by Martin Limon
“And this double life,” I asked, “being considered a hero but not really being one, does it bother him?”
Doc Yong nodded slowly. “Yes. He owes everything to Bandit Lee and the Manchurian Battalion. That is why he helps us. That is why he is risking his life.”
“Is that the only reason?” I asked.
“And also,” she said, “because he faces a great shame.” She paused. I waited. “In North Korea, even a hero, or the family of a hero, is not immune from the avarice of the Great Leader and the legions of party cadres who serve him. Hero Kang’s daughter was systematically brainwashed like all the other young women who grow up in this country.”
“Brainwashed?”
“Taught to believe the Joy Brigade is a place of honor when it is a place of shame.”
When my senses returned, the referee was guiding me back toward the center of the floor. Hero Kang looked worried. The soldiers on either side of the gym were standing in the bleachers, pointing and laughing. All their lives, the government and the schools taught them to hate foreigners—especially Americans and the Japanese—but for entertainment purposes, any foreigner would do. I spotted Senior Captain Rhee, her arms still crossed and a look of disgust on her face. The experts of the First Corps all stood in a line, smirking and shaking their heads.
Fifth-degree black-belt Pak glanced up into the stands at Commissar Oh. The Commissar languidly removed his cigarette and nodded. Pak looked back at me, smiling. It was the cold smile of a predator. I turned to Hero Kang. His fists were clenched, his face puffed in a spasm of anguish. Pak was about to take me out. Kang knew it, Pak knew it, everyone in the stadium knew it. Senior Captain Rhee motioned for her security men to move in closer. Hero Kang and I would be arrested and tortured.
The referee waved us together. Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It had nothing to do with the rules of this tournament, nothing to do with the martial spirit of Taekwondo, but everything to do with survival. If I could survive one kick, I would be able to take it from there.
Almost casually, Pak stepped forward, his back straight, not even crouching in the fighting position most often assumed by practitioners of the martial arts. He didn’t need to. His kicks came out so fast he was confident I couldn’t stop them. I was confident of the same thing. But stopping them wasn’t my goal. I hopped forward. Pak launched a circular front kick that swiped my forehead. It didn’t hurt me, but I pretended to stagger. The crowd was hooting. Pak followed. I backed up but stood my ground. Pak launched a vicious round kick to my midsection, which I partially blocked with my forearms, but still it forced me to bend forward. That’s when I lunged. He countered with two more roundhouses to my head and my shoulders and for a second I thought I’d black out. Somehow I fought away the darkness until I could see his eyes staring straight into mine. He wasn’t worried. As soon as we clinched, the referee—according to the rules of Taekwondo and the rules of propriety—would break us apart. We would pause for a second, the referee would wave us together, and then Pak could resume his assault.
As the referee stepped forward to break us from our clinch, I remembered the sheriff’s deputies at the Main Street Gym. I remembered them coaching me to keep my left jab straight. “Don’t get fancy,” they’d tell me. “Just reach out straight, like you’re reaching for an apple.” While Pak was standing there—dropping his guard, backing up, complying with the referee’s orders—I let him have it with a left jab. His head snapped back. My right followed.
Before fifth-level black-belt Pak hit the ground, he was out cold.
The referee screamed in outrage, shoving his arms in front of me. The men of the First Corps howled in anger and rushed toward me. Hero Kang shoved me from behind and I lost my footing, falling under a sea of rushing bodies. There were punches and kicks from every direction and I heard Hero Kang cursing above me. Out of the pile, a foot swung toward my head and suddenly everything went blank.
When I came to, I was lying facedown on stone.
I expected to hear the wet splash of the sponge and feel the cool dribble of soap on my skin, but instead all I felt was cold. A terrible cold. I tried to raise my head. A spasm of pain ran down my back. I controlled it and lifted my head as high as I could. The room was dark, no steam, no masseuse hovering nearby. There was only the sound of clanging metal far away and occasional distant voices. Flickering rays of light filtered through a high aperture. I studied the stone beneath me. It wasn’t stone at all. It was brick. I lifted myself to my feet, but before I could stand fully my head hit the roof. I shuffled toward the light and peered through a small barred window that I only now realized was part of a thick wooden door. The brick hallways outside were long and silent and empty.
Prison.
I took inventory of myself. I was only wearing jockey shorts and a soiled T-shirt, and suddenly I realized I was shivering, my teeth chattering from the cold. The cell was only a few steps across in either direction, and the only appurtenances were a metal bucket and a wood-slat bench made of ancient lumber, splintered and filthy.
Still, it was better than the floor.
I sat on the bench, crouched forward, wondering what had gone wrong with Hero Kang’s plans. I remembered the rage in people’s eyes, their desire to kill me. No wonder they’d thrown me in here. Maybe they’d done me a favor. It was better than being torn limb from limb by an angry mob. Sort of.
I thought of the torture in my future. Would they tie my wrists behind my back and hang me from the rafters, popping my shoulders out of joint? Would they turn me upside down and pour water up my nose? Or would they just practice their Taekwondo on me for hours at a time?
How long would I be able to withstand it?
Not long, I decided.
Whether or not my cover story would stand up to scrutiny depended on how well it had been prepared by the Manchurian Battalion. I tried to think of a fallback cover story, in case the Romanian one fell apart. Some way to convince the North Korean interrogators that I wasn’t an American spy.
Offhand, I couldn’t think of one.
6
The wooden door swung open. Startled, I sat up on the bench.
A guard entered, armed only with a billy club. Two other guards stood behind him, one with a Russian-made pistol strapped to his waist.
“Charyo!” the guard said. Attention!
I stood as best I could, but I had to keep my head bowed because of the low ceiling. Candlelight from the hallway cast a dim glow into my cell.
The guards stood aside and a small man in a military uniform entered the cell. I recognized him immediately—the man in charge of the Taekwondo tournament, Commissar Oh. He was smoking furiously, as if to dispel whatever odor this room might have, an odor I could no longer notice. He wore a loose cape and smoked from an ivory cigarette holder. He had the darting eyes of a fashion designer on opening night in Paris.
“Naimsei na!” he said, wrinkling his nose and glancing toward the bucket in the corner.
One of the guards hustled forward, grabbed the bucket, and carried it out of the tiny cell. With the offending filth removed, Commissar Oh looked me up and down. His eyes lingered on my crotch, as if he were fascinated by something. I decided not to flinch, nor to look downward to see what he was looking at. If my fly was open, so be it.
Finally, he looked back at my face and said something in Russian.
I stared at him blankly.
He exhaled in exasperation. Then he started speaking in Korean. “What are you, stupid? A Warsaw Pact officer and you don’t speak Russian. What the hell good are you?”
I continued to stare at him blankly, pretending that I didn’t understand, keeping the muscles in my face immobile so they wouldn’t betray me.
He puffed on his cigarette, squinting behind rising smoke. “Maybe I ought to chop you in pieces,” he said, still speaking in Korean, “and sell your rotten foreign flesh to a hog farm.”
A couple of the guards murmured in assent.
Commissar Oh
glanced back at them angrily. “No one wants your opinion.”
They lowered their heads and became quiet.
“You embarrassed us today,” he continued, “attacking our First Corps champion like that, knocking him down. With trickery! You couldn’t have done that within the rules.”
He paced to his left, studying me as if I were indeed a lump of flesh he was planning on carving. I tried not to respond in any way. Stoic, like the war hero I was supposed to be.
How good was the cover story Hero Kang had constructed for me? Had Commissar Oh checked me out with the Foreign Ministry? Was he still convinced I was a Romanian officer? If they’d had any inkling that I was an American spy, they would have already been feeding me to a hog farm.
“What to do with you?” Commissar Oh said. “I can’t just let you go without punishment; it would be like covering our face with shit. You must make amends to our Great Leader.” He stared at me, waiting for a response. When he didn’t get one, he said, “You’ll have to pay for your crime somehow. And dearly.” He puffed mightily on the last of his cigarette until the filter glowed. “Foreigners. Always a problem.”
He tossed the butt on the ground and stomped it flat. He swiveled on his high-heeled leather boots and stalked out of the cell.
“Punish him!” he shouted to the guards. “Make him understand that he’s nothing but a miserable foreign beast. Less than human. Make him cry and kneel and praise the Great Leader.” Then he stopped, pointing his finger at the lead guard. “But don’t kill him.”
The guard nodded. When the door closed, I was left alone.
Nervously, I sat back down on the bench.
Ten minutes later, the guards returned, bearing straps and chains and the same bucket they’d removed from my cell, still sloshing with filth.
It seemed like years, but I knew that only two or three hours had passed since Commissar Oh had left my cell. Every part of my body hurt and I could still feel the filthy water clinging like slime to my sinus cavities and the back of my mouth. In the middle of the water torture, I’d lost all sense of pride. It was too much. When you can’t breathe, nothing is sweeter than the thought of air, of just being allowed the luxury of inhaling and exhaling. Finally, I blurted out in English, “No more!”
The guards who were torturing me were uneducated men and knew nothing of the language of their archenemy, America. Luckily for me. They probably assumed I was speaking Romanian. When I realized they weren’t going to stop, I shocked them by speaking Korean.
“Let me talk to Commissar Oh,” I told them.
By the way they stepped back and their eyes widened, you would’ve thought that an ape had just opened its mouth and recited a passage from Kim Il-sung’s Juche philosophy.
The good part was they stopped torturing me. Someone was sent to fetch Commissar Oh. They kept me shackled but allowed me to hobble over to the splintered wooden bench. I collapsed and, luxuriating in the sweet air entering and exiting my lungs, soon fell asleep.
Commissar Oh’s face loomed above me. I realized that his hand was on my belly and my stomach muscles clenched. I sat up, almost bumping foreheads with him. All the guards had disappeared.
“You wanted to speak to me?” he said in Korean.
I nodded. “I lied to you,” I said, hanging my head, as if ashamed. “I didn’t want you to know. I thought it might give me some sort of advantage, but the truth is that I’ve been studying Korean. A little. But I don’t speak well.”
Commissar Oh puffed on his cigarette, forcing a small gray cloud to rise in front of his eyes. “I can understand you well enough,” he said.
“I apologize for punching the First Corps champion. I was wrong. He was too good for me. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Commissar Oh continued to puff and nod. “You’ve been lying to me,” he said. “Not letting us know you speak our language. Where did you learn?”
“Here. Since I’ve arrived.” I let my head droop, in total submission. That part, I wasn’t faking.
“Repentance,” he said, “isn’t good enough.”
“What?”
I pretended not to understand the word.
“Saying you’re sorry,” he repeated. “That’s not good enough. You must prostrate yourself before the Great Leader, publicly. You must admit your crimes. And then you must make amends.”
Amends? What sort of amends? But I didn’t ask out loud.
“I will arrange it,” he said, “but it won’t be easy.” New energy came into his voice. “You must show your loyalty to the Great Leader with actions, not just words.”
I dared to gaze up at him. “What sort of actions?”
“You’re a military man,” he said. “You must have some information on military equipment, supplies, that sort of thing.” The ember of his cigarette flamed more brightly. “The Warsaw Pact consumes much of the weapons and material our socialist comrades in the Soviet Union so generously supply. Certainly you can find out what’s budgeted for in your next five-year plan. It would help if we knew so we could adjust our own internal production accordingly.”
The Soviet Union bleeds its own people to churn out military equipment in a mad attempt to keep up with the massive military-industrial complex of the United States. It also provides tanks and guns and ammunition to the Warsaw Pact countries in Europe and in North Korea. There’s competition for the military aid. If North Korea knew how much had been committed to the Warsaw Pact, it would help in their negotiations with the top brass in the Kremlin.
Commissar Oh wanted to turn me into his personal spy.
I stared out the barred window of my cell into the bleak hallway. Impatient guards farther down the corridor shuffled their boots and murmured. I glanced at the half-empty bucket of filth sitting in the corner and wanted to give in immediately to all of Commissar Oh’s demands. Instead, I fought the urge. I bargained.
“I want to be paid in dollars,” I said.
Oh stared at me from behind the glowing ember of his cigarette.
“There’s no pay. You must work out of loyalty to the Great Leader. Otherwise, I could keep you here forever.”
“My embassy would find out.”
He shrugged. “What could they do?”
“I want money,” I said, putting as much stubbornness into my voice as I could. “Then I will work for you.”
Commissar Oh lowered his almost-finished cigarette and flicked the burning tip onto the brick floor. It sizzled for a second and flamed out.
“Only after we confirm your information to be genuine,” he said. “Then we will pay yen, not dollars.”
Japanese currency would be good enough. “Yes,” I replied, “but I want some money up front.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Commissar Oh barked a laugh. Then his face hardened. “First, before you receive any money, you will prostrate yourself before the Great Leader. You will beg his forgiveness. You will ask him to cleanse you of your foreign ways and enlighten you in the path of his shining leadership. Do you understand?”
I nodded. “I understand.”
Commissar Oh swiveled, flourishing his cape as he did so. On the way out the door, he shouted, “Get him cleaned up! I want him in the Great Hall in half an hour!”
I was being washed again.
The difference this time was that the woman doing the scrubbing was cute, and she wore only a bra and panties. After a couple minutes of sponging, I stood up, grabbed a bucket, and started pouring water over myself to wash off the soapy lather. The woman seemed worried and kept pointing for me to lie back down. Instead, I grabbed a towel and dried myself off. I sloshed across the moist floor and swung open a wooden door. A blast of cold air hit me as I stepped outside onto dry tile.
My body ached and I could see bruises on my arms and shoulders and legs. Nothing I couldn’t survive.
I wasn’t sure exactly where I was. The guards had kept the shackles on while we climbed three flights of stairs. In a holding area t
hat reminded me of a South Korean police station, they unlocked my chains and allowed me to slip back into my Warsaw Pact uniform. Then they shoved me in the back of a quarter-ton truck. I sat huddled on a narrow wooden bench as we turned onto a long boulevard. I inhaled deeply. Fresh air, available even in the center of this country’s most densely populated city. Still, I thought I could taste the filthy water in my throat and fought back the urge to vomit.
After a couple of miles, the driver turned off the main road and soon we were winding our way up into the forested hills. I wondered if Hero Kang and Doc Yong would ever figure out where I was. Maybe. But it was up to me to get myself out of this mess and find them. As we continued into the hills, the scene around us changed. In the distance, elegantly carved pagodas stood above walled homes, and behind them lurked hidden ponds, gardens, gingko trees, and crimson dragons guarding wood-carved gateways. Beverly Hills come to Pyongyang. Just reward for the self-sacrificing vanguard of the people’s revolution.
Uniformed guards opened an iron gate and we pulled into a long driveway. Unceremoniously, I was yanked out of the truck and ushered downstairs, and for a moment I thought I’d be locked up again. Instead, I was treated to another steam bath.
Commissar Oh had called the building I was in “the Great Hall.” It was a vast affair with elegantly carved wooden buildings and gardens and pleasure halls, like an ancient palace preserved as a museum that’s not open to the public. Hero Kang had described it to me earlier: the main cadre’s rest and recuperation area and the Pyongyang headquarters of the Joy Brigade. I’d ended up where I’d wanted to go all along. Not as an honored guest, but as a supplicant who was under orders to grovel in shame and prostrate himself in front of the Great Leader. And as a spy for Commissar Oh.