The Calligrapher's Daughter (45 page)

The major said, “You will be separated from the men.” He gave instructions to a guard who led me to the far side of the prison yard toward a row of vacant cells.

I was locked behind a wood and iron door in a narrow, dank cell with a high, barred window. When my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I saw a stained pallet on the rough plank floor and a beaten metal bucket. I clasped my hands, trying to pray, but all that came was
Like liquid, like water
. I leaned my back against the door, afraid to go farther into the cell, and watched a striped rectangle of light, cast through the window, travel infinitely slowly from the base of the wall, across the dirty floor to the edge of the bucket, catching a surprising gleam. Footsteps approached. The same impassive guard, who looked like he might be Korean, rattled keys in the lock. He handed me a small milking stool, a blanket and a tin of water, saying, “Major Yoshida’s orders.”

I sat on the stool in the far corner of the cell, wrapped in the blanket, though it gave no warmth. I watched the rectangle of light crawl along the wall. Sometimes dust visibly wafted through the light, once a pale green
moth, and slowly I began to remember the Psalms.
But Thou, O Lord, art a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cry aloud to the Lord, and He answers me from His holy hill …
” The words gave me the vision of flowing green hills, the huge burial mounds of ancient kings and warlords, around which flowed streams of pure and silvery water that soaked into the earth, encouraging the grasses to root farther, deeper, forever, until the gold-crowned skulls, bound in twisting roots, collapsed in rot. My body began to shiver and I made it stop. I closed my eyes, closed my mind to the fear that waited beside me.

Long after the box of light had swept the cell, the sky far above the window grayed with night. The crack of a hundred naked electric bulbs turning on shook me to awareness. Glassy light cast new patterns in my cell. A howl rose from the shadows. At first I thought a cat had entered the prison yard and was yowling in heat. Then I thought it was a wild predator and felt almost relieved, for I knew then what to be afraid of. I heard guttural voices and realized in horror that a man was screaming. I stood. I sat. The sounds blurred. Absurdly, I thought someone was doing laundry, beating a washing stick on wet clothes against a stone. Sharp brief buzzes. Animal screams. A snap like a branch breaking.

The sounds of torture beat about me like bats and I tried to stuff my fingers into my ears. I buried my head in the rank mattress, pleading to the dread night spirits who had whisked away the sanity from men’s minds and made them servants of terror.

At last, the darkness stilled, and I prayed on my knees for strength, courage and dignity to face what might befall me at dawn. Slowly, painfully, the morning rose and the weak early sun leaked into the cell. I found that my body called, and I drank the water and urinated in the bucket. Repelled by my human stink, I vomited. I looked up to a rattling of keys. A different guard handed me a wet towel and stood outside while I wiped the rough cloth over my face, neck, wrists and hands. He opened the cell and took me to the latrine to empty the bucket, then led me to a large building on the other side of the prison yard. I was shown into a small clean room with two chairs and a table with a small brown teapot and cups. The guard stood by the door and I stood by the table, breathing the delicate, glorious scent of green tea. The guard left as Major Yoshida entered. He smelled of anise and rubbing alcohol.

“Sit.” He pointed to a chair and leaned against the other. He gestured that I should pour tea and drink. Nervous, but no longer afraid, I sipped, set my cup down and cast my eyes to my lap.

“Tell me about this man, Calvin Cho.”

I gave his full Korean name, the location of his family home, and described how I came to know him. I hid nothing, because having seen his handwriting and the many envelopes, I was absolutely sure of him. He was studying to be a minister—perhaps he was already ordained—and he couldn’t possibly be a spy. This, too, I told the major.

“Did you know that he is in regular contact with the American government?”

“I haven’t heard from him in more than two years, my lord.” But he had written! What was in those letters?

Major Yoshida sat across from me and nodded to the tea. I sipped, thanking the particles of tea leaves for absorbing the sun’s heat on dewy terraced mountains, growing fat and lustrous, then drying in the same heat, preserving God’s grace in a fragile, fragrant medium for me to drink at this table.

“Tell me about your Jesus Christ,” he said. So unexpected was this turn in the interrogation that I looked directly into his eyes. I saw nothing to guide me or fool me, and so I began to recount Bible lessons. Many words, like
parable
, I knew no Japanese for, and he allowed me to use Korean as needed.

After three hours, I’d drunk all the tea. I recited the beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, my voice echoing in the bare room like a lingering note in the chamber of a closed piano. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth …” I paused, thinking this might have offended the major, but he remained expressionless.

When I finished, certain my chronology was wrong, I worried that I probably shouldn’t have mentioned “if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other cheek also,” and fretted over what I had missed and what to say next. Why was my head so empty of the Bible? The major stood abruptly and left the room.

I felt an urgent need to urinate and was almost happy to see the guard.
He led me to the latrine, then to my cell. The tin of water had been refilled and the bucket removed. I was instructed to call the guard when I needed to use the latrine. Cold, I wrapped myself in the blanket, and in the daylight saw its filth. I tried to pray, but my thoughts were filled with the strange interrogation of the morning. I remembered the smell of anise and the expensive tea, and tried to reconstruct those scents in my nose. Sometimes I stood and paced to warm my limbs and distract myself from growing hunger. I felt my mind closing in a peculiar way, as if it were preparing for siege, then I remembered the sounds of night.

When the square of light had almost traveled beyond my cell, the guard came and wordlessly unlocked the gate to deliver a bundle that had obviously been searched. Inside the loose wrapping was a lidded bowl from home, a woolen shawl and a pair of thick socks. My heart cried out,
Mother!
and I pressed the socks to my face, trying to breathe the smell of home, the smell of the beloved hands that had held those socks. My mother was not one to say to her children, “I love you.” It was an assumed truth, given freely at the gate of the womb.

I put on the socks and uncovered the bowl to find a mix of rice and millet with cabbage leaves on top and a shank of the salted fish I’d bought yesterday—forever ago. I ate with my fingers, keeping the bowl in the last square of light from the window. On the bottom of the bowl was a piece of folded rice paper, written finely with ink that bled slightly into the moist grains sticking to its surface. My fingers shaking, I kept my back to the cell door and unfolded the tiny paper.

With tears for my mother’s wisdom, steadfastness and love, I crumpled the scripture in my mouth and chewed thoroughly. I repacked the empty bowl in the cloth, knotting it just the way I knew my mother had knotted it. I felt our fingers had touched, and I was full.

MY MOTHER CAME every day for the next eighty-nine days, although I never saw her. I couldn’t think how she suffered the hours walking in sleet and snow, for to do so would cause me unbearable pain. Every part of my mind and body waited for the guard to bring the bundle from home. My mother delivered food, a message and the strength of her unseen presence, a silent but desperately vital link to outside. After several days when little changed in the routine of cold, solitary days and freezing, fearsome nights, I thought less and less of life beyond the walls. I clocked the light in my cell and waited for the singular benediction of my mother’s daily delivery. When I learned through the rice paper messages that bribes to Watanabe had proved fruitless and other official pleas had gone unheard, my focus narrowed even more. My breathing slowed, my eyes shrank, each sense dulled in waiting, pinpointed to the exact moment when the light would lie like a gift in my lap, the guard’s boots would crack the icy dirt outside the cell door, the key would turn in the lock and he’d deliver the bundle from Mother.

Major Yoshida interrogated me weekly in much the same manner as before, once saying I could have my husband’s letters when I confessed to being a spy. The letters would prove the truth of his involvement with the American government, the major said, and would also show how he had implicated me. Assured by their existence, I no longer cared about the contents of the letters. In those moments, I was oddly grateful that I’d been arrested, else I would never have known the fact of his constancy. I used my mother’s rice paper scripture as the basis to tell more about Jesus toward the end of each interrogation, as was Major Yoshida’s wish. He always left curtly.

The major’s strange curiosity about the Bible made me wonder if my imprisonment was a call for me to declare my faith, or was a test I’d passed, as evidenced by my relatively healthy condition, though I was slowly growing weaker. I knew I should be glad for the chance to share the Gospel, but the contrast of the nights to the days confused me. Even if I could accept that it was the opportunity to speak the Word that had spared me from the other side of the prison compound, the suffering inflicted there refuted the existence of a merciful, loving God.

Because of the humiliation of having to ask the guard, I tried to hold my need for the toilet to once at dawn and at sundown. I had to overcome my embarrassment and ask for rags when I menstruated, but I only bled the first month. I felt my body shutting down as my mind closed to sensation with each passing day. I kept the wool shawl wrapped around my head and over my face when I slept. Although I shook lice from my blanket every morning, I didn’t itch as much as in the beginning. I was given another blanket, but there was no protection from the frigid draft that rose from the frozen earth beneath the planks. I began to look forward to the interrogations because the room was somewhat warm and the guard would bring a washrag. When I talked about Jesus, I focused on the single brown ceramic cup of water, sometimes tea, on the table before me. I was grateful for its curve and the shimmer of light on the water’s surface. It gave me something pure to focus on and made me think of life, fluidity and strength.

I counted eighteen days of snow, six days of freezing rain, thirty-four days of clouds, twenty-three days of sunlight …

The twelfth week, during interrogation, I talked about the book of Luke, John the Baptist and the temptation of Satan in the desert. I remembered stories out of order but told them when they came to me. I spoke of miracles: the centurion whose slave was healed, the fishes and loaves, Lazarus, walking on the Sea of Galilee, the leper cured. I related what I could of the politics in the Acts of the Apostles, and the preaching of Peter and Paul. In a long pause that followed, I prayed to be given the words to continue.

Major Yoshida stood and left, as always.

The next five nights there were no sounds of torture, an unusual— and welcome—relief.

The twelfth Sunday, I woke to the quiet world of snow. Flakes drifted through the high window to land on my cheeks and melt like morning dew. The guard unlocked my cell. He led me to the toilet as usual, but this time, afterward, he took me to the main gate. “You are released,” he said without expression. I stood in disbelief for a moment and refrained from looking back, angry that I wondered if Major Yoshida watched me leave. Outside the walls, I stared at the sky, its dizzying whorls of white, and felt the free winter wind caress my face. I thanked the skies for my release and
protection, and I prayed for the souls of the faceless men whose suffering I had witnessed.

Clutching my frayed coat, I tightened the shawl around my head and shoulders and walked slowly, my legs weak from inactivity. The snow slowed to a dusting about an hour later when I thought I might be close to town, and I saw ahead on the road the silhouette of my mother, her recognizable steady gait, her beloved form. I found myself running and when I reached her, I fell to her feet and embraced her ankles. We sat together on the road in the snow for some time, sobbing, searching each other’s face to prove it was true, wiping each other’s tears, my mother ensuring I was whole and unharmed, praising God. I was certain that in all the dampened snowy earth there was no sweeter sound than her voice, no sweeter vision than her eyes upon mine.

Mother held my arm and we turned toward home. We walked cautiously and slowly, my feet unsure and legs unsteady. With long stretches of silence in between, she talked about the goings-on at home. “Father and Dongsaeng still argue about the value of classical education. Father considered agreeing to let him teach, but decided he’s too young to impart any learning. Imo writes that her nephew received top marks at university. Unsook still goes every Monday to the orphanage. The director said the children had a wonderful Christmas because of her. Unsook is a little short of breath these days and I’m praying that she’ll miss this month’s bleeding.”

I recognized by the foreignness of what I heard that my mind had been altered, and this was her attempt to nudge it back to the life I’d known before. I tried hard to focus on the words, but it was her voice that helped normalcy seep back in.

The snow stopped fully by the time we passed the guardhouse that marked one li before entrance into the city. “We should rest. You should eat to have strength for the remainder of the walk home.”