by D. B. John
Cho remembered. “He sent you a letter of thanks signed in his own hand …” The whole family had gathered round to read it, glowing with pride and shaking Yong-ho’s shoulder. “It was delivered with a box of oranges …”
“… And a DVD player and a warm blanket.”
Cho’s face was agog. Then he began laughing silently. “That’s what you got for giving him twenty-five million dollars?”
Yong-ho nodded.
“In cash?”
Yong-ho began to chuckle, too. Suddenly they were both laughing so hard the car shook. They laughed until their cheeks were streaked with tears, and they had aches in their bellies.
After that they retreated into their own thoughts as the city began to stir. The sky was lightening to a deep purple, and drifts of clouds near the horizon were catching fire. A bright, cold day beckoned.
Cho felt dazed with wonder and disgust. He was smiling, he realized—a would-you-fucking-believe-it kind of smile, as if he’d been duped in the most extraordinary scam. Kim Jong-il was running a mafia racket and using the rocket program to hold the world to ransom. He, Cho, was part of a tiny elite bought off with trinkets, while the rest of the population, about whom, now he thought about it, he had only the haziest idea, labored in obscurity … Who were the masses? Not the rosy-cheeked workers and farmers on state television. Suddenly he had the sensation of a vast cloth of painted scenery splitting and tearing, and behind it millions of souls twisting in agony. He’d seen them—from his car window on the occasions he’d left Pyongyang. Stick figures, breaking rocks in distant fields or doubled over planting rice saplings. Old ajummas at filthy roadside markets. Children with large heads and swollen stomachs.
He felt his mouth fill with saliva.
Yong-ho looked at him then turned his head away, as if he’d read his thoughts. He seemed to be mulling over something, hesitating. “What I’m about to tell you, younger brother, is known to very few …”
With a sudden premonition, Cho knew. The abductions.
Yong-ho flicked his cigarette out of the window and watched it trail orange sparks. “Our Leader said that if we were to know our enemies, we had to get into their minds. He called it ‘localization.’ Most of the victims, as you know, were snatched from Japan and South Korea.
“Well, the program was a failure. We got some useful information out of them—how our enemies spoke, their slang, their capitalist customs, and all that, but it wasn’t worth the effort. And of the hundreds we brought here, only a few were successfully reconditioned.”
“Successfully what?”
“Turned into spies and sent back to their home countries. Even the youngest ones had such strong memories of their lives at home that almost all of them resisted our teachings. That left us with the problem of what to do with them. We couldn’t just let them go. So the decision was taken to make them disappear—some in accidents, others to the camps.”
“But …” Cho’s face buckled, horrified. “The Leader acknowledged the kidnappings. I was there when he apologized to the Japanese prime minister. The victims were repatriated.”
“Five of them were.” He looked at Cho meaningfully. “Five. The Japanese never found out how many we’d brought here. The families of most of them thought they were dead or missing and have never even guessed they were here.”
The saliva in Cho’s mouth tasted bilious, his tongue like something bloated and rotten. He wanted to change the subject. “The program ended.”
Yong-ho shook his head. “The abductions ended … but the Localization Program didn’t. In fact it got more ambitious.” He gave Cho a tentative look that said Sure you want to know? “We began sending female spies abroad to entrap men of other non-Korean races.”
Cho didn’t understand. “Entrap?”
“Become pregnant by them, and give birth to their babies here in Pyongyang. At the same time we enticed non-Korean men here—men with white, black, or brown skin to get certain Korean women pregnant.”
“What?”
“This was our Leader’s solution to the failure of localization, which he renamed the Seed-Bearing Program. We’re creating spies and assassins who look foreign—some have blue eyes and blond hair—but who have been brought up learning nothing but the Juche teachings of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.”
Cho’s gasp was a half laugh, as if someone were trying to tell him the sun went round the earth and not vice versa, or that reality was a figment in the dream of a chimpanzee.
“But I’ve never seen anyone of any other race living here as a Kor—”
Cho stopped. A synapse in his mind was connecting, relating what Yong-ho was telling him with …
The bile was rising in his stomach.
“You won’t see them,” Yong-ho said simply. “They live in a secret compound, which they never leave, a short drive north of Pyongyang. Their training and all their needs are provided for by Section 915 of the Organization and Guidance Department. The eldest of them are in their late teens now and almost ready for active service abroad. The Leader has visited them many times. They’ve been encouraged to look upon him as their father. He brings them treats and gifts—”
The pressure in his stomach spiked. Cho wound the window down and gulped in the freezing air.
“You’ve gone white, younger brother—”
He threw open the door, staggered, part-run, part-skip, toward the nearest pine, and vomited in wrenching, agonizing heaves.
After a minute he stood upright, leaning his forehead against the rough bark, watching an arc of mucus hang from his mouth, glistening in the moonlight, and wondered if it would freeze before his eyes. The air smelled of pine needles and his mind was now strangely clear. He looked back toward the car. A light flared amber as Yong-ho lit another cigarette, and the synapse in Cho’s memory connected.
She was taken. Twelve years ago. From a beach in South Korea.
His brother’s voice was muffled. “Get back here before you freeze.”
Cho got in and closed the door. “What about women of other races?”
“Mm?”
“You said men of other races were enticed here, for this … Seed-Bearing Program. What about women of other races?”
Yong-ho shrugged distractedly. “It’s possible …” His humor had drained away with the last of the soju and his face was desolate. “So what’re we going to do, little brother?” He exhaled and leaned his head against the window. “I guess it’s the soldier’s way out for me.” He mimed the two fingers of a revolver pointed to the back of his mouth and made a click with his tongue.
Cho let several minutes go by. The first trolley bus was heading down Chilsongmun Street, trailing sparks from the overhead cable. On the river a coal barge cleaved its wake on the slow-moving water, turning mother-of-pearl in the gathering light. On the far side of the city Power Station Number One was puffing a column of pink smoke high into the sky, and beyond it the first row of hills was materializing in the haze, then the row behind, and, very faintly, the farthest row.
“No, elder brother,” Cho said, turning the key in the ignition. The powerful engine engaged softly. “We’re going to escape.”
28
Hyesan Train Station
Ryanggang Province, North Korea
The women were subdued as they laid out their goods. Like Mrs. Moon, they probably hadn’t slept. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The market was waking to a dead-clear stillness. An air of mourning hung over the station, and the mood throughout the city streets was fear. Mrs. Yang, Mrs. Kwon, and Grandma Whiskey distracted themselves by making a plan for Sun-i: the girl would be smuggled over the river after dark to stay with distant relatives of Mrs. Yang’s in Changbai.
Mrs. Moon sat absently on her rice sacks, staring into space. Her mind lingered somewhere between nightmare and the realm of the spirits. Anything her eyes fell upon—a fence post, a headscarf, a uniform—suddenly arranged themselves in a crooked way in her mind and she’d see
Curly’s body tied to the stake.
Tae-hyon had begged her to stay at home in the village for a few days, and not go near Hyesan. But hiding would change nothing. In trying to save Curly, a condemned criminal, she had made herself known to the Bowibu. She was a marked woman now.
Kyu was assembling the table. She should be starting the cooking but she was unable to perform the simplest task. Sergeant Jang dropped by asking for bingdu. She gave him five grams without even trying to extract a favor in return.
She looked down the empty aisle toward the station building. The executions had made everyone lie low.
A group of youths from the Maintenance of Social Order Brigade was clearing the beggars from the station platform. She watched them kick an aged woman who got stiffly to her feet. They kicked again to make her move away. She’d left behind a tin cup and they kicked that, too, sending it clattering across the platform. It was a scene Mrs. Moon had witnessed many times, but this time it fascinated her. She could not take her eyes off the woman, who had difficulty walking and whose hair was matted and dirty, or the stony-faced youths in their red armbands. From deep in her stomach she felt a rage kindle and rise. It blazed brightly for a moment, then died, and her mood darkened even further. She lived in an upside-down world where good was evil and evil was good. It made no sense, but she knew it wasn’t right.
A lamb goes uncomplaining forth …
She barely reacted when one of the policemen came to tell her she was ordered to present herself at the local police station at 5:00 p.m. In the wake of the executions, she learned, a team of Bowibu special investigators had arrived in the city to root out factionalists and subversive elements.
Her name was on a list.
Moon’s Korean Barbeque did not open that day. With Kyu’s help she sold her gas burner and all her stock. She used the money to buy a new Chinese refrigerator that she would offer to the head of the investigation team to have her name removed from the list. They could accept it or shoot her. It was all the same to her. She had nothing left.
29
The “Forbidden City,” Compound of the Workers’ Party Elite
Joong-gu District
Pyongyang, North Korea
Cho arrived back at the apartment minutes before his wife and Books woke up. He had not slept in two days and had eaten little, but anger and terror were mixing in his veins like fuel and oxidizer in a rocket thruster.
His mind was sparking with the escape plan he and Yong-ho had begun to hatch in the car. They had agreed to talk again tonight.
He showered and dressed in a clean white shirt, his fingers trembling as he did up the buttons.
How, except with the most affected charade, was he going to make it through his day at work? He was debriefing the First Deputy Minister at ten and would spend the rest of the day reporting on the meetings with the Yankees.
Much of the plan depended on Yong-ho: this morning he would send an urgent commission for two Chinese passports for himself and for Cho, containing forged visas for Taiwan and Macao. Yong-ho could do this without arousing suspicion—Bureau 39 regularly procured false travel documents. For money they would use the hundred-dollar supernotes. If, for any reason, these counterfeits were detected and they were unable to use them once they’d reached China, then—and this made the hairs on Cho’s neck stand on end—Yong-ho would access the Kim family’s secret accounts at the Banco Delta Asia in Macao, where he had regularly made deposits and withdrawals on the Leader’s behalf.
How much time did they have? It was impossible to know for sure, but as Cho’s mind raced he realized that fortune might have thrown them a slender chance. The Leader departed today on an official visit to Beijing by train—Cho himself had organized the logistics with the Guard Command. The great man would return to Pyongyang in forty-eight hours, and Cho’s instinct—from years of second-guessing that mind—was that he would defer passing sentence on such a sensitive case until the journey home.
They had less than forty-eight hours to escape the country.
Yong-ho traveled regularly on Bureau 39 business. With luck it was not too late for him to escape Pyongyang tomorrow by air, but Cho could not simply ask for a plane ticket. He would somehow have to make his own way north and slip across the Yalu River into China. Once in China he would use his forged passport to rendezvous with Yong-ho in Taiwan. From there they would seek asylum in the West. Yong-ho had ruled out South Korea. Too many Bowibu spies and assassins had infiltrated the South, he said. Without heavy security, the two of them would be tracked down and killed within weeks.
Making his own way north to the border with China was only the first of Cho’s worries. How was he going take his wife and son? Using what documents?
How was he even going to tell them?
There was no possible way of obtaining passports for all of them without giving the game away. And he had never even been to the border. Its mountains were known to him only from legend, the “white hell” where the Great Leader had defeated the Japanese. Even if he could reach there by train, a journey that could last days on the creaking rail network, he had no idea how or where he would get his family over the river. He knew that people crept across in the dead of night, but he had no contacts there, no brokers who could help.
Panic surged through him, making his legs turn to paper. He felt like a man fleeing a monster in a nightmare. Every scenario he envisaged extrapolated to catastrophe. In desperation he realized that the only sure way to save his wife was if she stayed behind. She could claim she had been deceived by a criminal element, and would be believed. Her own status, as the daughter of a Heroic Family, would protect her.
But his son …
He smoothed the tension from his face, put on the jacket of his uniform, and, smiling broadly, he entered the kitchen.
“Good morning,” his wife said, giving him a sideways glance as she laid out the breakfast. “You’re as pale as a fish.”
Cho couldn’t open his mouth. He felt if he opened his mouth he’d fall apart. He picked up his tea and saw the tremor in the liquid’s surface. He got up again and excused himself. He locked himself in the bathroom and tried to think, think, but no idea came to him. He leaned his forehead to the cool surface of the mirror and began to mutter softly so that his breath steamed the glass, muttering to whom, he didn’t know, but if the spirits of his ancestors could help him, they should help him now.
It was at that moment that he heard Books’s voice in the kitchen saying he didn’t want his kimchi because it burned his throat. Cho pressed his ear to the bathroom door. His wife was murmuring something about swollen glands and a slight temperature. And then: “I think you’d better stay home from school today.”
Cho wiped his face, stilled his breathing, and walked back into the kitchen. As casually as he could, he said, “I’ll take him to the doctor, just to be sure.”
Five minutes later he had strapped Books into the passenger seat of the new Mercedes and was driving to the University Medical Hospital in Tonghung-dong, where he figured the staff were less well paid than those at the special hospital for cadres’ families. It was still early—plenty of time for him to get to work.
They were directed to a dim waiting room that stank of bleach, and sat on plastic chairs. Books took out a picture puzzle and leaned his head against Cho’s shoulder. Eventually a young female nurse with a white headscarf asked them to come to a consulting room. Cho held Books’s hand and carried his heavy briefcase in the other. The room was small. There were half a dozen kerosene lamps grouped on the floor for when the power failed. She sat him down, asked the boy his name, put a thermometer in his mouth, felt his throat.
“He’ll be fine.” She smiled at Cho. “It’s a mild viral infection.”
Cho’s words were deliberate and cold. “I want to see the most senior physician here.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said, surprised. “He’ll feel better—
“Do as I say …” He adopted the manner
of a high Party official being provoked. “… or you’ll be mopping floors in a dysentery ward.”
She flushed scarlet and left.
His son looked at Cho wide eyed. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, no,” Cho said, squeezing his hand and trying to keep his voice steady.
Panic again. Fight it.
A minute later, a tall, gray-haired man in a clean white coat entered. His face was deeply lined and his eyes had a hardened pragmatism. “I’m Dr. Baek,” he said gruffly.
Cho stood. “I’m concerned about the swelling in my son’s throat.”
The doctor listened to the boy’s heartbeat with a stethoscope, looked inside his mouth, and he, too, felt the glands in the throat. Then Cho said to the boy, “Wait next to the car.”
Twenty minutes later Cho jumped back into the driver’s seat and fastened his seat belt. In his briefcase was a letter typed on the hospital’s letterhead stating Dr. Baek’s professional opinion that the cause of the throat swelling could not be determined and recommending an urgent examination at the specialist unit of the Women and Children’s Hospital in Dandong, where an appointment for tomorrow was at this moment being made. It had cost Cho a thousand euros and two bottles of Hennessy Black cognac.
His mind was speeding on automatic. If he lost focus, even for a second, he feared his nerve would fail and his body shut down. And then he’d be alone, like a prisoner in a cell, with the question he could not answer.
How can I abandon my wife?
He checked the car’s speed and slowed down, feeling panic again. Traffic police were on duty at every intersection.