Bamboo and Blood (2 page)

When he felt anxious, which was rare, his right hand held the fingers of the left, a source of comfort, perhaps, or an unconscious effort to hide them from harm, maybe a habit from difficult times. After watching him for a few days, I realized that when he paused to think, he always lined up his hands against each other, one finger at a time, meticulously, deliberately. Once everything was perfectly aligned, five fingertips against their twins, it meant he had decided what he wanted to say. Then he put his hands down on the table again, where they lay still, completely comfortable and at ease.

“I thought I was going to die up there.” The foreigner spoke English with a slight accent. Even after two weeks accompanying him several hours a day, I hadn’t been able to place the source. I had heard all sorts of accents before, but none like this. It nagged at me, not being able to place him. His documents said he was from Switzerland. Maybe, but somehow I doubted that was the whole story.

From the beginning, as we stood around waiting for his bags at the airport, he spoke in a soothing cadence, a voice so smooth I wondered if he swallowed a bit of silk every morning—silk pills, maybe. Without fail, he turned complex thoughts into short, simple sentences so I could translate for Pak. That alone told me he had done this many times before. It was not the mark of a tourist, or even a businessman. Western businessmen sometimes spoke slowly, like we were idiots, but there was always an aura of tension around them, a slight odor of calculation. They couldn’t help themselves. Not this visitor. He stood casually in the immigration line, he shook our hands casually when we introduced
ourselves, but this was not a casual visit. In the dreary, dangerous winter of 1997, he had been put in our care, under the protection of the Ministry of Public Security. This was inexplicable, at least to me. We didn’t babysit foreigners, we followed them at a discreet distance. If Pak knew anything, as usual he wasn’t saying.

“The wind never let up.” The foreigner took off his scarf. “From down below maybe you couldn’t tell. The trees lower down didn’t move much from what I could see, but the wind near the top was like a knife.” He laughed. “That’s a cliché, isn’t it? I’m sorry. But it cut through my coat, cut through my gloves. You people may be used to this weather. I’m not.”

A worse place to hold a conversation, I thought, would have been hard to find. The hut was small, cold, and dark. The only light came from what little remained of a slate gray day seeping through a tiny window on the far wall. The three of us stood bunched together in one corner, squeezed by a square wooden table with one chair. Normally, I would have looked to see what sort of wood the table was. I was too cold to care.

Who would have put furniture in a room so tiny? There was a piece missing from the side of the table, the side closest the window, as if something had stuck its head in and taken out a bite. Not a rough cut but a clean, symmetrical bite. I looked again at the wood. It was only pine, and not very good pine, either. I was going to freeze to death under a lousy, sappy pine table. I looked more closely. Maybe it had been gnawed, though the light was fading so fast I couldn’t tell for sure. Who ate tables? I thought back to woodworking tools my grandfather had used—cutting tools, chisels, planes. Every night, they were lined up on the wall of his workshop. It was a pleasant, peaceful place, cool in the summer, fragrant with resin that seeped from the pieces of newly cut wood. “You have to keep things neat,” he’d say as he finished putting everything in its place. “Life may not be like that, not for humans, anyway. You’ll find that out someday, to your sorrow. But there is order everywhere else around us. You’ll never come across a disorderly forest, and I’m not talking about trees standing in rows and saluting, either.” He’d point to the tools. “Put them back where they belong,” he’d say. “Let them get a rest, refresh their spirit.” Once the implements were in place, he’d brush the sawdust into a
pile and put it in a barrel that sat in the corner. “People don’t treat things right anymore,” he’d say, “don’t ask me why.”

The foreigner’s voice brought me back to the hut. “Why are we standing?” I’d never heard someone sound so friendly even though he was shouting. We had to get out of this place. Everything about it was wrong. We had no psychological edge in here for making this man explain—without games or irony or coatings of vocal friendship—what the hell he had been doing on the mountain in this weather. Trying to start any sort of a serious interrogation, even a short one, was impossible. We might as well be on a minibus in a gale. I had the feeling the foreigner thought he could leave anytime he wanted, just get off at the next stop and disappear into the swirling darkness. There wasn’t even any way to lock the door. It barely shut, and the wind made it rattle and shake the whole time he spoke. “Why are we standing around? There’s nowhere to go for the moment,” he said. It was his way of making sure we knew the score was even—we were trapped just like he was, all equally uncomfortable, and nothing would change that. He looked at us and smiled faintly. It might be two against one, but minus ten centigrade was a good leveler of odds and he knew it. When neither Pak nor I moved, he squeezed himself into the chair. I watched him put his fingers together. He had something more to say.

“Presumably, you’ll kick me out of the country. Just as well, you’ll hear no complaints from me. To tell the truth, I’m anxious to get back to where it is warm, maybe stretch out on a beach and have suntan oil rubbed onto my chest by someone.” He held my eye for a moment and smiled as the wind tore at the roof. Then he turned to Pak. “Someone wearing a bikini.”

Pak moved from one foot to the other. The floor was radiating cold up through the soles of our boots so that my shinbones were starting to ache. “If it were up to me,” Pak said, “you’d be on a plane right away. Even better, you’d have been gone yesterday. But that won’t happen. So your beach will have to wait. You’ll need something warmer than a bikini back in Pyongyang, because they say it’s going to be a cold winter. There will be lots of questions, and they won’t be politely asked, not like the inspector here does. Questions every day, all day, morning, noon, and
night. Sun? Even in the unlikely event there are windows in the room you’ll get, you won’t see much sun.” Pak took off his hat and fiddled with the snap for a moment. I knew he was figuring out exactly how to phrase what he wanted to say next. “You were supposed to stay close. That was the agreement. You stay with us; we keep you safe. That’s how it was going to work. An hour here or there out of touch we could explain if we had to. But this time you went too far, disappearing all day long. They’ll be waiting when we get back, believe me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The left hand moved for its shelter. The foreigner shrugged again but offered nothing.

“Don’t be a wise guy,” I said. “You say you’re from Switzerland. That’s nowhere near the Mediterranean, so why don’t we drop this image of suntan oil and bikinis?”

“Ah, very good, Inspector.” He threw back his head and laughed. “As always, perceptive and to the point. You’re right, I was born in Lausanne, but I’m still a Jew.” He paused, calculating the moment of maximum impact. His eyebrows wriggled, just enough to be noticed. “Genetic heritage, sunshine in my bones, a thousand generations in the desert. Can’t deny our genes, can we? What do yours tell you?”

“They’re off duty.” I glanced at Pak. He hadn’t changed expression, but I had no doubt he was digging himself out from the wreckage. A Swiss Jew? A Jew of any sort roaming around Pyongyang? Not just roaming around, but under the protection and observation of the Ministry—our little unit of the Ministry, to be precise, and there was no reason to doubt the precision that would ensue. Maddeningly sarcastic questions, sharpened to a fine and precise point, recorded in painful detail, asked again and again. Fingers would point, and I knew where.

Pak was still chewing things over. I could see his jaws working. The prolonged silence only intensified the cold.

“It could have been a Swiss gene that impelled our guest up that mountain like a goat in this weather,” I said, trying to keep some words aloft. Maybe they would push the air around, keep it from freezing solid. Maybe a touch of anger would help. Anger was heat in another form, after
all. Pak didn’t join in. Normally, he would follow up my opening, keep things moving. Fine, I thought, let him come up with something better to get us out of this mess.

Or was it not a mess? Did someone else know exactly who this fellow was? It wouldn’t be the first time someone higher up left us hanging out to dry. I looked at the foreigner. Now there was no choice. Bad place for an interrogation or not, we had to find out something more about him. We needed answers before we got back to Pyongyang.

There is no sense questioning a man when you are wearing a hat, however, especially a hat with earflaps. It undermines all sense of authority. I took off my hat, and regretted it instantly. “Why do you wander around all the time? I’ve never seen anything like it. When it rains, you go for a walk. When it’s freezing, you go for a drive. Now it’s storming, it’s miserable, it’s getting worse by the minute, and what do you do? You go mountain climbing? What the hell did you think you’d find up there?” The wind screamed at the door, pulled it open and banged it shut again.

The temperature was still dropping. I didn’t want to be in this storm another minute. We might die, literally where we stood. They’d discover us months later, a threesome frozen in place, a perfect revolutionary tableau to be labeled “Interrogation of an Enemy Spy” and then visited by lines of schoolchildren ever after.

“Where’s your car?” I demanded. It was hopeless; the wind was slamming against the side of the hut. In another second it would send us swirling into the winter sky, earflaps and all, and take our cars with it. Pak looked at the ceiling, which was showing signs of giving way. The foreigner sat unperturbed. I put my face close to Pak’s and shouted, “Didn’t I tell you, letting him have his own car would be trouble?” This self-assured, wandering Jew in Pyongyang had been put in our charge, and what did we do? In response to his silken request, we’d gotten him his own car. His own car! Nothing fancy, but that wouldn’t count in our favor, not in the least. Already I could hear it, the lame route the conversation in the State Security Department’s interrogation room would take. At least I had to hope it would be SSD. Their interrogations rarely got anywhere with us; the plastic chairs became unbearable after an
hour or so and no one could concentrate after that. But they would keep hammering on the same point—he had a car, he had his
own
car, and we had gotten it for him. “Well, how were we supposed to know?” I’d say when they finally gave up and told us to go home so they could stretch and get something hot to drink. “We’re not paid to be mind readers, are we?”

The foreigner looked at me oddly. Something I hadn’t seen from him before, a touch of anger, started across his face, but after a moment the familiar half-smile settled back on his lips. “Let me guess, you’re about to begin asking me questions that could get me into trouble.” One eyebrow waltzed toward the other. “You don’t want to get me in trouble, do you?”

The wind stopped suddenly, leaving nothing but silent, burning cold in the hut. “Questions don’t cause trouble.” Pak shifted his weight again and slapped his arms across his chest. “Only answers do. Save it, would you? We have to walk a kilometer back to our car, and we’d better get there before the temperature falls any more, assuming it has anyplace left to fall. The Ministry will send someone for your vehicle in a day or so if the roads are passable. You won’t be needing it anyway.”

“Let me guess, you’re afraid yours won’t start in the cold.” The foreigner stood up and put his hand on Pak’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t let me bring back a good car battery the last time I went to China. I offered, did I not? But you refused. So stubborn, so stubborn. It must be in the genes.” He didn’t seem fazed by the warning that people—unfriendly, nasty, thick-necked people—would be waiting when we got back to the city. Maybe something had been lost in my rendering of what Pak said. He could be a difficult man to translate. The edge on his thoughts didn’t always survive the journey between languages.

I could see that the more Pak mulled things over, the angrier he was getting. The thought had occurred to him, too. Someone had used us. Pak could forgive almost everything, but not being used. His lips had tightened into a thin line. I wondered how he could accomplish such a feat in this icebox. My teeth had started to ache. Our quarry smiled radiantly. “Is there any coffee, some way to heat water?” he asked. From the look on his face, you’d have thought we were waiting for the menus so we could order dinner and a bottle of wine.

“The warmest things in reach are those genes of yours. Crank them up full blast, because we’re going to need something to keep from freezing while we walk to the car.” I looked at his naked ears. “Here, take my hat.”

Pak shook his head and frowned, but I wasn’t interested.

Two men from the special section were waiting when we stumbled into the office, past midnight. One was asleep, his head slack, chin bumping on his chest. The other one was awake, his long, ugly face fatigued and angry. “My, my, look who has returned to the nest.” He pointed at two cups on the desk. “You don’t mind? We helped ourselves to some tea. Maybe you could clean those once in a while. They were all greasy-like.” This was directed at me, an opening shot. People from the special section like to get under your skin first thing; they think it makes them look tough. I was tired and numb beyond saving, but I smiled. “Whatever you say.”

Pak slowly took off his coat. He stood rubbing his hands together for a moment, then pulled out the chair behind his desk and sat down. “I don’t remember setting up an appointment with you two.” He looked from one man to the other. “Or is this a friendly call? Maybe you want to repay the money you owe me. You do, you know. You both do. I haven’t forgotten. And, oh, say, is that your car down there? It’s in my spot.” Pak slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk. “Move it.”