I was hard pressed to argue with this agitprop, supplied in full by our stewardess. I felt bad for her. She had been chosen among a handful to consort with the alien ideology. Her ill will was patent.
The Pyongyang airport looks, from the tarmac, like a prison block. It is a trellis of windows that together are lintel for a billboard of Kim Il-sung. We deplaned and passed through customs without fanfare. We’d had our marching orders. No cell phones, no laptops, no literature in which North Korea makes an appearance, no American flags or icons of patriotic zeal. Then we were relieved of our passports, which agreed with me but which Isolde didn’t like. I’d forgotten to tell her that for the duration of our stay in the Forbidden City, we were captive to the Forbidden City. She wore stilettos that jabbed the floor until she snapped a heel in dudgeon. I promised to buy her flats. She hobbled to the bus.
We dined in our hotel, which was marooned on an island in the Taedong River, and were sent to our room at 8 p.m. I had the sense not to ask our minders when we might dispense with the charade that I was but another tourist, and spent the evening wandering about the hotel. As with most places in Pyongyang, it was large-scale and finessed to screen the essential poverty of the state. There was a bowling alley with lights and power that were turned on by request and shut down the instant you were done. Likewise with the casino, movie theater, nightclub, and bar. You might be looking at the largest movie screen in Asia, but with no electricity to run the projector.
That night the theater billed cinema verité, part one of the 1978 epic Nameless Heroes, which starred the four American soldiers who had defected. The movie is probably twenty-five hours long. Isolde and I got through twenty-five minutes. The theater was deserted, just us and a hotel guide who cautioned that to talk during the film was to discredit its organizing principle, which was the eminence of Kim Jong-il.
I told Isolde to keep quiet and that we would not stay long. She asked if there were any other movies playing, or maybe we could just watch TV? She wondered if Friends was syndicated abroad. I took her hand. She had frosted her lips pink and wore her hair, a sunny blond, fanned about her shoulders. Her Southern accent was not pronounced but was still noticeable — a swallowing of medial consonants and a tendency to diphthong her words so that they went on and on. Fire was ray-yed. Her favorite band was the Grateful Day-ed. You know what’s not any fu-uhn? This movie lauding Kim Il-suh-ung.
Our guard told us to shut up. But Isolde just couldn’t. She kept asking why the Americans in this film were killing everyone without cause and then remembering that killing people without cause is often just what we Americans do. And it wasn’t like the North Koreans were ever going to forget that. God knows why I had thought otherwise. Where I saw in Pyongyang a desire to improve relations with the West and put the hatred aside, they saw in me distaste for my government and a stake in its downfall. Their thinking: What would happen if North Korea backed a heterodoxy opposed to the U.S. imperialist wolves and baby killers? A chance to destabilize the U.S. from within. Perhaps to lodge a spy or two among us. To get a foothold where before they had had none. How naive I am? Very, it seems.
And so, sitting there watching Nameless Heroes, I began to get a bad feeling. Perhaps I had not given North Korea its due as a repressor of men. The Pass of Tears to labor camp was but one misstep away. Sneak a Western soap opera — a favorite in the North — and you could be sent to the notorious prison compound Yodok. Consider this: It’s midnight and all of a sudden, the People’s Security Force kills the electricity before a house raid just so you can’t eject your tapes smuggled in from the South. And for this: twenty years’ hard labor.
If the Koreans were even showing us Nameless Heroes, it meant they knew to whom I’d been married and the nature of her work. It meant they knew she was after those soldiers. And so it began to seem possible they had actually invited me here to end my life at Yodok.
The only way off the island was by bridge. We had no transportation and no passports, and I hardly thought Isolde was dressed for the four-thousand-mile trek to freedom. There was nothing to be done.
They woke us up at 4 a.m. General Kim Jong-il, it seemed, had insomnia. It was unlikely Isolde was intended to join me, but when my five minutes to recoup sense and bathe were up, the escort was more than a little vexed to find her languishing in bed. One got the impression his livelihood — possibly his life — was riding on the timeliness of our arrival at the general’s abode.
What sorts of men are granted audience with a quixotic, possibly insane but more likely astute megalomaniac? What sorts of men does this megalomaniac prefer? Men who drink. In the limousine were two in uniform and a third in civilian dress. The officers did not talk to us but decanted a malted beverage into four glasses. I don’t much like the drink, so I gave mine to Isolde, at which juncture I was advised to take it back.
Traversing the city at night was not much different from during the day. In the day the roads were stippled with cars — a handful — and at night there were none. Lights were scarce, there were no traffic signals, and every road felt epic. These were not roads, they were runways. Tree lined. Swept clean. Flanked in the distance by the gray slab architecture we’ve come to associate with the Eastern Bloc. I looked out at the full moon and starscape and decided this must be the only capital city in the world with industry so depressed, you could see the starscape.
Isolde began to nod off. Both military men nudged my foot. I pinched her leg. She said, “All right, all right,” and asked for a drink of her own.
Now, perhaps I am a Westerner who thinks all Asians look alike, in which case and insofar as I share this problem with millions, I should be forgiven the following observation: the civilian between the officers of rank looked a whole lot like Kim Jong-il. The multiple chins and pompadour. The tan leisure suit with elastic waist. The pudgy wrists and feminine eyeglasses that came halfway down his face. The way he regarded Isolde, whose Swedish coloring I’d been told the general preferred. Based on what I knew of him, there was no chance he was in our Benz, unacknowledged and without the pageantry imperious men like to grant a summit, but even so: the likeness was astonishing. But also discomfiting. Now and then, if a streetlamp happened to be on and illuminated his face, something about it seemed off. Skin grafts, maybe. Silicone implants. I’d heard he was vain like that. But still.
We drove through the city and out toward the coast. I knew Kim Jong-il had a beach residence and assumed this was our destination. By night’s ebb, however, we were still driving. The guards never took their eyes off us, but the man in the leisure suit was charming. He tippled without pause, refilling my glass and his. We made small talk. I was fettered in my speech, assuming the car was bugged. A lovely city, Pyongyang. Most hospitable. Yes, yes, but how did I like the movie? I said it was testament to the creative genius embodied in the general’s seminal tome on the subject of filmmaking. I said, and here was the biggest risk I’d ever taken in my life, “In particular, the Americans were great, a wonderful coup for Korean cinema.”