“So, then, it’s over?”
Father stopped replying. That night, neither of our parents seemed to get much sleep: we could hear them murmuring in their room until late into the night, sometimes raising their voices at each other. We tossed and turned, and Grandmother didn’t get much sleep either because she kept tucking the blankets back around us and whispering to us to go to sleep. The next morning Father left for Chongjin with the two men.
This was the start of the misfortune that visited our family.
Three days passed, and then five, and still Father didn’t return home. Mother went to the train station every day to wait for him. Then one day, a group of soldiers and a familiar-looking Party official came banging on our door. The official handed our mother a slip of paper.
“You’ve been issued a summons,” he said.
“What does this mean?”
“You must vacate. New tenants are arriving. Report to the district office right away.”
Mother left at once for the office, which wasn’t far from where we lived. The soldiers came into the house without bothering to remove their boots and began opening all of the doors. They started carrying out the refrigerator and television set. Grandmother tried to stop them.
“What are you doing? You think you can just take other people’s things?!”
“Out of the way.”
The Party official tried to pacify her: “Ma’am, there’s no point arguing with us. Now that you’ve received a summons, your property is being seized, and you’re being relocated.”
Later I learned that Mother and Mi, who’d finished secondary school, and Jung and Sook, who were still in school, were told to go to Puryong, where they would be assigned jobs. So what was to become of Grandmother, Hyun and me? No slips of paper came our way; our names weren’t even mentioned. I don’t know how the days and hours passed after that. We spent that first night clinging to each other on the floor of our emptied room, clothes and blankets strewn all around us. When we awoke the next morning, Mi was gone. Our mother seemed completely unruffled by it.
“That sly girl … She kept saying she was going to cross the river one day and flee to China. Well, she’s all grown up now, so she’ll make it on her own, wherever she is.”
Mother kept trying to reassure Grandmother: she’d asked the chairman to keep an eye on them; Father would only be gone for another month, two at the latest; he’d done so much for the country that, of course, this was all just a minor misunderstanding. She also made a point of adding that Grandmother would be assigned to a collective farm, so she would receive food rations in exchange for helping out there. But no one knew better than Mother herself that this was all just talk.
The day my mother and sisters left I stood off to the side and refused to cry. They each carried a small bundle of rations. As they walked away, they kept glancing back. They were looking at us, of course, but they were probably also engraving the image of our beloved home in their minds. None of us knew it was the last time we would ever see each other. At some point they started showing up in my dreams. They stand beside each other, Mother, Sook and Jung, looking at me from a distance, smiling gently and not saying a word. Perhaps these are their ghosts.
Grandmother decided it was best for us to stay put until the new tenants arrived, just in case Father returned in the meantime. Unable to turn on the lights, we were eating some boiled potatoes for our dinner when we heard footsteps outside. Then we heard someone clear his throat and mutter, as if to himself: “I wonder if anyone’s home?”
Hyun recognized Uncle Salamander’s voice and called out: “Uncle! We’re here!” Grandmother rushed out to greet him. She fell to the ground and clung to his legs.
“Aigo! Our family is ruined!”
“Grandmother, please stand up. I heard what happened.”
He lit a cigarette and let out a deep sigh. Grandmother filled him in on everything that had transpired, punctuating the story with complaints.
“I should’ve gotten here sooner!” he said. He paced back and forth, deep in thought, and then turned to Grandmother. “Pack your things. And dress the kids in warm layers.”
“Are we going somewhere? It’s the middle of the night …”
“Let’s cross the river. We’ll figure out a way for you to survive once we’re there.”
“But what about the others?”
“Elder Brother’s a resourceful man. I have no doubt he’ll be back, so I’m taking you across the river to wait for him there. When he returns we’ll get the others back from Puryong too.”
Grandmother had no reason not to go along with his plan. To her as well, Uncle Salamander must have seemed our only hope. The moment he’d arrived we were happier and more reassured to see him than if it had been Father. Grandmother went into the shed, pulled up the floorboards, scooped out all of the grain that our mother had saved for us when she left and filled three large sacks, one for each of us. Uncle Salamander lifted Hyun’s sack and mine in one hand like they weighed nothing.
We stayed off the main roads and travelled along a wooded path toward the riverbank. Chilsung followed close behind. Uncle Salamander knew, as well as the rest of us, the location of every guard post and the places where the river was narrow and shallow. We headed upstream and chose a spot where the Tumen swept, in a big semi-circle, around a large patch of gravel. It was where my sisters and I used to go in the winter to play on the ice. The water was cold, but Uncle Salamander tucked my sister and me under his arms to help us across. Grandmother slipped and fell twice.
Our little group made it to the other side, onto Chinese soil. The cold air barrelling down from the slope of the mountains seemed to penetrate our clothes. We walked late into the night, for over thirty li, and arrived at a small village outside of Chongshan. We could see a few lights in the darkness.
“Stay here and take care of your grandmother,” Uncle Salamander said. “I’ll go check it out first.”
He warned Grandmother to stay away from the main road, and instructed her to wait for him in the forest. After a long while, he returned and took us to a farmhouse just past an orchard where a farmer, his mother, his wife and their daughter (who was the same age as our sister Jung) all lived. We felt much better once we were resting on their warm, heated floor. The house was divided into two rooms, but one was occupied by the husband and wife. The farmer kept calling Uncle Salamander “Elder Brother,” so we figured they were close; later we learned that, before he was married, the farmer had worked in a restaurant next to Uncle Salamander’s office.
Grandmother, Hyun and I offered to sleep in the small shed they kept at the end of the orchard. It was filled with fruit boxes, farm tools, wheelbarrows and other things, but Uncle Salamander and the farmer shoved all of it over to one side and covered the floor with plastic sheeting and a blanket to make it more comfortable for us.
“Elder Brother will come to join you in no time,” Uncle Salamander reassured us. “I’ll give instructions to a friend in Musan that I trust, so don’t worry. In the meantime, I’ll look for Mi, as you said she’s already on this side of the river. I hope she hasn’t run into any problems.”
With that, he left. The farmer’s daughter was delighted by Chilsung. She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him for so long that I started to feel jealous. The rest of her family must have felt it was good to have a dog around, as wild boars and rabbits would come down from the nearby mountains and damage the crops. The next morning the family was already making a racket and calling the dog by name the same way we did: “Chilsung-ah! Chilsung-ah!”