All Monsters Must Die (12 page)

By now, Shin and Choi were sleeping only three or four hours a night. In a way, they were happy again.

* * *

ANOTHER MONUMENT IS
on the itinerary for the afternoon: the Mansu Hill Grand Monument, where a statue of Kim Il-sung, twenty-two and a half metres tall, gazes out over Pyongyang. Behind it, on the wall of the Korean Revolution Museum, is a mosaic that depicts the snow-clad holy revolutionary mountain. We obediently line up again and bow. Elias starts waving to the people, his right hand moving like a propeller. The German North Korean sympathizers arrive with their crocheted vests and beards. None of them greet us.

Mr. Song takes us aside and says in a low voice: “Look at my haircut: a normal, simple centre parting. You see that a lot in North Korea. Nothing strange here.”

He explains that North Koreans have better hair growth than Westerners; that they rarely lose their hair, don't go grey, that it grows quickly, and that they have to cut it often. When we're back on the bus we look around at the nineteen other men in our group. Seven are more or less bald; three have significantly thinning hair. And all nineteen are under the age of forty.

Mr. Song is right.

AFTER THE MONUMENT,
we are taken to the flower show to admire Kimjongilia and Kimilsungia, blossoms named after the leaders. The first is a blood-red begonia developed by a Japanese botanist; the other is a violet orchid, a gift from Indonesia's President Sukarno when both Kims were visiting in 1965 — the only known occasion that either of North Korea's leaders used a plane to leave the country. Since the trip to Indonesia, the flower has been diligently cultivated. Kimjongilia is said to represent love, justice, wisdom, and peace — words that don't necessarily spring to mind when thinking about Kim Jong-il.

It turns out the weekly flower show is a huge attraction. Arrangements adorned with light and water features shimmer and bubble. There are colourful installations with models of Pyongyang's famous monuments surrounded by flowers. Paintings of Mount Baekdu in different seasons provide the backdrop. Young women in uniforms and families pose for pictures in front of the arrangements. Most people are in brown Home Guard uniforms. Women have bangs and shoulder-length hair that is combed back and fixed in place with the regulation cap. The jackets nip in at the waist.

Women pose, smiling, carefully made up. Over the years, make-up has been one of the few products that North Korean women are able to buy. Cosmetics for women and tobacco for men. The feminine ideal is to be pale and slim; eyebrows are plucked and filled in, and lips are painted red and lined with a contouring pencil.

In
Illusive Utopia
, Kim Suk-young describes North Korea as “a fashion-conscious nation.” She means that the design of the uniforms is part of the body politics — that is, part of the aesthetic formation of the nation. It's prescriptive down to the last detail, and it permeates everything from the mass games, parades, theatre, opera, and film to people's everyday clothing. What makes North Korean uniforms unique, she says, is the accentuation of the feminine. She compares them to Chinese revolutionary uniforms, which strove to nullify the differences between the sexes. North Korea went in the other direction, choosing to enhance Woman as a dualistic character. Traditional, virtuous clothing has been preserved and complemented with uniforms that style women as both feminine and military. And the North Korean body politic is an extension of the ruling dynasty's own aesthetic preferences. The leaders visit textile factories, examining fabrics and feeling their quality; they study street life in Pyongyang and give detailed orders about the manufacturing of high heels. At parades, women carry automatic weapons and wear slinky knee-length skirts and tall boots while marching in synchrony, legs lifted high.

The female traffic officers in Pyongyang express the same aesthetic ideal. Their employment contract is like that of a modelling agency. In addition to being beautiful, they have to be at least five feet, three inches tall and unmarried. They are drilled in behaviour and choreography, and the state supplies them with make-up. They have four uniforms, one for each season. During the cold winter of 2005, Kim Jong-il personally saw to it that they were given extra-thick cotton underwear, according to a traffic cop who was interviewed in a Chinese newspaper. Whether Kim Jong-il actually got involved — he is known for being a micromanager — or it's just the North Korean way of speaking, where everything is thanks to the leader, is hard to say.

North Korea even has its own unique fabric. Made from limestone and anthracite, Vinalon, or “Juche fibre” as the product is also called, was invented by the North Korean chemist Ri Sung-gi in the 1930s, while he was still living in Japan. (He returned to Korea of his own volition during the Korean War.) Full-scale manufacturing began in 1961 under the slogan: “Vinalon is the solution to the clothing problem.” Kim Il-sung was excited about this operation, not least because one of its by-products could be used in the manufacturing of chemical weapons, including tear gas, mustard gas, and a poisonous gas that is absorbed by the blood. For a time, most things in North Korea were made of Vinalon. As North Korea expert Bertil Lintner says in
Great Leader, Dear Leader
: They “wake up under their Vinalon quilts and have to put on their Vinalon suits, caps, and canvas shoes before going to work.”

MADAME AND SHIN
experienced at first hand how clothing was governed from the top down in the fashion-conscious nation. In their joint memoir, they recount the order to wear a hat in the beginning of the 1980s: “The instructions from the Party were religiously followed, so everyone started putting something on their head. Some women wore Western-style hats with a large shade and other women wore hats with ear covers resembling children's hats, all while wearing modified
joseonot
s.” On another occasion, when Kim Il-sung had just come home from a trip to Eastern Europe, a message was relayed that men should wear ties. “The next day, everyone was wearing a tie regardless of whether it matched their other clothes or not. People who did not have a dress shirt still wore a tie on top of collarless shirts. From then on, party members and office workers put aside their Mao suits and started to wear ties at work. But Kim Jong-il insisted on wearing a Mao suit.”

Kim Jong-il was also deeply involved with Madame's private wardrobe. Rather early on during her imprisonment, he sent her fifty or so boxes of fabric and clothing. There was cashmere for coats, silk for Korean dresses, thin veils, velvet for evening dresses, and three mink coats. Almost every day he sent her boots, hats, and gloves. One of the boxes was filled with make-up. Madame got chills when she saw that all the cosmetics were from her favourite brand. She must have been watched and studied over for a long period of time before the kidnapping.

Kim Jong-il made sure photographers documented her wearing everything he sent. Later, it surfaced that he also knew Shin Sang-ok's shirt size and what his favourite colours were.

* * *

AFTER THE FLOWER
show, the bus takes us to the Juche Tower. The 170-metre-tall monument was erected in honour of Kim Il-sung's seventieth birthday, and each stone represents one day of his life. The guide at the site takes us up in the elevator to the observation deck. The sky is clear, and the late-afternoon light is gentle. On one side is the Taedong River. On the other, the view is incomparable: a city devoid of advertising, with very few cars and the odd bicycle like an ant on the street. Pyongyang seems like an aged, sun-bleached architectural model made of painted balsa wood and spread out as far as the eye can see. Everything looks orderly from this distance.

The guide, who is dressed in a white
hanbok
, is different from the others we've met: she's a bit older and a bit more charming. She doesn't deliver her talk mechanically; she doesn't tell us where to turn our gazes. She says that her legs are tired from standing all day. Then she chats casually with us. After a while, she falls silent and goes back to pondering the view, a view she sees every day but that she now explores as if there still were nuances left to discover. We ask her about Vinalon and its daily use in North Korea today. Are the Mao suits we see people wearing on the street made from Vinalon? She replies that it's unusual for clothes to be made of the material these days; it's mostly just used for blankets.

She sees the cosmetics in our bags and subtly arches an eyebrow. We've bought the best North Korean beauty products, she assures us. She seems to know what she's talking about.

* * *

WE HAVE EATEN
dinner and are sitting on the rattan furniture on the outdoor terrace at the Yanggakdo Hotel. Our guides are exhausted. Mr. Song has imposed a collective punishment. The tumult over the course of the day has resulted in us being grounded for the night. The evening walk through the city that was promised has been cancelled.

But right now no one is sorry. Trond has ordered a round of beer for the table. He stands up like a conductor, encouraging everyone to drink. We ask Ms. Kim what she thinks about Trond.

“He's fat,” she says.

During the day, the guides struggled to keep the group together. Oksana snuck off several times, happy and carefree. Elias was swept along, consumed with his dream of making contact with the North Korean people. Faced with children and the elderly, his propeller hand was set in motion. They treated him as if he were invisible.

Elias asks detailed questions. He wants to seem like a normal tourist, but his inquiries betray him. In spite of his youth, we think he has probably already reached the limit of what someone can learn about North Korea as an outsider. Now he wants first-hand information. It's not that Elias sympathizes with the regime, quite the opposite in fact. He seems to want to get to the bottom of this crazy country, to witness the monstrous nature of the totalitarian regime. But he is stuck in the gap between what he sees and what he knows.

Half-seriously, half-jokingly Mr. Song asked early on if Elias was with the
CIA
. Now he's tired of the detailed and endless questions. With a flaring sardonic glint, Mr. Song finally responds: “Too much information can be fatal.”

Whether this death threat was what made Elias choose not to partake in the evening's festivities, we don't know, but we do assume that he's trying to uncover all of the hotel's secrets. Among the mysteries is the non-existent fifth floor. It has simply been left out of the Yanggakdo Hotel: in the elevator, there's a jump between buttons four and six. In South Korea, it's the fourth floor that is usually omitted, because the number four symbolizes death.

The Bromma boys claim there's a brothel on the seventh floor. Elias went there and found Mr. Song sitting at a desk just outside the elevator. Elias was immediately shown out. Later, he took the stairs and saw rows of men's and women's shoes lined up outside of the rooms. The eighth floor is also interesting. The employees from the spa, the casino, and the Egyptian-themed disco in the basement spend their free time there. They are all Chinese people from Macao. Hiring North Koreans would be too risky, because of the contact they'd have with foreigners. Ari has managed to get a glimpse of the lives of these Chinese guest workers — men wearing only underwear, stooped over portable gas stoves on the floor — but was promptly shown back to the elevator.

The Bromma boys have their own souvenir from one of the forbidden floors. They've taken pictures of corridors covered in propaganda images. They show us a picture of one of them wearing Ray-Bans and making a peace sign. He's popped the collar of his polo shirt unusually high, like a sea bass flaring its gills. In the background there are pictures of soldiers standing tall, holding machine guns next to the party symbol.

TROND WAVES IN
a fresh round of beers. Ari, the flat-cap-wearing Dutchman, stands up, as if Trond will need help conducting the drinkers. We sit at the far, somewhat calmer, end of the table and try to get Ms. Kim to tell us about her life in Pyongyang. Nils, the Gothenburger who lives in Minsk, helps to interpret. It's painfully slow going, even though Nils speaks perfect Russian.

Ms. Kim is wearing a white dress that has a discreet black stripe on the Peter Pan collar. She looks thin and fragile. Her slim wrists seem like they're made from Meissen porcelain. Her father is among the elite. He's been stationed in Novosibirsk, Russia, in order to establish business contacts, on government orders. She says that she likes her language studies and going on walks with her sister, her best friend, and her dog. She and her sister are musical. They both sing and play the piano. In the evenings, they socialize with people their own age at the Kim Il-sung Socialist Youth League. Ms. Kim doesn't like pizza. A movie ticket costs the equivalent of seven pennies. Regarding marriage, everything is very strict. She says that when the time comes, women are twenty-five and the men are thirty. When we question the exact ages, she insists that's how it is.

Farther down the table, one of the Bromma boys vents about how his parents got hit by property tax on their mansion in Stockholm. The six bathrooms were the problem. Thank god the Alliance, Sweden's right-wing government, put a stop to this exploitation of mansion-owners. In his short-sleeved, chicken-yellow Ralph Lauren shirt, red lambswool sweater knotted over his shoulder, shorts, and deck shoes without socks, he seems to have been teleported here from a sailboat that has just docked at some exclusive yacht club.

Two bottles of vodka have materialized and Mr. Song finally starts to relax. Someone brings up the topic of gay clubs. Homosexuality doesn't exist in North Korea, Mr. Song says, and grins at our ridiculousness. The term “gay club” doesn't exist in North Korea. Can, then, the idea of a gay club exist or be understood? Only if it exists in a parallel universe.

One of the Bromma boys gets up, twists the metal cap off the vodka bottle, and calls out to Mr. Song: “Have you heard about Stureplan?”