by D. B. John
The secretary of state gave an affronted laugh. “He really thinks he could take South Korea by force?”
“With banners flying. And my guess is that he’ll act soon. He’s ailing now and thinking of his place in history. That missile he’s going to point at LA is to make sure we don’t interfere. He knows the average American won’t risk a nuclear strike for the sake of a faraway peninsula.”
“Would he use it?”
It surprised Jenna to realize she had never imagined whether he would actually press the button, but she was in no doubt. “Yes.”
The secretary of state fell silent. She seemed to have dropped her public persona and Jenna thought she looked tired and diminished, the weight of the world’s cares upon her.
Eventually she said, “Do we have any options?”
“Doing nothing may be your only option,” Jenna said.
“Impossible. Congress’ll have me for breakfast.”
Fisk said, “A preemptive strike is out of the question. Seoul is only forty miles south of North Korea’s border. The retaliation against our ally would be horrific.”
The three of them were on their feet facing the windows, thinking. The mist on the Alps was now shot with shafts of light.
“There is one course of action,” Jenna said.
“I am all ears, Dr. Williams.” The secretary of state’s voice sounded jaded, cynical.
Jenna met her eye. “Kill Kim Jong-il.”
The secretary of state gave a guilty chuckle. “We’d never get near him.”
Thirty-six hours later, back in Washington and unable to sleep, her body still on Central European Time, Jenna called Fisk. If she waited until morning she feared she might change her mind.
At the end of the meeting in the hotel, when he’d walked her to the elevator, her mind was still thinking so deeply on what they’d discussed that she’d barely acknowledged his handshake when he’d said good-bye.
“I’m hoping you’ll reconsider my offer,” he’d said. “I could use your help. Urgently.”
She’d turned to face him just as the elevator doors were closing.
She had no clear or convincing reasons for her decision, but plenty against—she’d be walking out on her academic career, on her tenure at Georgetown, which she would never get back. But she felt that a door was being opened for her, and some deep and unformulated sense told her that it led to Soo-min.
Fisk’s phone went to voice mail.
In the stillness of her apartment her voice sounded small and calm.
“If you want me … I’m in.”
10
Hyesan
Ryanggang Province, North Korea
Years ago, in the days of the Great Leader, Mrs. Moon had been a cook. She’d roll her own noodles from buckwheat and make naengmyon—the tangy ice-cold broth with marinated pork and spicy mustard sauce. Her radish kimchi, fermented all summer in earthenware jars and flavored with ginger and garlic, was so tasty that even her mother-in-law, invalided on a mat and living in the family house, had felt compelled to praise it.
The Great Leader blessed them like the sun ripened the wheat. He was Father to them all, a prophet in whose presence flowers bloomed and snow melted. “Rice means socialism,” he told them, and through the years of bumper harvests and fields of flying red flags, his words seemed a self-evident truth.
But the Father died and the world changed. Power passed to the Son, the Dear Leader, and Mrs. Moon learned that hunger meant socialism, too. The ration system that had provided for everyone, twice a month like clockwork, became irregular, then broke down. The farm director called in the army to protect the grain store, and it was robbed by the very soldiers sent to guard it. Tae-hyon’s coal mine stopped paying wages. Production dwindled as the power cuts became more frequent, then stopped.
In the worst weeks not a kernel of maize was to be found in the village or in Hyesan, where the steel and lumber mills stopped puffing smoke and the streets fell silent during the day, filled with the dead and the walking dead, their minds hallucinating from hunger. Mrs. Moon trekked daily to the forest, though the skin hung from her arms and her joints were so painful it exhausted her even to lift one foot in front of the other. At these times her mind betrayed her, tormenting her with memories of long-ago dishes she’d cooked. A beef bulgogi sizzled to perfection. Steamed cockles served in a spicy yangnyeomjang sauce. When she became faint she would lie in the moss between the pines, calling to the spirits of her mother and father, and they would appear to her. Light shone through them, and their words were not in time with the moving of their mouths, but their voices were as clear as bells. They told her not to close her eyes; they told her not to fall asleep.
She learned which roots could be eaten and which made the tongue swell up. She added nettles and raspberry leaves to broth to make it look as if it had vegetables, and tiny snails to make it look as if it had meat. Noodles she boiled for an hour to make them seem larger. She mashed a paste out of acorns, sweetened it with saccharine, and molded it into small, bitter cakes.
The famine deepened, and her foraging was not enough. On the day she saw children in the village picking through ox shit in search of undigested seeds to eat, something inside her changed, permanently. All her life she had been decent and honest, but now she started stealing tools from the farm and selling them for a few cups of corn. She crept into neighbors’ yards at night, dug up their urns of fermenting kimchi, and ate it with Tae-hyon. She begged for grains from friends who themselves were starving. She saw hunger drive villagers insane. New graves were dug up and the corpses vanished. Parents took food from their own children. She was glad she had no longer had children to care for. It comforted her to tell herself that. It eased the pain of memory. Not a baby on her back, nor one running alongside her.
You don’t know yourself until you know hunger.
The Dear Leader felt his people’s agony and wept for them. “I am with you on this arduous march,” he told them. “Whosoever may endure these trials shall become a true revolutionary.” The television news showed him eating simple meals of potatoes, in solidarity with the people’s plight, but to Mrs. Moon’s eyes the wealth of his belly looked greater than ever. At the entrance to the village a new slogan appeared on a long red placard.
If you survive a thousand miles of suffering,
you shall receive ten thousand miles of joy!
Mrs. Moon read it and knew it was goatshit. She looked up at the colored-glass mural of the Dear Leader standing in a field of golden wheat and made a vow to herself there and then. I will never again count on you for anything. If famine returned, she would be ready.
The villagers began to shirk their work whenever they had something to bribe their workplace director. They grew potatoes and runner beans on the hardscrabble lots behind their houses, and foraged in the forest for mushrooms and berries. Mrs. Moon trailed pumpkin vines over her roof, and hoarded lentils and rice in jars. She grew garlic and onions behind her house. At harvest time she slept under the stars to guard her crop. Her trust in the system was gone. Those kindly souls who’d put others before themselves had been the first to starve to death. The Dear Leader had done nothing to help them. As hundreds of thousands died with grass in their mouths, the food-shortage problem had simply solved itself.
She decided to make rice cakes, something simple to see how things went on her first day. She sweetened them with syrup, rounded them into moist, gelatinous balls, and placed a blueberry and an almond on top of each. Arranged like flowers in her nickel bowl, she covered them with a cloth. She prepared in silence, by the light of the wind-up flashlight from the balloon. She was about to leave the house when a key rattled in her door and it opened. Two officials wearing white gloves were on the doorstep. Comrade Pak was with them, holding a large ring with several dozen keys hanging from it.
From long habit Mrs. Moon assumed an expression of cheerful optimism. “Don’t wake my husband,” she whispered.
The two officials we
nt to the Father-Son portraits on the wall, took them down, and ran their gloves over the glass and the frames, then held them at an angle to the light, searching for any motes of dust. She cleaned them every day—even in the rainy season, when spots of mold could creep under the glass, they sparkled—but she always watched this inspection with apprehension. The men hung them back on the wall with extreme care, and nodded to her. As they were leaving one of them saw the wind-up flashlight on the table.
Goatshit.
He stared at it for a moment, and went outside. To her horror he was speaking into Comrade Pak’s ear. The woman’s face hardened, then she entered the house without removing her boots. She picked up the flashlight with two fingers, as if it were something rotten. Now Mrs. Moon remembered that the words MADE IN SOUTH KOREA were printed on it, and felt her heart flip over in her chest.
“Where d’you get this, citizen?” The woman’s voice was flat but her eyes held a glint of real malice.
“In Hyesan,” she lied. “Please don’t drop it. I swapped a half kilo of mushrooms for that.”
The woman regarded her with cold suspicion, and left.
Curse that woman and all her ancestors!
Mrs. Moon rushed to catch the truck into Hyesan. The wind off the Paektu Mountains was cold enough to stop hearts, but she felt herself sweating freely. Why hadn’t she offered the old bitch a bribe? No, too dangerous. She could tell when people were agreeable to a little encouragement and when they weren’t. As the truck lurched and bumped out of the village, she felt fear swelling in her gut like a tumor.
The hands of the station clock stood at 9:00 a.m. The Great Leader’s face smiled with fatherly love on the crowds arriving to catch the morning trains. A hail of static announced a departure for Musan.
The sky was a stark blue with a stinging chill in it. At the cheaper end of the market, just beneath the iron bridge, Mrs. Moon saw the same dozen women squatting behind their mats. Two or three were keeping food hot with tiny smoking heaters made from paint tins. Customers were already milling about, picking up a hot snack for breakfast. The loudspeaker was blaring out an army chorus to a background crunch of marching feet.
Mrs. Moon cast her eyes about for the sunflower-yellow headscarf of the young woman who’d bought the Choco Pies—Curly, wasn’t that her nickname?—and was surprised when the woman herself spotted her first and greeted her warmly. “A lovely morning, ajumma.” Over her coat she wore an apron printed with colorful flowers, and had tucked her curls into her headscarf with a hair clip. She seemed to radiate warmth, some inner contentment that made her stand out from all the other women, who were much older, and muffled grubbily against the cold.
“Who do I pay to rent a spot?” Mrs. Moon said.
Curly laughed. “He’ll find you, don’t worry.”
But as Mrs. Moon put her bowl down and bent painfully to her knees to sit on the concrete platform, she sensed the other women watching her with unwelcoming eyes. When she was as comfortable as she could get sitting on her straw mat she filled her lungs and joined the women’s calls.
“Tteok sassayo!” Come and buy rice cakes.
Almost at once a soldier in a long green coat was pulling his buddy by the sleeve toward Mrs. Moon’s mat. “Two,” he said.
“Fifty won each,” she said, placing the cakes in a wrap of newspaper. The soldiers seemed very young—rough types with hard brown faces and rifles slung across their backs. They pushed some filthy notes into her hand and walked away.
“Very nice, ajumma,” one of them called back with his mouth full.
Mrs. Moon looked at the notes in her palm. They hadn’t given her enough. The women were still watching.
“Find another spot tomorrow,” a voice said next to her. “We don’t want them thinking they can get away with that here.” Her neighbor on the sidewalk was a grandmother wrapped in so many layers that only a yellowish nose protruded. Her mat was arranged with bottles of Chinese whiskey and a pyramid of home-rolled cigarettes.
What a grim bunch these women were. They sold dried herbs or bags of tiny fried fish, or batteries and plastic toys, or silver disks that she knew were illegal from the way they were whisked from hiding places beneath mats. But even these tough old birds creased into a smile when Curly spoke to them. That woman was a ray of pure sunshine. When she wasn’t helping in the canteen, she had her own mat selling dumplings. Her daughter, a girl of about twelve, sat with her, guarding the takings.
At lunchtime Mrs. Moon experienced her first real test. Customers clustered like bees around the mats, and she was slow in counting out change—“Come on, ajumma, do we look like we’re at the seaside?”—but she soon made an interesting discovery. She could sell.
“Tteok sassayo!”
Customers seemed to warm to her and stopped to chat. I must have an honest face, she thought. But to her dismay this only seemed to deepen her isolation among the women. By midafternoon she’d tried several times to break the ice with offers to guard their wares while they went on errands, or provide change when they’d run out, yet still they kept their voices low around her. A cordon of mistrust had been cast around her, and she could guess why. She didn’t blame them. Even the gentlest neighbor could turn out to be a Bowibu informer.
The crowd swelled again with the arrival of a train from Hamhung that was four days late. A reek of oil and soldered steel filled the air. Mrs. Moon watched a line of tiny Pioneers in red neckerchiefs following their teacher. Now and then she spotted women who appeared out of nowhere when the station was crowded, and behaved oddly, weaving through the throng, or loitering in corners and flashing a smile at single men. Mrs. Moon averted her eyes and did not judge. During the famine, even village girls had done that. The figures that frightened her were the older teenage boys. Some were hoodlums, hanging about the market in sullen packs, but others staggered lethargically with gaunt faces, bumping into people, or gazing at things that weren’t there. Or they lay propped against walls, muttering, with faces that seemed caught between ecstasy and despair.
It was later afternoon when the police came for her.
There were two of them, wearing the caps of the Ministry of People’s Security. When they stopped in front of her mat she bowed her head almost to the ground. Again, the women were watching.
The younger one had a loutish grin and a plain, flat face, like a shovel; the other, whom she later learned was called Sergeant Jang, was the senior and seemed to know all the women by name. He might have been good looking once and still thought he was.
“Are you a Hyesan resident?” he said.
“Baekam County, sir,” she said, keeping her voice low.
She sensed everyone around her sit up. The younger one stopped grinning.
“You have a permit to leave Baekam County?” the senior officer said.
“Yes, sir.”
She handed him her ID passbook. The travel permit approved by the farm director had cost her a bottle of corn liquor, and the man’s scowl had made it clear to her that she’d have to come up a better bribe better next time.
The sergeant examined the ID passbook, turning each page, and Mrs. Moon felt her stomach sink. Don’t ask me in front of these women why I’m a worker on—
“The October 18th Collective Farm!” he said, raising his eyebrows.
She felt her face burn.
He crouched down so that he was at eye level and looked at her, but with more curiosity than menace. “What was your crime, eh?”
Mrs. Moon stared at her mat.
“All right, ajumma,” he said, getting up. He tossed the passbook into her lap. “Two thousand won a week for your spot. Pay me at the end of the day.”
After they’d gone, she sensed the women around her relax very slightly. Something in what had just taken place seemed to have resolved some fear they had about her. They began meeting her eye when she looked at them.
By the end of the day the sky was turning a deep orange and a bone-chilling northerly was sweeping down from
Manchuria, whirling up eddies of coal dust in the corners of the station. Yet still the crowds stood about in the shadows of the unlit platforms, waiting for trains that ran to no timetable. On the clock tower an electric light came on over the Great Leader’s face.
Across the market the blue beams of pencil flashlights danced across goods and money. Mrs. Moon had sold all but three of her rice cakes, and rolled up her mat. Her fingers were numb with cold and her knees swollen and painful. In her apron were takings totaling more than two thousand won. She wanted to feel buoyed by her first day’s success, but her failure to make friends troubled her. Curly was the only one who’d spoken to her.
Unable to resist a peek at the money, she opened her pocket a fraction and began counting the notes with the tips of her fingers.
A shadow fell across her.
One of the teenage boys was standing right over her, blocking her light. She recoiled as if he were a wild pig, and pulled her coat together over her apron pocket.
“They said you have the nicest rice cakes,” he said softly. The light of a passing lamp illuminated his face only for a second. His eyes weren’t focusing, and his mouth was missing teeth. He was insect thin, with pale fingers that looked as if they were made from coral.
He seemed so lost and forlorn that Mrs. Moon’s heart softened. “Here,” she said, giving him her last rice cakes in newspaper.
He smiled and she saw how young he was. “I can pay with this,” he said, revealing a square of folded paper in his palm, the size of a postage stamp.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“Bingdu,” he said simply.
Mrs. Moon stared at him without understanding. “Go,” she said.
The boy took the food and ran away.
A rasping noise erupted next to her. It took her a moment to realize that Grandma Whiskey, on the neighboring mat, was laughing.
“You idiot,” she said through a phlegmy cackle. “The kid’s lost his mind on that stuff. One wrap of bingdu will buy a twenty-kilo bag of rice.” The laugh brought on a liquid cough. Mrs. Moon closed her eyes as the woman hacked up a gob of mucus and blew it onto the concrete.