*
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.
“You have a visitor,” the guard announced.
“Yeobo?” JungHo started to say. His wife hadn’t been to see him yet, but he supposed that she’d been tied up with the children.
“Turn around and put your hands together.”
JungHo turned around and gathered his wrists behind his back, and felt the handcuffs clasp around them. He was led through the hallway and into an empty room, where he was uncuffed. There was a wooden table and two chairs in the middle of the room. JungHo sat down, folded his arms over the table, and buried his head low. He was overcome with fatigue and he was not such a young man as to keep his head stiffly up out of pride.
“JungHo,” someone called out.
He looked up in disbelief. His eyes came into focus and took in the figure of Jade, both completely familiar and strange at the same time.
“Jade,” he managed to say, still reeling from dizziness. “Is it really you?”
Jade nodded, sat down across from him, and held on to his hand. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve missed you. It’s so good to see you,” he said shakily. He had so much to tell her, but now his mind drew a blank and all he could do was squeeze her hand.
“It’s good to see you too. I always regretted what I said before you went to Shanghai. Please forgive me,” Jade said, looking into his eyes. She’d always been this way, candid and kind—he remembered with a rush of fondness.
“No, that was my fault. I shouldn’t have pressured you.” JungHo felt like being direct with her because there wasn’t much time left anyway.
“You know, you’ve been my truest friend and the best person I’ve known in my life.” Jade tried to sound uplifting instead of sad. “I went to ask HanChol to put in a word for you. He’s extremely well connected with the regime and the military. He’ll do the best he can for my sake.”
“Thank you—it means the world to me that you wanted to help me. I just don’t know if it’s possible . . .” He paused. Jade started to protest, but he shook his head and continued. “I had a dream last night where I was crossing a desert. It was a beautiful place with fine, soft, pink sand and a clear blue sky. Then the sand started to fall from above, like rain. It first came up to my ankles and then my knees . . .”
Jade gazed into his face with her dark, still-lovely eyes.
“I was trying to run out of there when I woke up. And then it hit me later this morning. I was inside an hourglass.” JungHo smiled so that many lines appeared on the loose skin of his cheeks, grizzled with gray hair.
“JungHo . . .” Jade began to say, but he shook his head.
“Given the odds, I should have died a long time ago. I’m not afraid of anything that may come to pass . . . The only thing is, I wish I’d done some things differently in my life. Only now that I’m nearing the end, do I finally see everything so clearly.” JungHo wrapped both his hands around Jade’s smaller ones.
“What do you mean?”
“I never told you about the story of my father and a tiger, did I?”
Jade shook her head.
“It’s an astonishing story my father told me before he passed. As a child I didn’t know what to make of it, but many years later I met someone who confirmed that my father’s account was true.
“This was about fifty years ago in PyongAhn province. It was in the middle of winter and we didn’t have anything to eat, so my father went hunting in the mountains with a bow and arrow. He was hoping to catch some rabbits or a deer, but started tracking what looked like a leopard’s paw prints.
“So he followed the prints all the way to the deepest mountains, and it ended at a cliff. There he came face-to-face with the animal—but it turned out to be a tigerling rather than a leopard. If he’d shot and killed it, we would have had enough to eat for a year at least. But he just turned around and started walking down the mountain. It started to snow, and he was already close to starvation. Finally, he fell down, thinking he would not get back up.