Winter
In the Eyes of a Prisoner
Winter was probably the harshest season of the year when we were in that camp. Winter. Even saying the word sent shivers running along the length of the spine, as if I was able to sense the arctic weather as I allowed the word to slip from my lips. The season brought along with it a series of cold weather which would last for weeks; paths buried beneath endless layers of snow; trees left bare as the leaves were stripped from them; ice freezing over the landscape; clouds of pure white appearing before us as we spoke. I would have been lying if I didn’t think the iciness was beautiful - it looked stunning - but the effects of winter weren’t so amazing, they weren’t so beautiful.
Winter seemed to take the most casualties along with it. The cases of those with pneumonia drastically increased within the season and the number of deaths due to the disease were higher than ever. If someone had been cursed with it, we all knew it was the end. Pneumonia was a death sentence. We all knew that they would die, as hard as that would have been to admit. We all knew that there was no chance that they could have recovered from it and returned to the rest of us as if everything was normal days, weeks later. They were people who were just counting down seconds until they reached their end.
Work during the winter couldn’t have been any more cruel. The work load decreased slightly but we were forced to work as hard as we had ever been, the weather making each miniscule task so much more difficult than it actually was. Our hands struggled to stay still as our bodies shivered due to the cold air that managed to seep through the gaps in the door. No one wanted to go outside to fetch any water, too frightened, in fear that they would catch pneumonia and it would be the end. But someone always had to be forced to leave.
Of course, I was the outsider. Of course I would have been the one that had to go. Of course, they would have done anything to get rid of me. Miraculously, the task was never too difficult for me and at first, when I was first given the task, I didn’t understand why the others complained so much, why they treated the task as if it was a death sentence - I went out, turned the corner and pails of water sat there, almost frozen over into ice, but still useable. I merely thought there words were over-exaggerations but I later found out the truth. It was as if Nichkhun knew the girls would ask me to go out, and he would arrange for the water to be sent for us, making the job easier. It was as if he was spying on me.
Somehow, I didn’t mind. I used the ‘special treatment’ to my advantage - I knew I couldn’t catch the pneumonia. I knew I couldn’t die. The others would have thought it was unfair if they knew. But they didn’t know. They would never know. Spending time with general Nichkhun had it’s advantages, as if there was a benefits package given to me because I went to see him every evening.
I grew to enjoy visiting him each night, anticipating the moment when the soldier would call for me and I would follow him to Nichkhun’s chamber. He made me feel comfortable after all, made me feel immune to the fact that I was actually an outsider. He was a friend that I could confide in, a friend that I could tell things that I struggled to say to anyone else and he told me things in return. I learned of his family and his past, the ups and downs of his life, while he grew aware of mine. He didn’t judge me for any part of it. Neither did I.
……
“I used to love the winters when I was younger,” a smile cracked across his lips, the blankness shattering away from his face. I always found myself watching the change in his emotions and facial expressions, witnessing the moments of happiness and anger, able to differentiate between each expression to tell what he was feeling. By that point, I felt like some sort of expert on him.
He looked out of the glass as the icy, white drops cascaded down from the sky, the snow sending him back to the past, the happier times in his life. He indulged in the nostalgia and reminiscence, almost forgetting that I was still there. There was softness in his eyes, one that seemed to appear quite frequently those days. It was a look that made me feel so warm inside that I could stare into them for hours on end.
Travelling back to the past seemed to create these emotions within us, emotions that I found difficult to explain. It was like the past was the only way to escape from the present, the horrors of a war that surrounded us, that was inescapable. The past brought us solace and peace, things we struggled to find in times like these. The present, as I had mentioned time and time again, broke not only families, but people as well. People like Nichkhun. People that only knew hatred but wanted to return to times where love was all that they had known. When hatred wasn’t a word that existed in their vocabulary.
“My siblings and I used to run outside as soon as we saw the snow fall, just waiting for it to set before the snowballs used to fly back and forth. We’d spend such a long time out there before my ‘mother’ would call all of us in, our bodies numb from the cold.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It was. Sometimes my father would come out and play with us for a while. I think it was one of the only moments that we felt like a real family. I didn’t feel like an intruder, being the unwanted son that they never really wanted to take care of. We were a family,” he turned his head slightly in my direction, his eyes lowered to the ground, the corners of his lips briefly tilting upwards. His eyes switched swiftly back to the window, eagerly searching for the memories once again as they drifted away with the gentle breezes around us.
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, he turned in my direction and asked, “What about you?”
“Mother never let me play out there,” I admitted almost immediately, acknowledging the strictness of my upbringing. There were so many barriers keeping me trapped from my childhood desires. “She was always worried that I would catch some kind of cold so she kept me inside and made sure the maids kept a close eye on me while she went off to complete some task of hers.”
“You never played in the snow?”
“You sound so shocked.”
A chuckle escaped from his lips as he continued to watch me in disbelief. “Well, you never had a complete childhood if you didn’t get to play out in the snow.”
“It’s not like I didn’t want to. I used to watch the other children out there enjoying themselves from my window growing jealous because I never had the chance to go out there.”
My situation didn’t sound as terrible as it actually was. If I had spoken about it, you wouldn’t have thought that merely being kept in a realm of safety wasn’t that bad. You would have thought that my mother, my parents, had known best to keep me away from the others, by keeping me trapped inside. But they had kept me away from creating a lifetime of memories. All children would be able to remember the times that they had played with their friends, when they played in the snow. I couldn’t do that. The snow held so many memories for people like Nichkhun and nothing but blankness for those like me.
“And you never tried to join them?”
He cupped his chin in the palm of his hands, leaning forward slightly as he glanced back and forth between me and the window. The glass had almost become frozen over with ice, the images beyond the screen becoming blurred, objects becoming unclear. My eyes locked on it, scanning in even closer until I found small cracks along the ice
“When my mother didn’t want me to do something, I couldn’t do it.” That had been the story all of my life. Though I loved her, though I missed her, she held all of the rules. Mother controlled my life and I suppose being in Korea was the only time when I could have done things for myself. It was the only place where she couldn’t control my actions.
“Did your father never let you out?”
I heaved a sigh, brushing my fingers through my dishevelled locks. “My father was never home. He was always busy with work, travelling back and forth from Beijing constantly,” I glanced down, watching the floor beneath me as my next words escaped my lips barely in a whisper. “He didn’t have any time to spend with me.”
“We’re quite similar then,” He replied almost jovially, “Our fathers never had any time to spend with us.”
“I don’t think that’s something that you can boast about.”
“Well, at least we’re not so strange compared to each other.”
…….
There was something about the way that he had said those words, as if he was glad that there weren’t so many differences between our characters and personalities. We also seemed very similar once we got to know each other, once we found out each others likes and dislikes. And he was right. We weren’t actually such strangers to each other, unlike what we had first thought that day we had met in the camp.
He had told me about why he had chosen me but sometimes, I still found myself wondering why it was me. Did he have some kind of instinct about me? Did he sense that we could have made such a connection with each other? I mean, he could have ended my life then and there on that first day; he could have shot a bullet through my body. But he didn’t. He kept me alive. It was almost as though he had actually saved my life. There were so many opportunities where he could have ended my life but each time, he hadn’t. He kept me there, standing. He cut my hair but he kept me alive. He may have violated me, but he didn’t end my life.
Instead, he made me believe that there was someone out there that could actually love me. I knew my parents had loved me, Jo Kwon had loved me, but Nichkhun was different. He brought me to love him, made me feel like I was the only person in the world. He stayed by my side through the rough times where I felt out-casted by the people I thought were my own. Nichkhun held me in his arms during those cold, winter evenings, moulded his warm lips into mine and made love indulge between us. He made me feel like there was nothing that I had to worry about in the world, that he could take care of me through all of my difficulties.
…….
I leaned forward onto the counter, my hand swirling through the dense liquid within the pot endlessly. The ingredient moved back and forth, mixing between the boiling bubbles that had gathered around the rims and slowly moved into the centre of the circle. The sounds of shuffling fabric became audible around me, the low murmurs and mumbles almost hidden beneath me as the others carried their weight across the kitchen floor. I leaned forward, casually glancing at them from the corner of my eye. There were a few unfamiliar faces within my line of sight, struggling to cope with the workload.
They were replacements for those who had died and those who had caught it and were on the waiting list, ready to be sent to their graves. Perhaps I shouldn’t have treated death as such a light-hearted manner but it was something we had grown accustomed to. The first few deaths were always the hardest and those that followed, nobody could care less. Death was a way of life. We had all learned not to grow too attached.
The temperature had dropped drastically around us, gently cool breezes carried through the air towards us. Each sweep of wind was deadly, potentially taking us to our death beds if our immune system was too weak to resist the bacteria and disease. Everyone’s immune system was too weak. It was something that we were all going to have to accept. Death was a way of life. It was just that sometimes people died earlier than others.
“Sulli, can you pass me those ingredients?” One of the girls called from a distance.
A deep sigh followed immediately after the words, a hand appearing within my line of sight as she dragged the ingredients across the counter towards her. My head turned slightly in her direction, briefly catching a glimpse of her face before she twisted her body away, carrying her weight across the kitchen to the others. By that point it had been two months. Two months since the incident, since we stopped speaking to each other. Each day I waited for her to utter something, to say something to me, to acknowledge me and each day I became disappointed at the result. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to let the past go, and after all, it was my fault. Yet no matter how much I acknowledged my faults, she couldn’t bring herself to forgive me.
“Where’s Seungyeon?” I heard someone ask, muttering the words beneath their breath as if they didn’t want anyone else to hear their words. But of course, all of us heard the words tear through the silence around us and our ears followed them eagerly.
“She’s in the infirmary,” the other girl spoke monotonously, saying those words extemporaneously as if there was no emotion left within her. No hope.
“When did she catch it?”
“Last night. She started developing the symptoms around 10 o’clock,” she replied almost immediately, a slight hint of hesitation beneath her voice. “She’ll be dead by tomorrow.”
“Poor Seungyeon.”
The conversation between those girls ended as soon as those last words were spoken, like the conversation was some sort of routine that happened every time we noticed that someone was missing from the crowds. The camp was cruel. It changed people. It changed everyone and we had no choice but to change. Our circumstances, our situations demanded that we change. And sometimes I believed that we could never return to our old selves.
I also found myself worrying about the others those days. She may not have liked me any longer but each night, I wondered if I would see Sulli in the kitchen the next day. Each morning when I walked in there, I was relieved to see her standing amongst the crowd tending to the food, relieved that she was alive. Of course, I worried about Boa also and I worried about her small child that had no choice but to be raised in a world of hatred and violence.
“I wonder when it’s time for her to die. She has no place here anymore,” Someone whispered almost soundlessly, the harshness of their words tearing through me as if it was trying to ignite a response from me. I knew they were meant for me and they wanted me to hear.
Our world was a cruel place. But none of you would have been able to understand the extent of that unless you were there.
……
Those evenings I lay upon my bunk, unable to will myself to sleep despite the apparent exhaustion within me. I couldn’t return to the land of my dreams, dreams that struggled to last through the pains of each day. Something kept me awake through the coolness of the night, as the artic breezes drifted around us and the moon sat at the centre of a distant sky, the brightness of it’s form standing out against the dark hues of the night skies. I could have forced my eyes closed for hours on end yet I was incapable of falling into a deep slumber.
“Victoria.” I heard a voice call out to me one evening, my eyelids closed as I blocked out all the lights that lingered in the distance. I dismissed it, knowing that there was no chance that anyone could have been trying to speak to me. I didn’t know one person that would have wanted to speak to me there.
“Victoria.” The voice had grown softer, the melodic notes floating through the air towards me. “I know you’re awake.”
I turned my head, blinking the sleepiness encrusted within my eyes away. I still found it difficult to believe that anyone would have wanted to speak to me. But once I opened my eyes, the disbelief had been wiped clean from my face. Boa stared back at me, crouched by the side of my bunk as her fatigue and anxiety became evident upon the features of her face. She looked pain-stricken and upset, fresh tears moistening her cheeks as others threatened to fall from her eyes. I had never seen her so weak.
“Boa, what are you doing here?” I struggled to lift myself up, my shoulders trying to force me back down to the bunk. A wave of nausea washed over me, lingering within my body as a strong burst of warmth followed it closely. Everything became dizzy, as if everything was spinning around me, the objects becoming blurred.
She cleared , exhaling a cool breath, “I needed to talk to you,”
“Now?”
“Yes,” she responded quickly, the immediate quality of her words throwing me back a few moments. “You need to come with me.”
“Boa, do you know what time-”
“It’s urgent, Victoria.”
She wrapped her long fingers around my wrist, trying to pull me off my bunk as her urgency became apparent. I noticed the small beads of perspiration that had gathered across her forehead, the worry etched across her face and anxiety hidden deep within her dark orbs. Something was worrying her.
The cold wind and arctic breezes hit us like a storm as we escaped the warmth of the building. A series of minute bumps gathered across my arms, the skin becoming frozen to the touch. My feet crunched upon the layers of snow beneath us, the nausea continuing to linger within me but slowly beginning to disappear in the same way that it had arrived. Ice had frozen over the walls, icicles hanging down from the ceilings.
My eyes scanned quickly over the entirety of our surroundings, searching for anyone else that could have been watching us. I didn’t know how she felt towards me any longer, though she probably liked me more than the others did. I found myself growing anxious that she had been sent to lure me out and the others would pounce on me like animals. But surprisingly, I found no one else there, no one hiding within the dark shadows bordering the edges of the buildings.
“Can you please explain why you brought me out here?” I asked urgently as the shivers ran along the length of my spine, my feet carrying my weight forward a few more steps.
Her head turned swiftly in my direction, her hand quickly grabbing my arm, restraining me from moving any further.
“Be quiet,” she hissed, “There are still guards patrolling around.”
I looked around us, conscious that others were still there and I was unable to make myself feel comfortable. There was no way I could have felt comfortable in such cold anyway, but there was such an eeriness, a darkness to the night that could have ignited discomfort within anyone, especially when accompanied by the silence.
Boa’s eyes met mine through the minimal light provided by the moon, her lips parting as the words struggled to slip from them. “Minseok is sick. My baby is dying, Victoria.”
“He has pneumonia?”
Her eyes struggled to fight the oncoming tears away and she gulped, trying to suppress the emotions within her. I knew that at any moment, the tears could have broken through the barrier and streamed down her face. “He’s too weak to fight against it. His immune system isn’t strong enough,” she lowered her head, the tears upon her lashes glistening beneath the light. “I’m going to lose him.”
“We probably only have a few days left.” Those were the only words that I could make out between the sobs that had escaped into the air.
“I’m very sorry, Boa. I didn‘t know.”
I had no idea how I should have comforted her, reassured her that he was going to be okay. Because I knew he wasn’t. I couldn’t force myself to lie for her sake, to make her feel better. I couldn’t act like there was nothing wrong. She knew. I knew. We both knew his fate from that point.
“I need you to help me,” She glanced upwards, her eyes wet with the warm liquid that continued to spill out onto her cheeks.
My eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “Help you? How could I help you?”
“I need you to get him some medicine,” she replied simply, “You see General Nichkhun every evening and I thought you could ask him for some medicine.”
“Boa, you know I can’t do that. I could be killed.” The hesitation was evident within my voice. On one hand, I could have been saving her baby’s life and on the other, both of our lives could have been taken. We may have had a fondness for each other, but I was hesitant to trust Nichkhun.
“Please, Victoria. If you were a mother, you would want to do everything to protect your child. I just want to protect mine.”
“I don’t know.”
She had become a broken woman in front of me. I understood her intentions were only to save her son, the most precious person to her. She came to me because she thought I may have been able to help her. And I was able to help her. I knew Nichkhun would have understood and helped us. I had never seen Boa so weak before that day, so helpless, and I knew I had no choice but to do what was right, without knowing what consequences my actions would have had.
I heaved a deep sigh, “I’ll try my best.”
Hi guys! This was originally supposed to be a much longer chapter but I thought it would take me too long to finish it and it would take you guys so long to read it so I decided to split it into two parts. Something shocking is going to happen in the next chapter and I'm super excited (for some strange reason) to write it. .
Thanks for reading and take care because I care and love you all (yes, you all) so much,
love from coolgirlaamy xxxx
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