Falling Off the Map (3 page)

Self-possession, I gathered, was never easy in his company. “I was attracted by benevolent President Kim Il Sung with a bright smile,” wrote a glamorous Hong Kong actress who had sung “A Whistle” before the North Korean president. “He seemed to smile all the time looking at me. When I sang the third stanza he looked at the stage … through binoculars with a smile.” Soon the tension was getting unbearable. “I was so excited that I nearly fell to the stage.”

I mopped my brow and put the magazine down.

The minute we landed at Pyongyang International, seats began crashing down on legs and suitcases on heads. We were led into a bus to take us to the terminal, and the martial music started up again. Inside, a few lipsticked soldiers apprehended me as soon as they saw me walking around alone. Then a tall, debonair young man, with a nonchalant Left Bank air, puffing on an Albanian cigarette, came up and extended a hand. “I am your guide,” he began smoothly, ushering me into a white Volvo sedan. “What is your occupation? What is your religion? Have you been to South Korea? What were you doing before you came to China? What will you do after you leave China?” We drove through the sepulchral dusk, rows of featureless concrete towers looming through the gray on every side, the gloom relieved only by an occasional
Sound of Music
billboard. His conversation exhausted, the guide confiscated my passport and scowled. We passed more paintings of workers singing at the heavens. “Korean and Chinese are faintly similar?” I tried. “Totally different,” he replied.

At the Pyongyang Koryo Hotel, which is forty-five stories high, I was led into an elevator that was as naked as an interrogation chamber, save for some overhead klieg lights. Then I was taken to my “Deluxe Room.” This was a four-room suite, almost entirely bare—one of its chambers was naked even of a trash can. The refrigerator next to the wall was likewise empty. The hotel was rich, however, in mirrors: there were mirrors in every passageway, huge four-sided pillars of mirrors in the lobby, ninety-four mirrors in the hangarlike dining room. It was a curious place, but comfortable: there was a calendar on the wall, featuring four important dates in the life of Kim Il Sung; there was a black-and-white TV, on which children could be seen reciting slogans; and though there was no lock on my door, it was graced by a five-digit number.

“It’s going to be a long three weeks,” a U.N. official was
saying as I went into the dining room for dinner. “Today they took me to the Botanical Garden and showed me all the plants named after Kim Il Sung, even all the bloody plants planted by Kim Il Sung.” He had not, I gathered, seen Kimjongilia (named after the son of Kim). Like every closed country around the world, from Yemen to Bhutan, North Korea was teeming with these types—U.N. men and development aides, acronymed bigwigs and troubleshooters. Now they were seated in the dining room, German and Chilean and African, many in their most formal gear, surrounded by ninety-four reflections of themselves and picking at some grizzled rainbow trout. Around me, a familiar chorus rose up. “They’re very nice, these people, but totally hopeless.” “Their problem is they’re overenthusiastic. But you can’t tell them that, of course, and …” I, for my part, recalled the counsel of the in-flight magazine. “If you talk in the daytime, you’ll be overheard by a bird,” it had advised. “And at night by a rat.”

Later I decided to take a walk around Pyongyang. It was an unusual place, just the same as in the photographs: there were no cars or bicycles along the streets; almost no shops or restaurants or cinemas; nothing, in fact, to distract from the spotless and unworldly hush. I walked for two hours round the city, but I came across no shocks or surprises, nothing charming or touching or strange; nothing at all, in fact. There were no smiles on the people’s faces, no fears, no expression. The ashen pallor of a ghost hung over the huge, unbending, earless streets. Here, in a sense, was Marxism in the raw and by the book; both the apotheosis of the system and its epitaph. The block-capital streets and numbered towers, the two-hundred-foot monuments and impersonal megaliths, the featureless statues and murals, seemed a kind of abstract of Communism, as flawless as a blueprint; they also seemed a kind of memento mori, the last souvenirs of a system that was elsewhere all but extinct.
The more modern the buildings in Korea, the more the country felt outdated. Korea, in that sense, was generic.

And as in no other Communist country I had seen, there seemed no chinks in the wall here, no murmurs of dissent or whispers of “Change money?”; no curious glances in the street; none of the hustlers and hookers who are the main appointments of every state-run hotel. Nothing, in fact, to smudge the place or make it distinctive. Everything was just the way Kim planned it, executed with unswerving efficiency. The first time I tried to walk across one of the deserted avenues, I was instantly sent back by a red-flare-waving policewoman.

Then, however, I came upon my first surprise: in a huge and half-lit square, two hundred people had gathered, late on this Saturday night, in concentric circles, tidily arranged behind a leader. Silently, solemnly, they began walking through a series of military-style dances, the steps of their ghostly pantomime echoing through the night.

The next day, my sightseeing began in earnest. I was taken to the Grand People’s Study House (with a “capacity of containing 30 million volumes”), the 150,000-seat stadium built for the 1988 Olympics, the 180-foot Arch of Triumph (“For its ideological content, size, architectural style and the representation of sculpture,” the
Korea Guidebook
had explained, “the Arch of Triumph attains the highest perfection of monumental art”). “It’s amazing it’s so much like the Arc de Triomphe!” I marveled. “Totally different,” snapped my guide.

Later, standing in the shadow of the seventy-foot bronze statue of the “peerless patriot and national hero,” he extended a sweeping arm across the whole Orwellian skyline. “At first,” he explained, “we did not know how to make buildings and sculptures. We tried, but it was not beautiful. But we tried and tried again. Now look.” I mumbled something about the
economic costs of such monumentalism. He looked incredulous. “How can you say our economy is weak when we have all this?” Kim Il Sung had built up the whole nation out of the rubble of war; having begun with a tabula rasa, he had enjoyed the rare opportunity to construct an entire nation in his image, stamped over with his monogram. Now, my guide went on, fifty thousand new flats were going to be completed in honor of the “sun of the nation’s” eightieth birthday in 1992. It fell, appropriately enough, on Income Tax Day. That might also be the occasion when he handed over power to his son, Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il (or One Right Way Kim, as my guide translated). “Enemy propagandists say that this is a family dynasty,” he explained. “But we need a leader just like Kim Il Sung. Who better than his son?”

Occasionally, as we drove, we saw people, always in groups, marching in regimental ranks to work, to the sound of exhortatory loudspeakers, or gathered in long lines at bus stops. By nine-thirty on this Sunday morning, enormous color-coordinated crowds were already practicing “mass card games” in Kim Il Sung Stadium (the Koreans are world champions of “mass games”; they have “mass games” majors in college and practice card patterns every day in school). The enormous expanse of Kim Il Sung Square was filled with children standing in the rain, “dancing hand in hand to the tune of the light melodies of ‘Pyongyang Shining under the Rays of the Lodestar.’ ” Everywhere I looked, people were filing along in groups, two by two, in Indian file, with a leader at their head, like kindergartners on a field trip. “People are the most valuable thing in the world,” my guide informed me, making them sound like subway tokens.

Making contact with these valuable things, however, was no easy matter. For though every child who passed me in the street gave me a “Welcome” salute, and though certain citizens had
been designated to wave to foreigners, conversation did not seem imminent. For one thing, the hotel was sequestered in the western suburbs, within walking distance of almost nothing; for another, no taxis were available, and foreigners were not allowed to carry Korean money. This was a little disappointing. “Visitors are bound to make many friends in Korea,” the brochures had promised, going on to point out, “There are no extremes of hot or cold” (the average temperature in January, it explained, was -8° Celsius).

For lunch, the two of us went for a banquet at a traditional Korean-style restaurant. Again our room was utterly bare, even of paintings or scrolls. The brochures, I remembered wistfully, had promised a chafing dish, gray mullet soup, and viper wines. Afterwards, I was taken to the humble thatched cottage at Mangyongdae, or “All Seeing Hill,” where the “all-triumphant, resolute and incomparable leader” had spent his childhood, “nursing his great revolutionary will.” I had already—in my first few hours in the country—seen his first wife’s tomb, his uncle’s grave, his cousin’s headstone. Now I was able to enjoy his grandmother’s broken kimchi jar and his great-grandfather’s tiny study (though here there was some ambiguity: was it his
great
grandfather, as in “great man and father of the people,” or merely his great-grandfather?). Hundreds of devotees lined up in the drizzle to have their pictures taken in the cradle of the revolution as hymnlike organ music was piped in through the extravagantly landscaped grounds; my guide pointed out the “many beautiful trees and marvelous pebbles contributed by the people.” In the bushes, scores of workers labored silently to keep the gardens perfect.

“Our leader began his Communist struggle in 1925,” the guide told me.

“But he was only thirteen then!”

My guide nodded sagely.

Nearby was the famous Mangyongdae Fun Fair, built to “cater for over 100,000 visitors a day.” On this day, however, I counted fifteen, or roughly three for every functioning ride. I began to fear that mad mouse might not make me rhythmical and buoyant.

“Did your president come here?”

“Oh, yes,” said the guide, his face flushed with the seemingly genuine joy he reserved for such moments. “And he was surrounded by hundreds of children.”

It was silly of me to have asked, I suppose: soon enough I was seeing the plaque commemorating his visit to the video arcade (reverberant now with the sound of toy guns). Within twenty-four hours, I was being shown the hugely blown-up color photographs of his Fun Fair trip. The “eminent Marxist-Leninist and outstanding military strategist” had chosen the Fun Fair site himself, I read in a book called
An Earthly Paradise for the People;
and in the book
The Great Man Kim Jong Il
, I learned that the younger Kim had personally demanded that a Jet Coaster be made 1,500 meters long. The Jet Coaster, he had remarked, “is very good for developing boldness in young people.”

By now, things were beginning to fall into a pattern.

“What is that statue?” I asked as we drove past a series of
tableaux vivants
and four-hundred-foot Korean monuments to Korea.

“Oh, Juche,” said my guide, almost casually.

The Juche idea was, of course, much on my mind as the days went on. Luckily, I had many opportunities to explore it further. The main headline in the
Pyongyang Times
was “A letter to President Kim Il Sung.” Page 2 featured a report on a meeting of the Asian Regional Institute of the Juche Idea (ARIJI); page 3, by good fortune, featured another report on the meeting of the Asian Regional Institute of the Juche Idea. In my hotel
bookstore’s display case, there were 114 different works, all of them by Kim
père
and
fils
, in Japanese and Arabic and everything in between; behind them were fourteen more shelves, double-stacked with other titles whose genres were usefully specified—
Immortal History: Revolutionary Aurora
(“A Cycle of Novels”),
The Mother of Korea
(“A Biographical Novel”). I saw two books that did not seem strictly relevant:
Story of a Hedgehog
and
Boys Wipe Out Bandits.
But all the rest, thank Kim, stuck assiduously to the main theme: the Great Leader’s brief biography stretched across 1,808 pages.

I also took the opportunity, while here, of purchasing a copy of Kim Jong Il’s ground-breaking study,
On the Art of the Cinema.
In it, the Dear Leader begins, surprisingly, by contending that “Art and Life are important activities.” He goes on to pronounce that “Make-up is a noble art.” He concludes, with typical boldness, by asserting that “A person with a low level of technical skill cannot make an excellent technician.”

People say that Pyongyang is a dreary city, but I found no shortage of diversions there: I was taken to the subway stations (with their 250-foot mosaics, marble pillars, and gold chandeliers, built at air-raid-shelter level), and to the Thermal Power Station; to the Korean Revolutionary Museum, and to a performance by the Korean People’s Army Circus (whose artists wielded guns while doing handstands and chanted slogans while revolving in midair). I even got a tour around the five-hundred room Children’s Palace. “Children are very important,” my guide pointed out. “We must always think of the future.” The future and the past, in fact, seemed the places where the North Koreans felt most comfortable: anywhere but now.

“The system is like a big family,” he went on.

“Does your president remain close to his family?”

“Yes,” he said. “But Kim Jong Il has his own room. He is grown up enough. He is forty-eight.”

The deliriously smiling infants at the palace were kind enough to put on an hour-long variety show just for foreign guests. In one dance, a laid-back cicada, cradling a guitar, tried to persuade a group of smiling ants to join him in the shade. The hardworking insects, collective-minded to the end, smilingly rebuffed him, and when a blizzard came, the cicada was left friendless and unprepared. “This is a simple parable,” my guide whispered to me. “But it has a big meaning. For example, if we try at a socialist revolution …”

There was also much else to do. At night, in Pyongyang’s equivalent of the Rainbow Room, I heard a six-piece band play “The Isle of Capri,” and I once played billiards with a large Bavarian businessman made maudlin and drunk by the fact that the North Koreans had unexpectedly agreed to pay off a fifteen-year-old debt to his company. Downstairs, in the blue-lit Koryo Tea Room, the Village People were once again in fashion. I was pleasantly surprised to read that in the Second Pyongyang Film Festival, the Gold Torch for documentaries had been given to a Korean film; the Koreans had also taken the gold in the women’s adult group and the junior group events of the World Radio Finding Championships (and a silver in the junior group individual event). They had ample occasion to practice, I imagined: every radio in the country, after all, was fixed so as to receive only one acceptable frequency.