And so too came the conversation with Father and all the worries I had for him.
Was he a traitor? Because if he was, then I should report him. But then all my family would suffer. Or was he ill? Delusional?
Nothing made sense any more. I felt tricked into having the dream. I felt soiled from the words Father had said. And I felt a traitor to my country for not reporting him. But more than anything I felt so very, very alone.
I wished I could share it with someone.
That night, a year after I first met Sook, when I could hear my father’s snores and my mother’s slow, steady breathing, when I knew Grandmother would be sleeping and I could creep past her, I pulled my clothes round me and slid from the house. The moon was the thinnest slip of a crescent, and the darkness of the countryside swallowed me as I moved through it.
There was barely a sound, an eerie stillness, the trees half dead, motionless with no wind, the earth dry under my feet, the dust slipping behind me with every step.
I saw his outline, saw him turn to me, smile, felt warmth in my chest, heard myself sigh. Then a sudden screech came from above us, and next to me Sook jumped, and I heard his intake of breath as he stifled a scream.
City boy, I thought.
“It was only an owl,” I whispered. I stopped, and the smile on my face slipped as I felt pressure on my hand and squeezing at my fingers. I looked down – Sook was holding my hand. I stared at our fingers, blurry, indistinguishable in the half-light, and I looked up at his face so close and felt my cheeks flush.
Neither of us moved, or said a word, but so much passed between us as the moment stretched on: a conversation unspoken, an intensity in the air, an understanding somehow reached as it drew to an end.
“Let’s walk,” he breathed.
And we did, together, hand in hand, so close our shoulders brushed as we moved, so nervous that I didn’t dare move my fingers or acknowledge that we were touching. Something so simple and natural, but something I had never seen any couple do before. Not in public.
It was exciting. Rebellious.
“Are you hungry?” he whispered as we reached the village greenhouses. I nodded and reluctantly let go of his hand.
We sat with our backs against the glass and our legs tucked under us for warmth.
“Here,” he said, placing a bun in my hands.
“Your mother’s baking?”
He took another from his pocket for himself. “She won’t notice.”
I struggled to believe that was true, not with so much hunger, with people who could offer good money for this bun in my hands, money that she could use to buy more ingredients, to bake more, to sell more. We couldn’t afford the ingredients even if we had the contacts to get them, and even if we had, we wouldn’t be allowed a permit to sell them in the markets.
How would Min-Jee feel if she knew her son was giving them away? And worst of all, to someone beulsun like me? What would she say to him? What would she do to us?
She wouldn’t care that I was starving and so was my family. She couldn’t, just as I had to not care that my neighbours too were starving, that the baby girl next door died from malnutrition, not enough milk from her mother to see her into her second month. I only ever heard her cry the night she was born.
Too many people were starving for me to be able to care about any of them. Aid for them would have to form an infinite queue to stop them feeling hungry for just one night. One solitary act of kindness would make little difference.
So without thinking of them, I tore a piece off the bun and placed it on my tongue, watching Sook do the same.
“I can’t stay long tonight. My mother’s not well. I’m worried she’ll get up and notice I’m missing.”
“All right,” I replied. “I understand.”
We carried on eating, but said little. I was disappointed; I wanted to be with him, feel my hand in his again, see that smile on his face in the moonlight, have that excitement tipping my stomach.
“You want to walk back that way with me? Past my house?”
I hesitated. We had never gone that way before. He stood up and held out his hand to mine. For a second I stared at it, the long fingers, the short nails, the lines deep in his palm, and then I lifted my hand, placed it in his and felt myself pulled up from the ground.
I smiled.
We walked.
And too soon we were approaching his house. He pointed to the different windows, explaining what each room was, knowing, I suppose, that I would never be allowed inside. There was a kitchen for cooking in, with a sink to wash things, and taps that water came from. A room each to sleep in, with beds that stayed out all day. Another with comfortable chairs to sit on and a television to watch.
“No foreign channels though,” he joked.
I told him about our two rooms for five of us; our one table and five hard chairs; our one radio with, of course, its one government channel to listen to; one bucket to wash in, brush teeth in, wash pots and prepare food in. No taps. No running water.
We sat together around the back of his house, under a window pulled closed, the dead trees of the old orchard like crumbling gravestones before us, no use even for firewood.
“The apartment we had in Pyongyang was better,” he said. “There was more food too. Better conditions, people were happier, the streets and buildings were clean and tidy.”
He sighed. “There were big, tall buildings too. And underground trains, the deepest in the world, magnificent, with chandeliers in the stations and…”
He was describing my dream and I couldn’t believe it. Father was right, at least about that, there was a place like it. But he was wrong about our Dear Leader. I knew that. He must’ve been.
“And do the buildings stretch right up high?” I asked.
“Some.” He nodded.
“With lights in the windows that are orange or yellow or white. And there are loads of cars in the roads, one after another after another, all different shapes and sizes and colours.” My voice became louder and my words faster. “And bars where you can buy drinks, and loud music thumping out, and people dancing in clothes of all different colours and styles?”
He stared at me.
I closed my eyes and could see it again, just as if I was strolling down it in real life. “And there are restaurants with smells of food, and stalls that sell food already cooked that you can carry around and eat and… and… and my father says there’s enough food for everyone, and he says there’s medicine if you get ill, and he said that’s where I’ll live. That’s where my future is.”
My excitement flooded out of me. The relief that I could share this with someone, with Sook, my best friend, the person who meant so much to me. Who I wanted to be with, stay with, make a life with. And I could do it, couldn’t I? Maybe? In that place? That place that must’ve been Pyongyang. And Father was right – about that.
“No,” he said.
I opened my eyes.
“That’s not Pyongyang. Pyongyang is quiet; there’s government music through the loudspeakers, but nothing else. A couple of cars on the roads, but black ones mostly, police cars. And you know nobody wears clothes like that. What you’re talking about sounds like Chinese clothes, and they’re banned. Yes, there are restaurants, but not like that. And there are no flashing or coloured lights. That’s not Pyongyang.”