6
The wooden door swung open. Startled, I sat up on the bench.
A guard entered, armed only with a billy club. Two other guards stood behind him, one with a Russian-made pistol strapped to his waist.
“Charyo!” the guard said. Attention!
I stood as best I could, but I had to keep my head bowed because of the low ceiling. Candlelight from the hallway cast a dim glow into my cell.
The guards stood aside and a small man in a military uniform entered the cell. I recognized him immediately- the man in charge of the Taekwondo tournament, Commissar Oh. He was smoking furiously, as if to dispel whatever odor this room might have, an odor I could no longer notice. He wore a loose cape and smoked from an ivory cigarette holder. He had the darting eyes of a fashion designer on opening night in Paris.
“Naimsei na!” he said, wrinkling his nose and glancing toward the bucket in the corner.
One of the guards hustled forward, grabbed the bucket, and carried it out of the tiny cell. With the offending filth removed, Commissar Oh looked me up and down. His eyes lingered on my crotch, as if he were fascinated by something. I decided not to flinch, nor to look downward to see what he was looking at. If my fly was open, so be it.
Finally, he looked back at my face and said something in Russian.
I stared at him blankly.
He exhaled in exasperation. Then he started speaking in Korean. “What are you, stupid? A Warsaw Pact officer and you don’t speak Russian. What the hell good are you?”
I continued to stare at him blankly, pretending that I didn’t understand, keeping the muscles in my face immobile so they wouldn’t betray me.
He puffed on his cigarette, squinting behind rising smoke. “Maybe I ought to chop you in pieces,” he said, still speaking in Korean, “and sell your rotten foreign flesh to a hog farm.”
A couple of the guards murmured in assent.
Commissar Oh glanced back at them angrily. “No one wants your opinion.”
They lowered their heads and became quiet.
“You embarrassed us today,” he continued, “attacking our First Corps champion like that, knocking him down. With trickery! You couldn’t have done that within the rules.”
He paced to his left, studying me as if I were indeed a lump of flesh he was planning on carving. I tried not to respond in any way. Stoic, like the war hero I was supposed to be.
How good was the cover story Hero Kang had constructed for me? Had Commissar Oh checked me out with the Foreign Ministry? Was he still convinced I was a Romanian officer? If they’d had any inkling that I was an American spy, they would have already been feeding me to a hog farm.
“What to do with you?” Commissar Oh said. “I can’t just let you go without punishment; it would be like covering our face with shit. You must make amends to our Great Leader.” He stared at me, waiting for a response. When he didn’t get one, he said, “You’ll have to pay for your crime somehow. And dearly.” He puffed mightily on the last of his cigarette until the filter glowed. “Foreigners. Always a problem.”
He tossed the butt on the ground and stomped it flat. He swiveled on his high-heeled leather boots and stalked out of the cell.
“Punish him!” he shouted to the guards. “Make him understand that he’s nothing but a miserable foreign beast. Less than human. Make him cry and kneel and praise the Great Leader.” Then he stopped, pointing his finger at the lead guard. “But don’t kill him.”
The guard nodded. When the door closed, I was left alone.
Nervously, I sat back down on the bench.
Ten minutes later, the guards returned, bearing straps and chains and the same bucket they’d removed from my cell, still sloshing with filth.
It seemed like years, but I knew that only two or three hours had passed since Commissar Oh had left my cell. Every part of my body hurt and I could still feel the filthy water clinging like slime to my sinus cavities and the back of my mouth. In the middle of the water torture, I’d lost all sense of pride. It was too much. When you can’t breathe, nothing is sweeter than the thought of air, of just being allowed the luxury of inhaling and exhaling. Finally, I blurted out in English, “No more!”
The guards who were torturing me were uneducated men and knew nothing of the language of their archenemy, America. Luckily for me. They probably assumed I was speaking Romanian. When I realized they weren’t going to stop, I shocked them by speaking Korean.
“Let me talk to Commissar Oh,” I told them.
By the way they stepped back and their eyes widened, you would’ve thought that an ape had just opened its mouth and recited a passage from Kim Il-sung’s Juche philosophy.
The good part was they stopped torturing me. Someone was sent to fetch Commissar Oh. They kept me shackled but allowed me to hobble over to the splintered wooden bench. I collapsed and, luxuriating in the sweet air entering and exiting my lungs, soon fell asleep.
Commissar Oh’s face loomed above me. I realized that his hand was on my belly and my stomach muscles clenched. I sat up, almost bumping foreheads with him. All the guards had disappeared.
“You wanted to speak to me?” he said in Korean.
I nodded. “I lied to you,” I said, hanging my head, as if ashamed. “I didn’t want you to know. I thought it might give me some sort of advantage, but the truth is that I’ve been studying Korean. A little. But I don’t speak well.”
Commissar Oh puffed on his cigarette, forcing a small gray cloud to rise in front of his eyes. “I can understand you well enough,” he said.
“I apologize for punching the First Corps champion. I was wrong. He was too good for me. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Commissar Oh continued to puff and nod. “You’ve been lying to me,” he said. “Not letting us know you speak our language. Where did you learn?”
“Here. Since I’ve arrived.” I let my head droop, in total submission. That part, I wasn’t faking.
“Repentance,” he said, “isn’t good enough.”
“What?”
I pretended not to understand the word.
“Saying you’re sorry,” he repeated. “That’s not good enough. You must prostrate yourself before the Great Leader, publicly. You must admit your crimes. And then you must make amends.”
Amends? What sort of amends? But I didn’t ask out loud.
“I will arrange it,” he said, “but it won’t be easy.” New energy came into his voice. “You must show your loyalty to the Great Leader with actions, not just words.”
I dared to gaze up at him. “What sort of actions?”
“You’re a military man,” he said. “You must have some information on military equipment, supplies, that sort of thing.” The ember of his cigarette flamed more brightly. “The Warsaw Pact consumes much of the weapons and material our socialist comrades in the Soviet Union so generously supply. Certainly you can find out what’s budgeted for in your next five-year plan. It would help if we knew so we could adjust our own internal production accordingly.”
The Soviet Union bleeds its own people to churn out military equipment in a mad attempt to keep up with the massive military-industrial complex of the United States. It also provides tanks and guns and ammunition to the Warsaw Pact countries in Europe and in North Korea. There’s competition for the military aid. If North Korea knew how much had been committed to the Warsaw Pact, it would help in their negotiations with the top brass in the Kremlin.
Commissar Oh wanted to turn me into his personal spy.
I stared out the barred window of my cell into the bleak hallway. Impatient guards farther down the corridor shuffled their boots and murmured. I glanced at the half-empty bucket of filth sitting in the corner and wanted to
