Part Two: The Light From Within
To Read Part One of this short story, click HERE.
I floundered forward, blind, my cold hands passing over rough tree bark again and again until I could feel my hands becoming raw and sticky. At times I tripped and fell to my knees and I caught myself on the cold earth and papery leaves.
I could hear the men shouting behind me, no doubt noting that the flattened grasses led off into the forest.
I reached out for a trunk of a tree and noted that while it was slender, it would hold. I grabbed a branch and hoisted myself up to the lower branches and then climbed. I pulled my emaciated body higher and higher against the spiky pine bark and I knew the only reason that the rather thin branches did not snap was because I was so light.
Then I curled up onto a branch and wrapped my arms around the trunk, which had become dangerously narrow. From where I had just run, I saw jittering lights sweep through the forest. The soldiers remained on the path, but they spread out in order to see beyond the obstacles of trees and bushes. Some raised their flashlights higher than ground level and to my utter horror, one beam angled up into the branches at me, but a tree blocked me from view.
Minutes passed; flashlights moved on down the path and shouts became distant. But a few flashlights remained to sweep through the forest, some traveling higher than ground level but not too high.
But then, a beam landed directly on me. It stayed there for several seconds, freezing me into numbness.
Then it moved on.
It landed on me again, and the fear flooded me again.
Then it moved on again.
A few minutes passed that seemed like hours, and at last I tried to move my limbs.
I couldn’t.
My arms and legs would not obey my brain.
My only movement was shudders that were becoming more and more involuntary, wracking my body and making my teeth chatter in my ears. The black cloak of fear and darkness that seemed to cover every moment of my life seemed to smother and permeate every cell in my body.
Every day, for the past two years, I had expected my mother to be ripped from me, just like my father had. But I realized that nothing could prepare me for the fact that I had heard her scream at the end. The sound of her raw voice echoed back at me up there in the tree. I yearned to be held by my mother, to be with her, and tears flowed from my eyes and my face became numb with the cold.
Stop feeling, I commanded myself.
Get going, now.
But I couldn’t. All I could think of was my mother and those damn grasshoppers. Those insects had kept me out so late. If only I had come home earlier, I could’ve seen my mother one last time.
But if I had seen her one last time, I would’ve also been seen by the soldiers. Taken. Executed for reading forbidden material. Religious material.
Words and verses from the various scriptures I had been memorizing over the past few years whirled through my brain.
In the beginning there was the word.
He is Allah… to Him belong the best names.
In the world you will have tribulation.
The soul is eternal, ever-existing, primeval.
The soul is not slain when the body is slain.
Surrender unto Me. Do not fear.
Do not fear.
My mind fixated on those three words and they cycled through my mind, over and over again. Minutes passed before I realized that my hands had stopped trembling, the violent shudders that had radiated from my chest had softened to shivers, and my breathing had moved from my chest to my belly.
Breathe.
Surrender unto Me.
Do not fear.
In the blackness on that cold night, frozen in the branches of a tree, my mother’s warm brown eyes appeared in my vision, and I remembered how they shone. She shone. She had directed me to read all of the particular passages I had come to memorize, pointing and encouraging with her eyes, not daring to speak aloud. Her eyes, above all else, showed me her soul. The Rat had told me she had died, and I knew he spoke the truth. But her soul, her soul… still existed.
It had to.
I reached up to wipe the tears from my face, and I realized with a start that I had just moved my hand. I moved my toes and my shoulders. I took a deep breath and exhaled.
The Rat had ratted me out after all. He had led the border patrol straight to me, like he had said he would.
But… what had happened there at the end? Light had landed on me, but then moved away. Then it had landed on me again and then moved away in the same direction.
The same direction.
Which direction?
I rewound back to those moments, straining my mind to remember. To... the right. Off to the right.
Obviously I had been seen, otherwise the light would not have landed on me for so long and returned back to me. But by whom?
It could have only been the Rat.
He had said that if I was found I would be interrogated, and in interrogation I would be burned and ripped apart in order to reveal information buried deep within. I would have eventually revealed the Rat’s role in my escape. So it seems that he had been found this night along the border after all, so close to the DMZ and unauthorized to be here, so he had given the closest information to the truth in order to escape suspicion.
But when he had found me here in the forest, when the rest of the search team had moved on… he had not killed me, like he said he would. He had told me which direction to go.
Now go, I heard his voice echo in my mind.
Gingerly, I reached out to a branch, maneuvering among the sticky, spiky branches and pines. I strained my ears for sounds of the search, but I could only hear far-off calls.
Only when my feet touched the earth did I remember that any step in this forest could mean my death. Sudden, explosive. Would it be painful? Or over so quick I would feel no pain? I had once seen another villager step on a landmine. The horror splattered across my mind in the dark.
My limbs began to freeze again.
I only had a short time before the dawn would come, and the light of morning would give me away immediately to scouts. The new fence would be installed the next day - once work had started on this, I would be trapped forever.
I needed to move off to the right. But every step meant I could face death.
What choice did I have?
I grasped the trunk of the tree, orienting myself to how I had been seated up in the branches, visualizing the movement of the flashlight moving off to the right. I willed my feet to move, but they were frozen.
Breathe.
Surrender unto Me.
Do not fear.
From what I had read in The Bhagavad-gita, Me meant God, someone all-powerful and in control. But my only context for someone like that was Dear Leader, and Dear Leader brought only fear into every fiber of my being. I had been born in fear and lived in fear every waking moment of my life.
I could never surrender to Dear Leader.
The Quran said that God’s mercy embraces all things. But an embrace by Dear Leader meant death. Gruesome, horrific death.
God must be someone else, someone who would embrace me like my mother - soft and gentle. Someone who would guide me like my father - firm and strong. Someone who could see me at this very moment. Someone in whose arms I could place my body and heart.
A friend.
I’ll always remember that two things became very clear to me that night at the base of the tree, standing like an animal in a hunter’s trap.
The first: God was in control. If my time had come to die, no one could save me. But if He wanted to save me, no one could kill me. Not a landmine, not a gun, nothing.
The second: Knowledge radiated out from my beating heart into my fingertips that even if my body was slain this evening, my soul would go on.
There was nothing to fear.
So I took a step.
And another.
I breathed and took step after step. A surreal peace filtered over me. Step after step after step
after
step.
After an inestimable amount of time, I glimpsed a tiny yellow light in the distance, steady and wan, blinking in and out of view through the trees. I fixated on that light and kept taking steps, knowing that each one could be my last moment in this world.
But then, very faintly, I heard a dog bark.
My heart jolted.
The hunting dogs. Dogs who could detect landmines, avoid them, seek me out, and lead the soldiers straight to me.
I moved faster, not even listening for the telltale click of stepping on a landmine. I realized that I would rather die by a mine seeking freedom than be hunted down by a dog and shot to pieces by a gun.
The barks got louder. The hunting crew was approaching from behind and I could even start to see the bouncing light of a flashlight flickering on the trees in front of me.
Suddenly, I tripped and fell flat on my face. Jarred by the fall, I just laid there for a shocked moment before scrambling to my feet. But as soon as I put pressure on my right foot, I buckled and almost cried out - my foot had been gnarled by something that had pierced straight through my tattered boots. I instinctively looked behind me and to my surprise I saw that I could see, very faintly, a low barbed-wire fence.
A low, barbed-wire fence.
The yellow light shining in the distance came from a lone outpost.
That was…
Disbelief made me freeze for a moment before I began to limp forward, resisting the urge to call out - someone, help me! Please, help me!
If I was truly on the side of South Korea, then there should be no more landmines -
CLICK.
I almost kept moving forward but the sound sent chills and terror through my body and forced me to freeze.
I could hear the barks of the dogs approaching from behind.
I wanted to scream. To wave. To sob and beg - someone, please, rescue me.
Do not fear Do not fear Do not fear
It took a few moments for me to process that I could see two dark outlines approaching me from the side of South Korea. Soldiers. They wouldn’t be here fast enough, though. I knew they wouldn’t.
Suddenly the dogs burst out of the path far off to the left, flashlights sweeping the open field of long grasses in this unusual border gap with South Korea. The flashlights landed on me and I took a deep breath and waited for the bullets to come.
They did not. The soldiers only advanced from behind but kept their distance - they could see I was in the telltale frozen stance of someone who had activated a mine and that I was in mine territory. There was another issue, though - the soldiers advancing from the South Korea side had come closer, and guns from both parties were trained on each other.
A figure dashed up to me - the Rat - and he bent down to my left foot. I immediately could sense that he was shifting and moving pins to disarm the mine.
Since he had not shot me like he had said he would, I asked frantically, “You’re taking me in?”
“The South Korean soldiers are approaching with bullet shields,” he said, his voice muffled. “I have a shield too, so when I say GO, run towards them, and I will hold up my shield,”
Shield? What was he talking about? He had no shield.
“This is a criminal! We must take her in for interrogation!” A North Korean soldier shouted.
“She is officially within the jurisdiction of South Korea,” came a response, the accent so different, so strange - “and all North Koreans are citizens of South Korea. She is under our protection. Desist!”
Click slide cliiiick
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, utterly stunned.
Silence. At last, he straightened and looked me in the eye. “Because I killed your mother.” In those words, I could hear the words that we did not have words for in our dialect but I had learned by reading books, by reading scriptures: I am sorry. Please forgive me.
I swallowed and nodded.
He commanded, “GO.”
I turned and ran. The South Korean soldiers were just two tall silhouettes of bullet shields, and when the North Korean soldiers saw that I had started running, it took them several long seconds for them to realize that I was escaping before they raised their guns and began to fire.
Behind me I heard a sound like a heavy sack falling.
Bullets whizzed around me and I ran and ran. But then an explosion of pain hit me in the shoulder, then my leg, and the pain and pressure had me falling face forward into the tangled grasses. My right leg was losing all feeling. My vision became splotchy.
Shouts. More gunfire exploding around me, above and around.
Whoomp - something was placed around me and I could feel my legs being adjusted. I could feel blood seeping out of me and the gunfire sounds became muted. Faintly, I could feel someone touching my arms and legs, and then tie something around me - and then a biting, shocking pain around my shoulders and the very tops of my thighs. My mind became a little sharper.
In those moments, an image from a few days before flashed into my mind - the dim backlight of the e-reader as I read in the dark underneath a blanket. Reading the words that had seemed so indecipherable at the time: Surrender unto Me. Do not fear.
Surrounded by darkness but blinking in the light.
My absurd fantasy.
Not so absurd.
I decided that I would not die like an animal in that field, bleeding into the grass. I would hold onto my humanity, I would die like a human with an eternal soul and with someone to surrender to.
I am Yours, I spoke into the ether. And for the very first time in my life I felt every last trace of fear dissipate from my being and only gentle light remained.
***
I awoke to the sounds of beeps. I blearily opened my eyes and squinted.
“Hello,” a woman said. My eyes adjusted to bring into focus a woman wearing a white fabric coat. She smiled faintly. “My name is Doctor Kim. You escaped from North Korea along the 38th Parallel eight days ago,” she said in that strange accent. She shook her head, as if in disbelief. “You are now in a hospital in South Korea. You are guaranteed citizenship here,”
I could only move my eyes, trying to take in where I was. So bright. So alien. This light hurt my eyes. Now that I was awake, two nurses entered and fluttered around me. They maneuvered my bed by some kind of whirring electronic means so that I could sit up. Almost a full minute passed while I took in my surroundings and processed what the doctor had said.
“What is your name?” the doctor asked.
“Da-” I cleared my throat. “Dal-rae,” I rasped.
“Dal-rae,” the doctor repeated, and one of the nurses scribbled something down on a clipboard. The other nurse stepped forward with a cup of water and said softly, “Of course, you are connected to an IV, but let us see if you can take fluids now,”
I gulped the liquid and water spilled down my mouth and onto my patterned hospital gown. “Sorry,” I mumbled, embarrassed.
“Oh no, I am sorry,” the nurse exclaimed, wiping me face. “You weren’t ready,”
“Dal-rae, I am sorry to say your friend was killed,” the doctor said gently.
I looked at her, confused.
Friend?
My thoughts moved slowly back to those surreal moments a world away and I remembered the sound of the heavy sack falling. The Rat had said that he had had a shield. But now I understood that he had been the shield, giving me precious seconds to run. The clarity of events tumbled back to me, and I remembered how he had stalled the North Korean soldiers from firing at me while he disarmed the mine I stood upon, buying time for the South Korean soldiers to advance.
I closed my eyes, a strange experience flooding my heart, a mishmash of emotions I could not identify. Heat, cold, warmth.
Not my friend.
But not... a Rat.
“Your right femur was shattered by a bullet,” the doctor said somewhat hesitantly.
I frowned and looked down at my right leg, which I saw was completely encased in a cast. A wave of nausea rolled over me.
“By the time an ambulance reached you, you had lost a lot of blood. We performed an emergency surgery to repair the bone and insert metal pins. It was an extensive procedure that was complicated by your very weak health. That is why you have been unconscious for so long,” she paused then awkwardly, and for an irrational moment I wondered if they had found my sack of mushrooms and grasshoppers. I flushed with shame. “We were uncertain for awhile if you would make it. The whole country has been watching your progress on TV. ‘The Brave Defector From North Korea Who Crossed the DMZ.’”
The whole country watching me? I couldn’t understand.
“But you are now stable,” Dr. Kim said. And in a softer tone, “You are safe now.”
Safe.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Mother and I had burned to escape to freedom for so long. Now here I was, supposedly free, but without mother I felt hollow and tiny and so very, very alone. I had nothing and no one and I belonged nowhere. I was in a bright hospital, but my heart began to pound in that blackness of fear I had lived in for every moment of my life. Still.
Even here.
I recalled the one moment in my life when I had been free and when I had been safe. I had been lying, broken and bleeding into the grass, surrounded by the whir of bullets and on the brink of slipping from my body.
I breathed in, breathed out, and there on the hospital bed I brought both my hands up to my chest to lay upon my beating heart.
I am Yours, my friend.
“Dal-rae? We know this is a big adjustment for you. Is there anything we can do to help with this transition?”
I opened my eyes. There was only one thing I wanted - it had been the cause of my mother and father’s death, but my own salvation. An object I had never been able to mention out loud, and I had to remind myself that here, I could.
So I whispered, “Would you… have an e-reader?”
