by D. B. John
During the meal Cho found himself discussing the banalities and practicalities of the visit, along with everyone else, each to conceal his enjoyment of the food, which was fresh and came in bountiful portions. By the time their empty plates had been cleared and they had accepted Pam’s recommendation of the strawberry cheesecake, followed by coffee, even Ambassador Shin seemed at peace with the world. When the check arrived he picked it up to pay, but Cho took it from him with an assured smile. A sense of pride and occasion came over him. He opened the Italian hand-stitched wallet with the crisp hundred-dollar bills, the gift Yong-ho had given him the day of the parade, and paid. He thought of presenting Pam with Anecdotes of Kim Il Sung’s Life, but changed his mind and left her a generous tip.
They stepped out onto the sidewalk to a cold, clear night. The city gave no sign of winding down. Streets buzzed with traffic and pedestrians. And lights—lights blazed everywhere, from the display windows of the shops, even though they were closed, and—Cho looked up—in every floor of the office tower opposite, though the workers had gone home. He rubbed his hands together, anticipating the adventure of walking the city block back to the hotel, when a middle-aged man with a thin moustache emerged from the restaurant in a hurry. His name tag said GONZALO. He had Cho’s money in his hand, and was holding what looked like a small scanning device with a blue light.
“Uh, sir? I’m the manager. Do you have another method of payment please? We believe these bills are counterfeits.”
13
Hyesan Train Station
Ryanggang Province, North Korea
The day was cold enough to freeze rice spirit but Mrs. Moon had never seen the market so busy. A power cut had closed both lines into Hyesan. Two trains were stranded in the station, and stranded trains meant stranded customers.
Her benches were rammed with diners, and a line of people waited to be seated. Steam rose, smoke drifted, chopsticks tap-tapped. Few spoke. Hot soup was slurped straight from the bowl. It was too cold to sit still. The sky was a sheet of platinum, and threatening snow.
Mrs. Moon’s money belt was thickening by the minute with grubby, tattered won. Her gas burner was turned up full; the four largest pans were simmering on the cooktop, and she was down to her last sack of charcoal. Curly and her daughter were serving, and Grandma Whiskey, whom she’d hired to help cook, was stirring an aromatic fish stew that was selling for three hundred won a bowl. The missing member of her team was Kyu.
“Serve the police first,” she murmured to Curly. She was worried there wouldn’t be enough.
A thin cheer went up in the station building, followed by a screech from the loudspeaker that made everyone cover their ears. The electricity was back.
At last she caught sight of Kyu. The boy was weaving his way between the mats and the line of customers, silent and stoic as a cat. He took a final drag of bingdu from his pipe, inhaling it to the deepest pockets of his lungs, and blew out a white plume in the direction of China.
“Not in front of my customers,” she said.
“We’ll need a second table soon,” he said, taking up his position on top of the rice sacks.
A horn beeped, causing a small commotion at the far end of the platform. An open-top police jeep was crawling toward the canteen, forcing the market traders to pull their mats out of the way. Mrs. Moon’s line of customers parted to let it through. Sergeant Jang got out and walked up to her kitchen area with a proprietorial air, nodding at the customers and rubbing his hands. Shovel-face began unloading the rice from the back of the jeep. It came in pale-blue burlap sacks printed the words UNITED NATIONS WORLD FOOD PROGRAM.
“Ajumma.” Sergeant Jang grinned, revealing good yellow teeth. “Your face is more warming than a bowl of hot mandu-guk.”
“What d’you want?”
“I wonder if you would pay me in yuan today …”
“You can give me five percent off for hard currency. The money changers charge me.”
She had not used the honorific terms his rank was due, but she was older than him, and she knew the rice he sold her was stolen Yankee tribute.
“If you say so.”
He scowled suddenly when he noticed Kyu, who had lit his pipe again, and beckoned to the boy with a flick of his fingers. Kyu passed him the pipe, which he wiped and put to his mouth, taking a deep drag. When he exhaled, Mrs. Moon noticed an unpleasant gleam come into his eyes.
“And, uh, another thing …” He leaned into her ear and she sensed trouble coming. “The Bowibu arrested four people on a train at Wiyeon Station this morning …” His voice fell to a whisper, “for possessing Bibles. Tiny bloody pocket Bibles, ajumma.” His breath carried a sweetish hint of alcohol. “I don’t want the Bowibu snooping around this station, terrifying everyone, any more than you do.” He looked at her meaningfully. “Someone is handing them out to passengers as they board trains. Let’s make sure no one’s doing that here.”
Mrs. Moon sighed. He was making her responsible. “I’ll warn the women. If they see anything you’ll be the first to know.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said, straightening up. “This is making the Bowibu ve-ery twitchy.” He made a creepy-crawly movement with his fingers. “They see spies and saboteurs everywhere they look …”
Mrs. Moon watched him go.
“What a cunt,” Kyu said.
Barely six weeks had gone by since the day Mrs. Moon had first set her mat on the platform and sold rice cakes, a nobody from the countryside who didn’t know the rules.
Her bribe of the hundreds of pairs of gloves and socks had taken care of matters with the county police. Not only was she let off the hook for deserting her work unit at the farm, but she’d made allies of the policemen. They’d done as she’d suggested and distributed the gloves and socks as free gifts to the villagers of Baekam County. Just as she had predicted, the initiative had won them the praise of the local Party, and promotions.
What had happened the day after that, when she had returned to the market, convinced her that her fortunes were flowing in a very good direction.
The women had gathered around her mat in a circle. Curly was among them, hiding the smile on her face with her hand. Whatever was coming, Mrs. Moon sensed that his was her idea.
“We invite you to join our cooperative,” said Mrs. Yang, who sold dried fish and batteries.
Mrs. Moon got up off the ground with difficulty and bowed to Mrs. Yang. She knew this was their thanks for saving Curly from the hands of that official during the previous night’s raid on the market, but she did not understand what was meant by cooperative, until Mrs. Kwon, who sold plastic toys and candies that had no sell-by date, explained that it was an informal club set up by the women to lend money if any of them needed to make an investment, or pay a bribe. Then they bowed deeply to her, and went back to their mats.
“The offer’s there, ajumma,” Curly said. “Take it.”
“What would I invest in?” Mrs. Moon said. “I’m not much of a trader.”
“You said you could cook.”
This got Mrs. Moon’s mind working. “It’s true … But the ingredients I’d want aren’t in Hyesan. I’d be offering the same noodle soup and bean-paste stew everyone serves.”
Again, Curly regarded her with that bright concentration. Her eyes were wide and clear, the slight cast in one of then giving her an attractive vulnerability. Her lips were the color of rose quartz and slightly open, forever on the verge of confiding something. Whatever the source of her contentment, she carried it in her heart, like heat inside the earth. The sunflower-yellow headscarf she wore suited her. Light shines from you, Mrs. Moon thought.
“What supplies do you need, ajumma? I will get them for you.”
Mrs. Moon smiled and pinched the young woman’s cheek. “Where would you get fresh beef, and good-quality pork? There’s nothing here.”
Curly’s voice fell to a whisper. “From China.”
Mrs. Moon’s smile vanished.
This was
when she learned that Curly had been to Changbai, on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, more than once. She had crossed at night, bribing border guards she knew at a certain narrow, wooded point of the riverbank near her house, and crept over the ice.
Mrs. Moon’s eyes popped wide open. “What were you doing in China?”
But to that question Curly said something vague and evasive about having business with Chinese merchants.
“And if you were caught?”
“I have protection,” she said coyly, and looked down.
At dawn the next day, Mrs. Moon scattered an offering of salt to the mountain spirits and gave thanks to her ancestors for blessing her with good fortune. A few stars still shone clear and frostily, but the comet in the west had gone. Whatever course of events it had foretold was now in motion. She felt sure of it. She had asked her parents in dreams what the comet had signified but they had answered in riddles and verses and she hadn’t understood.
A lamb goes uncomplaining forth …
“… the guilt of all men bearing,” she murmured as she stepped back into the house.
“Mm?” Tae-hyon stirred under the blanket and his leg twitched. “What are your bloody ancestors telling you now?”
Later that day she used a loan from the women’s cooperative to buy a new Chinese-made gas burner and two extra-large steel pans, a long, cast-iron tray for the charcoal, and a gridiron. Curly insisted on making the trip to fetch the supplies herself, refusing Mrs. Moon’s offer to hire smugglers. That evening she slipped across to Changbai in China, returning the next day with everything on Mrs. Moon’s list. White fish and scallops. Good-quality fresh pork and tenderloin beef that could be marinated and cut into thin strips. Ox bone. A dozen different spices. Refined sugar. Root ginger, ginseng, chili sauce, and—impossible to obtain in Hyesan in November—sweet, crisp lettuce. Everything else—the soybean paste, garlic, kimchi, and dried noodles—Mrs. Moon bought in the market. Rice she had to buy from the local racket controlled by the police. Finally she found a carpenter to make her a cheap pine table and two benches out of packing crates.
The day after that, as she’d watched the table being assembled, her nerves were wound so tight she was visiting the lavatory every ten minutes.
The vegetables had been peeled and chopped, the rice washed, and the meat marinated. She had an ample supply of charcoal. Curly and her daughter were on standby; Grandma Whiskey had her cleanest apron on, which wasn’t saying much. At 8:00 a.m. she fired up the gas burners and lit the charcoal. An hour later, Moon’s Korean Barbecue opened for business.
The day started slowly, with only a modest trade by midmorning, and worryingly few customers by midday. But something strange happened after that. Word of mouth spread from the station to the city square outside, as did the smells of grilling beef and sweet charcoal smoke and steam from two simmering pans, of fish stew and ox-bone soup, and by early afternoon her benches were almost full.
At midday the next day her benches were completely full, with a small line of customers waiting, a line that grew longer throughout the day, even when sparse snowflakes began floating like goose down.
By the end of her first week Moon’s Korean Barbeque was the talk of Hyesan. She had a permanent line of waiting customers that included city officials and their families. Customers were paying for their meals with won, yuan, euros, American dollars—the king of the black-market currencies, which Mrs. Moon had not seen before—and, occasionally, with Choco Pies. Soon she had multiple exchange rates at her fingertips. Bingdu she refused to accept as payment, although bingdu, she realized, was everywhere. The drug had become a currency.
Within two weeks she had paid back all the money borrowed from the cooperative. She had hired additional smugglers to obtain her supplies from Changbai, and she was asking the police to increase the supply of rice. From that point onward, she became the market’s unofficial head.
But success brought with it fresh worries. Party officials were breathing down her neck about trading rules that changed as often as the wind. And wherever she looked she saw a peeping grimy face—kotchebi, children so hungry they ate raw corn from the ground. She’d fed them once. Now they were a daily menace, swiping food and picking pockets. She needed protection.
That’s when she remembered the teenager who’d seemed so lost in the world when he’d tried to pay for rice cakes with a wrap of bingdu, all those weeks ago on her first day as a trader. When she described him—the insect-thin boy with a shaman’s eyes—the kids knew who she meant. He slept in a boarded-up bottling plant on the city outskirts. His name was Kyu.
In the crumbling factory she found him smoking bingdu with a gang of children who stank like rotten berries.
“Not safe here, ajumma,” he said, watching her from behind a veil of white mist.
“I’m offering you a job.” She covered her mouth and nose with her handkerchief. “And a bath.”
Fourteen years of age and short and stunted, Kyu had been abandoned in the market at the age of five by a mother who had gone to China in search of food. A street fighter with a cat’s sense for danger, he was a true kotchebi. When he wasn’t high on bingdu Mrs. Moon sensed in him a deep bitterness toward life. If he ever saw his mother again, he said, he would force her to watch him eat white rice. But he had no clear memory of what she looked like. Mrs. Moon understood his grief. She knew how it felt to reach out into the void for the ones she had lost. The memory of them was too painful for her to bear, though they visited her in dreams. Kyu, whom she’d taken under her wing as if she’d known him all her life, would be a grandson’s age.
Mrs. Moon fed Kyu all the food he could eat but she suspected he could have survived on love and affection alone. He became her protection, her lookout, her source of news. Nothing happened in the market without Kyu knowing. Over the following weeks his tiny body filled out, until he was strong enough to dominate the kotchebi. Any kids wanting to pickpocket or steal at Hyesan Train Station needed Kyu’s permission. Without permission, all they could do was beg.
When Sergeant Jang had reversed his jeep back along the platform it occurred to Mrs. Moon that if anyone knew who was handing out illegal Bibles, Kyu would. She was about to ask him when a surge of customers arrived, army cadets drawn by the aroma of sizzling bulgogi. The stranded train passengers were eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at her canteen, despite the cold. This had been her busiest, most profitable day. But by early evening the temperature had dropped further and the market was thinning out. She turned off the gas burner and gave the still-warm charcoal to the kotchebi.
The moon hung faint and silken like a spider’s egg. Just a few dim lamps had appeared in the windows of Hyesan’s houses, but the sky above Changbai on the Chinese side of the river glowed amber from so much streetlight and neon. She’d heard there were cities in China that hadn’t existed a year ago. Towers of glass that reached the clouds, they said.
The women were packing up. Mrs. Moon sat in front of the brazier with Kyu, warming herself before the journey home. She watched Kyu’s young, old-man face as he tipped white powder from a paper wrap into his pipe.
“Can’t you leave that stuff alone?”
The brazier crackled in tongues of flame that reflected in his smoked-glass eyes. He flicked his plastic lighter, held it under the bowl of the pipe, and took a deep drag. “Bingdu takes away pain … It takes away hunger and cold.” He offered the pipe to her.
She waved it away.
Just then a train horn sounded, so loud it split the air and echoed off the mountains. An instant tension swept through the station as people grabbed luggage and small children and dashed through the shadows toward the platform, shouting. The Hamhung train that had been sitting in the station all day was departing, and Mrs. Moon suddenly remembered her question.
“Who’s handing out Bibles?”
There was a din of banging train doors and a crackling announcement from the loudspeaker. In the sparse lights of the station, she could see fam
ilies gathering along the platform’s edge, waving good-bye.
The spectacle distracted her for a moment from Kyu, and when she turned back to him he was avoiding her eye.
“If you really want to know, ajumma …”
Passengers with contraband were being helped up onto the roof, where they wouldn’t be searched. A whistle rose, shrill and clear in the cold air, followed by the calls of well-wishers, and the train began to move very slowly, creaking its way out of the station. Hands and arms in the crowd on the platform were still passing packages of food and goods up to people in the open windows.
“… The answer’s in front of you.”
For a split second a blaze of sparks on the train’s overhead cables illuminated the whole scene as clearly as a flash photograph.
Mrs. Moon was feeling the cold deep in her bones now, and moved to get up. When she got to her feet she stopped and stood dead still. Without thinking, she looked in the direction of the platform, now in shadow again. She could not have said how, but some sense was making her react to something she’d just seen a moment ago. The scene lit by that flash of sparks persisted on her retina, its impact too vivid to wear off immediately.
One color amid the khakis and grays had stood out.
Sunflower yellow … In the crowd on the platform she’d seen a bright-yellow headscarf. A young woman passing a small package up to someone on the train … after it had started moving.
Her heart turned over in her chest.
*
The house lay at the end of a dirt street of low huts with corrugated iron fences. Dogs barked as Mrs. Moon passed each gate. An open drain glistened in the moonlight, flowing toward the river, which she could hear gurgling beneath the ice about a hundred yards away at the end of the street. She knocked on the front gate and listened. To her right was the path that ran along the river, the border itself, where guards patrolled in pairs. Dark trees reached out from the far bank. The river was so narrow here she could throw a pebble and it would land in China.