The Revisionists (30 page)

Sang Hee watched her for a moment as she placed the plate and glass on the bedside table.

“You’re a very careful girl, aren’t you?”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. You can go.”

The rest of the day was normal, task after task after task, occasionally interrupted by tense moments with Sang Hee. After Hyun Ki came home and the couple ate dinner, Sari put the babies to bed, then took out the garbage and the recycling. She hid the flash drive in an empty can, placing it exactly where Leo had told her to. She felt nervous as she did this, but surely no one could tell this was different from any other garbage night. While crouching there at the sidewalk, she gave the briefest of glances down the street, the rows of cars parked on either side. Was Leo sitting in one of them right now? Was he watching her?

She walked into the house through the back door, resisting the temptation to look over her shoulder at the innocent-appearing trash and recycling bins. To her surprise, Sang Hee was sitting at the kitchen table, alone, with a bottle of whiskey and a glass.

“Excuse me,” Sari said, lowering her eyes.

“Sit down,” Sang Hee said. “Have a drink with me.”

Sari had never received anything remotely resembling a social invitation from Sang Hee before. She took a glass from the cabinet, fully expecting the mistress to laugh and rescind the invitation. As Sari filled her glass at the faucet, Sang Hee said, “No, I said have a
drink
with me. You aren’t Muslim, girl, right? You can drink?”

“Yes,” Sari said, emptying her glass in the sink and sitting down hesitantly. Sang Hee poured her some whiskey.

“Tell me, what do you think of my family?”

“It is a beautiful family, madam.”

Sang Hee’s face was a mask. “What else do you think?”

“I think Hana is very precocious. I think she will be a diplomat like her father, or whatever she wishes to be.”

“What would you do to have a family like mine?”

“I… I don’t understand what you mean.”

“It’s perfect, isn’t it? Two cute babies, a sweet little girl. An attractive husband. Don’t blush—I’m only stating a fact. He is a good-looking man. I’ve done well for myself, haven’t I?”

“You have, madam.”

“You haven’t touched your drink.”

Sari touched it, barely.

“One day maybe you’ll have a family for yourself. After our stay here is finished, after we’ve all gone back to Korea and you’ve scurried off to some other job. Maybe you’ll meet a nice young immigrant, some handsome dark-skinned man, who will take away your maidenhood and offer you something in return.”

Sari stared at her glass.

“And you’ll bear him children, and they’ll suck on your round breasts and grow fat, and they will be so cute. You at least will think they’re cute, even if others don’t. So, you’ll be happy. Imagine that for a moment. Are you imagining it?”

“Madam?”

“You need to imagine it.” Sang Hee’s voice hardened. “Close your eyes. This only works if you really, really imagine it.”

Sari was afraid to close her eyes around Sang Hee but more afraid of disobeying. She closed her eyes.

“Imagine your dark-skinned man. Maybe it was someone you knew back in Indonesia, or maybe someone you saw in the slums at Seoul. A construction worker, a janitor, I don’t know. Imagine him, and imagine him taking you, and imagine the family you create. Now imagine a few years later. There are times you feel tired of him and unappreciated, yes, there are times you wish you could return to the happy courtship days, but overall you’re happy. It’s life. It has its trials and its pleasures.”

There was a pause as Sang Hee sipped, and Sari wondered if she was allowed to open her eyes yet. She was about to ask when Sang Hee continued.

“But then things change. I forgot to tell you, you aren’t in South Korea, you’re in North Korea. It’s different there. People think they’re in paradise but they’re not. They’re brought up to believe that it’s heaven on earth, but it’s not, and it only gets worse. One day your husband is angry with you because of something you did—nothing terrible, just some trivial thing, that’s how marriage is—and when he’s out with his friends he gets carried away and says things he shouldn’t. Not about you, but about the Dear Leader. The Dear Leader is what we call God over in North Korea, only it isn’t God, it’s a man, and he is not dear. Your husband says things he shouldn’t, and a few days later the government sends people to your home and they take your husband away. They don’t say why. The night passes and he does not return. All night long you are terrified. Your children—two little girls—ask where he is and you lie to them. You say he will be home soon. But you assume the worst, because this is what happens to people who say the wrong thing. You don’t sleep for two days, and you don’t leave the house, because you can’t bear to tell any of your friends. You’re afraid that if they find out, they will shun you. You would do the same thing to them, after all, and you have.

“One week later he returns with the government people, and his eyes are black and his skin is sickly and he looks so much thinner. After just one week. He tells you that the family is moving out of the city, to the north, to work new jobs. Are you imagining it?”

Sari told her that she was.

“So you go north, with your cute children, and you live in a shack with no heat in a destitute little village. Not even a village—a camp, and surrounding it are walls and big ugly guards with guns who call you names and say they’d love to fuck you sometime when your dark-skinned man isn’t around. So you never walk near the walls again, and you warn your cute little girls to stay away too. Your new shack has thin walls and the only heat comes from a small stove—it’s very cold in autumn, and winter is unbearable. You are told that you are a miner now, and they make you crawl into caves and smash a hammer against stone until your fingers feel that they’re breaking off. This is important work for the revolution, they say. Your husband does the same job, in a different mine. You only see him at night, when you’re too tired to talk to each other. You eat thin broth and less than a handful of rice every day. Your children are sent to a special school in the camp where they are told that you and your husband are traitors, evil people who think wicked thoughts and cannot be trusted. Your children stop talking to you. You lose ten kilograms, then fifteen, then more. Your children look terrible. They get sick a lot, and you try to treat them, and it’s the only time they don’t yell at you and call you impure. But the camp doesn’t have any good medicines, so their illnesses linger. You almost prefer them when they’re sick, because at least they let you hold them again. Are you still imagining this?”

“Yes.” Sari’s voice was faint. It was like she barely existed. Sang Hee’s voice blotted her out.

“You’re a liar. You
can’t
imagine it. It’s impossible. It’s something that just
happens,
and even then you can’t understand it. There is no way a pretty little thing sitting in a clean kitchen with a full stomach can imagine it.” Sari heard Sang Hee pour more whiskey. “But keep trying. And stop ignoring your glass.”

Sari took another sip.

“The other thing you can’t imagine is the
time
. Years. You think you will go insane, and then you do go insane, but it keeps going on. And I forgot to tell you: The people in this camp do not talk to one another. You have all been warned. You are impure elements and cannot be allowed to exchange information, share your dirty germs. You are allowed to speak the bare minimum of words while working in the mines, but that’s it. The isolation is unbearable. To see so many faces and never know what their voices sound like. Now and then there are mine explosions and people die. Now and then people try to escape, but they’re always caught. If they aren’t shot during the attempt, they’re brought in for a public execution. You lose track of how many of these you’ve had to watch. Your little girls have to watch too. After the people who tried to escape are killed, their families are too.”

Sari could feel the drink affecting her, making her head heavy and her toes warm. Fear kept her awake, yet she felt herself descending into a nightmare. She wanted Sang Hee to stop and let her sleep.

The mistress told her to drink more.

“Then something happens. Something you had not expected, because you had stopped expecting things. One of the new functionaries in charge of the camp is someone you knew from the city. Back when you were a human being. He has just been sent to replace someone, and he sees you walking toward the mine. You look away, ashamed and afraid. The next morning, on your way to work, he summons you into his office. It’s a dirty old building with flimsy walls, but compared to your shack it feels luxurious. You walk past the other clerks, people who have spat at you, and you keep your head down. Then you are alone in his office and he closes the door. He offers you tea. You are too scared to refuse. The two of you knew each other growing up. You went to school together, and you liked him. Only after his family moved away and you grew older did you realize that he’d liked you too but had been too shy to tell you. His family would visit the old neighborhood every now and then, which is the only reason you recognize him now that he’s a man. You’re surprised that he recognizes you, because you are so much thinner and uglier than before.”

Sari heard Sang Hee take a sip. She told Sari to do the same. It was smoky on Sari’s lips, numbing on her tongue.

“You sit there as he pulls a file and reads, and you know he is reading about you and your husband, about what your husband said.”

Then there was proof that the drink was affecting Sari: she asked a question. “What had my husband said?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever they say he said. You sit there while the functionary reads about your life, your rotten and tiny little life, and then he talks to you and asks how you are. You lie, of course. You tell him the Dear Leader provides all that your family needs, you thank him for his beneficence, you say that you are so fortunate to have been granted all this despite the horrible act your husband committed. Then he sends you back to the mines. You wonder if you were rude not to inquire about his own family, but you’d been too nervous. The overseers at the mine punish you for being late—two slaps in the face, and you aren’t given any lunch.

“Three days later the functionary summons you again. The door is closed, and he sits closer to you than last time. He tells you he wants to know how you really feel. You’re frightened, but you remember to ask about his family. His parents have died but he says they lived well. His brothers were once important Party officials like him, he says, but they recently have all been put in charge of camps like this, far away from Pyongyang. He says this is because relatives of the Dear Leader consider his family to be rivals, and want them removed. He says he is lucky that he was sent into the mountains and not simply killed.

“People do not talk like this anywhere in the country, and especially not in this camp. It makes you more nervous. He scoots his little chair closer to yours, and your knees are almost touching. You haven’t been looking at him this whole time, but you do now. He is not too handsome, but not ugly either—a perfectly average man. He has good hair and you haven’t seen teeth that clean in a long time. Your husband hasn’t touched you in weeks, and the last few times were not fun at all, no joy in it. Almost wrestling. You’ve been turned into an animal, do you understand? A filthy animal. Try to imagine that; but you can’t—it’s impossible to imagine being something that itself lacks imagination, has had imagination beaten and starved out of it. But my point is that to be this close to a not-unattractive man, it does things to you.”

Sari swallowed. Her hand was still holding the glass; she was afraid to let it go. It was something to cling to.

“What he does is this: He asks if you want to get out. He tells you that he too is a prisoner here, in a way; the Party will never call for him, never give him a better posting. He has been put here to rot. The difference, he says, is that he at least will die an old man, but you will die very soon. He says he can help. Things are happening quickly, and if he doesn’t act soon, his connections will disappear as these people too are banished to distant posts. He says he knows how he can get you out, but it will be difficult. He tells you he’s crazy to offer you this, but he wants to. You say no. This is all a test, you realize. A trap. You tell him no, you have all you need here. Then he says you can go. He tells you the overseers won’t punish you for being late this time, and you are surprised to find that he is right.

“But one week later, it happens again, the same way. He tells you this is not a loyalty test and he really wants to help you. All week you have been thinking of his offer, assuming it was a test but wondering
what if
it was genuine. And now, here he is again, making you the same offer. You dare to ask him what he wants in return, and now you’re staring down, looking at his hands. They are so fine and soft—you forgot that adult fingers could look so white and pure. He sits up straighter and tells you that you have misunderstood. Your heart races and you think,
It was a test, and I have failed.
He says he doesn’t want anything. He only wants to make the most of this brief opportunity to do something good.”

Then Sang Hee laughed. “Can you believe that? He actually uses the word
good
. Because here’s the thing: He can only let one person escape. His plan, which he can’t tell you until he puts it in motion, can only work for one. Two would be impossible, let alone four. You shake your head and say no again.

“Imagine how hard it is to sleep, to even
think
about anything other than escape now that it has been offered to you. And you turned it down! You are a fool. Every time you smash your fingers in the mine, every time one of the guards harasses you, every time you
shiver,
you think to yourself,
It doesn’t have to be. I could escape
. But you missed your chance. Two nights later, when your husband returns from work, he hits you. He’s done that before, a few times. He tells you that he heard about the new functionary inviting you to his office. The guards told him, made obscene gestures. He hits you again until you tell him that if you show up to work with bruises, he’ll be punished. It’s true—only the guards are allowed to hit you. Abusive husbands are counterrevolutionary. After you tell him that, he stops. But he refuses to speak to you.