A lamp was on in one of the upstairs windows; then someone clicked it off. The other building was half in the sun but looked deserted.
The buildings were about three hundred meters away, though because of the angle and the clear air at that hour, they looked closer. I could see the guard pretty well. He was leaning against a tree, sipping tea, a dog curled up at his feet-a violation of every rule I'd ever learned about sentry duty. Up the valley the sun glinted off something metallic, first only at one spot, then at another, and another. Probably machine-gun posts, judging from how regularly they were spaced.
There was a double fence line. None of this impressed the dog, which was fast asleep.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see who it was. We'd been trained never to make that mistake; I made it anyway. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground looking up at the tree tops, my cheek aching. Luckily, because the whole thing happened so fast, I hadn't tensed: My back was fine. I relaxed on the pine needles and, for a moment, enjoyed the trees and blue sky.
Then the sky was blotted out by a face leaning over me. It was one of the Military Security thugs I'd seen the night before, loitering outside the goat lady's tent. I couldn't believe someone that big and ugly could have moved so quietly. In the darkness, I hadn't gotten a good look at him, but now he had my full attention. There was no doubt he was Korean, but neither could anyone miss that in his veins flowed blood from ancestors who never belonged here. The hawklike features, the sharp nose on a long, lean face, flashing eyes set deep in his head.
Allowing for generations of marriage with the locals, this was the face of a long-ago Arab horseman, come far from home and trapped here by fateful orders he could not disobey.
I'd seen a face like this once before. On the road near our house, a traveling barber had set up shop. Same nose, same deep-set eyes. I'd stared, not just because he looked different, but because he had a different air; he moved like someone who wasn't comfortable surrounded by the fields and the hills. "Don't gawk at strangers," my grandfather said.
Then he lowered his voice. "That one"-he nodded his head toward the barber-"beware of his kind." Centuries ago, he told me, when their empire stretched halfway around the earth, the Mongols had sent Arab princesses and their retainers to the Korean court. They stayed, or most of them, and mixed with the population.
Yes, but at that time the court was in the southern part of the country, I said; how could there be any descendants around where we lived, far to the north? My grandfather laughed and snapped his belt. "Do you think they didn't spend the night up here on the way south to Chungchong?"
Abruptly, he turned serious again. Foreign blood, he warned, was a stain; it would never go away. "Anyone named Chong might be one of them. Watch for people named Chong." He spoke so gravely it gave me chills. "Watch their eyes real close."
In this case, I had no choice. His nose was almost touching mine, and I could smell the breakfast on his breath. "Surprised to see me?" He didn't expect an answer.
I started to get up, but he put a huge hand on my shoulder and pushed me back onto the ground. "No, if you stand, that might catch the attention of the guard down there. If he got off a lucky shot, it could kill you. Bad way to start the day."
I rubbed my cheek. "And this was a good way?"
He considered that for a moment. "Where you from?"
"Who wants to know?"
He growled. "Don't tempt me. If you disappeared in these hills, no one would care."
"You're not going to kill me. You'd have done it by now if those were your orders."
He grunted and stood up, apparently not worried about the guard down below. "I'm going to ask you some questions. If I like the answers, you can limp back to the inn, gather your things, and go back to where you came from. If I don't-" He opened his coat, and I saw he had a knife that had an odd blade. "It's used to gut goats." He let his coat fall back.
My cheek was going numb, and my eye was starting to swell. I was getting tired of this sort of thing. Pak had sent me out of Pyongyang, he said, to keep me safe. Getting hit on the head and punched in the face all in the same lousy town wasn't my idea of safe. What the hell was Pak thinking, telling me to steer clear of Kang and then pushing me into his path? If he knew something big was going on, why didn't he just tell me? Maybe I should have resigned, like he wanted. I looked up into the ugly face. No, I didn't want to resign, I wanted to get this guy's foot off my chest.
"I'm only going to ask each question once. Before I do, and to save us some time, I'll tell you I've checked in Wonsan."
If my cheek hadn't hurt so bad I might have laughed in his face.
What was he going to check in Wonsan? I hadn't filled out any registration papers at the inn; there were no documents to trace. If he'd called the Wonsan State Security Department, they'd have had a good giggle and then gone back to sleep. They were incredibly lazy. I knew this for a fact because we needed their help once and when we called to explain our problem, there was nothing but a long silence on the other end of the phone.
"You checked. Good for you. If you know the answers, why are you asking?"
"Name."
"Ho Tarn."
Ho Tarn had been a ranking party member years ago, a smart man with the normal number of enemies; he died in a hospital overseas. Ho Tarn's father and my grandfather had known each other. We made a piece of furniture for Ho's family, and they liked it very much. At the time, Ho had been a college student. He was home when we delivered the piece: a blanket chest made of chestnut that I'd smoothed and polished for days before my grandfather nodded in satisfaction.
When Ho heard I'd helped build the chest, he took me outside into the courtyard. It was May, and the blossoms on the apple tree were new, brilliantly white. Ho was fairly short, so it didn't feel like an adult was talking to me, more like a brother. "Your grandfather is a great man. Still we need him, and we will need you, too, before all of this is over." I thanked him, though I found it odd he should speak to me in that way.
Later, when I told my grandfather, he became angrier than I had ever seen him. "Have you learned nothing from me, in all of these years?" he shouted. "When someone takes you aside and says even three honest words to you, haven't you learned not to tell anyone else, not even me?" His face was white with rage. "You'll get yourself killed, you'll get anyone stupid enough to trust you sent to the camps, and why? Because you don't pay attention, you don't see. Can my grandson be such a fool?"
"I'm not a fool."
"Then don't act like one. I lost my son to this. Don't let me lose the rest of the family as well."
"This. What is this?"
He grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me. "Look around you.
Do you think this is what we wanted, that for this we fought the Japanese, for this I sent your father to die on a lousy winter morning? For Christ's sake, look around you!"
I froze. I couldn't breathe. I'd never heard him speak like that. Not once, never once. For weeks afterward we barely said anything to each other. Years later, when I was assigned to a guard detail for a visiting Romanian official, Ho, who by then had become Foreign Minister, came up to me during a quiet moment. "That chest is in my house. It still gleams." Just then he was called away, and we never met again.
"So, Comrade Ho, you graduated from the Wonsan Fishery College, did you?"
I had no idea if there was such a place, but he probably checked at least that much, so I stuck to the truth. "Never heard of it. Whoever told you I knew anything about fishing?"