The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [152]
“Did you know that he is in regular contact with the American government?”
“I haven’t heard from him in more than two years, my lord.” But he had written! What was in those letters?
Major Yoshida sat across from me and nodded to the tea. I sipped, thanking the particles of tea leaves for absorbing the sun’s heat on dewy terraced mountains, growing fat and lustrous, then drying in the same heat, preserving God’s grace in a fragile, fragrant medium for me to drink at this table.
“Tell me about your Jesus Christ,” he said. So unexpected was this turn in the interrogation that I looked directly into his eyes. I saw nothing to guide me or fool me, and so I began to recount Bible lessons. Many words, like parable, I knew no Japanese for, and he allowed me to use Korean as needed.
After three hours, I’d drunk all the tea. I recited the beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, my voice echoing in the bare room like a lingering note in the chamber of a closed piano. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth …” I paused, thinking this might have offended the major, but he remained expressionless.
When I finished, certain my chronology was wrong, I worried that I probably shouldn’t have mentioned “if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other cheek also,” and fretted over what I had missed and what to say next. Why was my head so empty of the Bible? The major stood abruptly and left the room.
I felt an urgent need to urinate and was almost happy to see the guard. He led me to the latrine, then to my cell. The tin of water had been refilled and the bucket removed. I was instructed to call the guard when I needed to use the latrine. Cold, I wrapped myself in the blanket, and in the daylight saw its filth. I tried to pray, but my thoughts were filled with the strange interrogation of the morning. I remembered the smell of anise and the expensive tea, and tried to reconstruct those scents in my nose. Sometimes I stood and paced to warm my limbs and distract myself from growing hunger. I felt my mind closing in a peculiar way, as if it were preparing for siege, then I remembered the sounds of night.
When the square of light had almost traveled beyond my cell, the guard came and wordlessly unlocked the gate to deliver a bundle that had obviously been searched. Inside the loose wrapping was a lidded bowl from home, a woolen shawl and a pair of thick socks. My heart cried out, Mother! and I pressed the socks to my face, trying to breathe the smell of home, the smell of the beloved hands that had held those socks. My mother was not one to say to her children, “I love you.” It was an assumed truth, given freely at the gate of the womb.
I put on the socks and uncovered the bowl to find a mix of rice and millet with cabbage leaves on top and a shank of the salted fish I’d bought yesterday—forever ago. I ate with my fingers, keeping the bowl in the last square of light from the window. On the bottom of the bowl was a piece of folded rice paper, written finely with ink that bled slightly into the moist grains sticking to its surface. My fingers shaking, I kept my back to the cell door and unfolded the tiny paper.
Wake up!
Stand in your faith
with the strength of a soldier.
There you’ll find love.
Cor. 13
With tears for my mother’s wisdom, steadfastness and love, I crumpled the scripture in my mouth and chewed thoroughly. I repacked the empty bowl in the cloth, knotting it just the way I knew my mother had knotted it. I felt our fingers had touched, and I was full.
MY MOTHER CAME every day for the next eighty-nine days, although I never saw her. I couldn’t think how she suffered the hours walking in sleet and snow, for to do so would cause me unbearable pain. Every part of my mind and body waited for the guard to bring the bundle