Hwang Sok-Yong - The Guest

Hurry, she hissed. You have to get out of here! It’s those Jesus freaks.

I raced around the house into the backyard, tore the rough hedge fence apart, and fled. I ran for my life, tearing up the hill behind our house. I meant to go all the way over it, but the trails were so steep that I was soon stumbling, panting horribly. I was leaning up against a rock, trying to catch my breath, when I heard them yelling from down below.

Sunnam, you son of a bitch! We know you’re up there!

Come down or we’ll kill your whole family!

How could I keep going? My wife, she wasn’t even from around there. She used to be a worker at a sock factory in Pyongyang. All her life, she’d known nothing but hardship — she started working when she was twelve, taking care of her parents and her younger brothers and sisters. I met her at one of the Party training sessions. We both belonged to the lowest class, so neither of us had anything to our names but our bare hands. We had two children, a three year old and a tiny new baby, just like Comrade Pak Illang’s little family. I trudged on back down. As soon as I got near my house, a couple of them rushed me, striking me on the back with the butts of their rifles. I fell to the ground.

We caught the Mole!

The shout seemed to come from far, far away.

Uncle Sunnam’s face was already soaked in blood from being beaten by several different men. By the time I got there, everything had already been taken care of. His hands were tied behind his back with a telephone cord, and he was on his knees. I glanced at him, but he dropped his head when our eyes met. I looked over the hedge fence and saw his wife squatting down on the ground, looking as if she’d been frightened out of her senses, blood streaming down from her nose. The older kid was right next to her, and the younger one was sitting on the ground. I guess they knew somehow that they shouldn’t cry too loudly; they were just moaning quietly. Sunnam had played with us when we were all just kids, hanging around the neighborhood, and he’d never been directly involved in any village conflict — no one really had a personal grudge against him. Still, he’d been involved with the so-called peacekeeping troops in town from the very beginning, so everyone felt kind of intimidated by him. His wife was a member of the Women’s League, but she’d always gotten along pretty well with the other women in the village. We hesitated.

Should we take them to town?

The man in charge of searching the house was the first to ask the question. We all knew, though, what would happen to them if we took them in. The young ones on our side had their eyes peeled for opportunities like these — they were dying for a chance to get their hands on a real Red. It didn’t take me long to decide. All it took was two little words.

Shoot them.

A couple of men turned and ran back inside the fence. I heard them cock their guns. Then came the shots. I didn’t look back. When the men shoved Sunnam, he fell into step, leading the way down the village road. We got to the village entrance. Illang, with his newly pierced nose and his party were waiting for us. The whole lot of us formed a line and began marching towards town down the new road. Wet fog spread out over the stream like a blanket of smoke. The eulalias were in full bloom, white against the stream banks. I was walking in front of Uncle Sunnam when I heard his deep voice address me from behind.

Yohan, can I have a word with you?

I just turned and looked at him.

What’s the point of going all the way to town? Please. Kill me here.

I stopped walking. I wanted to put some distance between Illang’s party, who continued on their way, and our group. I turned to the young men from Kwangmyŏng Church who stopped with me.

Let’s finish him off here.

But he’s a key figure — do you think that’d be wise?

We’re going to be killing them all later on, anyway. Don’t worry. Tell the guys up front to go on ahead.

Sending a man to the front to let them know what was going on, I took out a cigarette. I lit it and held it to Sunnam’s lips.

Go ahead. Take a puff.

Greedily, Sunnam took the cigarette between his lips, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke come out his nose. I lit another for myself.

Well, you certainly are a sight to see — and to think how you used to go around with your nose stuck up in the air. You shouldn’t have played the Red game.

Sunnam stood there without saying a word, just smoking his cigarette. He spat it out when it was only half done. With a deep sigh, he looked up at the sky. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Without facing him directly, I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and said, Why the tears?

It’s just the smoke.

My companions began to prod me.

Let’s just get this over with and move on.

I spotted a utility pole along the stream bank. I turned to the boys.

String him up over there.

Was I remembering that time with the dog, that day I followed him down to the stream during the Tano Festival? 41The guys unraveled one of the telephone cords they always had tied around their waists for easy access and shaped it into a noose. As one of the men pulled the noose down over his head from behind, Sunnam said, Yohan, can I ask you a favor?

What is it?

Please — bury me with my family.

I didn’t answer. I just gave the signal to my men. They tossed the other end of the telephone cord over one of the pins that stuck out of the utility pole and pulled with every ounce of strength they had. With a strange gurgle, Sunnam’s body was suddenly up in the air, his legs flailing. At first the men stood there and hung onto their end of the cord, but then they just tied it off on one of the pins farther down and left it. We all hung around for a while, waiting for Sunnam to die. Every time it looked like he might finally be gone, his limp body dangling silently for a moment, his legs would jerk again and the struggle would start all over again. Blood oozed from the cut under his chin where the wire cut into his flesh and trickled down the nape of his neck. I pulled my gun out from the waist of my trousers and aimed at his heart. I fired.

I did tell you, didn’t I, that I was assigned to work in the kitchen at the county hall with the womenfolk, right? And so I survived — just barely — all thanks to Sangho and Yohan, but so many unspeakable things happened during those three days that I can’t even recall much of it. Meals were cooked at two separate locations, the county hall and the police station. They were short-handed so almost a dozen men my age had been recruited to help out, and that was just for the kitchen I worked in. The women and I were in charge of feeding the young men who came together in the county hall meeting room. There were hundreds of people assembled in the front yard, too, but the new recruits were responsible for cooking their meals. The men in the meeting room were the leaders of the uprising, so their meals were a little better — they got rice and soup and slices of salted radish. The young men in the front yard were given plain rice balls. We all made do with rice balls during the war, out there in the streets; you probably already knew that, though. We’d just roll some cooked rice into little balls with our hands. We used to dream of finding some salty side dishes, or maybe just getting hold of some soy sauce. The cooks who made the rice balls used to dip their hands in salt water before kneading the rice to try and give them some flavor, but it wasn’t the same.

Anyway, the women and I would put all the rice in a large wooden bowl and pour the soup into a bucket and take it all up to the meeting room. The place was full of faces I’d never seen before. I gathered that these were the men who’d come up from the South. Looking a bit more closely, though, I spotted some familiar faces scattered among them. I saw one young man who used to be a member of the church youth group and another who’d joined the Korean Independence Party. Picking up bits and pieces of conversation here and there, I realized they were all discussing the arrival of the U.S. Army. Apparently the Americans had just arrived in Haeju — they and the South Koreans were headed north, marching towards Sŏhŭng and Sin’gye. The men I was feeding weren’t actual soldiers so they had no official rank, but they were all wearing American army uniforms and carrying brand new guns. It looked like they’d come in just before we brought them their dinner, so they’d probably arrived in town a little earlier that very evening — that would have been the sixteenth. They said that they were only the advance party. One of them recognized me.