16. Night
NIGHT
It was late. The sun had set hours ago, and with it the functional day in Joseon because the electricity would be shut off until tomorrow morning.
She was across the city, back at her hotel.
He sighed, looking up at the bar of moonlight on his ceiling.
He had been in love before. He had made love, too. He’d used a rudimentary approach to contraception known the world over to be only moderately effective. In his case, it had worked. He had no children.
Despite knowing it was the first foreigner who’d ever gotten close to him. The first non-Korean, the first non-Asian woman even. All of those superficial details paled when the realization struck:
He didn’t regret what they’d done.
He regretted that they had used contraception at all.
He sat up. Looked out the window at the moon and stars above.
Of all the lines he’d crossed, wanting a family with her was nothing short of subversive. She was off-limits. She was here on a time limit. His mind knew that. No afternoon in her arms could change that. But his heart was unconvinced.
He lay back down, rubbing his temples.
He was in love with her. It was impossible. This would end terribly.
And yet his heart whispered: it wouldn’t.
The following morning he was back at Embassy Row, waiting for her. Correction: waiting for her delegation. Right. Not just her.
He heard the sound of bike tires round the corner: the squeak of an axle that had been left out in the rain, the whirr of the freewheel as the bicycle coasted. Marina skidded to a stop in front of him, her minders, Miss Park and Miss Wu behind her.
He grinned. “A novel way to make your entrance.”
She smiled back at him. “I missed riding my bike,” she admitted, and walked her bike up to the security guard.
Her minders looked like they did not share her sentiment.
The guard recognized her on sight and lifted the barrier, along with his eyebrows.
Miss Park and Miss Wu were several steps behind them. He checked the sightlines automatically. There were cameras everywhere: all the better to spot a would-be defector running from a Pyongyang street into a diplomatic mission.
She parked her bike outside and they entered the would-be European Union’s Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic.
Unspoken: the electricity was not reliable, so they took the stairs.
Miss Wu and Miss Park made to follow them, but Marina turned: I’ve got it from here, she told them, and they walked back down to the ground floor.
He shouldn’t hope what he hoped but he did anyway.
His eyes lighted on every surface of the building, as they did inside every room he’d ever been in: but this one had no leadership portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
No cameras or listening devices visible.
Other than sporadic electricity, lighting, water, and heating, it was unlike any other building in Joseon.
But still he waited.
They crossed in silence to where she’d set up an office, and she circled behind her desk, checking the paper someone had set on it overnight. Then she looked up.
And he let it go all across his face, unhidden. He found he had stopped cataloguing her posture, her shirt, her bag. He was simply taking her in, the way you watch a storm roll in — already committed to landfall, no use pretending otherwise, with nothing to do but stand there and let it come.
Her gaze slowed, taking him in.
She had come to inspect barriers. Diplomatic access. Cameras, surveillance, availability of medical treatment. Assess the legitimacy of SCIFs; if diplomatic norms would be respected. She was here to find everything that would affect the mission, and she found a leak.
The European Union’s security delegate had found the one loophole inside Joseon: the human heart.
Her messenger bag strap slipped slowly off her shoulder and dropped on her desk, crinkling the paper beneath it.
Inspecting the SCIF was a routine priority, it turned out. She questioned, almost daily, if security had been breached.
Vice Minister Jung was pleased that Ri was invited to the chancery.
He urged Ri to go, and not turn her down.
They didn’t discuss details, but the vice minister didn’t appear concerned with any impropriety occurring.
For the vice minister, there was impropriety in the MOFA not trying its best to convince the EU to re-open its mission to the People’s Republic.
There was nothing improper in patriotic duty to the nation, the vice minister said.
The vice minister suspected enough of what was going on. He turned a blind eye to it.
“There’s nothing wrong with the SCIF,” he would say, a farce of a protest in case bugs had been, indeed, re-installed overnight along the corridors.
As soon as the door was shut behind them, it was on. The table. The desk. The chair. The wall. Everywhere. Anywhere, as long as it was inside that room.
It was the best sex of his life. More importantly, it was the freest he’d ever been. Every choice in that room was his. Hers. Theirs.
An alarm sounded in the back of his mind, over a fire that he was aware of and wanted to deal with later: he was falling for her, he knew. It was inevitable. A force of nature. A siren song to the deep that would take him down with it.
She developed a friction burn low on her back and on her knees from the roughness of the carpet. He developed the same badges of honor—or dishonor, according to the state.
She noticed the passing look of regret on his face right before they began. Each and every time. This time, the condom package was between her teeth, torn open with one hand while the other was suitably engaged.
“What?” she had asked, the package moving on her lip.
He almost laughed from the movement, but held his hands up. “It’s nothing. Carry on.”
She retreated, just enough. “No, really, tell me.” Her eyes mirroring concern.
That look was killing him. He let out a long exhale of breath that he hadn’t known he’d been holding. “It’s just… selfish of me, really.”
She half-smiled, knowingly. “It’s the condom. You want to feel me,” she ventured, her fingers trailing lightly along his torso.
That she knew so well by now, despite how little she appeared to know about his heart.
Now was the time to remedy that, here in the one place they could speak freely, however fleetingly:
“Marina…”
“What?”
He took a deep breath, tracing the contours of her cheek with his fingertips: “It’s that this way, we will never have a child together.”
She went very still.
“What’s worse is, I know you’re leaving. I still want it. And some part of me mourns it already, but it would keep me alive, thinking you and our child are somewhere free in this world.” Unsaid: even if I’m not.
She took the package from her lips slowly. He felt stupid. He should never have said that.
Marina leaned over and breathed into his ear: “I’m going to have to take you with me, aren’t I? Take you home with me?”
He swallowed hard, and a tear rolled out the side of his eye, heading straight to the floor. “You do that—we do that—and my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nieces and nephew: they all get sentenced to gulag, and die in prison camp.”
Her face flushed. “No.” Her voice scarcely a whisper.
He reached for her face and held it in his hands. “It’s Joseon, my darling.”
Her eyes filled as she hovered over him. One drop, two drops hit him. “We’re doomed lovers, aren’t we?”
He stroked her face with his thumb. “Yes. We are.”