From the Fatherland, with Love, page 70
Some of her colleagues had gone so far as to tell her that the major regarded her as a kind of daughter or younger sister. But the honor of being noticed by such a high-ranking superior was tempered by a vague sense of dissatisfaction at not being fully recognized as a fellow officer. He was absolutely typical of the DPRK male—the mere fact that she was a woman made him look down on her. His attitude was not one of deliberate disrespect or discrimination. His instinctive assumption was that she was sweet but a bit weak and so needed looking after. “For the time being,” she told him, “we’ve got enough to last three weeks.” The major gave her a satisfied nod, then asked her to do a favor for them. Could she go to the Kyushu Medical Center that morning and pay the hospital bill for Corporal Song Jin Pal, who was to be released in the evening. The tab would be repaid from the Special Police budget, but it would be a big help if she could take care of it in the meantime.
At the mention of the hospital, she faltered for a moment, her eye fixed on a painting on the shiny wall of a woman on horseback galloping between the trees in a grove. “What’s wrong?” the major asked. “Nothing,” she replied, shaking her head. “I could have a couple of security guards take you,” he said. “That won’t be necessary, but could you please write a memo concerning the deduction from the police budget?” Kim exchanged a smiling glance with Ri. “You’re certainly efficient,” he remarked as he handed her the signed chit. “Are all women from your part of the country like you?”
Her heart was still beating fast. She had never imagined that she’d be going there, where he worked. But if she let this chance go by, there surely wouldn’t be another, particularly if headquarters was moved out to Odo. She had first seen him on the day the two men were executed. Dressed in hospital whites, he had burst out of the hospital, heading through the rain toward the camp’s assembly area. As she stood there watching him approach, she felt tension building up inside her. Nobody, whether an officer or an enlisted man, was in the least looking forward to the impending event, and now this white-coated figure had come along to stir her conscience and stifle her breath.
The thin, elderly doctor had passed between the rows of soldiers. The security guards hesitated to restrain him, both because of his apparel and obvious profession and because of his age. Though under orders to allow neither spectators nor the media to witness the execution, they’d never expected anyone like this to show up. No Japanese individual had ever dared to confront the KEF on his own. Moreover, the whole contingent was drawn up, with the firing squad ready to proceed. Waving his arms, his mouth set tight and his rain-soaked hair plastered to his forehead, he trudged straight on through the mud that speckled the hem of his hospital coat and turned his white sandals brown. The commander stared in disbelief as the man moved closer through the ranks and, making a megaphone of his hands, shouted again and again for them to “Stop the murder!”—first in Japanese, and then in broken Korean: “Sar-in mallida! Sar-in mallida!”
The condemned men, tied to the posts and blindfolded, turned their heads, straining to understand the commotion. Even those resigned to death might start getting their hopes up from a sudden shift in mood like this. Would it be called off? Hyang Mok had seen other men about to be shot grasping at such straws, frantically trying to free themselves and begging for mercy. When Major Kim ordered the man’s removal, the guards surrounded him, lifted him onto their shoulders, and carried him over to a few of his colleagues who had come in pursuit. As he was being borne away, he passed directly in front of Hyang Mok, standing next to Kim Sun I and Ri Gwi Hui. The small white name tag attached to his breast pocket caught her eye. She recognized the three Chinese characters—“world,” “good,” “tree”—but didn’t know how to pronounce them in Japanese. As soon as he had been lowered to the ground, shots from the firing squad rang out. The major, as instructed, then reached for his Tokarev and gave each of the writhing men the coup de grâce. At that moment, Hyang Mok felt as though a thorn had lodged in her throat. As a member of the railway police on the Chinese border, she had witnessed other executions without any such reaction; it had to be the old man’s protest that brought it on. She stood watching in the rain until, surrounded by his colleagues, he had returned to the hospital. “Comrade Kim,” called out a soldier in charge of the cleanup operation, “don’t catch cold.”
The two corpses were untied and lowered onto plywood boards. While they were being taken away, she noticed a solitary sandal lying in the mud. Looking around to be sure that nobody was watching, she picked it up, without knowing why. That night, as she was falling asleep on her cot, the old doctor rose into her mind, and at dawn he reappeared in a dream. And yet her preoccupation was still a mystery to her. All she knew was that she wanted to meet him.
She returned to her desk in the big hall and went back to work but couldn’t concentrate. She stared blankly at the names on the bilingual list. “Someone’s on the line,” said Kang Cheol, her immediate subordinate, who was sitting across from her. The call was from the director of a food wholesaler. She began with her usual flattery, saying how much everyone had enjoyed the sesame liquor they’d recently received. “Ah, glad to hear it,” came the reply. As they turned to business, she thought she’d be able to put the hospital out of her mind. The director, whose name was Yoshimoto, told her about some supplies of shellfish, sardines, and bonito, informed her he had a batch of instant noodles and curry that were past their sell-date, and brought to her attention a quantity of ham that was being stored in a Hakata Port warehouse.
For some reason, the word “ham” made her heart skip a beat. She knew she’d heard it before, though at first she couldn’t remember when or where. “Ham?” she said. “Yes, from China. We got it two years ago, lots of it, from Guangzhou, but it doesn’t sell here: too salty. It wound up in our warehouse on the Hakozaki Pier. We’d be happy to let you have it cheap.” Hyang Mok asked what exactly ham was. “It’s a kind of cured pork,” she was told. And suddenly a long-lost memory resurfaced. It was uncanny: perhaps the recurrent dreams about the hospital doctor had plowed up the field of her past, allowing these memories of her father to spring up.
One day during her first year at the local People’s School, her father had presented the family with a large, cylindrical chunk of meat: “This,” he said, smiling, “is called ham.” He normally didn’t talk much, and only rarely laughed, so the family was surprised, even worried, by his cheerful mood. “Yes, this is pretty special,” he declared as he laid the object on the table. That afternoon an old woman, a returnee from Japan, had apparently come to the hospital where he worked, asking to be examined for pain in her knees and abdominal discomfort. The woman had left Japan some forty years before, staying first in Pyongyang but then settling in this mining area, after being more or less sent into exile. She said she hadn’t a single chon to pay him with, then abruptly reached down and lifted her skirt.
“I nearly fell out of my chair,” he said with a burst of laughter. The old woman had been sent some parcels by relatives in Japan, but she was now down to the last item of any value, and this she had tied under her skirt before slipping out of the house. She’d had to resort to this scheme, she said, because her son and daughter-in-law thought she spent too much on herself. The flesh-colored ham, he said, had looked at first like the stump of a third leg.
Hyang Mok fell silent for a moment. “Hello? Lieutenant Kim? Can you hear me?” the man shouted into the receiver. “I was thinking about the ham,” she replied. “Could you bring a sample here to headquarters this evening?” He agreed, and she ended the call but sat at her desk with a lingering smile. “Good news?” asked Kang. “He said something funny,” she answered, and stood up. Her face had tightened again as she moved toward the exit, feeling annoyed with herself for getting distracted.
It was still a bit early, but she decided to change into civilian clothes, thinking that doing so, along with arranging her hair, might help her calm down. She returned to the Maple Room and opened the wardrobe shared by all the women officers. This big piece of furniture, made of a fine-grained, unvarnished wood, had been on display outside the grand ballroom, as a sales sample. Apparently parents bought such gifts for their newly-wed children. The amount shown on the tag was 1.8 million yen. She was astonished at the price, as were her roommates; they had counted and recounted the zeros. The tag still dangled from the door handle. A gray suit was hanging next to a T-shirt, jeans, and a spare uniform. The store where she had bought the suit had provided the clear plastic bag in which it was wrapped and the white plastic hanger—a novelty to her. She brushed her hand over the surface of her cot to remove any dirt or dust before taking the suit from the bag and laying it down.
Only Hyang Mok among the female officers was authorized to dress in civilian clothes and then for the sole purpose of meeting and negotiating with company representatives. Along with the cut-price suit, she had bought two white blouses, four pairs of stockings of the kind that you wore like pants, and a pair of low-heeled boots. She’d not worn a skirt since her days as a pupil in the People’s School, and she had never before pulled nylon stockings over her legs. They had a pleasantly smooth feel, and though they were so thin as to be virtually invisible against the skin, they were surprisingly warm. She had given a pair to Ri Gwi Hui, who told her she got cold sitting in front of a computer all day.
She took off her uniform and the T-shirt she wore underneath and ran her arms through the sleeves of the blouse. It was as plain as a man’s shirt, but it had a touch of the feminine about it, with a roundish collar and buttons that looked vaguely like seashells, and Hyang Mok was particularly fond of it. She couldn’t say the same about the underwear, however. She remembered how she and Gwi Hui had protested when given these flimsy things during their training for the occupation of the Dome. Even now she disliked the shape and color: they made her feel like a streetwalker. And yet, as she and Gwi Hui admitted to each other in frequent conversations on the subject, they were actually quite pleasant to wear.
The fabric and tailoring of the gray suit was so smooth that merely touching it with her fingertips gave her pleasure. If she pressed her face against it, there was the smell of high-quality cloth. As a child, she had been given a sweater her mother had made from the wool of a sheep they’d bought in the free market. There wasn’t enough for all four of the children, but her older brothers had willingly let their little sister have priority. She had enjoyed watching them and their mother shear the sheep in the spring light, its bleating reverberating through the valley as the wool fluttered down like clumps of dandelion fluff. Put into a pot and cooked to remove the grease, with the water being allowed to boil away three times, it was placed on a board to dry before being carefully combed, then stretched out and wound onto the spindle of the spinning wheel. The sweater her mother knitted for her was bristly and heavy, and when she put her arms through the sleeves, it had an animal smell. But it was wonderfully warm.
She remembered the feel of that sweater as she adjusted her collar and skirt in front of the wardrobe mirror. The front of the jacket seemed to be lacking something, so she added a silver necklace that the manager of a clothing store called Gap had given her. Once she had put a small comb in her hair, her dress preparations were complete. On a page from a notebook lying on the table she wrote the three characters of the doctor’s name, then took from her own personal drawer in the wardrobe the sandal she’d been keeping there. She shoved it into her leather shoulder bag.
Hyang Mok informed the woman on loan from City Hall that there would be a delay in the purchase-order form for the canned seafood. At ten o’clock she met the head of a company dealing in plastic chopsticks and spoons. With the declining birthrate, the number of children in Fukuoka had diminished drastically, and there was a huge surplus of utensils like those the man brought to show her. These were unacceptable, however: they all had cartoon figures on the handles. At ten-thirty she and the doctor Heo Jip moved to the Laurel Room, now set aside as a special meeting place, to talk with the head of sales for Medicina, a pharmaceutical wholesaler. Other commercial negotiations were usually conducted with the participants sitting on sofas in the lobby, but Medicina was virtually the only wholesaler of its kind in Kyushu and thus relatively impervious to bargaining, which was why their people were given special treatment.
The executive, a man named Ninomiya, was a mild-mannered chemist in his late forties—and an unrelentingly tough negotiator. The ongoing shortage of medical supplies that had come in the wake of the blockade, and the upcoming arrival of hordes of soldiers who’d had a storm-tossed voyage, made the KEF’s needs all the more urgent. As he sipped the ginseng tea he’d been served, Ninomiya examined the list provided by Heo Jip and compared it to the inventory recorded in his laptop.
Heo Jip’s lack of Japanese meant things had to be translated, which was made difficult and tedious by the large number of technical words and phrases involved. With constant reference to a dictionary acquired in Fukuoka, Hyang Mok struggled to explain such terms as diuretics used to treat malnutrition-caused edema, quinolone antibiotics used against enterococci, and beta blockers used to treat high blood pressure. As there were many new medications unavailable in the Republic, and as those required were in any case in short supply, the discussion dragged on. The most commonly used items such as antibiotics, analgesics, antiseptic lotion, nutritional supplements, digestive medicine, antipyretics, eye drops, and sticking plaster were particularly scarce. In the end, only a fifth of the hoped-for supply could be purchased, and at a higher-than-expected cost. Ninomiya explained that while, strictly speaking, the arrangement was contrary to Japanese law, the company would cooperate out of humanitarian concern.
While they were still in conversation, they heard the sound of army boots and jangling equipment. An SOF platoon led by Second Lieutenant Pak Il Su entered the lobby carrying AK rifles and Scorpion sub-machine guns. Major Kim Hak Su was issuing orders in front of the elevator, but the glass partition made his words difficult to hear. Finally the soldiers split into groups and boarded four of the elevators. “What’s all this?” Ninomiya asked, and Hyang Mok said she thought it must be a training exercise. Heo Jip got up and opened the door to ask Kim what was going on. The latter, aware that an important meeting was being conducted in the special reception area, made a point of entering the room and politely greeting Ninomiya before explaining in Japanese that they had received a report of some “vermin” on the loose and were thus conducting a precautionary patrol. “Vermin?” said Ninomiya. “Yes,” said Kim Hak Su, with a laugh. “Nothing to worry about. Just some little rats!”
When the meeting was over, Ninomiya, knowing that Hyang Mok was on her way to the Kyushu Medical Center, offered her a ride in his car, saying that he too was going there to make arrangements for the delivery of supplies. With her superior’s permission, she accepted the offer. Would she need an armed escort? She said that wouldn’t be necessary but was told to take along a pistol. She requisitioned a Soviet-era PSM, a lightweight weapon used on special assignments, and placed it in her shoulder bag.
Ninomiya drove his large white automobile up to the entrance to the reception hall, got out, and opened the door for her. The name of his firm was painted on the side in blue letters. As he started the engine, he explained that the company president had given the enterprise a Spanish name because he was keen on the paintings of Picasso. The leather seats had a pleasant smell. The sea, sparkling in the late morning sun, came immediately into view as they drove off. Hyang Mok remarked on the beauty of the scene, and Ninomiya gave her a quiet smile and nodded in agreement. As they passed the checkpoint, she extracted the memo from her shoulder bag and asked him whether he knew a physician by the name that was written on it. He took it in one hand, glanced at it, and replied: “Yes, Dr. Seragi,” saying that he was well known and respected in the area but that he also had a reputation for being somewhat stubborn and something of a lone wolf. He was usually, she was told, in the immunology office on the third floor.
A lone wolf. When she heard this expression, it occurred to her that Seragi might in some ways resemble her own father. She knew that after having suffered horribly as an ethnic Korean during the Cultural Revolution in China, he had fled to the Republic all by himself, and in other respects as well he was a solitary man. A specialist in cholera, he had almost no friends and made no effort to socialize. Welling up from inside her came an image of him pressing his hands together above the water that she and her brothers brought each morning and mumbling some sort of prayer, then donning his hat and going off to the clinic, lunchbox and satchel in hand. She had no memory of him ever playing with her, or reading her a story. Just once, he had spent an evening fishing with her and her oldest brother. They spoke little and caught nothing, but it was an evening she’d never forgotten.
Fathers in the Republic, particularly in rural areas, were still deeply imbued with the feudalistic, patriarchal attitude of days gone by. But Hyang Mok’s father did not rule over his family with fussy authority, or scold them, or punish them with beatings. He was, to be sure, rather brusque with them, but as her mother once explained, he was simply a very serious man, and terribly shy. Maybe he just didn’t know how to relate to children. But they, for their part, were in awe of their father. They knew that he could read medical texts in German and Russian and was fluent in Chinese as well.
“I’ll let you out here, and drive on to the parking lot.” Ninomiya opened the door for her and said goodbye. By the entrance to the hospital was a guardroom, where an older man dressed in a navy-blue uniform greeted her and immediately ushered her in, presumably because he’d seen her get out of a car with the Medicina logo. She nodded and gave him a little smile as the large glass door slid open. The lobby was as big as the hotel’s, with a soaring ceiling. A number of senior citizens were sitting in front of the outpatient counter waiting to be called. In her wallet Hyang Mok had, in addition to some cash, an ID card containing various information including a resident code, a civilian health-insurance number, and an account number for a local bank. This had been issued only to her and a few other officers. She could go to the counter, show her card, state her business, and pay the bill, all in a few minutes.
