I stepped outside to face them and tried
to keep the alarm out of my
voice. ‘I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow,’ I said.
‘No, you have to come with us now,’ the shaven-headed one said. ‘Don’t
worry. Everything will be fine.’
Mrs Ahn looked shocked.
I left my phone and my bag, and went with them.
Min-ho wanted to
come. I told him to stay. I had to handle this.
The men took me to an unfurnished apartment in a block on the other
side of Changbai. The shaven-headed one led me into a bare room, and
closed the door. He stood so close I could feel his breath, and spoke directly
into my face.
‘We found your family. Your mother said your brother had already left to
meet you at that old man Ahn’s house. Whether you needed us or not makes
no difference to me. We’ve done our part. Now you pay.’
‘How much?’
‘Seventy thousand yuan.’
My blood froze. That was almost $8,500 and many,
many times more
than I had.
‘I don’t have that kind of money.’
‘Your rich-ass businessman friend in Shenyang is paying,’ he said. ‘The
broker was clear about that.’ He handed me a cellphone. ‘Call the
businessman. Tell him to transfer the money.’
My heart sank to my stomach. As misunderstandings went, this one
couldn’t be bigger.
‘This has nothing to do with the businessman,’ I said. ‘I’m the one who
has to pay. He was just being helpful. I hardly know him. I can’t ask him for
money.’
‘Then you have a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘I’ll put it this way. If you don’t pay, we’ll
take you back to North
Korea.’
Chapter 29
The comfort of moonlight
Sympathetic people I’d met in China would sometimes express their
bewilderment that the Kim dynasty had been tyrannizing North Korea for
almost six decades. How does that family get away with it? Just as baffling,
how do their subjects go on coping? In truth there is no dividing line
between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens.
The Kims rule by making
everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to
the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless. A terrorized Party
cadre will terrorize his subordinates, and so on down the chain; a friend will
inform on a friend out of fear of punishment for not informing. A nicely
brought-up boy will become a guard who kicks to death a girl caught trying
to escape to China, because her
songbun has sunk to the bottom of the heap
and she’s worthless and hostile in the eyes of the state. Ordinary people are
made persecutors, denouncers, thieves. They use the fear flowing from the
top to win some advantage, or to survive.
And although he was Chinese,
and not from North Korea, I was seeing a prime example in this criminal in
front of me, standing inches from my face. He had it in his power to rescue
people, to be a hero. Instead he was using the terror of the regime to benefit
himself and add to the misery of others. He had me on a cliff edge.
Pay me,
or I push.
I said it again. ‘I don’t have that kind of money. If you can reduce the fee,
I’ll see what I can do. But if you can’t, there’s nothing I can do.’
I felt utterly resigned. He must have seen it in my eyes, because he left
me alone and conferred with the others. The apartment had cheap plaster
walls. I could hear most of what was spoken in the next room.
‘If
you want money from her, you can’t touch her,’ one of them said.
Shaven-head came back into the room. He said I would have to stay here
until a solution was found. He would send to Mr Ahn’s for my bag.
I hoped the neutral look on my face hid my panic. My phone and all my
cash were in that bag. I did not want them to get their hands on the cash – or
I’d have nothing to give Min-ho and my mother,
or to Mrs Ahn for the
smuggler’s fee.
I asked Shaven-head if I could use his phone. He told me to talk in front
of him so he could hear what I was saying.
I called my own phone’s number but no one at Mr Ahn’s answered it. I
called it again. And again. Shaven-head lost interest and went to talk to the
others.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
