by Fiona Maazel
50. The river was frozen, and the crossing a skeleton race at half speed, chest pressed to the ice. I met no guards, just Chul-min, who’d sat behind a bush for the three-hour window in which he’d been told I would come. From there we went to a farmhouse just a mile east of the train station at Simch’ong-ni. Then: Hoeryong to Musan to Hyesan to Kanggye to Pyongyang. Three hundred eighty miles. A six-hour drive by car, six days via North Korean rail.
51. There’s a reason most people never see anything of North Korea but Pyongyang. It’s because the rest of the country is squalid beyond all imagining, and this to spite the homogeneity of its design: single-story homes in a grid, whitewashed timber or stucco walls, the rooftops an orange clay tile, and every plot squared in with a brindled picket fence. There is no cement to pave the roads and no shoes to walk the cement, so mostly people are barefoot, even in the snow. The filth seems meticulous and prolific in its outreach—even the soap can’t stay clean— which makes sense of the delimited color scheme of people’s clothes: black, gray, black, brown. No one stands out unless you know what to look for. The border towns are crammed with smugglers and People’s Security Force officers not sharp enough to serve in Pyongyang, and all are engaged in one illegal activity or another—trucking in contraband like PCs or just stealing fertilizer from a truck—and with one motive in mind: to stay alive. For this reason, strangers are unwelcome. I spent that first day in a janitor’s closet at the train station. Fuel being scarce, the schedule was a joke. A train came when it came. By the tracks: people asleep on the ice, in wheelbarrows, playing cards, trading nylon for corn, which cost a lot of corn. Faces wan and tapered, and everyone’s hair falling out. Amazing how hair and dust always find each other; the stuff blew across the tracks like briar.
52. You couldn’t travel without a permit. Mine was forged, and so when a train finally did arrive, I boarded the caboose and sat in the back. Two boys tried to freeload but were tossed by a female guard so shrill, two other kids gave up the con before she even got there. In North Korea, arrest and gulag are redress for most any crime, but often it depends on who’s watching.
The train was four cars, three of which looked Korean and one that was slightly larger, probably imported from Romania twenty years ago. I doubt it had been serviced since, and for the shrieks issued from the engine, the chassis, God knew, I didn’t think we’d get far. I wore a wool hat, pulled low, and stared through the window, past the black rime cleaved to the pane and at the countryside that could probably walk itself to Pyongyang faster than us.
53. The track skirts the Yalu and cuts into the base of one mountain range after another. My viewing options were this: the relatively prosperous towns on the Chinese side—Tumen looks like Six Flags at night—or the wasted and unrelentingly depressed landscape of North Korea on the other. I passed the hours undisturbed until we stalled just outside Hoeryong, next to a fishery qua morgue because there’d been no electricity to recycle or purify the water or just no money for food. Either way, the fish were dead and suffusing the air with a vapor so pungent it made everyone weep. My nose ran; my lungs threw up whatever came down, which became a problem since the one thing a prosthetic face cannot sustain is tears. I deboarded the train and fell in line with several women headed to a factory down a gravel road paved in snow. It was 5 a.m. Maybe they’d get an hour’s worth of electricity today and make a sock. I covered my mouth with a scarf and tried not to breathe; the effluent was ammonia and methane, though no one else seemed to care.
54. I was about to sever from the group when one of the women had the same idea. She had a look I’d seen before. It said: Soon I will be dead. The others did not argue, didn’t even break stride. But the one who trailed had come to a stop, pitched left, right, and, when neither direction appealed, straight down. She wore black sweats and a thin parka, a shawl round her head, and slip-on sneakers. Nothing fit; this was not clothing so much as coverage. But it was still worth money, so that when she called me over it was to ask if I’d buy it off her in bulk. She was at least seventy years old; she’d fit in my carry-on luggage.
I looked around. It was still dark, and anyone not at work would not be coming. She sat in the snow and began to undress. It was December, freezing, and her jacket seemed to unzip one tooth at a time for how slow she went. I risked speech and said, “What makes you think I have money? Get up,” and since I could hear the generators kick on at the factory, I said, “There’s work.”
She smiled, but even the black before dawn had nothing on what opened up from inside this woman. She was dying; she was ready. And there was nothing unusual about it. Every day, millions of lives were resolved in this horrible place in the same way.
“I have a daughter,” she said, and she took off her sneakers, which she held out to me. “Three thousand won.” A month’s salary. “Just give it to her. I know you won’t steal. I can tell you have a child, too.”
I wanted this dialogue to end, but I couldn’t leave her in the snow. I tried to help her up. No chance. It was as though the end of her life had consolidated in her body, given her heft and presence. I took the sneakers, sat down. Probably she had roundworm. The skin of her face was almost brittle, her eyes punched deep into her skull, but I still thought she could make it.
But no. She simply lay down in the snow. And when I bent over to check her pulse, she said, “Foreigners are not liked in this country. If it’s really worth it, get who you came for and run.”
55. I got my new face at the inn. And another at Hyesan, which I passed through unbothered, though I might have preferred bother to the kind of fear I’d begun to experience the closer I got to Pyongyang. The kind that molests the confidence of a heart called up from the minor leagues.
Next: a few hours in Kanggye, home to Plant 26, where many of the country’s nuclear aspirations are pursued underground.
Finally: Pyongyang. For the ride in, I’d upgraded my face and clothes to reflect the outsized prosperity of the city’s demographic, at least compared to the north. I wore leather pumps, which cost six months’ salary at the jangmadang, and notably false eyelashes, because augmentations of beauty meant wealth. Ah, irony: I was a Western woman wanting to look like a Korean who wanted to look Western.
56. We rolled in at noon to music pumped from loudspeakers at a square nearby. I think it was the anthem “No Motherland Without You,” in which one hundred men chorus Kim Jong-il’s glory to mesmerizing effect. With the trumpets, horns, voice of the people risen up as one, I left the station all in favor of the socialist state, too. The majesty of this place was undeniable—the giant courtyards, monuments, imperial architecture—and dwarfing of whatever private aspirations you woke up to. I bowed to the wind and headed south, toward the river. The music trailed off. We cannot live without you, Kim Jongil. Our country cannot exist without you. The people believe in you. It was a festive time to be in Pyongyang, close to the New Year, when the city dolls up. No power for most of the night, but plenty to train footlights on Kim Il-sung, whose likeness was cloned in statues across the country. A big guy, Kim Il-sung, or so the statues would have you believe. The chest is pumped; the gut is jut.
I moved on. Most roads are too wide to traverse if there’s traffic, which there never is, but still, you have to underpass your way across town. The city is almost as built underground as over. The metro is but a quarter of the action down there. Bunkers, escape routes, and residencies for when the shit hits—at 350 feet below ground, you can build most anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if the architecture under Cincinnati once looked to the North for inspiration.
57. Martin was waiting for me near the Chungsong Bridge, on a park bench by the water. We were conspicuous for being outside in this weather, but inconspicuous for the same reason: No one trying to hide would present themselves thus. Martin was too tall to make like a Korean, so we’d agreed on Russian Here for Business. We couldn’t talk for more than three minutes in the open, just enough time to discuss where he’d set up shop. He said I was l
ate. He said he needed eight hours for our Glorious General Who Descended from Heaven face. I said we had six. He said Kim Jong-il was the hardest face we’d ever done. I said we had six, let’s go.
58. We reconvened in a café near the hotel district where foreigners are a common sight. The proprietress showed me to the basement without comment; she might have been more surprised if we’d sat down and ordered lunch. Martin had his gear arranged on a blanket. For light we had a kerosene lamp plus dapple from a window that gave us the shoe view from above. He sat me on the floor. Glorious General Kim Jong-il has four look-alikes in his employ, probably more. Some have had plastic surgery; others were just born with it. I had Martin. Martin plus six hours plus the high handicap of having to impersonate an impersonator, sartor resartus, which took the pressure off. Or so you’d think.
He said, “It’s Popsicles down here—how can you be sweating?” Nonplussed Martin. Swabbing my cheeks. “My fingers are numb. These conditions are terrible.”
“Get some tea.”
He snorted. “I don’t think we paid her to serve us.” Though, judging from the contraband all over the basement—like that aerial wasn’t snatching broadcast news from Seoul every night—the lady of the place did business of all kinds. “Just relax,” he said. “We’ve done this a thousand times.” He applied powder. Blew on my skin.
“Seriously,” he said. “Whatever it is, shut it down. I can’t work like this. You need to stop sweating.”
And what could I say? Was I supposed to tell him that, after all this, it seemed possible I might not be able to breathe in the shared car space of my ex-husband?
59. Eyes closed. And when they open, it is to a handheld mirror, eye level. Hello, I say. Greetings. I am sixty-three. I am five-two without the platform shoes I’ve never been seen without. I am rotund. My hairline has withdrawn midway up my skull; it hopes to reach the summit by 2012, Year of the Perfect Strong and Prosperous Nation. I wear girly glasses, but I am a man at heart. I like women who take off their clothes for money, and ravioli with pumpkin filling. My favorite garment is the anorak; my favorite color is brown. I am mysterious and unreachable, North Korea cannot live without me, and just now I am about to meet a gentleman from the United States who will tell me about the Helix and its plans to bring our people together. We will drive around Pyongyang. And a few hours later, when I ask about his family, he will say things about his wife and child with a subtext of longing whose content is the loneliness we’re born into and cannot shake, but so what, so what, so what. It is the wife who matters now. The wife and child, nothing else. And for this information, I will begin to rethink my life.
60. So now it’s on record: How dangerous is Thurlow Dan? Not so much. When he was in North Korea, all he did was tour the city with his sweetheart in disguise.
The chairman wiped his brow. It was getting on 4 p.m., the sleepiest time of day. He thought if this were Spain or Israel or any country more attuned to the circadian needs of the body, he could at least recess for a siesta. But no. They would carry on until the very Western hour of 5 p.m., the happy hour. The hour a chairman returns to his wife and her cause du jour—the weeding of our SWAT and HRT personnel for those with jiffy finger: boys who don’t think, just shoot. Was there any chance the hostages got sniped and no one was telling him? Doubtful. His private theory? The four detained by Thurlow Dan were dispersed throughout the country, having escaped the Helix House hours before it blew and wanting, horribly, to escape everything else. The chairman understood. Were he not accountable to the people for answers, he might even have wished them luck. Either way, those stories would out.
VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.
VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.
Anne-Janet, the set should reflect the times.
All things considered, this wasn’t so bad. A cot in the Helix House. A chance. An emotional context for events that might never transpire elsewhere, events called kissing and touch. Anne-Janet planning it out; Ned was her target. Anne-Janet taking the reins because she had survived cancer and incest and was not about to be cowed by a dark place in a dark time.
“You okay?” she whispered, and she put out her hand, which he couldn’t see or did not take.
Not cowed, but maybe a little discouraged. And unhelped by the warfare in her head. Half going: Kudos for exploiting alone time with a guy you like, AJ! Half going: Um, in the hours since being kidnapped, you have done nothing but augment an attraction that was already burlesque, and some ideas any sane person would dismiss. Among them: if you were kidnapped with a guy you liked, mutual duress was supposed to hasten the intimacy between you. Forget the barter of secrets and memories in the afterglow of sex, forget the dating and twaddle and rollback of your defensive line until you either had to love this person or kill yourself. Forget the prelude, just head straight for what your heart needed, which was a place to go when you were scared and lonely and, in this case, detained in a cult leader’s house in the suburbs of Cincinnati.
Right? Wrong. And Anne-Janet wasn’t stupid. She had not forgone self-doubt. She could never forgo self-doubt, since amid the miscellaneous fallout of being a victim was the constant suspicion that your feelings were nuts. If you’d fallen prey to the world’s incapacity to bring people together but were thinking only of how to get kissed by Ned Hammerstein, it was likely your priorities were askew. And if the task of releasing your lips from a burlap hood and clamping them around his hard-on was more pressing than escaping environs that might be your last, you were, arguably, a crackpot.
It was getting late. Three or four a.m. Their wrists were still cuffed behind their backs. They had each been assigned a bed, two on either side of an opaque screen that partitioned the room and was bolted to the walls. Presumably this was to guard against rebellion in numbers and to ensure the four could not see each other, though Anne-Janet thought the precaution redundant, since they’d already been given hoods. In any case, it didn’t work. On their first night they’d tried to band together. What the hell was happening to them? There were expletives and incredulity and sentences that fell off the ledge (But—What the—Why in God’s name—). They felt, in the main, duped by the arm of government known as the Department of the Interior and, worst of all, lacking the means to recompense themselves for the wrong done them. But that was as far as their shared feelings went. While the others groused, Anne-Janet had the sad thought that the kidnapping would not do for her what it would likely do for them, which was to make inconsequential, even silly, all the bewilderments and crises that had obsessed their lives to date. Quite the opposite. She had experienced such hardship that this check on her perspective only confirmed how dreadful it all had been. The others were panicked, she was calm, and in this calm managed to foreclose on just one more way to feel a part of the group.
Well, to hell with the group. She might have been paired with Olgo or Bruce, but the guards had chosen Ned and in this was a call to action. Even the layout of the cots was a call to action. That, or it was just having to sleep in a cot at all, but the arrangement invoked for her the bedtime dogma of summer camp and, in tow, feelings you tended to experience more acutely at camp, the bleating heart and onus to complete rites of passage before the summer was out. Anne-Janet was so behind on everything that the rites were as looming and fearsome as they were for girls half her age, and probably, for being so deferred, they were worse.
“Ned,” she said. “You awake?”
“Like anyone could sleep in this nightmare.”
“Want to talk?”
“What’s there to say? This isn’t happening.”
“I dunno. You could ask me about me. Pass
the time. Chitchat.”
No sooner said than she rolled her eyes to China. Half her head going: Good one, AJ! The other yelling: Crackpot! She’d already told Ned about her mother and the hip, and, from what she could gather at work, everyone knew about her cancer because on her second day, a hospital renowned for strides in oncology but not discretion had called every extension on the floor looking for her.
The cancer had happened so fast. One second she was just bloated; the next she was having a colorectal neoplasm excised by a doctor who said she was lucky to get away without a colostomy, because there’s always that chance, and what young lady wanted her colon popped out her small intestine? She was irradiated. Poisoned. The skin of her hands and feet turned horse hoof. Her cancer was on the move, her cancer was in retreat. Move, retreat. Stage three. It was hard to imagine herself into next week, and for this shortsightedness she wanted the payoff. A reconfigured mental state. To live without fear. Go out on a limb. Do drugs whose effect you cannot predict, have sex with people you do not know. Surely this was someone’s idea of fun—why not hers? The months went by without a recurrence. And since she had done nothing to inch out on that limb, the rest was easy. Did she want to go to Cincinnati and share a hotel room with one Ned Hammerstein, on whom she had a crush? Absolutely. Because the refurbished mental state and drugs and edgy lifestyle were all fine and well, but what Anne-Janet really wanted before she left this life was intercourse. Intercourse with a man who liked her and might even look at her the way they did in the movies and who, if she had to say it, was not related to her in any way.