Subterrene War 02: Exogene (26 page)

“Do you have any skills?”

Margaret nodded. “We are soldiers.”

“Can you cut wood?”

“We can learn, Aunt.”

They spoke among themselves again until a minute later the woman banged her gavel. Everyone in the auditorium rose.

“You,” the woman announced, “will be assigned to one of the wood-cutting units, and will remain under armed guard until the spring thaw. Then you will help defend the train for our trip south.”

With that it ended and the three exited the stage, at which point the entire auditorium emptied, leaving us, Yoon-sung, and six guards, who promptly ushered us toward the door and into the street. Yoon-sung accompanied us. She stood in the doorway of our hut, holding her nose at the smell, and after the guards had left, smiled.

“You are very lucky.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The Dear Leader never shows such mercy. But then many of our wood cutters have been killed, and we need the help for the spring shipment.”

“Where are we going?”

Yoon-sung’s smile disappeared, replaced by the usual expression, empty and distant. “Wonsan,” she said, “Korea,” and then shut the door.

The next day they stripped us of our armor. According to Margaret, they promised to give it back in time for the spring trip, but the clothes they replaced it with made me realize that the discomfort of living in armor—of having to remove it to use the latrine bucket—was nothing compared to living with Russia’s winter. Yoon-sung handed us two sets of clothes, which consisted of wool pants, shirts and socks; leather ankle boots; padded mittens; and a
hooded oversuit. The oversuit was identical to the others we had seen. It consisted of an underlayer of what looked like ballistic cloth, over which had been sewn quilted canvas, stuffed with feathers so that when I put it on and pulled the hood over our heads, the cold retreated except from my eyes. The Siberian cold stabbed into them, bringing tears. My vision reduced to what I saw through a constant squint, and at night it became a terrifying proposition to open them for fear of having the lids freeze in place. Without armor, we felt exposed.

The next day Yoon-sung came for us, and pulled us from the hut into a dark daylight, with thick clouds overhead and flurries already starting to fall. We scurried after her. As we moved down the road, southward out of town, she explained where we were going.

“Today you go to cut trees with us. They assigned you to my unit and I am to teach you how to become timber-women.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to hold in the heat. “Will we get food?” Our own supplies had finally run out, and my stomach began growling. Yoon-sung stopped to reach into a satchel slung across her back, pulling from it two bundles of mushrooms wrapped in paper. She handed them to us.

“I don’t care what the Dear Leader tells us,” she said, “this is Japanese food. Raw mushrooms. It’s the food of cavemen, the uninitiated. Still, it’s a meal and better than nothing.”

I finished mine in a few minutes, so hungry that I almost didn’t hear what she told us about the rules. “So if we do anything wrong,” I said, “we’ll be shot.”

Yoon-sung glared at me. She patted a holster at her
side, which held an old-style pistol, chemically propelled. “I may be among the untrusted, Catherine, but do what I say. I will use this if I have to, especially on you.”

“Why do you call yourself untrusted?” asked Margaret.

“I am part Japanese. My grandfather was an expatriate in Japan before the war, and so my father grew up there, married a Japanese woman. When the war started he brought us back to the great city, to Pyongyang. Things went well for him. But for us, his children, with enemy blood in their veins…” Yoon-sung paused to think. “It did not go as smoothly.”

The thought that a nonbred could hate her parents confused me; of all the conversations of men I’d heard on the line, in the tunnels, so many of them had included fond sentiments about their parents that it became something to envy—an experience we would never have. But Yoon-sung’s eyes showed no sign of tears. When she spoke there was no indication of sympathy or nostalgia, no love for the past or family, and a bit more of my convictions began to crumble when I realized that my observations of humanity had been limited. They had been only a small part of a much greater world. Here was one that seemed to hate being human, or at least aspects of it.

“But she was your mother,” I said. “Do you not love her? Does she not care for you?”

Yoon-sung laughed. “She was a Japanese whore, and it would have been better had he never married her, had I never been born. You are not like me, cannot understand. We do not choose our parents. We are taught from a young age to respect and honor them, but to honor the Dear Leader more, to give our loyalty to the Republic first. So when I caught my mother communicating with
Japanese relatives I turned her in, and now my mother is dead. She got what she deserved. My father did not. The Dear Leader removed him from a Ministry position and sent him and my older brother to the lines; now I’m the only one left. Had I been older I would have acted differently, I think; I would have killed her myself and spared my father the humiliation of being labeled untrustworthy.” Ahead of us, a group of about twenty others waited, stamping their feet and slapping their shoulders to keep warm. “No more talking now, we join the remainder of my unit. Do as I show you and let Margaret translate, because as much as I enjoy the chance to practice Russian, everything today will be in Korean.”

I almost laughed at that, thinking that if this was Yoon-sung when she enjoyed something, I would hate to see her angry.

The men and women who waited glanced at us with blank expressions, and Yoon-sung didn’t bother with introductions, instead ushering us off the main road and down a logging trail, on either side of which lay barren snowfields littered with stumps and fallen trees. Ice and snow had collected on some of the branches. It capped them with its cold hand, as if to say that the winter had claimed these ones and that no amount of work could pull them free. In the distance I heard shouting. A loud crack followed, and a large pine ahead of us started to fall over slowly before it struck the ground to send up a cloud of snow. This was the logging area. Yoon-sung spoke with the foreman to get directions, and before long we arrived at our assigned section where someone had already positioned ancient, alcohol-powered saws, ropes, shovels, and chains. She pointed to a pair of handsaws.

“Those are yours. When we fell the trees, you will strip them of branches.”

“That’s all?” I asked.

Yoon-sung shook her head. “For now. We are fed according to the danger and exertion of our labor, and yours is the easiest. The least food. Soon, you’ll wish for more dangerous jobs so you can eat, because those mushrooms are the only things you’ll get until tonight.”

All day we worked. At first the duty seemed easy, even boring, since Margaret and I had nothing to do but wait for the men and women with power saws to cut through thick trunks. The saws screamed, and eventually took on voices as their operators started and stopped them, the whining of metal on wood alternating in pitch. Then the first tree fell. I almost missed it when someone shouted in Korean, and had less than a second to dodge the huge timber as it collapsed to the ground where I had been standing. From that point on, the labor was nonstop. After an hour of sawing, pushing the metal back and forth, my arms ached and I wondered how long it would take to wear through the palms of my mittens. After two hours I could feel my hands, the cold penetrating everything as sweat soaked into my wool clothes and then the oversuit, threatening to freeze. Snow started falling, lightly at first. But as one after another tree fell, the snow picked up until we found ourselves in a near-blizzard, with visibility reduced to tens of meters in either direction. Yoon-sung blew a whistle three times quickly. We all gathered around her, and she kept blowing it until everyone had arrived to be counted, before we began moving in a line, the person in back placing his or her hand on the shoulder of the one in front so nobody would get lost. Margaret was in front of me.

“It’s a different kind of living,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this. Working. And not like in the factories, here everyone seems to work for survival. It’s like a different kind of combat, with its own code of honor. Did you notice that nobody spoke?”

“So?”

“I like it.” My shoulders disagreed with me, making it hard to even keep my arm on Margaret’s and I laughed. “Because there is no discussion of God or bred versus nonbred. We are equal here, all equally expendable I think, and this is confusing.”

There was to be no more working that day. Margaret and I huddled for warmth in our hut, not sure if we’d survive. Once we stopped moving, the sweat-soaked oversuits froze in places, threatening to send us into hypothermia, but sometime after midday Yoon-sung arrived with three others, men who carried an iron stove and two handfuls of wood. They helped us assemble it. A thin exhaust pipe exited the stove’s top, and the men bored a narrow hole through the roof so they could push a pipe section into the air outside. Once it was lit Margaret and I crouched beside it, grateful for the bit of warmth it provided.

Before they left, Yoon-sung pointed outside. “You are permitted to gather wood in your free time. Do not touch trees that have been cut down, and take only wood that has fallen.” She tossed Margaret a pistol and smiled. “For the wolves. That is only to be carried when collecting personal wood so do not show up for work or meals with it. Once you’ve proven yourself to me, then I might change the rules.”

“We’ll be shot?” I asked. “If we show up armed for work?”

Yoon-sung grinned. “Dinner is in one hour. You should get moving; that wood won’t last long.” And she left.

Margaret and I stared at each other, and didn’t say anything. The warmth seeped into our mittens, thawing blistered hands and easing the aches in my shoulders as it dried the sweat that had, a few minutes before, threatened to kill us. It was an awful stove. The metal had been welded poorly, and dents and repaired cracks spoke of its history, of having been used long past its life, but to me it was a thing of beauty. I didn’t want to leave it. But after a few minutes we looked at each other and smiled.

“Do you want the pistol?” asked Margaret.

“You take it.”

“I’m guessing the wood close to town has all been scavenged,” she said, “we may have to wander far, and there’s the danger of getting lost in the snow. How do you suggest we do this?”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged, delighted that without armor she could see the gesture. “Quickly. I’m hungry, and it’s cold.”

As we left the hut and reentered what had become a living hell, the Siberian snow, I tried to focus on the good things, which really only amounted to one thought: we’d get to Korea in the spring. Yoon-sung and the others didn’t know that they would take us to exactly the place we wanted to go.

A
ll winter we worked. On some days enough snow fell that Margaret, I, and all the logging units sat for hours in the communal hall, smoking cigarettes that had been made from sawdust and a bit of tobacco, or drinking tea that was probably made from the same. The Koreans were a marvel of resourcefulness; everything was used, recycled, and then made into something else until finally it crumbled into dust so that nothing was allowed rest until the life had been squeezed from it completely. Eventually we learned the names of our fellow loggers, who were women, men, and young girls and boys, all of them among “the untrusted,” not worthy of a factory job underground where it was warm. There was Kang Song-won, a withered man who limped from gout and who told us about the Asian war because he had been a fighter pilot at age sixteen, but the Japanese shot down his plane in China so that by the time he found his way out of the mountains and into Russia, the nuclear weapons and biologicals had
already been unleashed. He refused to climb back into a plane. Song-won stayed with the logging community out of fear and never saw his family in Samjiyon again, forever labeled a coward.

Ch’on Sang-mi’s mother escaped with her when Allied forces bombed their political gulag, then hid on the other side of the Tumen River until South Korean and American forces pushed across in force, forcing them to run through the Russian winter snow. There had been almost no food. Her mother used all their winter clothes, which amounted to a single overcoat and two blankets, to keep her six-year-old daughter warm enough to survive, so that by the time she reached Chegdomyn gangrene had crept up to the woman’s knees and nobody knew how she could have even walked. She died a few minutes after handing Sang-mi to a stranger, also handing down her prison-camp dishonor.

Hwang Eun-ch’ung had been born in Russia and didn’t remember anything. But her parents fled before the war’s start, as defectors who wanted to escape the North and find a better life, so that when the Russians found them in Khabarovsk they waited until she was born before turning the entire family over to camp officials; the Koreans executed her parents and placed her in the care of a new family before sending her fourteen-year-old twin brothers southward to fight. She couldn’t remember them but had a photo. The Japanese captured both boys and paraded them both through the captured city of Munch’on, their images on all the news holos, even ones that made it to Chegdomyn, dooming Eun-ch’ung to a life in the woods.