20. Checkpoints
CHECKPOINTS
She sat in the van’s second row for the drive back. Not up front and beside the Mr. Choe, but beside him. The two minders sat behind them: Miss Park drifted off to sleep. Miss Wu was already snoring softly. Mr. Choe’s eyes were on the road, but his knuckles were clenched over the steering wheel.
He looked over at her.
She was already looking at him.
Hundreds of moments with her flashed through his mind. The world they pretended in. The SCIF where the walls came down.
It was the one place where he was free to tell the truth.
But even there, the truth was its own kind of prison.
She understood now that Joseon held his family hostage without ever touching them, and that if he crossed the border with her, he would spend the rest of his life wondering whether he'd condemned them to torture and death.
She drew her forefinger across her lower lip interrogatively, back and forth. Her gesture languid, her head tilted back just enough to show him the curve of her neck.
He checked again: minders asleep. Driver’s eyes on the road. Her eyes on him. This was the moment when he’d be foolish.
He brought his thumb and forefinger up to his lip, crossed them, and made the briefest twitch of his lips: a South Korean finger heart gesture. Blowing her a kiss.
Anyone who saw that gesture could suspect he was influenced by enemy ideology: a finger-heart was a South Korean influence.
K-dramas could only be smuggled in. Watching a K-drama was five years in hard labor camp, but sharing the file with others was a capital offense.
Executions were held publicly, with mandatory attendance for all, young and old, to warn them of the consequences.
She probably had no idea of the recklessness of a finger-heart.
A half smile of hers answered his own.
He wondered if this was how people survived here. Not by finding freedom, but by finding spaces too small for the government to notice.
The van jolted over a pothole.
Miss Wu mumbled something in the back, her hand on her head.
He pretended that he was looking outside and rubbed his nose as if to fend off an impending sneeze.
Mr. Choe looked back at him in the rearview: “Everyone alright back there?”
“Never better,” he answered, and it was true.
“Good,” Mr. Choe said.
Something in his voice put Ri on edge. He felt the van slowing down, and he looked ahead.
A soldier was walking out onto the road. He held up his hand for them to stop. The morning sun silhouetted him and the rifle slung over his back.
Mr. Choe rolled down the window.
“Travel permits,” the soldier said slowly.
Mr. Choe handed them over.
The soldier was rail-thin, his uniform hung on him at least three sizes too large. His cheekbones were sharp, his sunburned ears appeared to stick out from the side of his head.
The soldier looked inside the van and his eyes latched on Marina. He huffed, then returned to the travel permit paperwork. He opened the first, read it, turned it over and read the back. Then the next. Ri watched his eyes travel over stamps he had seen a hundred times before.
The soldier stopped at Marina’s. He rotated it in his hand, flipping back and forth, and hummed.
He looked through the open window at her, then back down at the paper.
“Foreign national.”
“We are escorting a foreign delegation and diplomat,” Ri said crisply.
“I can read,” the soldier said, then went back to reviewing her papers with such slowness it almost suggested the opposite.
Mr. Choe’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.
The soldier examined the permit again. “This authorization is for official travel.”
“A foreign delegation is official travel.”
The soldier considered that. “The foreign guest was outside Pyongyang on official business?”
Mr. Choe glanced at Marina in the mirror. “Yes.”
“Then perhaps her authorization is no longer valid.”
Ri almost laughed. That wasn’t how the permit worked, and everyone in the van knew it. Apparently the soldier knew it too, because he made no move to return their papers.
A truck pulled up behind them.
Then another.
The soldier remained serenely interested in Marina’s travel permit.
Marina stared at the soldier. “I have another document.”
Miss Wu and Miss Park leaned forward. Mr. Choe sucked in his breath between his teeth.
“Just let me get it.” She eyed the soldier’s rifle but then stopped, and looked him up and down. She reached into her bag.
Ri tightened his jaw. She had access to a diplomatic pouch, she might have taken a forbidden item with her. A weapon. “You have all of the documents you need,” he assured her.
She nodded, her expression drawn. “I do.”
She pulled out a signed letter with European Union letterhead and a ten-euro note. She folded the bank note inside the letter.
“I’m sorry, it’s in French.”
She handed it to Mr. Choe, who visibly exhaled and handed the paper, folded tightly over the bank note, to the checkpoint soldier.
The soldier was all smiles. He tilted his head: “Do you have one in English for my comrade? He can read it well.”
Another soldier emerged from a ramshackle hut near them, the bones in his hands visible from even a distance. “Let me check. Can you hand me back the paper, so I can compare?”
The letter was handed back to her—empty, no ten euro note inside. She fished out another folded sheet just as the second young soldier approached. Mr. Choe took it from her without inspecting it this time and passed it to the first soldier.
He unfolded it.
The bill inside was smaller: five euros.
“I don’t have an English version,” she said apologetically. “I know you are working hard here, I apologize for the inconvenience.”
He shrugged, his colleague looking over his shoulder.
“Everything is in order.”
He handed the permits back through the window. “Safe travels, comrades.”
The barrier lifted.
There was no perfect security, Ri thought. Only delays.
He watched the checkpoint disappear behind them.
No barrier could stop a determined person forever. It could only force them to find another path, until they gave up—or didn’t.
He looked over at Marina, who was staring out the window. She looked troubled.