The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  We reached the place where the boats were rented, a wooden pier down the bank to the left. There was a queue at the ticket office, which she joined, and I quickened my pace and joined it behind her, clutching my sheaf of won, because a French lover does not allow his lady friend to pay for herself. She ignored me and when she reached the counter she opened a white embroidered purse the size of a lady’s clutch bag, took out a banknote and exchanged it for a pair of tickets. Without looking at me she walked along the path and down the steep bank to the river where the empty boats were moored. Before boarding, shoes and socks had to be removed and handed in at a small wooden hut in exchange for a ticket; boating could only be done barefoot. I forgot to mention that the bank was teeming with people, those who planned to row and some who were happy to watch since the boats were unstable, frequently capsizing as I had seen the previous week when Francis Lemarque had tipped his boatmate into a deep stretch of river, where he floundered, yelling, ‘The camera! The camera!’ (The camera was saved in the nick of time.) When we finally climbed aboard before hundreds of incredulous eyes – there was no way for us to avoid being seen together now – I admired her courage, and I was beset by a single, obsessive thought: ‘Don’t capsize.’ The tall, strapping chubby-cheeked men in dark overalls who helped us aboard and handed me the oars seemed less than friendly, but I moved off impeccably and, as I did so, I noticed what had not previously occurred to me: our bare toes and the soles of our feet were now touching and could communicate.

  I rowed vigorously towards the middle of the river, extricating myself with some difficulty from the mass of lazy, circling boats. Had I not been terrified by the thousand staring faces and the certainty that we would capsize, I would have launched myself at that mouth, those thighs, those breasts, those eyes, but first I had to complete phase one of my plan: to float downriver, out of the city and into the countryside. I left the other boats upstream, having gauged the speed of the current and expecting to move downstream quickly. An inhuman howl erupted from behind me and I saw fear in my beloved’s eyes: she could see what I could only hear – ‘Tonmou!’ A single strangled ‘Tonmou!’, and the boat could no longer be manoeuvred, an iron hand had gripped the bow and was attempting to turn it back upstream. There could be no question of going any further. I had crossed some invisible barrier, attempted to escape a high-security area. The guard in his boat monitored everything. Farewell, countryside! But I do not give up easily. Again I began to row, against the current this time, fully expecting another ‘Tonmou!’ to halt my progress at any moment. I rowed through the well-ordered circle of the other boats – ‘They’re going round in circles,’ I said to myself, ‘they’re going round in circles’ – to me the circle seemed the very image of prison, the convict endlessly circling the prison yard, his cell, cut off from his plans, from his future. It was not long before my worst fears were confirmed. ‘Tonmou!’ The second shout was even more thunderous than the first. The warder upstream had obviously witnessed my attempted escape downstream, had watched me turn and prepared himself to capture me. He did not have to grab the bow; with a brusque sweep of my oar, I turned around and let the boat float until we melted into the crowd of boats – she trembling at the vehemence of the prohibition, I realizing and cursing the extent of my naïveté – rowing around in circles with everyone else while I tried to think.

  All of a sudden I noticed, in the middle of the river, close to yet outside the circle, a sand bar I had overlooked in my initial impetuousness. Gradually widening the circumference as I rowed, I allowed the boat to drift towards it until it ran aground, the bow wedged firmly in the sand. The language of entwined toes, of looks and shrugs and sighs was no longer enough. I took out the notebooks and pencils I had brought and, chatting all the while to her in French as much to dupe any rowers who came close enough as to spur myself on, I sketched a crude map of the Korean peninsula with a line through the centre representing the 38th parallel – in fact, I wrote 38 next to it. With a large black dot I indicated Pyongyang, saying ‘Pyongyang’ aloud and gesturing broadly around us. With another black dot on the far side of the line, I marked Seoul. Since I hadn’t understood her sudden transformation, her make-up, her hair, her dress, I suspected, as I’ve said, that maybe hailing from South Korea she had kept some of its customs. With the pencil I pointed to Seoul on the sheet of paper, my finger pointing at her. Her feet arched violently, almost in protest, against mine. She took my map and drew a larger map that extended as far as the Yalu River on the border with China. She made a black dot close to the river. Then she drew a house and pointed to herself, and sketched fighter squadrons dropping bombs in the sky above the house. She glanced around quickly, to ensure that no one in the other boats could see what she was about to do, then she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a pair of high, firm, tanned breasts and, beneath her left breast, a deep, terrible burn scar that slashed across her torso, and uttered one word in Korean, a word that is universal: napalm. This ghostly slash, this apparition, immediately vanished as she began to do up her blouse. Terrified, overwhelmed, frozen like a statue by the situation, I suddenly found myself swearing undying love like a chivalric knight, promising to take her suffering upon myself and find the Holy Grail. But chivalrous though it might be, the love I felt for her was not platonic and I did not have time for a lengthy courtship; my carnal desires had not abated, I wanted to hold her, to kiss her, I wanted to possess her and be possessed by her. On the pad, in a crude complicated sketch she nonetheless understood, I drew the route from the Taedonggang Hotel across the metal bridge to the hospital where she worked via the streets I had mentally photographed on my first night when Ok and I had taken Gatti there. She smiled, seeming surprised at my precise knowledge of the city. Though I did not have any coloured pencils, I traced a cross over the hospital, touching my finger to her lipstick to indicate ‘red’. I then drew a room with a bed and two people entwined on it and reinforced this childish signifier with a more adult one, my arms embracing the empty air beneath the eager gaze of other rowers who, without our noticing, had begun to crowd round us. She laughed openly, took the notepad and drew another room, longer and narrower, with twenty beds in it and a shelf above each bed: a dormitory. It was hopeless. Where could I be alone with her? Here she was, willing, within my grasp, yet out of reach, the textbook definition of the torment of Tantalus.

  Then I remembered a park we had been taken to visit at the beginning of our stay, a park famous in Pyongyang and throughout all of North Korea, since it had a theatre carved out 100 metres underground, where plays had been staged at the height of the bombing raids to galvanize the audience. This was Juche at its acme. I was not able to challenge Gatti – in his plaster cast – to race me up the 350 steps that led outside, but I challenged myself, only to stop halfway, exhausted and out of breath. I thought I remembered that the park had bushes, trees and benches.

  Whatever the case, we had to move, it was pointless to stay beached here. She, like me, realized it was time to go. I rowed gently, calmly, back to the jetty above which, along the steep embankment, hundreds of pairs of eyes all stared at us with the same lack of kindness. I drew alongside perfectly. She got to her feet; the men in overalls did not offer her a hand, she stumbled, slipped, tried to right herself and, suddenly, inexorably, the boat capsized just as Francis’s had the week before. The turbid water was at least four metres deep and, when she did not surface but carried on sinking, I dived as hard as I could, managing to catch hold of her and bring her to the surface. Now people offered to help, but I could see she was panicked, staring at the water, distressed, her little white handbag gone. I dived back in and, by some miracle, spotted something white against the mud. I rescued the bag, gave it to her and saw a fleeting flicker of pleasure in her distraught face. We were hustled, dripping wet, into the hut with the shoes where she collapsed and lay, motionless as though dead. I knew I had to do something, that action was our only salvation. I raised her up, gripping her hard to show her there was no way o
ut, that I was in charge and that I did not care what the Koreans thought. I dragged her, literally, up the embankment between the double row of staring faces, back to the towpath by which we had come. Just then, a military vehicle appeared, driving slowly, and she spoke to the driver, probably asking for a lift; he stared, spat at us contemptuously and drove off.

  I did not feel able to walk back the way we had come, censured by the singing brigades, and I chose the craziest solution, but one that would afford us privacy: we would walk through the rubble of the ruined city back to my hotel. So began a long march, me pulling her along when she refused, climbing over mountains of rubble, hills of stones, stumbling down slopes of gravel and scree, our clothes sodden and white with dust, our faces pale as pierrots, her beautiful hair a mess. There were falls, injuries, trickles of blood on chalk-white shins and thighs. It was long, exhausting, demoralizing, but we did not encounter anyone, my sense of direction was good and we reached the avenue. It was still early on that sweltering Sunday afternoon, there were few people about. I let go of her hand and walked on ahead, turning back more and more often as we approached the hotel. Then, what I expected happened: she stopped dead and, like a mule, refused to take another step. I went back to her, aware how much we looked like clowns. People were stopping to stare at us as I talked to her in my gentlest, most persuasive voice, carefully articulating the French words as though she might somehow read my lips. We were about a hundred metres from the hotel. I managed to convey to her I was going to investigate, that she should wait, that I would be right back. By some miracle the lobby, usually patrolled by the whispering men in caps, was completely deserted, as was the sweeping central staircase up to the landing where it split into two flights leading to the first floor. My room was on the second floor. I rapidly sized up the situation and went back to where she stood, frozen, her eyes vacant. I took her hand, almost wrenching it from its socket until finally she followed me. As soon as we reached the lobby, I let go and made a dash for the stairs, turning back on the landing to make sure she was behind me. I thought that by some extraordinary stroke of luck we had made it when two thunderous roars of ‘Tonmou!’ rooted us, each to a different stair. The shouts came from the porter’s glass lodge, which I had mistakenly assumed was empty. She stopped, resigned to the worst, and walked back towards the lodge where I saw her attempting to placate the furious porter who was already on the phone. I rushed down the last few steps, dashed towards the lodge, shouting abuse in French and waving my fist at the dumbfounded doorman. Then I did something the like of which no one had ever seen in the Taedonggang Hotel. Anger having given me the strength of ten – though my panic and the shots of B12 may have had something to do with it – I swept my petrified princess into my muscular arms, carried her to the second floor, opened the door to my room, locked it behind us, turned on the light in the bathroom, ran the shower, took from my suitcase some of the shirts I had tried to give her that morning, together with a pair of lightweight trousers, and handed them to her, taking her ruined handbag to dry it on the windowsill. Then I left her on her own in the bathroom.

  I had barely had time to recover my breath and my composure when I heard footsteps in the corridor and a knock at my door. I threw it open: there was Ok, and behind him the rest of our group back from the picnic, inquisitive, mocking, jealous; the caps followed behind, one by one, more and more of them, appearing from everywhere, like rats summoned by the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In a loud voice, I recounted my tall tale: I had gone for a walk by the river to the jetty we had seen the previous week where, completely by chance, I had encountered my nurse and asked her to go for a boat trip with me; my unforgivable clumsiness had capsized the boat and I had brought her back to the hotel through the ruins because she was so ashamed of the state she was in. At this point in my story – which clearly no one believed – she suddenly stepped out of the bathroom, an unforgettable apparition, an Asian version of a Botticelli Venus, my shirt knotted above her bellybutton, the new pair of trousers, which suited her perfectly, turned up at the ankles because they were too long. I asked Ok to repeat my hastily invented story to the caps. She had to hear it if we were to get our stories straight. He did as I asked. But there was nothing to be done, the caps escorted my beloved and Ok to an office upstairs. It was a trial. I took a shower, gradually making myself human again, marshalling every ounce of courage because I knew I would have serious need of it. The other members of the delegation had gone back to their rooms, I was the only person in the corridor, hesitating as to whether to await the outcome of the trial or intervene. It went on and on, seemingly never-ending.

  I brutally intervened, throwing open the office door to find it really was a trial: she was sitting next to Ok on one side of a long table, facing twelve judges lined up on the other side. I interrupted the session with a solemn, measured political statement, asking Ok to translate each of my words for the caps. What was happening here, I said, would force me to revise everything I had thought about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, would undermine the opinion I had formed during the course of my trip about this proud nation, this heroic people, the prodigious achievements they had made thanks to Juche, which I promised to report faithfully to Western Europe in my articles. But perhaps the word ‘democratic’ in describing the regime was going too far; at the very least, what I was now witnessing gave me pause for thought. Ok translated and I waited until he had finished each sentence before continuing. I then repeated in detail my account of how I had met the nurse, whose name I did not even know, my friendly, innocent suggestion that we go boating as a way of thanking her for the excellent care she had given me. If anyone was guilty here, it could only be me, and yet I could not see what my crime, or hers, or ours, might be; why a leisurely boat trip on the Taedong should justify this tribunal with its sinister overtones. I was far from convinced that the Great Leader, who had invited me and whose breadth of vision and diplomatic skill I had witnessed at first hand, would approve of such behaviour. Since I was a guest in this country, surely the customs of my country should prevail? In France, when a man wrongs a member of the opposite sex, even inadvertently, he makes amends. This I now intended to do, by taking the young woman back to the hospital where she worked, stopping by my room to pick up her shoes and her handbag, which I hoped would be dry by now, and her clothes, which I would parcel up.

  Hardly had Ok translated my last word than I took the nurse by the hand. She meekly followed me, we went back to my room leaving the door open, then we calmly walked down the stairs past caps who, to the shock of the other members of the delegation alerted I know not how, fell into step behind us. When we reached the street I turned towards the bridge, still holding her hand, which I squeezed tightly, trying to communicate impossible feelings. After about a hundred metres, she suddenly steered me left towards a new building of about a dozen storeys with a narrow spiral staircase. She led the way and we slowly climbed the steep stairs; at every landing I leaned over the banister and saw the men in caps silently following us with the same inexorable tread. On the eighth floor, she stopped and knocked on a door: a woman immediately answered, at which she turned to me and by a desperate look implored me to leave her. I waited for a moment in the doorway, watching the caps who, having come to a halt, now looked like herons perched on one leg. Then, with a heavy and wounded heart, I headed back to the hotel.

  Over dinner, as we were enjoying our last ‘Soup of the Mountain Gods’, which I found unbearably aphrodisiacal, Ok told me the name of the woman: Kim – not Il-sung, but Kum-sun – Kim Kum-sun. I asked Ok to write out her name in Korean characters, telling him I wanted to leave her a note, apologizing again. In fact, I was afraid that, through my fault, she would now be caught up in an endless spiral of problems with potentially severe consequences. I felt wretched and cut myself off completely, I did not speak to anyone and no one dared ask me about my day or question my version of events. I was due to leave Pyongyang with Chris only two days later for Shenyang, formerly
Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, the immense province in northern China. It would be a long train journey, part of it along the Trans-Siberian railway. That night I barely slept: the thought of leaving without seeing her again, after such a disaster, such a romantic fiasco, was abhorrent and made me despise the undiluted Communist totalitarianism that I was now experiencing. I could not bear the thought that she should suffer on my account. And though ours had been only a brief encounter, I loved her, I would have loved her, an infinity of possibilities lay before us. I was distraught, spending the whole night fomenting wild, meticulous detailed plans to see her again. That is how I am, it is difficult to make me give up. During my years in the Resistance I had learned several techniques to avoid being shadowed, I resolved I would use them to visit her the following day, I would not leave without holding her in my arms again. I would shake off the caps, outsmart anyone who tried to tail me.

  The following day at about noon, I arrived at Pyongyang central hospital without having taken a single wrong turn, or hesitating for even a moment. I went inside and found myself in a long corridor full of stretchers, I heard whimpers and moans. I spotted an elderly woman with an air of authority wearing a white coat with a stethoscope around her neck, clearly a doctor. I showed her the piece of paper on which Ok had written Kim Kum-sun’s name and asked her, in English, where I might find her. She did not seem surprised, did not ask any questions, but simply pointed to a door nearby. I knocked, opened the door, and saw her with two other nurses grouped around a patient whose bloody hand they were bandaging. All three of them were wearing the national costume, the smock and the braids she had worn the first times I had seen her. She looked up, rushed towards me, taking my hand and dragging me into the courtyard where, in a small alcove, she embraced me with a fierceness I reciprocated: we picked up the wild kiss we had begun the day before, tongues wrestling, mouths crushed together, panting for breath, our time together even more threatened. Now it was she who pushed me away, holding me at arms’ length, gazing at me passionately, desperately, before heading back to the building where she worked without turning back.