with the winch and the clubs seemed to be just down the corridor. Prison rules banned inmates from talking. But in their cell, which was just large enough for Shin and Uncle to lie side by side, they could whisper. Shin discovered later that the guards knew about these conversations.
Uncle seemed to Shin to have a special standing with the guards. They cut his hair and loaned him scissors so he could trim his beard. They brought him cups of water. They told him the time of day when he asked. They gave him extra food, much of which he shared with Shin.
‘Kid, you have a lot of days to live,’ Uncle said. ‘They say the sun shines even on mouse holes.’
The old man’s medical skills and caring words kept the boy alive. His fever waned, his mind cleared and his burns congealed into scars.
It was Shin’s first exposure to sustained kindness and he was grateful beyond words, but he also found it puzzling. He had not trusted his mother to keep him from starving. At school, he had trusted no one, with the possible exception of Hong Sung Jo, and informed on everyone. In return, he expected abuse and betrayal. In the cell, Uncle slowly reconfigured those expectations. The old man said he was lonely and seemed genuinely happy to share his space and meals with someone else. He never once angered or frightened Shin or undermined his recovery.
The routines of prison life following Shin’s interrogation and torture — discounting the screaming that periodically echoed down the prison corridor — were oddly sustaining.
Other than nursing the boy, Uncle was a man of leisure. He exercised daily in his cell. He cut Shin’s hair. He was an entertaining talker, whose knowledge of North Korea thrilled Shin, especially when the subject was food.
‘Uncle, tell me a story,’ Shin would say.
The old man described what food outside the fence looked, smelled and tasted like. Thanks to his loving descriptions of roasting pork, boiling chicken and eating clams at the seashore, Shin’s appetite came back with a vengeance.
As his health improved, the guards began to call him out of the cell. They were now very much aware that Shin had snitched on his family and they pressed him to inform on the old man.
‘You two are in there together,’ a guard said to Shin. ‘What does he say? Don’t conceal anything.’
Back in the cell, Uncle wanted to know, ‘What did they ask you?’
Squeezed between his nurse and his jailers, Shin elected to tell the truth to both sides. He told Uncle that the guards had asked him to be an informer. This did not surprise the old man. He continued to entertain Shin with long stories about good things to eat, but he did not volunteer biographical information. He would not talk about his family. He expressed no opinions about the government.
Shin guessed — based on the way Uncle used language — that he had once been an important and well- educated man. But it was only a guess.
Although it was a crime to talk about escaping from Camp 14, it was not against the rules to fantasize about what life would be like if the government were to set you free. Uncle told Shin that both of them would one day be released. Until then, he said, they had a sacred obligation to stay strong, live as long as possible and never consider suicide.
‘What do you think?’ Uncle would then ask Shin. ‘Do you believe I’ll also be able to make it out?’
Shin doubted it, but said nothing.
A guard unlocked the door of Shin’s cell and handed him the school uniform he had worn on the day he arrived in the underground prison.
‘Put on these clothes and come along quickly,’ the guard said.
As Shin changed, he asked Uncle what would happen. The old man assured him that he would be safe and that they would meet again on the outside.
‘Let me hold you once,’ he said, grasping both of Shin’s hands tightly.
Shin did not want to leave the cell. He had never trusted — never loved — anyone before. In the years ahead, he would think of the old man in the dark room far more often and with far greater affection than he thought of his parents. But after the guards led him out of the cell and locked its door, he never saw Uncle again.
8
They took Shin to the big bare room where, in early April, he had first been interrogated. Now, it was late November. Shin had just turned fourteen. He had not seen the sun for more than half a year.
What he saw in the room startled him: his father knelt in front of two interrogators who sat at their desks. He seemed much older and more careworn than before. He had been brought into the underground prison at about the same time as Shin.
Kneeling beside him, Shin saw that his father’s right leg canted outwards in an unnatural way. Shin Gyung Sub had also been tortured. Below his knee, his leg bones had been broken and they had knitted back together at an odd angle. The injury would end his relatively comfortable job as a camp mechanic and lathe operator. He would now have to hobble around as an unskilled labourer on a construction crew.
During his time in the underground prison, the guards told Shin’s father that his youngest son had informed them of the escape plan. When Shin later had a chance to talk to his father about this, the conversation was strained. His father said it was better to have told the guards than to have risked concealing the plan, but his caustic tone confused Shin. He sounded as if he knew his son’s first instinct was to inform.
‘Read it and stamp it,’ one of the interrogators said, handing a document to Shin and one to his father.
It was a nondisclosure form stipulating that father and son would not tell anyone what had gone on inside the prison. If they did talk, the document said, they would be punished.
After pressing their inked thumbs to their respective forms, they were handcuffed, blindfolded and led outside to the elevator. Above ground, their cuffs and blindfolds still on, they were guided into the backseat of a small car and driven away.
In the car, Shin guessed that he and his father would be released back into the camp’s population. The guards would not force them to sign a secrecy pledge and then shoot them. It did not make sense. But when the car stopped after about thirty minutes and his blindfold was removed, he panicked.
A crowd had gathered at the empty wheat field near his mother’s house. This was the place where Shin had witnessed two or three executions a year since he was a toddler. A makeshift gallows had been constructed and a wooden pole had been driven into the ground.
Shin was now certain that he and his father were to be executed. He became acutely aware of the air passing into and out of his lungs. He told himself these were the last breaths of his life.
His panic subsided when a guard barked out his father’s name.
‘Hey, Gyung Sub. Go sit at the very front.’
Shin was told to go with his father. A guard removed their handcuffs. They sat down. The officer overseeing the execution began to speak. Shin’s mother and brother were dragged out.
Shin had not seen them or heard anything about their fate since he walked out of his mother’s house on the night he betrayed them.
‘Execute Jang Hye Gyung and Shin He Geun, traitors of the people,’ the senior officer said.
Shin looked at his father. He was weeping silently.
The shame Shin feels about the executions has been compounded over the years by the lies he began telling in South Korea.
‘There is nothing in my life to compare with this burden,’ Shin told me on the day in California when he explained how and why he had misrepresented his past.
But he was not ashamed on the day of the executions. He was angry. He hated his mother and brother with the savage clarity of a wronged and wounded adolescent.
As he saw it, he had been tortured and nearly died, and his father had been crippled, because of their foolish, self-centred scheming. And only minutes before he saw them on the execution grounds, Shin had believed he would be shot because of their recklessness.
