Joy Brigade (15 page)

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

C
ommissar 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 José 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?”