by Adam Johnson
“Now we’re a proper team,” Officer So said as they admired their new boat.
That’s when the diver surfaced.
Lifting his mask, the diver showed a look of uncertain wonder to discover three men in his boat. But he handed up a sack of abalone and took Gil’s hand to help him aboard. The diver was larger than them, muscular in a wetsuit.
Officer So spoke to Gil, “Tell him our boat was damaged, that it sank.”
Gil spoke to the diver, who gestured wildly and laughed.
“I know your boat sank,” Gil translated back. “It almost landed on my head.”
Then the diver noticed the fishing vessel in the distance. He cocked his head at it.
Gil clapped the diver on the back and said something to him. The diver stared hard into Gil’s eyes and then panicked. Abalone divers, it turned out, carried a special kind of knife on their ankles, and Jun Do was a long time in subduing him. Finally, Jun Do took the diver’s back and began to squeeze, the water wringing from his wetsuit as the scissors choke sank in.
When the knife was flying, Gil had jumped overboard.
“What the fuck did you say to him?” Jun Do demanded.
“The truth,” Gil said, treading water.
Officer So had caught a pretty good gash in the forearm. He closed his eyes at the pain of it. “More practice,” is all he could say.
They put the diver in the fishing boat’s hold and continued to the mainland. That night, offshore from the town of Fukura, they put the Avon in the water. Next to Fukura’s long fishing pier, a summer amusement park had set up, with lanterns strung and old people singing karaoke on a public stage. Here Jun Do and Gil and Officer So hovered beyond the beach break, waiting for the neon piping on the roller coaster to go dark, for the monkeyish organ music of the midway to fall silent. Finally, a solitary figure stood at the end of the pier. When they saw the red of a cigarette, they knew it was a man. Officer So started the engine.
They motored in on idle, the pier towering as they came astern it. Where its pilings entered the heavy surf, there was chaos, with some waves leaping straight up and others deflecting out perpendicular to shore.
“Use your Japanese,” Officer So told Gil. “Tell him you lost your puppy or something. Get close. Then—over the rail. It’s a long fall, and the water’s cold. When he comes up, he’ll be fighting to get in the boat.”
Gil stepped out when they reached the beach. “I’ve got it,” he said. “This one’s mine.”
“Oh, no,” Officer So said. “You both go.”
“Seriously,” Gil said. “I think I can handle it.”
“Out,” Officer So said to Jun Do. “And wear those damn glasses.”
The two of them crossed the tide line and came to a small square. Here were benches and a little plaza, a shuttered tea stand. There seemed to be no statue, and they could not tell what the square glorified. The trees were full with plums, so ripe the skins broke and juice ran in their hands. It seemed impossible, a thing not to be trusted. A grubby man was sleeping on a bench, and they marveled at it, a person sleeping any place he wished.
Gil stared at all the town houses around them. They looked traditional, with dark beams and ceramic roofs, but you could tell they were brand new.
“I want to open all these doors,” he said. “Sit in their chairs, listen to their music.”
Jun Do stared at him.
“You know,” Gil said. “Just to see.”
The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it—he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.
Jun Do threw away his half-eaten plum. “I’ve had better,” he said.
On the pier, they walked planking stained from years of bait fishing. Ahead, at the end, they could see a face, lit from the blue glow of a mobile phone.
“Just get him over the rail,” Jun Do said.
Gil took a breath. “Over the rail,” he repeated.
There were empty bottles on the pier, cigarette butts. Jun Do was walking calmly forward, and he could feel Gil trying to copy this beside him. From below came the throaty bubble of an outboard idling. The figure ahead stopped speaking on the phone.
“Dare?” a voice called to them. “Dare nano?”
“Don’t answer,” Jun Do whispered.
“It’s a woman’s voice,” Gil said.
“Don’t answer,” Jun Do said.
The hood of a coat was pulled back to reveal a young woman’s face.
“I’m not made for this,”
Gil said. “Stick to the plan.”
Their footsteps seemed impossibly loud. It struck Jun Do that one day men had come for his mother like this, that he was now one of those men.
Then they were upon her. She was small under the coat. She opened her mouth, as if to scream, and Jun Do saw she had fine metal work all along her teeth. They gripped her arms and muscled her up on the rail.
“Zenzen oyogenai’n desu,” she said, and though Jun Do could speak no Japanese, he knew it was a raw, imploring confession, like “I’m a virgin.”
They threw her over the rail. She fell away silent, not a word or even the snatching of a breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though—it wasn’t fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they’d never know what became of her.
From below came a splash and the gunning of an outboard.
Jun Do couldn’t shake that look in her eyes.
On the pier was her phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Gil tried to say something, but Jun Do silenced him. “Mayumi?” a woman’s voice asked. “Mayumi?” Jun Do pushed some buttons to make it stop. When he leaned over the rail, the boat was rising and falling in the swells.
“Where is she?” Jun Do asked.
Officer So was staring into the water. “She went down,” he said.
“What do you mean she went down?”
He lifted his hands. “She hit and then she was gone.”
Jun Do turned to Gil. “What did she say?”
Gil said, “She said, I can’t swim.”
“ ‘I can’t swim’?” Jun Do asked. “She said she couldn’t swim and you didn’t stop me?”
“Throwing her over, that was the plan. You said stick to it.”
Jun Do looked into the black water again, deep here at the end of the pier. She was down there, that big coat like a sail in the current, her body rolling along the sandy floor.
The phone rang. It glowed blue and vibrated in Jun Do’s hand. He and Gil stared at it. Gil took the phone and listened, eyes wide. Jun Do could tell, even from here, that it was a woman’s voice, a mother’s. “Throw it away,” Jun Do told him. “Just toss it.”
Gil’s eyes roamed as he listened. His hand was trembling. He nodded his head several times. When he said, “Hai,” Jun Do grabbed it. He jabbed his finger at the buttons. There, on its small screen, appeared a picture of a baby. He threw it into the sea.
Jun Do went to the rail. “How could you not keep count,” he yelled down to Officer So. “How could you not keep count?”
That was the end of their practice. It was time to get the opera lady. Officer So was to cross the Sea of Japan on a fishing vessel, while Jun Do and Gil took the overnight ferry from Chongjin to Niigata. At midnight, with the singer in hand, they would meet Officer So on the beach. Simplicity, Officer So said, was the key to the plan.
Jun Do and Gil took the afternoon train north to Chongjin. At the station, families were
sleeping under cargo platforms, waiting for darkness so they could make the journey to Sinuiju, which was just a swim across the Tumen River from China.
They made for the Port of Chongjin on foot, passing the Reunification Smelter, its great cranes rusted in place, the copper lines to its furnace long since pilfered for scrap. Apartment blocks stood empty, their ration outlet windows butcher-papered. There was no laundry hanging to dry, no onion smoke in the air. All the trees had been cut during the famine, and now, years later, the saplings were uniform in size, trunks ankle-thick, their clean stalks popping up in the oddest places—in rain barrels and storm drains, one tree bursting from an outhouse where a human skeleton had shit its indigestible seed.
Long Tomorrows, when they came to it, looked no bigger than the infirmary.
Jun Do shouldn’t have pointed it out because Gil insisted they go in.
It was filled only with shadows. Everything had been stripped for fuel—even the doorframes had been burned. The roster of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution, painted on the wall, was the only thing left.
Gil didn’t believe that Jun Do had named all the orphans.
“You really memorized all the Martyrs?” he asked. “What about number eleven?”
“That’s Ha Shin,” Jun Do said. “When he was captured, he cut out his own tongue so the Japanese could get no information from him. There was a boy here who wouldn’t speak—I gave him that name.”
Gil ran his finger down the list.
“Here you are,” he said. “Martyr number seventy-six, Pak Jun Do. What’s that guy’s story?”
Jun Do touched the blackness on the floor where the stove had once been. “Even though he killed many Japanese soldiers,” he said, “the revolutionaries in Pak Jun Do’s unit didn’t trust him because he was descended from an impure blood line. To prove his loyalty, he hanged himself.”
Gil stared at him. “You gave yourself this name? Why?”
“He passed the ultimate loyalty test.”
The Orphan Master’s room, it turned out, was no bigger than a pallet. And of the portrait of the tormenting woman, Jun Do could find only a nail hole.
“Is this where you slept?” Gil asked. “In the Orphan Master’s room?”
Jun Do showed him the nail hole. “Here’s where the portrait of my mother hung.”
Gil inspected it. “There was a nail here, all right,” he said. “Tell me, if you lived with your father, how come you have an orphan’s name?”
“He couldn’t give me his name,” Jun Do said, “or everyone would see the shame of how he was forced to raise his son. And he couldn’t bear to give me another man’s name, even a Martyr’s. I had to do it.”
Gil’s expression was blank. “What about your mother?” he asked. “What was her name?”
They heard the horn of the Mangyongbong-92 ferry in the distance.
Jun Do said, “Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything.”
That night Jun Do stood in the dark stern of the ship, looking down into the turbulence of its wake. Rumina, he kept thinking. He didn’t listen for her voice or let himself visualize her. He only wondered how she’d spend this last day if she knew he was coming.
It was late morning when they entered Bandai-jima Port—the customs houses displaying their international flags. Large shipping vessels, painted humanitarian blue, were being loaded with rice at their moorings. Jun Do and Gil had forged documents, and in polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers they descended the gangway into downtown Niigata. It was a Sunday.
Making their way to the auditorium, Jun Do saw a passenger jet crossing the sky, a big plume behind it. He gawked, neck craned—amazing. So amazing he decided to feign normalcy at everything, like the colored lights controlling the traffic or the way buses kneeled, oxenlike, to let old people board. Of course the parking meters could talk, and the doors of businesses opened as they passed. Of course there was no water barrel in the bathroom, no ladle.
The matinee was a medley of works the opera troupe would stage over the coming season, so all the singers took turns offering brief arias. Gil seemed to know the songs, humming along with them. Rumina—small, broad-shouldered—mounted the stage in a dress the color of graphite. Her eyes were dark under sharp bangs. Jun Do could tell she’d known sadness, yet she couldn’t know that her greatest trials lay ahead, that this evening, when darkness fell, her life would become an opera, that Jun Do was the dark figure at the end of the first act who removes the heroine to a land of lament.
She sang in Italian and then German and then Japanese. When finally she sang in Korean, it came clear why Pyongyang had chosen her. The song was beautiful, her voice light now, singing of two lovers on a lake, and the song was not about the Dear Leader or defeating the imperialists or the pride of a North Korean factory. It was about a girl and a boy in a boat. The girl had a white choson-ot, the boy a soulful stare.
Rumina sang in Korean, and her dress was graphite, and she might as well have sung of a spider that spins white thread to capture her listeners. Jun Do and Gil wandered the streets of Niigata held by that thread, pretending they weren’t about to abduct her from the nearby artists’ village. A line kept ringing in Jun Do’s mind about how in the middle of the water the lovers decide to row no further.
They walked the city in a trance, waiting for dark. Advertisements especially had an effect on Jun Do. There were no ads in North Korea, and here they were on buses and posters, across video screens. Immediate and imploring—couples clasping one another, a sad child—he asked Gil what each one said, but the answers pertained to car insurance and telephone rates. Through a window, they watched Korean women cut the toenails of Japanese women. For fun, they operated a vending machine and received a bag of orange food neither would taste.
Gil paused before a store that sold equipment for undersea exploration. In the window was a large bag made to stow dive gear. It was black and nylon, and the salesperson showed them how it would hold everything needed for an underwater adventure for two. They bought it.
They asked a man pushing a cart if they could borrow it, and he told them at the supermarket they could get their own. Inside the store, it was almost impossible to tell what most of the boxes and packages contained. The important stuff, like radish bushels and buckets of chestnuts, were nowhere to be seen. Gil purchased a roll of heavy tape and, from a section of toys for children, a little watercolor set in a tin. Gil at least had someone to buy a souvenir for.
Darkness fell, storefronts lit suddenly with red-and-blue neon, and the willows were eerily illuminated from below. Car headlights flashed in his eyes. Jun Do felt exposed, singled out. Where was the curfew? Why didn’t the Japanese respect the dark like normal people?
They stood outside a bar, time yet to kill. Inside, people were laughing and talking.
Gil pulled out their yen. “No sense taking any back,” he said.
Inside, he ordered whiskeys. Two women were at the bar as well, and Gil bought their drinks. They smiled and returned to their conversation. “Did you see their teeth?” Gil asked. “So white and perfect, like children’s teeth.” When Jun Do didn’t agree, Gil said, “Relax, yeah? Loosen up.”
“Easy for you,” Jun Do said. “You don’t have to overpower someone tonight. Then get her across town. And if we don’t find Officer So on that beach—”
“Like that would be the worst thing,” Gil said. “You don’t see anyone around here plotting to escape to North Korea. You don’t see them coming to pluck people off our beaches.”
“That kind of talk doesn’t help.”
“Come, drink up,” Gil said. “I’ll get the singer into the bag tonight. You’re not the only guy capable of beating a woman, you know. How hard can it be?”
“I’ll handle the singer,” Jun Do said. “You just keep it together.”
“I can stuff a singer in a bag, okay?” Gil said. “I can push a shopping cart. You just drink up, you’re probably never going to see Japan again.”
&
nbsp; Gil tried to speak to the Japanese women, but they smiled and ignored him. Then he bought a drink for the bartender. She came over and talked with him while she poured it. She was thin shouldered, but her shirt was tight and her hair was absolutely black. They drank together, and he said something to make her laugh. When she went to fill an order, Gil turned to Jun Do. “If you slept with one of these girls,” Gil said, “you’d know it was because she wanted to, not like some military comfort girl trying to get nine stamps a day in her quota book or a factory gal getting married off by her housing council. Back home pretty girls never even raise their eyes to you. You can’t even have a cup of tea without her father arranging a marriage.”
Pretty girls? Jun Do thought. “The world thinks I’m an orphan, that’s my curse,” Jun Do told him. “But how did a Pyongyang boy like you end up doing such shitty jobs?”
Gil ordered more drinks, even though Jun Do had barely touched his. “Going to that orphanage really messed with your head,” Gil said. “Just because I don’t blow my nose in my hand anymore doesn’t mean I’m not a country boy, from Myohsun. You should move on, too. In Japan, you can be anyone you want to be.”
They heard a motorcycle pull up, and outside the window, they saw a man back it in line with a couple of other bikes. When he took the key from the ignition, he hid it under the lip of the gas tank. Gil and Jun Do glanced at one another.
Gil sipped his whiskey, swishing it around then tipping his head to delicately gargle.
“You don’t drink like a country boy.”
“You don’t drink like an orphan.”
“I’m not an orphan.”