Star of the North

by D. B. John

  “The Great Leader Kim Il-sung and his blessed son Kim Jong-il, the General of Korea!” he shouted.

  Cho’s wife clapped her hands, mascara tears tracking down her cheeks. “Man-sae! ” she cried.

  The sun, filtering through the haze, glittered on the distant generals’ tunics, drawing Cho’s eye to the dark figure standing slightly apart from them on the terrace, a stout young man in a black Mao tunic, the Dear Leader’s youngest son. The crowds had noticed him, too, because now there were streams of whispers running in every direction, causing the applause to subside. People were remarking on the young man, whose face was as plump and serene as the Buddha’s, as if a new god had been revealed to them.

  “Appa, who is it?” Cho’s son said.

  “A great person born of heaven,” Cho said. “One day, when you are older, he will be your teacher and guide.”

  Yong-ho leaned again into Cho’s ear. “They’re making me chief of staff to the new boy’s private secretariat,” he said, nodding toward the stout young man on the terrace, the Dear Leader’s son, “with the honorary rank of colonel …”

  Cho turned to him in astonishment. He put Books down.

  “The appointment will be announced in a few weeks,” Yong-ho said.

  The band played “Hold High the Red Flag,” and the first formation of helmeted troops bearing regimental banners—an artillery unit from the Front—was marching toward the Grand People’s Study House in a high parade step. The stamp of boots shook the ground. Drums beat time. The applause rose to a frenzy.

  “You’re not joking, are you?” Cho said over the noise. He gave a loud laugh and shook his brother’s hand violently. “You bring honor upon us all. Have you told Appa? I think he might die of pride.” But before Cho could lean over to his wife and pass on the news, Yong-ho grabbed his arm.

  “There’s just one thing, younger brother, and I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to worry …” His smile wavered. “An appointment at this level is conditional on me having a spotless class background … The Bowibu will make a full investigation.”

  “Naturally.” Cho was confused for a moment. “They must speak to Omma and Appa—”

  And then it struck him.

  It wasn’t their beloved adoptive parents the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu, would investigate. The parents with exemplary class backgrounds who’d taken in two wretched infant boys and raised them as their own. It was his real parentage that would be uncovered. The parents he and Yong-ho had never known. A pool of cold fear gathered in the pit of his stomach.

  He turned his face back to the parade. A detachment of the People’s Navy was passing in white tunics and caps, presenting AK-74s with bayonets fixed and barking “KIM–JONG–IL! KIM–JONG–IL!” The crowds joined in.

  “Relax,” Yong-ho said. “The risk is small.”

  “We know nothing about our real parents and grandparents. We don’t know whose blood we have.” Cho couldn’t believe he was saying this. “Elder brother, this investigation must not happen. You must withdraw from the appointment.”

  “Come on. Look at us. Do you honestly think we’re the seed of capitalists, or collaborators, or traitors who fought for the South?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Our Dear Leader himself said last year at Mangyongdae that the Revolution is carried out by our thoughts and deeds, not by family background. Times are changing. Besides, the Party is damned grateful for what I’ve done and knows I’ve earned this …”

  Yong-ho’s voice trailed away, his face suddenly clouded. He was a tall man with faintly cratered skin; hard, intelligent eyes; and nails bitten to the quick. The tailoring of his Chinese suit concealed the wire-thin physique of a high metabolism. His fingers trembled, needing a cigarette. In the complex political landscape of Pyongyang Cho knew that his brother was a significant player, though he never talked about his work. If anyone asked, he described himself as a fund-raiser.

  “If you’re wrong about this,” Cho said coolly, “do I need to tell you what could happen?”

  Yong-ho’s good mood seemed to have evaporated and Cho detected anxiety in his voice. “One simply does not turn down a job offer from the Leader, younger brother. I’ve told you not to worry. I am protected.”

  Cho thought about this. It was true that Yong-ho was one of the Admitted, an elite group of protected cadres. But an onset of cynicism told him that no one, even at that level, was protected from the crime of having bad blood.

  The band was playing “Ten Million Citizens Will Become Bullets and Bombs.” A unit of the Women’s Brigade was passing the saluting terrace, nylon-stockinged legs moving as if they were a single automaton. An odd fact, Cho thought, that women’s bodies were better suited to the goose step than men’s. Behind them on Sungri Street, assorted military hardware—the tanks, missile launchers, and APCs—was in formation, ready to roll into the parade.

  Cho’s wife caught his change of mood and stopped cheering.

  “Here.” Yong-ho reached into his jacket and handed Cho a small gift box made of fine-quality white card stock. “Something you can impress the white devils with. On your foreign trips.”

  But Cho was sunk in preoccupation. He forgot his manners and pocketed the box without thanking his brother.

  When the event was over, Cho’s driver was caught in a long line of waiting government cars, so Cho, his wife, and Books made the twenty-minute walk back to their residential compound in Joong-gu. The main boulevards were crowded with departing citizens and troops, the city still reverberating with the tumult of the parade. Ahead of them, marching along the center of Somun Street, hundreds of students in white shirts were heading back toward Kim Il-sung University carrying tall, streaming banners and singing.

  “Glory to Korea! Your star shines ever bright.

  We follow our Dear General, who leads us to the fight!”

  In the hazy autumn light every building seemed bathed in triumph. Books was chatting to his mother about child heroes who had fought the Japanese, but Cho remained silent, his mind filled with thoughts of Bowibu officers opening a case file, unearthing old birth records, exposing to the light the names and faces he’d never known, his real family. How long would it take them? He had no idea. A spasm of terror ran through him.

  At home he closed the door of his study, steadied his breathing, and told himself to calm down. Yong-ho was one of the Admitted! None of the organs of state, not the secret agents of the Bowibu, not the regular police, nor the army could touch him without the express permission of the Leader himself. And what could be so worrying in his real family’s past? His grandparents would have been dirt-poor peasants scratching about in pig shit like everyone else two generations ago. He poured himself a cognac from the decanter on his bureau and put a cassette tape in the stereo player. Swirling his glass in his hand, he sat back in his armchair, humming the refrain to “Hey Jude.” There was a short list of Western pop songs categorized as harmless. He’d bribed the music curator at the Grand People’s Study House to tape them for him. He felt himself begin to relax. Yong-ho’s appointment would bestow honor and a great prestige upon the family. He was worrying about nothing.

  Suddenly he remembered Yong-ho’s gift. He retrieved it from his tunic pocket and opened it. Inside the box, wrapped in tissue paper, was a wallet of soft, grained leather, with a label in English. HAND-STITCHED IN ITALY. It was a beautiful thing. Where had his brother obtained such a luxury? He ran his finger over the redundant cardholder pockets—no North Korean owned a credit card—and opened the bill compartment. Inside he found three American hundred-dollar bills, so crisp they might have rolled off the printing press that morning. Like new, he thought, and when he held one up to the light, he caught a faint whiff of fresh ink.

  5

  Hôtel du Lac

  Left Bank

  Geneva, Switzerland

  Mid-October, 2010

  The morning rush hour was starting when Jenna got to her hotel. It was on t
he Left Bank, a few blocks back from the Promenade du Lac and the glittering expanse of Lake Geneva, a sliver of which she could glimpse through a gap in the solid, wealthy apartment buildings. Her room had a tiny balcony overlooking a street of shops and a streetcar stop. If she craned her neck out she could see the Alps, brilliant white in the morning sun. She lay down on the bed exhausted, listening to the whir of the streetcars, thinking it was too noisy to get any rest. She fell into a deep sleep almost at once.

  All week Soo-min had been present with her, a genie released from a lamp. In the bathroom mirror she’d seen Soo-min behind her, watching her through the steam. At the piano she imagined she’d seen, for one hair-raising instant, a second pair of hands to her right, accompanying her. She’d awakened with a start in the dead of night, convinced she’d heard Soo-min whisper her name. Her sleep had been thick with dreams of her sister, which played in a rich, saturated color, making the dream seem more real than the faded world she woke up to. Inevitably the dreams slipped their way down, through a fissure in the crust of sleep, into a darker level, the underwater hell of the nightmare, but she had long gotten used to that.

  Jee-min was the first to be born. Soo-min had followed her out of the womb thirty-two minutes later, and for that reason always addressed her, when they spoke in Korean, as “elder sister.” Jee-min’s best friend was her mirror replica: Soo-min had the same laugh, thought the same thoughts, was cast in the same DNA. Their tics and foibles were indistinguishable. Each was an extension of the other. They shared a habit of not finishing sentences. They both inclined their heads and twirled their hair when spoken to. They loved lists and would wear colored hair bands on their wrists as reminders. They had no sense of direction and would easily get lost, even at the mall. Neither would eat boiled vegetables and made a puking face if anyone mentioned them. They were grouchy if they didn’t get nine hours’ sleep.

  The twins’ upbringing in Annandale was nothing out of the ordinary. The family’s income was enough to get by; their father indulged them; their mother was strict. They studied harder than the neighbors’ kids, though not as hard as the Chinese kids, and excelled at sport and music, taking their piano lessons together. On Sundays they joined their mother in the Korean congregation of the United Methodist Church. They followed the same fashions and fads as all the other girls they knew.

  And yet Jee-min and Soo-min Williams stood out in every way. It wasn’t just their startling intelligence. Some quality of contentedness they carried, some nature that was both shy and outgoing made people instantly warm to them. At school the identical two, Jenna and Susie, as they called themselves, were famous. Half Korean, half African American, with hair tied back in a large bunch, they had bold, freckled faces, and an easy, athletic poise—at thirteen they were the stars of the hockey field and the tallest girls in the school. At sixteen they were finalists in the Virginia Schools Taekwondo Championships. In training they sparred with each other. Boys were reluctant to take them on. They did not lack friends, yet they both knew that they each had only one true friend, and when you had a friend like that, there could be no other. Theirs was an exclusive club of two, and mischief was their relief from the regimen Han enforced.

  Report cards were pinned to their bedroom door so that they began each day with a reminder to strive. Coming second at anything was a fail in Han’s book, but the twins rarely came second at anything.

  In their midteens, as they thrilled in shared revelations of developing bodies, they applied makeup to each other’s faces and styled each other’s hair, each the mirror for the other. During dinner they’d quietly spit out kimchi into handkerchiefs when their mother’s back was turned—garlicky breath was a kiss deterrent. Meeting boys for dates was absolutely forbidden by Han, but with ready excuses to be out of the house—at taekwondo, at friends’ houses, at the library—their mother’s law was easy to circumvent. After lights-out Jee-min would climb into Soo-min’s bed for whispered discussions about boys, twining their legs and linking fingers, their heads on the pillow, facing each other very close, breathing each other’s breath.

  Their parents had always told them that separation would happen, though why this was inevitable or necessary was never really clear to the twins. Not long after their eighteenth birthday they embarked on separate gap years before beginning college. Soo-min was enrolled on a music foundation course at Sangmyung University in Seoul. Jee-min took an internship in a senator’s office on Capitol Hill.

  At Washington Dulles International Airport they hugged and cried. Jee-min gave her a sister a good-luck charm, a silver chain with a tiny silver tiger as a symbol of Korea. It was the only thing she had ever bought without her sister being present. Soo-min fastened it around her neck straight away. Her flight was called, and the moment of parting was agony. The twins would not let go of each other’s hands, and their parents, too, became distressed. Han’s face was heavy with guilt, as if she were seeing the effects of some needless and cruel experiment. Jee-min began missing her sister the instant she’d passed up the elevator and out of sight.

  She was at home reading in the backyard when she felt it—a tremor in the genetic skein that connected her to Soo-min, no matter where they were. First came a visceral contraction in her stomach. The next moment she experienced an overwhelming horror welling up inside her and then dying down, leaving saliva pooling in her mouth. She telephoned Soo-min’s hall of residence in Seoul but she was not there, even at breakfast time. For all of the next day, and the day after that, the silence from Soo-min confirmed what Jee-min already knew. She became acutely agitated, pacing the house and pulling at her hair, and lost all appetite for food. Her parents asked her what was wrong, but all she could say was that Soo-min was in danger. As the days went by she watched her parents’ puzzlement ripen to worry and finally to panic as their calls were not returned.

  The news, when it came, was by telephone. Jee-min knew it was the call because her father, Douglas, was silent for a long time listening to the voice on the other end, and reached for Han’s hand. An Inspector Ko of South Korea’s Incheon Metropolitan Police was asking if he had heard from his daughter. She had not returned to her college dorm in three days.

  Inspector Ko said that a woman who lived on Baengnyeong Island had reported the disappearance of her nineteen-year-old son, who had failed to return from the beach with a Korean American girl. The woman was convinced that her son had run away with Soo-min. The inspector conceded that this was a possibility. Teenage lovers occasionally escaped the pressure of their families, he said, but in almost all cases they made contact within a day or two.

  A Seoul tabloid newspaper obtained the pair’s college ID photos, Soo-min’s and Jae-hoon’s, and ran a story under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN ROMEO AND JULIET? with a hotline to call. The police displayed an official missing-persons notice in all bus and train stations. Soo-min’s photo showed her wearing the necklace, and Jee-min provided a description of it. It was the one item she knew for certain that Soo-min would always wear. Within a week there had been sightings of the pair in Busan, Incheon, Sokcho, Daegu, and as far away as Jeju Island. Inspector Ko cautioned Douglas and Han not to get their hopes up. None of the sightings turned up a single lead.

  Han went to pieces. She veered between tearful hysteria, insisting that Soo-min would call at any moment, and a strange, vacant-eyed listlessness that Jee-min had never seen in her before. It was Douglas who took charge. He confined Jee-min to the house, afraid that she’d try to harm herself, or attempt to make her way to Seoul. For days he implored her. Was there some secret of Soo-min’s he should know? Was she troubled by something she’d kept hidden from her parents? What was so terrible in her life that she’d want to run away with a boy she barely knew? Her parents were clinging to this hope, that Soo-min had been a romantic fool and would soon return.

  Jee-min knew that her sister had not run away. It was inconceivable that she would have made a decision like that without telling her. She also figured, rightly as it tu
rned out, that Soo-min had only just met this boy, Jae-hoon, and had not yet written to tell her about him, which she would have done in a long, intimate letter.

  Douglas was granted leave from Fort Belvoir, and made the grim journey to South Korea. For a month he enquired and searched. He combed the beaches of Baengnyeong Island, showing his daughter’s photograph to anyone who’d look, attracting stares, the tall black man in search of a lost daughter. He met the mother of Jae-hoon, who was as clueless and as distraught as he was. They held hands and cried and prayed together. “My son was a strong boy,” she said. She refused to accept that he had drowned. In the Itaewon District of Seoul she and Douglas handed out flyers printed with the pair’s photographs and searched the internet cafes and noraebang bars, where runaways went to find jobs. They met Inspector Ko, who gently told them that the simplest explanation was usually the right one. The abandoned possessions on the beach strongly suggested that the pair had got into difficulties while swimming. When Douglas returned home he was not the same.

  A profound emptiness descended on Jee-min’s parents. If a body had been discovered they could have mourned Soo-min and buried her. And maybe, in time, their grief would have eased a little. But their child vanished without trace, and this began to eat away at their hearts. Han changed from being a woman who knew everything to a woman who knew nothing. She had always had so much energy she could not sit still. Now she took sedatives and slept through the afternoons. One morning she walked out of the house and did not return until breakfast time the next day, by which time the police had been called. Her face was puffy and smirched and her clothes were dirty. When Jee-min asked her where she’d been she simply stared glassily. Douglas began to drink. Six months after Soo-min’s disappearance, he was discharged from the army.

  Jee-min missed her sister so acutely it was actually a physical pain. She and Soo-min had always moved in each other’s slipstreams, lived in each other’s warmth and light. Now she was alone in a cold headwind with no shelter. Emptiness did not begin to describe what she felt. And yet … Jee-min could not truly mourn her sister. Something inside her, a pilot light that wouldn’t go out, told her that Soo-min was alive. There had been so many times when the two of them had shared wordless understandings, moments of despair or joy communicated from a distance—not by a phone or letter but by some kind of genetic magnetism—and she felt her twin’s presence. As everyone around her began giving Soo-min up for dead she took comfort in the living power of this link, though she knew that facts and logic were against it. If Soo-min wasn’t dead, where had she gone? Why had she gone?