by James Church
Pak’s chair squeaked as he swiveled around to face the window. He slumped and put the tips of the fingers of both hands together, making small diamonds for the sunlight to shine through.
“They’re not working together, are they, those two aliens?” Pak pretended to ignore me, which meant I was right. “I don’t suppose anyone checked. Was there even a battery in that damned camera?”
Pak sat up and the chair squeaked again. “You go home.” He turned to face me. “You put on a clean shirt, if you can find one. Maybe some new trousers, too. You get a cup of tea and something to eat. Then, as fast as your little legs can pedal, you get back here. No visiting friends. No stopping at markets. No sitting under a tree, gazing at the summer sky.” He looked at his watch. “It’s 11:30. You got up early. Take a rest. Be back here at 1:45, in time to call Kang.”
“What does he have to do with this, anyway?”
“Out. Now!”
I got one foot out the door, and Pak called after me. “Inspector, don’t forget.”
“I know.” I said. “The pin.”
5
The day had turned into a summer steam bath, not good for pedaling a bicycle, especially with the back tire almost flat. Every morning, I put air in the tire. It leaked out a few hours later; no one could discover from where, or why it always stopped leaking by noon. Every couple of weeks, I brought the tire to an old man who fixed bicycles in the shade of a pair of chestnut trees not far from my office, until he finally told me in disgust not to come by anymore, it took up his time and ate into his profits. I asked him what happened to the spirit of cooperation among us working people, but he snorted and turned his attention to an old Chinese bike that had been hit by a car. “Now that,” he said, “will pay for dinner.”
“This is a controlled intersection.” I turned toward a traffic lady standing a few feet away, her whistle held close to her mouth. “And I control it. No bikes. No pedestrians. Just cars.” There wasn’t a car in sight. Sweet-looking girl, tough as nails. She had pouty lips, like all the traffic ladies did. Soon after I was assigned to the office, Pak and I had a long discussion about whether they selected girls with those lips from the start or trained them to look that way, extra lipstick or something.
Pak told me it didn’t matter; either way, he wanted me to keep away from them. “They’re off-limits. Each one of them is special issue.” He paused. “Let me rephrase that. Each one of them is to be respected. No leering, no clucking your tongue as you stroll by, no comments on their sweet blue uniforms, or their pertness, or anything. You get me? Everything about them has been checked out at the top. The top looks very kindly on them, and not very kindly on one of us if we ruffle their little feathers.”
I didn’t dismount. I’m not short, but sitting on a bike makes me look taller, and getting off the bicycle would make her think she had some authority over me. “Yeah, I know the rules, but I’m in a hurry. Official business.”
“There’s an underground passage.” She pointed to the corner. “Use it.”
“In this weather, a fifty-six-year-old man has to carry a bicycle up and down those stairs?” I didn’t figure she would back down, but I wanted to see her smile.
She didn’t smile, not even close. “You don’t look that old to me.” Someone guffawed in the crowd that was forming.
“Well, I’m in pretty good shape.”
She looked me straight in the eye. “I wouldn’t know.” This provoked another guffaw. One old woman put her hand over her mouth. “And I don’t care.”
My shirt was soaked with sweat when I emerged from the stairs on the other side. Still no cars. It did not improve my mood when I saw that the traffic lady had moved out of the sun into the shade. She was watching me casually, her uniform crisp and unwrinkled, her black boots gleaming as if there were no dust for a mile in any direction. I thought I saw a smile flit over her pouty lips, but I didn’t feel like chatting anymore. A man on the corner looked up and waved as I passed by. “Bad tire. Get you a new one?” I coasted under the willow trees that lined the river, trying to catch a breeze, then gave up and pulled onto the old Japanese-built bridge that led to my street in the decaying eastern part of Pyongyang.
Inside my room it was no cooler, but with the shades down, the sun no longer glared in my eyes. The apartment house was already falling down when I moved in years ago. It was one of four buildings set around a square in which several small flowering bushes grew according to no particular plan. The apartments had been constructed from blueprints the East Germans brought with them in 1954 as part of their offer to help rebuild a Korean city after the war. They ended up restoring Hamhung, on the east coast, but the architecture was so appealing to someone in Pyongyang that the plans were “borrowed” and used for a number of offices and apartments in the capital. Later, to no one’s surprise, it was decided that buildings in a “foreign style” were not a good idea. After the fact, special work teams went back and modified all of them, including my group of apartments, adding touches that would make them “our own.”
The floors of the balconies had crumbled beyond repair, except for a mysterious few that survived and were crowded with plants. Much of the building’s yellow facade on the first two floors had fallen away, leaving stained concrete that for some reason turned a deep green when it rained. An East German police official I once drove around the city told me the apartments were “Bauhaus style,” but he said that the tile roofs were nothing quite like they had in Berlin, and the designs on the balconies were—here he paused a moment looking for the right word—“interesting.”
You could still see where the new exterior designs had been added, one marking each of the six floors and all topped by what had once been an intricate, probably very attractive molding just below the roof line. Whole sections of tiles had come off the roof, which was why the stairway always smelled dank.
I liked the place. People said hello when they passed you in the hall, partly to make sure you didn’t knock them over in the dark corridors, but also from friendliness. A group of old ladies, widows of war veterans, was assigned rooms on the lower floors so they wouldn’t have to walk up so many stairs. In good weather they sat outside and watched the road that ran in front of the building. They enjoyed the idea of having an inspector from the Ministry of People’s Security living in their building; they thought it gave the place a certain status and imagined that if word spread it would keep the area free of burglars.
Soon after I moved in, a few of them cornered me to insist it was not right that I was unmarried. They waved aloft a list of girls for me to meet. Heading the list, they said, was a beauty from Kaesong, a good cook whose noodle dishes were worthy of the country’s old capital and would be waiting for me each night. I told them that if I got married, it would mean moving out of my tiny single room, and if I moved away, which I certainly would, they would be left without a resident police inspector. I never saw the names of the girls, nor heard again of noodles.
My apartment was simple, but it was home and it was enough. For a while, I kept a small altar for my parents near the door. I even had a vase with a flower to remind me of the countryside where I had grown up, a small valley an hour’s walk from the nearest town, with nothing but dirt paths and rice fields shimmering in the afternoon sun. My balcony was unsafe to stand on; the birds perched on what remained and chattered at sunset. The couple next door, though, had a good balcony. Our side of the building faced south, and in the sunlight they grew flowers in pots of every size and description. On Monday mornings, rain or shine, the wife left a fresh red flower outside my door. She had plenty of colors to choose from; she always gave me red.
Against one wall of my room I had a small, single-drawer pine chest, inherited from my grandfather. He had built it for his wife when they were first married somewhere in the mountains near the Amnok River, hidden away from the Japanese patrols in the early 1930s. I called it my Manchurian chest and kept a clean uniform in it during the years when we were issued
extras. There was an icebox—but I never bothered to plug it in—a burner where I boiled water for tea, and a Chinese-made rice cooker I’d brought back from Vladivostok, which always undercooked the rice. On the floor was a blue kettle with a wooden handle. The water in it was from three days ago, but the tap wasn’t working. There was still vodka in a bottle sitting on the icebox. The vodka was from Finland, and as I took a couple of swallows, I closed my eyes and imagined what it was like in the Finnish summer. Twilight that stretched forever—a soothing idea. Whenever I mentioned it to Pak, he replied that only meant the day shifts must be hell. I liked Pak, but he had no poetry in his soul.
The altar was long gone, as was the green celedon vase, cool and smooth to the touch. The vase had been my grandfather’s. When I was young, it sat on a bookshelf in his house. I had stared at it on many quiet afternoons, imagining the white cranes painted on the sides were lifting themselves in flight to somewhere I could barely picture. I don’t know when it was, but at some point I began to doubt that the cranes knew where they were going.
One night soon after moving into the apartment, I came back from the office to find the altar knocked over and the vase on the floor. It wasn’t necessary, and it wasn’t an accident. Just a rude calling card. There was nothing else to disturb, no books to scatter about or pictures to pull down from the walls, but if there were flowers, they had to knock them over. Otherwise, what was the point of rousting the room? Once I saw the vase hadn’t been damaged, I decided to forget the whole thing. Having the room searched didn’t bother me. Whoever did it wasn’t trying to be subtle. I figured maybe it was a drill, to show me how rooms looked after a search if you didn’t do your job right. Or maybe it was a mistake: The wrong file got pulled, and when they walked into my room they realized they had made a trip for nothing, so they let off some steam.
The second time I found the vase on the floor, I wrote them a note. Pak called me into his office and told me that had demonstrated poor judgment, but I heard no trace of anger or warning in his voice as he stood behind his desk to deliver the scolding. After the third time, I just took the vase to work and put it away in my file cabinet.
6
I was back in our building at 1:45. I stood in the doorway to Pak’s office, smoothing an oblong chip of persimmon wood with my fingers while I waited for Pak to get off the phone. I always carry a small piece of wood, the size of a matchbook, in my pocket. If you roll a piece of wood around in your fingers, eventually it finds the shape it wants to be and then starts smoothing itself. Every type of wood is different. Some take months to settle down; some can’t wait to slough off the bad years. I started doing it on sentry duty in the army to keep the circulation in my fingers. After I began work in the Ministry as an inspector, I discovered that while I was sitting at my desk, reviewing a file of unrelated facts, it helped me focus. Some people find it amusing; they call it my dirty habit. Other people can’t stand it, which can be useful during an interrogation. I just have to lean against the wall, not saying anything, turning the wood over in my fingers, and they get nervous.
Pak was pleased to see me, until he glanced at my lapel.
“Don’t blame me,” I said. “They took the pin. Kang probably has it on his desk. Look, I don’t want to get you in trouble. Why don’t I put in for a transfer, maybe up north, to Kanggye?”
I put the persimmon wood back in my pocket. I’d been working it for a couple of months and it was only just getting calm. Persimmon usually goes faster than that. It’s pretty wood if you treat it the right way. Otherwise it tends to be gaudy. You can’t be sure you’ve found the heart with persimmon; it just wants to please. Walnut is different. My grandfather used to tell me that walnut couldn’t give a damn. If you were going to match wits with walnut, he’d say, you’d better be serious.
“Pyongyang is getting too bourgeois. The traffic ladies won’t even let you ride across the street. Incidentally, I think one of them almost smiled at me.”
Pak ran his hand through his hair, a nervous habit he developed after his son died a year ago in a military training accident near the front. Pak was going gray, though he wasn’t that much older than I was, maybe five or six years. His hair was too long for a chief inspector. Recently, notes about “grooming” had been showing up in his file during the quarterly evaluations, but he didn’t care. Ever since his son died, he had been stepping on rules.
I never met Pak’s son. When he was still little, I returned from a liaison trip abroad with a present, a boxed set of tiny metal cars made in Japan. One of the cars was yellow; it was a bus. The others were red. The tiny doors even opened, and the black tires went around. Pak thanked me and said he was sure the boy would enjoy the cars, but a couple of weeks later I found the unopened box in the trash. I knew Pak wasn’t worried about having goods from the outside, and I knew he was fiercely attached to the boy, always wanted the best for him. I didn’t mention it, but that was the last time I brought back any gifts from a trip. Right after the boy died, I could sense Pak wanted to tell me something. Once or twice a week, always when the sun was getting low in the sky, he’d show up at my door and start a conversation, then fall silent. “Nothing, forget it,” he’d say at last. “You got any of that damned Finnish vodka around?”
“Kanggye?” Pak said now, a surprised look on his face. “No, not Kanggye. Kanggye is full of hicks and crooks. You’d drop dead of boredom, or worse. Let’s go for a walk.”
We went down the stairs into the street. “Ever notice the way the sunlight dances on the river, Inspector?” The river was several blocks away, hidden behind buildings that were empty and served no purpose except as a source of shade for crowds waiting for a bus in the late afternoon. Pak couldn’t see the river; he was just keeping up a one-sided conversation. “You should try your hand at poetry, Inspector. Maybe join a club studying ancient dance.”
Pak leaned forward when he walked, sailing into a wind no one else could feel. For someone who examined ideas seamlessly, his thoughts gliding like a razor cutting silk, he moved with a surprising lack of grace, shoulders hunched, arms swinging fitfully just out of rhythm with his steps. He never looked comfortable with gravity; it was a concession he seemed unwilling to make. As a man, Pak was handsome. The shaggy gray hair made his crisp features seem more delicate and finely wrought. Everything fit perfectly on his small face, even the hint of a frown that rested almost constantly on his lips and the elusive sense of worry that never left his shining eyes.
As we walked, Pak fell silent. Then he was no longer beside me. It happened so abruptly that I went several steps before I realized he was gone.
“Inspector!” I looked around to find him down an alley, sitting under a willow tree whose branches drooped onto a rusted swing set. “Marvelous how we provide for children, the little princes and princesses. Nothing too good for them, eh? Care to guess the last time this was painted?”
I settled next to him. “If this is a social criticism session, I have nothing to say. It only gets me sour looks.”
Pak hummed to himself, a folk tune about a young couple separated by a river no one could bridge. They would have drowned themselves, but before things got that far, Pak turned to me, speaking quietly. “Kim is not a captain.”
“Figures.”
“He’s not from any joint headquarters.”
“Army?”
“Close enough. He’s from the Military Security Command, a colonel.”
I didn’t say anything. Pak coughed, another nervous habit. He lowered his voice another notch. “I’m not supposed to know where he’s from, and neither are you.”
“The car?”
“A picture. One lousy picture, Inspector, and Kim would have gone away happy.”
“That’s what I figured, he was the one who wanted the picture. Those types are never happy, you know that. Happiness doesn’t sit well with their sort of noxious purity. They give loyalty a bad name. If the Center mentions it wants a dark night for a drive, Military Security look
s for ways to erase the moon.” Pak puffed out his cheeks, a sign I was going off on a tangent. I backed up. “Okay. The picture. Don’t they have their own camera, something expensive? Or are they too dumb to know how to use it?”
“Inspector!” Pak’s tone was always friendly, even when he was irritated with me, but now it was deadly cold. “Don’t underestimate them. If you’d pay attention once in a while, like the rest of us, you’d know that. Don’t even think about underestimating them.”
“What do we do now?”
“We go back to the office so you can call Kang.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s early, and you didn’t really answer my question.”
“At the moment, it will have to do. We’ll tiptoe until Kim retracts his claws and pads away. Just hope we’re too small for him.”
“He may want us as a snack.”
“Not if he can’t see us, or hear us, or smell us. For the next ten days we fade into the background. See this swing set? It’s colorless. Blends in with the dirt. Moves ever so gently when the wind blows. Even the birds won’t shit on it, because they don’t believe it’s here. That’s us. Do I make myself clear?”
“I bet they don’t have swing sets in Kanggye.”
“Inspector”—Pak got up and dusted off his trousers—“notice how the sunlight dances off the sunglasses of that guy on the corner?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s hope the battery in his camera isn’t working, either.”
7
The number on the piece of paper was only a switchboard. I told the operator I wanted to speak to Deputy Director Kang. “Everyone here is a deputy director,” she said. “The lot of them. And I have three Kangs. So you’ll have to be a little more specific.”
“How about the Investigations Department?” I asked.
“Better.” I could tell she was reading something, and it wasn’t a telephone book. “I do have a Kang in the Investigations Department.”
