Falling Off the Map Read Online Free

these types—U.N. men and development aides, acronymed bigwigs and troubleshooters. Now they were seated in the dining room, German and Chilean and African, many in their most formal gear, surrounded by ninety-four reflections of themselves and picking at some grizzled rainbow trout. Around me, a familiar chorus rose up. “They’re very nice, these people, but totally hopeless.” “Their problem is they’re overenthusiastic. But you can’t tell them that, of course, and …” I, for my part, recalled the counsel of the in-flight magazine. “If you talk in the daytime, you’ll be overheard by a bird,” it had advised. “And at night by a rat.”
    Later I decided to take a walk around Pyongyang. It was an unusual place, just the same as in the photographs: there were no cars or bicycles along the streets; almost no shops or restaurants or cinemas; nothing, in fact, to distract from the spotless and unworldly hush. I walked for two hours round the city, but I came across no shocks or surprises, nothing charming or touching or strange; nothing at all, in fact. There were no smiles on the people’s faces, no fears, no expression. The ashen pallor of a ghost hung over the huge, unbending, earless streets. Here, in a sense, was Marxism in the raw and by the book; both the apotheosis of the system and its epitaph. The block-capital streets and numbered towers, the two-hundred-foot monuments and impersonal megaliths, the featureless statues and murals, seemed a kind of abstract of Communism, as flawless as a blueprint; they also seemed a kind of memento mori, the last souvenirs of a system that was elsewhere all but extinct.The more modern the buildings in Korea, the more the country felt outdated. Korea, in that sense, was generic.
    And as in no other Communist country I had seen, there seemed no chinks in the wall here, no murmurs of dissent or whispers of “Change money?”; no curious glances in the street; none of the hustlers and hookers who are the main appointments of every state-run hotel. Nothing, in fact, to smudge the place or make it distinctive. Everything was just the way Kim planned it, executed with unswerving efficiency. The first time I tried to walk across one of the deserted avenues, I was instantly sent back by a red-flare-waving policewoman.
    Then, however, I came upon my first surprise: in a huge and half-lit square, two hundred people had gathered, late on this Saturday night, in concentric circles, tidily arranged behind a leader. Silently, solemnly, they began walking through a series of military-style dances, the steps of their ghostly pantomime echoing through the night.
    The next day, my sightseeing began in earnest. I was taken to the Grand People’s Study House (with a “capacity of containing 30 million volumes”), the 150,000-seat stadium built for the 1988 Olympics, the 180-foot Arch of Triumph (“For its ideological content, size, architectural style and the representation of sculpture,” the
Korea Guidebook
had explained, “the Arch of Triumph attains the highest perfection of monumental art”). “It’s amazing it’s so much like the Arc de Triomphe!” I marveled. “Totally different,” snapped my guide.
    Later, standing in the shadow of the seventy-foot bronze statue of the “peerless patriot and national hero,” he extended a sweeping arm across the whole Orwellian skyline. “At first,” he explained, “we did not know how to make buildings and sculptures. We tried, but it was not beautiful. But we tried and tried again. Now look.” I mumbled something about theeconomic costs of such monumentalism. He looked incredulous. “How can you say our economy is weak when we have all this?” Kim Il Sung had built up the whole nation out of the rubble of war; having begun with a tabula rasa, he had enjoyed the rare opportunity to construct an entire nation in his image, stamped over with his monogram. Now, my guide went on, fifty thousand new flats were going to be