A Corpse in the Koryo

5

The day had turned into a summer steam bath, not good for pedaling a bicycle, especially with the back tire almost flat. Every morning, I put air in the tire. It leaked out a few hours later; no one could discover from where, or why it always stopped leaking by noon. Every couple of weeks, I brought the tire to an old man who fixed bicycles in the shade of a pair of chestnut trees not far from my office, until he finally told me in disgust not to come by anymore, it took up his time and ate into his profits. I asked him what happened to the spirit of cooperation among us working people, but he snorted and turned his attention to an old Chinese bike that had been hit by a car. "Now that," he said, "will pay for dinner."

"This is a controlled intersection." I turned toward a traffic lady standing a few feet away, her whistle held close to her mouth. "And I control it. No bikes. No pedestrians. Just cars." There wasn't a car in sight. Sweet-looking girl, tough as nails. She had pouty lips, like all the traffic ladies did. Soon after I was assigned to the office, Pak and I had a long discussion about whether they selected girls with those lips from the start or trained them to look that way, extra lipstick or something.

Pak told me it didn't matter; either way, he wanted me to keep away from them. "They're off-limits. Each one of them is special issue." He paused. "Let me rephrase that. Each one of them is to be respected. No leering, no clucking your tongue as you stroll by, no comments on their sweet blue uniforms, or their pertness, or anything. You get me? Everything about them has been checked out at the top. The top looks very kindly on them, and not very kindly on one of us if we ruffle their little feathers."

I didn't dismount. I'm not short, but sitting on a bike makes me look taller, and getting off the bicycle would make her think she had some authority over me. "Yeah, I know the rules, but I'm in a hurry.

Official business."

"There's an underground passage." She pointed to the corner. "Use it."

"In this weather, a fifty-six-year-old man has to carry a bicycle up and down those stairs?" I didn't figure she would back down, but I wanted to see her smile.

She didn't smile, not even close. "You don't look that old to me."

Someone guffawed in the crowd that was forming.

"Well, I'm in pretty good shape."

She looked me straight in the eye. "I wouldn't know." This provoked another guffaw. One old woman put her hand over her mouth.

"And I don't care."

My shirt was soaked with sweat when I emerged from the stairs on the other side. Still no cars. It did not improve my mood when I saw that the traffic lady had moved out of the sun into the shade. She was watching me casually, her uniform crisp and unwrinkled, her black boots gleaming as if there were no dust for a mile in any direction. I thought I saw a smile flit over her pouty lips, but I didn't feel like chatting anymore. A man on the corner looked up and waved as I passed by. "Bad tire. Get you a new one?" I coasted under the willow trees that lined the river, trying to catch a breeze, then gave up and pulled onto the old Japanese-built bridge that led to my street in the decaying eastern part of Pyongyang.

Inside my room it was no cooler, but with the shades down, the sun no longer glared in my eyes. The apartment house was already falling down when I moved in years ago. It was one of four buildings set around a square in which several small flowering bushes grew according to no particular plan. The apartments had been constructed from blueprints the East Germans brought with them in 1954 as part of their offer to help rebuild a Korean city after the war. They ended up restoring Hamhung, on the east coast, but the architecture was so appealing to someone in Pyongyang that the plans were "borrowed" and used for a number of offices and apartments in the capital. Later, to no one's surprise, it was decided that buildings in a "foreign style" were not a good idea. After the fact, special work teams went back and modified all of them, including my group of apartments, adding touches that would make them "our own."

The floors of the balconies had crumbled beyond repair, except for a mysterious few that survived and were crowded with plants. Much of the building's yellow facade on the first two floors had fallen away, leaving stained concrete that for some reason turned a deep green when it rained.

An East German police official I once drove around the city told me the apartments were "Bauhaus style," but he said that the tile roofs were nothing quite like they had in Berlin, and the designs on the balconies were- here he paused a moment looking for the right word-"interesting."

You could still see where the new exterior designs had been added, one marking each of the six floors and all topped by what had once been an intricate, probably very attractive molding just below the roof line. Whole sections of tiles had come off the roof, which was why the stairway always smelled dank.

I liked the place. People said hello when they passed you in the hall, partly to make sure you didn't knock them over in the dark corridors, but also from friendliness. A group of old ladies, widows of war veterans, was assigned rooms on the lower floors so they wouldn't have to walk up so many stairs. In good weather they sat outside and watched the road that ran in front of the building. They enjoyed the idea of having an inspector from the Ministry of People's Security living in their building; they thought it gave the place a certain status and imagined that if word spread it would keep the area free of burglars.

Soon after I moved in, a few of them cornered me to insist it was not right that I was unmarried. They waved aloft a list of girls for me to meet. Heading the list, they said, was a beauty from Kaesong, a good cook whose noodle dishes were worthy of the country's old capital and would be waiting for me each night. I told them that if I got married, it would mean moving out of my tiny single room, and if I moved away, which I certainly would, they would be left without a resident police inspector. I never saw the names of the girls, nor heard again of noodles.

My apartment was simple, but it was home and it was enough. For a while, I kept a small altar for my parents near the door. I even had a vase with a flower to remind me of the countryside where I had grown up, a small valley an hour's walk from the nearest town, with nothing but dirt paths and rice fields shimmering in the afternoon sun. My balcony was unsafe to stand on; the birds perched on what remained and chattered at sunset. The couple next door, though, had a good balcony.

Our side of the building faced south, and in the sunlight they grew flowers in pots of every size and description. On Monday mornings, rain or shine, the wife left a fresh red flower outside my door. She had plenty of colors to choose from; she always gave me red.

Against one wall of my room I had a small, single-drawer pine chest, inherited from my grandfather. He had built it for his wife when they were first married somewhere in the mountains near the Amnok River, hidden away from the Japanese patrols in the early 1930s. I called it my Manchurian chest and kept a clean uniform in it during the years when we were issued extras. There was an icebox-but I never bothered to plug it in-a burner where I boiled water for tea, and a Chinese-made rice cooker I'd brought back from Vladivostok, which always undercooked the rice. On the floor was a blue kettle with a wooden handle. The water in it was from three days ago, but the tap wasn't working. There was still vodka in a bottle sitting on the icebox.

The vodka was from Finland, and as I took a couple of swallows, I closed my eyes and imagined what it was like in the Finnish summer.

Twilight that stretched forever-a soothing idea. Whenever I mentioned it to Pak, he replied that only meant the day shifts must be hell.

I liked Pak, but he had no poetry in his soul.

The altar was long gone, as was the green celadon vase, cool and smooth to the touch. The vase had been my grandfather's. When I was young, it sat on a bookshelf in his house. I had stared at it on many quiet afternoons, imagining the white cranes painted on the sides were lifting themselves in flight to somewhere I could barely picture. I don't know when it was, but at some point I began to doubt that the cranes knew where they were going.

One night soon after moving into the apartment, I came back from the office to find the altar knocked over and the vase on the floor. It wasn't necessary, and it wasn't an accident. Just a rude calling card. There was nothing else to disturb, no books to scatter about or pictures to pull down from the walls, but if there were flowers, they had to knock them over. Otherwise, what was the point of rousting the room? Once I saw the vase hadn't been damaged, I decided to forget the whole thing. Having the room searched didn't bother me. Whoever did it wasn't trying to be subtle. I figured maybe it was a drill, to show me how rooms looked after a search if you didn't do your job right. Or maybe it was a mistake: The wrong file got pulled, and when they walked into my room they realized they had made a trip for nothing, so they let off some steam.

The second time I found the vase on the floor, I wrote them a note.

Pak called me into his office and told me that had demonstrated poor judgment, but I heard no trace of anger or warning in his voice as he stood behind his desk to deliver the scolding. After the third time, I just took the vase to work and put it away in my file cabinet.