Just when Gi was about to give up, the last warm spoonful of water sloshing in the barrel, the sea calmed and their boat stopped. She assumed that she was hallucinating when the sounds of machinery pierced the quiet of their container. Then the room spun about in a dizzying way and landed on solid ground. Gi slipped in and out of consciousness, events unfolding in a dreamlike way. There was the sound of a truck, and of her mother singing to her, and then she was under the sky in the DMZ. She could hear the boxes being removed from the other chamber of their container, and muffled voices. She heard a padlock click, and cool, fresh air filled the space around her. There was more light than she had ever seen before, and the sound of retching as their foul air was breathed in by the person who opened the door. Then the foreman and Gianni stood in the doorway, kissing; but that was impossible and she blinked it away. It was a man with an electric prod and she screamed, but only dust came out of her cracked mouth. She blinked and it was a man, but his hands were empty.
Il-sun was being helped to her feet and led out the door. Gi forced herself up for fear that they would take Il-sun away and she would never see her again. When she stood, however, the ocean moved through her and she could not keep her balance. She did not have the strength to stand on her own. Jasmine and Cho were led away, and then a man came and helped her walk out of the squalid room.
Voices shot through the air in a torrent of unintelligible language, and the light was painfully bright. They were again inside a metal warehouse. The women were made to lean against a corrugated tin wall, while a man with shears cut their putrid clothes from their bodies. In places the cloth had to be painfully ripped from the flesh. The man choked from time to time as he did his job, the stench of their fouled bodies nearly overpowering him. Once the women were naked he appeared with a hose and doused them with a pressurized stream of water. The water stung like needles, but they ignored that, trying to capture the liquid in their hands so they could drink it. Realizing that his efforts to clean the women were going to be thwarted by their efforts to drink, the man reduced the pressure and let them drink their fill from the hose. Once their thirst was quenched, he shot them again with the water, this time to less resistance.
Once they were thoroughly soaked, another man handed them a bar of soap, but they were too weak to effectively scrub themselves. Someone barked orders, and there was some arguing; then two men appeared with rags and roughly scrubbed the women. Gi was deeply embarrassed by having her naked body so thoroughly handled by a strange man, but she lacked the strength to protest. Besides, she was relieved to be rid of the filth. They were once again hosed off and stood shivering, dripping dry against the wall.
A well-dressed Korean man walked in and stood in front of the women, looking at them with a hard, cold stare. He seemed displeased. He was in his sixties, with mixed silver and black hair. His face, when he was younger, would have been square and strong but was now well padded, with a slight sag in his skin. His eyes were hard slits and his mouth was set in a grim expression. His lower lip protruded slightly, with a fullness and femininity that was at odds with his otherwise wholly masculine appearance. He carried himself with power, and everyone shrank in deference to him. His stare bore into Gyong-ho, making her squirm. After a moment he turned on his heel and walked away.
62
G
YONG
-
HO
AWOKE
IN
A
strange room with her head pounding. She tried to sit up, but collapsed back on the bed, too dizzy to get up. She had to blink several times to clear her vision. Gray light was pouring in from a window, diffused through gauzy white curtains. It was an overcast day.
After the well-dressed man had walked away from them in the warehouse, Gi’s legs buckled and she collapsed to the floor. It was the last thing she remembered. She had been unconscious since then and had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there.
She felt an agonizing thirst and tried to call out to get someone’s attention, but it came out as a mute wheeze. Even so, she heard footsteps coming toward her, and a young woman appeared. The woman put her arm under Gi’s head to lift it off the pillow and then raised a glass of water to her lips. The water had lemon in it, and she gulped greedily.
“Thank you,” she tried to say, but it sounded like babble, even to her own ears. The woman pressed her finger to her lips.
The lemon water worked quickly to bring some vitality back to her, and she was able take in more of her surroundings.
She was lying in a narrow European-style bed in a small bedroom. The walls were covered in old, peeling wallpaper with a red floral pattern, and the hardwood floor was dented and scratched, and looked like it might have been there for a century or more. The ceiling was white plaster that was cracked in a crazed pattern radiating from an old light fixture. There was a table next to the bed with a cheap, modern-style lamp that looked out of place in the otherwise antiquated room. The air was cool and humid.
The woman who had helped her drink the water was short and slight, with a round face. She appeared to be about Gi’s age, or maybe a couple of years older, with heavily painted eyes and hair dyed an impossible auburn color. She had a kind face that bore a look of genuine concern. She helped Gi up to a sitting position, and then piled pillows against the headboard so that Gi could be supported by them while she sat. The woman then took a bowl from the bedside table and fed Gi a spoonful of its contents. It was a thin rice gruel mixed with meat broth. Although she was ravenous, Gi could only eat a few spoonfuls before she felt full and slightly nauseous.
A groaning sound came from an adjoining room, and the young woman set the bowl back on the table and hurried out the door. Gi could not tell whose voice it was, but she hoped it was from one of her companions. She tried to get up to see, but as soon as she moved she was overcome by dizziness and had to sink back onto the pillows. She pulled the covers off her body and was surprised by her nakedness. She had lost precious weight—her ribs protruded and the bones of her hips were well defined by lack of flesh. Her arms and legs were fragile stems. She noticed that the sores on her body had been thoughtfully dressed with gauze and tape, and she felt grateful that somebody cared.
A while later the young woman returned and fed her a few more bites of gruel. Slowly her strength began returning. After the second feeding, the young woman helped Gi out of bed and to the toilet. She gave her a pair of panties and an oversized tee-shirt to wear. The effort of making the thirty-pace round-trip between the bed and the toilet was exhausting, and afterward she fell into a deep sleep.
After that, the young woman awakened her every couple of hours to eat gruel and drink water. By the next afternoon, Gi was able to stand and walk to the toilet on her own. The young woman, it turned out, could not speak Korean, so Gi was not able to question her about their location. Once she could walk, she insisted, using hand gestures, on going to see her friends.
Gi discovered that she was in a suite of four small bedrooms with an adjoining bathroom. At one time the suite was probably a two-bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen and bathroom, but the kitchen had been taken out and the living room and kitchen divided into two small bedrooms. Each of the women was in her own bedroom.
Cho, like Gi, was able to walk, if shakily, on her own. Il-sun was not yet walking, but she had some color in her cheeks, and smiled when Gi walked in. She looked relieved to see her. Nobody had information about where they were.
Jasmine was the worst off of all. She appeared to have a fever, and slipped in and out of consciousness. Her lips were badly cracked and bleeding, and she was in a state of delirium. She was drinking and eating, however, when the glass and spoon were lifted to her mouth. Gi saw it as a promising sign. All the women were very thin and pale, but alive.
On her way back to bed, Gi paused to look out her bedroom window. It was her first look into the new world she had entered. She counted the time from their flight across the DMZ—they had spent a month in South Korea, and about three weeks in the shipping container—and she figured that it must already be early summer. It did not look it, though. The sky was overcast and a light drizzle darkened the charcoal gray asphalt of the road below, and the air held a humid chill. She could see that she was on the second floor of an old redbrick building, but could not tell how wide or tall the building was. To the right was an intersection that had a lot of cross traffic, but the street below was relatively quiet. She could hear the steady stream of cars through the intersection, and overall it sounded just like Seoul. She was certain, however, given the amount of time they’d been at sea, that she was no longer in Korea. Directly across the street was another brick building, with cracks in the walls and a sagging roofline. At street level there were shops of various kinds, though she could not tell what they were selling: All the writing was in western-style lettering. Various cars were parked along the street. Two people were walking along the sidewalk directly below her, but they were shielded from view by a large black umbrella.
By the next day Il-sun was getting up on her own. In spite of the trauma of their ordeal, she had not lost the baby. “She’s going to be a survivor just like us,” Gi said to her.
Il-sun smiled and replied, “What makes you think she will be a girl?”
Gi did not have an answer. It just had to be a girl.
There was no improvement for Jasmine yet. The young woman fed her every couple of hours with thin gruel. The other women were starting to eat solid food, in larger portions and less often. Strength was coming back to them rapidly.
It was not until the fourth day of her recovery that Gi had built up enough strength to try opening the main door out of the suite. She had been afraid to touch the doorknob because she knew the mystery of their situation would be solved on the other side of it, and she did not want to uncover any grim truths. She stood in front of the door for several minutes before reaching out to it. Finally, after taking a deep breath and holding it in, her fingers wrapped around the knob and she turned it. The knob was fixed in place—they were locked inside. Confirming for herself that she was once again held in captivity drained the precious strength out of her body. She went to bed, closed her eyes, and escaped into numbers until she fell asleep.
By the fifth day Jasmine still had not improved and their caregiver brought a man into their suite to have a look at her. He was a tall Asian man in his midthirties, but he did not speak much Korean. He brought with him a bag of medical supplies, and Gi assumed him to be a doctor. He thoroughly examined Jasmine, looking into her eyes, her nose, her ears, and inspected the sores that still festered on her body. He took her blood pressure and temperature. He brought some pills out of his bag and handed them to the young caregiver and gave her instructions in his unintelligible language. Then he brought a bag of fluid and some plastic tubes out of his kit. He inserted a needle into Jasmine’s arm, attached the tubes to the needle and then the bag of fluid to the tubes. He used a push pin to secure the bag in a high position against the wall.
“What is that?” asked Gi.
The doctor scrunched up his face at the question, his eyes rolling upwards as if trying to find the right words. Finally he said, “Food water.” It was not correct Korean, but she understood the meaning.
“Will she be okay?”
He looked confused at first, not understanding the words, but he seemed to understand the concerned look in Gi’s eyes.
“She fine week next,” he said. “No worry.”
The doctor then did a cursory inspection of the other three women, and indicated that they would be fine as long as they continued to eat and drink plenty of fluids. He then packed up his case and walked out the door.
Within a day Jasmine was much improved. Her fever abated, and with it left the delirium. As soon as Jasmine was able to stand on her own, their caregiver came less frequently, and only to deliver food and clean clothing. They were still not allowed out of the suite, and nor had anyone come to explain their circumstances to them.
A full week after arriving at their new location, the women were looking significantly more healthy and full in the face. The lock on their door jiggled, and in walked a stately woman, elegantly dressed in a fancy embroidered gown, followed by two large, muscular men.
“Come!” The woman shouted in Korean, standing in the doorway. Her voice rattled like an old truck, its huskiness caused by a lifetime of heavy smoking. The women came out of their rooms and stood before her.
She was short, but her posture was so erect and her poise so perfect that she seemed to tower over them. They would have described her as a tall woman, even though she was almost the shortest person in the room. She could have been anywhere from her midfifties to her midseventies, depending on how well or poorly she had aged, with her hair dyed black and pulled back in a tight bun. She had high, well-defined cheekbones, which were painted with a smear of rouge, and her eyebrows were penciled in over her eyes in a sinister arch. The outer corners of her eyes slanted upward, and her lips were pinched and plump and painted a deep shade of red. The skin of her neck was loose over hard, ropelike tendons. She wore a string of pearls and matching pearl pendant earrings that showed off the length of her neck. Her face was slightly wrinkled, and she was beautiful and frightening. When she was younger her beauty must have stopped hearts and caused collisions. Now she did it with her hard, penetrating stare.