Dear Leader (28 page)

Young-min sat up too. He looked at me and then at the ox and was about to speak; but then he lowered his gaze and began to pick miserably at the straw. We both realised that our faces and clothes were stained and that the look of a fugitive, which Chang-yong had said would give us away as North Koreans on the run, had crept up on us. If we continued our journey looking like this, there was no doubt that someone would report us to the authorities. We rubbed our faces with the white snow piled outside the barn, but it just smeared the dirt and made it worse.

We went to the nearest house and knocked on the courtyard door. Instead of cement or bricks, the fence was made of tightly joined planks. The chimney straggled above a dark-orange tin roof, which lacked the Korean roof tiles we had seen on some houses. We waited anxiously, feeling vulnerable with our dirty faces exposed to whoever might answer the door. There was some movement, and a moment later the door opened a little to reveal an old man peering out at us. He was wearing a worn black coat, but the buttons were shiny and new, and he didn’t look like a farmer. He might have been very old,
but his face looked more youthful than ancient. He could probably tell right away that we were North Koreans on the run, because he was about to close the door on us.

I bowed deeply. ‘Sir, may we please use your soap to wash our faces?’

Instead of closing the door, the old man put his head out of the gap again and looked us up and down. We thought he might not have understood our Korean, but to our great surprise he opened the door fully and spoke to us in our own language, so welcome to our ears.

‘Come in.’

The old man’s yard was neat and tidy, unlike Chang-yong’s house, whose walls were crumbling. There were three apple trees in one corner, straw wrapped round their trunks to keep them from freezing. The old man left us shivering in the yard and went into the house.

A few moments later he returned from the kitchen with a large brass washbowl full of steaming hot water. We rushed to help him with it and carried it to the corner of the yard opposite the apple trees. As Young-min and I politely told each other to go first, the old man shuffled towards us, lit a cigarette, and asked, ‘Have you come from across the river?’

Young-min hesitated for a moment, then answered, ‘Yes.’

The old man sucked deeply on his cigarette and blew out smoke that looked eerily white in the winter morning air. ‘I’ve had no end of refugees knocking on my door for food,’ he said. ‘There’s even been some who’ve stolen things and thrown rocks at me. But you! In all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask to wash!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Have you eaten yet?’

When he saw that we couldn’t answer with an immediate yes, he stamped out his half-smoked cigarette and asked us to come inside after we had washed. He shouted again from the kitchen, ‘Come on in when you’re clean!’

When we’d finished, we tipped out the soapy water and propped the bowl against the side of the house to drain. We made our way to the kitchen and pushed open the door to the room from which the voice had spoken. The old man was spooning out rice. The smell of it, so different from the outside air, flooded my lungs with warmth. At that moment, a feeling of bliss rushed through me that made my chest pound. It was a sublime moment of transcendence, the like of which I had never experienced before. The smell of cooking rice confirmed that the world had not yet abandoned us.

The rice was generously served in big bowls, steaming fresh from the stove. It was so chewy that, with each spoonful, there were grains sticking to the underside of the spoon as well as heaped in its bowl. The warmth of the grains in my throat as I swallowed comforted me. While we ate, the old man criticised Kim Jong-il emphatically. He said that in this modern age it was disgusting that our leader should starve his whole country, and insisted that Kim Jong-il’s pot belly was clear evidence of his selfishness and greed.

I was grateful for the rice, but even more for his sympathy. It felt like support for our plight, especially as everywhere else the refugees were spat on.

The old man asked, ‘Where are you heading? And how did you get into this state?’

‘We want to go to South Korea,’ Young-min replied.

‘The authorities must be after you, then. You must be on the run.’

‘Yes, we were nearly caught by the authorities,’ I replied.

‘Did you cross the river together?’

‘Yes, we’re friends.’

We answered his questions earnestly, wanting to show appreciation for his interest. But what he said next left us speechless.

‘You’re from Pyongyang,’ he declared, ‘and you’re accused of murder.’

We didn’t know what to say.

‘This village is close to Yanji city centre,’ the old man continued, ‘and a lot of refugees pass through. There isn’t a day without one of them. So the authorities keep an eye on this place. In fact, the day before yesterday, they searched every house, looking for two defectors from Pyongyang who escaped over the river after committing murder.’

My ears were ringing and the rice sat heavy in my stomach. When we left Mr Shin’s house, we had taken some comfort in the knowledge that China is a large country. Yet in this village that seemed so remote, an old man we’d never met before knew exactly who we were. It felt as if there were nowhere on this earth where we could hide, and that North Korea’s framing of us for murder would follow us to the ends of the earth.

‘We’re not murderers!’ Young-min blurted out desperately, but the old man waved his words away.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve lived for seventy years. I can tell by looking at you that you’re not murderers. I also know that the North Korean bastards like to frame people for murder. Neither the Chinese authorities nor any of the locals here believe a word they say.’

We had been tense and nervous, and ready to leave at once, but this brought us some relief.

‘So don’t go everywhere together,’ the old man advised us. ‘Walk separately, and be careful.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ I found myself bowing deeply once again.

Young-min, as if he wanted to repay the debt, took the empty bowls and spoons back into the kitchen. He insisted on doing the dishes too, but the old man managed to call him back to the main room, and found some paper and a pen. He explained that there was a Korean church in Yanji that he knew quite well, and he would write us a letter of introduction to the pastor there. He said the pastor could help us get to South Korea. Young-min and I could not believe it, and could hardly contain our excitement.

The old man drew us a map showing how to get to the church from Yanji bus terminal, to be sure that we wouldn’t get lost. He marked the church with a cross, and went over it several times to make it stand out. After repeating the directions, he tested us several times to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. ‘What building is this?’ he asked. ‘What road is that?’ He checked everything thoroughly. We answered his questions like two eager students.

As we said farewell, he said to us, ‘When you get to South Korea, settle in Seoul instead of in the provinces.’

After we’d heard these words, even our footsteps seemed lighter as we left the old man’s house. The letter of introduction and map that the old man had drawn so carefully seemed like a passport that would take us all the way to South Korea. We felt confident, and didn’t even put on our sunglasses. But we took care to follow the old man’s advice about staying apart.

Whenever we reached a road where there were people, we pretended not to know each other. It was actually exciting. Sometimes Young-min led the way and I fell back, and in the end we fought over who would get to walk in front. Once, when I was leading, I hid in an alley for a joke, and I watched Young-min turn white and search frantically for me up and down the road. A long journey that would have taken over an hour by bus passed by quickly as we playfully made our way.

The old man’s directions were so thorough that we very easily found Yanji Church in the busy city centre. Unlike other churches that stood out with prominent crosses, this church merely occupied some office space in a commercial building.

Before we knocked on the door, I glanced at the wooden sign that read ‘Yanji Church’ in black letters. Inside, I knew there would be South Koreans, and my heart swelled at the thought of falling into the embrace of my countrymen. Young-min too was verging on tears, as if we had come to the threshold of South Korea itself. I asked
him to knock. Sure enough, a voice answered in Korean, and when we entered there were three middle-aged men inside. One of them, wearing glasses, flushed on seeing us. His eyes, peering behind thick lenses, seemed unusually small.

‘How did you find us?’ he asked. ‘Come in, come in.’

The interior of the church was as spacious as the Revolutionary Study Rooms of Comrades Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il that were attached to all workplaces in North Korea. In the central part of the wall, where we expected portraits of the Kims to hang, there hung a cross instead. But the atmosphere of the room was just as solemn as the Revolutionary Study Rooms. Above the cross was a wooden slogan that read ‘Let’s be saved by saying Amen’. There were perhaps twenty wooden pews, and a desk near the door.

‘We want to meet the pastor,’ I said in reply. However, I didn’t realise at the time that I had left out the honorific suffix
nim
that South Koreans must add when using a title such as ‘pastor’ or ‘teacher’. In North Korea, the suffix
nim
may only be used for a member of the ruling Kim family – or for a teacher, because one of the titles of Kim Jong-il was Teacher Dear Leader. In this way, although we had come here to seek our saviour, we had not shown even the most basic respect for Him, and the eyes of the bespectacled man narrowed further.

‘Where have you come from?’ he growled.

‘We can only tell the pastor.’

‘He’s in South Korea at the moment. You can tell me. I’m standing in for him while he’s gone.’

My heart fluttered. If the pastor could go to South Korea from here, so might we! As I took the letter of introduction out from my pocket to give to the man, my hands shook. While he read the letter, Young-min looked curiously at the cross and Bible on the table, as if they were strange alien artefacts. To see these objects here in an ordinary setting, objects that you could see in North Korea only in
the UFD’s operational zones, made me feel like I had already stepped into South Korean territory. I couldn’t stop grinning.

Suddenly, the man took his glasses off and screamed at the top of his voice. ‘Get out of here at once!’

I stood there speechless.

‘Hey! Throw these guys out, they’re defectors!’

I felt as though I had just been knocked out. Before I could bring myself to consider that he might be joking, the two other men approached us and began to shove us out. Young-min didn’t bother to struggle, but instead, fell to his knees at the doorway.

‘We came here because we heard you were South Korean,’ he cried. ‘We risked our lives and crossed the border so that we could go to South Korea. We will die on the streets if you throw us out.’

‘What, you think you’re the only ones? Our pastor was arrested once because of you lot. The church will have to close down because of you. Get out! Get out, you bastards!’

I was astonished. Were these men from the country where we longed to seek refuge? When I saw the bespectacled man start to hit Young-min on the head, I felt my blood rush. He slapped Young-min in the face as he pleaded tearfully with them. I lost my temper and found myself screaming. I dragged the bespectacled man off Young-min and picked up the cross on the desk like a weapon.

‘Do you call yourselves human? We risked our lives to come here!’ I shouted.

‘Hurry up! Call the authorities! Report them!’

I had been about to give them a piece of my mind, but when I heard those two words of terror – ‘authorities’ and ‘report’ – in a single sentence, I seized Young-min’s arm and ran out of the church. It was a long way back to the entrance and we stumbled as we fled.

When we finally reached the street, the cars rushing past us sounded like sirens and I was filled with panic. Young-min led the way, but when he came to a fork in the road, he could not decide
which way to turn and I crashed into him, sending both of us tumbling onto the street.

Only when we found ourselves in a remote neighbourhood in the outskirts of the city could we think of looking behind us. As I caught my breath, a vast emptiness filled my soul. Even the South Korean church had turned us away and there was nowhere else to turn. As if to demonstrate that we had tried everything and there was nothing left, Young-min took out the map the old man had drawn so carefully and tore it to shreds. Every shred of it, as it fell to the ground, was a fragment of our shattered lives. We sat for a while in silence.

Young-min tapped my arm as I stared up at the sky, and asked, ‘Shall we spend some of that money today? Let’s get ourselves a drink.’

I remembered our final night back in Pyongyang, when we’d decided to escape after a drink, but ignored him. Then I said, ‘I’d rather look for a place to spend the night.’

I stood up and turned to go, but Young-min blocked my way.

‘Why? Why should we?’ he asked. ‘You think we can make it to South Korea after what we’ve just seen? They were going to report us! You and I, we’re neither North nor South Korean! Do you understand? We belong nowhere!’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. We wanted to settle in a free Korea, but it didn’t exist anywhere on earth. Although my body was physically here, it seemed as if my spirit had departed because I was too numb to perceive anything. If I had killed myself in North Korea, at least I would have been buried in the land of my family and friends. Here we could only wander like dogs until the rigour of death set in, and we would eventually disappear, unknown and unmourned, into the dust of these foreign roads. The thought of this tragic end to my existence convinced me that this was my last day on earth.

Young-min dragged me off to a drinks stall in the market. Bottles of alcohol, differently priced, were on display. He pointed to a small bottle of wine at 12 yuan, and then at a single empty glass, which
would cost 5 yuan to fill. When I realised it was a powerful Chinese soju, it was obvious that we would pass out on the streets if we drank this on an empty stomach, and we’d be exposed to the authorities. What could we eat to prevent this? As I did the sums in my head, I put the glass back down.