Post by Lawnmower Joe on Jul 24, 2014 17:37:06 GMT -5
I'm sorry I couldn't deliver "La Vie est Belle". I spent months trying to write it, but couldn't come up with a satisfactory plot or characters. For now "La Vie est Belle" is on hold, and I'm working on an another story. I hope you enjoy this one!
The steady sound of an old petrol engine rattled off the walls and ceiling of Yonggwang station. Kwang-jo looked up from the shirt he was stitching up, and saw a small railcar trundle down the station's right track. Its sides were painted red and gold, and a tattered DPRK flag fluttered behind it.
“Comrades!” called the railcar's single passenger, a young man wearing the uniform of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and holding a crude loudspeaker in one hand. As he shouted to Yonggwang's inhabitants his face seemed to twist into a savage, determined snarl. “Comrades! Remember that in five days time the entire Pyongyang Metro will be celebrating our Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung's birthday!”
The railcar had slowed to a crawl by then, and its small engine was vomiting a steady stream of grey-white smoke into the station's stuffy air. The people of Yonggwang had all abandoned their work, some even rushing to the platform to watch the railcar go by, some out of curiosity at seeing a motorise vehicle come through their home, others out of fear that showing a lack of interest in the event would attract attention. Kwang-jo, however, did not rise from his seat by the family tent. His view from there as just as good, and who would want a blast of exhaust smoke?
“As a sign of goodwill to the people” proclaimed the speaker. He seemed intent on speaking like a gun, turning every word into a bullet with which to shoot Yonggwang's sleepy denizens into action. “Comrade Chen Jin-chi and his fellow hard-working guides of the people will embark on a Metro-wide visit! Every station will be honoured with his presence, and will receive news from Dear Leader Kim Jong-un himself!”
Kwang's attention was peaked by that. Nobody in Yonggwang had ever seen the General Secretary of the Pyongyang War Effort. To them, the man was just a loud voice blared from railcars and whose words were printed on worn sheets of thrice-recycled paper or, in times of shortage, on carved plates of wood. Comrade Chen received his orders directly from the Dear Leader, whose eyes and ears extended all the way from his secret mountain hideout to Pyongyang Metro.
Kwang watched the railcar trundle off as the young Guard's speech faded into a scratchy recording of the Song of General Kim Il-Sung. As the railcar's engine sputtered off into the darkness of the Puhong tunnel, his eyes drifted back to the faded fresco adorning the station's wall. A view of the city from its river banks, pale faded buildings partially obscured by hanging trees. In some places the paint was beginning to peel off, exposing the dismal plaster and concrete beneath.
With a sigh, Kwang returned to his task. The shirts piled up beside him were all worn and torn, some even had their fabric slowly fraying away. As Kwang struggled to stitch up a tear in the shirt's arm with crude pig thread, he found himself wishing for some proper cotton thread. Official word was that the imperialist agressors had sabotaged the country's stocks of the fiber, leading to critical shortages and the slow disappearance of cotton clothing.
Kwang finished his repairs and quickly folded the shirt into a neat square. He then placed it on a pile of similarly folded clothing and pulled another one from the untreated pile.
“Kwang-jo!”
The young man sighed and put the shirt on his lap. “Yes, mother?”, he replied as dutifully as possible. His mother, a skinny woman going on fifty and whose face bore the heavy lines of fatigue and malnutrition, walked briskly out of the family tent, flap opening and closing with a snap of fabric.
“Kwang-jo, there is no pig meat left! Go to the butcher now and get me five days' worth of meat, I don't want us to run short so close to the Dear Leader's birthday.”
Kwang repressed a sigh, set the shirt aside and stood. His black clothes tugged uncomfortably at his arms and shins and made him look like an overgrown schoolchild. “Yes mother” he said, “just give me the coupons and I'll be on my way.”
His mother reached into a small leather pouch that hung from her waist and extracted a sheet of faded pink paper. She tore off several coupons with meticulous precision before handing them to her son, who took them in his pale thin hand and stuffed them into his pocket.
“I'll be back soon, mother” said Kwang. His mother simply nodded and vanished into the tent, leaving Kwang to trudge off alone through the station's crowded interior.
Yonggwang had, according to Kwang's father and mother, once been a gem of Korean architecture. Its white marble floor shone like polished silver beneath myriads of colourful lights, and its murals depicted Pyongyang in all its pre-war glory. Its massive concrete pillars held the earth up like Atlas held the sky, and its escalators, installed by direct order of Kim Il-Sung, seemed to stretch into infinity. But none of this past splendor was present in Kwang's daily life. The floors were filthy, thick with soot and grime and covered by thick clusters of old army tents and makeshift shacks that housed the station's population. The lights had died long ago, their colourful rays replaced by the dim flicker of oil lamps, candles, and the occasional harsh glare of a portable electric light. The pillars were still visible, but were covered in a thick layer of soot, and some enterprising citizens had requisitioned them to attach their washing lines. As for the escalators, Kwang had never seen them, as they were hidden beyond the Station Director's quarters and a thick set of steel blast doors.
Kwang stepped past the last of the tents before the station's meat stall, and was about to join the line that had formed there when the sound of angry voices and running feet caught his ear. He turned around as harsh shouts echoed through the station's smokey air, and through the dim light saw a man in mismatched black and white clothes making a mad dash towards the meat stall. Kwang stepped back a little when he saw the olive green uniforms of two Red Guards chasing the fleeing man.
“STOP, OR WE WILL SHOOT!” shouted one of them, his Type 58 held tightly to his chest. The man tripped over a box full of rubbish, sending gnawed pig bones and other detritus skittering over the grubby floor. The owner of the box emerged from the tent to hurl invectives at him, but quickly shrunk back into his shelter when he saw the Red Guards.
For some unknown reason, Kwang could not move. His feet seemed to have become fused to the floor, and all he could do was stare in amazement and horror as the fleeing man drew closer to him. Kwang caught a glimpse of the man reaching into his pocket before he collided with him. The young man was immediately knocked off his feet and he struck the floor with a startled grunt. Pain shot up from the base of his spine and he groaned, twisting on the floor like a pinned worm. Feet thundered past him, somebody shouted and the station echoed with a deafening burst of automatic gunfire.
For a moment Kwang lay stunned on the floor, staring up at the dark ceiling. The station had gone deathly quiet, as if the gunshots had signalled the end of all conversation, all laughter and all sadness.
“Comrades, please return to your daily activities!” called a voice, which Kwang assigned to one of the Red Guards, “this man was a spy and a saboteur and resisted arrest. We were forced to execute him.”
Kwang rose slowly, wincing at the pain that radiated from his lower spine. He briefly wondered if he had broken it, and felt a shiver of dread at having to visit the station's doctor. In Yonggwang it was said that catching a Cold was better than paying a visit to doctor Seu. Kwang stood, rubbing his lower back with his hands. A few meters away he saw a group of Red Guards, two of which were hastily transporting the lifeless form of the fleeing man away from the station's eyes. The others were shouting at onlookers and trying to dispell the shock of the execution. Kwang couldn't help but stare as the two Guards whisked the dead man away. He had never seen a dead man before, nor had he seen a public execution. Criminals and enemies of the people were usually arrested and taken away, either to be sent away for interrogation and imprisonment or to be assigned to the surface clean-up teams.
“Are you all right, comrade?” said a soft voice. Kwang tensed as someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself looking into the earnest eyes of a petite woman whose simple beauty would have charmed him were it not for her uniform and the rifle that hung from her shoulder. “That man gave you quite a shove.”
“-I-I'm all right, comrade” said Kwang with a weak smile, “my back's a little sore but it's nothing, really.”
The woman nodded and gave him a soft pat. “Good to hear...did you happen to know this man?”
Kwang shook his head. He knew everyone in Yonggwang, and the man who had slammed into him had not stirred his memory in any way. The woman nodded, her soft smile never leaving her lips.
“If you see or hear anything suspicious, report it immediately” she said, “we fear there may be saboteurs planning to strike during the upcoming festivities, and we suspect that man may have been one of them. Good day, comrade.”
The woman nodded again and walked away, leaving Kwang at a loss for words. His thoughts were a hopeless muddle. Saboteurs in Yonggwang? The thought sent chills down his spine. He had heard of imperialist infiltrators in other stations, but this one struck far too close to home. If the enemy could send his spies into Pyongyang's last refuge, how could they not strike the Metro's people directly? Reports of the Great War told of the innumerable atrocities committed by the imperialists, and of the monstrous weapons they used in their attempts to destroy the Korean people.
Kwang took a deep breath and did his best to focus on his current tasks. Buy meat for mother, then finish repairing the shirts. He turned mechanically back to the meat stall and its queue, which had reconstituted immediately after the execution like a flock of birds chased from a field.
“It took you long enough!” Snapped Kwang's mother when he returned to the family tent, his arms laden with pork. “Also I heard gunshots, what the hell happened?”
“-The Guards executed a saboteur” said Kwang as he handed the pork to his mother, “I was caught right in the middle of it. The saboteur knocked me over...”
“Just be glad you didn't catch a bullet, son” said his mother. Kwang sighed and returned to his sewing. A quick look at the station's clock, a pre-war mechanical device that was religiously wound up and oiled every few weeks, showed that Kwang's two older brothers and his father would be returning from the mushroom farms in an hour. Somewhere a pig squealed, and a Red Guard strolled between the tents, his face as drab as his uniform.
The steady sound of an old petrol engine rattled off the walls and ceiling of Yonggwang station. Kwang-jo looked up from the shirt he was stitching up, and saw a small railcar trundle down the station's right track. Its sides were painted red and gold, and a tattered DPRK flag fluttered behind it.
“Comrades!” called the railcar's single passenger, a young man wearing the uniform of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and holding a crude loudspeaker in one hand. As he shouted to Yonggwang's inhabitants his face seemed to twist into a savage, determined snarl. “Comrades! Remember that in five days time the entire Pyongyang Metro will be celebrating our Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung's birthday!”
The railcar had slowed to a crawl by then, and its small engine was vomiting a steady stream of grey-white smoke into the station's stuffy air. The people of Yonggwang had all abandoned their work, some even rushing to the platform to watch the railcar go by, some out of curiosity at seeing a motorise vehicle come through their home, others out of fear that showing a lack of interest in the event would attract attention. Kwang-jo, however, did not rise from his seat by the family tent. His view from there as just as good, and who would want a blast of exhaust smoke?
“As a sign of goodwill to the people” proclaimed the speaker. He seemed intent on speaking like a gun, turning every word into a bullet with which to shoot Yonggwang's sleepy denizens into action. “Comrade Chen Jin-chi and his fellow hard-working guides of the people will embark on a Metro-wide visit! Every station will be honoured with his presence, and will receive news from Dear Leader Kim Jong-un himself!”
Kwang's attention was peaked by that. Nobody in Yonggwang had ever seen the General Secretary of the Pyongyang War Effort. To them, the man was just a loud voice blared from railcars and whose words were printed on worn sheets of thrice-recycled paper or, in times of shortage, on carved plates of wood. Comrade Chen received his orders directly from the Dear Leader, whose eyes and ears extended all the way from his secret mountain hideout to Pyongyang Metro.
Kwang watched the railcar trundle off as the young Guard's speech faded into a scratchy recording of the Song of General Kim Il-Sung. As the railcar's engine sputtered off into the darkness of the Puhong tunnel, his eyes drifted back to the faded fresco adorning the station's wall. A view of the city from its river banks, pale faded buildings partially obscured by hanging trees. In some places the paint was beginning to peel off, exposing the dismal plaster and concrete beneath.
With a sigh, Kwang returned to his task. The shirts piled up beside him were all worn and torn, some even had their fabric slowly fraying away. As Kwang struggled to stitch up a tear in the shirt's arm with crude pig thread, he found himself wishing for some proper cotton thread. Official word was that the imperialist agressors had sabotaged the country's stocks of the fiber, leading to critical shortages and the slow disappearance of cotton clothing.
Kwang finished his repairs and quickly folded the shirt into a neat square. He then placed it on a pile of similarly folded clothing and pulled another one from the untreated pile.
“Kwang-jo!”
The young man sighed and put the shirt on his lap. “Yes, mother?”, he replied as dutifully as possible. His mother, a skinny woman going on fifty and whose face bore the heavy lines of fatigue and malnutrition, walked briskly out of the family tent, flap opening and closing with a snap of fabric.
“Kwang-jo, there is no pig meat left! Go to the butcher now and get me five days' worth of meat, I don't want us to run short so close to the Dear Leader's birthday.”
Kwang repressed a sigh, set the shirt aside and stood. His black clothes tugged uncomfortably at his arms and shins and made him look like an overgrown schoolchild. “Yes mother” he said, “just give me the coupons and I'll be on my way.”
His mother reached into a small leather pouch that hung from her waist and extracted a sheet of faded pink paper. She tore off several coupons with meticulous precision before handing them to her son, who took them in his pale thin hand and stuffed them into his pocket.
“I'll be back soon, mother” said Kwang. His mother simply nodded and vanished into the tent, leaving Kwang to trudge off alone through the station's crowded interior.
Yonggwang had, according to Kwang's father and mother, once been a gem of Korean architecture. Its white marble floor shone like polished silver beneath myriads of colourful lights, and its murals depicted Pyongyang in all its pre-war glory. Its massive concrete pillars held the earth up like Atlas held the sky, and its escalators, installed by direct order of Kim Il-Sung, seemed to stretch into infinity. But none of this past splendor was present in Kwang's daily life. The floors were filthy, thick with soot and grime and covered by thick clusters of old army tents and makeshift shacks that housed the station's population. The lights had died long ago, their colourful rays replaced by the dim flicker of oil lamps, candles, and the occasional harsh glare of a portable electric light. The pillars were still visible, but were covered in a thick layer of soot, and some enterprising citizens had requisitioned them to attach their washing lines. As for the escalators, Kwang had never seen them, as they were hidden beyond the Station Director's quarters and a thick set of steel blast doors.
Kwang stepped past the last of the tents before the station's meat stall, and was about to join the line that had formed there when the sound of angry voices and running feet caught his ear. He turned around as harsh shouts echoed through the station's smokey air, and through the dim light saw a man in mismatched black and white clothes making a mad dash towards the meat stall. Kwang stepped back a little when he saw the olive green uniforms of two Red Guards chasing the fleeing man.
“STOP, OR WE WILL SHOOT!” shouted one of them, his Type 58 held tightly to his chest. The man tripped over a box full of rubbish, sending gnawed pig bones and other detritus skittering over the grubby floor. The owner of the box emerged from the tent to hurl invectives at him, but quickly shrunk back into his shelter when he saw the Red Guards.
For some unknown reason, Kwang could not move. His feet seemed to have become fused to the floor, and all he could do was stare in amazement and horror as the fleeing man drew closer to him. Kwang caught a glimpse of the man reaching into his pocket before he collided with him. The young man was immediately knocked off his feet and he struck the floor with a startled grunt. Pain shot up from the base of his spine and he groaned, twisting on the floor like a pinned worm. Feet thundered past him, somebody shouted and the station echoed with a deafening burst of automatic gunfire.
For a moment Kwang lay stunned on the floor, staring up at the dark ceiling. The station had gone deathly quiet, as if the gunshots had signalled the end of all conversation, all laughter and all sadness.
“Comrades, please return to your daily activities!” called a voice, which Kwang assigned to one of the Red Guards, “this man was a spy and a saboteur and resisted arrest. We were forced to execute him.”
Kwang rose slowly, wincing at the pain that radiated from his lower spine. He briefly wondered if he had broken it, and felt a shiver of dread at having to visit the station's doctor. In Yonggwang it was said that catching a Cold was better than paying a visit to doctor Seu. Kwang stood, rubbing his lower back with his hands. A few meters away he saw a group of Red Guards, two of which were hastily transporting the lifeless form of the fleeing man away from the station's eyes. The others were shouting at onlookers and trying to dispell the shock of the execution. Kwang couldn't help but stare as the two Guards whisked the dead man away. He had never seen a dead man before, nor had he seen a public execution. Criminals and enemies of the people were usually arrested and taken away, either to be sent away for interrogation and imprisonment or to be assigned to the surface clean-up teams.
“Are you all right, comrade?” said a soft voice. Kwang tensed as someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself looking into the earnest eyes of a petite woman whose simple beauty would have charmed him were it not for her uniform and the rifle that hung from her shoulder. “That man gave you quite a shove.”
“-I-I'm all right, comrade” said Kwang with a weak smile, “my back's a little sore but it's nothing, really.”
The woman nodded and gave him a soft pat. “Good to hear...did you happen to know this man?”
Kwang shook his head. He knew everyone in Yonggwang, and the man who had slammed into him had not stirred his memory in any way. The woman nodded, her soft smile never leaving her lips.
“If you see or hear anything suspicious, report it immediately” she said, “we fear there may be saboteurs planning to strike during the upcoming festivities, and we suspect that man may have been one of them. Good day, comrade.”
The woman nodded again and walked away, leaving Kwang at a loss for words. His thoughts were a hopeless muddle. Saboteurs in Yonggwang? The thought sent chills down his spine. He had heard of imperialist infiltrators in other stations, but this one struck far too close to home. If the enemy could send his spies into Pyongyang's last refuge, how could they not strike the Metro's people directly? Reports of the Great War told of the innumerable atrocities committed by the imperialists, and of the monstrous weapons they used in their attempts to destroy the Korean people.
Kwang took a deep breath and did his best to focus on his current tasks. Buy meat for mother, then finish repairing the shirts. He turned mechanically back to the meat stall and its queue, which had reconstituted immediately after the execution like a flock of birds chased from a field.
“It took you long enough!” Snapped Kwang's mother when he returned to the family tent, his arms laden with pork. “Also I heard gunshots, what the hell happened?”
“-The Guards executed a saboteur” said Kwang as he handed the pork to his mother, “I was caught right in the middle of it. The saboteur knocked me over...”
“Just be glad you didn't catch a bullet, son” said his mother. Kwang sighed and returned to his sewing. A quick look at the station's clock, a pre-war mechanical device that was religiously wound up and oiled every few weeks, showed that Kwang's two older brothers and his father would be returning from the mushroom farms in an hour. Somewhere a pig squealed, and a Red Guard strolled between the tents, his face as drab as his uniform.