Drifting House (14 page)

“The most revered mountain in Joseon,” Woncheol muttered. “Baekdu Mountain, where our Great Leader Kim Il–sung was born. The ­second most worthy flower, Kimjongilia.”

The school routines, the lists of facts that he had recited faster than anyone in his class, helped normalize his breathing.

But she was still there.

“I’m a Joseon soldier,” he said louder now. “I’m a revolutionary warrior.”

It was wrong, so wrong. Still, he propped his elbow on his shaking knee.

He squinted, rubber band aimed.

His brother followed him the way he often did. He made his hands into a machine gun, targeted a denuded fir tree. “I’m getting myself a Big Nose,” he said, and popped off each potential American.

Woncheol aimed the rubber band, shot. She darted behind a tree; he hurtled behind a knot of rocks.

“Are you scared?” Choecheol looked ashamed for him. His legs spread out at an exaggerated distance as if to show that he would not go hiding behind rocks. Then he clambered through her.

“Watch out!” Woncheol cried.

“Watch what? The soldiers catch us, they kill us.” Choecheol struck his foot outward in a crescent kick. “That’s all.”

“It’s Gukhwa,” Woncheol said.

His brother stiffened, stepped back. “There’re no ghosts here,” he said loudly.

Woncheol shot out again; it went straight through her. ­Guk­hwa’s laugh was a baby’s gurgle that stopped abruptly. He covered his face with his hands, seeing the lumpy grain sack.

“We have to go back,” Woncheol said. “We were crazy to try.”

“Do you want to die?” said Choecheol. His voice was newly sharp. He stepped on his brother’s shadow. “I want to live.”

Woncheol looked west to China, a country where somewhere, he had a mother. There were a great many things he didn’t know, he realized, and as he gazed at the horizon of splintered peaks, his life shrank in significance. He squeezed his hands behind his back until they stopped trembling.

“Then let’s go,” he said, forceful enough to reassure his brother.

Choecheol reemerged, brambles in his hair. He stood at unsteady attention. A drunk cadet.

“Yes, comrade!” he cried. His voice ballooned with relief.

The night was a black glove. The mountains an endless rubble of loose stones. The stars the eyes of the dead. In the unnatural landscape the one day felt as long as Woncheol’s entire life. None of this mattered when Gukhwa began chanting his name.

He covered his ears. His mind was wild with cannonball thoughts.

Gukhwa’s face was swollen like a pincushion, her ashen toes braced against tree roots like a seagull perching on a rock.

“I want to sleep.” Choecheol sat beside Gukhwa in the snow, his legs out like chopsticks. “I’ll do anything to sleep.”

“If we sleep, we die.” Woncheol stared at his two siblings, his loving burdens.

“I want to sleep.”

“Just a few hours….”

“Sleep.” His voice was ­high-pitched.

“You won’t listen to your
hyeong
?” He was reduced to pleading.

“But I can’t move.” His brother flopped into a drift of snow to prove it.

“A few minutes, then. Then we go.”

Once children had obeyed the mother who obeyed the father who obeyed the Dear Leader. But the systems had fallen apart.

Woncheol drew a box in the whiteness around them. They huddled on the patch of dryness.

“We aren’t far,” he said, though he did not know where they were. He spoke with the false calm of an older brother.

“I wish we had a big rat,” said Choecheol. He looked up hopefully at Woncheol. “We could roast it on the fire.”

“Me, too.”

Woncheol tilted his head, filled his mouth with snow. The sting woke up his sleeping tongue, made it throb.

“It tastes like cold rice,” he said, though he did not remember the taste of rice.

“If we had an ear of corn…two! Roasted.”

“Don’t let’s talk about food.”

His brother picked his nose, considered the wet curl of mucus before twirling it into his mouth. He said, “Do Chinese people really eat children’s brains?”

“They don’t need to,” he said. “They are a land of rice bowls the size of you. That’s what people say.”

He said this, though he did not know who these people were; he had only his mother’s word and the stories that grew out of the mouths of other kids hustling in the market; a hope kindled, flickering dead, then rekindled by a snatch of a word, or by
the brief appearance of smuggled grain sold in the new, illegal markets.

“They eat rice every day there. That’s what the older boys said.”

“You saw what Omma brought back the first time.”

“Where is she?” Choecheol hugged himself.

“Nobody knows.” Woncheol wrapped his arms around his brother and gazed west toward where China must be. “Get some rest.”

They slept. Woncheol’s dreams had gone with his memories. There was no mother to haunt him with two large sacks of rice in her hands, releasing the grains that fell like snow. There was no father who made birdcalls that brought the village swallows settling onto his arms. There was only the emptiness of sleep, a peaceful forever, as if his body desired to become part of the snowy landscape and, over time, become the soil for another generation. But a sharp movement like teeth sinking into his arm ended the quiet.

He rolled Choecheol deep into a snowdrift. Then he jumped on the darkness, his boot smashed at where the nose must be. Underneath him, his walking stick. His arms swung up, down. A pestle to corn. He struck and struck. He could have stopped, but didn’t.

“I’m a revolutionary warrior!” Choecheol’s voice buckled. “I’m a Joseon soldier!”

Only then Woncheol stopped, looked at his brother’s head just above the snowdrift. A thread of mucus hung from Choecheol’s nose. He was crying. His own brother, afraid of him. And below Woncheol’s feet, there was nothing. Only the withered trees and
his shadow, gaunt and trembling in the moon’s light. He stuffed snow in his mouth when a scream escaped him. Choecheol clumsily put his arms around him, but he pulled away.

“We’ll never find her,” Woncheol said. “Omma left us. The way we left Gukhwa.”

“Hyeong, don’t say that!”

But Woncheol was crying because he knew it was true.

Choecheol kicked a stone downhill. It rolled until their sister stopped it with her feet. Powdered in snow, she looked like a small, icy spirit. A chill smothered Woncheol.

“There’s Gukhwa again,” he said.

“She’s a dead body.” Choecheol shored himself up. “She’s someone who’s gone far away.”

“She’s right there!”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts!” His brother charged ahead. “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”

“Wait for me!” Woncheol cried. Afraid alone, he followed him.

The next morning, the Tumen River. There was the hike down, the dangerous rustle of leaves. Guards were in outposts or on patrol, armed with Kalashnikovs and canvas boots. From an escarpment above, Woncheol watched. Beyond the endless mountains was Yanji, a city where it was said that the garbage could feed entire villages and the streetlights actually worked. There was also Gukhwa, as cold as stone. Their father, embalmed beneath the roof of coal that had collapsed on him. The world, forever dark for them both. And Woncheol was still alive; he did not know why he deserved it.

Noon. The brothers began the descent toward the river. Snow fell steadily, erasing their traces. The phalanx of guards had their cozy outposts, their rice. Woncheol assumed that their uniforms would dry over lunch; they would want to stay indoors and not get wet. Still, his heart was too fast. He muffled the sound with his hands. They passed a glassy waterfall. Their fingernails chipped, their hands bled from the rocks. They moved from roots of spruce and fir. Slowly. The iciness in his feet traveled through his body.

Finally. Before them was a gray landscape. They were meager shapes before they became a river, mountains, China. In the distance was a desolation of cement buildings so tall and crowded together, a person could disappear, never be found. The brothers stood where so many had stood in the past five years, and felt the same fugitive fears and hopes, the same dim sense that the world outstretched before them would never know or care about them.

“You were a good
hyeong,
” Choecheol said, his voice heavy.

“I’ll never make you eat arrowroot porridge again,” Woncheol said. “We’ll live differently.”

He did not know how to speak this muddy love and fear he had for his brother, so he held his hand tightly, then let go.

They ran. They pitched into the clearing. Dashed toward the river. When their feet touched the ice beneath the snow, they skidded and fell.

“Halt!” a voice shouted. “
Meomcheo,
or I’ll shoot!”

The man was small from a distance; he looked like a toy soldier in his uniform and starred cap, a rifle slung over his shoulder like a schoolbag. He hefted the gun up. Stop, stop, Woncheol’s glottis throbbed. The man aimed ahead at Choecheol, zigzagging across the ice, and pulled the trigger.

There was the sharp shriek of a bullet, then nothing. No one had been hit.

Woncheol choked.

“Run!” he shouted as he slid across the plate of ice.

Choecheol looked back at him, now frozen.

“Hyeong,” he said. He was crying.

“Your
hyeong
said run!”

And Choecheol ran, his light feet delicate on the ice. Each time he looked back, Woncheol shouted as he skidded, until finally his little brother was too far ahead to see.

Woncheol continued to skid forward, heavier and slower than Choecheol. His sister bounded in front of him. Her ­candle-wax eyes, bright and white as the core of a fire. Her cheeks now ­flamed—the only color in her stony face.

“Please let me go,” he begged.

She reached into her small gray mouth, drew out a maggot, and flung it at him.

Her tiny legs stayed squarely planted between him and China. He moved left; so did she. He moved right; she mirrored him. When he stepped back, she relaxed into a smile. She did not want him to leave her to become one of the forgotten ones. He saw this now. His hand rose to strike her away, and her face rushed to a sad place. He could not do it. She was his sister; he would never forget her, so he extended his hands toward her ruined body.

Across the frozen river, the thud of an approaching soldier’s steps faded as Woncheol now saw the phantom world that had always been there. His schoolteacher scraped bark from the air. His best friend, Gunhyeok, flush with his good luck, skinned and roasted a squirrel. While the sun was eclipsed by his father’s
swallows, their family home drifted across the ice. The chimney smoke smelled of his mother’s vinegary cabbage, her loamy earth scent. There was his father wearing his salty smile, strolling beside countless, diaphanous figures. And behind them, there were the shadows.

1
988. WHILE PEOPLE
became used to the country’s new, compromised democracy, and their disappointed conversations revolved around the transfer from a dictator to the dictator’s friend, Eunkang shrank into her compromised marriage. She was tired of smelling strange women on her husband and feeling like a desperate ­forty-year-old housewife, and not the professional artist that she was. So when her in–laws surprised them with a traditional house skirting the DMZ belt that divided Korea, for once Eunkang had not resisted their extravagance. Her marriage, she had believed, would finally be safe away from Seoul. She was wrong. Only a month after their move, she watched her husband, Seongwon, in their spacious
hanok
’s main
sarang
courtyard, his arms around a girl dressed like a shiny birthday present.

The girl was as long as a grain of brown rice and looked as if she would stay a glorious eighteen forever. In the morning heat, she tossed a ­half-eaten persimmon behind her near the lotus pond and unpinned her wavy hair so it cascaded down like a magic
carpet. When she disappeared into the
sarang baang
that was now Seongwon’s art studio, he followed. Already, Seongwon was exploring.

Eunkang wheeled toward his studio, then stopped herself. So what if he was her husband? She would not descend to the pathetic tirades that she associated with her mother, who had once triumphantly sent Eunkang’s father to jail under the adultery law to punish him. She thought of the girl’s lavish locks of ­blue-black hair that picked up images like a mirror, and her blurry smile that made Eunkang think of sex. She dusted off the persimmon and bit through its hard, bittersweet skin, and imagined what she tasted was the girl’s boldness. Monogamy was unnatural, Seongwon would say, and Eunkang agreed in theory. But in a country where female grooming was an art form, her own pageboy haircut and boy’s hips and chest made her look more unconventional than she was. As sadness filled her, she covered her ­wide-set eyes with her free hand as if guarding her secret self from others. She willed herself into the stone in Yu ­Chi-hwan’s poem, a stone so enlightened it was never moved to grief. It was unmoved by the chaos around it, so it could not be overwhelmed by anger:
Even if I were broken in half, I wouldn’t make a sound.

Eunkang and Seongwon had literally bumped into each other ten years ago at the Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel, where they were meeting potential marriage partners that their parents had arranged for them. Eunkang’s
matseon
was with a man who listed his entire extended family’s educational background (impressive), his salary (more impressive), and the optimal number
of children (two boys, one girl, preferably in that order). He made it clear that her age was alarming and, in truth, made her unsuitable for him, all this before their coffee had arrived. She left him to his pronouncements and eavesdropped on the more interesting conversation near them; the stranger’s startling, earnest metaphors and hands as free as ocean squid seemed to frighten his date, but intrigued Eunkang. She told her
matseon
partner why he would remain unmarried, then escaped to the hotel lobby and waited. When the earnest stranger emerged, she made sure to swerve into his arms. He didn’t look surprised, and instead said, “I know you,” with a tenderness that made her wonder if in their past lives they had loved each other. He was the painter Seong­­won Han.