A Dream of Lights (20 page)

Silence and darkness enveloped me. For a while I relaxed and rested, daring to feel safe, invisible and unknown. I knew the door behind me was blocked, the footsteps above me were only the neighbours and the scratching outside was only animals.

My baby snuffled and I worried about him: so small and helpless, his tiny hand clinging to my finger, his cry a whisper of apology.

He seemed impossible. A baby with no name because I didn’t dare, because that would mean I expected him to survive. I
hoped
he would, but every beat of his heart I felt, every rise and fall of his chest I saw as he breathed, was a surprise. Was spectacular. Was frightening. I was a mother.
His
mother. I was responsible for him, his safety and his life. Yet I was barely holding on to my own.

I fed him as soon as he murmured, hoping he was getting enough to live to the next minute and the next hour. Questions mounted in my head: where would I find food for me? How would I survive? What would happen to him if I died? How was I going to avoid the authorities? Could I really find my mother? Escape this country? All with a baby?

I watched through the window as night fell. No lights sparkled in any houses, no streetlights twinkled. A darkness so complete, shrouding the town and the countryside further and the mountains in the distance. Any sense of peace or of safety left me. I was falling into a black hole: empty, ominous and frightening. My eyes played tricks on me, showing me images hiding in the shadows: Grandfather at the fence, the guard looming above me, my friend from the camp, faces of prisoners I’d left behind, gaunt and pleading.

My ears told me people were creeping into the apartment, stepping towards me, guns pointing, an axe raised, handcuffs, rope, ready for me.

They let me escape
, I thought.
It was too easy. They followed me step by step, behind me in shadows, obscured by trees, hidden by bushes whenever I turned round. Laughing at me. Closing in on me now.

My heart pounded and my body leapt with every sound. I shuffled backwards until I found the wall, carried on sideways until I could prop myself in a corner. I drifted in and out of a fitful sleep, an odd sleep, waking at the slightest noise, confused for a moment, before the memories of the last couple of days took hold and I could recall how I had got to this point.

Sleep was difficult, rest was uneasy. But morning did come, without enemies at the door or death in the shadows. And the room reappeared around me as sunlight stretched through what glass remained in the window frames, and the dust again danced in its rays without a care and still in the apartment there was only me and the baby. I tiptoed across the floor in my bare feet, footsteps muted by dust, a trail of prints behind me, the baby in my arms cooing as I rocked him.

I wished I could stay there, make a home for us. But how long would it be before neighbours questioned who I was? Before someone asked to see my papers? Before I was arrested again? A day? Two or three maybe?

There was no option. There was no choice.

The clothes that had got so wet the day before were still damp and cold, so I rearranged everything with the drier ones next to my skin and the baby, and the damper ones on the outside. I hoped they would soon be dry. I hoped for no more snow.

With a glance left and right, I stepped from the apartment and into the corridor and out on to the street. I kept my head low as I headed further into the town, my pace even, catching nobody’s eye, hoping to look as if I knew where I was going.

I needed to know where I was, where the train tracks were, what direction I should be heading in, how far away Mother’s town was, how long it would take to get there. And I needed to, had to, avoid the police, the authorities, anyone who might report me or ask me anything. But I had no idea where to start or what to do.

I walked. Thinking. Worrying. Panicking about when I would next have to feed the baby, where I was going to do it, how I was going to without being seen.

My mind turned somersaults, but my feet drove me forward into a town that was so much bigger than I had ever seen before. There were wide roads that were empty, tall buildings that were blank and stark, music piping through loudspeakers that were tinny, with children’s high-pitched voices singing praises to our country. And people who had empty faces and few smiles.

There were no restaurants or stalls with the smells of food wafting from them. There was no music with beats and rhythms thumping. There were no bright clothes. No shop signs flashing. No cars with horns blaring and engines roaring.

But I saw train tracks to one side, and I followed them, and eventually they led me to the station. And high on the station building of grey concrete, two familiar faces again stared down at me: a burst of colour of pinked cheeks and shiny black hair, of red backgrounds and yellow sunbeams. A flash of warning to me, a flash of danger.

I stepped inside the station, thinking I could sit there a while, rest near people waiting for trains, and no one would be suspicious. There were no benches, there were no seats, so I wandered over to the busier side, thinking it easier to hide in a crowd, and sat down on the floor, my arms wrapped round my baby.

It had been so long since I’d seen anyone but prisoners or guards. I watched the people moving around, all so thin, and I saw the children, so many of them, lying on the station floor or drifting among the waiting, their eyes keen, darting here or there to the sound of something dropping to the floor or the rustle of someone’s hand in their pocket. Their faces were filthy, their clothes not much more than rags, their bodies a tangle of bones.

I couldn’t help but stare. Couldn’t help but lean forward, catching the eye of one, lifting a finger to beckon him over, watching his eyes, sullen and empty, dart over me.

“You got any food?” he asked.

I shook my head and he started to turn away. “Wait… please.”

His head turned back round to me, and I saw his shoulders droop with a sigh. His legs crumpled and he fell into a sitting position in front of me and I thought his bones would snap.

“What town are we in?” I whispered. He stared at me as if I’d asked if grass was green.

I reached a hand into my pocket, into the old sock, felt through and grabbed a dried worm, tearing it in half. I kept it hidden in my palm, stretched towards him and dropped a piece into his hand. He didn’t pause for a second. The worm half disappeared into his mouth and was gone.

“Musong,” he said, but it meant nothing to me.

“What about Chongyong?” I asked. “How far away is that?” His stare came back to me, not greedy but desperate, his palm up and open to me, waiting.

I dropped the other half of the worm into his hand, and it disappeared as quickly as the first.

He shrugged. “Couple of stops on the train, I think. Five hours maybe? Trains don’t move fast.”

I caught my breath, hot in my chest, nerves tipping my stomach. I tried not to stare at him. I felt relieved and excited, nervous and worried. Was it possible? Was it really possible?
No, of course it isn’t
, I thought and I felt stupid.
I have no ticket. Can’t get a ticket. Have no money. No visa. No permit.

I sensed him watching me, waiting for the next question and the chance to earn more food. But I didn’t need to know any more; it was pointless asking when the next train was due or how much it cost. I would have to follow the tracks, and I would have to hope I could make it that far keeping hidden and out of view. Five hours by slow train; how far was that? How long would it take to walk?

I felt the baby squirm in his sling under my clothes, heard his soft whimper and I peered down, loosening my top layers, but keeping him hidden.

“What you got?” the boy whispered and he skulked towards me.

My eyes flashed to him and away, back to my baby, positioning him for feeding, his snuffles and murmurs the quietest of sounds. I didn’t answer.

“What is it?” he asked again.

There was no way I could trust him; he would betray me for a sniff of food, or for his own safety. Wouldn’t we all?

“You’ll have to beg from someone else. I don’t have any more.” I shook my head at him.

“I don’t beg,” he said. “Even if you do, people don’t give anything because they don’t have anything.” He paused. “Apart from you. So you must be desperate. Or just plain stupid.”

“Why are you here if you’re not begging?”

His brow furrowed. “Where else am I going to go? We all live here,” he said, pointing to the other children around us.

I stared at him, as he stared back at me, taking me in, sizing me up. “You’re not from here, are you?”

I didn’t say a word.

He sighed. “They call us
kochebi
.”

“Swallows?” I asked.
Kochebi
was the name for those small, swift birds that dart after insects in the summer.

“Yes. Because we’re little, and we wander around in flocks – wandering swallows. None of us have parents or family. We have nowhere to live and nowhere else to go. So we stay here because it’s dry, and because people pass through, and sometimes they drop stuff, and sometimes it’s stuff you can eat. Sometimes kids just lie down and give up and die. Most do eventually. There’s no way out, see? There’s nothing for us but this.”

I followed his sad eyes as they looked over the station, the adults waiting, the kids shuffling around or lying on the floor or propped against a wall.

“There,” he said, his bony finger pointing to a heap on the floor. “That kid there, see? Near the wall? And the column?”

I nodded.

“He died yesterday.”

I stared at what I’d thought was a bundle of rags, and I could make out a couple of toes, the outline maybe of a hand. My skin prickled. It was like the camp all over again. But with no work. Nobody cared about these children. Nobody moved their starved bodies. Nobody bothered to see if they were alive or dead.

“Why doesn’t anybody feed you all? Or help you?”

“How? And who would?”

I tried to look at each of their faces. His question echoed in my head. How could you feed all of them? There were so many. How could you help one and not the other? And keep helping? Every day?

“How long has it been like this?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. As long as I can remember. Worse now, though, since I’ve been by myself.”

I nodded. “How long’s that been?”

He was silent a moment, his fingers scratching through his tangled hair, his hand pulling at his ragged clothes, his face full of pain and his eyes full of memories.

“Two years, I think. Three? Not sure. Not long after I turned thirteen.” He sighed.

I couldn’t take my eyes from him. Couldn’t believe he was any older than ten. He was so short, so skinny. Again I stared round at the other kids, the
kochebi
, as he called them. How old were they? Some seemed smaller. One or two slightly taller, but all with that gaunt look of hunger that had turned them into these walking ghosts.

I thought back to the camp, to our arrival and the faces looming towards us of skeletons barely living. Three months it had taken, for us to become one of them.

And I thought of life back in our village, back home, years ago, a life ago. We never had much food, but we had enough to survive, just. We could grow things, our own food, not a lot, but we had a little ground at the back of the house with enough space for a couple of rows of potatoes and a few carrots. Enough to ease away the clawing hunger the day brought and to help you sleep through the night without your stomach rumbling you awake.

Here in the town, there was barely any ground to grow anything, people lived in apartment blocks or tiny houses and you relied on what the government said were your rations, what you needed to survive given the job you did and the age you were.

“What about your rations?” I asked.

He looked up at me with his wide eyes, mocking. “I don’t get rations,” he said. “Because I don’t live anywhere. And even those who do only get a handful of rice a day.” He paused a moment, wiping his face with fingers like dried twigs about to snap. “It’s the same everywhere,” he said. “Doesn’t make any difference if you sneak on a train and go to the next town. It’s all the same. May as well die here as there.”

Suddenly I saw myself, lying dead on the ground with my baby crying before his last breath left his body. What right had I bringing another hungry mouth into this world? How long could we survive?

No
, I thought,
no, no, no. I will not let this be me. I will not let this be my baby. I’ll move on. I’ll follow the tracks and I’ll make it to Mother’s town. If it takes me days or weeks or months. I will not become one of these.

I tried to stand, every muscle in my body stiff and unwilling, and I glanced down at the tiny bundle hidden in my clothing, his perfect face so calm, so trusting.

If only he knew how valuable, how important, how rare every breath he takes is. How fragile. How each one goes against what should be.

I ignored the pain in my body and I stood up. “I have to go,” I said.