A Dream of Lights (12 page)

The thought of the postcard and the letters and photographs and magazines my family had burned never left me, not as the mornings became lighter and the days longer, nor as I heard the crack of ice melting on the frozen stream and knew spring was here.

And every day as I worked, I thought of different ways to ask Grandfather what it all meant, who’d sent them, where the rest of my family was, what his story was, desperate to know now in case something terrible happened to us and the truth could never be shared.

But when the days passed and evenings came and I sat at the table looking at his face so tired and so drawn, life falling away from him, I couldn’t find the words to say. Every day, it seemed, my courage to ask him dwindled, and my reluctance to upset him grew.

I wished I had a photograph of us from when we first arrived so I could see how much we had all changed, at least on the outside. Even with the light fading I could tell my grandmother’s hair was thinning and falling out, that her cheeks were hollow and that even the anger in her eyes was fading, as it seemed her life force was too.

I watched my grandfather’s fingers bend round the spoon and noticed how his knuckles stuck out, and as he walked across the hut, I saw it was with a stooped back and shuffling feet. And when I hugged him that night before going to sleep I could feel his spine curling under my fingertips and his shoulder blades pressing through to my cheek. Tears sprang to my eyes and my heart ached.

I remembered the words from my father in the darkness –
I can feel the bones in your arms and legs… but I have no more food to give you…
I stare at your pale skin and your blue lips…
but I don’t have enough fuel to keep you warm…

I understand you now, Father
, I thought.

How I had changed, the weight my body had lost, I didn’t know. But I could see my ribs and feel my hip bones, could reach my fingers round the tops of my arms, and I could see the shadows and the sadness in Grandfather’s eyes when he looked at me, and I wondered if he could see me fading as I could him.

We were skeletons, we were monsters, we were the living dead.

But I learnt to turn my head and my memory away from the bad things, although that was hard, and I learnt that although they controlled our bodies and our movements, inside my head was invisible to them, and my thoughts and imagination could take me wherever I wanted, and the smallest of things could lift my spirits even if only for a fraction of time.

And so as I walked back to the hut that I refused to call home after yet another day, my eyes searched across the dull earth, and my heart lifted as I saw a sprout of green poking through. Then my mouth tipped a smile when I noticed a sparrow balanced on a branch above me, a few twigs grasped between his beak for making his nest. I stopped as I saw a flower hiding in the dirt, a feeling of warmth and joy in my chest as I dug it from the earth with my fingers, the roots so fragile in my hands, its delicate petals of white and pink.

I hoped I could keep it alive, hoped it would grow on the window sill of the hut, hoped I could wake to it every morning. For a while at least.

My eyes drifted across the land in front of me, my feet moving automatically towards somewhere to sit, to rest, to sleep so briefly until it all began again the following day. But with my flower to look at when I woke.

But a shout came. A noise. A cry. Thin and weak, yet pierced with fear and pain. And my senses prickled and I paused, my head jerking upwards and my eyes staring towards the hut where I knew it had come from. My hut.

It came again, louder this time, and frightened. The door flew open and I stopped, staring, watching helplessly. The guard, the one who hated me, the one who killed that boy, whose face I spat in, stormed out of my hut, his gun in one hand, his other gripping my grandmother’s hair, pulling her along the ground.

My hand shot over my mouth to stop myself screaming. I told my legs not to move as I watched her arms lift and flail around, her hands reaching for her head as she tried to protect herself, and her legs scrabbling in the dirt as they tried and tried to get upright. And her face… oh, her face… so vulnerable… so weak… so ashamed.

Again, as with the boy, nobody did anything. No one stopped to help, or shouted in anger, or even paused what they were doing to watch in horror. All apart from one, my grandfather, who was now standing next to me.

We stood without a word spoken, watching her being dragged away, listening to her cries tearing through the air, knowing it might well be the last time we saw her and there was nothing,
nothing
, we could do. I could feel Grandfather’s sobs pulling at his body as he stepped closer to me, and I felt his fingers touch mine, and I grabbed his hand and held it, holding him close, keeping him close, my grandfather. My loyal, my sympathetic, my kind and caring, my generous and affectionate, my wonderful grandfather.

We watched Grandmother disappear into the distance, towards the buildings whose threat hung over us all, with the tales we’d all heard of gas experiments or chemicals, solitary confinement or beatings, punishments from the cruellest of imaginations, and I felt her eyes boring into me, hating me, blaming me for everything since the day Sook’s mother sent the men to our house.

Yes, I regretted it, with my whole heart I did, as I watched her go and as I felt the pain of my grandfather. What had she done or said to be taken away from us? So little, it could be nothing. I didn’t want, or need, to know.

She disappeared and then so did her cries, and the shouts of the guard.

We waited in our hut, our cornmeal eaten, hoping to hear the door creak open, her footsteps across the floor, her moans about how many trips to the river she’d taken that day and how little she could find to eat.

I dropped the flower into an old broken cup and placed it on the window sill, my symbol of hope for her return. Darkness slipped over us, quiet and inconspicuous, and we lit a candle and waited. For what? Did we really believe she’d be coming back that night? Or ever?

We pulled our bed mats together and stretched blankets over us to keep warm, to find comfort in another body being close.

“You think she’s dead?” His question was so honest it hurt.

“N— no,” I stammered.

“I do.”

I didn’t move. Didn’t reach my hand to his to offer comfort or support, I just lay there, the silence agonising, feeling his chest rise and fall as he breathed, and secretly, guiltily, selfishly, I was grateful it wasn’t him who’d been taken from me.

“Tell me,” I whispered. “Please. Tell me who sent the letters and postcards. Tell me what happened.”

He shook his head.

“Why not?” I sighed. “Why don’t you want me to know? Is it that bad? Are you worried what I’ll think of you? Because you know, whatever it is, however bad you think it is, it won’t change anything. You’ll still be Grandfather.”

He wiped a hand across his face.

“You’ll still mean the world to me,” I whispered.

He sighed, long and slow, then he closed his eyes and lowered his head. And I thought that was it. He wouldn’t tell me; nothing would change. And next he would be gone, like Grandmother, and his secrets and his past would go with him. And I would never know, and I would never understand.

“I did a terrible thing, Yoora,” he whispered, and he looked up at me with his eyes full of tears. “A dreadful thing and she never forgave me.” I took his hand and held it, his skin so dry I thought it would flake away, his bones so pronounced I thought they would break.

“I said sorry so many times, but it never made any difference. Sorry can’t take it away. It’s not your fault, you see? That we’re here, in this
prison
, this
camp
. I know you think it is. I know you blame yourself. But all you did was trust somebody.”

“Grandmother blames me.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Ever questioned why our social class is so low? Why we’re
beulsun,
tainted blood? We just are, aren’t we?”

I shrugged.

“For years I told your parents that they should explain things to you, but they never did. Your father wanted to, but not your mother. But then what are mothers for if not to protect their children?” His face wrinkled into a smile so unfamiliar, but a smile that faded away with the longest of sighs. “All right, child, we start from as far back as I can remember. Yes?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I breathed.

“I was six years old, standing on the deck of a ship, staring out at this expanse of grey sky above me, and this never-ending blue beneath me; I’d never seen anything like it.
It’s the sea
, my mother told me.
It’s wet and cold and don’t fall in.
” He smiled at the memory.

“It lurched up and down and side to side, and while my mother filled my head with stories of the better life we were going to have, I emptied my stomach over the side, cried a little and searched across the blue for land. It was 1941 and we were heading to Japan. So many of their men had gone to fight in the war that they were short of workers, and so they offered Koreans like my parents all sorts of promises to lure them over.”

“You went from North Korea over to Japan?”

He shook his head. “No. We were from the South.”

I stared at him.

“It wasn’t split then. There wasn’t a North and a South, it was all one big country. We came from a village near Seoul.”

“But that makes you… that means you’re…”

The candlelight flickered on his face and I tried to make sense of the look I could see on his face: sorrow or anger or disappointment.

“The enemy?” He snorted. “Do I look it? Or your grandmother? Does she?”

“She’s from the South too?”

He nodded. I stared at him. “But… but… the South started the war against the North, so…”

He interrupted, his head shaking, his finger wagging at me. “No, Yoora. That’s what they want you, want everyone, to believe. But that’s not true. They rewrote history to fit what they wanted and nobody dares question it. People from my generation know, but they say nothing. How could they?”

It went against everything I’d been taught, and all the history books I’d read at school. But I realised I couldn’t believe anything, about my country wholeheartedly or without question now. How much was lies? I hoped one day I could find out. I knew now that I believed Grandfather, as I believed those words Father had spoken all that time ago. Completely and utterly.

“We arrived in Japan with barely more than what we were standing up in, but with hopes and promises keeping our spirits high. It was going to be a good life, an easier life. We were going to be happy. But I don’t remember it ever keeping its promises. We were always outsiders and we all tended to group together, societies of Korean workers growing in corners of cities. My father went from job to job, never settling, and I watched my parents’ expressions turn from hope to frustration to apathy.

“Time passed, I met a girl – your grandmother – and more time went by, and all of a sudden I was in love with her; I felt like…” I watched him lift his eyes as if he was looking for the answer in the darkness of the ceiling. “Like I’d woken up… like I was alive at last.”

He sighed and I stared at him over the candlelight, watching it flicker on to his skin through shadows dancing in the warmth of those memories in his eyes. I remembered Sook, how he made me feel – alive and awake – just as Grandfather had said, and I felt that horrible sadness clawing at me.

“But…” he continued, “you make plans, you think of the future, but then
life
happens. November the third 1959, Japanese Culture Day, celebrating peace and freedom, the day she told me she was pregnant.”

My hand flew to my mouth and I stared at him. “You weren’t married?” I whispered.

He shrugged, his smile lifting again as he glanced at my wide eyes of disbelief. “Still aren’t,” he whispered.

I was so shocked. It was unbelievable. My grandmother? Pregnant and unmarried? Pretending to be married now?

“Nobody knows,” he added, his face so close to mine I could see a spark of something in his eyes that told me he might always have been a rebel. But in hiding. And with a quiet voice.

“We spent a while trying to decide what to do and who we should tell and what we should say. What my parents would do, how hers would react. But in the end, we didn’t tell them at all. I was so frightened her parents would take her away from me, that I would never see her again or the baby, that I convinced her to run away with me, to go back to Korea and make a life together for the three of us.

“By then the country was split in two. She wanted to go to the South, close to where we both had relatives. I wanted to go to the North. The North offered free health care, free education. The South didn’t. And the North didn’t have any of her relatives who I thought might take her away from me.

“Like a child I moaned and nagged, until she gave way. We arrived pretending we were married, pretending we were older and for a while things were good, things were great in fact, and I believed I’d made the right decision for us. We sent letters back to Japan, apologising, explaining, saying we would visit, and hoped they would visit us. We missed them.

“The country seemed prosperous. We were given jobs, somewhere to live, food every week – our rations. The streets and the buildings were clean; there was barely any crime. We felt safe and we felt happy. And our little boy, your father, was born.

“But gradually, and I don’t know when, things started to go wrong. We were moved from the town into the country. Away from my job in the factory, your grandmother’s job in the office, to work the land instead. Tough, physical work. With less and less food. We wrote telling our families we’d moved, but no letters ever came back. Again and again we asked the authorities for permission to visit them, but again and again it was refused.

“Years passed and, thinking our families had disowned us, we stopped writing. I watched the sparkle of life and beauty leave your grandmother, and I saw her hatred and anger for me grow.
What can I do?
I used to think over and over.
There has to be something… something.
I could only think of one thing – I wrote to all the old addresses I could remember in Japan, and all the ones I could remember of relatives in the South, and had the letters smuggled out. And I waited. Hoping. And waited. And finally,
finally
, after nearly a year, one came back. From my brother in the South, with tales of their devastation when I ran away, of them leaving Japan and heading back to Seoul, and the journey one letter made, passed from kind hands to kind hands, over thousands of miles.”

I didn’t wonder any more, as his story unfolded, why I had never been told about my family, or had it explained to me why we were
beulsun.
The candlelight showed me all the guilt and pain etched deep on his face as lines and wrinkles, running through his hair as grey.

“She didn’t hate you,” I whispered. “She loved you. I’m sure she did. Still does.”

He squeezed my hand and I watched his eyes begin to glisten and his mouth turn down. “She told me every single day,” he whispered, “that she blamed me and she hated me. And every
single
day I apologised. But it never made any difference. I took her life from her.” His tears began to pour, and his words were gulped and uneven.

I opened my mouth to ask him about the postcard, if his brother had sent it, how it had reached us, but this wasn’t the time. I wished I could take his pain away from him, but I was the wrong person to do that, so instead I put my arms round him and held him tight.

Strange
, I thought,
that decisions made so long ago have led to this – us struggling with every sunrise and sunset to survive, hour by hour, minute by minute. With death on our shoulder, whispering in our ear, waiting for our day, our time.