"Not anymore. The unit was so depleted they had to disband it. Everyone was out looking for food. He told me that the countryside…" Pak shook his head again. "It's bad. Very bad."
I sat down. We were in the thick of it; there was no sense trying to avoid the subject anymore. "Are you alright? I mean, the family?" Pak had a young son. His wife was sick, and his mother was getting weaker by the day.
Pak stared out his window. The view was enough to depress anybody, especially in the middle of winter. "Two meals a day, very healthy. Isn't that what they say on the radio? If two is healthy, what do we call one meal a day? Or does hot water count as nourishment now?"
"I hear that the radio doesn't operate in the provinces most of the time. Not enough fuel for the generators. Not enough technicians left to fix the transmitters that still have fuel."
"Careful what you repeat, Inspector," Pak said quietly. Then even more quietly, "Most of the time, neither do the trains. Almost nothing moves out there these days."
"And?" The situation in the countryside was not a secret; the local security offices had stopped trying to prevent the stories from circulating. One Ministry officer who was in town to plead for backup support told me it was like trying to blot out the sun with a rat's turd. When I told him to come up with a better image, he grinned quickly. "It's a joke, Inspector. We've eaten all the rats. There aren't any rat turds left."
"And?" I repeated the question.
"And, and we do what we do," Pak said. His voice was back to normal. "That's all there is to it. A couple of the other districts in Pyongyang are running short on people; some of the shifts have been lengthened." I'd heard officers were disappearing for days at a time without notice, looking for food, sick from the cold, but there was no use mentioning it. Pak cleared his throat and looked away. "You going or staying?" He didn't want to ask because he didn't want to make me answer. Just posing the question was an admission of where things stood.
"I'm here, aren't I?"
He nodded slowly. I didn't say anything else, and neither did he. In the silence, there was no doubt we were both thinking the same thing. I knew better than to mention it, but I kept wondering. Suddenly, I realized Pak was looking at me in horror, because I had just said it out loud.
"Is he going to make it?" The words hung in the cold air. In summer they might have vanished quickly, but in the cold they lingered, fed on each other, grew like a wave that swells until it swallows the sky.
Or maybe I didn't really say the words; maybe it was just that my lips moved. "Is he going to make it?" Even if it's just your lips moving over that question, it booms around the room. Loud enough to rattle the windows, and paint itself on the walls so that anyone who comes in a week later will see it.
He. Him.
With a slight lifting of the eyebrows, say "him"-no one had any doubt that you meant the new leader, still mourning his father as the rest of us drifted. We all knew that we were drifting, and we knew where. A nation of shriveled leaves floating on a doomed river toward the falls. A winter of endless sorrow.
The horror on Pak's face dissolved again into weariness. I knew his body was soaked in fatigue, functioning on momentum, getting up each morning with regret that morning had come at all, not knowing why each new day arrived, unbidden. Each night he fell asleep while he posted the signs on the four corners of the darkness, "Tomorrow is canceled, please, no more. No more." But dawn ignored the pleas, dawn brought nothing, no hope, no light, nothing but a selfish insistence that it would inflict itself, empty-handed, the burden of new hours grinding down even the strongest until they imagined death itself had abandoned them, taking friends and family but leaving them.
I lived alone, but loneliness was no burden, not like people sometimes imagined. It was a matter of indifference to me if a new day came. Dawn brought nothing, but I didn't care. If the new light of day had ever meant anything, I had forgotten what it was.
"How is your mother?" I asked Pak. Once, that was a simple question, a question from normal times, when the answer was normal, in a normal conversation. It wasn't simple now, but if I didn't ask it, it would mean there was nothing left for us to hold from before. It used to be a simple question because the answer was simple. No more.
Now, Pak might tell me to mind my business. If he was as weary as he looked at this moment, he might simply walk out the door, down the stairs, and never come back. I waited, and the waiting spoke to how far from normal we had drifted. He sat and didn't answer, not with words, not with a gesture, not with his posture. That void told me what he didn't have the will to say. No, he wouldn't leave. He wouldn't leave, though there were people we both knew who had done that, leaving family, leaving everything, walking into the cold and disappearing. A query would come down from the Ministry once a month-"Where is so-and-so? Anyone with information about so-and-so should report immediately to the chief of personnel," which was almost funny because the chief of personnel had disappeared. Someone had been assigned his job but not given the title lest that person disappear, too, and the job have to be filled again.
"She rarely eats." If he was going to stay, he had to speak. He knew it. He had to talk to other people and read his files and draw one breath after another. "She says her food should go for the boy. We've argued until I can't say the words anymore."
"I have more than I can use."
"No, Inspector, you don't. I need you healthy."
"Just let me know." He nodded. That meant the subject was closed, and it was time to move things back to business. If you had to breathe, you might as well get back to business. "That background report may be delayed a little more," I said. "Some of the people I have to interview in order to finish it aren't around."
There it was again. I didn't say where they had gone. I didn't have to. Pak knew what I meant. I could see in his eyes what he was thinking. He was imagining what he would never do, being one of the gone. Leaving everything, avoiding tomorrow.
6
After a session like that with Pak, I wasn't going to my office and stare at the walls. A long walk would do me good. If it got cold enough as the sun went down, it would drive everything from my mind. I could get back to the office after dark, finish a little paperwork, and then go home.
"Don't take my car," Pak said. "I need it later to get to some meetings. Take the duty vehicle. It's back from repair, guaranteed to start. Just in case, don't go too far."
The Potong River wasn't too far, and I liked walking there. By then, there wasn't much left of the afternoon. It turned to dusk, but dusk didn't hang around; nothing wanted to linger at this time of year. That was why I didn't see her coming.
"Hello, Inspector."
"Hello, yourself." There wasn't much else to say. She was the last person I expected to run across. Then it occurred to me, maybe it was fate. Why not? I was due for some fate. "I was just thinking about you."
"Is that so?"
"I've been wondering, what if I want a transfer?"
"Something wrong between you and Pak? You finally exhausted his patience? The man has a reservoir of patience deeper than the ocean, but you have drained it."
"No, Pak is fine, still putting up with me. I'm just thinking ahead. A whole career in Pyongyang, it might not look so good when it comes time for my promotion."
"If either of us lives that long. Face it, you're not ever going to be promoted, O. Besides, when did you start craving advancement? 'Don't make the offer,' you said the last time the subject came up. 'I won't take it. I'm fine where I am.'"
She was a woman I'd met in the army; "an old friend" is how I described her to people when they asked. A few years ago, she had been made a deputy in the Ministry's personnel section. It was her chief who had disappeared. The whole section had been put on report for not predicting that the boss was going to defect. No one knew for sure if he had defected, but he was gone, and it was pretty clear he wasn't on vacation in Cuba.