A Corpse in the Koryo

6

I walked from the tearoom toward the train station and back up the street where the jeep had crashed. It was gone, and the larch tree had been chopped down. Three thugs with flat faces and small eyes were standing around. They were dressed as laborers, which was laughable.

They had the unmistakable air of a Military Security squad, but I didn't bother them, and they didn't bother me. The long-legged girls had vanished.

I looked closely at everyone else, mostly to be sure I wasn't being followed. Kang had said I could expect to be tailed simply because I'd been seen with him. Well, that was my fault. Pak had sent me out of Pyongyang to get me away from Kang. Now I was having tea with the man. Well, almost having tea. I should have told him to get lost. Not that it would have done any good. I had the feeling that Kang was never lost.

No one asked me if I was smuggling fish, which was a good thing.

I'd never been to Wonsan, though once at the office I'd read in a magazine about a vacation beach near there. Everybody in the picture was smiling and looked to be having a swell time, even allowing for the fact that everyone always has big smiles in the magazines at the office. It was an old magazine, from the 1960s, when everyone was poor but still had hope.

We had hope then, too. My grandfather and I planned to open a furniture shop. The leadership wasn't sure it wanted an old hero of the revolution toiling that way-no one uses the word "toil" anymore, but we did then. He was stubborn, and they finally decided they couldn't stop him so they might as well say it was alright.

We went north into the mountains toward the Chinese border to find a supply of lumber, good old trees, chestnut, elm, maybe some maple, though my grandfather said he didn't like maple. In 1937, one of his friends had been hanged from a maple tree by the Japanese army.

He hated the Japanese-all the more, he said, because they'd turned beautiful trees into gallows.

After a few days wandering around, we could see there weren't many trees we could use. There was scrub pine all over, useless for furniture, even bad furniture. When we climbed to the back reaches of the Kangnam Range, my grandfather howled with disgust. None of these forests had recovered from decades of heartache and slaughter. The Japanese had exploited them-cut a lot down for spite, the old man said, though I thought he might be exaggerating. During the 1950s, what remained was blasted by armies marching back and forth, fighting in places none of them even knew existed and never wanted to see again. Anything left was picked over during the hard years that followed.

Grandfather said we'd have to go farther afield to find the right wood, so he requested permission for us to cross the Soviet border at Khasan far in the northeast and catch the train to Siberia. At first they only granted a passport for him, with a note attached that I would have to stay. My grandfather read the note over dinner. The next morning he got up early, pulled on his old uniform, and walked down the street before I was even dressed. I went into the woodshed and took down two or three tools, just to hold them, though this was forbidden. In the afternoon, while I was putting things back, I heard him singing as he climbed the hill to our house.

At that time, his tools hung from pegs on the whitewashed walls, the saws on one line nearest the floor, the measuring tools on a middle row, and the scraping tools along the top. I was so short that I had to stand on a box to reach the highest row. Everything had to be in order when he got home, but as I reached to put a small plane in its place, the box tipped and I crashed to the floor. Grandfather appeared at the door. "Are you alright?" he asked. I ran over and put my arms around his legs. He stroked my head for a moment, then pushed me away.

"That plane has just had a bad shock. Put it back where it belongs. Tomorrow before dawn, you'll have to come in and ask forgiveness as it wakes, lest it get crooked on us." He walked partway out the door, then turned and reached in his pocket. "Here, don't drop this." It was my passport.

After sitting on the train for days looking out the window at the same scene, rivers and forests and meadows morning through night, we stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere. I never saw so many trees, before or since: miles of white birch forests, rivers of tall pine spilling down hillsides, aspens along stream beds, poplar trees with their leaves fluttering in the wind growing in mysterious circles around bog fields of berries, stands of maple that I knew would explode in color in a few months, tall elms that gave shade so dense it was like walking into the night at noon. What caught my attention most of all was the groups of dead trees. Always in groups. Trunks stripped of bark, broken, leaning, branches stiff and leafless. Never a single one standing by itself. I finally asked my grandfather. "Trees are not like people." His lips tightened, and his cheeks lost their color. "They're more civilized. People lose someone, what do they do? Nothing, they just keep going. Some people lose everything, everything. They lose everything, they keep going.

Not trees. Trees don't do that. They live together, they don't move away, they know each other, they feel the wind and the rain at the same time, they can't bear it when one of them dies. So the whole group just stops living." He paused while the train went past a patch of open ground with an abandoned log cabin. "Don't listen to anyone who tells you about loyalty to an idea. You're alone," he said. "Without your family, you're alone."

One afternoon, we stumbled into a prison camp. There were no fences, no barbed wire, but the air changed as soon as we stepped into the clearing. A moment later, three guards appeared in front of us, submachine guns unslung. Each guard had a dog, snarling and pulling on a thick leather leash. The guards told us to get the hell out or they'd put the dogs on us. My grandfather was in his late sixties then, but still a fighter. He stared straight at the head guard, a young fellow with a sharp face and Tartar eyes, and told him in perfect Russian, softly so the two other guards had to strain to hear, that if the dogs got off their leashes, we'd make soup of them. The three guards laughed, but they backed off. That night my grandfather didn't say much, and he was subdued for the rest of the journey. It was only at dinner weeks later, after we finally got home, that he cleared his throat, put down his rice bowl, and told me that I was near the point where I'd have to make a choice in my life. "You can't shape people," he said, "just like you can't shape wood. You've got to find the heart and work from there. There's no such thing as scrap, not wood, not people."