The Beloved Daughter (10 page)

PART THREE

North Hamyong Province

North Korea

Furnace

“We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.” Psalm 66:12

“Hurry up, filthy prisoners!” the guard shouted at us. The Old Woman had been dead for eight months. Two months after her death I was released unexpectedly from underground detainment, but my eyes still stung in bright lights. The agent’s whip flicked against the back of my prison uniform and grazed my skin. The young girl at my side grabbed my arm.

“I can’t go in there!” She cried out as the flames lurched toward us. She was only a teenager, no older than I was when I first went to work in the garment factory. The guard’s whip snapped through the air a second time and landed on the girl’s back. She fell to her knees with a sob.

“Stand up,” I urged, dragging the prisoner by her elbow. Together, we shielded our faces with our arms and entered the blazing building.

“We’re going to die!” the girl yelled.

“No,” I assured her, “we’ll be fine. That guard’s not coming in here. He won’t hurt you anymore.” As I stared at the leaping flames before us, I knew that it wasn’t the guard the girl was afraid of.

“Hurry!” I called to her, shouting in order to be heard over the roaring blaze. Dozens of prisoners from the garment factory were dispatched with us to put out the flames in the train depot by Camp 22’s Chungbong mine. Eventually, the guards realized it was hopeless to save the building, so they ordered those of us still alive to enter the burning station to salvage the most important documents. I held the young girl’s arm and looked around for the metal file cabinets that contained the bills of sale, shipping orders, and production records that were more valuable to the National Security Agency than the lives of us prisoners.

The smoke burned my lungs, but I couldn’t gasp in enough air to force a cough. Above the howls of the inferno, I heard a loud crackling. A smoldering beam fell from the ceiling, nearly striking my companion’s head.

“We’re going to die in here!” The girl shrieked and dropped to the floor. I turned and knelt down to help her when another prisoner grabbed me from behind.

“There’s no time!” he shouted. “Move!” He jerked me up by my arm and pulled me forward just as the roof collapsed behind me. I turned around and saw a pile of debris, almost as tall as myself, right in the spot where the girl had been kneeling.

“Are you hurt?” questioned the man who saved me. I shook my head. There were no other prisoners in sight. “My name is Shin,” he said. “You better follow me.” The main entrance was completely blocked off by rubble so we crawled farther in. I longed for fresh air, wincing in pain with each short breath of soot and ash.

This was my first time in the train depot. Shin and I eventually made our way to a semi-enclosed tunnel. A current of fresh air howled through, and I coughed so hard that I vomited bile.

When my body stopped convulsing, I looked around and saw a single train track. Ladders and empty crates cluttered the wooden platform where we were lying. “What is this place?” I whispered, resulting in a second coughing fit. I hunched over as my lungs tried to clear out the black soot from the fire.

Shin made his way over to the far side of the station where long shadows hid a pile of crates in almost total obscurity. He turned several empty boxes on their sides and made a small enclosure against a corner of the building. As he worked, Shin beckoned me to come closer. Still too weary to stand, I crawled over and joined him behind the crates.

“What are you doing?”

Shin put his finger to his lips. “They won’t finish sorting through all this rubble for days. If we disappear on the morning train, wouldn’t they simply assume we were dead?”

My heart raced. “You can’t really be thinking of escape,” I hissed before another choking episode seized my body.

Shin patted my back in a feeble attempt to quiet my coughing. “I can’t stay here,” he explained. “I have a daughter. I need to find her.”

 “They’ll send you to the detention centers if you get caught,” I warned Shin. “Do you have any idea what they’d do to you there?”

Shin cringed. “I know more about it than you could guess.”

I looked away. What right did this prisoner have to assume that he, or anyone else, had witnessed more heinous crimes than I in those underground torture cells?

I would have voiced my argument but froze when I heard footsteps. Shin pulled me behind the crates, and we both ducked down behind them.

“No one here,” shouted a man.

“Check around,” another voiced sounded from farther back. “Make sure nobody’s hiding by those boxes.” I held my breath, tried to swallow away another cough, and willed the shadows and darkness to cover us both. Our shelter of crates now seemed a shamefully inadequate refuge. Visions of torture back in the underground detainment center ran unchecked through my mind.

The guard approached our makeshift tower. I could glimpse portions of his olive-green uniform through the slats of the crates. He stuck out his toe and gave our structure a half-hearted kick when a gunshot sounded from nearby. Shin and I both jumped, and I’m certain that I gasped aloud, but the guard was already running back toward the smoldering building.

“Catch her!” a voice from within the depot shouted. “Prisoner, stop!”

Someone else called out, “She’s heading for the tracks.”

Two more gunshots rang out, followed by a warbled cry and a thud just a few meters away. I squeezed my eyes shut and begged my lungs to breathe evenly. For a moment there was silence, and then I heard boots approaching the end of the plank. I bit my lip to stifle another cough.

“Is she dead?” a man asked.

“I would say so,” answered the second.

“Should we clean it up?”

“Leave her there. The train will arrive in the morning. It should make her a pretty example for anyone else thinking of escape.”

Still trembling, I listened to the guards’ receding footsteps. I sat in a terrified daze for what must have been at least an hour, but nobody returned.

Eventually, the full moon began its nocturnal ascent. The hoot of an owl interrupted the stillness, and for the first time I realized how cold it was.

“You’re shivering,” whispered Shin. I didn’t say anything. Thoughts of freedom and escape intermingled with the dread of discovery and detainment. “Please,” Shin continued, shifting his weight, “let me give you my coat.” Before I could react, Shin wrapped a makeshift burlap jacket around my shoulders. His hand brushed against my cheek, and he cleared his throat.

I thought about Shin’s words:
“They won’t finish sorting through all this rubble for days. If we disappear on the morning train, wouldn’t they simply assume we were dead?”

Would they? It sounded more like wishful thinking than trustworthy logic to me. But if I went back to my unit at camp, wouldn’t the guards punish me? Wouldn’t they assume I tried to help the prisoner whose body now lay within a few meters of my handmade refuge? I thought about faking an injury from the fire, but the inner building was already searched. Who would believe me?

Fear kept me crouched behind the crates. I didn’t want to escape with Shin. I knew it would never work. But I couldn’t forget the Old Woman’s words that continued to beckon to me eight months after her death:
“You have the seal of freedom upon your forehead.”
The Old Woman had been so convinced that I would one day throw off my prisoner uniform and escape the confines of Camp 22. “
God Almighty will himself provide you safe escort beyond prison walls.”
In spite of the Old Woman’s confidence, my fear of punishment was just as strong a restraint as Camp 22’s electric fence.

I wasn’t willing to flee, but I knew it was too late to return to the dorm. The self-criticism sessions were probably halfway done by now. And so I waited.

Wishing I were safe with my unit, I begged the darkness to conceal me and the dawn to arrive quickly.

Light of Dawn

“The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.” Proverbs 4:18

There are some sounds that are so sweet, so sacred in the recesses of my mind, they will always remain with me: my father’s confession in the Hasambong precinct building, the Old Woman’s hymns of praise, the train’s whistle as Shin and I escaped Camp 22 crouched hidden in a coal car.

For the first time since I was a young girl of twelve, I was outside the heavily patrolled borders of the camp. Yet as I hid in the train car that raced me away from my prison of nine years, I knew the road ahead of me held many dangers.

It was just before dawn, and there was not enough light in the coal car to allow me to study my fellow runaway. I thought about our conversation last night, when Shin and I sat side by side behind our makeshift shelter of crates in the train station. Shin spoke briefly of his young daughter. He arranged safe passage into Yanji, China for her eight months earlier.

“My wife is dead,” Shin explained in the darkness. “My little girl is all I have left.”

Based on his appearance and speech, I tried to guess Shin’s age. He was skinny but not yet emaciated; in spite of his internment at Camp 22, he still appeared to have most of his health and vigor. I wondered about his past, but Shin remained elusive. I suspected he was well-off, both financially and politically, before his arrest. I figured that sending a minor to China safely required significant bribe money and appropriate contacts. Shin’s burlap coat revealed a resourceful survival instinct. Although he didn’t become a prisoner until sometime after his daughter’s escape, Shin seemed familiar with the train depot’s inner workings. When the train arrived hours before sunrise that morning, Shin knew the precise time that we could emerge from our hiding place, when both the conductor and the guards were preoccupied. Right before we slipped into one of the coal cars, Shin opened the door easily in spite of its complicated locking system.

Because Shin was risking detainment, torture, even execution at the hands of the National Security Agency in order to be reunited with his daughter, it was obvious that he was a brave and devoted father. Yet how he coordinated his escape with a fire in the train depot, how he became so familiar with the minute details of train depot procedures after only a few months of imprisonment, or why he chose to put himself in even more danger by inviting me to flee Camp 22 with him, I could only wonder.

Shin told me that the train ride to the Kimchaek steel mill would take about three hours. I was exhausted, but even once we were relatively safe in one of the coal cars heading away from Camp 22, I still couldn’t sleep. Shin and I sat side by side behind large crates of coal, with no room to stretch our legs. My neck and shoulders ached.

“You should rest,” Shin advised. “Once we arrive in Kimchaek it’s a long journey to the Chinese border.”

Although my body was exhausted, my mind raced as fast as our train to freedom. Yesterday, I woke up in the dorm with my unit, hoping to complete my twelve-hour shift at the garment factory with minimal discomfort. Now here I was, still wearing my prisoner’s clothes, preparing to follow a stranger all the way from Kimchaek to the northernmost region of North Hamyong, where we would try to cross the Tumen River into China.

“You can’t sleep, can you?” Shin finally asked.

“My mind won’t slow down,” I confessed.

“When I was a boy traveling to the coast with my family,” Shin began, confirming my suspicions that he came from a wealthy heritage, “my father would tell us stories. Perhaps you could tell us one to help the time pass more pleasantly.”

“I don’t know many stories.” I wished that my childhood included opportunities to learn the tales that a respectable lady might tell her traveling companion.