A Corpse in the Koryo

by James Church

  “That’s not what I meant.” She stopped and I waited. The silence grew, but there was nothing awkward about it.

  “In the house where I grew up,” I said after a while, “there were only two of us, my grandfather and me. Both my parents died in the war. My older brother went away to a school for the children of war heroes, but I was too young. Grandfather said that I had to be more filial than any kid whose parents were still living, I had to respect the memory of my father and mother with all my heart. If I’d been a tree, he used to say, I would have had to be the straightest one in the forest.”

  “Trees in the forest aren’t alone. My father used to tell us that when you see a tree standing by itself, it’s a sign that something sad will happen.”

  “Maybe my father would have said that, too. I don’t know what he would have told me. It isn’t something I wonder about.” The silence fell between us again. I looked at her face and was surprised to find she was crying softly. I handed her a handkerchief. “I’ve heard that when a man and a woman part, he gives her a handkerchief.” I paused. “I hope you won’t keep that.”

  She laughed, the mixed-up laugh that sometimes comes from a woman who has been crying. “This is very nice of you, Inspector. It’s the sort of thing I imagined you’d do. Maybe that’s why I’ve thought about you so much since we met.” She dried her eyes. “What do you want?”

  “Wasn’t this your idea?”

  We sat down on the pine needles. She was close beside me but with enough distance to leave open what she had in mind. “That must have been long ago,” she said. “A week, a decade. Time moves in funny ways in this country. Did I suggest a picnic? I must have been intoxicated with the idea of a quiet afternoon. Maybe I thought it would be like at home, by the lake. Maybe I thought you and I would have something to talk about. Do we? Pardon me for asking again, but what you do want? It’s not an unreasonable question, under the circumstances. You didn’t drive up to Hyangsan to see me. You didn’t even know I’d be here.”

  “You’re right. I was surprised. I’m just wondering, how is it that you happen to be so far away from where you normally stay?”

  “This is a resort, as you may have noticed. There are tourists here, with dollars.” She let the thought hang in the air. “Not very pretty, I realize. Do you still want to have a picnic?”

  “Tell me about Finland.”

  “You mean, why would a Finn come here, to this country?”

  “You know a guy named Pikkusaari?”

  She turned her head away quickly. I hadn’t even thought about that question. It just came out, like Lake Keitele.

  “I don’t know him well. He used to work for the Finnish National Police. He and my father often did business, though he was very young at the time.”

  Now it was my turn to blink. Maybe she was making this up. She probably made a lot of things up, but I didn’t follow that thought too far.

  “Your father did business with the police?”

  “No, Inspector, my father was a spy. I never knew exactly who he worked for. As a businessman, he traveled all over. He was gone every winter and spring, but every year on June 21, without fail, he always came home. We waited at the train station for him, my sisters and I. Pikkusaari came to see him a couple of times a month, in the summer. The two of them went for long walks beside the lake, moving slowly, their hands behind their backs. Sometimes they would be gone for hours. When they came back down the path, they looked exactly the same, moving slowly, hands behind their backs, as if they’d never said a word to each other the whole time. For all I know, they didn’t.

  “When they returned, Pikkusaari would always say, ‘You’re a lucky man, Ollie. You’ve a good wife and fine children. All you lack is a son. I wish I could say the same.’ Then they would drink a bottle of vodka, sitting on the wicker chairs we put under the birch trees in the back of the house, and listen to old records. My father had a good collection of classical music, but he insisted it be kept for winter, when everything was dreary. Summer was for jazz, he’d say. With the record player perched on the ledge of the open window, the sound turned up, he liked to sit facing the lake, tapping his feet. Pikkusaari liked jazz, too, but he said he couldn’t listen to it at home. His mother couldn’t stand what she called ‘that noise.’

  “That’s how they’d sit, my father and Pikkusaari, drinking and listening to jazz. Neither spoke, except to say something in English, ‘Oh yeah,’ or ‘That’s the stuff.’ After a few glasses of vodka, Pikkusaari would stand up and start to dance by himself, perspiring, his face tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, his hands swaying over his head as he turned in small, tight circles. Where we lived was quiet, no other houses nearby, and the scratchy sound of jazz, a trumpet and then a piano wildly taking flight, would make its way down to the water, where my sisters and I lay on our backs on the pier, watching the clouds. Around nine or ten o’clock at night, with the summer sky still bright and small waves from the lake splashing against the wooden pilings, Pikkusaari would stagger toward his car. My father would call after him, ‘You’re drunk, you fool, drive slowly.’”

  “Did your father ever come here?”

  Lena shook her head. “To this godforsa … isolated country? He said it wasn’t worth his time.”

  “Any Asians ever come out to see you at the lake?”

  “My mother was Chinese, Inspector. It was rare enough among all those blondes. We always had visitors.” She was dodging the question; I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did, but I wasn’t going to spoil the picnic. “If you must know, Pikkusaari came out the most. My mother said it wasn’t to see my father really, but to see me.”

  “Fine. Enough questions. Let’s just enjoy the view.” As I moved closer to her, my hand touched hers. I could see the pulse in her throat, and the way the breeze floated strands of her long hair over her shoulders.

  Then it was gone. She stood up and brushed the pine needles off her skirt. “I think we’re out of luck again, Inspector. I have to be back in the hotel before dinner, to change and put on my makeup. Anyway”—she looked up at the sky—“it’s going to rain.” She pointed across the valley, where a huge cloud bank was piling up, dwarfing the hills and rapidly replacing the high blue of autumn with a heavy blackness that squeezed the light out of what might have been a glorious afternoon.

  4

  “People think I’m absentminded, that I forget things. Maybe. To me, it’s more complicated. I know something, but I choose not to remember it. I can do both at the same time.”

  The Irishman looked tired, but I knew he was wide-awake. He turned off the tape recorder and put his hand over his eyes. “That’s not good for a detective, is it? Detectives are supposed to see everything, remember everything.”

  “So you think. But knowing too much can only lead to trouble. You know what you need to know. I’m not talking about instincts. No, my instincts are fine. Sometimes they move sideways, like an ox stumbling across a muddy field, I let them move however they wish. People think instincts should be sharp, they should fly like arrows. I don’t believe that. I think instincts should wander and meander, like streams coming down the mountain. An arrow can miss the target. A stream always knows where it is going, eventually.”

  “Maybe. But if you forget things, you make mistakes.”

  “And why not? Mistakes are good. The more mistakes, the better. People who make mistakes get promoted. They can be trusted. Why? They’re not dangerous. They can’t be too serious. People who don’t make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability. They might land on you.” I stood up and stretched. “Listen, Richie, where I live, we don’t solve cases. What is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable? For you, life is optimistic, endless in possibilities, but you think the parts are limited and self-contained. That’s why you make lists. You think it is possible to check off what is done. Me, I don’t ever make a list. What if someone sees it? It would l
ack something important, surely, and that would be evidence to be used against me. Not today, maybe, but someday. For the same reason, I don’t draw diagrams. I don’t connect dots. Unnecessary, because I know that nothing is a straight line. Everything is circles, overlapping circles that bleed into each other.”

  “Bleeding circles?”

  “To solve a case you have to put the wind in a jar. For me, life consists of badly limited possibilities, but I know the parts are endlessly rearranged, always shifting, always changing. Nobody puts down their foot twice in the same place. I once heard a Westerner say, ‘What you see is what you get.’ We laughed for days about that at the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that. But it’s what you people want to believe. Straightforward, direct, what’s the term?”

  “Transparent.”

  “Ah, Richie, you are trying to read my mind. You shouldn’t do that. No, not transparent. It doesn’t matter. I’m not saying your way is wrong. It doesn’t exist, not for me.”

  “So nothing is ever solved. That is a grand excuse if ever I heard one.”

  “An excuse? Could you live with uncertainty, moving shapes and shadows, morning, noon, and night, my friend? The mountains have become the only certain thing in my life. When they disappear, I die.”

  “Glorious words, Inspector. Put them to music and they’d make a fine, sad drinking song. But we’re not here to sing, are we? You’re to talk, I’m to listen.” He wrote something in his notebook and then turned on the tape recorder but quickly turned it off again. “The tragedy, Inspector, is that you have poetry in your soul, but all my ears are trained to hear is facts.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Richie. There’s less poetry as you go along.”

  5

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was reading when Song stepped into the room, pale and scared. There was blood on his shirt, lots of it. “Come, quickly, to the temple.” I didn’t ask but followed him silently up the steep road; he walked so fast, it was hard to keep up. The rain had stopped, but there were enough lingering clouds to cover the moon. The road was dark, and the sound of the river, swollen with the afternoon’s storm, echoed against the hills. At the gate to the temple compound, Song was waiting for me. “In there.” He pointed. “The low building.” He was hoarse, like someone who had been screaming. “I’m staying here.” He looked down at his shirt. “You couldn’t pay me enough to go back in there.”

  Before dawn I was on my way north to Kanggye, driving fast. That early, I didn’t expect any other traffic. I stuck to the middle of the highway, because if I hit a pothole at the speed I was going, the car’s frame would probably break apart. When the gas gauge showed empty, I pulled over. The gas can in the trunk was only half full; it might get me to Kanggye but no farther. Song owed me, for the gas, for everything. He knew he owed me, and he knew that someday I was going to collect.

  6

  The Inn of the Red Dragon in Kanggye was a wreck. The TV lay on its side, smashed. I stepped on the pages of a paperback book scattered over the floor. A moan came from the back room. The clerk was lying on a bed, his face to the wall. He rolled over when he heard me at the door. He had been pistol-whipped, badly.

  “Welcome back, Inspector. I don’t have any vacancies.” It was hard to understand him because his face was so bruised.

  “Who?”

  He coughed and his body tensed in pain. Maybe a rib was broken, too. “What difference does it make? I don’t keep score anymore. They asked about you.”

  “And?”

  “I told them I didn’t have any registration papers for anyone of your description.”

  “They believe you?”

  “That’s when they broke my ribs. What do you think?”

  I turned to go. “I’ll be back. I’ve got to get to Manpo.”

  He shook his head. “Too late. You’ll never make it.”

  “I need some gas.”

  He wiped the blood that was oozing from his mouth. “Grandma Pak might have some gas coupons.” He moaned again and rolled back to face the wall. “If she’s still alive.”

  The place where Grandma Pak usually sat was empty. The blanket was still on the floor, along with her eyeglasses. The frames were bent and one lens was shattered. At least it wasn’t a bullet hole. I looked along the bottom of the wall for a loose board, anything that might be a place to hide papers. In the corner was a different, older party newspaper. April 15, 1962. The editorial on the front chattered about loyalty in bold letters. Underneath the newspaper was a small wooden box. Loyalty covers a lot of sins, they like to say. Maybe that was what she figured.

  The box felt worn and smooth, the corners rounded from being handled. It had been made without nails, from Siberian chestnut. It was notched along the top to make the lid fit perfectly; the grain on each side matched precisely all the way around. I didn’t have to look twice to know whose hand it was from. My grandfather worked four months, morning and night, on that box. Most of the detail work was on the inside: a carving of a tiger on a rock, with a pine forest stretched below. You could even see the pinecones. I opened it up. There were some old train schedules and a black-and-white photograph of a young woman, her mouth set, staring into the camera with wide, dark eyes. Underneath were three gas coupons, the fancy ones with scenes of workers embossed on the front and farmers in a rice paddy on the back. They had expired twenty years ago. I put two in my pocket, then put the box in the corner again, under the newspaper. Maybe Grandma Pak would find her way back. I wanted the box there if she did.

  7

  The gas station at the edge of the city looked deserted; the front gate was shut tight. A sentry waved me away when I pulled up. An old man wearing a cloth cap looked at me from behind the bars of the gate. “Everything’s closed. You can’t get nothing here.” I handed the coupons to him. He studied them closely, then said something to the sentry. The gate sagged so badly it took the two of them to swing it open.

  The old man put out his hand. “Give me the keys. You can’t drive in without a military pass. You can sit over there if you want.” He indicated a concrete bench on a patch of dirt next to a low fence. He got in and started the car. “A Volvo. Not many of these left. None in Hamhung as far as I know. And only a few in Pyongyang.” I watched the car pull up to the fuel pump at the far end of the compound. The sentry dragged the gate shut and locked it.

  A rose bush grew along the fence behind the bench, climbing up from the ugly oil-stained pavement to make a thick wall. The flowers were red, a shade lighter than the girl’s blouse had been. The bush was pruned and tended, fed and watered. Each leaf was a glossy green, free of pests or disease. At night, when the air was still and no trucks were spewing exhaust along the street, this spot must have been a perfumed silence.

  The old man was standing next to me. “Even in this sadness, in this ugly time, the roses want to bloom,” he said quietly. “Here are your keys. You better keep these gas coupons. Or maybe put ‘em back where they came from.” He touched the bill of his cap in a small salute and watched from the side of the road as I drove down the town’s main street, past a half-ruined guesthouse called the Rainbow Inn and a park where a woman and a frail girl were sweeping imaginary leaves from the gravel walkway.

  At the edge of town, the street made a sharp bend and gave way to a two-lane, rutted dirt track. I couldn’t drive fast, but with a full tank of gas, I made it to just outside Manpo with only one stop. A bridge was down, and two soldiers were directing traffic through a field to a ford across the river. They weren’t checking papers, but when I parked at the water’s edge, waiting my turn, one of them looked at my plates, then stuck his head in the window. “You really from Hamhung?”

  “Nah. Never been there.” From his accent I could tell he wasn’t from that part of the country. “Hamgyong people are kind of thick. I won this car in a card game with a couple of them.” He laughed and waved me on, forgetting that he meant to bum a cigarette.

  8

  The four table
s had been overturned, their legs snapped off and broken into pieces. Each of the vases was shattered, the flowers strewn around the room. On the rear counter, a pool of blood was soaking the pages of a book that lay face down.

  Kang sat on the floor with his back against the wall. “I’ve been waiting for you, Inspector.” He spoke each word distinctly. “What took you so long?” He saw me grip the pistol in my coat pocket.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not armed.”

  “Somehow, I don’t believe you, Kang. I never should have.”

  He looked around the wreckage of the room. “Inspector, if you don’t mind, I’m not in the mood for your moralizing. You know, I hoped you would get here first. But you were behind them each step of the way, weren’t you?” He tapped his watch and held it to his ear. “Battery’s gone.” He smiled faintly. “Sound familiar?”

  I took the pistol out of my pocket and held it at my side. “What happened here?”

  “We don’t have much time left. You’re allowed one guess, Inspector.” His smile faded. “They came looking for me. And now they’re desperate. They know they have to get this done.” He glanced back at the counter, as if he still couldn’t grasp what had happened, but from the set of his shoulders, I could see that he knew.

  “Do you know where they took her?”

  “Somewhere her screams will be muffled.” He looked up at the ceiling, but his eyes were half closed; he must have been watching something ugly inside his head, because he grimaced. “Do us a favor, Inspector. Shoot me. You hate me, and you’ll be a hero. They’ll give you a medal.”

  “You killed Pak. If you didn’t squeeze the trigger, you caused it. Your whole network has been torn up by the roots, people flung like garbage across the landscape. So I will shoot you, Kang. But if I do it right now, your soul may float free. First, I want to know it’s soaked in regret, that it will drag around the stinking mud into forever. I don’t want to look up and think of you near the stars.”