“Jade—” HanChol took a small sip of his coffee. “You know, I owe a lot to you.”
It was Jade’s turn to sip on her coffee, which was really to hide how her eyes had suddenly filled with tears. “Yes, I know,” she croaked unevenly behind her cup.
HanChol reached over and touched her arm gently. She put her cup down on the saucer and sponged the corners of her eyes with a finger, carefully avoiding her eye makeup.
“I’m so sorry about how I hurt you,” he said.
“That night when you came over for the last time,” Jade began shakily. “Aunt Dani passed away. I almost died of guilt, but then it was the war, so maybe I was just dying of hunger. How I survived that, I don’t know exactly.”
HanChol withdrew his hand from her and looked down at his lap in silence.
“I’m truly, truly sorry,” he said at last. “I wish that there was something I could do to beg your forgiveness . . .” Without looking up, he sensed she was now crying openly by the sound of her sharp breathing.
“There is something you can do for me,” she managed to say between hiccups.
“I’ll do anything.”
“Do you remember Mr. Nam JungHo? He helped me with a lot of things when we were young. If I needed anything, he was always there,” Jade said. HanChol remembered the man—short, wiry, a bit savage and uncouth. There was an incident during the war when JungHo rudely offered him free food in front of all his cronies, just to show who had the upper hand. But HanChol didn’t hate or even scorn him, having never given him too much thought.
“Before Aunt Dani died, JungHo used to come by with sacks of rice when no one had anything to eat, and he helped me find Lotus after she went missing. He’s been arrested,” Jade continued.
“On what charges?” HanChol asked, though he more or less already guessed at the answer.
“Espionage, Communist activity. He was a member of the Communist Party a long time ago, but I doubt that he’s a spy for the North. You know it’s not about what he actually believes or commits . . . This is just an excuse to get rid of any opposition. I know JungHo is innocent. I’ve never met any other man with such a good heart. You have connections to the regime—couldn’t you put in a word?”
“What you’re asking—it’s very difficult. Even if I speak on his behalf, there’s no guarantee that it will work. President Park has his own way of doing things. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I know it will be difficult. All I’m asking is that you try,” Jade said.
“Okay, I promise I’ll put in a word.”
When Jade got up to leave, HanChol rose with her. “Don’t leave—stay with me,” he wanted to say; the words were almost caught up in his throat.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” he said instead. “I once told you I wouldn’t feel for anyone else the way I did for you . . . It turned out to be true.”
“Ah, HanChol, me too.” She reached over and squeezed his hand one last time. A hot tear rolled off and landed with a splash on his wrist. “Me too, a thousand times.”
*
IN JAIL, JUNGHO HAD BEEN having peculiarly vivid dreams. In one, he was walking in the mountains when a tiger approached him and knelt down. He climbed up on its back and it went leaping over the blue hills, almost flying, shrouded in clouds. In another dream, he was crossing a beautiful, heatless desert. The sand was as fine as flour and sunset-pink, and the sky was a clear turquoise. He was looking for something—a well. Then, seamlessly as it always happens in dreams, the object of his search changed to Jade. Without warning the sand started pouring down from the sky like rain. It was painless, nothing got inside his eyes or nose, but he realized he would be buried if he didn’t pick up his pace. He was running weightlessly in the sandstorm when he woke up, drenched in sweat.
The morning after that dream, he woke up and ate a bowl of murky porridge that was slid underneath his door. There were a notepad and a pencil among the few things that he was permitted to have in his cell, so he began practicing writing. Even though he’d campaigned and was elected as the representative of his district, JungHo still had trouble with his letters. MyungBo had once said that he wrote to his son from prison; JungHo had two sons, and wished he could say something to them as well. So far, he’d only managed to fill a whole page with the blocky characters of his own name. Then there was a sound of footsteps clanking along the hallway and the sliding of the peephole.