All Woman and Springtime Page 6

  Recovering herself, the mistress swallowed, bowed her head in the polite way and said, “Anyang haseyo.”

  The young man took a final drag from his cigarette, exhaled smoke in a long, steady stream from the corner of his mouth, then flicked the butt carelessly into the yard. Most people would have scavenged the remaining tobacco from the butt to roll into another cigarette, but clearly he did not feel the need to conserve. He held his eyes on the mistress for a long moment before speaking.

  “Where do you want this?” he asked, kicking the box at his feet with his toe. His voice was smooth and steady. His phrasing was abrupt, but he spoke each word with slow deliberation. It sounded like he was trying to make his voice deeper than it actually was. Even so, the texture of his voice caused a tingling sensation to bubble up her spine.

  “Inside. On the counter,” she said, finding herself short of breath.

  The mistress wondered how a young man could come to possess foreign cigarettes, which by all accounts were difficult to find and prohibitively expensive. They were normally a privilege bandied about by Party officials. Then she realized that, as a dealer of contraband, he probably had access to all manner of exotic things. That would also explain the full quality to his skin—he obviously ate well enough to support his muscular frame.

  He set the box down with a heavy thud onto a countertop, then, turning around to face the mistress, leaned casually against a wall. The kitchen had no decoration, only stained walls that may have been white at one time. It was a large, square room surrounded by cupboards and countertops, and there was a wooden chopping block in the center. It was by no means modern, but it was sufficient for the simple meals prepared by the girls. He stood there silently, watching the mistress with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Can I offer you something? Some tea?” she asked, blushing.

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, as if weighing whether or not having a cup of tea would damage his image.

  “That would be nice, thank you,” he replied.

  His politeness caught her off guard—it was at odds with his otherwise tough demeanor. She put a kettle of water on the stove.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” she asked, offering him a stool.

  He sat down. In contrast to the studied confidence he had been exuding while standing, sitting on the stool made him seem nervous and uncertain. It was as if his assuredness hinged on being able to lean impudently against walls. He sat stiffly upright, hands on his knees, the tips of his loafers pointing in slightly toward each other. In his discomfort he gazed around the room as if to admire ornate molding rather than the plain and dingy kitchen walls. He could have been in the lobby of a doctor’s office awaiting an exam. The mistress remained standing near the stove, examining him.

  After several moments of awkward silence, she spoke. “Have you been with Lee Won’s organization for a long time?” She immediately felt silly for asking. He was obviously Father Lee’s new black market contact.

  “Me?” he laughed. “I’m not part of any organization. His friends in the South pay me to deliver goods. That’s as far as it goes.”

  The water on the stove came to a boil and she poured it into a teapot with a scattering of tea leaves. Weak tea was all anyone had to offer, but she was still embarrassed by having to serve it that way—he seemed accustomed to abundance. Would he think less of her for serving weak tea? The mistress wanted to ask him what it was like living in constant danger, being an outlaw and trafficking goods; but she hesitated, unsure if it would be proper. She had a dangerous secret of her own, owning and reading the Bible, which she felt gave them a peculiar kind of intimacy. She wanted to share that with him.

  She poured tea into chipped ceramic teacups and handed one to the young man, who nodded in thanks. She remained standing, studying the surface of the tea in her cup. They sipped their tea in a thick atmosphere of thoughts, none of which could quite condense into spoken words.

  The young man finished his tea, then swirled the last drop that was clinging to the bottom of his cup as if he hoped to find something to say in it. Finding nothing, he put the cup down, the drop still in it, and stood up. The mistress, who was still staring into her nearly untouched tea, put her cup down as well.

  “Thank you for the delivery. I’m very sorry, I have nothing to pay you.”

  “I’ve been paid already,” he said.

  When he stood, he donned once again his tough persona. He walked to the door, opened it, then closed it behind him without looking back.

  THE YOUNG MAN now made deliveries every week. As brief and infrequent as his visits were, the mistress looked forward to them. She developed an elaborate fantasy of who he was and how he lived, based on nothing more than his rebellious swagger, his nervous silences and terse answers to her few questions. Their conversations had mostly been limited to short greetings and a courteous thank-you. Sometimes he would stay for a cup of tea, but always he would sit nervously, silence prevailing between them.

  She looked for clues about him, like the way he drank his tea with purpose, neither delicately sipping nor oafishly gulping. He obviously cared about his appearance, always arriving clean, his clothes spotless and in careful disarray on his frame. He kept his hair trimmed, from what she could see under the newsboy cap he always wore. That he wore the hat at all was curious: It was an unusual style and obviously foreign, yet he wore it in the open without fear and, even more puzzling, with impunity. In her imagination, she saw him as an eloquent conversationalist, once relaxed, expressing insightful ideas in direct, concise truisms. He seemed the brooding, thinking type. She imagined that his illicit line of work stemmed from a rebellious iconoclasm that ran so deeply in his marrow that he could not keep himself from it; he was an idealist fighting a dangerous establishment, ultimately for humanitarian aims. That must be why he so steadfastly delivered his illegal supplies to the orphanage. But she had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe he was just a criminal; but even that she found attractive.

  She liked watching his muscles work underneath his shirt as he hefted the heavy food boxes. She enjoyed watching him walk out the door, his trim backside flexing and relaxing in his confident stride. Most of all, she loved inhaling his earthy aroma as he stirred the air when he walked past her. She counted the hours until she saw him again.

  12

  IL-SUN PRETENDED NOTHING HAD happened, and so Gyong-ho did too. It was easier that way. Gi did not understand her feelings and could not even begin to explain them. They woke up, performed their morning rituals, dressed, and walked to work as normal, but the gulf between them seemed impassable. They each tried lobbing words into it, like “good morning,” and “it’s cold today,” but the phrases echoed unnaturally in their ears. They gave up and walked in silence. This time it was Gi who was dragging her feet from lack of sleep.

  Gi felt as though they were being pried out of girlhood: herself unwillingly, Il-sun enthusiastically. They were on a threshold and all their priorities were changing at once. It was too fast. Il-sun seemed to be running toward it with open arms, impatient for the knowledge and the sophistication of the womanhood fitting her new body. Gi shrank from it. She had just gotten comfortable here.

  Things had begun changing when they found the book John and Daisy. They had come home early because the electricity at the factory had gone out. When they walked into the kitchen to check in with the mistress, she was standing and staring wistfully at the back door with her hand on her cheek. She seemed in a pleasant daze. She turned and smiled at the girls, then excused herself to her bedroom.

  “What’s with her?” asked Il-sun.

  “I don’t know, but she looks happy.”

  “Hey, what’s in here?” Il-sun asked, noticing a box on the counter. She lifted one of the lid flaps.

  “It’s not ours. We should leave it alone,” replied Gi.

  “I’m just curious,” Il-sun said, peeking inside. “There’s food in here!”

  “Today must have been a spec
ial ration day or something,” Gi said, peeking into the box.

  “Maybe we should put it away for the mistress,” said Il-sun.

  They began sorting through the contents of the box: a few ragged- looking onions, a bulb of garlic, several potatoes, a bag of rice, and a bag of red beans. As they removed the items, a rectangular bundle wrapped in a stained cloth and tied with a string tumbled onto the counter. Gi picked it up. It was not a food item and she was conflicted about what to do with it. Should she unwrap it, or leave it on the counter for the mistress? She was inclining toward the latter when Il-sun noticed it in her hands.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s for the mistress. I think we should leave it.”

  Il-sun snatched it from her. She turned it over, prodded and bent it. “It feels like a book to me.”

  “It’s not for us. We should leave it like we found it.”

  “We can look and then wrap it right back up.” Her eyes had taken on a mischievous glint.

  “Il-sun, no! We could get in trouble.”

  “For what? Unpacking the food box? The mistress always tells us we need to take the initiative when it comes to helping out. Don’t you want to see what it is?”

  “But it isn’t ours!”

  “If we get caught, here’s what we’ll say: We were unpacking the food box, we picked it up by mistake, and the wrapping came undone. See? It’s not even tied very well.” With that she pulled at the string and the cloth fell open. “Oops,” she said with exaggerated indifference.

  In her hands was a book unlike she had ever seen before, a paperback with a graphic cover. The cover illustration showed two Caucasian people, a man and a woman, in a mad embrace. The woman had blond hair and was wearing a gauzy dress that appeared to be falling off, slipping over her overly large breasts. Her head was back, her very red lips seductively parted. The man in the illustration had dark brown shoulder-length hair and a face of rough stubble. He was shirtless, with rippling muscles and a narrow waist. He was gazing intently at the woman’s parted lips, his arms wrapped around her tightly. The cover had both Korean characters and small foreign print. The title, spelled phonetically in Korean, was John and Daisy, and in smaller characters it said, “Translated from English by Andrew Kim.” This was definitely not a regular-issue book.

  The girls stared at it openmouthed, transfixed by the blatantly erotic cover. They had never imagined that such a thing could exist. Where could it have come from? What story could the book have to tell? It was certainly not a safe thing to possess. They looked at each other, each with a different thought about what to do next.

  “We should tie it back up and leave it like we found it,” Gyong-ho said, trying to sound definitive.

  “I want to read it.”

  “We can’t do that! What will the mistress say when she looks for it and can’t find it?”

  “She may not even know it’s here. How do we know it is even hers? Besides, I don’t think anyone in her right mind would publicly claim this, do you?”

  “No, which is the same reason that we would be better off leaving it alone too.”

  “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I’m just curious. What harm could it do?”

  “You don’t have any idea—”

  Gyong-ho was interrupted by the sound of the mistress’s door opening. Il-sun quickly hid the book in the waistband of her trousers, pulling her blouse over it to cover the bulge.

  The mistress emerged still smiling. She looked from one to the other of them, and then at the empty box. Her face fell slightly.

  “Is that all? Was there anything else in the box?”

  There was a tense silence and Gyong-ho felt the blood drain from her face. She counted flies on the kitchen window.

  “No, miss. Should there have been something?” Il-sun said a little too brightly.

  The mistress deflated. “No. No, nothing.”

  With that, she turned and left the room.

  Over the next few weeks Il-sun consumed the book. She studied it with more interest and concentration than she had given to any of her studies in school. Gi refused to read it, but that did not stop Il-sun from reading passages to her or from talking about it nonstop. Gi felt certain that there were no details of the book of which she was unaware because of Il-sun’s long discourses and verbalized ruminations on the subject. She had gotten quite tired of hearing about it. Besides, she really did not understand much of it.

  Not long after that Il-sun met the man on the scooter, and Gi could not help but think that Il-sun had been emboldened by reading the book. Gi had only ever seen the man from a distance, and that was fine with her. There was something shark-eyed in the way he seemed to linger around the factory, and her natural inclination was to avoid him.

  “Let’s go talk to him, Gi!” Il-sun had said. They were on their way home from the factory. It was only midafternoon, but the factory was shut down because an expected shipment of cloth had not arrived. The man was sitting on his scooter across the street.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “He gives me the creeps.”

  “He looks interesting. Maybe he’ll give us a ride on his scooter!”

  “No way.”

  “Come on, Gi. Let’s have some fun.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “I’m going to talk to him. You’ll be jealous after he has driven me all over the city on his scooter and all you’ve done is play dice with a twelve- year-old.”

  “You’ll be jealous when I’m playing dice and you’re dead.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “The mistress will kill you, if the guy on the scooter doesn’t.”

  “You’ll cover for me, won’t you?”

  “Il-sun!”

  “Gi!”

  Gi paused, then sighed. “Okay. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You know me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  13

  GRANDMOTHER WAS THE FIRST to go. She died peacefully in her sleep during their first week at the prison camp. The guards had been merciful—mindful of Grandmother’s old age and confusion, they did not overwork her. She was sitting on a stool in the garden pulling weeds the day before she died and, to Gi, looked content. That was the benefit of Grandmother’s confusion: From moment to moment, she could forget who and where she was. Gyong-ho and her parents did not have that luxury.

  The family arrived at the prison camp just after dawn and was immediately split up. They were told it was to facilitate reeducation; a rottenness had infected the family, and in order to keep it from spreading among them they needed to be isolated from one another.

  The camp was large, like a small city, with miles of dirt roads lined with rows of barracks made of plywood and tin, plus several buildings for labor and reeducation purposes. There was a constant flurry of activity. Guards with rifles patrolled the perimeters and the streets like gangs of angry youth, looking for, and often creating, trouble. The men, women, and children were all housed in separate areas and were not free to roam between them. Gyong-ho was allowed to see her mother for thirty minutes every few days, which was how she learned of her grandmother’s death, but was never permitted to see her father.

  The camp was nestled in a deep valley and was surrounded by electric fences topped with razor wire. Guard posts with bored and trigger-happy sharpshooters were spaced every hundred meters, and the inmates were warned of land mines in the surrounding fields. The prisoners were a gaunt and dirty lot, their clothes stained, torn, and foul. They reminded Gyong-ho of farm beasts, wallowing in filth and excrement. The inmates had faraway looks in their eyes, weighed down by grim and sagging mouths. For weeks Gyong-ho walked on tiptoe and made a great effort to keep from making contact with the filth that was all around. Little by little, as her own clothes became stained and smelly and layers of grime coated her body, she began to recognize herself as part of her surroundings, a mem
ber of the sallow, sorry community around her.

  Gi was assigned to one of the windowless barracks where more than a dozen girls slept on hard, bare planks. She was given a thin blanket, a small tin bowl, and a set of rough wooden chopsticks. These were her only possessions. The blankets had to be particularly well guarded because some of the older girls were inclined to steal them in order to better insulate themselves against the frigid Chosun nights.

  Gyong-ho cried inconsolably the first night she spent in the crowded and dirty room. She was frightened and missed her family. The guard assigned to her dormitory, a severe woman in a crisp uniform, irritated by the noise, jerked her by the arm into the street outside and told her that if she did not stop breaking the Dear Leader’s peace immediately, her mother would be brought out and shot dead in front of her. Her vivid, eight-year-old’s imagination could visualize it clearly; and with every ounce of strength that she possessed, she swallowed her grief and tears. With no outlet, however, the wailing echoed inside her, filling her up, reverberating until her every moment was saturated with it. It was a constant background hum.

  14

  THE MISTRESS STOOD, HOLDING the gift gently with her fingertips as if it might crumble into dust. The young man had seen her, and understood her, even without words. They were kindred outlaws, treasonous in their thoughts and desires.

  The brown paper had fallen to reveal a clear cellophane package stapled closed at the top, together with a thin cardboard label. The label was printed with what she recognized as Chinese characters, though she could not read them, and below that was a foreign script—perhaps English or French, or even German. She carefully removed the label by prizing up the staples, and then set it on her dresser. She would hide it later in the pages of her Bible, along with the few other foreign wrappings and newsprint scraps that had been stowed away in previous food boxes. She cherished these illegal snippets.