its counterparts outside the city; and even if she did not recognize it at the time, she was lucky to be there. It was set up specifically for orphans from good families loyal to the Party.

  Il-sun did not adjust well to life in the orphanage. She developed a reputation for being vindictive, sly, and cunning in her abuses. Many girls tried to befriend her, but she shunned them all. She had been accustomed to better food, cleaner conditions, a doting mother, and more privacy. Now she was just one of many girls in the care of a lone, overworked state employee. She had been told all her life that, with her excellent songbun, she would be able to find a good husband high in the Party ranks, that she would always enjoy greater comforts and privilege than most. All that was gone now. Now she was a castoff, a throwaway, a burden to the Republic—an undesirable.

  Her pique found its sharpest focus on one girl in particular, who had arrived at the orphanage under mysterious circumstances a few months after her. To Il-sun, Gyong-ho looked more like a half-starved rodent than a thirteen-year-old girl. She was a skeletal wisp with long arms and a lopsided posture. Her spine was twisted and her left arm hung lower than her right, as if she were perpetually carrying a heavy sack of rice over her shoulder. Her wavy hair was matted and dirty, and she made no effort to straighten it. Her skin was pale and cold, made all the more so by the contrast with her black hair. Her wretchedness was exacerbated by her name: Gyong-ho was a boy’s name, a souvenir from a bygone era when parents, wishing for a boy, gave their girls masculine names. Gyong-ho refused to speak, instead only shaking or nodding her head. She had a wide, blank look in her eyes that seemed a permanent part of her features.

  Gyong-ho arrived at the orphanage in the middle of the night in a big black automobile. It was an unusually opulent arrival for an orphan, especially considering her soiled state. The first thing Il-sun noticed about her was her smell, which filled the entranceway of the orphanage and assaulted Il-sun at the top of the stairs from where she was spying. She smelled filthy, but not in the way of a person who has worked hard between regular baths. She smelled as if she had crawled out of a sewer in which she had wallowed for months or years. Grime streaked her face and stained her hands. The orphanage mistress scolded Il-sun for being out of bed, and then whisked the girl off to the bath. Il-sun had never seen a face before that was completely blank, that showed absolutely nothing; but that was the only way to describe Gyong-ho’s face on the night of her arrival. She was empty, devoid of feeling—devoid of self—and that scared Il-sun.

  For the first few weeks Il-sun ignored Gyong-ho because she looked and behaved oddly, stuck as she was in a state of near catatonia. But after a while something about her began to eat away at Il-sun’s patience. She hated her for her weakness. She hated her for being collapsed. She feared Gyong-ho for showing her how low the human spirit can be degraded and still not die. Gyong-ho was pathetic, broken, useless, and yet still alive. It meant that Il-sun herself could be broken further—things could get worse. Gyong-ho’s wretchedness stimulated such anger that Il-sun felt compelled to st
rike out at her. She tripped her, and shoved her when the mistress was not looking, and threw pebbles at the back of her head. She called her names and tried to rally the other girls into the cause of ostracizing her. Gyong-ho became the focus of a deep, stirring rage about the weakness of humankind and the apparent lack of any accountable or benevolent overseer.

  One day, a few months after Gyong-ho’s arrival, the girls were given a rare treat of pork with their vegetables and rice. The portion was small, as usual, but the sliver of meat put a smile on Il-sun’s normally scowling face. Some of the other girls had never even tasted meat before. Il-sun ate hungrily until her bowl was empty, and then scraped it with her finger to make sure none of the valuable juices would go to waste. When she was finished, she looked up to see Gyong-ho staring blankly at her bowl of untouched food. It was an affront. Life was precious and hard, and the meat was such a rare opportunity to gather strength that Gyong-ho’s inability to respond to it provoked Il-sun’s fury. She walked over to her, stripped the bowl of food from her hands, and said, “If you’re not going to eat it, stupid cow, I will.” She then shoveled the food into her mouth, greedily scraping it out of the bowl with her fingers, making exaggerated sounds of pleasure. When the food was finished and the bowl licked clean, she forced it back into Gyong-ho’s hands and stood over her, waiting for a response. What she most craved was for Gyong-ho to protest, to yell at her or fight back. She wanted her to stand up and hit her, or scream obscenities—that would have meant she was alive. But none of that came. Instead, Gyong-ho kept her head down, a silent stream of tears running down each cheek and falling into her empty bowl.

  “I hate you!” shouted Il-sun. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” With each time she yelled it, something capped and frozen moved and dissolved inside of her. With each time she screamed, she realized more deeply that it was not Gyong-ho she hated; it was herself. She had failed her mother, had failed her brother, had even failed the father she had never known. “I hate you!” she said to herself, more softly. “I hate you!” She fell to her knees, saying, “I hate you.” A torrent of grief rushed up from a dormant pool and erupted from her eyes. The relief she had felt after her mother’s death had been a thin crust over a well of sadness that she had not allowed herself to feel. But she was feeling it now in full. She missed her mother more than words could say. It ached from every organ and every limb, and it all came out through her eyes and the shaking of her shoulders as she sobbed.

  She felt a hand on her head. In her collapse she had laid her cheek, without realizing it, on Gyong-ho’s lap. Gyong-ho had placed her small, hollow hand caringly on Il-sun’s head; and when Il-sun looked up, for the first time Gyong-ho’s face was not a void. It never really had been, not completely. It was then that Il-sun could see the flicker of Gyong-ho underneath the empty-looking husk. The pilot light had not gone out. She was a girl with a beating heart who had fully capitulated to some unseen suffering, but whose essence still throbbed beneath the surface. She saw how alone Gyong-ho was, how she had laid herself down to a demon whose torture of her never ceased; and yet she kept soldiering on, albeit damaged, every day. What must she have gone through to be reduced as she was? She was still fighting back, in the small way that she could, just by being alive. She was a person to be admired for her strength, not despised for her weakness.

  In that moment an understanding was born between them that was the foundation of a friendship—two halves finding unexpected completion. Gyong-ho’s broken state gave Il-sun a constructive focus. She nursed Gyong-ho’s enfeebled spirit with the irrepressible quest for girlish fun and mischief. Slowly, Gyong-ho’s catatonia melted away as Il-sun, day after day, brushed her hair and chatted idly with her. Having someone to care for kept Il-sun from seeking the kind of trouble that would have led her to her brother’s fate, and being cared for gave Gyong-ho a sense of safety that allowed her to come, at least a little bit, out of her shell.

  “My name is Gi-Gi-Gi-Gi-Gyong-ho,” she said to Il-sun, stuttering her name as they formally met each other. She often had difficulty saying her own name.

  “Why don’t you just tell people your name is Gi? It would be simpler,” Il-sun joked. From that point on she called her Gi.

  Once cleaned up, Gi was not exactly pretty, but she had a quirky personality that Il-sun enjoyed. She looked at the world in a completely different way from anyone Il-sun had ever met, reducing it in her mind to its fundamental pieces and the forces that acted on them. Where Il-sun was almost entirely focused on the people in her life and how they related with each other, Gyong-ho seemed to care only about the physical construction of the world around her. She cared little for social grace, or perhaps she had simply never been trained; and so, in the rare moments when she would speak to anyone other than Il-sun, she often came across as brusque and insensitive. She did have a subtle sense of humor that would emerge at unexpected moments, making Il-sun laugh. Il-sun was a bridge to the outside world for Gi, showing her that many of the dangers she feared were imagined: Gyong-ho startled easily at loud noises and sudden movements, as if at any moment she was expecting a great calamity to come upon her. She was shy and reticent where Il-sun was forward and often spoke out of turn.

  Gi never spoke about her past, and anytime Il-sun pressed her for information she became evasive and sometimes hostile. It was as if she was fighting a lengthy and gruesome battle not to remember it; and when she came too close within her own mind, she would race away on another topic until she seemed to have forgotten what it was she was avoiding. If she got too close to her memory, her eyes would roll back in her head and her face would become a blank stone for minutes, sometimes for hours. Then, quite suddenly, she would return, maybe cheerful, maybe sullen, but as if nothing at all had happened.

  One of the odd things that made Gyong-ho so puzzling and special was her obsession with numbers. It was eerie how she could do large and complicated computations instantly in her head. It was as if she could simply see the numbers floating in front of her eyes, as if they drifted weightlessly, borne on the dust churned upward by the turning of her mind. Il-sun was lost when it came to numbers, so it seemed particularly miraculous to her whenever Gi showed off her talent. It was the only time she didn’t look quite so afraid. It seemed to Il-sun that Gi clung to numbers in the same way Il-sun clung to her anger—it was the only thing of which she could be absolutely certain. At times, when they were bored, Il-sun would try as hard as she could to make a calculation too complex or the numbers too large, lofting a string of numbers at Gi, all the while checking answers on a calculator she had stolen from their school. Gyong-ho never made a mistake. This was nothing more than amusement for both girls. It never occurred to them, being orphans and therefore having bad songbun, that Gi’s talent could be used for anything practical. They would never qualify for anything more than manual factory labor.

  Il-sun could not muster much enthusiasm for her factory job. Had her mother lived and her life stayed on course, Il-sun would have been given a first-rate education and lived in their fine family apartment until she left to make a life, and a family, with her undoubtedly well-connected husband. She had never gotten over the sense that she was meant for a better life, married to a man who would shield her from the common drudgery that afflicted most of Chosun. That dream was dashed, but she was still determined to climb, any way she could, out of the mire of mediocrity that her life had become. She still believed that her way out was through a man. Perhaps she had already found him.

  3

  THE ORPHANAGE MISTRESS SAT in front of a scratched, old mirror, raking through her hair with a comb that was missing most of its teeth. She spent many hours, whenever she had hours, combing, looking at herself and trying to will her perfectly straight hair curly. She would have been happy if it had turned even slightly wavy, but her hair never complied. She reached back and tied it into a tight bun on the back of her head. This was her one indulgence, gazing into the mirror and fantasizing about a different self.

/>   She applied powder from the bottom of an empty tin using a brush that held more dust than color. Again, it was the fantasy that fueled the ritual. Her face was an acreage of plainness, of nothing special, of a measure of time. It was a dull clock ticking off years, showing a late hour of youth, on the cusp of middle age. Her face might as well have been a pane of glass—eyes rolled right on past it, slid straight off it without stopping or even slowing down, seeing right through her.

  She bit at her lips for color, then smoothed over them with the bottom of a taper candle, just for the sensation. On a different face they might have been nice lips, she thought, just right for kissing. She batted her eyes at herself, then sighed. Her birth certificate claimed that she was one hundred percent Chosun, but her eyes betrayed a hint of Japanese. This did not have any consequence for her, such as limited mobility within the Party—people were used to looking the other way for such ancestral transgressions—but it was like a small badge of shame.

  She slid one foot, then the other into old, white, knee-length stockings that had dark impressions of her footprints stained into the feet. A clean toe peeked out between threads, its unadorned nail filed to a precise length, reflecting the light from her bedroom window. The stockings were ragged along the top and deftly stitched in places. On first glance, just seeing the ankles, they could have been new. Maybe someone will notice my ankles, she thought. Her unshapely underwear was a drab, laundered gray, and she quickly covered over it with a neatly pressed skirt and starched blouse. She took great care in her appearance, but for whom? The orphans? They certainly did not care. Her superiors? They never concerned themselves with the orphanage. Looking into her partial reflection, it seemed that there was nothing there but a uniform of efficiency, her face a mere window on her shoulders.