Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  “Is that the first time one took a swing at you?”

  He sniggered. “No, happens all the time. It’s the first time someone connected that well, though. Nah, mate, they do all sorts to try and get a rise out of you: pee in a cup and throw it through the crack in the door; throw shit at you. Recently, one prisoner came up to a colleague of mine and said ‘I’ve been paid to assault you.’ Then he pulled a razor blade from his pocket and slashed the poor bastard diagonally across the face. Usually it’s because they want to be reclassified and moved nearer their families. A lot of them are nice, though. It’s not, like, all bad.”

  The first hour and a half of conversation was a little frosty, although, just like the prison population, not all bad. Dan’s guard was up—I’m going to sidestep any obvious puns here—but by the third beer he seemed to relax, slouching into his stool, I think convinced I wasn’t there with any kind of nefarious intent and that even after all these years apart we still got on just fine. We teased each other in that uniquely English way that is simultaneously offensive and affectionate as we leapfrogged from topic to topic.

  “Fletch,” he said, adopting a more serious tone. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to put it out there—what happened with the wedding?”

  I squirmed on my stool, which seemed suddenly prickly. “I… I don’t know,” I stammered, looking down at the table. “I thought it was for the best. A friendship can’t only be based on the past, right?”

  He leaned back on his stool. “Why would ours be? I know I’m still here, and I’ve got the same job, but I’ve changed, too.”

  I’d never met someone who’d been on the other side of my defriending. Not only that, because of my talent for living only in the future tense, I’d never given the people I’d cut so surgically out of my life a second thought. Yet here was one of those people, on the next stool, obviously still resentful. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sure that message came across much blunter than I intended it.”

  “Well.” He hesitated. “I know what you’re like. You always were very direct. I guess that’s why you like Germany so much. I think other people found it very blunt, though.”

  I squirmed a bit more; it seemed the least I could do. He necked the last of his beer. “We had a good connection, and I thought it was sad that you just closed it off.”

  I nodded, drank faster to try to keep up, made some murmuring noises that hinted at wrongdoing and guilt without actually admitting any. He was right, he had changed. So had Thetford. I’d forgotten that. Because I’d hit pause on it the day I left, that was how it had remained in my mind, but really, it had long since run on without me.

  “Come on,” Dan said, getting up from his stool. “There’s some people I’d like you to meet.”

  Dan and his wife owned a house just a few estates over from the ones in which Dan and I had grown up. We found his son Noah in the lounge watching cartoons. He was just eleven months old but huge for his age. He had the delightfully wrinkled appearance of an elderly man, so that when he proudly took a few unsteady steps towards us, it looked more like walking was something he was slowly forgetting than a talent he was just acquiring. We had dinner, sat in the garden, and drank too much vodka and cranberry (our old drink, something else I’d long forgotten but that Dan had prepared especially). Amy worked at the prison as well, and they passed the evening telling stories just as varied and wacky and entertaining as those I’d travelled thousands of miles to collect—not just of the prison but also of the people Dan and I knew: stories of one-night stands that had resulted in pregnancies, of marriages cut short by infidelity, of out-of-control gambling and drinking. Stories of people who’d grown up, and of people who’d remained stubbornly the same; of sociopaths and soccer mums and kids, so many kids. The past was sprinkled in there too, but only as a minor, supporting character. They mentioned their wedding at least six times, teasing me as much as they thought I could bear.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” I said, finally, my face flushed crimson with embarrassment. “I regret it. I should have been there.”

  Dan looked at Amy. “Yeah, you should have, you big idiot. What you reckon, Ames? Shall we let him off the hook?”

  Amy smiled. “Nah, let him grovel a bit yet.” They laughed.

  At eleven, we stood to hug once again, this time with genuine warmth. “It’s been great,” Dan said. “Don’t leave it so long next time, okay?”

  “I won’t,” I said, and meant it.

  The next morning, I waited at the Bus Interchange for a bus to Newmarket, some thirty miles away, where my parents and sister now live. The two days in Thetford had been extremely enjoyable, full of interesting characters and humorous tales. Revisiting them hadn’t depressed me, as I’d thought it would. I was no longer that spotty, confused teenager. Nor was Thetford the awful, depraved place I’d pretended it to be, probably to assuage any guilt I’d had at not wanting to visit it. It was a somewhat generic market town, not the best that England had to offer, but hardly the crappiest either. Is it a strange place? Certainly. Because all places are strange places, I was coming to realise. Strange because people are, fundamentally, strange. We’re odd ramshackle collections of confusions, delusions, hopes, dreams, neuroses, unrequited loves, repressed traumas, magical thinking, denial, honesty, humour, earnestness, and kindness. For some reason, I’d thought that because the people here had chosen to live in the same place in which they were born, resisting the urge to flee to some big, anonymous, polluted city, their stories were uninteresting. That had been stupid. In the end, the only thing that had really stopped me from coming here was me. I’d had a story about Thetford, and I’d told that story so often I’d started to believe it was true.

  As humans, we’re constantly working to try to make sense of ourselves, to try to neaten our histories. We’re our stories, nothing more. I’d gotten stuck in an incorrect narrative of my own life, a story that said I was normal, that my life was boring, and that there was some greater nobility in the struggles I saw playing out in Taksim Square, Hebron, Chişinău, Tiraspol, and other places.

  Here I was on yet another trip, alone, while Annett was back in Berlin. The last year of our relationship had been our worst. Where we’d needed to work harder to understand each other, and to stay interested in each other after all these years, I hadn’t been pulling my weight. It had gotten hard, and I’d reacted as I usually did, by running away from it in a spiral of counterproductive behaviour that only exacerbated the original problem and thus increased my urge to do a little more fleeing. I had gotten so focused on what was out there, on the next weird country, the next great anecdote, the next despot, that I’d stopped appreciating the life I had. Travel is wonderful. A near-perfect state of surprise, wonder, and excitement. A chance to challenge your assumptions, defeat your prejudices, and write a new story for yourself. As a traveller. An exile. An adventurer. An explorer. As someone with great stories of struggle, survival, curiosity, courage, and reinvention. But the pursuit of those narratives can be harmful, too.

  Everything in life is about dosage. I’d gotten the dosage wrong. I felt ready to reprioritise, to commit to Berlin, to Annett, to my job as a writer, to staying when things got hard, instead of running away to some romanticised, mirage, wanderlust new. I wanted to change my story.

  To show Annett this, on the way back to Berlin, I bought her something I thought I’d never buy.

  15

  Interlude #3: A gift

  I seated myself at the kitchen table, facing the front door, waiting for Annett to return home from work. A small rectangular box sat in front of me, on the table. I drummed two fingers impatiently next to it.

  She should have been home by now.

  Then came the sound of jangling keys in the lock, followed by a thud as the door slammed into the wall. That poor wall. It wasn’t Annett-proof. Five steps later she stood in the doorway to our kitchen-diner scrutinising the mail in her hand. She caught a glimpse of me from the corner of her eye and yelped.

&n
bsp; “You made me jump. What are you doing sitting there like some kind of weird, bald statue?”

  Her gaze moved down to the table. A look of alarm flashed across her face. “What’s that?” she said, pointing at the wrapped box in front of me.

  I adopted a calm, authoritative tone. “Sit down, Annett.”

  “Oh God. You are even using my name now? Why? What’s going on?”

  “We need to have a talk.” I betrayed no emotion.

  She dropped her backpack on the floor. “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  Her breath was shallow and rapid. “Oh God. What is that? It’s not—”

  She sat, continuing to breathe as if she’d never done it before. “You fucker,” she muttered. We tended to treat our relationship like a toaster we’d won in a prize draw we couldn’t remember entering—not necessarily what we’d been looking for, but now that it was here, well, a toaster could certainly be useful. It wasn’t a normal approach to a relationship, to not think you’d always be together, to not have that as a goal even, but it worked for us. Took the pressure off having to chase Happy Ever After.

  I put my hands on the box. “I know things between us haven’t been great lately,” I began. “And you’ve been asking me where this relationship is going.”

  I took a theatrically large breath. I was milking the moment. “But I think it’s time for us to take the next step…”

  Annett was trying to meet my gaze but couldn’t. She angled her face away but peeked back, like someone watching a horror film. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. ARRRGH. No. Why?” Annett was the product of divorce and strongly opposed to involving the state in her love life.

  With two hands, I pushed the box across the table to her.

  She was squirming in her seat, as if every word I spoke raised its temperature five degrees. I was certain. I was ready. “I want us to take the next step. Open it.”

  She reached hesitantly for the box, wrapped in silver paper. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she said, as the paper fell away. A few tears streaked her cheeks.

  She read the words on the box slowly. “Pet rock?” It was not the jewellery box nor the ring she’d been expecting.

  I nodded. “Pet rock.”

  She opened that box to find not the sort of rock you put on your finger, but the sort you might find in the garden. A small smooth grey rock. Pet Rock was a smash-hit novelty Christmas gift back in the seventies. It really was just a rock. It came with a lead (for taking Pet Rock out on walks) and a book that explained how to look after it. “Our first-ever pet!” I gushed. “I think we’re ready to take the next step, to be responsible for something.” I was laughing now, enjoying the meanness of my prank.

  She picked up the rock and pretended to throw it at me. “You son of a bitch. Why did you do that to me? I thought you were going to propose. Oh God,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “That would have been awful. Oh, wow, what a relief.”

  “I know,” I said. “But…” I hesitated here because, again, I was going to say my least favourite words in any language. “There is a point to this. You were right. You usually are. Going to Thetford was good for me,” I continued. “I’m not saying I’ve changed, and that you were right about everything. Travelling’s great and I’ll always want to see as much of this odd global Human Experiment as I can. But I realise now that those stories I’ve been chasing, in all the places that weren’t here, well, there are also great ones right here, too. I’ve also realised that it’s good to make sacrifices for the things that are important to you.”

  She put Pet Rock back in its box. “I like that you’re wired for novelty. You have been since I met you—you just lost it there somehow. That curiosity is what makes it interesting to be in a relationship with you. Every time you read a book you suddenly have a whole new world view, even if you forget it after a week.”

  I nodded. “I’m hoping to try to keep this new one for quite a bit longer. Somehow I lost sight of how lucky, special, and in no way normal my life is. I’m going to work on that. Say yes to any weddings, family events, or social engagements you want us to go to. I always enjoy them in the end no matter how much I complain beforehand. In the meantime I’m going to be here, trying to keep a grip on myself, and reinvesting in my relationships.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I can do that.” I got up to go to the fridge, moved a magnet, and returned with the itinerary she’d created for the Italy trip we’d cancelled for China. It had been pinned, unloved, to the fridge for a long time. “Our next trip,” I said, pushing it towards her, “once we decide to take another, is your pick.”

  She scrunched up her nose. “Nah. Italy’s okay but it peaked like five hundred years ago already. And I’ve kind of missed the trips like Istanbul, Israel, and Ghana.”

  “And China and the Hare Krishnas?” I winked.

  “Don’t push your luck.” She slid the paper back across the table. “No. For my pick, I’ve a much better idea where we should go.”

  16

  Pyongyang, North Korea: “He praised it for its revolutionary spirit.”

  North Korean kebabs, mass dances, dem two bruddas

  With not a minute to spare, Annett and I arrived at the tour company’s orientation session, in Beijing. The room was above a restaurant, had no air conditioning, and was sweltering in the August heat. Inside were fifty fellow tourists and six Western tour guides. It was a bumper group, since we would be in North Korea during the seventieth anniversary of their liberation from Japanese colonial rule. There were rumours of military parades and mass games. “The insanity will be turned up to eleven,” said a tall, Australian guide called Tristan. The group clapped and whooped enthusiastically. We were here for insanity. We were here for eleven.

  We were going to the collective fiction known as North Korea, one of the least-visited and most-secretive places on earth, a dictatorship ruled by the iron will of one family of legendary, malevolent megalomaniacs: the Kims. North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to use its official (flagrantly inaccurate) name, has been ruled by just three of them: Eternal President Kim Il-Sung (1948–1994); his son, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il (1994–2011); and his son, the chubby-cheeked Marshal Kim Jong-un (since 2012).

  Backpacks were slung onto backs and suitcases were rolled in the direction of Beijing Central Station for our overnight train to the border.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Annett said. “We’ve been reading about North Korea for years. Now we’re finally going.”

  “I’m really glad you pushed for us to do this,” I said. “It’s the perfect way to wrap up all those trips I’ve been doing. North Korea has a bit of all of them, somehow.”

  “Yeah, but on a totally different scale.”

  Inside the station we found about four million people all jostling each other in a space for four thousand.

  “Ah, China,” I said. “It’s good to be back.”

  Annett jutted her elbows out in an attack posture and looked at the gauntlet we would need to run. “Bring it on.”

  When it comes to tourists, North Korea works a little differently from other countries. You have to enter via China. You must have a guide at all times. You can have a personal one, which is extremely expensive, or join a tour, which is merely very. Our tour would last ten days. After a few weeks of nerves and extra forms to complete to convince the Koreans to let a writer in, I got a Skype call from the agency to say it was all done and very much dusted.

  I looked at Annett, making use of her boxing training, more than holding her own in the scrum. It was nice to have her with me again. I had someone to talk to, and reassuringly, that person was always better informed and organised than I was. It was like travelling with a real-life Google that you could also hug.

  Aboard the train, our group spread out across several carriages and swapped stories. None of us could quite believe it was happening; we really were going to North Korea. For some it was
a whim, a lark, a good story for the pub, while for others it was the culmination of years of fevered interest in and study of what is undoubtedly one of the planet’s oddest little nooks. Everyone wanted to know why everyone else had decided to visit North Korea, or the DPRK, as our Western guides kept encouraging us to call it. It would be disrespectful to call the country North Korea in front of our Korean handlers. As far as they were concerned, North Korea was the only Korea. The centre. Not the north of anything.

  A cart of alcohol and snacks was wheeled through the carriage. After it passed us it contained neither. Soon one of the guides, a short Englishman called Rob, was tipsy. We crowded around him like children at Grandpa’s knee.

  “So I know this guy, a Canadian, right,” he said. “Speaks fluent Korean, works as a translator. He’s met Kim Jong-un many times.”

  There were murmurs of disbelief. The marshal himself?

  “Anyway. No big deal.” I had a sudden flashback to Gregor. “So he says the last time he met Kim Jong-un, at some sports event, right, he called him aside and said he wanted to make the country more open, to make it better for the people.”

  “Do you think Kim Jong-un is as bad as the media makes out?” asked an Australian, called Simon.

  Rob scoffed loudly. “You can’t trust the media, man.” He flattened his empty can under his foot. “I think he’s quite misunderstood. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, really.” As long as you didn’t question his deforestation strategy, anyway. Reports in the (untrustworthy) media were saying Kim Jong-un had just had one of his senior advisers killed by firing squad for doing just that.