Princess Bari (2 page)

“Well, she said your great-great-grandmother was a shaman in Hamheung.”

“Watch your mouth! Don't you know what kind of trouble we could get in if you start spreading that nonsense around?”

“But when I married you, everyone in your village knew that your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother were powerful shamans before Liberation …”

“Damn it, woman! Keep it down! We're descended from poor farmers. That means we're part of the core class.”

Grandmother said that Father had been a good student ever since his days at the People's Primary School. Right after the war, when the Chinese People's Volunteer Army was still stationed in the city, he had picked up some Chinese here and there and would even go to the base with the older folk to help settle civil complaints. He graduated first in his class from secondary school and even received a recommendation to attend university in Pyongyang.

Our parents wound up married to each other due to our grandmother's meddling. Father had completed his labour mobilization during summer break from his first year of university, and found a spare week to return home for a visit only to discover a girl waiting there for him.

He stepped through the gate and called out: “Mother, can you bring me some cold water?” Who should come out of the kitchen then but this short, bob-haired girl carrying a bowl of water with both hands …

He forgot all about the water and stared at her stupidly before finally asking: “Who're you, Comrade?”

Grandmother answered for her.

“Who do you think? That's your wife.”

Father practically jumped out of his skin at that and ran for the station, where he hopped the first train for Pyongyang. About a month later, he was ordered to report to the academic affairs office. The professor in charge of monitoring the students stood with his cheeks puffed out and studied him for a moment before gesturing with his chin for him to sit down.

“I didn't think you were the type, Comrade – only a student, but already you're married … Now, I know your mother's a widow and girls run in your family, so I understand why you want to get started as soon as possible and try for a son. But explain to me why you abandoned your wife.”

Father, flabbergasted, started talking gibberish.

“No, uh, it's not like that, you see, I went home for a short visit and out of the blue my mother said I was married so I hurried back to school and –”

Just then the door cracked open, and Grandmother stuck her head in.

“Hey! We're here,” she said, and stepped inside. Then she glanced back at someone and said: “Well, come in already.”

The bob-haired girl followed her in, head hanging down, and bowed wordlessly at the professor. Father's face turned bright red. He got up without saying a word.

“We don't need to discuss this any further,” the professor said. “I'll issue you a pass so you can escort your mother home. You're married now. Time to go home and consummate it.”

“I have to finish school first …”

“You should've thought about that before you got married! Go on, now. If you stick around any longer, I'll have to tell your comrades. If the Youth Association gets wind of this, you'll be marked as a bad element, maybe even as a decadent, and you'll be expelled.”

So that was how Father wound up being dragged back to Chongjin. From the moment they boarded the train, Grandmother started laying down threats.

“No more running around from now on. This union was arranged by my guardian spirit, so if you don't do as I say, we're through. You'll go your way, and I'll go mine.”

Grandmother produced a baby sling from somewhere and tied one end around Father's leg where he was sitting. Then she tied a round knot into the sling and held it up to Mother's ankle.

“Lift your foot, girl. Slip it through this.”

Mother took off her rubber shoe, pulled up her sagging sock, and said: “Make it tight.”

Father told us that when he turned his head to see what the two women were doing, Mother met his eye and stuck her tongue out at him. (Right up until we were all separated, any time that story happened to come up when they were fighting, Father would burst out: “I should've chopped my leg off and run away to start a new life back when I had the chance!”) Grandmother wrapped the free end of the sling around her wrist several times and then let out a long sigh, as if she could finally relax. At this point in the story, my sisters and I would ask her: “Why did you decide to make Mother your daughter-in-law?” Grandmother would tell us about the dream she'd had, and how she had gone to our mother's village to find her.

“I dreamed that a celestial maiden fell out of the sky and landed with a loud thud right on top of the house. She rolled off the roof and into the courtyard. I called out: ‘Hello, hello, if you're a ghost, then back off, and if you're a person, then be on your way.' But she told me she had tended the garden of the Great Jade Emperor in his heavenly palace, and that she'd been dropped to Earth as punishment for overwatering the flowers and causing them to fall from their stems.

“I glanced around the courtyard, and sure enough, there were exactly seven flowers lying on the ground. She picked them up one by one and offered them to me. I put out my hand to take them, but before I could, that crazy girl opened the gate and took a hop, skip and a jump backwards and ran off. I ran after her. I chased her all the way to a sorghum-stalk fence in front of someone's house, and then I woke up.

“The dream was so strange that I went outside to take a look. The road the celestial maiden had taken led to the next village. I wound my way down the road just like I had in the dream, and ended up at a house surrounded by a sorghum-stalk fence and thought:
How curious is this?
When I went into the yard, a girl was singing. She was wiping down the large clay jars on the
jangdokdae
. She had cleaned the soybean paste jars and soy sauce jars to a high shine. From behind, she had a nice rump, and though I'm a woman myself and not a man, that butt of hers was as plump and tantalizing as a peony. So I invited her to come and live with us. I met her parents too and told them all about your father.”

Everyone in the family knew that Grandmother had a strange gift, but Father alone refused to acknowledge it. Nevertheless, whenever it was the end of the year or the start of a new one, or when he woke up in the morning from an unsettling dream, he would stealthily ask her what his fortune held. “Oh, and then,” he would mutter, as if to himself, “this water jar split in two, and a catfish the size of my forearm came wriggling out.”

But not only would Grandmother
not
interpret his dream for him, she would toy with him by playing stupid: “Mm, we should boil up some catfish stew! Give the whole family a feast.”

Since our mother kept winding up pregnant with another of us while she was still struggling to recover from the last pregnancy and take care of the latest newborn, she wasn't able to go to work like the other mothers. Our parents must have been more careful after Mi, the third girl, was born, because it was three years before Jung came along. Mother used that time to finally get out of the house. She helped with making side dishes in one of the food factories that had started on the collective farms and in cities and counties across the country during the postwar recovery years; then, later, she was assigned to a recreation centre where she learned hair cutting and styling techniques. After six months, she worked in the barbershop of a public bath in the city.

But because of Father's and Grandmother's unquenchable desire for a son and grandson, Mother was only able to work for about a year, including her apprenticeship period, before she had to quit. After the incident where Father held Sook under the bathwater, Mother seemed to give up entirely on the idea of doing something different with her life. Everyone said Sook wound up the way she did after having the measles, but Mother and Grandmother blamed Father for it and talked behind his back about how it was his fault for holding the newborn under water. Up until she'd passed her third birthday, it seemed as if she was just slow to start talking, but then they realized she'd been a deaf-mute all along.

*

I was attending a local kindergarten at the time, so I must have been about five years old. The azaleas had bloomed a bright red at the top of the hill, and my sisters were out filling their baskets with freshly-picked shepherd's purse, which means it had to be early spring.

I was sitting on the sunny
twenmaru
porch just off the main room, basking in the warm sun, when Hindungi suddenly crossed the courtyard, heading straight for the front gate and growling. Her ears were folded back, and she bared her teeth and started barking ferociously. Wondering who it was, I went over to the gate and pushed open the wooden door. A little girl, just a bit bigger than me, was standing there. She wore a shin-length
mongdang
skirt and a
jeogori
blouse, both made from white cotton. I thought she was one of Hyun's friends coming over to play. I said: “Hyun's not home right now,” but the girl just stared straight at me without saying a word. Hindungi was still barking wildly behind me, but the girl didn't look the least bit scared.

I thought I heard her say: “This isn't the place.” No sooner did I hear those words than she turned and ran off. Actually, I'm not sure whether she ran away or faded away right before my eyes. I hurried out the gate, wondering where she'd vanished to, and saw that she was already way down at the far end of the path that ran along the other houses, which were all similar in size and shape to ours. Her ponytail swayed back and forth as she went. She stopped in front of a house with an apricot tree in the yard, turned to look my way, and slipped inside. The reason I remember that ponytail is because of the bright red ribbon fluttering at the end of it. That night, while we were all eating dinner, our mother told Father there'd been a death in the neighbourhood.

“We need to give some condolence money to the head of the neighbourhood unit. Her family just lost their grandson.”

“What? How did he die?”

Before Mother could answer Father's question, Grandmother muttered to herself: “Must have been something in his past life. It's fate.”

“You don't think it's the typhoid fever that's been going around?”

I tugged on the hem of Grandmother's skirt to tell her what I'd seen earlier.

“Grandma! Grandma!”

“Yes, yes, let's eat.”

“I saw something earlier, Grandma. A little girl came to our door and then left. She went into the house with the apricot tree in the yard.”

No one paid any attention, but after dinner Grandmother pulled me aside, sat me down on the
twenmaru
and asked me a lot of questions.

“Who did you say you saw?”

“A little girl dressed all in white. Hindungi barked at her and tried to bite her. When she saw me, she said, ‘This isn't the place,' and left. I wondered where she was going so I followed her outside, and I saw her go into the apricot-tree house.”

“Did you make eye contact with her?”

“Yes! Right before she went in, she turned and looked at me.”

Grandmother nodded and stroked my hair.

“You'll be all right,” she said. “You've got the gift in your blood. Now, do as Grandmother tells you. Spit on the ground three times and stamp your left foot three times.”

That day I became very ill. My body got really hot, and I started talking nonsense. It went on all night. Father carried me on his back to a hospital down near the harbour. Children and old people who'd been brought there from towns and villages nearby were lying in rows in every room. I don't remember how many days I spent there. All I do remember is seeing that little girl perched on the ledge of the lattice window, close to where several people were lying. I stared up at her. I wasn't afraid. After I was sent home, my sisters were moved out of the back room where we normally all slept, and my grandmother stayed by my side. She was the only one who would come near me. My fever would dip during the day and then set me afire again at night. Hives the size of millet seeds broke out all over my body and took a long time to go away. Grandmother kept asking me about the girl.

“Do you still see her?”

“No, but I did at the hospital. Grandma, who is she?”

“That's the typhoid ghost. Nothing will happen to you. My guardian spirit is keeping watch.”

I don't know how long I was sick. I kept slipping in and out of sleep both day and night. I can still remember the dream I had:

I enter the grounds of what looks like an old temple. A stone wall has collapsed, and tiles from the half-caved-in roof lie scattered about in the reedy, weed-filled courtyard. I don't go into the darkened temple, but instead stand nervously next to a slanting pillar and peer inside. Something moves. A dark red ribbon comes slithering out of the shadows. I turn and start to run. The ribbon stands on end and springs after me. I run through a forest, wade across a stream and cut through rice paddies, clambering over the high ridges between them, and make it back to the entrance of our village. The whole time, that red ribbon is dancing after me. Just then, Grandmother appears. She looks different – she's wearing a white
hanbok
and has her hair up in a chignon with a long hairpin holding it in place. She pushes me behind her and lets out a loud yell:

“Hex, be gone!”

The ribbon slithers to the ground and vanishes.

I woke up in a panic. My body and face were drenched in sweat as if I'd been caught in a rainstorm. Grandmother sat up and wiped my face and neck with a cotton cloth. “Hold on just a little longer, and it'll pass,” she said.

Though I was awake, my body kept growing and shrinking over and over as the fever rose and fell. My arms and legs grew longer and longer until they were pressed up against the floor and the walls. Then they shrivelled and shrank up smaller than beans, like rolled up balls of snot dug from both nostrils, and got softer and softer until the skin burst. The warm floor against my back dropped and carried me down, down, down, into the earth below. Faces appeared in the wallpaper. Their mouths opened, and they laughed and chattered noisily at me.