All Monsters Must Die (7 page)

* * *

IT'S EVENING AT
the hotel outside of Samjiyon. We're sitting on our beds, waiting for the hot water to be turned on. During dinner, Mr. Song had explained that we should avoid brushing our teeth with the tap water.

“The water is very
strong
,” he said. “You might lose all of your teeth.”

Andrei, the Russian chemist, perked up when he heard Ms. Kim's translation of the warning. He was looking forward to collecting yet another unique water sample to take back to Moscow.

“Awesome, now I'm going to lose my teeth,” one of the Bromma boys grumbled. He'd already used the strong tap water.

In anticipation of the hot water that comes on for only one hour a day, we watch scenes from parliament on the national television channel. The camera pans slowly over the rows of ageing men and the occasional woman, who all sit with their eyes shut as if lost in prayer. Sometimes a concise, low chant breaks out in response to the speaker's sermon-like statements. Along with Kim Jong-il, the 687 representatives in the Supreme People's Assembly are actually elected. And as nominated representatives they always get 100 percent of the votes “from the people.” When measures come up for vote in the assembly, the members always hold up their cards openly. They are always in agreement with their leader. It is as if they are the nervous system and he is the brain.

After the long-winded political liturgy comes a film showing archival footage narrated by a man with a hysterical voice. People toil in the fields, in the steel mills, on the railroads, on the rice paddies. Physical labour is undertaken by smiling citizens who move like wind-up toys.

The narrator goes up in pitch and the scene shifts to a group of people pulling a boat to shore during a storm. They throw themselves at the rope, eyes ablaze, someone falls but clambers up again, laughing. Kim Jong-il shows up in the next scene, and the narrator is on the verge of collapse, blubbering with tears and giddy laughter. When the leader is not shaking hands, he's gesturing with his right hand with soft, fast movements, giving instructions about everything imaginable. This “on-the-spot guidance” happens wherever he is, whether it's in an office or on the factory floor. Now a blushing woman poses by his side. She takes his arm and giggles. It's a heated moment — something unrestrained is breaking through.

We stare at the images of Kim Jong-il on the television. Then a montage shows the launching of a Taepodong missile, followed by people's reactions to the announcement of the new weapon. The footage shows people reading the newspapers and cheering; there are close-ups of others who are mad with joy. They bounce up and down, arms raised, eyes shining. The narrator is ecstatic.

The pipes cough. The hour of hot water has begun.

DAY 4

The Monster

IN THE MORNING,
distant rhythmic howls can be heard in the surrounding woods. We're sitting in the bus outside of the hotel, waiting for everyone else in the group to turn up. Assuming they've survived the strong water, that is. The hotel personnel, who act more like functionaries, won't let us leave. They've discovered that four towels embellished with tigers are missing. They have even identified the guilty among us, but none of those who are named will admit to towel theft. The Värmlanders are silent as stone and stare out at the spruce forest. The Ukrainian wearing camouflage pants denies it flat out, and the Bromma boys don't even bother responding. But the functionaries insist. In the end, Trond tires of the fuss, and goes in and pays the twenty-four dollars for the four tiger towels.

The incident has delayed us and it jeopardizes our visit to the first stop on the day's schedule: the Samjiyon Schoolchildren's Palace. Andrei has a framed certificate of friendship from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow that he is supposed to present to the representatives of the after-school facility.

In Samjiyon we pass a group of uniformed workers who march in lines of two, their shovels over their shoulders. A red banner has been mounted on the main street. Preparations are underway for the sixtieth-anniversary celebration of the nation. The high, peaked roofs of the residences resemble gingerbread houses, likely a design element related to the area's intended status as a ski resort. But there are also rows of white-painted houses made of armoured concrete that look like they could withstand almost anything.

Mr. Song is stressed out. He explains that we don't have time to get off at the schoolchildren's palace. But the bus travels up the driveway to the front of the building and Andrei jumps off the bus with the certificate tucked under his arm. He rushes up the stairs, manages to shake hands with a man wearing a suit, hands over the frame, and runs back. The bus is already moving when he throws himself back on board. We see the disappointed man on the stairs awkwardly waving us off.

BUT THERE IS
no time to dwell on this. We have more important things ahead of us. We are on our way to Baekdu, the holy revolutionary mountain — a dormant volcano with a crater lake. The bus travels along gravel roads through spruce forests. As we ascend the mountain, larch forests take over, the trees become more gnarled and sparse, and the air is ever cooler. The landscape is more barren the higher up we go, and soon a wooded upland with mighty views unfurls before us.

Baekdu is the highest point on the entire Korean peninsula. The rusty red and orange streaks of lava on the volcanic rock remind us of Iceland's landscape. The haze between the distant, bluish ridges of Manchuria creates a depth of field like stained glass. Snow leopards, wild boar, wolves, bears, and even the Siberian tiger — here called the Baekdu tiger — are said to still roam this land.

In 1999, North Korea gifted a Baekdu tiger to South Korea as a gesture of reconciliation. The renowned South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk immediately began a cloning project to preserve the Baekdu tiger's Korean origin. “I'll spread the Korean people's spirit by cloning the Mount Baekdu tiger,” he proclaimed. But this was before Hwang claimed to have cloned human stem cells and was exposed for having fabricated his results. Since that scandal, South Korean stem cell research has had to live down a bad reputation.

We ascend to a plateau, pass by a military checkpoint, and make our way to the volcano by foot. When we get to the ridge of the crater we look out over the magnificent crater lake. Cheonji — Heaven Lake — is majestic, with its cerulean water. When we look across the rim of the volcano — at a distance of about five kilometres — we spot the Chinese border control, which looks like a set of small nesting boxes atop a mountain.

To celebrate Kim Il-sung's eighty-second birthday, enormous metal letters that spelled out “revolutionary holy mountain” were set into the slope. Over a three-year period, the letters and the amenities on Baekdu were built by so-called “shock brigades.” It was heroic work, and the suffering itself had value. According to the Workers' Party of North Korea's publication
Rodong Sinmun
(
Workers' Newspaper
), the shock brigade “dragged huge tree trunks down the mountainsides” and “gathered stones from the beds of rivers where ice was floating.”

Baekdu occupies a central place in North Korea's national mythology. The iconography of the mountain is spread through depictions on photographs, stamps, mosaics, and paintings. The revolutionary Korean spirit — the one that drove out the Japanese colonizers and triumphed over the imperialists — radiates from the volcano like the aura of a giant magical monolith.

According to the official national legend, Kim Jong-il was born in a little wooden cabin just down the mountain. At the moment of his birth, a bright new star appeared in the sky, along with a double rainbow, if one can imagine these two phenomena occurring simultaneously. Then, as Bertil Lintner recounts in
Great Leader, Dear Leader
, a swallow descended from the heavens to “herald the birth of a general who will rule all the world.” When Kim Jong-il returned to his birthplace for the first time in his adult life, a similar natural phenomenon happened: the heavy clouds hanging over the crater scattered and a rainbow stretched across the heavens. The elements acknowledged him as the master.

A guide wearing a brown uniform and a peaked cap speaks to us using a megaphone. She gestures with her arms, explaining that the peaks of the holy revolutionary mountain are always covered in snow. When we point at the mountain and tell the guide that they aren't actually covered in snow, she looks past us and repeats: “The peaks of holy revolutionary mountain are always covered in snow.” The observations of us mere civilians are not to sully the image of this national treasure, whose prescribed appearance is inscribed in the nation's history forever.

IN 1935, THE
Swedish explorer Sten Bergman was one of the few Western travellers to visit the Baekdu region. With him was his entourage: Harald Sjökvist, a taxidermist and former locomotive driver, and Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese chef and Casanova. Bergman found fresh tracks from a pack of wolves, and he caught a Ural owl, a three-toed woodpecker, a black woodpecker, an azure-winged magpie, and a black grouse. Bergman also photographed the people he met on his journey. The birds are in the Swedish Museum of Natural History's collections in Stockholm, and the photographs are today considered unique documents. In Bergman's time, this region was largely untraversable. Under normal circumstances, the explorer claimed, you would be robbed, killed, or kidnapped by Manchurian or Korean bandits. He and his companions had once found a dead Korean on a mountain slope but they themselves survived thanks to their military escort of fifty Japanese soldiers. In his book,
In Korean Wilds and Villages
, he writes:

Clouds of mist now came sweeping along and hid parts of the lake, but at moments they would clear off and we could again see the whole of it. Swifts bred in great numbers in the crevices of the crater walls and we could see many of them as they swept through the air. There was a sharp wind and it was bitterly cold. Gusts of sand also kept blowing about . . .

On a level plateau right on the highest point of the mountain a ceremony was now to take place. The trumpet-call went forth to summon all together, and the military formed rank in perfect style, facing toward Japan. The other members of the expedition also formed themselves into a group alongside. With fixed bayonets and drawn swords, the following words were then called out with wild enthusiasm: “
Tenno heika bansai, Kogo heika bansai!
” — “Long live His Majesty the Emperor, Long live Her Majesty the Empress!”

Our group stands in formation against the background of the crater lake. The sand whirls and the calls of swifts echo in the crevices of the crater walls. The man who films us takes a group photo.

Swiss Bruno leads a hike up to the very top — a cliff formation that juts out over one side and has no safety railings. Bruno quickly pulls ahead of the group. He moves with incredible determination. Behind him are the Swedish fighter pilot and the Värmlanders. The rest of us taste blood in our mouths and our breathing is laboured in the thin air. We are at an elevation of 2,700 metres.

After climbing to the summit, we don't join those from the group who decide to take a cable car down to the lake. Instead we stare at a dangerously steep stairway that runs halfway down to the water and watch Andrei taking another water sample. It's hard to imagine that this cold lake can accommodate any life, but after being stocked with fish in the 1960s it is now home to a subspecies of Arctic char. In 1987, a splendid specimen was caught during test fishing. It was put on ice and flown to Kim Jong-il's palace, where it was served at his birthday dinner.

We've been told that the treacherous stairway is made up of 216 steps, a numerological representation of Kim Jong-il's birthday (February 16). Uncharacteristically, they underestimated the numbers. There are surely several thousand steps and it is so steep that even the least afflicted might get vertigo.

The heavenly lake is deep. At its deepest, it's nearly 400 metres to the bottom. Since 1903, there have been regular reports from the Chinese side that the lake is home to a monster, and in more recent years, film footage and photographs have been presented as evidence of its existence. The monster was described as having a long neck and a bull-like head when it was first sighted, and was said to have attacked people at the water's edge; they responded with six shots from a gun and the creature fled back to the depths of the lake. Other eyewitness accounts describe an animal that resembles a giant seal, with a long neck and a human head. The most recent report was in 2007, when a Chinese
TV
reporter filmed a twenty-minute sequence that captured six creatures swimming in formation. Judging by the trails in the water and what appeared to be heads breaking the water's surface, this footage appeared to show large animals of some kind. Their fins, or wings, were longer than their bodies, the reporter said, and they swam as fast as motorboats.

But there is no room in the North Korean historical record for a monster dwelling in the depths of Heaven Lake. It is not denied that there are large animals living in the lake, however: the Arctic char must have mutated into giant fish over time.

BEFORE WE LEAVE
Mount Baekdu we meet a group of uniformed men and women, some of whom are carrying red flags. They look important in their caps, with their stern expressions, but when the guard sounds his whistle they rush back. It turns out they are regular workers being ordered to the top of the mountain, where they have a job to do.

* * *

IT IS ALMOST
thirty-seven years to the day that three Swedish leftist radicals were invited to visit North Korea. In 1971, journalists Villy Bergström and Kurt Wickman and photographer Arne Hjort were naive enough to believe that they would be meeting with Kim Il-sung, and would be able to wander freely in Pyongyang and converse with workers and farmers. Instead, they were taken along a prescribed path of drawn-out visits to cult sites dedicated to Kim Il-sung and his dynasty, as well as the Korean Revolution Museum, exemplary daycare centres, and ironworks.

Ironworks aren't on our itinerary, but generally speaking, the trip the journalists took and ours match up: the obligatory monuments in Pyongyang, Kaesong, and Panmunjom, for example. Going by other travel accounts, not much has changed — the same routes and the same rhetoric for the past forty years.

Bergström, Wickman, and Hjort published an account of their journey called
Pictures from North Korea
(
Bilder från Nordkorea
). At the time, the book was criticized for taking too hard a stance against North Korea, but in later years it was held up as a grotesque whitewashing of a horrific dictatorship.

Pictures from North Korea
isn't at all the whitewashing that critics make it out to be. Rather, it unfolds as an ironic reportage on the cult of personality around Kim Il-sung and his family, which had already reached monumental proportions by 1971. Sure, there's a desire among the three leftists to see the positive in the North Korean model, but it is worth noting that the book was written before the catastrophic famine, in a period when South Korea was a severe military dictatorship and North Korean industry was operating at full throttle. And though the three travellers wanted to find a utopia on the other side of the earth, a place where socialism had succeeded, they were soon driven to madness by their guides' evasion tactics and the droning speeches about Kim Il-sung's achievements.

Bergström wrote about their visit to Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang. (The same stop was on our itinerary, but for some reason it was cancelled.) He and his friends had made a special request to meet professors of economics in order to discuss the North Korean economy. But the professors held their tongues, and instead the dean took their guests to the so-called “animal room,” where jars of fish, and stuffed foxes, wolves, and bears were on display. Each specimen had been caught and killed by Kim Il-sung himself, who had then sent them to the university so that the students could study these rare examples of Korean fauna. The dean then explained that brave comrade Kim Il-sung had also shot an enormous tiger, “the largest tiger ever to be brought down in Korea.” The leader's hunting rifles and dog were proudly displayed, together with the taxidermied animal.

Bergström, who was a hunter, noticed that the shotgun was a twelve-calibre, double-barrelled Sauer & Sohn from East Germany, “one that's fit for pheasant and hare, possibly a deer at an extremely close range.” The hunting dog turned out to be “an Irish Setter, a so-called pointer, known for its ability to point to partridges, pheasants and grouse.”