Chol hwan Kang The Aquariums of Pyongyang; Ten

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.Mi-ho made less fuss about eating her first grilled rat than I did.True, I initially lied to her about the nature of the meat, but when I later told her the truth she wasn’t the least bit disgusted.The poor girl was so hungry.She was suffering from pellagra, and that dish may have been her last shot at survival.At my urging, the entire family eventually took to eating rat.My uncle was the hardest to convince, but after a few months of demurring, the day came when his hunger pains were just too sharp and he, too, relented.That was the last time I saw him turn down a piece of grilled rat meat.The Yodok rats, it should be said, were fine specimens—much finer than any rat I ever caught in Seoul—and since they reproduced quickly, they were the only food product in the camp that was never in short supply.I was not the only prisoner in Yodok to hunt rats.There were many devotees of the sport, and each had his or her own technique for trapping and preserving the game.I discovered that a friend of mine had turned his hut into a full-blown breeding ground.The other kids and I had noticed that he was always in good shape, while we, despite our little supplements, remained hungry and thin.Was he stealing food? Was someone giving it to him? Fearing that we had begun to suspect him of collaborating with the guards, the boy called us over to his hut one day for an explanation.His family was allotted two rooms, just like we were, but instead of using all their living space, they all squeezed into one room and left the second space entirely for the rats.To attract them, my friend had stolen corn from the fields and spread it on the floor.The plan worked perfectly, and the number of nests multiplied.The only maintenance required was sprinkling a little corn on the floor every few days.Whenever he got hungry, all my friend had to do was grab a wire trap and fish out a rat.It was a veritable pantry, the secret to his robust health.Another of the camp’s rat hunters prospered by taking advantage of his job as the watchman of the corn depot.The vast corn storage area, which was surrounded by barbed wire, contained about a hundred small wire-mesh silos, into which the prisoners emptied their harvest at the end of each day.Prisoners were allowed to enter the area freely, but the guard always patted them down on their way out.Everyone envied the guard’s job, especially because the man who held the position was chubby—indeed almost fat—which only helped fuel speculation about his diet.People said that he always had meat in his mess tin.While most prisoners were sure he was doubling as a snitch, they also suspected him of stealing corn.Security eventually got wind of the rumor and sent guards to search the man’s hovel.What they discovered was a large receptacle packed tight with salt-cured rat meat.The guards couldn’t be more pleased with the man’s ingenuity and fervor in controlling the population of the corn-thieving rats.The complaints of his libelers only helped shore up his position.All the meals and extra rations provided me by the rats gradually changed my view of these animals.I began to see them as useful, even precious, on a par with chickens and rabbits.I was truly grateful for their existence, and still am.Absurd though it may seem to those who have never known hunger, I actually felt a connection with them.I remember an encounter I had with a rat in our hut one night.Raising my head from my mattress I saw him staring at me from between two floorboards.We were locked in each other’s gaze, staring into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time, until the spell broke and he scurried away.Before entering the camp, I had thought of rats as scary and disgusting.Today I think of them as touchingly kind animals.Sentiments aside, the following winter was a hard one, and the occasional rats I trapped afforded considerable succor.The snowfalls were so heavy that only the sharpest crags of the surrounding mountains broke through the thick blanket of white.It seemed as though nature were telling us that to get out of Yodok we would have to be the world’s greatest mountain climbers—a title none of us could claim.As long as the temperature remained above–13˚F, work went on as usual.Imagine us kids, dressed all in rags, trying to chop down a tree whose essential oils were needed for the latest “Let’s Earn Some Dollars for Kim Il-sung” campaign.With our bodies waistdeep in snow, we had to dig evacuation paths in case a tree didn’t fall as planned.Many adults were killed and maimed that way.Once a tree was down, we chopped off its branches and hauled the trunk to the foot of the mountain on our shoulders.At the end of the day, we returned to our huts—my, I almost said homes!—with our hands and feet frozen stiff and our whole bodies utterly exhausted.On one particularly cold winter’s day, I got home with a strange, painful stinging sensation in my feet.I tried soaking them in lukewarm water, but this only made them feel worse.Cold water was the only thing that brought relief.The next morning when I woke up, my toenails were solid black and I was unable to walk.The guards let me work inside that day, weaving wicker baskets as I had been taught in school.My toenails eventually fell off, but I miraculously escaped necrosis and the amputation it would have necessitated.New shoes were given to us every two years, but the quality was so poor, and our work so demanding, that the pair never lasted more than a year.To avoid frostbite, we wrapped our extremities in layers of rags and dried rat skins.In the bitterest cold, we swathed our heads and faces in tattered castoffs, leaving only our eyes uncovered.Such measures could never contend with the bitter–10˚F temperatures that descended on the mountain.The only way to keep from freezing was to keep moving; but this wasn’t something everyone could do, and every year, several old people died from the cold.These memories come back to me whenever I go skiing and see high, snow-covered mountains with sheer black crags.I try to explain my feelings to South Korean friends, but have little success [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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