Who Has A Real Castle Where I Can Hide?

Na Cheon wanted to survive. She began wondering about how she could leave Karachi and Pakistan.

“By boat.”

“Then go back by boat. I’ll find you one. But Iqbal can’t know. He’d kill me.”

“Why do you do it then?” Na Cheon asked.

“I’ll get paid, don’t worry. Give me time.”

Time passed, the night came, five women, not just Na Cheon, left the house in different ways and met Na Cheon’s customer on a distant street. He took them to a freighter called Chemise.

“Go now! Musa the Chinaman is ready for you. All you have to do to get to Korea is work along the way. Go!”

When the ship left the wharf, that was one moment.

When the tug let go, that was another moment.

When they could not see the lights of Karachi anymore, that was the real moment. Na Cheon’s life came back to her from when she was a little girl on the floor of their house in Camp 22 to Beijing to Seoul to the Punjab to Karachi and her bond with Park Pak-sun with whom she still slept if she could.

And now there was this to know: the sea birds, the sea itself, Captain Musa inviting them into his cabin, the other crew, and an American called Walker with an ugly soft round brown wool hat on a hook on the wall. She donned the hat. It made her tremble.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You look good. It’s an Afghan hat. Do you want it?”

“No.” She put it back on the hook. “Where is the brim?”

“There isn’t any. That’s not how they’re made.”

She put it on again. “Could an Afghan general wear a hat like this?”

“Yes, he could.”

“What kind of a general?”

“The fighting kind.”

“Why so much fighting all the time?”

“I don’t know, Na Cheon. Did you know a general once?”

“My father.”

“He was a general?”

“Yes, in camp.”

“What kind of camp?”

“A camp for not-human insects in North Korea.”

“Not-human insects?”

Na Cheon sat beside him, her slender body needing only a few inches of the bunk on which to perch.

“I take the hat off now, okay?”

“Okay, take it off.”

You want sex?

“Yes, but I’d like to talk more. I’d like to get to know you.”

He had a beard that was grey brown and hair that was grey brown and a low voice that was easy to understand. He spoke slowly and said that if she told him what she could about herself, he would tell her what he could about himself.

Na Cheon told him where she learned English and explained why she was in Pakistan and said maybe when she got to South Korea, she would find Reverend Sung Wei, who said there was no North and South Korea just like there had never been a North and South Vietnam.

“No, there never was,” Walker agreed. “But what happens if you find Sung Wei?”

“I don’t know. Marry somebody maybe. It’s what they say. What about you?”

Walker grimaced. Not happy. “I have no plan. All I know is I left Afghanistan where I lived for over twenty years and I’m not going back.”

“North Korea I don’t go back, either. What plan is that? No plan. Sung Wei, maybe he knows. Anyway, now I am here.”

“I am, too. Just you and me.”

They laughed. When sex was finished, he kept his arm around her and stroked her hair and sometimes he lifted his head and looked down at her with a tired smile on his face.

She returned twice. She wanted him to tell her his story as she had told him hers from being a little girl to a young woman now. He said he taught English in Afghanistan, rented rooms to travelers, and worked sometimes sort of as an interpreter, sort of an advisor. Did he believe in Allah or Jesus?  He said no, he didn’t. And he didn’t go to America much because one time he returned he’d visited the wife he’d run away from and it hadn’t worked. And another time he saw his older sister, who was sick. So that hadn’t worked, either. For a long time life was better for him in Afghanistan although during the Taliban years he lived in Peshawar, Pakistan.

“But let’s not talk about all that anymore, okay? And if you don’t want to talk about North Korea, that’s okay, too. We can just lie here.”

“I make you hard?”

He kissed her and held her and told her that her face was beautiful because it was asymmetrical. She didn’t know that word. He held his hands up and framed her face the way a photographer would and tilted them, just slightly.

“Sort of like that. Provocative because it’s canted a bit.”

She went back to the room where the women all sat and looked in the mirror.

“What is it?” Park Pok-sun asked.

“The American says something about my face. Am I beautiful?”

“Yes, you’re beautiful.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. Hair for sure.”

“More beautiful than you?”

“Yes, to me, yes. Your eyes, you see more. Your lips, they say more. You think, that’s what everyone says who looks at you. She must think! How could she not think?”

“But I have been afraid to think!”

“Still?”

“Yes, you know that. All the time my mind dances when I talk to this American with the ugly hat. Americans don’t wear those hats. Why don’t I tell him? He can’t have that hat.”

“Why not?”

“It’s an Afghan hat.”

“I haven’t gone to him. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Go to him, then. Knock on his door.”

“It’s never my turn for him when he gets his.”

“You want my turn next so you can see the hat and talk to him?”

Park Pok-sun did not hesitate. She was curious about this hat, and why it meant so much to Na Cheon. “Yes, give me your turn with him. I tell him I do it for you, you’re too sore, need rest but come back next time ready for more.”

They laughed and lay down and Na Cheon put her head between Park Pok-sun’s breasts.

“His hat is not like your father’s hat you tell me about?” Park Pok-sun asked softly.

“No, no, not like my father’s hat, but he says generals wear these hats. Fighting generals. Oh, I am so afraid. What if North Koreans find me in Seoul? What if they drag me back to not-human insect camp?”

“Where else can we go?  We’re Koreans.”

“I don’t know. But I ask myself so much: Where can I hide? Who has a real castle where I can hide?”

The freighter throbbed along. They were just over the engine room and could hear the motors grinding steadily. The sound never ceased. Night after night, day after day. On the sea everything seemed forever but nowhere else.

Robert Earle has published over forty short stories in journals across the U.S. and Canada. His fiction often pursues international themes because he was a diplomat for twenty-five years. He has degrees in literature and writing from Princeton and Johns Hopkins.