Two days later, the captain and I stood about a meter apart, not far from the border with China. After I finished reading the file, Major Kim had made clear that he wanted me to drive to the border to see exactly where the problem was centered. The file mainly focused on Chinese plans to move into the North to stop a collapse. There were wild rumors that Chinese were already flooding into the country, though no one could ever seem to spot them.
“I don’t know what’s sparking these stories or who is helping to spread them, but they have to be stopped,” Kim said. His people in the South were alarmed, and they were making his life a nightmare. He was doing his best to keep them calm, he told me. For the time being, that was possible by playing down the more alarmist of the reports, but it wouldn’t work forever. He needed someone to go up there and look around. He didn’t trust his own people on such a mission, because he didn’t know which ones were really loyal to him and which were reporting to his many detractors in Seoul. He wasn’t overjoyed to have to use me, he said, but I’d been highly recommended and he didn’t have time to search for alternatives. “Your pedigree is considered impeccable, you were never in a responsible position, and you’ve been thrown out of Pyongyang. All that looks good on a bio sheet. Remember, one thing you don’t want to do is double-cross me,” he said. “But I think you already know that.”
The captain came along because Kim didn’t trust me, and I was there because Kim didn’t trust the captain. It was simple. The captain said he wasn’t supposed to let me drive, but would I mind because he had a bad headache from drinking too much the night before. So I drove, and he tried to sleep. We went through the mountains near Hyangsan, where the maples looked like a forest fire burning on the hillsides. I went off the main road to avoid a couple of ugly towns, then sped through Huichon to Kopun, where my grandfather and I sometimes went shortly after the war for wood from a special stand of oaks.
Past Kopun, the valleys had a few farms with goats on the hills and fruit trees along the road but nowhere really to stop, so I drove until I found a pavilion on a mountain thick with pine trees, overlooking a river. Not far from the pavilion was a glade of Erman’s birch, beautiful trees, almost twenty meters tall and at peace in the afternoon sun. I sat underneath them and closed my eyes until a couple of old women showed up, pushing bicycles loaded with apples.
“What are you going to do with those, Grandma?” The captain seemed better; he was picking his teeth with a silver toothpick.
“What do you think I’m going to do with them?” The first woman put her bike against a tree. “What does anyone do with fruit? Where are you from, anyway?”
“Never mind him,” I said. “How about giving us a couple of those apples. It will lighten your load.”
“I don’t want the load lightened. As soon as we get to the top of this hill, I’ll need the extra weight to keep me from going too fast down the other side, won’t I? Unless you want to buy more than two. I’m not against sharing, you understand, but a person’s got to make a living. And that’s not easy these days.”
“More complaints,” the captain said. “Nothing but complaints from you people.” There it was again. Even the captain was afflicted with Kim’s compulsion to mark the territory, to draw a thick line between the “you” and the “us.”
“Do you want the apples or don’t you?” The old lady shifted the load on the seat of the bike. “I haven’t got all day. The Chinese only buy in the afternoon, and I’m already late for the market.”
The captain sat up. “What Chinese?”
“What Chinese? They’re strutting all over the place.”
“You’ve seen them?” The captain had a notepad out and was searching for a pen.
The old lady shook her head. “If you don’t want the apples, why don’t you just say so?” As she pushed the bike onto the road, she turned to her companion, sitting on her heels a few meters away, watching closely. “I was right,” she said. “Wasn’t I right? As soon as we spotted them I said they were a couple of deadbeats from Pyongyang.”
“Time to go.” The captain took one last look around. “How long until we get there? I don’t want to be roaming around at dusk. It’s hard to see Chinese in that light. Step on it, will you?”
It took another five hours, going up mountains, down mountains, around mountains. The captain dozed; each time he woke with a start. “Where are we? Did we cross into China?”
“What makes you think that?”
“More trees, and then more trees. Where did they come from? I thought you didn’t have any left.”
“Got to get up early to fool your people,” I said. “I called ahead and told the farms to mobilize everyone to plant these big trees in a hurry. But you spotted it right away.”
“Let me offer a suggestion,” said the captain. “It would save a lot of time if you people would build a few bridges over these valleys. A nice, straight highway would probably cut an hour, maybe two, off the drive. You might build some tunnels, too, while you’re at it. We could send some of our engineers up to show you how to do it.”
“Captain, tunnels are one thing we know how to build.”
“Then why don’t they do something about these roads?”
“Nothing wrong with these roads,” I said. “They’re scenic. Why don’t you look at the scenery?”
He looked and I drove as fast as I dared as we descended from the mountains down to Chosan, toward the shores of a lake formed by a dam on the Amnok River. We arrived before dusk, but not a lot before. I suggested we wait until morning to look around, but the captain seemed in a hurry.
“Let’s go out there now, get it over with,” he said. “There’s plenty of light left, and I don’t want to hang around.”