Joy Brigade (22 page)

A
dirty-faced boy startled me awake. He stared down at me, his mouth partially open, narrow eyes impassive. His bamboo-thin body was clad only in a flimsy tunic and loose pantaloons, more like rags than clothes.

“Koma-yah,”
I said,
“mul isso?”
Boy, do you have water?

The boy turned his head slowly and pointed.
“Choggiisso.”
Over there.

“Katchi ka,”
I said. Let’s go together.

Last night, I’d found refuge in this small shed that must’ve once been used to house an ox. All valuable farm animals, of course, had long since been confiscated by the collectives. However, individual livestock pens like this one, high up in the hills on the fringes of arable land, still stood. This was the third shed I’d slept in in as many nights.

Strangely, the boy wasn’t afraid of me. He reached toward my beard and grinned.

“Halabboji dok-katte.”
Just like a grandfather.

“Nei,”
I said, rubbing the rough stubble.
“Halabboji pissut hei.”
Yes. The same as a grandfather.

From a rusty pump, the boy poured me water in a dented metal pan. I drank it down. Then I asked him,
“Pap isso?”
Do you have food?

“Jom kanman,”
the boy said. Just a moment. He ran off.

I estimated his age, at first glance, to be about eight or nine, but with malnutrition rampant in these mountains, he could’ve been two or three years older. If he brought me something to eat, that would be good, but if he brought adults, I’d have to flee. I squatted next to the drafty walls of the animal pen and squinted out into the overcast daylight. I’d slept late. It had to be an hour past dawn. I should’ve found a better hiding place before the sun came up, but the night before I’d been making good time through the hill country and hadn’t wanted to stop until I stumbled into this splintered refuge. I wasn’t sure how far I was from the Kwangju Mountains. When the boy returned, alone, I asked him.

“Forty
li
,” he told me, pointing toward the east. He said there was a bus that ran from the village to the town of Sokdei. I could take that.

“Tone oopso,”
I told him. I don’t have any money.

His mouth fell open. “But you are a foreigner.”

“Some foreigners,” I explained, “don’t have money.”

While he chewed on that amazing thought, I chewed on the
ddok
he had brought me. A thick, glutinous cylinder of rubberized rice powder. Awful stuff. In South Korea,
I’d often turned my nose up at it. Here, after three days of eating only the occasional rotten turnip or wilted cabbage leaves, it tasted like four courses at a five-star restaurant. In seconds it was gone. The boy brought me more water.

As I drank, he asked, “Are you a soldier?”

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t going to tell him in which army.

“And you’re going to the Kwangju Mountains.”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you ride in a truck?”

“Not all soldiers ride in trucks.”

“Yes they do. They all do. I saw them, between here and Sokdei. Maybe five trucks.”

“Where were they going?”

“Many places. Each truck went in a different direction.”

They were setting up a line, I thought, between me and the mountains. How much did the North Koreans know of my mission? How important did they think I was? Important enough, anyway, to send five truckloads of infantry. In the last three days, I’d searched in vain for the village Hye-kyong had told me about, the village called Neibyol. I decided to risk asking this boy.

“It’s over there,” he told me, pointing. “To the south. On the other side of that mountain.”

Sokdei, where the boy had seen the soldiers, was to the east. It made sense for me to travel south toward Neibyol. Still, my strength was fading and it would only be a matter of time until the soldiers closed in on me. Now was the time to take a chance.

“Have you ever heard of someone called Moon Chaser?”

“Moon Chaser?” The boy’s eyes opened wide. “You know him?”

“We’ve never met,” I said.

The boy started shaking his head. “My mom never does business with the Moon Chaser. She loves the Great Leader. She would never do such a thing. The Great Leader provides everything for us.”

The boy was nervous now, stepping away from me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He shook his head. Then he turned and ran.

I moved out, heading south.

A red sun cast long shadows by the time I reached Neibyol. It was the most unprepossessing cluster of shacks I’d seen during my entire three-day sojourn in these hills. The buildings were made of rotted wood, some of the planks knocked loose; the thatched roofs had turned rust brown and looked as if the bundled straw hadn’t been replaced in years.

I was well hidden in a stone grotto, with escape routes both ways, because I was worried that the boy had alerted someone to my presence. But even if the army knew about me, they would have trouble navigating their way through these hills. The countryside looked as if it hadn’t changed since the Chosun Dynasty. The massive roads and trains and canals leading into and out of the capital city of Pyongyang were not to be found here. There was little arable land in North Korea, so all the big agricultural communes were located in the Taedong River valley, to the northeast. Neither were there any mining
activities that I’d seen. I knew from my briefings that massive amounts of copper, zinc, lead, and iron ore were found in North Korea, but those deposits were located in Hamgyong Province, far to the north. These hinterlands, between Pyongyang and the DMZ, were like a land that time forgot. Soldiers in trucks would have a lot of ground to cover and poor roads to do it on, which would be good for me. My goal was to reach the Manchurian Battalion somewhere on the slopes of Mount O-song. If I kept moving, I had a chance.

A white fluffy dog, a common breed in Korea, was chained to a stake outside a hovel on the edge of Neibyol. Smoke rose from metal tubes that jutted out of a few of the homes. At a stream less than a mile away, women squatted, hammering laundry with sticks. I contemplated knocking on a door, startling the homeowner, and asking for Moon Chaser. The odds of anyone here owning a phone and being able to notify the authorities were slim to zero. Still, I decided to remain hidden, to observe. Food was on my mind. Inside one small fence, earthenware kimchi pots were half buried in the ground. I could lift the lid, rip off the cheesecloth covering, and shovel handfuls of the fiery-hot fermented cabbage into my mouth. Just the thought caused saliva to form at the edge of my dry tongue. But I wasn’t a thief. There must be a better way.

A door slid open. An old woman in a baggy skirt and tunic stepped off a wooden porch, carrying a pan that she placed in front of the dog. The dog wagged its tail gratefully and immediately stuck his snout into what looked like rice gruel. The woman left the dog and puttered around in a small garden. Nothing was growing at this time of year,
but still she squatted through the rows, pulling out weeds where she found them.

Her hair was gray, her face covered with liver spots. Certainly, she’d been an adult two decades ago during the Korean War. The experiences she’d lived through, I could only imagine. I decided to take a chance on her. I rose from my hiding place and walked slowly into the village. As I approached, she looked up and I greeted her.

“Anyonghaseiyo, halmonni?”
I said. Are you at peace, grandmother?

To my surprise, she didn’t seem shocked at the sudden appearance of a foreigner. The wrinkles on her face deepened as she smiled.

“Anyonghaseiyo,”
she replied.

She seemed delighted to see me. There probably wasn’t a lot to do in this sleepy village of Neibyol. Even a filthy foreigner emerging suddenly from the hills was a welcome diversion. I apologized for my appearance and told her that I’d been traveling and asked her if she had any rice gruel she could spare.

Still smiling, she nodded and told me she had. Placing both hands on her knees, she rose stiffly and walked with her back bent into the house. Two minutes later, she returned with a pan that looked very much like the one she’d given the dog. I bowed and thanked her and squatted near her porch, shoveling the delicious rice gruel laced with what I believed to be turnip greens into my mouth with the pair of chopsticks she’d furnished. When I was finished, I bowed and handed the pan back to her, using both hands, as was the custom.

She was still smiling. “You’re very hungry,” she said.

I nodded, wiping my mouth.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m searching for someone.”

“Who?”

I decided to risk it. “Moon Chaser,” I said.

Her expression didn’t change.

“Are you a Soviet?” she asked.

“Romanian,” I replied.

The word apparently meant nothing to her. “Why are you alone?”

“I got lost. Moon Chaser will help me return to my unit.”

She nodded at that. “Do you know what Moon Chaser does?”

“No,” I replied. “Not exactly.”

“He’s a capitalist,” she said. “He exploits the people, sucks their blood. And worst of all, he doesn’t follow the precepts of our Great Leader.” Her face broke into an even broader grin and she was cackling madly, as if at some great joke. “A capitalist,” she said, slapping her knee with the mirth of the statement. “A
capitalist
.” She was almost choking on her laughter now. “Can you imagine those idiots? Here they almost starve us to death, work us to the bone, steal our sons to spend their lives in the army, and then they tell us to beware of
capitalists
. Capitalists who would exploit our labor. Capitalists like that skinny idiot, Moon Chaser!”

She was beside herself with laughter now. I was grinning too, keeping up with her.

“And what has Moon Chaser ever done,” she asked me, “except maybe make a little extra money for his mother
and his grandmother? Except maybe build a new gravestone for his father. ‘Exploit the workers.’
Bah!
”

Then she glanced around, realizing she’d said too much. She turned back to me. “Are you going to turn me in?”

I shook my head. “I am a simple soldier. I only want to talk to Moon Chaser.”

She squinted at me, suspicious for the first time. “Why do you speak Korean?”

I shrugged. “Practice.”

“You are a soldier,” she said, “but not so simple.” She studied me pensively, her mind reaching back in time. “During the war, I saw many foreign soldiers. They all looked like you. Dirty, dark beards, filthy clothes. But to us they looked like princes. They had food. They had medicine. At night, when there was no fighting, they’d sometimes set up tents and fire up diesel-fuel heaters. They lived like kings.”

She was staring off into space, conjuring up ghosts.

“The Great Leader wants us to hate them,” she continued. “I suppose I should—two of my brothers were killed in the war—but I can’t bring myself to hate them. They were just doing what their leaders forced them to do. Like us. Always under the thumb of the emperor.”

In all my time in North Korea, no one—not even Hero Kang—had spoken so boldly.

“You are very brave, grandmother,” I said.

She cackled. “What are they going to do? Shoot me? I’m old. They’d be curing the ache in my bones. Still, I don’t normally talk like this. Not to these nosey old biddies here in this village. But you are a foreigner. No one listens to a foreigner. I can say whatever I like.”

“What kind of man is Moon Chaser?”

“Smart,” she replied immediately. “Despite what the people around here say. He does business. He survives. He takes care of his mother and his grandmother. Isn’t that what a son is supposed to do?”

“I thought you said he was an idiot.”

“An idiot to take the risks he does. But smart to get away with them.”

“How can I find him?”

She glanced around the village. “They’re all out working now. Go hide somewhere. When I see him, I’ll tell him to go to you.”

“Where should I hide?”

The old woman thought. “Are you afraid of ghosts?”

“Ghosts? No.”

“Good. Just ignore them. They won’t harm you. You’re a foreigner. Wait at the grave mounds, on that hill over there. Stay well hidden. I’ll send Moon Chaser to you.”

Before I left, she handed me a few rubbery lengths of
ddok
. I bowed and thanked her gratefully.

It must’ve been nine or ten p.m when the army trucks pulled into Neibyol. I lay flat on a grass-studded grave mound, my
ddok
long since eaten, wondering when—or if—Moon Chaser would show up. There were two trucks, Soviet-made, judging by the triangular shape of their engine compartments. Had the old grandmother betrayed me, or was this just part of their regular search pattern? Actually, it didn’t make much difference. Either way, the smart move was for me to canvass the area. Still,
I waited. I wanted to find out as much as I could about this patrol.

Shadows leapt off the backs of the trucks, about a dozen from each. They fanned out toward the flickering candlelight from the straw-thatched hovels. Voices were raised in fright and in protest. More voices shouted them down. Soon the entire village had been searched and people were lined up to be questioned. My eyes were well adjusted to the moonlight by now, but only by listening to the quavering tone of children’s voices could I imagine the tears on their faces. And then one woman was screaming. The soldiers were taking something valuable from her, an heirloom of some sort. The gruff voice of the officer in charge accused her of harboring contraband and hoarding wealth against the will of the people. She screamed that the heirloom belonged to her grandmother, but she was smacked down, and except for her whimpering, the village became deathly quiet. Using lanterns confiscated from the villagers, the soldiers started searching the outlying barns.

I contemplated trying to steal a truck. My feet were raw and the soles of my shoes were about to fall off. I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to march through these mountains. In the end, I decided that letting them know that I was here would be the worst thing I could do. Reluctantly, I backed away from the grave mounds, leaving the ghosts behind, disappointed that I hadn’t been able to make contact with the man called Moon Chaser.