How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee

Author:Krys Lee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-14T11:46:37+00:00

11

Danny

That April I woke up each morning in the cave as dark as a mother’s womb. It was damp and smelled worse than a gym locker room, but the choir of breathing tickling my ears was reassuring. When I shifted, my back scraped against layers of stones and paper and my tarp, which I’d laid underneath us to keep the moisture out. The warm bundle beside me moved, too. It was Yongju. I made sure it was always Yongju beside me.

Everything changed when Jangmi came. The next morning, when I wiggled out from under the filthy blankets, there was a gap beside me where Yongju should have been. I crawled toward the morning light, one hand out in front as I tried not to wake anyone up. Outside I saw what I’d feared.

Jangmi was sitting on a boulder, her hands folded over her swollen belly as Yongju dusted off dirt and silvery threads of cobwebs from her hair. They looked as if they’d been up and talking for hours. He gently pulled her hair back into a loose knot as if to see better her heart-shaped face and skin carved out of a perfect piece of marble. She clearly spelled trouble, and I found myself praying that he was only giving her hair a final cleaning. He murmured something and she looked like a queen speaking to her audience when she responded. That was when I squeezed in between them and slung my arm around Yongju’s shoulders.

I said, “What are you two doing up?”

Yongju flushed as if I’d caught him kissing her.

“What are you doing here in the mountains with us?” she said, though the sweetness of her voice reminded me of blooming cherry blossoms. She’d learned the night before as we walked back that I was a Joseon-jok.

Yongju’s eyes followed her hand stirring from her swollen belly to her too-perfect equation of a face. Mine did, too, for very different reasons.

Bakjun came out from our pit on his hands and knees. “How’s our nuna doing?” He circled her like a hungry dog.

“Very well.” She looked at Yongju. “Dongmu, thanks to you, I slept perfectly well. It was such a terrible night in the rain—I didn’t know where to go.”

Yongju flushed again. “You must be hungry, dongmu.”

She looked swiftly from the trees as gnarled as gnomes to our ragtag assembly emerging from the dugout. In that one sweeping glance that I would associate with her, she assessed how best to proceed.

Then she said quietly, “My baby is hungry,” which seemed impossible. When she had come back to the cave with us the night before, all she had done was eat. Over our breakfast of stale bread and tiny potatoes that I had cajoled alive, I watched my friends go from trying to please her and making her comfortable to flirting wildly with her. I was confounded. It made no difference that she was years older than them or pregnant. Their comments got bolder, and Jangmi didn’t discourage them. It was as if she wanted to keep her options open.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.