A Corpse in the Koryo (13 page)

"Okay, I deal in fish."

"Good." He stepped back and looked at my clothes. "Not flashy enough for Wonsan. You look like every hack from the capital, but it'll have to do." He frowned. "Improvisation."

"I'm smuggling fish, not starring in a mov
ie.
"

"You're staying alive, if you can. This is Manpo, remember? What are you getting in return for the fish?"

My back whimpered. I didn't want to get knocked out anymore. I'd be laid up for a week, swallowing warm beer, eating black bread with blueberry jam, and looking at blue buttons on that white blouse.

Maybe I'd learn the words of a Finnish song or tap into a regular source of Finnish vodka, but it still didn't seem worth the trouble.

"I don't know, what do I get?" But I was talking to myself. Kang was gone. The door of the teahouse locked behind me with the grim heavy sound of steel wrapping itself in steel. All of a sudden, I couldn't think of the name of a single fish. Well, trout, maybe, but who knows if that really qualifies as seafood.

6

I walked from the tearoom toward the train station and back up the street where the jeep had crashed. It was gone, and the larch tree had been chopped down. Three thugs with flat faces and small eyes were standing around. They were dressed as laborers, which was laughable.

They had the unmistakable air of a Military Security squad, but I didn't bother them, and they didn't bother me. The long-legged girls had vanished.

I looked closely at everyone else, mostly to be sure I wasn't being followed. Kang had said I could expect to be tailed simply because I'd been seen with him. Well, that was my fault. Pak had sent me out of Pyongyang to get me away from Kang. Now I was having tea with the man. Well, almost having tea. I should have told him to get lost. Not that it would have done any good. I had the feeling that Kang was never lost.

No one asked me if I was smuggling fish, which was a good thing.

I'd never been to Wonsan, though once at the office I'd read in a magazine about a vacation beach near there. Everybody in the picture was smiling and looked to be having a swell time, even allowing for the fact that everyone always has big smiles in the magazines at the office. It was an old magazine, from the 1960s, when everyone was poor but still had hope.

We had hope then, too. My grandfather and I planned to open a furniture shop. The leadership wasn't sure it wanted an old hero of the revolution toiling that way--no one uses the word "toil" anymore, but we did then. He was stubborn, and they finally decided they couldn't stop him so they might as well say it was alright.

We went north into the mountains toward the Chinese border to find a supply of lumber, good old trees, chestnut, elm, maybe some maple, though my grandfather said he didn't like maple. In 1937, one of his friends had been hanged from a maple tree by the Japanese army.

He hated the Japanese--all the more, he said, because they'd turned beautiful trees into gallows.

After a few days wandering around, we could see there weren't many trees we could use. There was scrub pine all over, useless for furniture, even bad furniture. When we climbed to the back reaches of the Kangnam Range, my grandfather howled with disgust. None of these forests had recovered from decades of heartache and slaughter. The Japanese had exploited them--cut a lot down for spite, the old man said, though I thought he might be exaggerating. During the 1950s, what remained was blasted by armies marching back and forth, fighting in places none of them even knew existed and never wanted to see again. Anything left was picked over during the hard years that followed.

Grandfather

said we'd have to go farther afield to find the right wood, so he requested permission for us to cross the Soviet border at Khasan far in the northeast and catch the train to Siberia. At first they only granted a passport for him, with a note attached that I would have to stay. My grandfather read the note over dinner. The next morning he got up early, pulled on his old uniform, and walked down the street before I was even dressed. I went into the woodshed and took down two or three tools, just to hold them, though this was forbidden. In the afternoon, while I was putting things back, I heard him singing as he climbed the hill to our house.

At that time, his tools hung from pegs on the whitewashed walls, the saws on one line nearest the floor, the measuring tools on a middle row, and the scraping tools along the top. I was so short that I had to stand on a box to reach the highest row. Everything had to be in order when he got home, but as I reached to put a small plane in its place, the box tipped and I crashed to the floor. Grandfather appeared at the door. "Are you alright?" he asked. I ran over and put my arms around his legs. He stroked my head for a moment, then pushed me away.

"That plane has just had a bad shock. Put it back where it belongs. Tomorrow before dawn, you'll have to come in and ask forgiveness as it wakes, lest it get crooked on us." He walked partway out the door, then turned and reached in his pocket. "Here, don't drop this." It was my passport.

After sitting on the train for days looking out the window at the same scene, rivers and forests and meadows morning through night, we stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere. I never saw so many trees, before or since: miles of white birch forests, rivers of tall pine spilling down hillsides, aspens along stream beds, poplar trees with their leaves fluttering in the wind growing in mysterious circles around bog fields of berries, stands of maple that I knew would explode in color in a few months, tall elms that gave shade so dense it was like walking into the night at noon. What caught my attention most of all was the groups of dead trees. Always in groups. Trunks stripped of bark, broken, leaning, branches stiff and leafless. Never a single one standing by itself. I finally asked my grandfather. "Trees are not like people." His lips tightened, and his cheeks lost their color. "They're more civilized. People lose someone, what do they do? Nothing, they just keep going. Some people lose everything, everything. They lose everything, they keep going.

Not trees. Trees don't do that. They live together, they don't move away, they know each other, they feel the wind and the rain at the same time, they can't bear it when one of them dies. So the whole group just stops living." He paused while the train went past a patch of open ground with an abandoned log cabin. "Don't listen to anyone who tells you about loyalty to an idea. You're alone," he said. "Without your family, you're alone."

One afternoon, we stumbled into a prison camp. There were no fences, no barbed wire, but the air changed as soon as we stepped into the clearing. A moment later, three guards appeared in front of us, submachine guns unslung. Each guard had a dog, snarling and pulling on a thick leather leash. The guards told us to get the hell out or they'd put the dogs on us. My grandfather was in his late sixties then, but still a fighter. He stared straight at the head guard, a young fellow with a sharp face and Tartar eyes, and told him in perfect Russian, softly so the two other guards had to strain to hear, that if the dogs got off their leashes, we'd make soup of them. The three guards laughed, but they backed off. That night my grandfather didn't say much, and he was subdued for the rest of the journey. It was only at dinner weeks later, after we finally got home, that he cleared his throat, put down his rice bowl, and told me that I was near the point where I'd have to make a choice in my life. "You can't shape people," he said, "just like you can't shape wood. You've got to find the heart and work from there. There's no such thing as scrap, not wood, not people."

7

In the summer, Manpo stayed light until late, but near eight o'clock the shadows from the mountains fell across the streets, then the sun dropped out of the sky and it was cold. I still hadn't bought a jacket, and most of the stalls near the train station had been taken down for the night. I could trade some of my fish for a fleece-lined coat in the morning.

The few stalls still open were selling food by candlelight. When I showed the woman in front of one of them my ration coupons, she snorted. "I may not be young, and I know I'm not pretty, but believe me, I'm not crazy. Food costs money, friend. Chinese is nice. Russian will do. Dollars make the best meal of all."

"What do you have?" The stall behind her was covered down the sides with thin canvas and plastic sheeting. I couldn't place the odors coming from inside. Nothing I ever ate in Pyongyang smelled so bad.

"You just let me worry about that. If you're hungry, with five dollars you'll eat fine. Maybe the best meal you ever had."

"Five dollars?" I could eat for a week, maybe two, at home on that much money.

"You're not from here, are you?" Her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"In fact, I've never seen you before. No one flashes food coupons, unless they're new. Real new."

"I'm from Wonsan." I tried to smile like the people in the magazine at the office.

"Far from home."

"Yes, business, money."

"Sorry, I'm closed."

"Since when? It's too early to close."

"How would you know? What district are you from in Wonsan?"

I could see she was looking past me. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of two of the thugs who had been standing around where the jeep had been shot up. Maybe she thought I was Military Security, with them. They had picked up the scent of something out of the ordinary. One of them moved up close behind me. He had been drinking. I hoped he wasn't a mean drunk.

"Can I get some more potatoes?" It was Kang's voice, drifting out of the tent. The man was everywhere. The woman ducked inside, and I followed. Kang bobbed his head slightly and looked away. He didn't want to know me, not now. Not with a drunken Military Security type outside, sniffing the air.

"Last time I was here," Kang said with some irritation, "you had seafood. Tonight all you have is goat, and it must have died of old age."

"Sit on it, comrade," the old lady stirred the pot over an open wood fire. "Ask our friend here what happened to the seafood delivery that never arrived last week. He's from Wonsan, though he doesn't look like he knows anything about fish."

"I'm waiting for a shipment," I said, sitting down next to Kang at the overturned wooden crate that served as a table. "Of fish. Maybe I can let you have some."

"What kind of fish?" Kang asked.

"What's it to you?" I snarled. "Big fish, little fish. Who the hell cares.

It swims, I make a profit, someone eats dinner. Everyone's happy."

"I knew he wasn't from Wonsan," muttered the old lady. "Big fish, little fish. What an idiot."

The party in the room next door was raucous. I don't mind other people being happy, but at that hour they should keep it to themselves. I didn't figure the Manpo Inn was a place where they smiled on parties in the rooms, but I was wrong. When I complained to the clerk downstairs, he looked at me blankly.

"You know," I said. "Sleep. What people do at night."

"Yeah, so, pleasant dreams, comrade. Do you mind?" He had a VCR in the back room, and there was a tape in it. Most of the people were blond. I couldn't tell by their clothes where they were from because they weren't wearing any.

"How about another room?"

"All full. People want to party, not my business. Not yours, either, for that matter."

"My idea is to get some sleep. That's why I'm paying for your crummy room. Either tell the party to pipe down or move me."

"I've got a third choice for you."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. There's the door." He pointed.

"It's two in the morning."

"Dawn comes early in these parts."

"You wouldn't want me to complain to the local People's Committee, would you?"

He leaned across the desk, so close I could see the stains on his shirt from dinner. "Be my guest. They're in 305."

"That's next door to me."

"Correct."

"How about some tea?"

"Maybe the Finnish girl can get you some when she's done for the night." I didn't like the way he leered. "Look," I said, "accept my congratulations, you're as nasty as they come."

"Couple of baskets of fish, you might be able to get a quieter room." I must have looked surprised. "The way I hear it, you push fish across the border. A basket more or less ..." He waited for me to say something, then frowned. "Up to you. I guess it's true. Wonsan people are pretty tight. Must be from having such a fat life, living by the beach and all."

"A while ago you said I was from Pyongyang."

"Yeah, well, I gave it some thought. Something about you isn't right, not smart enough to be from Pyongyang."

I decided this was meant as a compliment. "The truck doesn't get here until tomorrow. I need the room tonight."

"No problem. I'll know when it gets here. And it won't get across the border until a basket shows up at my back door. If this works out, maybe we can do regular business. Lots of fish in the sea, they say." He reached into a drawer and came up with a key. "Five-oh-one. We just painted it for an important visitor. Gets some use but never for more than an hour at a time. Your Finnish friend thinks it's a dump, but she uses it just the same." His leer was cut short by a shrieking coming from the video. "You think that party next to you is loud, you got no idea!"

He turned, went into the back room, and closed the door behind him.

An amazing idea, fish as currency. Then again, why not? Maybe a little difficult to carry around. I pulled a few Chinese notes out of my pocket. At least you could eat fish. Even several more baskets of imaginary fish were not going to solve my basic problem. Last week I was minding my own business. Today I had the feeling I was slowly getting sucked into a deadly game between Kang and Colonel Kim. It had to be something more than a personal feud. Kim thought a picture of a car coming from the direction of South Korea could be used against Kang, but why? Military Security was a sledgehammer; it wouldn't be deployed for something minor. True, intelligence and security organs were always rubbing each other the wrong way. I once had a knife fight in my sector between two drunken agents. Neither would tell me where he worked, and both had identification papers that were laughable. When we reported this up the line, we got a phone call back with clear instructions to let them go. No explanation.