by Martin Limon
The half-naked masseuse helped me dress, even squatting in front of me to tie my shoelaces. She was a cute girl, very cute, with straight black hair tied in pigtails and a round, pleasant face. In other circumstances, I probably would’ve tried to spend more time with her in the steam room. But not now. I was too nervous. And the gaping maw of that dungeon was still fresh in my mind. All I could think of was finishing the job so Hero Kang and I could get the hell out of here and find Doc Yong.
When I was fully dressed, I combed my hair and pulled on my cloth cap and pushed through a pair of double doors that led out into a long gallery. Confused as to which way to go, I glanced back at the girl. She smiled and pointed to her right. I nodded and marched down the hallway.
Varnished wood slats squeaked beneath my feet, interspersed every few yards with wooden pedestals holding celadon vases stuffed with flowers. Oil-papered windows looked out onto well-tended gardens on either side, illuminated by a three-quarter moon and the soft glow of Chinese lanterns. Again I thought how well these party cadres lived. It pays to cozy up to the Great Leader.
Voices murmured up ahead, dozens of them. The hallway wound to the left and back to the right and finally I arrived at an ornate wooden door with large brass handles in the shape of fire-breathing dragons. The voices behind the door were louder now. I took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
It was a vast hall. Most of the space was filled by an elevated floor covered in tatami mats. Sitting behind a short-legged table on a dais were Commissar Oh and four or five political lackeys. All of them wore traditional silk pantaloons and red vests, looking like courtiers from the Chosun Dynasty. The venerable General Yi, Commander of the First Corps, was nowhere to be seen.
In front of the dais were many small tables, only a couple of feet off the floor, and sitting around them cross-legged were dozens of men, all of them young and athletic-looking. Before the tournament, Hero Kang had briefed me about what to expect if I made it this far. This was an awards banquet in honor of various teams-soccer, volleyball, and Taekwondo-that had won tournaments within the last few months. I recognized the athletes of the First Corps Taekwondo team. All of them glared at me. Except for the older men on the dais, everyone wore military uniforms. Each table held a charcoal brazier and sizzling atop it were succulent chunks of beef. The aroma of charred meat filled my nostrils, accompanied by the sharp tang of pickled cabbage and roasting garlic, causing me to salivate. A young woman knelt in front of each brazier, using shears to cut raw meat into edible pieces and chopsticks to flip burning morsels deftly atop the flames. The women were very young and attractive and they all wore the short-skirted uniform of the Korean People’s Army.
All eyes were on me. None of them exactly pleased to see me.
I held my breath. With one word from Commissar Oh, these men would rise up and tear me limb from limb. I scanned the room. No Hero Kang. Another thing I noticed: fifth-level black-belt Pak wasn’t here either. I hoped the erstwhile First Corps champion hadn’t been seriously hurt, but even if he hadn’t, the loss of face at being knocked out by a foreigner would be too much for him. It figured that he wouldn’t make an appearance.
The young women serving the older dignitaries at the head table were not wearing military uniforms. Instead, they were decked out in the beautiful full-skirted chima-chogori traditional Korean gowns. Commissar Oh frowned and motioned with his chopsticks and one of the girls knelt next to him. He whispered something in her ear. She bowed and, keeping her head lowered, backed away respectfully.
All talking stopped. The only sound was of meat sizzling. I stood alone, not knowing what to do, feeling as out of place as a hunchback at a ballet rehearsal. Finally, a soldier appeared at my side, a frail young man, clearly not one of the athletes. He motioned for me to follow. I slipped off my shoes and stepped up onto the raised floor.
Off to the side, balanced on a varnished wooden easel, stood an enormous color photograph of the Great Leader. It was bedecked with sweet-smelling flowers, and red-wrapped gifts and bowls of fat fruit, which sat in front of the photo. The young man led me to a spot about twenty feet in front of this shrine and handed me a yellowed slip of paper filled with ink-smudged hangul.
“Ilgo,” he said. Read.
He backed away and I turned to the expectant crowd. Everyone had stopped eating-all eyes were on me. I held the paper in front of me and started reading. An enraged murmur rolled through the crowd. My young guide hustled forward, motioning with both hands downward. I knelt on one knee and he kept motioning. I lowered myself on both knees and then lowered my forehead to the ground. Satisfied, the young man backed up.
How the hell was I supposed to read the script with my head touching the ground? I raised my head a little, just enough so I could hold the note in front of me and still see the photo of the Great Leader. This time, when I started reciting it, there was a respectful silence.
Hangul is a phonetic writing system and I read the note verbatim. Parts of it I didn’t understand. Still, the essence of it was that Kim Il-sung is stronger than Superman and kinder than Jesus Christ and the rest of us are less than maggots and all good things emanate from an absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the Great Leader. When I finished reading, the young man motioned for me to bow three times, which I did.
Finally, I was allowed to rise to my feet and back away respectfully from the smiling mug of the shining light of the people.
Although they were sitting flat on the floor in a cross-legged position, all the athletes in the room rose to their feet gracefully and started toward me. I braced myself, prepared to fight to the end. Instead, they started clapping and cheering, and soon I was being patted roughly on the back and punched playfully on the shoulder. One of the beautiful young ladies approached me with a smile and held out a wreath of flowers. I lowered my head and she placed it around my shoulders and bowed to me. Then I was escorted up on the dais where a short-legged table was set up for me.
My chopsticks were made of silver.
I was a hero again.
7
Commissar Oh and the young men in the crowd grabbed their chopsticks and started chomping away on marinated beef, pickled vegetables, and fluffy white rice.
The charcoal inside the metal drum suspended from the center of my little table was already glowing. One of the silk-clad ladies appeared and deftly laid slices of kalbi, deboned short ribs, on its hot wire grill. In seconds, the fat of the marinated beef was sizzling. She also set down a bowl of rice and three plates filled with turnip, cabbage, and cucumber kimchi. Then she departed. On my own, I used the shears she’d left behind to slice some of the meat and adjusted the slices over the fire with the chopsticks, keeping them out of the flames.
None of the men present knew that Commissar Oh had locked me in a dungeon and had me tortured. But I knew. And I wasn’t about to forget it either. Still, I was famished, and even though I wasn’t happy about accepting his hospitality, I was going to eat my fill. It was mid-evening now. I tried to figure out how long I’d been locked up. At least twenty-four hours, I figured, although I couldn’t really be sure. I wondered if I had a concussion from the beatings I’d taken or lung damage from the water torture. Probably, but no one had mentioned anything about medical attention and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. I felt I was hanging on by my fingernails here, and as long as I was being fed and I wasn’t locked up, for the moment, that was good enough.
Now that the foreigner had been shoved in his corner, everyone turned their attention away from me and resumed eating. Martial music burst out of tinny speakers. I figured I’d better eat quickly, because Koreans have a habit of clearing all tables at once, whether you’re finished or not, and then beginning speeches or entertainment or whatever delights the evening might hold. I shoved beef, still bloody, into my mouth. I ate all the kimchi and all the rice, but no one appeared at my table to offer me seconds.
I watched Commissar Oh. He ate sparingly and listened intently to the conversation of
the men around him. The pleased expression on his face told me that they were flattering him. The same young man who had guided me from the door to this spot appeared next to Commissar Oh. He knelt and whispered into the commissar’s ear, and they both glanced at me. I stared back, my face impassive. The commissar turned back to the aide and said something, and the aide bowed and backed away.
I studied the young women who served the athletes. For the most part, they performed their duties in a business-like manner, but occasionally one of the young men said something to them and they looked up and smiled. Wire baskets containing clinking bottles of clear liquid were brought into the hall-soju. Soon the young women were pouring the soju into small shot glasses, holding the bottle with their right hand, supporting their forearm with the flattened palm of their left. The same elegantly dressed woman who’d delivered my food brought me a half-filled bottle of soju and a glass. She left abruptly. I poured it myself. In South Korea, she would have poured it for me. Not doing so was, if not an insult, at least a lack of propriety, but I was in no position to complain. When all glasses were full, Commissar Oh raised his in the air and started to speak.
Some of it I didn’t understand because the statement was long and flowery, but it boiled down to this: Foreigners continue to flock to our country to bask in the glow of the teachings of our Great Leader. Even now his wisdom is spreading beyond our shores and all who hear his mighty words quake at his power and the single-minded resolve of his people to use their bodies as weapons to protect his glory and advance the cause of our Great Leader and kick the running-dog Americans out of Korea and reunite our country under his glorious banner.
Or something like that.
When he was done, I drank as heartily and as deeply as anyone, mainly hoping the 40-proof liquor would ease the aches and pains in my tortured body.
More meat was brought in, and more soju, and then a troupe of young women in flowing silk dresses, each a different color, began to dance to a music that was less martial and more traditional. The women swirled their huge skirts and banged on drums. They leaned against each other and sang lilting songs with sweet voices.
While I was watching the show, someone knelt in front of me, keeping her head bowed. A woman in a bright-blue silk dress, not the one who had been serving me previously. She cut my meat, placed some of it carefully on the brazier, and turned it with chopsticks. Then, using two hands, she poured me a shot of soju. After I sipped, she looked up at me.
I held myself steady, attempting not to gasp. Kneeling before me was Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook.
Up close, she was even more beautiful than she’d seemed at a distance. Lips soft, complexion flawless, black eyes burning. I thought of something I’d read somewhere, about the Mongol Khan’s advice when choosing a wife: Her face should be as flat as the grassy plains, her eyes narrow in order to keep out evil spirits, and her legs strong to make her husband happy. Except for the legs, which I couldn’t see, Captain Rhee fit the requirements. Back at Eighth Army, some GIs would have found her unattractive. She didn’t meet the traditional Western standard of beauty. Her nose wasn’t pointed, her eyes weren’t round, and she certainly wasn’t blonde. She was strictly Asian, through and through, and that’s what I found fascinating about her. Her straight black hair was oiled and pulled back and knotted in a bun, held in place by a single red peg.
She said something in a language I didn’t understand. Was it Latin-based? It seemed to be. Romanian, I thought. I caught the words that were similar to the Spanish for “where” and “born.” The problem was that I had no answer for her. I made something up.
“Moldavia,” I said.
This seemed to satisfy her, and, luckily for me, she apparently had reached the limit of her ability to speak Romanian. She switched to English. “Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was sultry, like the voice of a lover tangled in satin sheets.
I gawked at her, trying to concentrate, lost in the beauty of her soft white skin.
She continued speaking quietly, intimately, in English, keeping her head bowed so no one would notice our conversation, appearing to concentrate on turning the meat.
“A Peruvian sailor named Jose Aracadio Medin,” she said, “disappears from an Albanian ship. Then a Warsaw Pact officer turns up on a train unexpectedly, traveling north out of Nampo, but for some reason he doesn’t speak Russian. Now that same Romanian officer wins a Taekwondo tournament.” With her beautiful black eyes she peered up at me. “Who are you?”
Again, I didn’t answer. I knew if she hadn’t exposed me already, she wouldn’t until she could figure out whether or not powerful people in North Korea were behind me. If she exposed me too early, she took the risk of also exposing the incompetence of her clients, the commander of the Port of Nampo and the security apparatus at the Pyongyang Train Station. And incompetence in North Korea can prove fatal. Mistakes are not tolerated by the Great Leader and are dealt with harshly. Therefore, bad news is suppressed; information flows downhill but never uphill. Senior Captain Rhee’s task was to follow me, capture me if possible, question me, and keep everything quiet until she was sure of who, and what, she was dealing with.
“Hero Kang claims you are a hero of the invasion of Prague,” she said, staring intently into my eyes, searching for any sign of understanding. “But the Romanians didn’t participate in that invasion.” She leaned even closer to me. I felt her fresh breath mingling with mine. “You are a liar,” she said, pausing for a while to let the insult sink in. When I didn’t react, she said, “In this country, everyone lies. It is how we live. But you are after something. What is it?”
Her hand reached out and touched mine. The fingers were soft, long, clinging.
“We are the same, you and I,” she said. “You can trust me. Maybe we can do business.”
The music ended with a rousing crescendo. The gorgeous young dancing women took a bow and started to back out of the room. Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook leaned away, pulling her hand back quickly. She looked around. I couldn’t help admiring her lovely profile. Her figure was full, and even under the covering of her silk tunic and high-waisted skirt, it was clear that Captain Rhee Mi-sook was all woman.
“I will talk to you later,” she said. “Stay away from the women here. Anyone you touch will be cast off and sent to work in the rice fields.”
Still, I didn’t answer. She couldn’t be sure I spoke English. She stood and gave me one last exasperated look. “Do you understand me?” she asked. But it was time for her and all the women to leave. She sighed in frustration and disappeared in a whoosh of swirling silk.
The lights lowered. Somewhere behind us, a movie projector clattered to life. A beam of light found a white screen and then we were feted with sports highlights of recent international events. In each clip, North Koreans competed and were victorious. Not one loss was reported. As the film flickered, the young women started to filter back into the room. However, they were no longer wearing their military uniforms. Now they were wearing skirts and blouses of either pure white or flowery patterned silk. Some of them went straight to a particular table and a particular young man. Other women held back, unsure of where to go, until one of the young men called to her. Then they bowed and scurried forward eagerly, taking a seat next to the man and almost immediately snuggling up next to him. The commissar had disappeared. Soon no one was paying attention to the sporting events on the screen and I realized that there was a lot of heavy breathing going on. Skirts were lifted, blouses opened.
I’d been in brothels before. Plenty of them. Even the worst of them offered a little privacy. But here, none of the young athletes were grabbing some girl by the hand and sneaking off into a back room. They all stayed where they were. It didn’t seem natural. But this was North Korea. The bosses wanted to reward these young champions, but they didn’t want to offer any of these young people privacy, where they might be able to form an even more intimate relationship, where they might talk about their hopes and dreams, where they mig
ht-by some fantastic stretch of the imagination-begin to plot against the Great Leader. I felt very uncomfortable.
And then a young woman appeared by my side. The flickering light of the newsreel fell on a round face and a mouth set in a determined line. She was still wearing a military uniform.
“Even in the harshest of winters,” she whispered in Korean, “the mugunghwa blooms.”
The purple mugunghwa is the ancient national flower of Korea. The sturdy blossom springs to life throughout the length and breadth of the Korean peninsula. In recent times, the North Korean regime designated the mongnan, a type of magnolia, the new national flower in its place-a move the South Koreans never agreed with.
She waited for my answer.
“Especially, I’m told, on the highest mountains,” I whispered back.
She picked up a tray of cold meat and slipped a key in my hand. Without looking back, she carried the tray away through the side door of the hall. Holding it low so no one else could see it, I studied the key. It was large, old-fashioned, apparently made of brass. A number had been etched along its side: 444.
I stared at the key, twisting it in the dim light to make sure I was reading it right. There it was, three Arabic numerals: 444. I was surprised because I’d never before seen such a combination in South Korea. South Korean hotels don’t have a fourth floor, or even a room number four, much less a room numbered four forty-four.
Still, there it was. I clutched the key in my hand. Everyone seemed preoccupied. I slipped into the shadows by the wall and edged through the rustling clothes and gasping breaths until I’d made my way out into the empty hallway. In the moonlit courtyard, I crouched for a moment behind a tall shrub with sturdy branches.
I waited. No one was following. No sign of Captain Rhee Mi-sook. I crept away toward buildings that I hoped would be lodging for the cadres, still wondering about the curious numbers. Still wondering if I’d live through this night.