COMMANDER GA tried to forget about the interrogator, though Ga could smell the cucumber on his breath long after the man had swallowed his pill and walked out the door. Speaking of Sun Moon had put fresh images of her in Ga’s mind, and that’s what Ga cared about. He could practically see the movie they’d been talking about. A True Daughter of the Country. That was the name of the movie, not Tyrants Asunder. Sun Moon had played a woman from the southern island of Cheju who leaves her family and journeys north to battle the imperialists at Inchon. Cheju, he learned, was famous for its women abalone divers, and the movie opens with three sisters on a raft. Opaque waves capped with pumice-colored foam lift and drop the women. A wave the color of charcoal rolls into the frame, blotting the women from view until it passes, while brutal clouds scrape the volcanic shore. The oldest sister is Sun Moon. She splashes water on her limbs, to prepare herself for the cold, and adjusts her mask as her sisters speak of village gossip. Then Sun Moon hefts a rock, breathes deeply, and rolls backward off the raft into water so dark it should be night. The sisters switch their talk to the war and their sick mother and their fears that Sun Moon will abandon them. They lie back on the raft in a moment filmed from the mast above, and the sisters speak of village life again, of their neighbors’ crushes and spats, but they have gone somber and it is clear that what they are not talking about is the war and how, if they do not go to it, it will come to them.
He’d watched this movie with the others, projected onto the side of the prison infirmary, the only building that was painted white. It was Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, their one day off work a year. The inmates sat on upended pieces of firewood that they’d beaten free of ice, and this was his first look at her, a woman luminous with beauty who plunges into darkness and simply won’t seem to return. The sisters speak on and on, the waves build and break, the patients in the infirmary weakly moan as their blood-collection bags fill, and still Sun Moon will not surface. He wrings his hands at the loss of her, all the prisoners do, and even though she eventually surfaces, they all know that for the rest of the movie she will have that power over them.
It was that night, he now remembered, that Mongnan saved his life for the second time. It was very cold, the coldest he’d ever been, for work was what kept them warm all day, and watching a movie in the snow had allowed his body temperature to dangerously fall.
Mongnan appeared at his bunk, touching his chest and his feet to gauge his aliveness.
“Come,” she said. “We must move quickly.”
His limbs barely functioned as he followed the old woman. Others in their bunks stirred as they passed, but none sat up, as there was so little time for sleep. Together, they raced for a corner of the prison yard that was normally brightly lit and watched by a two-man guard tower. “The bulb to the main searchlight has burned out,” Mongnan whispered to him as they ran. “It will take them a while to get another, but we must be quick.” In the dark, they crouched, picking up all the moths that had fallen dead before the lamp had died. “Fill your mouth,” she said. “Your stomach doesn’t care.” He did as he was told and soon he was chewing a wad of them—their furry abdomens drying his mouth, despite the goop that burst from them and a sharp aspirin taste from some chemical on their wings. His stomach hadn’t been filled since Texas. He and Mongnan fled in the dark with handfuls of moths—wings slightly singed but ready to keep them alive another week.
GOOD MORNING, CITIZENS! In your housing blocks, on your factory floors, gather ’round your loudspeakers for today’s news: the North Korean table-tennis team has just defeated its Somali counterpart in straight sets! Also, President Robert Mugabe sends his well wishes on this, the anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea. Don’t forget, it is improper to sit on the escalators leading into the subways. The Minister of Defense reminds us that the deepest subways in the world are for your civil-defense safety, should the Americans sneak-attack again. No sitting! And kelp-harvesting season will soon be upon us! Time to sterilize your jars and cans. And, finally, it is once again our privilege to crown the year’s Best North Korean Story. Last year’s tale of sorrow at the hands of South Korean missionaries was a one-hundred-percent success. This year’s promises to be even more grand—it is a true story of love and sorrow, of faith and endurance, and of the Dear Leader’s unending dedication to even the lowliest citizen of this great nation. Sadly, there is tragedy. Yet there is redemption, too! And taekwondo! Stay close to your loudspeakers, citizens, for each daily installment.
THE NEXT MORNING, my head was foggy from the sedative. Still, I raced to Division 42, where we checked on Commander Ga. As is the law of beatings, the real hurt came the day after. Rather ingeniously, he had stitched up the cut over his eye, but by what means he’d improvised a needle and thread we couldn’t tell. We would have to discover his method so that we could ask him about it.
We took Commander Ga to the cafeteria, a place we thought would seem less threatening. Most people believe that harm won’t come to them in a public space. We had the interns fetch Ga some breakfast. Jujack fixed a bowl of bi bim bop, while Q-Kee heated a kettle for cha. None of us liked the name “Q-Kee.” It went against the professionalism we were trying to project at Division 42, something sorely missing with Pubyok wandering around in forty-year-old suits from Hamhung and bulgogi-stained ties. But since the new opera diva started going by her initials, all the young women were doing it. Pyongyang can be so trendy that way. Q-Kee countered our complaints with the fact that we wouldn’t reveal our names, and she was unmoved when we explained that the policy was a holdover from the war, when subjects were seen as possible spies rather than citizens who had lost their revolutionary zeal and gone astray. She didn’t buy it, and neither did we. How could you build a reputation in an environment where the only people who got names were the interns and the sad old retirees who clamber in to relive the glory days?
While Commander Ga ate his breakfast, Q-Kee engaged him in some small talk.
“Which kwans do you think have a shot at the Golden Belt this year?” she asked.
Commander Ga simply wolfed his food. We’d never met someone who’d made it out of a mining prison before, but one look at how he ate told us all we needed to know about the conditions at Prison 33. Imagine stepping from a place like that into Commander Ga’s beautiful house on Mount Taesong. His view of Pyongyang is suddenly yours, his famed rice-wine collection is suddenly yours, and then there is his wife.
Q-Kee tried again. “One of the girls in the fifty-five-kilo division just qualified using the dwi chagi ga,” she said. This was Ga’s signature move. He’d personally modified the dwi chagi so that now its execution required turning your back to the opponent to lure him in. Ga either knew nothing of taekwondo or he didn’t take the bait. Of course this wasn’t the real Commander Ga, so he should have no real knowledge of Golden Belt—level martial arts. The questioning was a necessary step in determining the degree to which he actually believed he was Commander Ga.
Ga horsed down the last swallow, wiped his mouth, and pushed the bowl away.
“You’ll never find them,” he said to us. “I don’t care what happens to me, so don’t bother trying to make me tell you.”
His voice was stern, and interrogators aren’t used to being spoken to that way. Some of the Pubyok at another table caught wind of this tone and came over.
Commander Ga pulled the teapot to him. Instead of pouring a cup, he opened the pot and removed the steaming teabag. This he placed on the cut over his eye. He squinted at the pain, and tears of hot tea ran down his cheek. “You said you wanted my story,” he told us. “I’ll give it to you, everything but the fates of the woman and her kids. But first, I need something.”
One of the Pubyok pulled off a shoe and advanced upon Ga.
“Stop,” I called. “Let him finish.”
The Pubyok hesitated, shoe high.
Ga paid this threat no mind. Was this a result of his pain training? Was he accustomed to beatings? Some people simply feel better after a beating—beatings are often good cures for guilt and self-loathing. Was he suffering from these?
In a calmer voice, we told the Pubyok, “He’s ours. Sarge gave his word.”
The Pubyok backed down, but they joined us at our table, four of them, with their teapot. Of course they drink pu-erh, and they stink of it all day long.
“What is this thing you need?” we asked him.
Commander Ga said, “I need the answer to a question.”
The Pubyok were beside themselves. Never in their lives had they heard such talk from a subject. The team looked my way. “Sir,” Q-Kee said. “This is the wrong road to go down.”
Jujack said, “With all due respect, sir. We should give this guy a sniff of the towering white flower.”
I put my hand up. “Enough,” I said. “Our subject will tell us how he first met Commander Ga, and when he is finished we will answer one question, any question he wishes.”
The old-timers looked on with seething disbelief. They leaned on their hard, ropy forearms, their knotted hands and bent fingers and misgrown fingernails squeezed tight with restraint.
Commander Ga said, “I met Commander Ga twice. The first time was in the spring—I heard he would be visiting the prison on the eve of his arrival.”
“Start there,” we told him.
“Shortly after I entered Prison 33,” he said, “Mongnan started a rumor that one of the new inmates was an undercover agent from the Ministry of Prison Mines, sent there to catch guards who were killing inmates for fun and thus lowering the production quotas. It worked, I suppose—they said fewer inmates were maimed for the sport of it. But the guards thumping on you—when winter came, that was the least of your worries.”
“What did the guards call you?” we asked him.
“There are no names,” he said. “I made it through winter, but afterward I was different. I can’t make you understand what the winter was like, what that did to me. When the thaw came, I didn’t care about anything. I would leer at the guards like they were orphans. I kept acting out at self-criticism sessions. Instead of confessing that I could have pushed one more ore cart or mined an extra ton, I would berate my hands for not listening to my mouth or blame my right foot for not following my left. Winter had changed me—I was someone else now. The cold, there are no words for it.”
“For the love of Juche,” the old Pubyok said. He still had his shoe on the table. “If we were interrogating this idiot, there’d already be a funeral team on its way to retrieve that glorious, glorious actress and her poor tots.”
“This isn’t even Commander Ga,” we reminded him.
“Then why are we listening to him whimper about prison?” He turned to Commander Ga. “You think those mountains are cold? Imagine them with Yankee snipers and B-29 strikes. Imagine those hills without a camp cook to serve you hot cabbage soup every day. Imagine there’s no comfortable infirmary cot where they painlessly put you out of your misery.”
Nobody ever dropped bombs on us, but we knew what Commander Ga was talking about. Once we had to go north to get the biography of a guard at Prison 14-18. All day we rode north in the back of a crow, slush spraying up from the floorboards, our boots freezing solid, the whole time wondering if we were really going to interrogate a subject or if that was just what we’d been told to lure us to prison without a fuss. As the cold froze the turds inside our asses, we could only wonder if the Pubyok hadn’t finally pulled the lever on us.
Commander Ga went on, “Because I was new, I was housed next to the infirmary, where people complained all night. One old man in there was a particular pain in the ass. He wasn’t productive because his hands no longer worked. People might have covered for him, but he was hated—one of his eyes was cloudy, and he only knew how to accuse and demand. All night the guy would moan an endless series of questions. Who are you? he’d call to the night. Why are you here? Why won’t you answer? Week after week, I’d wonder when the blood truck would finally come to shut him up. But then I started to think about his questions. Why was I there? What was my crime? Eventually, I began to answer him. Why won’t you confess? he’d call out, and through my harmonica barracks, I’d shout, I’m ready to confess, I’ll tell everything. These conversations made people nervous, and then one night, I got a visit from Mongnan. She was the oldest woman in the camp, and she’d long ago lost her hips and breasts to hunger. Her hair was cut like a man’s, and she kept her palms wrapped with strips of cloth.”
Commander Ga continued with his story of how he and Mongnan sneaked out of the barracks, past the mud room and water barrels, and if we perhaps didn’t say it, we all must have been thinking that the name Mongnan meant “Magnolia,” the grandest white flower of them all. That’s what our subjects say they see when the autopilot takes them to the apex of pain—a wintry mountaintop, where from the frost a lone white blossom opens for them. No matter how their bodies contort, it is the stillness of this image they remember. It couldn’t be so bad, could it? A single afternoon of pain … and then the past is behind you, every shortcoming and failure is gone, every last bitter mouthful of it.
“Outside, past my rising breath,” Commander Ga continued, “I asked Mongnan where all the guards had gone. She pointed toward the bright lights of the administration buildings. The Minister of Prison Mines must be coming tomorrow, she said. I’ve seen this before. They’ll be up all night cooking the books.
“So? I asked her.
“The Minister is coming, she said. That’s why they’ve worked us so hard, that’s why all the weak have been thrown in the infirmary. She pointed to the warden’s complex, every light burning bright. Look at all the electricity they’re using, she said. Listen to that poor generator. The only way they can light this whole place is with the electric fence off.
“So what, escape? I asked. There’s nowhere to run.
“Oh, we’ll all die here, she said. Rest assured. But it won’t be tonight.
“And suddenly she was moving across the yard, stiff-spined but quick in the dark. I caught up with her at the fence, where we squatted. The fence was two fences, really, a parallel line of concrete posts strung with cables on brown ceramic insulators. Inside was a stretch of no-man’s-land, teeming with wild ginger and radishes that nobody lived to steal.
“She moved to reach through the wires. Wait, I said. Shouldn’t we test it? But Mongnan reached under the fence and pulled out two radishes, crisp and cold, which we ate on the spot. Then we began digging the wild ginger that grew there. All the old ladies in camp got placed on grave detail—they buried the bodies where they fell, just deep enough that the rain wouldn’t seep them out. And you could always tell ginger plants whose tap root had penetrated a corpse: the blooms were large, iridescent yellow, and it was hard to jerk loose a plant whose roots had hooked a rib below.
“When our pockets could hold no more, we ate another radish and I could feel it cleaning my teeth. Ah, the joys of a scarcity distribution, Mongnan said and finished the radish—root, stem, and blossom. This place is a lecture on supply and demand. Here is my blackboard, she said, looking to the night sky. Then she put a hand on the electric fence. And here is my final exam.”
In the cafeteria, Q-Kee jumped up. “Wait,” she said. “Is this Li Mongnan, the professor who was denounced, along with her students?”
Commander Ga stopped his story. “A professor?” he asked us. “What was her subject?”
It was a tremendous gaffe. The Pubyok just shook their heads. We had just given our subject more information than he’d given us. We dismissed both interns and asked Commander Ga to please continue.
“Were her students transported?” Ga asked. “Had Mongnan outlived them at Prison 33?”
“Please continue,” we requested. “When you’re done, we’ll answer one question.”
Commander Ga took a moment to digest this. Then he nodded and continued. “There was a pond in which the guards raised trout to feed to their families. The fish were counted every morning, and if one went missing, the whole camp would starve. I followed Mongnan to the low wall of the circular pool, where she crouched and reached over to snatch a fish from the black water. It took a couple tries, but she had a net rigged from a hoop of wire, and the fabric wrapped around Mongnan’s hands gave her a good grip. She held a trout behind the pectoral fins—so healthy, so perfectly alive. Pinch it here, just up from the tail, she said. Then massage it here, behind the belly. When you feel the egg pocket, squeeze. Mongnan lifted the fish high and then milked an apricot-colored stream of eggs into her mouth. She tossed the fish back.
“Then it was my turn. Mongnan snatched another fish and showed me the slit that marked it as female. Pinch hard, she cautioned, or you’ll get fish shit. I squeezed the fish, and a shot of eggs sprayed my face, surprisingly warm. Gelatinous, briny, unmistakably alive, I smelled it on my cheeks, then, wiping, licked my palms. With practice, I got the knack. We milked the eggs of a dozen fish, stars crossing the sky as we sat there, stunned.
“Why are you helping me? I asked her.
“I am an old woman, she said. That’s what old women do.
“Yes, but why me?
“Mongnan rubbed her hands in the dirt, to get the smell off. You need it, she said. The winter took ten kilos from you. You don’t have that to give again.
“I’m asking, why do you care?
“Have you heard of Prison Number 9?
“I’ve heard of it.
“It’s their most profitable prison mine—five guards run a prison of fifteen hundred. They just stand at the gate and never go inside. The whole prison is in the mine, there’s no barracks, no kitchen, no infirmary—
“I said I’ve heard of it, I told her. Are you saying we should feel lucky we’re in a nice prison?
“Mongnan stood. I heard there was a fire in Prison 9, she said. The guards wouldn’t open the gates to let the prisoners out, so the smoke killed everyone inside.
“I nodded at the gravity of her story, but said, You’re not answering my question.
“That minister is coming here tomorrow to inspect our mine. Think how his life is going right now. Think how much shit he’s been eating. She grabbed me by the shoulder. You can’t be talking to your hands and feet at self-criticism. You can’t be throwing the guards stupid looks. You’ve got to stop debating the old man in the infirmary.
“Okay, I said.
“And the answer to your question is this: why I’m helping you is none of your business.
“We made our way past the latrine benches and leaped the piers of the gravity sewer. There was a pallet where people who died in the night were stacked, but now it was empty. As we passed it, Mongnan said, My tripod gets to sleep in tomorrow. Still and clear, the night smelled of birch trees, which a detail of old men had been cutting into cane strips. Finally we came to the cistern and the ox that turned its great pump wheel. It had kneeled down on a bed of birch bark, very pungent. When the beast heard Mongnan’s voice, it stood. She turned to me, whispering, The fish eggs, that’s once a year. I can show you where the tadpoles arrive in the streams, and when the trees by the west tower give their sap. There are other such tricks, but you can’t count on them. There are only two constant sources of nourishment in the camp. One I’ll show you later, when things get difficult, for it is quite distasteful. Here is the other.
“She touched the beast on the nose, then patted the black plates between its horns. She fed him a piece of wild ginger—it breathed sharply through its nostrils, then chewed sideways. From deep in her pockets, Mongnan produced a medium-sized jar. An old man showed me this, she said. The oldest man in the camp at the time. He must have been sixty, maybe more, but very fit. It was a cave-in that killed him, not hunger or weakness. He was strong when he went.
“She ducked under the ox, already hanging long and red. With a tight grip, Mongnan began stroking him. The ox smelled my hands, looking for more ginger, and I looked into its wet, black eyes. There was a man a few years back, Mongnan said, from under the ox. He had a little razor, and he would make cuts in the beast’s hide, to drink the blood when it leaked. That was a different animal. The beast didn’t complain, but the blood trickled out and froze, which the guards noticed, and that was the end of the little man. I photographed his body after the punishment. I went through all his clothes looking for that razor, but I never found it.
“The ox snorted—its eyes were wide and uncertain, and it swung its head from side to side as if looking for something. Then it closed its eyes, and soon Mongnan emerged with a jar, nearly full and steaming. Mongnan drank half at one go and handed it to me. I tried to take a sip, but when a little rope of it went down my throat, the rest hung on, and it all swam down at once. The ox knelt again. You’ll be strong for three days, she said.
“We looked at the lights glowing in the guard buildings. We looked toward China. This regime will come to an end, she said. I have studied every angle, and it cannot last. One day all the guards will run away—they’ll head that way, for the border. There will be disbelief, then confusion, then chaos, and finally a vacuum. You must have a plan ready. Act before the vacuum is filled.
“We began to make our way back toward the barracks, our stomachs full, our pockets full. When we heard the dying man again, we shook our heads.
“Why won’t I tell them what they want to know? the dying man moaned, his voice reverberating through the barracks. What am I doing here? What is my crime?
“Allow me, Mongnan said. She cupped her hands and moaned back, Your crime is disturbing the peace.
“Oblivious, the dying man moaned again. Who am I?
“Mongnan made her voice low and moaned, You are Duc Dan, the camp’s pain in the ass. Please die quietly. Die in silence, and I promise to take a flattering last photo of you.”
In the cafeteria, one of the Pubyoks pounded the table. “Enough,” he shouted. “Enough of this.”
Commander Ga stopped his story.
The old interrogator knotted his hands. “Don’t you know a lie when you hear one?” he asked us. “Can’t you see the way this subject is playing you? He’s talking about Kim Duc Dan, trying to make you think he’s in prison. Interrogators don’t go to prison, that’s impossible.”
Another old-timer stood. “Duc Dan’s retired,” he said. “You all went to his going-away party. He moved to the beach in Wonsan. He’s not in jail, that’s a lie that he’s in jail. He’s painting seashells right now. You all saw the brochure he had.”
Commander Ga said, “I haven’t gotten to the part about Commander Ga yet. Don’t you want to hear the story of our first encounter?”
The first interrogator ignored him. “Interrogators don’t go to prison,” he said. “Hell, Duc Dan probably interrogated half the people in Prison 33, that’s where this parasite got Duc Dan’s name. Tell us where you heard this name. Tell us how you know about his milky eye. Confess to your lie. Why won’t you tell us the truth?”
The Pubyok with the shoe stood. He had jagged scars in his neat gray hair. “Enough storytime,” he said, and looked at our team with a disgust that left no doubt about his thoughts on our methods. Then he turned toward Ga. “Enough fairy tales,” he said. “Tell us what you did with the actress’s corpse, or by the blood of Inchon we’ll make your fingernails tell us.”
The look on Commander Ga’s face made the old men grab him. They poured piping hot pu-erh in his facial wounds before dragging him off, leaving us to race to our office to begin filling out the forms that we hoped would get him back.