A Dream of Lights (8 page)

I pulled a blanket up and round me, peering out from inside as the truck drove us further and further into the camp, as the gates and the fence and the watchtower and the world beyond withdrew and dwindled and finally disappeared.

A memory.

We passed guards with uniforms similar to those of the People’s Army, the dark green of old moss, black boots still shiny despite the mud and brown belts pulled in at small waists. Their backs were straight like ramrods and their faces stern and harsh with expressions unchanging.

We passed rows and rows of huts, piles of soil or stones, dilapidated shacks and large brick buildings. Farmland and felled trees, office buildings and a factory, a school and a coal mine. The prison stretched on and on and on. It was huge and sprawling; as big as a town, no, bigger, bigger than a city, but it was a prison camp, and the atmosphere that hung over everything was the quiet stillness of dread and fear and control.

A chill went through to my bones.

The truck slowed near a group of wooden huts and when I saw the people by them my hand reached for Grandfather, searching his face, then my grandmother’s, the shock so clear in their eyes, the same shock that was running through my body and pounding at my head.

These people were skeletons. Their arms and legs like sticks, their bones jutting out from their skin, their clothes threadbare rags hanging off them, their hair matted thick with dirt or falling out in clumps. I saw a woman with her lower arm missing, a boy with only three fingers on one hand, a man hunchbacked, hobbling across the rugged earth.

These weren’t people – they were monsters.

I couldn’t stop my mouth from gaping or my eyes from staring wide, and I clambered from the back of the truck with my whole body shaking with fear of these creatures.

A woman, of what age I couldn’t tell, lurched up to me, sores and purple blotches on her face and scabs and cuts on her hands, and she leant into me with her breath pungent and stale. “We all looked like you when we arrived. It doesn’t take long,” she muttered. “Three months and you’ll be just like us.”

I turned away, disgusted and shocked. I wanted to run, to hide, to escape – or just to wake up from this nightmare. But there was no waking. This was reality.

I looked back at the people, the monsters, as they watched us new arrivals, leering at us, asking where we were from, if we knew their relatives or friends, if we had any news from outside, if anything had changed. But I couldn’t look at their faces, their hollow, sucked-in cheeks, their eyes deep in their sockets, staring out at us with a mixture of curiosity and blankness. They were my horror and my terror and my fear. Yet one word from a guard and they were gone, scattering like dry leaves on a gust of wind. I thought of the boy from school, the one with the radio, wondering if he ended up in a place like this, and if he was still alive.

I wondered if he did deserve it. And I hoped somebody other than me
had
reported him.

The guards pointed their guns at us and we lifted down the two boxes of our belongings from the back of the truck – cups and plates and pots that Mother or Father or someone had packed from the house – and they ushered us away from the path and towards a group of huts.

As I walked, my eyes flitted around, taking everything in: the mountains flanking us, snow dusting the tops, the banks of trees leading up them, the barren earth at my feet, the camp stretching out in every direction, and that terrible feeling draped over everything, of quietness with no calm. Stillness and emptiness. Trepidation and danger.

I didn’t feel like the adult I nearly was; instead I was a child again, naive and weak and useless. My guilt tore away any maturity I thought I had.

The guard led us to a wooden hut. “This is where you live,” he said. “The other huts around here make up your work unit. You attend roll call at six in the morning, where you are instructed as to your day’s duty. You work until six at night when there is another roll call. You work seven days a week. There are no holidays.

“You and you,” he pointed to me and Grandfather, “your ration is five hundred grams of corn as you will be working, the old woman gets four hundred and will be in charge of preparing food. Outside your hut is a small piece of earth where you can grow vegetables.

“You are lucky,” he continued, as he opened the door to the hut. “The furniture from the previous family has been left, and the bedding. Otherwise you would have had nothing.” He paused for a moment, and I took a step into the hut.

“What happened to them?” I whispered.

Without a breath, he strode across to me, and before I’d even thought to move, he’d hit me across the face. My cheek stung, and I wanted so much to cry, but I stood firm, with my face fixed and my eyes blinking away tears that I would not let fall.

“Someone from your work unit will be along with your corn,” he said, then left.

I felt my grandfather’s arm going round me, and his slender hand on my face.

“I don’t know how we’re going to keep warm in here,” my grandmother said. “Look at the roof – you can see the sky through the planks of wood. And the walls and the floors,” she continued, “they’re just mud.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to my grandfather.

“No more, Yoora,” he breathed.

“And how do I light this fire? We have no matches. How will we keep warm tonight? What about our clothes? We didn’t bring any of our clothes!”

Panic lifted in her voice and Grandfather took her in his arms and held her, stroking her greying hair away from her face, whispering in her ear words of comfort private to them. I turned away.

He was an old man, his hair and his body worn thin from years of work and worry, whose care now, according to our custom, should have been the responsibility of his son.

But I had killed his son.

We stared round at our new home: one room, like a shed, with dirty bedding strewn across a few mats on the floor, an empty furnace to one side with no coal or matches or wood to burn, a table with a few chairs, a chest of drawers and a cupboard. The air was cold and icy and stale from whoever had been here before.

The morning, waking in my home, seeing that leer on Sook’s face, watching my father being shot, running away from the guards, felt like such a long time ago, and now darkness and gloom and shadows stretched over us and swallowed us whole, weighing down heavy on our thin shoulders.

Grandfather pulled a cord and a bare light bulb hanging from the middle of the low ceiling flickered a dim light, casting ghosts of shadows around us and bags under our eyes as if we were already skeletons.

We just stood, without a word, in shock maybe, and I felt the freezing wind blowing through the gaps in the roof and the door, ice reaching into me and shaking me from the inside. I had never known cold like it.

“We’ll sleep together,” said Grandfather. “Keep each other warm.”

I heard footsteps in front of the hut and stopped moving, stopped breathing even, tried to stop trembling so I could listen. I hoped it wasn’t the guard coming back, and visions flashed in my head of guns and sticks and fists.

The door creaked open and a face that looked older than Grandmother’s appeared. “I’m from your work unit. I’ve brought your corn.”

I breathed again as she stepped into the hut and we all watched her as she headed to the furnace. “I’ve brought you some wood too, but you’ll have to find me some more in return – I can’t give it away. Here,” she said to Grandmother and bent down. “I’ll show you how to light the fire without matches and how to keep the flame burning. And how to prepare food using the furnace. There are no cookers anywhere.”

The wood began to pop and burn and I sat down in front of it, rubbing life back into my cold hands, feeling the heat from the flame on my sore skin, and watching it dance and flicker on the walls of mud.

The woman looked old, thin and drained, but said she was in her forties. “I’ve been here ten years, but ten years in here ages you like thirty out there. I’m lucky to be alive, but I will die in here.”

She didn’t ask why we were there, or offer her story – she was abrupt to the point of rudeness, but she’d survived for ten years. “I took some of your corn,” she added, pouring some of what was left into a tin with water and placing it on the furnace. “In payment for helping you.”

My surprise must’ve shown on my face because she opened her eyes as wide as they seemed able to go and glared at me. “I’m not here to make friends. Not enemies either though – there are enough people in here who would accuse you of anything to save themselves, or to earn favour with the guards, or to get a bit of extra food. That’s not me. I was a nurse before, but in here I don’t do anything for nothing. Nobody does. Keep your head down and do as you’re told and you might survive long enough to get ill enough to die.”

We all stared at her.

“Does anyone ever escape?” My words were quiet.

She huffed, shaking her head, moving towards me and leaning close, her missing teeth obvious now, as were the pits and scars on her skin, and her thinning hair. “You’d have to be crazy to try it. The fence is electrified, and even if you dare touch it, sirens go off, and the dogs come out, and the guns. On the other side of the fence is a ditch that runs all the way round, wide and deep. And at the bottom of the ditch? Spikes stick up. You don’t jump far enough…” She shrugged. “There are guard posts at intervals around the camp, lookout towers too and there are roll calls twice a day. And even if,
even if
you managed to avoid the guards and the towers and get through the fence and over the ditch, where then? You seen the mountains? You going to get over them?”

She shook her head. “You know what happens if you’re caught?” she continued. “You’re executed – shot or hung. I’ve never known anyone get out alive. No, you’d have to be crazy to try.” She stood up to leave. “Mind you,” she said, stopping and turning round to face us all, “a few months in here and you’ll be crazy anyway.” And I’m sure I saw the ghost of a smile flicker across her lips.

We spent a cold night shivering under blankets left by the family before us – blankets that smelt of rot and decay and death. I could imagine their bodies around me and over me; I could imagine them breathing.

Maybe their last breaths.

Maybe they died under those blankets and I was breathing in their suffering and their disease.

Are there lice in here?
I thought.
Fleas that sucked on their blood before ours? How many families were in here before them? How many will be after us?

But in the side of the mat I found a hole, and I slipped the postcard inside. My hope, my secret, that I wanted to keep safe.

The following morning we ate our breakfast of cornmeal, not enough to take away the hunger, and headed over for roll call with the rest of our ‘village’, our status as new arrivals turning heads and attracting stares. I wondered whether they were curious about what had happened to us, or just curious as to whether we had any food to barter with, perhaps for information or tips about survival.

We answered our names, we heard the others, voices pale and quiet in the expanse around us, and we changed into the uniforms we were given – deep purple, itchy fabric, heavy on our bodies and chafing at our legs and arms. I tried not to react when Grandfather was told he would be working in the coal mine, or when I was told to head up the mountain to help with logging and felling trees.

I watched Grandmother turn back to our hut, a bucket she had been given to collect water hanging from one hand, the clothes we had just taken off, in the other, her head hanging low, her feet shuffling along the frozen ground.

It was clear from the explanation given at roll call that Grandmother’s life was going to be hard, even though she had not been given a job. She would have to walk half an hour to the stream, break the ice if it was frozen, fill the bucket with water and walk back again. Then repeat the whole thing. And again. She would have to climb into the mountains to look for something edible to bulk out our rations, or we would simply not survive. The bark from trees perhaps, leaves that weren’t poisonous yet still alive in winter, half-dormant insects, herbs that could be added to the corn.

But, as I looked up at the hills around us, I could see that so much of the mountainside was already bare. How many people in this camp had already stripped what they could from the ground and the trees and the wildlife? Higher up there were banks of frosted green, but that was a long way, a steep climb, and I doubted my grandmother would be able to manage that far. She was old and frail, and I watched her tiny frame struggle off into the distance, and I felt pity for her.

Grandfather watched her too and I could see in his eyes the same guilt I had in my heart. But why he felt like that, I had no idea.

The only two words I could offer him – I’m sorry – I’d said too much already and the words couldn’t change anything, not even my guilt. I turned and headed to my work detail with a handful of other prisoners, hoping I would still be alive in twelve hours to see Grandfather and Grandmother again, hoping they too would survive.

I shut off and shut down as I walked, not worrying about Grandmother clambering along the mountainside in the freezing cold, or about Grandfather shut in the mine with so little air, or about how old and frail and weak they both were.

Because that would make it harder.

Instead I thought only of one step at a time, as Grandfather had said, and one log at a time, and one minute at a time, and somehow, with arms of lead and legs I could barely move, the end of the day arrived, and somehow I made it back to our hut.

And somehow so did they.

We sat in silence round the table that had been pulled up close to the furnace, the wind whistling through the holes in the door and the cold leaking down through the gaps in the roof. We pulled blankets round our shoulders as we spooned cornmeal into our mouths, into stomachs that wanted, and needed, much, much more.

Twelve hours’ hard labour. No break. No rest. No lunch. I was cold and tired and hungry, and the reality of what our lives had become hit me hard. I could see Grandfather’s head nodding as he fought sleep long enough to eat, but I didn’t dare look into his face. I wanted to cry. I wanted someone to save me. I wanted to wake up and be back at home, looking into my father’s eyes as he asked me if I’d had a bad dream.

“Yes,” I would say. “The worst. You weren’t there. And it was my fault. It was all my fault.” I would just be able to make out his smile in the moonlight, and I would feel his fingers on my cheek as he told me it was only a dream. Only a dream.

And when I woke it would be the morning of the day I first met Sook, and I would go to do my chores, and after I’d shown him where to take the night soil, I wouldn’t take the bun from him. I would never agree to meet him. I would never walk with him in the darkness. I would never smile at him or hold his hand or look into his eyes that I thought had cared for me.

I would never, never fall in love with him.

And I would never, never trust him.

My spoon scraped the bottom of the tin that was empty of cornmeal too soon. I hated cornmeal. Even the soup Mother had cooked at home was better than this.

“I wonder what Mother’s doing now,” I whispered without thinking.

“I’m surprised you care,” Grandmother hissed back to me.

I felt my cheeks burning and wished I hadn’t said anything. “Of course I care,” I replied, keeping my eyes away from her. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“No. You were just thoughtless. Even after I’d told you to stay away. You knew who his mother was. You knew the dangers.
Why
did you tell him? How could you have possibly thought that he wouldn’t tell his mother?”

Her anger bore down on me, but I didn’t say a word.

“Everything now is because of you. Your stupidity and selfishness. Why my son’s dead. Why we’re stuck in here. And will die in here.”

“But… I didn’t… I only…” I sighed. “I told him about that place in my dream. I thought it was Pyongyang, but he said it couldn’t be because he used to live there, but in my dream…”

“Dream,” she scoffed. “How do you think all that stuff got inside your head? It wasn’t some
vision
of some future. It was stuck in your memory from all the letters and postcards, and the stories your grandfather used to tell you. It’s his fault too. Him and his ideas and decisions.”

I saw my grandfather look up, saw his mouth open to speak, to defend himself perhaps, then he closed it again and his gaze drifted away.

“What?” I asked Grandmother.“What are you talking about?”

She leant towards me. “I made him stop telling you. I told him you wouldn’t be able to keep a secret. And I was right.”

“But—”

“He should never have told you anything. It’s all stayed in your head all that time and then come flooding out like that.”

I rubbed my hands across my face, over my forehead and my eyes. My head was buzzing, tiredness blurring everything, nothing making sense to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.

She pushed her bowl away and leant towards me, her voice low, her eyes blazing into mine. “The crime they accused your father of, that he was planning an escape – they said they knew all about it from Sook’s mother, the woman I told you to keep away from. You know about
that
? She could only have learnt it from you; from you telling her son.”

I shook my head. “But… but I didn’t tell him that. He just thought it because… because…” I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t remember exactly what I had said to Sook. I didn’t want to argue, didn’t have the strength or the will. I didn’t need any more guilt, or to carry any more blame. I wanted to ask about the letters, what they were burning that morning, what she meant about the things Grandfather had told me when I was younger. But I didn’t.

“I loved him,” I whispered, and I saw her, from the corner of my eye, standing over me, overbearing and overpowering, shaking her head, then turning to her husband.

“Love gets you nowhere,” she hissed. “Believe me.”

Her words were low and cold and they hung in the air and over me and Grandfather, and I watched his hands pull back from the table and his fingers curl inside his palm. I heard the gentle sigh of his breath and saw the shadow of his head as it tipped forward.

I had loved Sook.

As I tried to sleep that night, our second night at the camp, his face loomed up behind my closed eyelids, and I saw his smile, felt his warmth and listened to his voice as he spoke to me on those nights as we walked. But I pushed them out and I tried to forget them, and in my head instead I watched his leering grin at my family’s trial, heard the shooting of the guns that killed my father, remembered my mother’s arms around me.

I hate him
, I told myself.
And if I ever get out of here, I will find him. And I will track him down, and I will take a knife, and I will kill him.

Because yes, it was my fault, my stupidity and naivety and some romantic notion that hid inside me, but I wouldn’t be killing him for me. I would live with my guilt and my anger.

It would be for my family.