From the Fatherland, with Love, page 71
But if she made the payment first and then asked to see Dr. Seragi, her identity as a KEF officer would already be known to the hospital. Having tried to stop the execution of the two soldiers, he was likely to be hostile and might tell the receptionist to say that he was out of the office or in a meeting, and that would be that. With the arriving troops, she was bound to be busy helping to set things up in the temporary barracks and wouldn’t get another chance to come here. She looked at her watch. It was still several minutes before noon. If she talked to Seragi for a quarter of an hour, paid the bill, and then returned to headquarters, it shouldn’t be a problem. Leaving the reception area, she crossed the lobby and nipped into the elevator just as the doors were closing. “Which floor?” an elderly man clutching an IV stand asked her. “Three, please,” she replied with a slight bow of her head.
It was such a large hospital that one could easily lose one’s way. Hyang Mok got off on the third floor. There were rooms running right and left, and she couldn’t even guess where the one she was looking for might be. The linoleum floor had a mirror-like polish, and the entire corridor was spotless. Hyang Mok asked a passing nurse for Dr. Seragi’s office. Asked in turn what her business was, she replied that she had an appointment with him at noon to discuss a possible lecture. The nurse told her in a precise but friendly way that she should turn right in front of the dispensary; his office was at the end of that corridor. Walking on, Hyang Mok noted with some nostalgia the faint smell of medicine and disinfectant, and the peculiar atmosphere of a place populated by sick people and those caring for them. Her father’s clinic had been an old wooden structure with antiquated equipment and couldn’t be compared to this. But the feeling of the place had been very much the same.
She passed a group of doctors outside the dispensary, nodded to them, and walked purposefully on, head held high. From the gist of their conversation, she guessed they were on their way to lunch in the cafeteria. It was not long before noon; she could only hope Seragi was still in his office. She turned right and continued on past a conference room, a kitchenette, and the orderlies’ room, and then came to the offices. There were five of these, separated by recessed, floor-to-ceiling windows. The sign on the first door said MEDICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH OFFICE; then came KINETIC IMAGING, CARDIOVASCULAR PHYSIOLOGY, and ORGAN PRESERVATION AND TRANSPLANTATION. The last office was long and narrow and situated next to an enclosed balcony that looked out onto the hotel, the Dome, and the KEF camp. The sign, in both English and Japanese, read IMMUNOLOGY RESEARCH OFFICE. On the door at eye level was a card indicating that the doctor was in. Her heart was beating faster, and she took several deep breaths before knocking. “Come in,” said a voice inside. Her pulse further quickened, as though her heart might pop out of her mouth. What was she trying to do? She was acting on her own, without any authorization. The thought of being taken into custody by the Japanese police or SDF made her look in her shoulder bag, just to make sure the PSM was there. If that happened, she told herself, she would end it then and there.
As she was about to knock again, the door opened. Seragi stood before her, a puzzled expression on his face. “Who are you?” he asked. When she said she wanted to speak to him, she got a sharp look from behind his glasses. Again he asked: “Who are you?” His voice was soft, but he made no move to let her in. Her imperfect Japanese, she realized, probably told him that she was Korean. “My name is Kim Hyang Mok. I am a second lieutenant in the Koryo Expeditionary Force.” At the mention of the KEF, Seragi stared at her, frowning, then looked to see whether there was anyone behind her. “You’re alone?” he asked, and when she nodded, he moved aside to let her enter.
Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves. In the middle of the room was a large desk, and outside the window was the balcony, beyond which she could see the hotel and the camp. Seragi didn’t offer her a chair, and he himself remained standing, arms folded. He left the door open. He looked smaller and older than he had when she first saw him. Physically he was quite different from her father. But now that she was seeing him face to face in his doctor’s apparel, she understood why he had appeared to her in her dreams and why she had come to see him. The shock of the realization made her feel as though she’d walked out of an ondol-heated room into subfreezing air. She sat down in a chair in front of the desk. She knew she should say something but found herself speechless. She heard Seragi’s voice as though from a great distance: “What do you want?” Still seated, she reached into her shoulder bag, took out the PSM, released the safety catch, and thumbed back the hammer. The metallic sound of the spring was unmistakable in the quiet room. Clearly alarmed, Seragi moved toward the door. “I’d like you to stay,” said Hyang Mok. “Are you here to shoot me?” he asked. Hyang Mok shook her head and reached into her shoulder bag again to produce the white sandal. “I wanted to return this to you.”
Adjusting his glasses, Seragi came forward and took the sandal from her, though still apparently unaware that it was his own. He alternately looked at it, then at her, evidently baffled by this gesture. Then, seeing his own name written faintly on the instep, he looked at her again, as though remembering the execution, and took a deep breath. “Why did you bring me this?” he asked her. “I thought you might need it,” she replied. Seragi stepped to the door and glanced up and down the corridor before closing it.
Holding the sandal in one hand, he slowly crossed the room and sat down in his high-backed swivel chair across from her. The outline of his white coat was silhouetted against the light from the window. On his desk she saw a notebook PC, photographs that appeared to be of his family, various books, and memos. There was also a strange object: a stuffed baby chicken with black wings, sitting on a stand inscribed with the word Chimera. Seragi noticed that she was staring at it and explained: “It has this name because it represents an organism containing genetically different tissues. The wings are those of a quail. Early on in the embryonic development of the chick, part of its neural tube is replaced by that of a quail, and that’s why the wings are black. But the chick dies soon after hatching. It becomes paralyzed, unable to move its wings or walk, and finally weakens and gives up the ghost. Its immune system rejects the quail’s nerve cells, you see.”
As he spoke, Seragi placed the sandal on his desk and, as if speaking to himself, wondered again why she had gone to the trouble of bringing it to him. “My father is a physician; he too values the things he works with,” she said, then realized that she’d been speaking in the present tense. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “my father is no longer alive.” It was while on duty as a railway security guard at a tunnel near the Chinese border that she’d heard he was seriously ill. Her commanding officer had received a telegram and given her temporary leave. The next morning she headed for home, first taking the train and then getting a ride in a charcoal delivery truck. Her father was very weak, having contracted pneumonia, and he died soon after her arrival. As she had sat at his bedside, he’d brought his face close to hers to convey two final messages. The first was: “Wish I could have gone fishing with you again.” The second was: “Love and cherish your children.”
“Love and cherish your children.” She turned the words over and over now in her mind, words she had long since buried inside her. She felt she should say something to avoid further confusion, but her throat was too dry and her voice too hoarse. When Seragi poured her some coffee from a pot at the window, she nodded her thanks and finally managed to ask him why he had made his protest at the execution. He poured some coffee for himself, silently held the cup in both hands as though to warm them, and then gazed out of the window. Beyond the glass pane and the balcony lay the campground. The lunch hour had just begun, and soldiers were gathered around steaming pots on folding tables. “Let me tell you a story from long ago,” he said. “During the war, I witnessed many executions in your country. It’s not as if everything we did in your country was evil. We built roads and dams; we carried out irrigation and draining projects. But we did terrible things too. As a boy soldier, I couldn’t do anything to stop the executions, but it also wouldn’t have occurred to me to try, because I didn’t see anything wrong with it.”
The walls were all lined with books. There were bookshelves next to the door and others on both sides that reached the ceiling. The strange little bird perched atop the desk had been so skillfully stuffed that it looked as if it might cheep. The sugarless coffee was bitter but had a delicious aroma. Hyang Mok was barely following what Seragi was saying. “I was fifteen at the time. I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t so much a monster as an ignoramus. But there’s nothing worse than ignorance. After we were all repatriated, I began to have disturbing dreams. And when I got back to school, I began to realize the significance of those executions. It’s now been nearly seventy years, and the scenes still come back to me in my sleep. At the age of eighty-three, I know I could die at any time, but I’ve got no stomach for a new set of nightmares.”
He stopped speaking and looked at Hyang Mok’s hands. She was still holding the pistol. It wasn’t him she wanted to shoot, but herself. She couldn’t do it here, though; that would only cause trouble for everyone. She’d have to do it somewhere else—put a bullet through her throat, or through her head. “Love and cherish your children,” her father had said to her as he lay dying. She had forgotten those words, and gone on living as though nothing were wrong. Staring down at the pistol in her hand, she told Seragi: “I killed my own baby.” She looked up to see his silhouette shifting in the chair, but against the light she couldn’t make out his features clearly. After her father’s death she had left the railway job and returned home, where she married a man who worked as a technician for a cannery near the sea. A child was born in 2002. The village, too small to benefit from Chinese black-market supplies, had been suffering from a long-term famine. Price controls had collapsed, so that rice and corn now cost hundreds of times more than they had just a few years before. The immediate cause of her father’s death had been pneumonia, but his weakened condition had been the result of malnutrition. They had killed the sheep that had provided the wool for Hyang Mok’s sweater and sold the meat on the free market. Her mother had gone with her brothers into the hills in the hope of collecting firewood to exchange on the market in Ranam for eggs and honey, but other villagers had already done the same, and not a stick remained.
Hyang Mok’s husband was a serious and resourceful person. He used split bamboo staves to bring running water into their house from upstream, and he taught himself how to manufacture soap from acorn ash. The food shortage worsened after the birth of their child, and he was tempted every day to steal cans from the factory, where sardines and codfish were being processed for cat-food exports. But the factory was run under the watchful supervision of the Fourth Corps of the People’s Army, with military trucks being used to transport both the raw materials and the final product. By the time the baby was able to hold its head steady, Hyang Mok no longer had any breast milk, forcing her to feed the infant the juice from mashed corn, but corn, to say nothing of rice, became increasingly hard to come by.
Her husband used to stay up all night making soap to sell on the free market, burning acorns, filtering the ashes through hemp cloth, and mixing them with powdered pieces of ordinary soap. The result was a foamy liquid that he then bottled. The trouble was that a better-quality Chinese soap was already available, so that he was obliged to sell what he’d made for next to nothing, with much of it finding no buyers at any price. Hyang Mok’s mother and her brothers sold the family furniture on the Chinese border and with the money bought some corn, selling half of it in Ranam and keeping the rest for the family. They used only a bare minimum of crockery and bedding and auctioned off the old doctor’s books and medical equipment. The last thing to go was the oil-paper cover on the ondol floor, which they peeled off and sold. Finally, when there was nothing else that could be exchanged for money, Hyang Mok remembered having gone to the coast with her siblings years ago to collect shellfish. Braving the cold of the autumn sea, she waded in but found that even that source of food had been exhausted. When she suggested going into the hills to trap rabbits, her mother laughed: they had long since vanished, she was told, along with the pheasants, turtle doves, wild ducks, bamboo partridges, and other birds.
When winter came, the villagers resorted to cutting down the trees in their orchard in order to keep warm. At one time Hyang Mok had often gone into the hills in search of medicinal herbs, but now only conifers such as pine and cedar remained on the largely denuded hills. With the first snowfall, a public execution attended by the entire village took place in front of the miners’ barracks. Her husband was shocked to see that the two condemned men tied to the posts were fellow workers at the factory, who had been caught stealing cans. After that he seemed to become utterly dispirited. He told her that some workers drinking together had been overheard by soldiers complaining that there was “plenty of fish for foreign cats but none for us,” and were beaten within an inch of their lives. Shortly afterwards he left home, going off to look for work across the Tumen River in China. He returned once, carrying a sack of wheat flour, but then left again, this time for good. There were various rumors: some said he had drowned crossing the river; others said that he’d been apprehended and executed by Korean border guards, others still that he was living with an ethnic Korean woman in Yanji. The truth of the matter remained unknown.
One wintry day Hyang Mok’s mother and brothers came by to take her into the hills to strip bark off the pine trees, which the villagers were beginning to eat, cutting into the trunks with a sickle and then pulling with their hands. The bark didn’t peel easily, and their nails would get broken and bloody. Once they got the stuff off, they took it home and used a sharp stone to scrape off the tough outer layer and the sap. They soaked what remained in a bucket of water overnight, then put it in a pot and boiled it for hours in sodium bicarbonate. Washed once, it was left to dry in the shade for another forty-eight hours, before being beaten with a round stone in a hemp sack. Finally, they would mix the sticky powder with wheat flour or corn and eat it. The pine fibers were tasteless and virtually indigestible, causing the abdomen to swell. This is what began to happen to Hyang Mok’s undernourished one-year-old, who’d grown too weak even to cry. The powdered pine bark seemed to relieve the baby’s hunger, but it went largely undigested and was excreted more or less whole. Hyang Mok had to pick fibers out of the infant’s rectum.
One day, after chewing on the pine fiber herself to soften it further, she gave the child a small mouthful, but it was now so weak that it couldn’t swallow, spitting it all out. And when Hyang Mok finally managed to force some down, the baby began to writhe about, its small belly gurgling, its intestines bulging under the skin, and the accumulated gas swelling its entire midsection. The fibers had blocked the digestive tract. With the death of her father, the village had no doctor, so there was nothing that could be done. That evening, its belly swollen like a balloon, the infant died. Mothers locally used to gently tap their babies on the belly to lull them to sleep, rather than rocking them in a cradle. Seeing her dead child’s monstrously swollen tummy, Hyang Mok thought she’d committed a sin that not even her own death would expunge.
“This was foolish of me,” she said to Seragi. “Coming to see you and telling you this can’t take away my guilt. I’m sorry for intruding. It was foolish.” She had failed to honor her father’s wish. Far from loving and cherishing her child, she had killed it with her own hands, and then tried to escape that reality. Seeing Dr. Seragi there at the place of execution in his white coat, she had remembered her father and was forced to confront the crime she’d tried for so long to conceal from herself. The irony was that if she hadn’t come to Kyushu, she might never have come to grips with this reality; her duty to the Republic had always taken precedence. Moreover, there were so many others who had lost children to starvation that the sheer horror of it all had eased what should have been any human being’s most heartbreaking loss.
She returned the PSM to her shoulder bag, feeling ashamed of imposing on this man and taking up his time. Seragi remained in his chair, staring at her. The hotel beyond the window stood like a knife plunged straight into the earth. Suddenly she saw white smoke coming from the windows of one floor. An instant later she heard the sound of a small explosion. Seragi turned around to look. Reaching for her phone, she called Ri Hui Cheol. There was more smoke from the same floor—the eighth—and then the sound of a second explosion.
“We haven’t been able to contact the reconnaissance unit and don’t know what’s happened,” Ri calmly reported. “It’s not clear whether there’s been enemy infiltration or an accident. A Japanese worker has reported that it might be a gas leak. We’ve called the police and the fire department. They’re on their way.” He ended the call, and she decided to take care of the hospital bill and return to headquarters. There was no reason for her to stay here any longer. She should have died, not the child. That alone was now clear. “You must excuse me, Doctor,” she said, getting up and heading for the door, but he stopped her, saying, “Wait a moment.” He went to a shelf against the wall and pulled out an old book. “Do you know any English?” he asked. “A little,” she said. “Then you should be able to read this simple story by Hans Christian Andersen. There’s a story called ‘The Angel.’ Let me just read you the beginning for now. ‘Whenever a good child dies, an angel of God comes down from heaven, takes the dead child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies over all the places that child had loved in life. Then he gathers a large handful of flowers, which he carries up to the Lord, that they may bloom more brightly in heaven than they do on earth. And He presses the flowers to His heart, kissing the one that pleases Him best and bestowing on it a voice, that it may join the choir in hymns of joy.’”
