Your Republic Is Calling You (11 page)

When Ki-yong turned fifteen, his mother grew suspicious of his father. Or it may have been that she had been suspicious of him for a long time. A note she found in his pocket triggered her doubts. A pretty feminine script looped across the paper, "A flower blooming, hidden on an unknown road. Do you know this nameless flower? Please know my feelings when you smell this flower as you walk along a bumpy road." Father explained that it was the lyrics of the song "We Will Go with the Song of Happiness in Our Arms." While Mother knew the song as well, she believed it was a love letter, that a tramp in love with her husband had written the note under the guise of a song. Father told her that he had heard it on the radio and liked it, and asked one of the workers under his supervision to jot down the lyrics for him, but Mother's suspicions weren't dispelled. One day, when Ki-yong and
Father were fishing at Taedong River, Father slid a cigarette between his lips and said, "I'm worried about your mother."

Since their home was a two-room apartment, no secret could be kept from the children. The layout forced them to grow up quickly. Ki-yong realized that Father was not asserting his innocence. Instead of saying he was hurt by her suspicions, he was saying he was worried about Mother. Ki-yong understood vaguely what that signified but didn't show it on his face.

Mother also lamented about her situation to Ki-yong. "Since you are the eldest son, you have to take my side no matter what happens. Your father was always popular with women. His nose is always in a book, so when women chase after him he doesn't know what to do and just ends up going along with them." Mother stopped and lowered her voice, looking around. "Shh. They're listening in next door, those sneaky rats."

"Mother, please stop!" Ki-yong spat out.

Mother looked bewildered, then sank into a deep despair. "You don't believe me either!" she accused.

Ki-yong looked away. It would have been preferable to deal with some other problem. He wouldn't have minded if Father had really cheated on her, he hadn't been a party member, or he had committed a more serious offense. For a moment, Ki-yong wished he had a different mother. He wanted his mother to be a comforting, warm, unsuspicious, mature woman.

She shot at him, "I knew it. You're on his side because you're a boy."

Mother threatened Father that she would complain to the Party and to his bosses. Father ignored her. One weekend, leaving Mother alone at home, Father took the three boys to
the ice skating rink. The two younger ones glided on the frozen pond, blissfully ignorant of the situation at home. The large thermometer hanging at the rink indicated a temperature of fourteen degrees. Little kids rode on sleds while the older ones skated, and when they got hungry they gnawed on corn on the cob they had stashed in their pockets. Ki-yong had put on Father's skates; they were a little too roomy. To this day, he remembers clearly what Father said to him at the rink. "What is Juche Ideology?"

Ki-yong hesitated, then reeled off what he'd learned in school. "It is a revolutionary ideology putting forth that humans have creativity, consciousness, and independence, and decide their own fate."

Father looked tired. He squinted as the low-hanging winter sun shone on his face. "Do you really believe humans are that mighty?"

Ki-yong couldn't believe his ears. This was forbidden talk, something that was near impossible to hear at school. "Pardon?"

Father lit a cigarette. The spark from the match jumped to the cigarette paper and flared brightly before it extinguished.

"The ancient Greeks believed that the world was composed of four elements."

"We learned that at school."

"What are they?"

"Water, fire, air, and earth. Greek philosophy soon became dialectic materialism..."

Father cut him off. "That is right. As you know, I make dams to capture water. Of those four elements, I studied water and earth. I don't know much about the rest. I was never interested in how humans did what. Juche Ideology ... well, it is probably right. It's a good thing for a human to create his
own destiny through creativity, consciousness, and independence. But remember when there was a flood in Hwanghae Province two years ago? If the dam floods over and bursts, humans are the same as dogs or pigs. They're just swept away."

"Isn't that why people like you put theory into practice and build dams to control nature?"

"That's only a temporary solution. The last war was all about fire. Pyongyang went back to the stone age because of American bombs. After that was the era of earth. We picked up our shovels and erected cities. Through the Chollima Movement, we built a republic as good as any other. Now it's the era of water. Water appears placid from the outside but there's actually a very powerful energy within it. That's why we have to control water. We're doing that now, but nobody knows what will happen. Soon it will become the era of air. It may be the most painful era, more than the periods of fire, earth, and water. You can't see air but without it, people can't breathe."

At the time, Ki-yong didn't know what Father was trying to tell him. But soon, he understood that Father was deriding the pointless self-centered worldview of Juche Ideology, and was accurately prophesying North Korea's future. Years later, in the early 1990s, after a series of floods, the so-called arduous march began. It was the era of starvation, where the only available food was grass and bark and dirt. Stomachs went empty. The era of air. People said,
If this is how it is, let's fight with anyone, be it South Korea or America. Let's go all the way until the very end.

Father changed the subject. "Your mother is a child of the earth. She's from a farming family. But as you know, I'm a child of water."

Ki-yong's grandfather was a boatman on Taedong River.
He remained one even when the Japanese built a railway bridge over the river and luminaries like Natsume Soseki, Yi Kwangsu, and Na Hye-sok traversed it by train. When Ki-yong's father came back from Koje Island, his own father was waiting for him in a hut on a riverbank dense with weeping willows. Like the willows, a few of whose branches were always dipped in water, Father had a damp and dark side to him. Even his preference of talking frankly, instead of beating around the bush, was more characteristic of water than of earth or fire. Ki-yong, who was quick to catch on to nuances and possessed a good ear for language, understood that waterlike Father was telling him that he was being trapped by Mother, the earth, and that at some point the water would breach the earthen walls and go where it wanted. But this knowledge made Ki-yong feel uncomfortable. Why were they getting him involved in their arguments?

Ki-yong was a good skater. Even in ill-fitting skates, he turned corners faster than anyone and stopped precisely, with a spray of ice. Ki-yong bent low and shot forward, his legs stretching and lengthening. He went around counterclockwise on the outer edge of the pond as the beginners in the inner circle slowly wobbled around in the other direction. The chilly wind slapped his cheeks, but it wasn't painful. The smoke from a small fire of weeds, kindled to ward off the cold, billowed, aromatic and sulfurous. Ki-yong glided faster and completed a loop. He straightened and placed his feet parallel to each other, braking to a stop with a flourish, sending up a shower of ice chips.

That day was the first time he spoke with Jong-hee, a girl who lived on the same floor as Ki-yong's family, at the southern end of the hall. Her cheeks were red and her small nose was pert. At 7:20
A.M.,
when all the students gathered at the meeting place and marched to school together, grouped by
class, their eyes met. It happened again at the skating rink. Jong-hee smiled, a red knitted scarf looped around her neck, and Ki-yong slid past her, missing his chance to reciprocate. Fifteen-year-old Ki-yong didn't have the courage to double back to say hello. But as he rested by the wooden post, watching his breath turn white, she came over to him, her long limbs moving elegantly.

"You're a very good skater."

Ki-yong was self-conscious about the gaze of his father, who was probably observing this from somewhere, and that of his school friends. He felt a little proud, too, but didn't know how to express this pride, and so it was a sort of pointless emotion.

"Are they your skates?" Jong-hee asked finally, when Ki-yong didn't say anything.

"No, my father's."

"So you can speak!" Jong-hee flashed him a smile and pushed off toward the inner circle. It was an embarrassingly unsophisticated conversation, but it was Pyongyang in the mid-1970s. Openly dating symbolized one's ideological laxity and was the subject of severe criticism. Nobody knew what to do or say to a girl at the ice rink; it wasn't only Ki-yong who was terribly inept. Dating was a clear taboo. Their interaction that day wouldn't have been that strained had he known that he would soon vomit on her, and twenty years later, would unexpectedly bump into her.

Jong-hee was well known in school. From the age of eleven, she was chosen to represent their school in large-scale Mass Games with children from all around the country, to celebrate the founding anniversary of the Workers Party or the War Victory Anniversary. More than eighty thousand children were divided into ten teams, and each came out and performed awe-inspiring, circuslike aerobics routines.
Jong-hee was tall and good enough to be in the front row of her team. The performances went on for twenty days and all the schoolchildren in Pyongyang went to watch. Everyone dressed up—students in uniforms, men in suits, and women in blue or red hanbok. The crowd walked between the large columns and gathered in the Main Theater.

The aerobics routines were composed of scenes from revolutionary history, such as the armed anti-Japanese struggle. Ki-yong and the rest of the boys tracked Jong-hee's movements with their eyes, proud of their school representative. She leaned back, picked up a small ball and threw it high in the sky, did a running start like a doe, and launched into a somersault, catching the falling ball with her legs. More than one hundred girls threw the balls high above their heads and caught them with their legs in unison, and not a single one dropped the ball. Jong-hee looked more mature than her age because of her vivid eye makeup and red lipstick. Ki-yong and his friends watched Jong-hee's leaps and turns with their mouths agape, envious of the children who lifted her up and marched away.

Why would someone like that talk to him? Ki-yong couldn't believe it. A little later, when he looked for her, she was already gone. His brothers grew tired of sledding and the sun was dropping behind Moran Peak. They gathered their skates and sleds and went home.

A few days after their skating excursion, Father went to check on a Yalu River dam and power plant. A fissure had been discovered in the dam, which was built during the Japanese occupation, so a drove of functionaries from Pyongyang had to go to Sinuiju. That day happened to be Ki-yong's sixteenth birthday. Everything was symbolic: there was a fissure in the dam, Father wasn't home, Pyongyang was experiencing a blackout, and his two brothers were chosen as
school representatives to go on a trip to Myohyang Mountain. Ki-yong felt an inexplicable dread for having to spend his birthday with only Mother.

"Mother will cook chicken stew for you. I'll bring you a present from Sinuiju. What would you like?" Father asked.

"A foreign-made ballpoint pen, please." Ki-yong actually wanted a good pair of shoes. But he ended up asking for a ballpoint pen made in a foreign country. Father ruffled his hair and left for work.

Father took the 6:00
P.M.
train from Pyongyang station. As soon as it left, Pyongyang tumbled into darkness, as if someone had flicked off the light switch. Nobody knew if the blackout involved a problem with the hydropower plant or the electricity line coming into Pyongyang. Nobody in the North had any inkling about what was going on. The paper and television didn't mention it at all, leaving rumors to fill the void. In darkened Pyongyang, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Blackouts were routine. Or it could be a blackout drill to prepare for an air attack. But there was no siren that indicated the onset of a drill. Ki-yong walked home from the subway station. The December sun set early; it was already dark. Ki-yong stopped by his mother's foreign currency store. The unlit store was closed. Ki-yong shook the steel shutters a few times, but when nobody came out, he headed home. He climbed the stairs of the harmonica apartment building and approached his unit, the savory smell of chicken stew greeting him.

"Mother, I'm home!"

No answer. It was dark inside the apartment and the gas burner was on, casting a bluish glow. Ki-yong turned it off and went into the master bedroom. Mother wasn't there either. Did she go somewhere to borrow a candle? Ki-yong went out to the hall and looked around, peeking into a few
apartments with open doors, but she wasn't to be found. Instead, he bumped into Jong-hee, who was coming home from practice. Even under the faint candlelight, he could tell that she was smiling at him. She bounced down the hall, her steps lighthearted and airy, revealing her talent for gymnastics. Ki-yong went back inside and tossed his book bag under his desk. The aroma of the chicken stew wasn't quite as strong anymore. He went into the bathroom, scooped some cold water they had saved in the tub into a big bucket and thoroughly washed his hands, face, and neck. It was dark in the bathroom, so dark that he couldn't even see his face in the mirror. Ki-yong searched like a blind man for a towel, but then slipped and fell. He tried to get up but fell again. The floor was slippery, coated with something wet. Ki-yong, sitting on the bathroom floor rubbing his aching tailbone, realized that there was someone else sitting on the floor, next to him. He reached out and felt clothes and then a brassiere under the clothes. He patted the face and the waist, then started to scream. It was a body, crumpled.

Ki-yong bolted out into the hall and sprinted toward the end of the hallway, where faint light was coming through. He panted, leaning against the railing. He could hear his breath and found himself feeling inhuman, like an animal, a wild hog cornered during a hunt. Jong-hee ran out of her apartment, candle in hand. Ki-yong was covered in blood, but it looked like dirt in the dim light. His neighbors rushed out, surprised by his screams. Jong-hee boldly embraced Ki-yong and led him toward the narrow balcony hanging at the end of the hallway, where people couldn't see them. The westerly wind from the Yellow Sea battered them. Ki-yong, on his knees, in Jong-hee's arms, drew in ragged breaths, then vomited warm, sour liquid onto her chest.