Dear Leader (34 page)

Cho-rin pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialled her uncle’s number straight away. She talked to him for over half an hour, blurting out entire sentences in Chinese whenever the conversation seemed to become more tense. When she finally slipped her phone away, I waved my hands dismissively and said, ‘If he says no, it’s fine. I need to leave China as soon as I can anyway.’

‘No, it’s all right! He says I’m to take you to his house tonight.’

In the few hours we had before the meeting, I tried to call Mr Shin several times with the money Cho-rin had given me. I used a public phone because if the Chinese authorities were tapping Mr Shin’s phone, I didn’t want Cho-rin’s mobile number to come up. At around seven in the evening, I finally got through to Mr Shin.

He said that there was still no news from Young-min. When he heard from him, I said, he should stress that Young-min must not return to his cousin’s house, but should instead travel to Shenyang. Mr Shin gave me his wife’s mobile number, in case I might not be able to get through on his. He said that when I had established a way to reach South Korea safely, I should inform them, so that his wife
could join me. I asked Mr Shin to please leave his phone connected, because I knew Young-min would be calling back.

That night, Cho-rin and I took a cab to her uncle’s house. Instead of taking the main roads, we seemed to be going through lots of alleyways. Cho-rin explained that the driver was taking a short cut because it was rush hour, but the journey still took over twenty minutes. She paid the fare at the end. It seemed like a fortune: over 25 yuan.

At the entrance to a luxurious apartment building, Cho-rin turned to me and said, very seriously, as though my life depended on it, ‘When my uncle asks, just say you play piano really well. He’s not musical at all, so you don’t have to worry. If you feel uncomfortable about playing, just say your hands hurt. You know how musicians don’t play when their hands are injured – that sort of thing.’

The apartment was on the eighth floor. As Cho-rin had said, her uncle was indeed a wealthy man. The fittings and furnishings were expensive. Unlike Mr Shin’s flat, which had a heated floor covered in old-fashioned linoleum, this house had a marble floor covered with areas of plush carpet. This was only the second private home I had seen in my life with a marble floor.

In North Korea, the most luxurious private homes were in Eundok Village in East Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il’s closest associates lived. Its surroundings were beautifully landscaped, with many trees and the Daedong River flowing nearby. As the residential area was said to have been constructed as a special favour from Kim Jong-il, it was named ‘Eundok’ (Korean for ‘favour’).

Director Im lived there, and I was often invited into his home. Eundok Village was encircled with electric fencing and patrolled by armed guards. There were six buildings within the compound, and the village had its own diesel generator to provide an uninterrupted electricity supply for its residents. All six buildings had four storeys and were the same rectangular shape and size. The ground floor
consisted of garages, and the family apartments were from the first floor upwards. Only one generation of a family lived on each floor. The lifts were made by Mitsubishi in Japan. Director Im lived on the second floor of his building.

The lift doors on the second floor opened directly into his home. The hallway was full of bicycles, tennis rackets and assorted boxes. When you took your shoes off to enter the main living area you put them in a shoe cabinet that reached from the floor to the high ceiling. There was a main corridor in the middle of the apartment, and the doors to the rooms on either side of the corridor faced each other. The first large space was the living room, and the kitchen was at the far end of the corridor. There were two bathrooms, and a total of ten rooms excluding the bathrooms.

The walls of the living room were covered in framed photographs showing Director Im with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. Three mahogany display cabinets stood against one wall. The cabinets displayed state medals, gold watches and other special gifts, and the wine glasses into which Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il had poured wine for him. One of the items I found most interesting in Director Im’s private study was a telephone. It was a black rotary phone with the red Workers’ Party emblem in the centre of the dial. Director Im explained to me that ordinary phones weren’t as reliable; and besides, they might be bugged. His hotline to Kim Jong-il was an old-fashioned model specially built for this purpose, he explained. Behind the phone there was a small antenna and a red LED light, which came on when there was a call from Kim Jong-il.

The apartments indeed could only have been built as a ‘favour’ from Kim Jong-il. Even in the kitchen, incongruously, there was a large chandelier with countless glittering crystals. Director Im explained that this was a high-end design specially imported from Germany. Each crystal had three hundred and twenty sides, he said,
and – just as with diamonds – the cutting of the crystals had a crucial effect on how the light was reflected.

For me, though, the marble floor was the most striking feature of his home. Most ordinary North Korean homes had flooring that was little more than a version of wallpaper. Those who were better off had decorated linoleum flooring or wooden floorboards imported from China or Japan. But that wasn’t what surprised me about the marble floor: before stepping into Director Im’s home, I had thought that marble floors were an exclusively First Class construction feature, which could only be used in sanctified buildings directly related to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, such as the Revolutionary Rooms attached to all schools and workplaces. In these Rooms, students received ideological indoctrination appropriate to their age group so that, as they moved up each year from nursery all the way to the end of university, the entire span of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s formative years would be covered by the sessions. For working adults, various kinds of political and self-criticism sessions took place in the Rooms, the workplace equivalents being covered with photographs of Kim Jong-il conducting relevant on-site guidance. Revolutionary Rooms nationwide had to have their displays updated at least once every three years, for which purpose funds for the maintenance of the cult of Kim were set aside. When I asked about Director Im’s marble floor, he crouched down and rapped it with his knuckles, explaining that it was made from pink Italian marble. Although Cho-rin’s uncle also had a marble floor in his apartment, it was yellowish and looked as if it had lost its original colour. And instead of photographs taken with Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, there were just three paintings hanging on the living-room wall. Although I couldn’t see a stove, the apartment was comfortably heated. In each of the four corners of the living room there stood a traditional Chinese vase glazed in red and as tall as a grown man. Dark brown curtains were draped from the huge windows.
When I sat on the black leather couch, I sank into its cushioned depths.

‘Nice to meet you,’ said the uncle. He was a man in his early fifties, wearing a brown cardigan. His gaze was gentle, and his lips were plump. His accent was not very different from Mr Shin’s. As he had already heard my story from Cho-rin, he seemed uninterested in hearing further details. That was a relief.

He asked, ‘So you used to be a pianist?’

‘Yes.’ I tried to stick to a short answer at Cho-rin’s earlier insistence, but uneasy with this exaggeration of my piano-playing skills, I felt I needed to provide more of an explanation: ‘My music teacher was a famous violinist. Before he moved to North Korea during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he was a member of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. I never trained to be a professional pianist, but I learned to play a little from my teacher.’

The uncle looked over at Cho-rin.

She said, ‘Yes, that’s right, his teacher was a famous musician. That’s wonderful, isn’t it? Just like you, Uncle, you’re a successful businessman, but, to be honest, you can’t claim to be a world-class business expert, now can you?’ She glanced at her hands as she spoke, and looked a bit uncomfortable.

The uncle said, ‘Yes, yes, Cho-rin, you’ve already said that. Well, can you play something for us?’

As he rose from the sofa, Cho-rin rushed to my side. ‘Do you think you can play? Are you sure your hands are not injured? Uncle, can’t you just take my word for it?’

‘No, I can’t.’

Cho-rin assumed a mock-angry expression. It was clear that they were very close, as he laughed heartily at her pretend petulance.

Passing a corridor that led off to the right of the living room, we entered a room in which there stood a black upright Yamaha. It looked far more impressive than the Yamaha we had had at home in
North Korea. I tested the pedals. My foot was met not with a smooth resistance, but some kind of scraping sensation. The piano seemed never to have been played.

I proceeded to play a scale from the lower notes all the way to the top. Fortunately, the instrument was not too much out of tune, although I was sure it had not been touched since it was bought. I explained that a piano was a living, breathing thing. If it were not looked after regularly, the changes in weather would affect its tone. I saw Cho-rin smiling broadly, looking pleased with my demonstration of expertise.

‘Play us a song!’ she urged me.

What should I play? I decided to go for an easy piece, ‘Autumn Whispers’ by Richard Clayderman, which I could play from memory. Already, images from home filled my mind and one in particular made me smile. Once, on a state holiday, I had played ‘Autumn Whispers’ in a mini-concert I had put on for guests at our home. The security agent responsible for my residential area, who must have received a complaint from nearby, came to break up the party. In North Korea, you were not allowed to enjoy or share foreign culture unless the performance was authorised, as in the case of students studying Western music at university level for example. But even for them, this was supposed to remain a restricted privilege. Putting on a performance for laypeople, as I had been doing with my private concert, was strictly prohibited.

The security agent pleaded with me, saying that he would have let us continue on any other state holiday, but this was the occasion of the General’s birthday. He really could not risk others finding out about our concert on such a day, he said. Someone in the audience offered the agent a glass of wine, and he finally relented, sitting down among the guests. After hearing one piece, he was the one who paid me the most enthusiastic compliments, saying that the sound of the piano was beautiful.

The faces I longed for among that audience came to me one by one. As I played each melodic phrase, I recalled their names in my mind. From the periphery of my vision, I could see that Cho-rin had clasped her hands.

This autumnal piece proceeded to pull me deeper into my memories, with images of the family I had left behind. The sofa where my mother sat to listen to my piano practice when I was still a child; the smoke drifting from the end of my father’s cigarette as he sat next to her with his eyes closed. Then later, when my elder sisters came to visit with their husbands, the tiny hands of my infant nephew as he suckled at my sister’s breast, and the sparkling eyes of my other nephews and nieces as they rushed into their uncle’s arms.

In the interlude, the quickening pace of the melody evoked a story of broken calm, of unspoken goodbyes and of terror; my ears ringing with the pounding of my feet as I crossed the Tumen River, the stomp of military boots in pursuit. When I returned to the autumn fields of the coda, the sky was a stark blue. Wanting to allow the resonant last note to linger, I lifted my foot from the pedal slowly. I waited for the tips of my fingers to rise and leave the sensitive touch of the keyboard, before gently returning my hands to rest on my knees.

As the last notes faded, I could hear Cho-rin sniff. ‘Someone with your musical talents, why have you had to suffer like this? You haven’t been able to eat. You’ve even been sleeping rough. Oh, I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry I keep on crying.’

Cho-rin’s uncle didn’t say anything, but he came to stand next to me and rested his hand on my shoulder. After we had moved back into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, he took a cigarette from his pocket only to put it away again. He still said nothing and spun the lighter in his fingers. When he finally lit his cigarette and blew out the smoke, he spoke intensely and with sincerity.

‘To be honest, I only let Cho-rin bring you here because she was so insistent about it. I asked around before you arrived. The crackdown
on North Korean refugees here is pretty bad at the moment. They say it’s become much worse in recent days.’

‘Uncle, how can a man go back on his word?’ Cho-rin interrupted.

‘I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime. I don’t think you’re the sort who escaped out of hunger. Am I right?’

‘There were certain circumstances that led me to flee,’ I replied.

‘Of course, but in that case, neither North Korea nor our own authorities here in China are going to give up on you easily.’

I lowered my head in silent agreement.

‘Well, do you have contacts in South Korea? What brought you all the way to Shenyang?’

‘Actually, I crossed the river with a friend. But we were separated in Yanji. It wasn’t part of the plan.’

‘Why was that? You left North Korea together?’

I sketched the trajectory of what had happened since we crossed the river.

Tapping the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray, Cho-rin’s uncle made a proposal. ‘This is what we’ll do,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when your friend will show up, but you can stay here until then. Promise me two things, though. First, you mustn’t leave the house. Here in Xita there are more police officers than there are cockroaches. The other thing is that I can’t have two of you in the house. You’ll have to leave as soon as your friend arrives.’

Cho-rin tugged at her uncle’s sleeve. ‘Uncle, even if his friend arrives, can’t they stay as long as they need to, if he teaches piano?’ she asked.