A Dream of Lights (11 page)

The rains came, heavy and continuous.

So much fell and for so long that I thought the sky couldn’t possibly hold any more, and trying to keep dry was ridiculous. Every part of me was soaked: from the hair pasted to my head, to the clothes stuck to my skin, to my feet skidding inside shoes that did little more than hold together small puddles.

I struggled up the mountainside watching the rain pour off the ends of other prisoners’ noses like a bad cold, running down their faces in rivers so fast that wiping them would’ve been pointless. It was strange, yet it was mesmerising. It was the rainy season.

I tried to work, but so many times the saw would stick in the logs, or my feet skid in the mud, or the logs slip through my wet hands and to the ground. Over and over. And every time my hands failed me, I remembered the boy and I looked for the guard who had killed him with my stomach turning somersaults. So much time I wasted stopping, sighing, wiping my hands down my wet trouser legs, staring at everyone else struggling just as much as I was. Desperation clawing at us all as we realised we were not going to make our quota.

I stopped to wipe my hands yet again, and next to me the girl who I’d buried the boy with paused too.

“Look at that,” she whispered. The first words she’d said to me since that night.

I turned to see. And there was the guard and for a moment I thought she was warning me, as she had done before, but I watched as much as I dared, and I saw what she meant – there was the funniest of sights in the worst of places.

He was struggling up the hillside, his feet slipping every few paces, taking him back to where he started. Over and over.

I glanced back at her and saw the hint of a smile dance across her face.

“Don’t stare at him!” I hissed.

“Look at the mud all over his boots.”

I turned to the side slightly, scared he would see me and of what he would do to me, but still watching, mesmerised, from the corner of my eye. “He’s going to fall over,” I whispered.

She looked at me with mischief in her eyes, and I knew that every bit of her was hoping he would.

I risked another look, saw his feet still slipping, his body lurching sideways, his hands clutching at the air for something that wasn’t there. “Look!” I whispered. And as she turned, he fell forward, his knees landing in the sodden earth, his hands splashing into the mud, his whole body slipping slowly downwards.

We shot a look at each other and turned away, our attention focused on the log next to us as our bodies shook with laughter, our hands over our mouths, giggling like schoolgirls, stopping for a moment as we calmed, then glancing at each other again, and again laughter pouring from us. Laughter among madness; a ray of light in a place so dark.

And that day we didn’t make our quota, but when it came to checking, the guard had disappeared.

I walked back to the hut, trying to remember the laughter and the smiles and that wonderful feeling of lightness in my chest. Trying not to remember that the last time I felt like that was with Sook. Hoping the guard hadn’t seen us laughing.

Hoping we wouldn’t pay for it the following day.

We stood so long at the following morning’s roll call, in clothes still wet and heavy, with rain still hammering down on us and around us, and puddles to our ankles, that my mind began to drift. I thought of the previous day, laughing with the girl, the guard falling over, and I was surprised when I saw his uniform was pristine again, and wondered how long it had taken him to scrub off the mud, or if he had someone do it for him.

Did he see us?
I thought.
Is he planning some kind of punishment? Revenge?

My throat, my chest, my stomach, everything flushed hot.

No. Don’t think. Don’t think
, I told myself.

I forced my mind to wander instead to other things, other places, lifting my spirits away from that place to somewhere better, happier, freer. Drier perhaps.

“Is there a rainy season in Seoul?” I whispered to Grandfather next to me.

“Shh,” he said.

“They can’t hear us,” I replied. “And they’re not looking this way.”

“Yes.” A different voice spoke, to my right I thought, and I glanced that way. The man nodded. “Between June and September. It’s the East Asian monsoon season.”

I turned to him, amazed. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“I’ve read…” But he stopped, his eyes leaving mine and opening wide as something over my shoulder caught his attention. And he turned his head back to face the front, staring away to a vague point in the distance, his face, his whole body, a statue.

“How do you know?” I repeated, louder this time.

“Yoora,” my grandfather hissed, but it barely registered with me.

“Have you been there? Have you been to Seoul?”

But still the man didn’t move. I paused. Everything was silent and everything was still. But something was close to me, so close I could feel it breathing, its eyes upon me, waiting. I held my breath and I turned. And there he was – the guard.

“You,” he said. “Again.”

I dared to lift my head, to look him straight in the eye, and I saw something… something that scared me, that made my skin crawl and my breath catch, and fear pound in my head and run down my veins and into every part of my body. Something so powerful, so wrong, that it hurt just to look at it and made my eyes close and my head lower away from it.

He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me forward out of the line to stand me in front of everyone. I lifted my head and looked back at every single face so blank, so vague, anonymous, like slaves. Among them, the girl I thought could be a friend. And Grandfather. And Grandmother.

Don’t cry
, I told myself.
Don’t cry.

I tried to breathe slowly in and slowly out, tried to calm myself, stop my heart banging in my chest, and my thoughts racing with visions of terrible things I was scared of happening.

I stretched up on tiptoe as his hand dragged my hair up and up, and I closed my eyes, trying to remember Mother and Father, their strength and their bravery.

But it was a memory of Sook that came to me. His face in the rain. Smiling at me. Laughing with me. An evening we spent together hidden among the trees, hoping, naively, that they’d shelter us from the rains. We were warm, but we were drenched.

How could I have forgotten that?
I thought.

His feet were so wet he took off his shoes, standing with the mud pushing between his toes, telling me how nice it felt, begging me to come and do the same. Laughing at me barefoot and wading across the mud to him, standing in front of him, with him, our feet squelching and slipping and sliding. Together. Laughing at the sight we must’ve looked. And the strangeness of it.

Sook
, I thought, standing in front of my whole ‘village’, waiting for whatever the guard chose to do.
Sook.
And I let that thought come to my head, let myself see it and listen to it –
I miss you.

The guard let go of my hair and grabbed me round the throat. “I could kill you any day I choose.” His voice hissed in my ear, low, secretive, menacing. “Any day or any time. I could kill you now if I wanted to. Nobody would care. Or I could let you go, let you think you’re safe, wait until you’re cutting down trees, or walking down the hills, or in your hut sleeping – I could wake you for a second before killing you. I can do whatever I like to you.”

I felt his breath in my face as he moved in front of me. “Open your eyes,” he hissed.

I peeled back my eyelids, but kept my head down.

“Look at me!” he shouted.

Slowly I raised my head to those eyes full of hatred glaring at me and into me.

“Because I will kill you one day. When I’ve had enough of you.” His hand squeezed at my throat and I felt the pressure growing in my head.

“My face,” he said, leering at me, “will be the last you ever see as you die.”

No
, I thought.
The last face I will see as I die will be of someone I love. Because you cannot take my imagination from me.

His grip tightened further and blackness seeped across my vision, and I could see nothing but what was in my head, a face coming towards me, forming, smiling at me. Not Mother. Not Father.

Sook.

The guard let go and I fell to the ground, gasping for the breath he’d allowed me to take. And the face disappeared.

Through the mud splashing and the rain pouring I watched the feet of all the prisoners as they filed past me to work. No one, not even the girl I had spoken with, stopping to check on me, to rest a hand on my shoulder or to mutter a word of concern. Only my grandfather slowing enough to allow him to watch my chest rise and fall and to turn his empty palm to me as if trying to show me there was nothing he could do.

Because there wasn’t. And I knew that.

I dragged myself back to my feet, took a deep breath and followed my work unit up the hillside when all I wanted to do was collapse and give up.

No
, I thought.
Don’t give up. Keep going, keep going.
And I thought of Grandfather’s words –
One day at a time, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other and maybe, just maybe.

I struggled through the rain coming down, trying to calm myself, watching the leaves and branches turning glossy and reflecting the light, listening to the drops hammering out rhythms on trees or bushes or hands or faces as if it was nature’s song, and as it collected in puddles of mud and sloshed back and forth with the steps of prisoners’ feet.

I heard someone close by and I glanced to one side to see the girl. All she did was look, but she’d done what so many others hadn’t.

I dared to hope that those small moments we’d shared, me and the girl, laughing at the guard, her glance at me after he humiliated me, would mark the beginning of a friendship for us, but it didn’t. Not quite. Instead it was more of a companionship, an understanding, or a connection where we never shared our names, or our stories about why we were in there, or even spoke more than a few words together.

But we would nod to each other if we found berries hiding on bushes and help each other fill our pockets and our mouths with them, and we would point out purple stains on fingers or chins or lips that could give us away to the guards and all the starving faces around us.

They were moments of relief that kept me breathing. Because every morning, and every roll call in the evening, that guard marched down the rows of prisoners, and every time he came towards me he would slow, and I would watch his hand move towards his gun, see his palm rest on the grip and his finger stretch towards the trigger.

And every single time it would make me feel sick. Every single time I would think I was about to die. Waiting to see him draw his gun, see that barrel pointing towards me and the flash of light in front of my eyes before blackness swallowed me. The power, the control he held over me, never once wavered. Never. Not through autumn or as winter came, or as I realised a year had passed.

I would lie in bed with the cold biting through me, and the wind howling around the hut and through the gaps, and I would listen for every noise, waiting for the day I would wake to his clammy hands round my throat or his gun cold against my head.

And the only way I could sleep, when even exhaustion wouldn’t take me, was to remember those moments of some kind of friendship with the girl, replaying in my mind the snowdrifts lying thickly over everything and staying for weeks on end, taking turns with her to walk in front up the mountainside, the other able to follow the path of the first, legs and feet stretching through channels and stepping in gaps already made in the snow.

Maybe it is a friendship
, I thought.
Or maybe she’s nothing more than another prisoner.

But whatever name I gave it didn’t matter anyway. Whatever it was, it was helping me sleep, helping me breathe in and out every day and helping me stay alive. Because life was intolerable, although we tolerated it. It was hardship like no other. It was debasing and terrifying. So many people of all ages dying from illness or malnutrition or starvation. Or beaten to death. Or executed. Or experimented on, I heard.

I longed not to hear these things and not to see them, wished instead to hear tales of freedom granted or a successful escape, stories that might lift me or give me hope, help keep the face of that guard away from my eyes and his threat from echoing inside my head. But I exchanged a few words here and there with people from our ‘village’, and Grandmother spoke to some of the women as she climbed up the hills around us, and Grandfather whispered to the other men in the mine, and all we ever heard was of the most terrible things that you thought no human could inflict on another.

I thought of those who sanctioned this place I found myself in, and the idealised view I held of my country did its final unravelling. I remembered Father’s words to me after the dream that marked the beginning of so much and wondered if all he was ever guilty of was of telling me the truth.

Because this wasn’t right. Because no crime could be horrendous enough to warrant the punishments I knew were being meted out, and the only crime it seemed anyone here was accused of was against the state or against the leadership. And that was so vague, so manipulable. Even as I looked around me, and listened to snatched words and half-conversations, I realised that innocence was everywhere. But innocence was irrelevant.