by Martin Limon
I gazed behind me down the alley, at the gray light, at a sparrow that flitted across my vision through the cold, fresh air. Then I looked back at the foul opening. I had no choice but to follow this man. I was lost in a country that despised Americans, like a fat carp swimming among sharks. I went through the opening into the muddy pit.
After a few yards, I was able to stand almost upright. An electric torch appeared in Hero Kang’s hand and he used it to guide his way over the jagged floor of the tunnel. Stones jutted down from the roof above me. I dodged most of them but clunked my head a couple of times, cursing as I did so.
The tunnels were used, Hero Kang told me, during the Korean War to hide from American bombs.
“We were most afraid of the napalm,” Hero Kang said. “You Americans splashed it everywhere, turning us into cowering moles. The Great Leader had his headquarters in a cave not far from here. That’s why the network is so huge. In addition to the army, the average citizens, with their bare hands, tunneled into the mountains too. For safety. After the war, the army used explosives and closed most of the tunnels, but the people have reclaimed them, pulling out dirt and lumber and boulders to develop a little world back here where we can live free of constant surveillance.”
Ahead of us, men grunted in cadence. And then I heard some familiar words: “Kyongnei. Chunbi. Shijak.” Bow. Prepare. Begin.
A door opened into a vast chamber lit by glass lanterns. In the center of the chamber, a raised wooden platform, a dochang, had been constructed. At least two-dozen men stood facing an instructor, some wearing white karate robes, most not.
“A Taekwondo class,” I said to Hero Kang.
“Yes.”
Taekwondo is taught to everyone in school and in the military, for the defense of the country. In its advanced forms, however, it is taught only to those favored by the Great Leader.
“So these men practice here in secret,” I said.
“Yes.”
We watched the men go through their choreographed moves. I’d studied Taekwondo in Seoul, on the base. A lot of GIs did. So far, I’d advanced to the first level of black belt, but I was a rank amateur compared to these men. Their kicks, hops, punches, and parries were carried out with a blinding precision and speed.
“So why have you brought me here?” I asked.
Hero Kang grinned. “You need to practice. Take off your clothes.” He pointed to a bench covered with jackets and hats and shoes. Then he walked over to a line of pegs in the stone wall and selected a white uniform. He tossed it to me. “Put this on.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is this about that ‘tournament’ you mentioned?”
Hero Kang grinned even more broadly. “We’re going to find out what kind of fighter you are.”
I lay collapsed on a cold wooden floor. The pummeling I’d taken from the Taekwondo experts had been brutal. I was bigger than any of them, my legs and arms longer, my body heavier. Still, they’d kicked me around as if I were an overstuffed beanbag. When I was a kid, I’d studied boxing in a sheriff’s program at the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles and I considered myself to be pretty good. More than once, my left jab had pulled me out of a jam. But Taekwondo emphasizes the use of the feet and the legs and more contact is allowed with kicks. Punches, by contrast, have to be pulled. So much for my advantage. I rolled over and groaned, longing to take a shower. Hero Kang assured me that in this worker’s paradise there was no hot water available.
“Tonight,” he said, “food will be brought to you. Until then, you are to wait and make no sound whatsoever.”
After the workout, he’d had me change back into the Romanian officer’s uniform. I’d been perspiring so much from the workout that the once-clean Warsaw Pact uniform was soon soaked through with sweat and the coarse wool rubbed mercilessly against my skin. We’d slipped out of a different exit from the underground tunnels and made our way about a half-mile, with me hobbling as fast as I could behind Hero Kang. Finally, we stepped into a deserted building constructed like a yoguan, a traditional Korean inn. There was a double door out front, a small wood-floored foyer, and a central stairway that led upstairs to long halls with cubicle-like rooms behind small doors. The only problem was that there was no proprietor. As usual, Hero Kang strode in like he owned the place and bade me follow him upstairs to the last room in a long hallway, where, once inside, I collapsed on the floor. In the next five minutes or so, I heard a few distant footsteps in the building and the occasional bump of wood on wood.
Hero Kang turned to leave. “I will lock the door from the outside.”
I sat up, feeling the bruises along my thighs and forearms. “Lock it from the outside? When will you be back?”
Hero Kang shushed me. “Tomorrow. Early. But like I said, someone will bring you food.”
“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
He pointed at an iron pee pot in the corner.
I nodded, realizing angrily that my options for self-controlled action were rapidly diminishing.
“Don’t worry,” he said, reading my thoughts. “There are many out there looking for you, but right here in the middle of the city, you are well hidden. And there are many of us too, to protect you.”
“Why is it so important to bring me here? I told you before, I must see Doctor Yong In-ja first. Before I do anything.”
Hero Kang backed out of the door. A metal hasp squeaked closed and a padlock clicked. I groaned and lay back down on the floor. It was cold in there. Almost freezing. The perspiration turned clammy on my skin. I rolled over and groaned again, hungry, miserable, frightened. There was a world of hostility out there, and I hadn’t a friend in the world except for Hero Kang. And who knew when he’d come back?
These thoughts caused my stomach to churn, and so, with an effort of will, I thrust them out of my mind. Eventually I dozed, for how long I’m not sure. Finally, after what must’ve been two or three hours, a metallic clang brought me fully awake. I sat up. The room was dark now, illuminated only by moonlight seeping through a transom-like window.
I listened carefully. At first nothing, and then the sound of someone rummaging around near the front of the room. I crouched and searched for something to use as a weapon. Nothing available but my fists.
Another metallic clang as a small hinge creaked open and then what sounded like something being dropped into a chute. I recognized the sounds. I’d heard them often in South Korea: someone replenishing the cylindrical charcoal briquettes in the underground heating system. I placed my hand flat on the floor. No heat yet. Then more clanging as tongs and a metal pan were being put away. Footsteps approached the front door.
Someone fiddled with the lock, the rusty hasp was pulled back, and the door swung open. Whoever it was held a candle low in front of his or her body, head bowed and hooded. I couldn’t see a face. Then I saw a long woolen skirt rustle forward, and the candle being placed on the floor. The woman, whoever she was, had a huge wooden disc strapped to her back like a shield, and tied to that were three layers of tightly folded material. In her left hand she held a large brass pot stuffed with a brown paper bag, and in her right a canvas bag smeared with soot. She let both drop to the floor.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The woman ignored me as she closed the door and slid shut the inner bolt. Then she placed the candle atop the wooden box meant to hold shoes. She shrugged off the shield and the material strapped to it, and a canvas bag, hidden between the layers, plopped out on the floor. Finally, she turned and knelt in front of me. I waited, afraid of what I thought I was seeing, terrified to allow myself to believe what my mind was telling me-not until I was sure. She slid back her hood.
There are moments in our lives that, because of pain or joy or terror, are unforgettable. This, to me, was one of those moments. I felt as if a surge passed through my body. Until that moment, I had suppressed my feelings of longing, of loss, and of loneliness. As I beheld the face I thought I’d never see again, I realized how much I’d missed her.
Doctor Yong In-ja stared at me somberly, not smiling. Hers was a smooth face, even-featured, with short bobbed hair and thick-rimmed glasses. No one, at least in the West, would accuse her of being beautiful. But I thought she was. In fact, at that moment, I wanted to embrace her, but I knew better. Being Korean-and a most reserved Korean at that-she kept her distance for this formal moment. Then she did an odd thing-she lowered her forehead to the ground, held it there, and said, “Choesong hamnida.” I am terribly sorry.
As far as I was concerned, Doctor Yong In-ja had nothing to be sorry about. I told her that.
“You are wrong,” she replied. “I have much to be sorry about. Due to my own selfishness, I have brought you into terrible danger.”
She was speaking English now. One of the things that always fascinated me about her was that even though English was her second language, she spoke it better than most GIs did. Including me.
“No. You have nothing to be sorry about,” I told her. “I wanted to come here. I would’ve had it no other way.”
She stared at me quizzically. “Why?”
“Because of you,” I said.
She turned away. “You will change your mind when I tell you all that I came here to say.”
“No,” I replied. “I won’t change my mind.”
Then she turned back and stared deeply into my eyes, evaluating what she saw, turning it over in that finely tuned mind of hers. Finally, she did what I hoped she’d do. She made a decision. The right decision. She held my eyes steadily and then smiled. The most beautiful and the most radiant smile I’d seen in my life.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
“Yes.”
She gestured toward the charcoal briquettes in the dirty bag and the brass pot. “I’ll heat water for your bath.”
“And then?” I asked.
“You’ll eat. Rice. Bean curd soup.”
She unfolded four short legs on the wooden shield and set it on the floor.
“And after that?” I asked.
“You’ll sleep.” She allowed the folded sleeping mat and comforter to flop loosely onto the floor.
“Alone?”
“We’ll see,” she replied.
Doc Yong shook me awake. In the pale moonlight, she placed a forefinger against her pursed lips, warning me to be quiet. I sat up. Outside, boots pounded on pavement. I rose to my feet and crossed to the transom, trying vainly to reach the top latch. Doc Yong knelt on all fours and motioned to her back. I understood. She wanted me to use her as a stepladder to reach the latch. I was too heavy, I knew, but she pointed again to her back, insisting furiously. Gingerly, I stepped on her back with one foot, pulling myself up on the transom’s ledge, supporting most of my own weight, and reached the latch. I slipped it back, pulled open the transom and, for just a second, peeked out.
There, standing on the sidewalk, in the glow of the headlights of a military vehicle, stood a female military officer. She was tall and wore high leather boots and a dark-blue overcoat tied tightly around a slender waist. Black hair hung long and loose, glimmering from beneath a leather-brimmed cap. She barked orders. Armed men trotted down the sidewalk at her command. They were moving fast, apparently searching the area.
I lowered myself quickly, breathless now, not at the exertion but at the shock of seeing so many armed men across the street. But I was also stunned by something else. I was ashamed of myself for thinking of it, at this moment of emergency, but I was thinking of it nevertheless. I found myself focusing on the face of the female military officer: a long oval with smooth, white skin and puffed lips and angry eyes. She was very possibly the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Doc Yong stared at me, knowing something had changed. She hopped to her feet and, still motioning furiously, indicated that I was to lift her up to the level of the transom. I flexed my knees, grabbed her securely around the waist, and hoisted her easily into the air, holding her there while she clutched the edge of the transom. More boots pounded on pavement. An engine purred and began to fade. Finally, just as the muscles in my arms started to burn, she motioned for me to lower her to the floor. Then she pointed for me to close the transom. I did. Quietly.
She knelt in the center of the floor and relit the single candle.
We squatted opposite one another.
“She’s very beautiful,” she said.
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. You saw her.”
“The officer, you mean?”
“Yes. A daewui.”
“A senior captain,” I said. Before leaving Seoul, I’d memorized the ranks of all the branches of the North Korean military.
“Yes. They are searching the area, moving fast. This is a densely populated neighborhood and they don’t have enough men to knock on every door and search every room. That means she’s working alone, not in an official capacity.”
“She’s a fixer,” I said.
“Who told you about them?”
“Hero Kang.”
She nodded at that.
“What do you suppose they’re looking for?” I asked.
“A Romanian officer,” she replied, “who can’t speak Russian.”
“Or an Albanian sailor who escaped from the Port of Nampo.”
“By now,” she said, “they know you were traveling on a Peruvian passport.”
“And you know too.”
“Yes. I know too.”
“We can’t just sit here,” I said. “They’ll find us.”
Doc Yong shook her head vigorously. “A full door-to-door search will attract too much attention. I don’t believe they’ll do that. Attention is what they’re trying to avoid, to make sure that the superiors of the authorities at both the Port of Nampo and the Pyongyang Train Station are not alerted to their miserable failure.”
“You mean their miserable failure in allowing me to enter the country.”
“Yes. What they’ll do is sit tight and hope that you’ll become frightened and poke your head out. Instead, we must wait for Hero Kang. He’ll know how to get us out of here.”
“You could leave,” I said. “They’re not looking for you.”
Doc Yong shook her head again. “Not yet.”
She grabbed the canvas pack that had been strapped to her back, untied it, and pulled out a large bag. It was rectangular, wrapped in water-resistant oil paper. Beneath the paper were the tattered remnants of a leather binding, reinforced with varnished bamboo slats. A book, not bound at the spine but rather shot through with half a dozen brass rivets that held the thick sheaf of yellowed paper intact. What scholars call a codex. The paper I recognized-it was the same thick vellum as the scrap that had been given to me by an Eastern European sailor in the Port of Pusan. Doc Yong thumbed through the pages.
“Here,” she said. “Here is the section I cut out. We must replace it.”
“We will,” I said. “It’s in Seoul, in a safe place.”
Actually, the fragment had been stolen from me by a homicide investigator of the Korean National Police known as Mr. Kill. As part of the deal for me to come up here, I demanded that he return the fragment. He did. Now it was locked in the CID safe at Eighth Army headquarters.
Gently, I touched the rough leather of the codex. “Tell me about it,” I said.
Outside, we heard the abrupt shouts of soldiers. We froze for a second, listening as their footsteps passed.
Doc Yong turned back to the manuscript. For years, she explained, scholars thought that the codex was nothing but a myth.
“Supposedly,” Doc Yong said, “in the early fifteenth century, during the rule of our Great King Sejong, a strange man was spotted in the mountainous precincts of Hamgyong Province. A ‘wild man,’ he was called, and some said he was not a man at all but a beast. A court official was appointed to track him, an inspector of the king’s, a man who held the rank of Five White Horses.”
“A cop,” I said.
“More like what the Europeans call an ombud
sman.”
“A what?”
“Somebody appointed by the government to investigate anything unusual. Or anything that seems to have gone awry.”
“Okay,” I replied. “So this inspector of the Five White Horses starts chasing this wild man through the mountains. What happened?”
“He was accompanied by a scribe who wrote it all down. His name was Clerk Yi.” Doc Yong placed her hand on the codex. “That’s why we have this manuscript. It’s difficult for me to read not only because the writing is archaic but also because Clerk Yi had a very fluid style of penmanship, a style the Chinese call ‘grass writing.’ ”
In ancient times Koreans had no written language of their own. Educated people learned to read and write Chinese. If they were well off enough, they traveled to China to continue their studies. Indeed, some of the most revered poets in Chinese literature were Koreans.
“I’ve managed to translate about half of Clerk Yi’s manuscript so far,” Doc Yong said.
“Into English?”
“Both modern Korean and English,” she replied.
I shook my head, never failing to marvel at her brilliance. “So did they catch the beast?”
“I haven’t gotten there yet.”
“What was it? A man or an animal?”
“I’m not sure,” Doc Yong replied. “But I did get to the part about the tunnels, where the beast was being chased by the inspector and his minions and eluded them by entering ancient caverns.”
“The ones that tunnel beneath the DMZ.”
“Yes.”
“You got their attention at Eighth Army,” I said.
“I thought I would. And that’s why you’re here.”
“No. That’s not why I’m here.”
She waited, holding her breath.
“I’m here for you,” I said.
It was at that moment, while she gazed into my eyes, that someone kicked the door in.
4
Shards of wood erupted into the room, and a brown boot followed. A pair of hands grappled with the small door, ripping it off its already twisted hinges.