Paper Villages

Chapter One: The Erasure Table

The hamlet was called Todam-ri, and it took Song Yerim eleven minutes to remove it from the country.

She worked with the flat side of a knife blade first, lifting the ink in thin curls from the surface of the linen-backed sheet, then with a hard eraser shaved to a wedge, then with a soft one, then with a badger brush to sweep away the crumbs. When the paper was clean she breathed on it, held it to the window light, and checked for the ghost. There was always a ghost. Ink bit into fiber, and even after the black was gone the fibers remembered being written on, and if you tilted the sheet at the right angle you could see the shape of what had been there, a faint bruise in the shape of nine houses and a well.

Yerim knew the trick for that too. A wash of thinned gouache the exact tone of the surrounding contour field, applied with a sable brush in short strokes that followed the direction of the paper's grain. Then the contour lines redrawn across the space where Todam-ri had been, continuous, unhurried, as though the slope had always run smooth from the ridge to the stream without interruption.

When she was finished the map was better than truthful. It was beautiful.

The drafting hall of the State Cartography Bureau occupied the whole of the fourth floor and smelled of ammonia from the blueprint machines two floors below, of linseed oil, of the cheap coal they burned in October before the heating allowance was released in November. Forty-one tables in seven rows, each with its own adjustable lamp, each lamp angled slightly differently, so that from the doorway the hall looked like a field of small stiff flowers all leaning toward different suns. Above, on the seventh floor, was the glass-walled office of Political Security Officer Kwak Insoo, and there was no table in the hall from which you could not see it if you lifted your head.

Yerim did not lift her head often.

"Todam-ri," said Baik Junsu, arriving at her shoulder with the particular quietness of a man who had learned to walk on institutional floors. "Finished?"

"Finished, Section Chief."

He bent over the sheet. His breath had soju in it, thin and sour, the residue of last night rather than the beginning of today; Junsu was disciplined about the difference, or believed he was. He was fifty-eight, with the heavy shoulders of a man who had once carried survey equipment up mountains and the soft belly of a man who had spent twenty years since then signing forms. His fingers, when he touched the paper, were delicate. That was the thing about Junsu that Yerim had never been able to dislike. Whatever else had gone out of him, his hands still loved maps.

"You feathered the two-hundred line," he said.

"There's a spur there. It was in the 1974 sheet. If I make it clean, the next surveyor who walks that slope reports a discrepancy, and then somebody has to explain the discrepancy."

"Nobody is going to walk that slope."

"Somebody walked it in 1974."

Junsu made a sound that was almost a laugh. He straightened, took his stamp from his breast pocket, breathed on it out of habit, and pressed it into the corner block. Verified. Then he initialed beside it, and the nine houses and the well of Todam-ri were, administratively speaking, a thing that had never been.

"Sheet's for the Ministry of Agriculture," he said. "They're consolidating collectives in the north. Todam-ri has been folded into Sangwol Collective. Twelve families. They've already moved."

"I didn't ask."

"I know you didn't." He tapped the desk twice with two fingers, a gesture he made when he had said something he wished he hadn't. "Nine o'clock, sixth floor. All senior staff. Wear the jacket."

"What jacket?"

"The good one. There will be a Deputy Minister."

He moved off down the row. Yerim watched him stop at the next table, and the next, touching each finished sheet with the same care, saying almost nothing, stamping, initialing. Twenty-two erasures a week passed under that stamp. Villages, cemeteries, chapels, a spur road that had been built in the wrong place and could not be officially admitted, a bridge that had collapsed and could not be officially mourned. The Bureau's task was not to describe the country. It was to render the country as the government wished it to appear, and then to make that rendering so precise, so well-lettered, so handsomely printed, that it became easier to believe than the ground itself.

Yerim was very good at it. She had been very good at it for twelve years.

She cleaned her blades, capped her bottles, and washed her hands at the corner basin, and when she came back to her table there was a folded slip of tracing paper under the edge of her lamp. She recognized the fold before she recognized the hand. Three creases, the last one tucked, so that it opened only if you pulled the right corner.

After. The stairwell. The one that smells.

She put it in her mouth, chewed it to pulp, and swallowed it, because tracing paper was thin and dissolved fast and the wastepaper baskets on the fourth floor were emptied by a man who reported to the seventh.

---

Yun Seoha was waiting on the landing between three and four, where the drain in the corner had backed up in 1998 and had been noted, requisitioned, and forgotten. He was leaning against the rail with his coat over his arm and his surveyor's boots still on, mud dried in the welts, and when he saw her his whole face changed in the way it always did, like a room when someone turns on a second lamp.

"You're going to get us shot," Yerim said.

"Nobody uses this stairwell."

"That is exactly what makes it interesting to the people who are interested in stairwells."

He laughed. He was twenty-nine, five years younger than her, with a long straight back and a way of standing that suggested he had already been promoted and was simply waiting for the paperwork. He came from a good family in the eastern districts—a father in the Railway Ministry, an uncle in Foreign Trade—and he wore that inheritance easily, the way people do when they have never had to think about it.

"I have news," he said, "and I wanted to be the one who told you."

"Then tell me quickly."

"Choha." He said it the way another man might say a woman's name. "They're reviving the Choha scheme. Dam, reservoir, hydroelectric station, all of it. It's been dead since before I joined the service, and now it's alive, and it's the biggest thing the Ministry will do this decade. The Deputy Minister is announcing it upstairs in—" he checked his watch "—thirty-eight minutes."

Yerim leaned against the cold wall. Somewhere below, the blueprint machine began its cycle and the stairwell filled with the smell of ammonia.

"Choha," she said.

"You know it?"

"It's a river."

"It's four hundred megawatts." He caught her hand, quickly, and let it go just as quickly. "Yerim. Listen. They'll need survey teams. Field work, real field work, and whoever leads the survey and comes back with clean figures will be noticed. Not by Baik. By the Ministry. By the inner section." He was almost whispering. "I've asked to be assigned."

"Of course you have."

"Don't be like that."

"I'm not being like anything." She looked at him and felt the old double motion in her chest, tenderness and something colder pulling in different directions. He was the only person in the world who touched her. He was also the only person in the world who could destroy her by talking in his sleep. "I'm glad for you," she said, and meant it, roughly a quarter.

"And they'll need a draftsman," Seoha said. "A senior one. The best one in the building." He smiled. "So put on the good jacket, Comrade Draftsman."

---

The good jacket was gray, from a shop on Unification Street that no longer existed, and it had belonged to her mother.

Yerim kept it in her locker rather than at home, wrapped in the same brown paper it had come in, and she took it out perhaps four times a year. The lining was worn at the shoulders. There was a place inside the left cuff where her mother had embroidered a tiny character in gray thread, so small and so exactly the color of the cloth that in twenty-eight years nobody had ever noticed it. The character was 心. Heart. Geum Okja had embroidered it the winter she was given the jacket, and she had told her daughter, who was six years old and did not understand, that a person should always carry one thing that only she knows about.

Yerim buttoned the jacket, checked the mirror in the locker door, and pressed her hair flat at the temples.

On the sixth floor, in the long conference room with the map of the nation covering the whole north wall, chairs had been arranged in rows and the good tea things brought out. Junsu was already there, in the second row, sitting very upright. Along the side wall stood Kwak Insoo, hands behind his back, in a suit that fit him better than anyone else's suit fit them, watching people arrive with the mild attention of a man counting stock.

Insoo was somewhere in his forties. He had a broad, unremarkable, almost kindly face and a habit of remembering things about people—your mother's home county, the fact that you had once mentioned liking pears—and offering these things back to you as gifts, so that you were never certain whether you were being cherished or inventoried.

"Comrade Song," he said, as she passed. "You're limping."

"The tram was full. I walked."

"From Third Bridge? That's four kilometers." He shook his head slowly. "You should apply for the bicycle allocation. I'd support it."

"Thank you, Officer Kwak."

"Sit near the front," he said. "This one concerns you."

She sat near the front. At nine o'clock exactly the doors opened and Deputy Minister Hwang Chulwoo came in with three aides and did not go to the podium but to the wall map, and stood there for a moment with his back to sixty seated people, looking at the country.

He was a heavy man in his late fifties with cropped gray hair and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. Yerim had seen his photograph in the bulletins. What the photographs did not show was that he stood like a man who had once worked outdoors, weight on the back foot, hands loose. He put a thick forefinger on the wall map, on a thin blue thread of river in the northeast, and traced it downstream, all the way down, through the mountains, through the plain, to the capital.

Then he turned around.

"Comrades," he said. "I am going to give you a valley."