The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

it over to Marshal Allan. And then he said:
    ‘Mr Marshal, show this at the next checkpoint. Then you will be guided to the second-in-command of the prime minister’s second-in-command.’
    Allan thanked him, saluted and returned to the car, pushing Herbert in front of him.
    ‘Since you have just become my aide, you will have to drive from now on,’ said Allan.
    ‘How exciting,’ said Herbert. ‘I haven’t driven a car since the Swiss police ordered me never to sit behind a wheel again.’
    ‘I think it’s best if you say no more,’ said Allan.
    ‘I have a hard time with left and right,’ said Herbert.
    ‘As already noted, I think it’s best if you say no more,’ said Allan.
     
    The journey continued with Herbert behind the wheel, and it went off much better than Allan had expected. And with the help of the pass there were no problems in getting all the way into the city and right up to the prime minister’s palace.
    Once there, the second-in-command’s second-in-command received them and said that the second-in-command could not receive them until three days later. Meanwhile, the gentlemen would be staying in the guest suite in the palace. And dinner would be served at eight o’clock, if that suited them.
    ‘What did I tell you?’ said Allan to Herbert.
     
    Kim Il Sung was born in April 1912 to a Christian family on the outskirts of Pyongyang. That family, like all other Korean families, was under Japanese sovereignty. Over the years, the Japanese did more or less what they wanted with people from the colony. Hundreds of thousands of Korean girls and women were captured and used as sex slaves for needy Japaneseimperial troops. Korean men were conscripted into the army to fight for the emperor who had, among other things, forced them to adopt Japanese names and in other respects done his best to eradicate the Korean language and culture.
    Kim Il Sung’s father was a quiet apothecary, but also sufficiently articulate in his criticism of the Japanese that the family one day found it wise to move northwards, to Chinese Mongolia.
    But after Japanese troops arrived in 1931 it wasn’t all peace and quiet there either. Kim Il Sung’s father was dead by then, but his mother encouraged him to join the Chinese guerrillas, with the ambition of forcing the Japanese out of Manchuria – and eventually Korea.
    Kim Il Sung made a career in the service of the Chinese, as a communist guerrilla. He gained a reputation for being a man of action, and brave too. He was appointed to the command of an entire division and he fought so fiercely against the Japanese that in the end only he himself and a few more in the division survived. That was in 1941, in the middle of the World War, and Kim Il Sung was forced to flee over the border to the Soviet Union.
    But he made a career there too. He was soon a major in the Red Army and fought right up until 1945.
    The end of the war meant that Japan had to hand back Korea. Kim Il Sung came back from exile, now as a national hero. All that remained was to build the state; there was no doubt that the people wanted Kim Il Sung as the Great Leader.
    But the victors from the war, the Soviet Union and the United States, had divided Korea into spheres of interest. And in the United States, they felt that you couldn’t have a documented communist as the head of the whole peninsula. So they flew in a head of state of their own, a Korean exile, and put him in the south. Kim Il Sung was expected to settle for the north, but thatis exactly what he didn’t do. Instead, he started the Korean War. If he could chase out the Japanese, then he could just as well chase out the Americans and their UN followers.
    Kim Il Sung had served in the military in both China and the Soviet Union. And now he was fighting for his own cause. What he had learned during the dramatic journey was, among other things, not to depend upon anybody.
    He made only one exception to that rule. And that exception had just been appointed as his second-in-command.
    Anybody who wanted to have contact with Prime Minister Kim Il Sung, must first seek a meeting with his son.
    Kim Jong Il.
    ‘And you should always let your visitors wait at least seventy-two hours before you receive them. That is how you maintain your authority, my son,’ Kim Il Sung had instructed him.
    ‘I think I understand, father,’ Kim Jong Il lied, after which he sought out a dictionary and looked up the word he hadn’t understood.’
     
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