Out the window, a beauty salon floated by, as did a boatful of kids in the middle of the school day. Another child, a boy criss-crossing the water in a black plastic washbasin, made eye contact with Yona’s party and instantly formed a ‘V’ sign with his fingers.
‘Pretty!’ the boy shouted, in Korean, to Yona.
Several children approached the women and brushed the dust off a chair in front of them. It looked like the children cleaned the chairs around here so regularly that there was no time for dust to actually collect.
‘How many languages do you think the local kids know?’ Yona asked.
The teacher looked at the children compassionately and answered.
‘They probably just know the most beautiful words in a lot of languages. The words tourists want to hear—wouldn’t that make sense? “Pretty”, “cute”, “handsome”: compliments like those.’
One of the kids saw that there was a Korean girl his age and came up to her, whispering, once again in Korean, that she was pretty. He said this while pointing to her eyebrows, and then the teacher’s daughter looked a little bit fearful.
Cheerful children draw attention regardless of where they are, but the child receiving the most interest here wasn’t acting cheerful. His eyes were as wet as a lake. When he glanced at Yona and then the teacher with waterlogged eyes, he asked each woman, ‘Mum?’ The Unda woman hugged the child, looking disillusioned as she explained.
‘His mother died recently. The boy hasn’t realised it yet.’
The Unda woman explained that the boy’s grandmother had just barely survived the sinkhole incident while pregnant, but ultimately, her daughter—his mother—had died of a genetic disorder. Yona and her fellow travellers absorbed the heavy fact that the source of all tragedy was that hole in the ground. The teacher held out her hand to the boy, which prompted him to ask again, ‘Mum?’ before weakly hugging her. Her daughter approached a dog lying on the ground a little way away, like she found this entire situation too strange to deal with.
It was an old dog that spent most of the time lying prone with its belly in the dirt. The blue hammock that hung behind the animal kept looking like it might brush against the dog’s back, but even when the teacher’s daughter climbed on to the hammock and rocked in it several times, the dog didn’t move a bit. Of course, it wasn’t old enough to have experienced the events of 1963, but the dog appeared frozen in time. Even if you pointed a camera at it, its expression didn’t change at all.
The Unda woman who’d been acting as their guide introduced herself as Nam. Nam led them around for half the day, explaining how to prepare and eat an Unda meal, from catching a fish to cooking it. When evening came, she brought nail art tools to the lodgings and sat down in front of Yona. Nam’s English wasn’t bad.
‘Unda woman have been skilled with our hands since long ago,’ Nam explained. ‘We’re good at this kind of thing.’
The woman was memorable for her expressions. One person used to scrutinising the hands and feet of strangers, and another who felt awkward entrusting her hands and feet to someone unfamiliar, sat face to face. The task proceeded, and Yona’s fingernails and toenails were coloured pink, one by one. Outside, the darkening sun seemed to be spinning round and round, and inside, the wind from the fan rotated around the room at a similar speed.
Night came. Yona carried her camera around and captured images of the inside of the house. Damp bedding, a naked light bulb that drooped like the tongue of someone who’d hanged herself, the rusted roof and a door that looked like it had decided the day it was installed that it wouldn’t fit into its frame. Yona couldn’t lie down to sleep, maybe because the bedding was wet, so she kept sitting for a while. The biggest drag was, of course, the toilet. Yona didn’t believe that she would be able to pull her pants down and expose her buttocks in those dark and clammy unkempt facilities, not even to relieve the past four days of constipation.
Misfortune befell the teacher, too, although not due to the toilet. Her daughter had left a toy at the resort, and it was an error on the teacher’s part to think that she’d be okay for one night and two days without it. The girl’s toy was nowhere to be seen, and the teacher was stretched thin. The child needed something age-appropriate to play with. The guide held out a pen emblazoned with the image of Pororo the Little Penguin, but to a five-year-old, Pororo was already passé. Maybe she would have accepted it if it had been Tayo the Little Bus or Robocar Poli. But since neither Tayo nor Robocar made an appearance, the child began to grow more and more distracted, and when they went back to their individual rooms after dinner, her lack of focus became even more extreme. She kept looking for a remote control in this house on stilts, to lower the eyelids that she was sure were affixed somewhere outside. Dog-tired from trying to calm her ever-moving child, the teacher slept like a rock. She let out a few loud shrieks in her sleep that may have been caused by nightmares or may have been the sounds of slumber. No one approached the house to see what caused the noises.
The next day, the Unda group had to pack their bags right after dawn. The house on stilts that had harboured them for the night looked like a wreck. A re-enactment was under way: everything had been made to resemble the famed night in 1963. A fake head that supposedly belonged to the leader of the massacred Unda tribe now hung in front of their window. Farming tools covered with blood were scattered across the desert sand, and cut-off heads rolled about. Unda women in dishevelled dress approached the travellers and warned them to avoid the heads. Yona began to walk, careful not to step on the heads scattered here and there like jagged stones. The teacher and her daughter started the trek along with Yona. There were several others behind them, mostly people carrying the Jungle party’s luggage. The porters didn’t even look ten years old. As the sun rose higher and higher in the sky, the desert heated up. Yona had worn sandals with thick heels, but the bottoms of her feet felt as hot as if she were standing on a grill.
They stood at the highest point of the white sand desert and watched a performance unfold below. The Unda were being stabbed, pushed, and tripped by the weapon-wielding Kanu. Of course, it wasn’t just the Kanus overpowering the Undas. At one moment, everyone fell into a sand crater made especially for the re-enactment. The crater looked frightful thanks to the sound effects and props and lights, but it didn’t seem that dangerous, even as people slid down into it and the play came to its chaotic end. On the other side of the impromptu stage sat the writer and the college student, with a Kanu woman.
When the Jungle travellers reconvened, they realised that their accommodation and meals and activities had been almost identical, regardless of whether they’d chosen Unda or Kanu. They’d met several locals inside a house on stilts, eaten some simple snacks, and then, after watching a traditional performance, they’d slept in similar rooms. The massages and nail art and fishing were the same, too. One other thing was similar: everyone seemed to have been bitten over half their bodies by mosquitoes.
They all wanted to return quickly to the resort, but Yona was the reason they were delayed. One side of the window in the room Yona had stayed in was broken, and it was unclear if had been shattered before they arrived or if it got that way during the night—or if it had been tampered with during breakfast. Thanks to the broken window, the room was now filled with exotic winged insects, and Yona’s camera was gone. The writer scrutinised the glass and said that it seemed like someone who knew what they were doing had cut it with a knife. The guide looked uncomfortable, but she dealt with the situation like an expert. First they rummaged through the other houses on stilts, one by one. They looked, of course, at the room where they’d stayed, and then they searched the houses lined up next to it. They discovered three cameras.