And so, into record:
45. Lo, I want to tell you about North Korea and what actually happened when you were there. Looking back, I realize it was a flash point for us. Or for me, anyway. So I guess, after all these years, this is my Helix moment. This is me confessing all.
It’s true I’d been to Pyongyang a few times, with J.T. or as part of a tourist consortium from Japan, but for this last trip to see you there, it seemed prudent to enter the country with greater stealth and regard for the peril attached to my plans. The dissident movement in North Korea is alive and metastasized now that cell phones and digital cameras have breached the border. You can reach people on the inside, and they can reach you. This was how I made enough contacts to get down to Pyongyang from the north, where I’d enlisted help from Christian missionaries in Yanbian. They ran an orphanage for North Korean kids whose parents were living in the woods until they died, there being small opportunity for escape to Vietnam and even less to Mongolia, where the Chinese border patrol was much less easily bribed than the North Korean.
46. I was to hide with a couple and their five-year-old son until dark. It was a big risk for them, but since I’d come with rice and cured beef, a Zippo and butane, they took me in. To their home, which was a lair they’d dug by hand from the hillside. It was five by five, tops. Sustained by a four-foot square of wood that was rotted through and a tarp that caught moisture from the ground above and had to be drained several times a day. This family had already been repatriated to North Korea once, survived a detention center, and fled the second they got out. Yet, for a sack of beef jerky, they were willing to jeopardize what they had and keep me safe.
47. This day was also trial run for my Korean countenance. The nose, flared and recessed. The uncreased single eyelid and epicanthal fold. The ebon hair I’d had cut to accommodate a ponytail and bangs. The Yoo family had not been told about me; they expected a Korean, which is what they got. I knew how to act, and I kept my mouth shut. But it was difficult. Their son was stunted; he looked about three years younger than he was, though the time lost on his body was taken up by his parents, who looked sixty-plus, though they were half as old. They spent much of the day rubbing his hands and feet, and lapping the den on all fours, frostbite being the least dangerous but most avertable consequence of this lifestyle. The boy did not know the alphabet or numbers; he had not learned how to hold a pencil; probably this couple would have to give him up; and then what? Why go on? What illusion of value could they impose on the day-to-day once they’d parted from their child? Nightfall could not have come sooner.
48. Christmas is heretic in North Korea, but Constitution Day, at the end of December, usually means fewer guards on the border. I headed out at 3 a.m. I hiked the two miles from the hills between Liangshui and Mijiang to the Tumen River, which marks the border. In winter, it’s ten below and dark as tar. You can walk for an hour and still not make it. During that hour, either you meet no one, you bribe border patrol, or you beg for your life. The land is pack ice, but the snow keeps prints all season, and for how remote and forbidding is this terrain, only despair can explain why it’s so well traversed.
49. The dark was condensed in the valley between hilltops, though if I wanted to find my guide’s spangle — he’d be waiting for me on the North Korean side of the river — I’d have to depart from this safety and get to high ground. I was wearing canvas sneakers swaddled in washrags; the ascent was slow going. And not much reward once you got there. Paddy fields in spring and summer, tundra in the winter months, and at night no lights, cars, industry, or people. And yet, for the pandemonium in my heart, it was as though I stood among the eight hundred thousand who had made this crossing to date. Only they went in the other direction, from the certainties of famine and death to mortifications unknown but free. Only for love does anyone willingly go back.
50. The river was frozen, and the crossing a skeleton race at half speed, chest pressed to the ice. I met no guards, just Chul-min, who’d sat behind a bush for the three-hour window in which he’d been told I would come. From there we went to a farmhouse just a mile east of the train station at Simch’ong-ni. Then: Hoeryong to Musan to Hyesan to Kanggye to Pyongyang. Three hundred eighty miles. A six-hour drive by car, six days via North Korean rail.
51. There’s a reason most people never see anything of North Korea but Pyongyang. It’s because the rest of the country is squalid beyond all imagining, and this to spite the homogeneity of its design: single-story homes in a grid, whitewashed timber or stucco walls, the rooftops an orange clay tile, and every plot squared in with a brindled picket fence. There is no cement to pave the roads and no shoes to walk the cement, so mostly people are barefoot, even in the snow. The filth seems meticulous and prolific in its outreach — even the soap can’t stay clean— which makes sense of the delimited color scheme of people’s clothes: black, gray, black, brown. No one stands out unless you know what to look for. The border towns are crammed with smugglers and People’s Security Force officers not sharp enough to serve in Pyongyang, and all are engaged in one illegal activity or another — trucking in contraband like PCs or just stealing fertilizer from a truck — and with one motive in mind: to stay alive. For this reason, strangers are unwelcome. I spent that first day in a janitor’s closet at the train station. Fuel being scarce, the schedule was a joke. A train came when it came. By the tracks: people asleep on the ice, in wheelbarrows, playing cards, trading nylon for corn, which cost a lot of corn. Faces wan and tapered, and everyone’s hair falling out. Amazing how hair and dust always find each other; the stuff blew across the tracks like briar.
52. You couldn’t travel without a permit. Mine was forged, and so when a train finally did arrive, I boarded the caboose and sat in the back. Two boys tried to freeload but were tossed by a female guard so shrill, two other kids gave up the con before she even got there. In North Korea, arrest and gulag are redress for most any crime, but often it depends on who’s watching.
The train was four cars, three of which looked Korean and one that was slightly larger, probably imported from Romania twenty years ago. I doubt it had been serviced since, and for the shrieks issued from the engine, the chassis, God knew, I didn’t think we’d get far. I wore a wool hat, pulled low, and stared through the window, past the black rime cleaved to the pane and at the countryside that could probably walk itself to Pyongyang faster than us.
53. The track skirts the Yalu and cuts into the base of one mountain range after another. My viewing options were this: the relatively prosperous towns on the Chinese side — Tumen looks like Six Flags at night — or the wasted and unrelentingly depressed landscape of North Korea on the other. I passed the hours undisturbed until we stalled just outside Hoeryong, next to a fishery qua morgue because there’d been no electricity to recycle or purify the water or just no money for food. Either way, the fish were dead and suffusing the air with a vapor so pungent it made everyone weep. My nose ran; my lungs threw up whatever came down, which became a problem since the one thing a prosthetic face cannot sustain is tears. I deboarded the train and fell in line with several women headed to a factory down a gravel road paved in snow. It was 5 a.m. Maybe they’d get an hour’s worth of electricity today and make a sock. I covered my mouth with a scarf and tried not to breathe; the effluent was ammonia and methane, though no one else seemed to care.