willed his entire being into this unmovable, unresponsive mass was the sort of thing that might have intrigued me when I was still working in the Ministry. In those days, I often wondered how during interrogations people became inanimate without warning. It seemed to me it was a defense mechanism and my job was to find a way to break it down. Now, I could care less if he turned into the Taj Mahal.
In fact, I was never much taken with stones. Other kids would skip them in the pond, or throw them at birds. My grandfather thought rocks were a nuisance, a blight on the earth, and he infused me with the same worldview. He would not even let us have an inkstone in the house. He sharpened his axe on a whetstone only rarely, and then with an expression of obvious distaste. “Look at this,” he’d say as the sparks flew. “When one hard thing meets another, you get nothing but sorrow.”
“Diamonds are hard,” I said to him once, wanting to see his reaction.
“So what if they are?” he countered. He was studying a piece of corkwood he’d found. “Damnedest wood,” he said, holding it up to the light. “Might as well build something out of air.”
“Diamonds, if you go back far enough,” I said, “come from trees, ancient trees.”
“I don’t give a damn about ancient trees.” He looked at me sharply. “Pigs eat corn that grows in the dirt. Do I eat dirt? Use your head.”
“It was in a book; that’s all.”
“Listen, I’m telling you that we don’t know about ancient trees any better than we know about ancient kings,” he said. “What we know is this day, right now, and you,” he pointed at me, but not with the ragged urgency that sometimes took hold of his being, “you are going to have to pay attention to each day as it comes. You’ll have to pay attention more than I ever did. Don’t let them tell you about the glory kingdoms of the past, old rotten trees that they want to make into diamonds. Did you ever see a tree that thought it was a diamond? Well, did you, boy?” There it was, the “they” my grandfather used on rare occasions, and only when we were alone. I never asked what he meant; I didn’t have to.
“You and Major Kim work together long?” I stood up and ambled around the room. Eyes followed me, alert eyes, not of the fog-bound stare. “He and I haven’t known each other long. Delightful man, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sit down.” The thin man got to his feet. “I don’t want you standing or moving around. You’re not going anywhere. Don’t even think about it.”
“You mean contemplate making a break? Are you kidding? I’ve got no reason to run. This is my territory; I’m perfectly comfortable here.” I stopped in front of the maps on the wall. They were old, Yi Dynasty. “Interesting maps,” I said. “My family is from here.” I pointed at the northern border. “The village was pulverized during the war. It was on a mountaintop, not worth anything to anyone, but bombs came down anyway.”
“Is that why you picked a mountaintop to go to?”
It stunned me for a moment. I hadn’t ever thought about it. It never crossed my mind before. But there it was. A perfect stranger finds a key lying around and unlocks a door you’ve walked past how many times in the dark?
“Who knows?” I said, only I did know. I had been migrating, no different from a bird or a fish that goes upriver to complete the perfect circle. And I understood why. Once, only once in all those years, I found my grandfather drunk in his workshop. That had been a terrible shock to me. Because of his status as Hero of the Revolution, he was given a bottle of whiskey every year in April, not rice whiskey, but something from Scotland, a mark of his standing and the esteem in which he continued to be held. Mostly he shared the whiskey with others in our village, but he always kept some of the bottle for himself. This he nursed, took small sips on anniversaries that meant something to him-the day one of his friends was killed in the anti-Japanese struggle, the day my parents died in the war, the anniversary of the death of his young wife. He drank only to mark sadness. I noticed that, even though I was quite young. But on this occasion there was no anniversary. It was, for all I knew, a normal day. When I walked into the workshop, I found him-eyes bright, cheeks flushed. He sat carefully on a small bench, his back against the wall. With effort, he focused on me. When he finally spoke, his voice was clear: “What have we done?” Each word came out deliberately. He said it again, and this time his voice broke: “What have we done?”
Years later, very near the end, he said the same thing when I came to his room at the hospital to say good-bye. The shades were pulled and the room was dark, but his eyes were bright and his voice was surprisingly young. I had a little speech prepared in my head, but after I’d said a few words, I realized it was for me, not for him, so I stopped. He looked into my face for a long moment. After a while, he sighed. “What have we done?” They weren’t his last words, but they were the last I heard him say.
That was the reason I turned in my resignation and retreated to the mountain.
“No,” they had dismissed it out of hand when I first put in the request. “Impossible. You can’t resign.”
“You don’t think so?” I said. “I’m through, and you can’t do anything about it. If you arrest me, I’ll be off the force anyway. It’s all the same.”
In the end, they let me leave Pyongyang, to “retire,” but only after I signed an agreement that I would not have contact with anyone, no one, ever again without permission. In turn, they agreed never-ever- to call me back to any official duties. I worked on the language with great care so everything was covered, because given half a chance, they’d come up with something and say I’d missed a contingency. I made sure there were no exceptions. I never meant to come back to Pyongyang again.
There was no other way, because one morning as I woke, I heard a voice, “What have we done?” When I sat up and looked around, there was no one. The voice was mine. And I knew it wasn’t a question. It was an indictment.
4
The thin man and I drove around the city all the next morning. I asked him if he wanted to go up to the top of the Juche monument and stare at the city; he repeated what he’d already said about not having to listen to me. Finally, the radio in his car squawked and the dispatcher told him to drop me at Kim’s compound.
“I’ll be sitting right here waiting,” he said as he parked in front. “Don’t get any ideas about going out the back way. There is no back way.”
Kim was in the lobby, chewing out a couple of pasty-faced guards.
“The last time, I’m telling you, this is the last time I’m going to warn you. If it happens again, you go home in a paper bag. You understand?”
They indicated that they did.
“Then get back to work, and this time do it right. If that bastard gets out of your sight one more time… it’s a big black car, for the love of Pete! How can you lose it?”
I waved from the doorway. “If this is a bad time, I can come back.”
“No, this is a good time. Come up to my office. I have something to show you.”
As soon as he sat down, Kim started looking through the papers piled on his desk.
“I have some good information. The source is reliable. A good source is a good source; that’s what I say.” He didn’t look like he was getting much sleep. The strain must be taking its toll. “What it tells us is that Zhao is getting paid by a foreign power, one other than China. I don’t know which one, yet. But this source had it right, and this is a good source.”
I knew what that meant right away. He had been ordered to break off relations with Zhao but wasn’t sure how to go about that and still keep both of his lungs. He had to go slowly, build a case.
Kim was getting more agitated, going through the piles. He had some information on a piece of paper, and the piece of paper was somewhere on his desk. I knew Kim well enough by now to know that on any single day reality was formed from the pieces of paper in front of him. Change the papers, change the world.
“I don’t trust a source unless I know him,” I said, “and if I know him well enough, that always means there are reasons not to trust him.”
