by Martin Limon
I sat and waited.
It seemed like days. Finally, the door opened.
Leather boots appeared on the stone steps. Soon her face came into view: Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook, the woman who’d been haunting me since I first arrived in North Korea.
Her eyes were sad, and her full lips pouted.
“Now,” she said in English. “At last.”
She slipped off her leather coat, revealing a statuesque figure clad in tight black pants and blouse. From the pocket of the coat she pulled out a short leather whip. Then she turned to me and smiled, flicking the whip in front of her.
“Are you ready for some fun?” she said.
12
Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook set the whip aside and reached into the deep pocket of her leather coat, pulling out an ivory-handled knife. She pressed a button and the blade popped up with a snap. Heels clicking, she crossed the brick floor and stood in front of me.
“You’re filthy,” she said, loathing in her voice. “Stand!” she ordered in Korean. I did. She didn’t move away. Our bodies were practically touching. I was a head taller but she gazed up at me angrily, her soft lips curled in disgust. Deftly, she sliced my hemp tunic and pantaloons. With the long nails of her left hand she ripped the clothing off me. Finally, after she’d peeled off the last of my undergarments, I stood naked.
With the gleaming tip of the blade, she touched my chest. Pressing only hard enough to slice the first few layers of skin, she ran the tip of the blade down my body, across my stomach, stopping just as she reached my pubic hair. As she held the point of the blade there, ready to jab, she gazed into my eyes-searching, I believe, for fear.
She found it. Then she stepped back and hollered for the guards. Two men entered, both carrying wooden pails sloshing with water. Without hesitation they tossed the water on me. It was freezing. Before I could regain my breath, more men entered. They doused me with more water and rubbed my back and chest with some sort of harsh-smelling soap. Someone produced a thick-bristled brush, scrubbing my flesh, scratching it, almost peeling it off. I tried to shove them back, but there were too many of them.
They kicked the straw-covered cot out of the way and I fell to my knees. When they were done, I lay in a bloody mass of suds on the cold stone floor.
When I awoke, it was night. A metal lamp with a soft red bulb had been brought into the chamber. The tip of an insistent boot roused me awake. With a start, I sat up.
Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook gazed down at me. She wasn’t wearing her uniform now but rather a loose blue smock made of some sort of diaphanous material.
“Irrona,” she said. Get up.
I did.
She stepped closer and in the dim red glow examined the bruises and scratches on my body.
“Did they hurt you?” she asked. “No,” I replied.
Since my capture, she’d spoken only Korean to me. I wasn’t yet ready to admit that I understood English. It was foolish, I suppose. Eventually she’d find out that I didn’t speak Romanian and she’d figure out who I was, but all my training told me to stall for time, to give away nothing until I had to.
She stepped closer to me.
“You smell like lye,” she said in English.
I didn’t reply.
She leaned in so close to me that the tip of her nose was almost touching my chest. “But you’re clean,” she said in Korean.
Again, I didn’t respond.
Her lips parted, a moist tongue slithering out. And then she was kissing me, starting at my neck, working her way down.
Upstairs, a man screamed.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“Your friend,” she replied dreamily.
Moon Chaser.
He screamed again. And it was indeed him.
As the soft lips and probing tongue of Captain Rhee Mi-sook explored every part of my body, Moon Chaser’s screams of agony grew louder.
“You’re torturing him,” I said.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“You must stop.”
“When I’m ready.”
“When will that be?” I asked.
“When you tell me everything.”
I didn’t answer. Moon Chaser kept screaming. Captain Rhee Mi-sook’s soft tongue kept probing.
In the morning they fed me noodles. That night, a bowl of rice laced with turnip greens. In between, I was allowed all the barley tea I could drink. The purpose, I believed, was to keep me healthy. Captain Rhee and I engaged in two sessions a day, for three days. I told her nothing. All the while, during each assignation, Moon Chaser was tortured. It was a technique the North Koreans had used before: torture one man and let the guilt grow in another. Eighth Army had taught me to keep my feelings compartmentalized. Never blame yourself for what someone else was doing, in this case torturing a man who had risked his life for you. I tried, but it didn’t work. After one particularly hideous session, I broke down.
In English, I said, “That’s enough. You hear me? That’s enough!”
Captain Rhee’s eyes widened in mock surprise.
“I want you to stop torturing him.” When she didn’t respond, I took a deep breath and said, “I’m from Eighth Army.”
Unconcerned, Captain Rhee toyed with the sparse hair on my chest. “I know that,” she replied.
“Will you stop torturing him if I confess?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Moon Chaser was still screaming, so I confessed. Rapidly. Most of what I said bored her. About Hero Kang and Commissar Oh and Hero Kang’s daughter, Hye-kyong, and how they’d both died heroically. About the Manchurian Battalion and how they were seen as being too independent and how the Dear Leader was set on destroying them. All the while, she tried to distract me with her long fingers and her nibbling at various parts of me. I wondered what they’d done to her to make her this way. And then she told me.
She’d been selected from among thousands of girls, for being smart, for being pretty. A cadre of apparatchiks had traveled around the country, checking school records, listening to talent recitals of little girls singing and dancing and praising the glorious work of the Great Leader.
“I played the violin,” she said. “A composition written by the Great Leader himself, although my music teacher let slip once that it had actually been written by Bach. At the time, I didn’t believe him. I was only fourteen. They took me to Pyongyang for training and more education. When I was seventeen, the Great Leader visited me himself.”
“Alone?”
“Very alone. I didn’t know he was coming. He appeared suddenly in my room. Everything was quiet. I believe the entire dormitory had been evacuated. Outside, a ring of cars and soldiers protected the area.”
I studied her, looking for signs of outrage or sadness or even pride. I saw nothing. But she answered my unspoken question.
“I was a virgin,” she said. “He was old. Things didn’t work out so well.”
“You were expelled from the Joy Brigade?”
“Put in the army. The Great Leader wanted to make sure that if I talked, I knew I would be shot.”
“Did you talk?”
“Never.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“You are a foreigner. No one understands you and no one believes you. You don’t count.”
“Also,” I said, “I will die soon.”
“Yes. That’s another reason.” She stared up at the stone ceiling, lost in thought. Then she said, “In the army, every man used me.”
I waited, not moving.
“All the old colonels first, they each had their turn, with their weak bodies and their cold hands. And then the junior officers. I was lost, not knowing what to do. Shocked that I, who had dedicated my life to the Great Leader, was being betrayed like this. I knew that if the Great Leader were aware of their treachery, he would stop them and punish them all. But he wasn’t there. I was alone.”
“You had no one to turn to?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “No one.” She seemed slightly astonished. “A woman alone in the army, purposely kept away from other females. I was told to follow orders, to keep my mouth shut, that was all. I thought of killing myself. Of pulling out my pistol and ending it all, but I knew that would be seen as a direct insult to the Great Leader and my family would be punished. I couldn’t do that. Finally, I found some inner strength from somewhere and I decided to change. Not to change the men who were using me but to change myself. If they loved me, if they loved my face, my hands, my body, I would use that as my power. Once I made that decision, I felt free-and strong. I became more aware of my surroundings and started to search out the men who made the real decisions, the men with power, the men who could protect me.”
“The commissars,” I said.
“Yes. And that’s when I started to get what I wanted. Better working conditions, promotions, jobs with more authority.”
“And now you’re a fixer,” I said.
“Who told you that?”
I shrugged.
“No matter,” she replied. “Someday, I will be a commissar myself.” She turned to me and smiled, her sweet, beautiful smile. “But first, you will help me take down the Manchurian Battalion. All the things you’ve told me so far, I already know. I need you to tell me more. Why did the Manchurian Battalion bring you here? Who was your initial contact? What are their plans?”
Most of the questions she asked, I wouldn’t have been able to answer even if I wanted to. But I also knew that in the intelligence business a little information from one source could be pieced together with information from another source to create a comprehensive picture of the whole. When I claimed ignorance, sometimes honestly, she used the whip on me. I did my best not to cry out.
They were still torturing Moon Chaser. His screams had been reverberating through my skull for days. It was my fault he’d been caught. It was my fault he was suffering. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I broke down and told Captain Rhee about the manuscript of the wild man. She sat up as I spoke. I knew I’d caught her interest.
“Stop torturing him now,” I said.
She snapped her fingers. A guard came in. She barked the order, and two minutes later the screaming stopped.
“Tell me,” she commanded.
I told her of the tunnel through the Kwangju Mountains, impossible to discover except by the “wild man” who seemed to have some sixth sense that guided him through the bowels of the earth.
“It leads where?” she asked me breathlessly.
I was about to tell her when a bomb went off.
Quickly, she slipped back into her clothes, pulled on her boots, and ran outside. I sat on the metal bench, listening to the gunfire all around me, men shouting in anger and in terror.
A half-hour later, armed men burst into the dungeon. Some of them were spattered with blood. All of them were dirty and perspiration dripped from their foreheads. One of them held a ring of keys and he knelt and unshackled me. I was still naked.
Doctor Yong In-ja, holding a Kalashnikov rifle across her chest, strode between the men. “Find him some clothes,” she ordered. “Then bring him.”
Without saying a word to me, she swiveled and returned to the fight.
The redoubt high on the edge of Mount O-song was carefully camouflaged. Canvas netting strewn with weeds covered most of the buildings and some of them were sheltered beneath natural rock overhangs.
Doc Yong personally supervised my recovery. It didn’t take long. Most of my wounds were superficial. The avaricious Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook had merely exhausted me. It was Moon Chaser who’d been methodically ripped to shreds. The soldiers of the Manchurian Battalion rescued him from the Eastern Star Commune but he hadn’t survived the retreat up into the Kwangju Mountains. His body was carried the rest of the way and buried, with honors, within one of the grave mounds reserved for the martyrs of the Manchurian Battalion.
When I was well enough, Doc Yong introduced me to Il-yong, the First Dragon, my son. My first glimpse of him was like an awakening in my soul. Now I lived for him, not for myself. He was a bright-eyed boy who loved to smile. I thought he looked like her. She said he looked like me. He noticed everything and I told Doc Yong that that part was definitely like her. I prayed that he’d inherited her brains.
The raid on the Eastern Star Commune had killed a few North Korean soldiers and chased the rest away, including, presumably, Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook. Immediately, I told Doc Yong everything I knew about the plan to deploy the Red Star Brigade first to a village near Hamhung, and then from there up into the Kwangju Mountains for the assault on the Manchurian Battalion. She nodded gravely. That matched intelligence they’d already gathered.
I spilled my guts about the order of battle and the notes that I’d taken in the catacombs of the Joy Brigade. Somehow, in all the madness since then, the notes had been lost.
“Here,” Doc Yong said, sitting me at a wooden desk and handing me a pencil and a pad of paper. “Put down everything you can remember.” She poured me a cup of barley tea and left the room. The silence grew. I remembered Beikyang and the red star hitting the butt of a white goat, but after that, not much.
Eventually, I gave up and found Doc Yong.
“Keep trying,” she said. “Maybe in your dreams some of it will come back to you.”
I also told her about Hero Kang and his daughter, Hye-kyong, and the holding action of assaulting the petroleum transport convoy.
Another ceremony was held, honoring them. A single carved memorial was erected.
At night, Doc Yong and I lay in bed together. Beside us, on a small mat, Il-yong breathed softly. I lay awake, staring at the moonlight seeping through an oil-papered window, my happiness complete. Or almost. Thoughts of Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook remained, like a she-demon stalking me.
During the day, with Il-yong strapped to Doc Yong’s back, she gave me a complete tour of the grounds. To the north, twin peaks protected the mountain valley from the cold winds. To the south loomed Mount O-song. Thus sheltered, the valley had a surprisingly temperate climate that allowed the men and women of the Manchurian Battalion to work the land and raise many of their own crops. Not rice but cabbage and turnips and carrots and even a small grove of pear trees. The streams provided some fish, and for the rest of their sustenance, they traded with the collective farms in the valley below. Sometimes, when out of political favor, they had to travel far afield to purchase the rations that the central government supposedly provided free. But they had allies everywhere; people who secretly admired not only the valiant history of the Manchurian Battalion but also their independence.
Everywhere I went, people bowed to me and smiled. Doc Yong had been raised in South Korea and knew the truth about the government down there. It was corrupt and had its faults, and the southern economy was still suffering from the devastation of the Korean War, but fundamentally people were free. Doc Yong had spoken of these things at village meetings and reassured the leadership that the Americans were no longer the enemy of the North Korean people. Compromises could be reached. Peace negotiated. The United States, she promised everyone, was reasonable. Most importantly, the U.S. might be able to help the Manchurian Battalion maintain their independence.
That’s why I received so many smiles.
I thought of these things as I lay in bed next to Doc Yong. My belly was full with roast mackerel and kokktugi, pickled turnip, and heaping white bowls of steamed rice. I was satisfied, for once in my life, worried only about how I could provide help to these people. And how I’d be able to get Doc Yong and Il-yong back to South Korea.
Outside, wood clumped on stone. Rhythmically. I sat up in bed. Carefully, so as not to wake Doc Yong, I stood and slid open the small wood-paneled window.
A dark figure stalked away, like a fat blackbird with long, skinny legs. I stared at the figure in the glimmering moonlight, figuring that my eyesight must be going. Had Captain Rhee Mi-sook hit me so hard that she damaged my ocular nerve in
some way? I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Still the same husky figure with stick-like legs. Then it rounded a corner and disappeared in shadow.
When I slid shut the window, Doc Yong, wearing her cotton nightgown, sat on our sleeping mat, eyes wide, waiting for me. I sat down next to her.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“Our leader,” she said.
“Your leader? That was a man?”
“Very much a man,” she said. “Tomorrow you will meet him.”
Bandit Lee, the commander of the Manchurian Battalion, wore his wool uniform draped with metals from the campaigns against the Japanese colonialists and the war against the Yankee imperialists. His name had been acquired when he fought the Japanese Imperial Army in the vast wilderness of Manchuria and in the northern mountains of Korea. In those days, his enemies had thought of him not as a revolutionary but as a bandit.
He had broad shoulders and a thick waist, but at the knees his legs stopped. He stood on two wooden stumps. Doc Yong had told me earlier that he could’ve replaced the wooden stumps with more expensive prosthetics, or simply covered them with his trouser legs, but Bandit Lee eschewed both options. He wanted the world to see what had been done to him.
But the worst damage was not done to his legs. After all, war veterans without limbs were commonplace throughout the world. The most hideous part of his body was his face. Every inch of flesh had been charred, melted by American-manufactured napalm. North Korea-from coast to coast, from the DMZ to the Chinese border-had been saturated with the burning chemical during the Korean War. Bandit Lee had been one of its tens of thousands of victims. One who had survived. His face was not capable of expression. His nose was like a charred lump of coal, his mouth a wrinkled ebony slit. Red eyes stared out at the world as if from behind a mask. When he spoke, the words seemed burnt, escaping from a charred throat. His tongue flicked red, like a serpent emerging from a blackened hole.
“Beikyang,” he said
The sound was so rough, like a reptile hissing, that at first I didn’t understand him. He repeated the word and then said, “According to your report, the Red Star Brigade will rendezvous there prior to the final assault.”
