9. The Koryo Pyongyang
THE KORYO PYONGYANG
In the car, she clicked her seatbelt, and tears dropped straight to her lap.
“I know,” he said quietly, starting the car.
“You saw?”
He nodded.
“Does this?—”
He looked at her sharply, pointing to his ears, pointing around the interior of the car, and shook his head.
She cleared her throat. “Does this mean we’re on the route to Munsu-dong, now?”
He made a half cough, half strangled sound of emotion. “Yes,” he said finally. “We can visit the Oral Disease Prevention Center another day.”
She nodded silently, another tear falling. She sniffed.
The car slowed for the intersection, and there it was — the twin towers rising out of the haze like something poured rather than built, two brown columns joined at the top by that strange glassed bridge, as if the city had tried to fold its hands together and frozen mid-gesture.
"It’s the Koryo Pyongyang Hotel," Ri said, not quite a tour guide's voice. Flat. Informational. A fact offered because facts were safe.
Marina looked up: there were forty-some floors, revolving restaurant crown, a satellite dish nested somewhere she couldn't see but knew was there. It was weather hotel for foreigners, in a country that otherwise didn't want foreigners to see much. The contradiction sat in her like a held breath.
Part of the tourism industry that Bureau 39 was allegedly running.
Below the towers, the boulevard was alight with the pink-tinged rays of the late-afternoon sun: a traffic warden's white gloves cutting through empty air, cyclists weaving through the empty streets, a few children playing ball in a corner as they passed.
Marina watched the buildings slide past the window.
The traffic warden at Haebangsan Street made them wait, even though there were no other vehicles.
Maybe she was on a power trip.
Maybe the authority got to her head.
Maybe she too had just seen something shocking and was not yet back to normal functioning.
“Pongwha Metro Station next to us,” Ri said, pointing to his left. “When we turn, before we get to the bridge, is the Rodong Shinmun.”
She sniffed. “The newspaper?” He was trying to help her get herself together.
“The respected People’s newspaper,” he echoed.
The Taedong River was up ahead, and across it, Juche Tower dominated the southern city skyline.
“Even I know that’s Juche Tower by now,” she said, pointing.
He looked faintly pleased.
The Taedongkyo Bridge took them out over water gone molten — the Taedong catching the last of the sun and holding it, pink bleeding into gold, gold bleeding into the kind of light that made everything look forgiven.
Marina had the window down an inch, just enough to feel the river-cool air cut against the day's heat, and ahead of them the tower was rising the way it always seemed to: not gradually, but suddenly, all at once, granite ribs catching fire at the top where the torch sat lit red-gold against a sky doing it better.
She'd read the numbers. A hundred and seventy metres, one block for every day of a life, the kind of statistic that was supposed to awe you into forgetting to ask what it cost. And it worked anyway.
That was the maddening part. It worked on her the same as it would have worked on anyone — the sheer improbable confidence of it, spire and river and dying light conspiring to transform a monument to a police state into, for one unguarded second, like something breathtaking.
"They practice most evenings," Ri said, nodding toward the plaza as the car slowed. "Before the real thing."
Below the tower's base, where the stone apron opened out toward the water, a few hundred people were arranged in loose ranks — women in what they called joseonbok here, silk skirts lifting and dropping in slow unison, colors sorted like a garden that had been asked to hold still: rose, cobalt, a green like new rice.
Between the blocks of them, men in dark Western suits stood counting time, arms cutting the air in economical arcs, and over it all a recorded orchestra bled tinny and enormous from speakers she couldn't see.
Marina watched a woman near the front miss her turn by half a beat, correct, miss again — small, human, unmistakable — and felt something in her chest do the thing it kept doing lately, the thing she didn't have a report category for. Beauty and its handler, walking arm in arm.
"It's rehearsal for something," she said. Not quite a question.
"They are practicing for Double Ten—that is, October Tenth, when we celebrate the founding of the Korean People Worker’s Party." Ri's eyes stayed on the road, though the road, just then, gave him no reason to.
“Can I take pictures?” she asked.
He slowed the car to a stop. “Yes, of course.”
She photographed the mass dance practice, the sky a backdrop skirts turning gold, then bronze, then grey as a cloud crossed the sun.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said. Before it got too late—before curfew.
He amiably restarted the car and took them to Mundu-Dong, the diplomatic quarter.
She enlarged the photos on her phone, checking their faces closely.
The dancers’ faces were concentrated, shining with sweat.
Finally one young woman caught her eye. She wasn’t sad or grim.
Her face was relaxed, radiant, glowing with confidence.
“Did you take any good photos?” Ri asked.
“Just one,” she answered.
He nodded. “Sometimes just one is enough.”