Blindfold Game

DECEMBER

HIS SPIRIT WILL WANDER,“ Jones said. ”Why, because we weren’t here when he died?“ Smith said, and snorted. ”Superstitious nonsense.“

They stood at the foot of the grave. It was mounded in traditional fashion to prevent water seepage, but there was no headstone. The caretaker had had to give them directions to their father’s grave.

“What did he die of?” Jones said.

Smith shrugged. “An infection that could have been cured by a nonprescription drug available over the counter in any Western pharmacy.” His hands tightened into fists. When he became aware of it, he loosened them, deliberately relaxing one finger at a time. He breathed in and out again. “We will change this.”

Jones was less certain. “Will we?”

Smith had no doubts. “We will,” he said firmly.

“Will the Americans even pay attention?”

Smith gave a thin smile. “They will have no choice.” Jones wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t want to start a fight, at least „ on a less than international scale. They stood side by side at the foot the grave, staring at the mound of dirt. “Perhaps we’ll be back in time for sosang.”

“Perhaps,” Jones replied, but neither of them believed it. By the first anniversary of their father’s death his two sons would be dead or imprisoned in a land far away from this cemetery, and they both knew it. He turned. “Come. Uncle has a bed for us.”

THERE WASN’T A BED but there was a roof. It was chilly because there was no heat, and dark because the local electric utility had run out of fuel and had no money to buy more, but cold water still ran from the one tap and their uncle had managed to beg, borrow, or steal a few ounces of real beef, which he offered boiled in grass soup. Afterward he served them a traditional Korean tea, pouring boiling water from a tin saucepan dented almost but not quite past the point of function into a heated clay teapot. He poured more boiling water over the outside of the teapot as the tea brewed. He poured out the first two brews in ceremonial fashion, and everyone pretended not to notice that there were no tea leaves in either.

To the third brew he added the leaves, although so few the resulting liquid was still mostly water. It was hot, though, and warmed them as it went down. They drank it slowly, conversing in quiet tones, also from tradition but also because they didn’t want their uncle’s neighbors to learn that he had company and turn him in for harboring fugitives in exchange for a handful of rice.

Uncle had shrunk in the two years since they had seen him last, a boy’s body with an old man’s face. His skin and hair was colorless from malnutrition, and the sore on his left nostril where the border guards had pierced a hole to string him to the other captured escapees had never completely healed. He wore tattered trousers beneath a patched and faded jacket. The rags wrapped neatly around his feet in lieu of shoes he had somehow managed to keep mostly clean.

He spoke a few words, all his energy having gone into the welcome he had prepared for his nephews. He didn’t know how their father had died, but he praised the Morning Star for bringing him home and allowing him to be buried next to his wife, who had starved to death, his third son, a soldier who had been shot by his commanding officer when he refused to rob a peasant’s home to feed his troop, and his two daughters, who had died of exposure following their mother’s death.

When the tea was done, the three of them curled into threadbare blankets on a thin cot placed as close to the tiny stove as possible without setting the cot on fire. The brothers lay on either side of their uncle, and it was probably his warmest night since his wife had been sent away to a camp for daring to cross into China and ask for rice, a capital offense against the North Korean ideology of Juche, or self-reliance.

In a nation so self-absorbed that its modern history began in 1912, the year Kim II Sung was born, Juche was only one more example of political solipsism that, however much it defied reality, guided the lives of its citizens from cradle to increasingly early grave. It was why the uncle of Ja Yong-bae, alias Smith, and Ja Bae-ho, alias Jones, believed that Kim Jong II, known to his people by many names, including “the Morning Star,” had personally interceded to bring his brother’s body home.

His sons had escaped this philosophical inculcation when their mother had shoved them across the Chinese border ahead of her, and had turned to offer the guards pursuing them the rings from her fingers and the bodies of her daughters in exchange for her sons’ freedom.

THE BROTHERS SET OUT the next morning to walk from their uncle’s house to the nearest town, some twenty miles distant. From there they hitched a ride to Pyongyang. They contacted a local smuggler with whom they had had dealings in the past. He put them on a fishing boat that managed to slip past the defenses of two nations to put them ashore on a deserted stretch of coastline south of the DMZ. Under cover of night and a fortuitous fog they walked to Inchon and took a train to Seoul.

They arrived at the Great East Gate Market by midnight. The streets were mobbed with Koreans selling everything from New England Patriots jerseys to knockoffs of Halston dresses and Levi’s jeans. Down an alley they found a merchant selling Brooks Brothers suits, or what looked very much like them. Smith exchanged a few words with the merchant, who barely paused to acknowledge them before jerking a thumb toward the back of his stall. There they found two stools and a camp stove, and there they sat for three days, waiting. The merchant sold his Brooks Brothers merchandise steadily but not spectacularly.

At a little past 1:00 A.M. on the fourth day two tall young Russian women appeared, to greet the merchant with exuberant familiarity, to offer gifts of vodka and caviar, and to examine every single article of clothing he had in stock. Their Korean was competent if uninspired. A long, fierce negotiation followed that ended in the purchase of six men’s topcoats, a dozen women’s blazers, a dozen men’s sport jackets, and various amounts of skirts, shirts, sweaters, and vests for both sexes. After extracting a twenty percent discount for paying in cash, one of the women counted out a large wad of money into the merchant’s hand while the other muscled the clothing into an ungainly pile. Without looking up from the wad of currency the merchant snapped his fingers. Smith and Jones appeared with packs, to which the purchases were secured with rope. The women avoided looking at their faces and left soon after.

The brothers hauled the packs back to the coast, where they met the same smuggler, whose boat took them back across the border. From the coast they wended a tedious route north, on foot and sticking to heavily traveled roads, losing themselves in as much of a crowd as North Korea was at present capable of mustering. They crossed into Russia at Khasan, where the two Russian women welcomed them at the border, and rode in the back of a very cold step van with the cargo all the way to Khabarovsk. From Khabarovsk they took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Komsomolsk, again riding in the freight car with the Russians’ payload. From Komsomolsk they were upgraded into a seat on the aging Tupolev into Moscow, where they took leave of the women, who paid them well and then tipped them, too, which made them both think they should have checked the pockets and the linings of the clothing to see what else they had been bringing into Mother Russia.

In Moscow they took an even older Tupolev to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Their forged passports, visas, and work permits went unchallenged. They found menial jobs as sweepers and loaders on the docks and a one-room apartment with light but no heat.

They settled in to wait, sinking with barely a trace into the general population, which unlike the citizenry of many Russian cities was fully occupied building ships for the Russian Pacific fleet, assembling Mig fighters for export, manning a steel mill to furnish material for the construction of both, and lading freight on and off the many ships coming into the port.

Within days, the others began to trickle into town in ones and twos.

Smith and Jones wielded shovels and picks and the occasional broom, and waited.