The next morning, a pair of dump trucks pulled up and offloaded mounds of dirt on the sidewalks outside the Glory of Mount Paektu Housing Block, 29 Sinuiju Street. My work at Division 42 usually got me out of tasks like this, but not this time, the housing committee manager told me. Grass into Meat was a citywide campaign, it was out of his hands. The manager was generally leery of me because I’d had a few of the tenants sent away, and he thought I lived on the top floor out of paranoia, rather than to protect my parents from some of the building’s bad influences.
I found myself in a two-day human chain that moved buckets and jerry cans and shopping bags filled with earth up the stairwell to the roof. Sometimes there was a voice in my head that narrated events as they unfolded, as if it were writing my biography as I was living it, as if the audience for such a life’s story was only me. But I rarely got the chance to put this voice to paper—by the end of the second day, when I got down to the first floor and found myself last in line to bathe in what was now cold, gray water, the voice had vanished.
For my parents, I cooked spicy turnips with some mushrooms that an old widow on the second floor grew in kimchi jars. The power was spotty, so it seemed as though the amber light on the phone charger would never switch to green. My mother informed me that on the golf course, with the Foreign Minister of Burundi, Kim Jong Il had shot eleven holes in one. News of all the poverty in South Korea had my father depressed. The loudspeaker had broadcast a big story about starvation down there. The Dear Leader is sending them aid, he told me. I hope they can hang on until reunification. The mushrooms made my urine rusty pink.
Now that the roof was covered with twenty centimeters of soil, all I could think about was getting back to Division 42 to see if Commander Ga was on the road to recovery.
“Not so fast,” my housing-block manager told me the next morning. He pointed off the edge of the roof to a truck full of goats below. Because my parents were infirm, I’d have to do their share. Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University. Instead, we carried them over our shoulders, holding their legs out in front like handles. They’d fight like mad for about ten floors, but then succumb to the darkness of the cement stairwell and finally lower their heads in closed-eyed resignation. Even though the goats appeared to be in a state of total submission, I could tell they were alert and alive because of what you couldn’t see, what you could only feel against the back of your neck: their fast little hearts, fluttering like mad.
It would take weeks for the grass to grow, so a team was formed to make daily missions to Mansu Park to gather foliage for the goats to eat. The manager knew not to push his luck with me. We watched the goats warily circle the roof. One of the little ones got boxed against the ledge and was squeezed off. It was vocal all the way down, but the rest of the goats acted as if it never happened.
I skipped my bath so I could race to the Yanggakdo market. It was shameful how little I got for Comrade Buc’s ring. It seemed that everyone had a wedding ring for sale. Reeking of goat, I rode the subway home with a summer squash, some dried squid, a paper bag filled with Chinese peanuts, and a five-kilo sack of rice. You can’t help but notice how people on the metro have a way of giving you the stink-eye without even glancing your way.
I made a feast for my parents, and we were all in high spirits. I lit a second candle for the occasion. In the middle of dinner, the amber light on the charger turned green. I guess I’d imagined standing on the roof under the stars when I placed my first call with Commander Ga’s phone, like I’d behold the whole universe as I first employed a device that could reach any person on earth. Instead, I toyed with it while we ate, scrolling through the menus. The phone used the Roman alphabet, but I was only looking for numbers, and there was no record of calls coming in or going out.
My father heard the tones that the buttons made. “Have you got something there?” he asked.
“No,” I told him.
For a moment, it felt as though my mother glanced at the phone, but when I looked, she was staring straight ahead savoring the fluffy white rice—ration cards for rice had stopped months ago, and we’d been living a long time on millet. They used to ask where I got the money for black-market food, but they don’t anymore. I leaned toward my mother. I held the phone up and slowly passed it back and forth before her eyes. If she perceived the phone, she showed no sign.
I returned to the keypad. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anyone’s phone number—I didn’t—it was that only at this moment did I realize I had no one to call. There wasn’t a woman, a colleague, or even a relative that I had to contact. Didn’t I have a single friend?
“Father,” I said. He was eating the salty peanuts toasted with chilies that he loved. “Father, if you were to contact someone, anyone, who would it be?”
“Why would I contact anyone?” he asked. “I have no need.”
“It’s not need,” I said. “It’s want, like you’d want to call a friend or a relative.”
“Our Party comrades fulfill all our needs,” my mother said.
“What about your aunt?” I asked my father. “Don’t you have an aunt in the South?”
My father’s face was blank, expressionless. “We have no ties to that corrupt and capitalist nation,” he said.
“We denounce her,” my mother said.
“Hey, I’m not asking as a state interrogator,” I told them. “I’m your son. This is just family talk.”
They ate in silence. I returned to the phone, moving through its functions, all of which seemed disabled. I dialed a couple of random numbers, but the phone wouldn’t connect to the network, even though I could see the cellular tower from our window. I turned the volume up and down, but the ringer wouldn’t sound. I tried to employ the little camera feature, but it refused to snap a photo. It looked like I would be selling the thing after all. Still, it irked me that I couldn’t think of one person to call. I went through a mental list of all my professors, but my two favorites got sent to labor camps—it really hurt to add my signature to their writ of sedition, but I had a duty, I was already an intern at Division 42 by then.
“Hey, wait, I remember,” I said. “When I was a boy, there was a couple. They’d come over and the four of you would play cards late into the night. Aren’t you curious what happened to them? Wouldn’t you contact them if you could?”
“I don’t believe I’ve heard of these people,” my father said.
“I’m sure of it,” I told him. “I remember them clearly.”
“No,” he said. “You must be mistaken.”
“Father, it’s me. There’s no one else in the room. No one is listening.”
“Stop this dangerous talk,” my mother said. “We met with no one.”
“I’m not saying you met with anyone. The four of you would play cards after the factory closed. You would laugh and drink shoju.” I reached to take my father’s hand, but the touch surprised him, and he recoiled. “Father, it’s me, your son. Take my hand.”
“Do not question our loyalties,” my father said. “Is this a test?” he asked me. He looked white-eyed around the room. “Are we being tested?” he asked the air.
There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family. I was eight when my father had this talk with me. We were under a tree on Moranbong Hill. He told me that there was a path set out for us. On it we had to do everything the signs commanded and heed all the announcements along the way. Even if we walked this path side by side, he said, we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands. On Sundays the factories were closed so the air was clear, and I could imagine this path ahead stretching across the Taedong Valley, a path lined with willows and vaulted by singular white clouds moving as a group. We ate berry-flavored ices and listened to the sounds of old men at their chang-gi boards and slapping cards in a spirited game of go-stop. Soon my thoughts were of toy sailboats, like the ones the yangban kids were playing with at the pond. But my father was still walking me down that path.
My father said to me, “I denounce this boy for having a blue tongue.”
We laughed.
I pointed at my father. “This citizen eats mustard.”
I had recently tried mustard root for the first time, and the look on my face made my parents laugh. Everything mustard was now funny to me.
My father addressed an invisible authority in the air. “This boy has counterrevolutionary thoughts about mustard. He should be sent to a mustard-seed farm to correct his mustardy thinking.”
“This dad eats pickle ice with mustard poop,” I said.
“That was a good one. Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state.” His face was red, venomous. “I have witnessed him spew capitalist diatribes in an effort to poison our minds with his traitorous filth.”
The old men turned from their game to observe us.
I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”
He reached out and ruffled my hair.
It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I’d try to sleep, but I’d just lie on my cot puzzling over how Commander Ga had managed to change his life and become someone else. With no record of who he’d been. How do you escape your Party Aptitude Test score or elude twelve years of your teachers’ Rightness of Thinking evaluations? I could sense that Ga’s hidden history was chaptered with friends and adventures, and I was jealous of that. It didn’t matter to me that he had probably killed the woman he loved. How had he found love itself? How had he pulled that off? And had love made him become someone else, or, as I suspected, had love suddenly appeared once he took on a new identity? I suspected that Ga was the same person on the inside but had a whole new exterior. I could respect that. But wouldn’t the real change be, if a person was to go all the way, to get a new inner life?
There wasn’t even a file for this Commander Ga character—I only had Comrade Buc’s. I’d toss and turn for a while, wondering how Ga was so at peace, and then I’d relight my candle and pore over Buc’s file. I could tell my parents were awake, lying perfectly still, breathing evenly, listening to me as I rifled Comrade Buc’s file for any insight into Ga’s identity. I was jealous for the first time of the Pubyok, of their ability to get answers.
And then there came a single clear sound from the phone. Bing, it rang.
I heard the creak of canvas as my parents stiffened in their cots.
The phone on the table began to blink with a bright green light.
I took the phone in my hands and opened it. On its little screen was an image, a photo of a sidewalk, and set in the pavement was a star and in the star were two words in English, “Ingrid” and “Bergman.” It was daylight where this photo was taken.
I turned again to Comrade Buc’s file, looking for any images that might contain such a star. There were all the standard photos—his Party commission, receiving his Kim Il Sung pin at sixteen, his oath of eternal affiliation. I flipped to the photo of his dead family, heads thrown back, contorted on the floor. And yet so pure. The girls in their white dresses. The mother draping an arm over the older girls while holding the hand of the youngest. I felt a pang at the sight of her wedding ring. It must have been a hard time for them, their father newly arrested, and here at some formal family moment without him, they succumbed to “possibly carbon monoxide.” It’s hard to imagine losing a family, to have someone you love just disappear like that. I understood better now why Buc had warned us in the sump to be ready, to have a plan in place. I listened to the silence of my parents in that dark room, and I wondered if I shouldn’t have a plan in place for when I lost one of them, if that’s what Buc meant.
Because Comrade Buc’s family was clustered on the floor, the eye was naturally drawn there. For the first time I noticed that sitting on the table above them was a can of peaches, a small detail in relation to the entire photo. The can’s jagged lid was bent back, and I understood then that the method Commander Ga would use to excuse himself from the rest of his biography, whenever he felt like it, was sitting on his bedside table.
At Division 42, a strip of light was shining underneath the door to the Pubyok lounge. I slipped quietly past—with those guys, you never knew if they were staying late or arriving early.
I found Commander Ga sleeping peacefully, but his can of peaches was gone.
I shook him awake. “Where are the peaches?” I asked him.
He rubbed his face, ran a hand through his hair. “Is it day or night?” he asked.
“Night.”
He nodded. “Feels like night.”
“Peaches,” I said. “Is that what you fed to the actress and her kids? Is that how you killed them?”
Ga turned to his table. It was empty. “Where are my peaches?” he asked me. “Those are special peaches. You’ve got to get them back before something terrible happens.”
Just then, I saw Q-Kee walk past in the hall. It was three thirty in the morning! The shock-work whistles wouldn’t blow for another two hours. I called to her, but she kept going.
I turned to Ga. “You want to tell me what a Bergman is?”
“A Bergman?” he asked. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“How about an Ingrid?”
“There’s no such word,” he said.
I stared at him a moment. “Did you love her?”
“I still love her.”
“But how?” I asked him. “How did you get her to love you back?”
“Intimacy.”
“Intimacy? What is that?”
“It’s when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.”
I had to laugh. “No secrets?” I asked him. “It’s not possible. We spend weeks extracting entire biographies from subjects, and always when we hook them up to the autopilot, they blurt out some crucial detail we’d missed. So getting every secret out of someone, sorry, it’s just not possible.”
“No,” Ga said. “She gives you her secrets. And you give her yours.”
I saw Q-Kee walk past again, this time she was wearing a headlamp. I left Ga to catch up with her—she had a hallway-length lead on me. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I called to her.
Echoing through the halls, I heard her answer, “I’m dedicated.”
I caught up with her in the stairwell, but she wasn’t slowing. In her hands, she had a device from the shop, a hand pump connected to a section of rubber tubing. It’s used to irrigate and drain a subject’s stomach—organ swelling from force-induced fluids being the third most painful of all coercion tactics.
“Where are you going with that?” I asked.
Flight after flight, we spiraled deeper into the building.
“I don’t have time,” she said.
I grabbed her hard by the elbow and spun her. She didn’t look used to that treatment.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “But really, we have to hurry.”
Down two more flights, we came to the sump and the hatch was open.
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
She disappeared down the ladder, and when I followed, I could see Comrade Buc writhing on the floor, a spilled can of peaches beside him. Q-Kee was fighting his convulsions to get the tube down his throat. Black saliva streamed from his mouth, his eyes were drooping, sure signs of botulism poisoning.
“Forget it,” I said. “The toxin’s already in his nervous system.”
She grunted in frustration. “I know, I screwed up,” she said.
“Go on.”
“I shouldn’t have, I know,” she said. “It’s just that, he knows everything.”
“Knew.”
“Yes, knew.” She looked like she wanted to kick Buc’s shuddering body. “I thought if I could take a crack at him, then we’d figure this whole thing out. I came down here and asked him what he wanted, and he told me peaches. He said it was the last thing he wanted on earth.” Then she did kick him, but it seemed to bring no satisfaction. “He said if I brought him the peaches last night, he’d tell me everything in the morning.”
“How did he know night from day?”
She shook her head. “Another screwup. I told him.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Every intern makes that mistake.”
“But in the middle of the night,” she said, “I got this gut feeling something was wrong, so I came down to find him like this.”
“We don’t work on gut feelings,” I said. “Pubyok do.”
“Well, what did we get out of Buc? Basically nothing. What have we got from Commander Ga? A fucking fairy tale and how to jerk off an ox.”
“Q-Kee,” I said. I put my hands on my hips and took a deep breath.
“Don’t be mad at me,” she said. “You’re the one who asked Comrade Buc about canned peaches. You’re the one who told him Commander Ga was in the building. Buc just put two and two together.”
She looked ready to storm off. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Remember how Commander Ga asked whether those peaches were his or Comrade Buc’s? When I handed Comrade Buc the can of peaches, he asked me the same question.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What did I tell him? Nothing,” she said. “I’m the interrogator, remember?”
“Wrong,” I told her. “You’re the intern.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Interrogators are people who get results.”
Behind the cells where new subjects are first processed is the central property locker. It’s on the main floor, and before leaving I went there to snoop around. Anything of real value was looted by the MPSS agents long before bringing the subjects in. Up and down the rows I studied the meager possessions that people were carrying before their final visit here. Lots of sandals. Enemies of the state tended to wear a size seven, was my initial observation. Here were the acorns from people’s pockets, the twigs they used to clean their teeth, rucksacks filled with rags and eating utensils. And next to a piece of tape bearing Comrade Buc’s name, I found a can of peaches with a red-and-green label, grown in Manpo, canned in Fruit Factory 49.
I took the can of peaches and headed home.
The subway had started running, and jammed in one of the cars, I looked no different than the legions of gray-clad factory workers as we involuntarily leaned against one another in the turns. I kept seeing Buc’s family, beautiful in their white dresses. I kept hoping my mother, cooking breakfast blind, didn’t burn the apartment down. Somehow she always managed not to. And even one hundred meters underground we all heard the shock-work whistle’s five morning blasts.