Читать книгу The Girl with Seven Names - Hyeonseo Lee - Страница 18

A few months after the visit to the fortune-teller, during the summer school vacation, my mother had taken Min-ho somewhere and had left me at my grandmother’s house for the day. She was a fascinating woman, intelligent, and always full of stories. Her silver hair was pinned back in the old Korean style, with a needle through the bun. On this particular visit, however, she told me a story that devastated me.

To this day I’m not sure why she did it. She wasn’t being mischievous. And I don’t think her mind was weakening, making her forgetful of what should stay secret. The only explanation I can think of is that she thought I should know the truth while I was young, because I’d find it easier to come to terms with as a girl than if I discovered it later, as a grown woman. If that’s what she was thinking, she made a terrible misjudgement.

It was a warm Saturday morning and the door and windows were open. Outside in the yard, jays were chirping and drinking water from a bowl. We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father.’

I didn’t take in what she’d said.

She reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘Your name is Kim. Not Park.’

There was a long pause. I didn’t see where this was going, but I might have smiled uncertainly. This could be one of her jokes. Like my mother, she had quite a sense of humour.

Seeing my confusion, she said: ‘It’s the truth.’

She stood and went over to the glass cabinet where she kept her best bowls and plates. It had a small drawer in the bottom. She bent down stiffly. At the back of her neck I could see the string on which she kept her Party card. She retrieved a cardboard envelope, and handed it to me. It smelled damp.

‘Open it.’

I put my hand inside and pulled out a black and white photograph. It showed a wedding party. I recognized my mother at once. She was the bride in the centre, wearing a beautiful chima jeogori. But the scene didn’t make sense. The groom next to her was not my father. He was tall and handsome with slicked-back hair, and dressed in a Western-style suit. Behind them was a vast bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, arm outstretched, as if giving traffic directions.

My grandmother pointed to the groom in the suit. ‘That’s your father. And this lady …’ She pointed to a beautiful woman to the man’s right. ‘… is his sister – your aunt. She’s a film actress in Pyongyang. You strongly resemble her.’ She sighed. ‘Your real father was a nice man, and he loved you a lot.’

The room seemed to go dim. Whatever tethered me to reality had just been cut. I was floating in unreality, and deeply confused.

She explained that my mother had loved my father so much that she could not live with the man she’d married, my biological father. She’d divorced him.

My father is not my father? My eyes started brimming with tears. How could she say that?

I said nothing. She seemed to read the next question forming in my mind. I couldn’t open my mouth to ask it. I think if I’d opened my mouth I would have fallen apart.

‘Min-ho is your half-brother,’ she said, nodding.

I stared at her, but she ploughed on.

‘A couple of years ago, when your mother visited your Uncle Money in Pyongyang, she bumped into your real father in the street …’

A chill went through me. I did not like her calling this person my father.

‘… She had a photo of you in her purse and showed it to him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at it for a long time, then he slipped it into his pocket before she could stop him, and walked away. So he has your picture.’ My grandmother’s eyes drifted to the window and the mountains. ‘After that, I wrote to his sister the actress to ask what had happened to him. She told me he had remarried soon after the divorce and had twin girls, one of whom he named Ji-hae, after you.’

Ji-hae, my birth name.

A shadow passed over my grandmother’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’

There is a superstition in North Korea that if someone remarries and gives a child of the second marriage the same name as a child from the previous marriage, the second to receive the name will die.

‘When the girl was young, she fell sick and died.’

I left my grandmother’s house in a daze. I felt hollowed out, tearful and numb at the same time. She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done. Instead I buried it inside me, and it started to gnaw at my heart. I was still utterly confused. The only thing I kind of understood was that it explained the coolness of my father’s parents toward me, and their generosity toward Min-ho. He had their blood. I didn’t.

When I got home Min-ho was sitting on the floor drawing a picture with coloured crayons. What he’d drawn stunned me, and I felt tears again. And something like anger. It was crude and charming and showed stick figures of me, him, my mother and my father, all holding hands together beneath a shining sun. Inside the sun was a face of a man wearing glasses – Kim Il-sung.

Min-ho was now five years old. He was growing up into a good-natured boy, who liked to help our mother. He had a very cute smile. But now I felt as if a glass wall had gone up between us. He was a half-brother.

Our relationship changed from then on. I became an older sister who provoked him and started fights with him that he could never win. I feel so sorry about that now. My mother would say: ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be more like Min-ho?’

It would be years before I could process maturely the information my grandmother had given me, and reach out to him.

At dinner that evening I said nothing. My mother chatted about some business venture of Aunt Pretty’s; Min-ho was told not to hold his chopsticks in the air; my father was calm as usual, as if nothing had changed. Eventually he said: ‘What’s up with you? You’re as quiet as a little mouse.’

I stared at my bowl. I could not look at him.

In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything. He’s not my father.

I began to push him away and withdraw from him, thinking I had lost my love for him. The pain I was feeling was making me think this.

I began to avoid him.