The Accusation by Bandi

Author:Bandi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Though Mrs. Oh made every effort to comfort the child in her lap, the little girl was unable to quell her tears. Her sorrow seemed not to have subsided at all, so deeply had it pierced her innocent self. How to undo the hurt inside her, how to heal the wound inflicted when her soft knee had snapped, like the sparrow who fell afoul of evil Nolbu?

“Yeongsun, your grandma made a mistake.” The words seemed to split Mrs. Oh’s throat in two. “We won’t take the train again, okay? Never again!”

Never! There it was again, that hellish din, ringing in her ears as though reminding her to keep this promise. And that dreadful train station, the source of the commotion, appearing in her mind’s eye like a scene from some nightmare …

“There are people dying here!” screamed Mrs. Oh, seized by the despairing conviction that she was about to breathe her last, buried in this jumble of people. Her head and back were being steadily crushed by this mass of contorted, entangled limbs, while heavy blows knocked the wind from her chest. Throbbing heat, the stink of sweat, the gooey mud under her feet … these things were already growing faint for her, receding into the background. Only one single thought hung clear and sharp in her mind—that this was how she was going to die. Perhaps it was all her long years as a history teacher that gave her the illusion, now, of being caught up in a mass of starving slaves, in one of the grain riots she’d taught her pupils about.

And Mrs. Oh would have truly met her end in that spot, were it not for the fact that the bread supplies ran out just in the nick of time. As soon as all the bread from the handcart was sold, the maelstrom subsided. Mrs. Oh managed to buy three packs just before the chaos reached fever pitch, and kept them clutched safe to her chest the whole time. Holding in her mind the thought that they had been bought with their last ration coupons, that without them the family would go hungry for however long it now took to make it to their destination, Mrs. Oh kept a tight grip on these precious packets.

“Hey! Even grandmothers are crawling around in this mess?” a sweat-soaked young man cried in surprise when he spotted Mrs. Oh. Concentrating on finding her other shoe, which had come off and got kicked away from her in the melee, she gave no sign of having heard him. She found the muddied shoe and put it on, but there still remained the task of getting back into the waiting room to rejoin her husband and granddaughter. The room was rammed to the gills, so much so that even the window frames had disappeared, gotten rid of in a bid to free up some space. Whatever had previously been a window was now used as a door, and the water bottles people had brought with them for the journey were transformed into chamber pots.

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