The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Then the pumps kicked in, and thankfully, we couldn’t hear anything.

  WHEN Commander Ga returned to Sun Moon’s house, he was wearing the Western pistol on his hip. Before he could knock on the door, Brando alerted the house to his presence. Sun Moon answered in a simple choson-ot—its jeogori was white and the chima was patterned with pale blossoms. It was the peasant-girl dress she’d worn in the movie A True Daughter of the Country.

  Today, she did not banish him to the tunnel. He’d been to work and now he was home, and he was greeted as a normal husband returning from the office. The son and daughter were standing at attention in their school uniforms, though they hadn’t been going to school. She hadn’t let them out of her sight since he’d arrived. He called the girl girl and the boy boy because Sun Moon refused to tell him their names.

  The daughter held a wooden tray. On it was a steaming towel, which he used to wipe the dust from his face and neck, the backs of his hands. Upon the boy’s tray were various medals and pins placed there by his father. Commander Ga emptied his pockets onto the tray—some military won, subway tickets, his Ministry ID card—and in the commingling of these everyday objects, the two Commander Gas were one. But when a coin fell to the floor, the boy flinched in fear. If the ghost of Commander Ga was anywhere, it was here, in the worried posture of the children, in the punishment they seemed convinced was continually at hand.

  Next his wife held open a dobok like a drape, so that he could disrobe before them in privacy. When the dobok was cinched, Sun Moon turned to the children.

  “Go,” she told them. “Go practice your music.”

  When they were gone, she waited for the sounds of their warm-up scales before speaking, and then, when their notes seemed too soft, she made for the kitchen, where the loudspeaker was playing, and she was sure not to be overheard. He followed her, watched her cringe when she recognized that over the loudspeaker the new opera diva was singing Sea of Blood.

  Sun Moon relieved him of his weapon. She opened the cylinder and assured herself the chambers were empty. Then she gestured at Ga with the butt of the gun. “I must know how you came by this pistol,” she said.

  “It’s custom made,” he said. “One of a kind.”

  “Oh, I recognize the gun,” she said. “Tell me who gave it to you.”

  She pulled a chair to the counter and climbed atop it. She reached high to place the gun in the top cupboard.

  He watched her body elongating, taking a different shape under her choson-ot. Its hem lifted to show her ankles, and there she was, the whole weight of her balanced upon poised toes. He regarded that cabinet, wondering what else it might contain. Commander Ga’s pistol was in the backseat of the Mercedes, yet he asked, “Did your husband carry a gun?”

  “Does,” she said.

  “Does your husband carry a gun?”

  “You’re not answering my question,” she said. “I know the gun you brought home, we’ve used it in a half-dozen movies. It’s the pearl-handled pistol that the cold-blooded, cowboyish American officer always uses to shoot civilians.”

  She stepped off the chair, and dragged it back to the table. There were marks on the floor showing this had happened many times before.

  “Dak-Ho gave this to you from the prop warehouse,” she said. “Either he’s trying to send me some kind of message, or I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “The Dear Leader gave it to me,” he said.

  A pain crossed Sun Moon’s face. “I can’t stand that voice,” she said. The new diva had made it to the aria celebrating the martyred sniper teams of Myohyang. “I have to get out of here,” she said and stepped outside onto the deck.

  He joined her in the warm afternoon sunlight, the view from the top of Mount Taesong encompassing all of Pyongyang. Below them swallows turned in the air above the botanical gardens. In the cemetery, old people prepared for their deaths by opening lantern-paper parasols and visiting the graves of others.

  She smoked a cigarette as her eyes got wet, her makeup soon running. He stood next to her at the rail. He didn’t know if you could tell whether an actress was really crying. He only knew, real or fake, the tears were not for her husband. Perhaps she wept because she was thirty-seven now or because friends no longer visited, or for the way her children in their play theater punished the puppets for talking back.

  “The Dear Leader told me he was writing a new movie role for you.”

  Sun Moon turned her head to exhale smoke. “The Dear Leader only has room in his heart for opera now,” she said, and offered him the last draw of her cigarette.

  Ga took it and inhaled.

  “I knew you were from the country,” she said. “Look at how you hold that cigarette. What do you know of the Dear Leader or whether a new movie will happen or not?”

  Ga reached for her cigarettes and lit a new one, for himself.

  “I used to smoke,” he said. “But in prison, I lost the habit.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me, prison?”

  “They showed us a movie in there. It was A True Daughter of the Country.”

  She planted her elbows against the balcony rail and leaned back. It lifted her shoulders high, made visible the blades of her pelvis through the white of her choson-ot. She said, “I was just a kid when I made that movie, I didn’t know anything about acting.”

  She gave him a look, as if to ask, how was the movie received?

  “I used to live by the sea,” he said. “For a short time, I almost had a wife. I mean, maybe. It could have been. She was the wife of a shipmate, quite beautiful.”

  “But if she was a wife, she was already married,” Sun Moon said and looked at him, confused. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Oh, but her husband disappeared,” Commander Ga said. “Her husband just went off into the light. In prison, when things were not so good, I tried to think of her, my almost wife, my maybe wife, to keep me strong.” An image of the Captain came to him, of the Captain’s wife tattooed on the Captain’s ancient chest—how the once-black ink had turned blue and hazy as it migrated under the old man’s skin, a watercolor where indelibility had been, leaving only the stain of the woman he loved. That’s what had happened to the Second Mate’s wife in prison—she’d gone out of focus, she’d seeped from his memory. “Then I saw you on the movie screen, and I realized how plain she had been. She could sing, she had ambitions, but you showed me that she was only an almost beauty, a maybe beauty. The truth was that when I thought of the missing woman in my life, it was your face that I saw.”

  “This almost-maybe wife,” she said. “What happened to her?”

  He shrugged.

  “Nothing?” she asked. “You never saw her again?”

  “Where would I see her?” he asked.

  Though he hadn’t noticed, Sun Moon perceived her children had stopped playing their instruments. She went to the door and shouted until they resumed.

  She turned to him. “You should probably tell me why you were in prison.”

  “I went to America, where my mind was soiled by capitalist ways.”

  “California?”

  “Texas,” he said. “Where I got the dog.”

  She crossed her arms. “I don’t like any of this,” she said. “You must be part of my husband’s plan, he must have sent you as some kind of stand-in—otherwise, his friends would have killed you. I don’t know why you’re here, saying these things to me, and no one has killed you.”

  She gazed toward Pyongyang, as if the answer were there. He watched emotions cross her face like weather—uncertainty, like clouds blotting the sun, gave way to a wince of regret, eyes twitching, as with the first drops of rain. She was a great beauty, it was certainly true, but he saw now that what made him fall in love with her in prison was this, the way what was felt in her heart came instantly to her face. That was the source of her great acting, this thing that couldn’t be faked. You’d have to have twenty tattoos, he realized, to capture her moods. Dr. Son
g had made it to Texas, where he’d eaten barbecue. Gil had gotten to sip scotch and make a Japanese bartender laugh. And here he was, on Commander Ga’s balcony with Sun Moon, tear streaks on her face, backdropped by Pyongyang. It didn’t matter what happened to him now.

  He leaned toward her. That would make the moment perfect, to touch her. Everything would be worth it if he could wipe a tear from her cheek.

  She eyed him warily. “You said the husband of your almost wife. You said he disappeared, that he went off into the light. Did you kill him?”

  “No,” he told her. “That man defected. He escaped on a life raft. When we went to look for him, the morning sun off the ocean was so bright, it was like the light had swallowed him. He had the image of his wife tattooed on his chest, so he would always have her, even if she didn’t have him. But don’t worry, I won’t let you become a hazy memory.”

  She didn’t like the answer or the way he told it, he could tell. But his story was part of her story now. It couldn’t be helped. He reached to touch her cheek.

  “Stay away from me,” she said.

  “Your own husband, if you want to know, it was the darkness for him,” he said. “Your husband went off into the dark.”

  From somewhere below came the sound of a truck engine. Vehicles rarely came up the mountain, so Ga peered down into the woods, hoping to catch sight of it through a break in the trees.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Ga said to her. “The truth is that the Dear Leader has an assignment for me, and when that’s over, I expect you won’t see me again.”

  He looked at her, to see if she’d registered what he’d said.

  “I’ve worked with the Dear Leader for many years,” she told him. “Twelve motion pictures. I wouldn’t be so sure about what he does or doesn’t have in mind.”

  The sound grew until the engine was unmistakable, a heavy diesel with a low grind in the gearing. From the house next door, Comrade Buc stepped out onto his balcony and stared down into the woods, but he didn’t need to spot the truck for a grim look to cross his face. He and Ga caught each other’s eyes in a long, wary glance.

  Comrade Buc called to them, “Come join us, there’s little time.”

  Then he went inside.

  “What is it?” Sun Moon asked.

  Ga said, “It’s a crow.”

  “What’s a crow?”

  At the railing, they waited for the truck to pass into a visible stretch of road. “There,” he said when the black canvas of its canopy flashed through the trees. “That’s a crow.” For a moment the two of them watched the truck slowly climb the switchbacks toward their house.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to get,” he said. “That’s the truck that takes you away.”

  In 33, he’d often fantasized about what he’d have grabbed from the aircraft hangar if he’d had even a minute’s notice that he was headed for a prison mine. A needle, a nail, a razor, what he wouldn’t have given for those things in prison. A simple piece of wire, and he’d have had a bird snare. A rubber band could have triggered a rat trap. How many times he longed for a spoon to eat with. But now he had other concerns.

  “You take the kids into the tunnel,” Ga said. “I’ll go and meet the truck.”

  Sun Moon turned to Ga with a look of horror on her face.

  “What’s happening?” she asked. “Where does that truck take you?”

  “Where do you think it takes you?” he asked. “There’s no time. Just take the kids down. It’s me they’re after.”

  “I’m not going down there alone,” she said. “I’ve never even been down there. You can’t abandon us in some hole.”

  Comrade Buc came onto his balcony again. He was buttoning his collar. “Come over,” he said and threw a black tie around his neck. “We are ready over here. Time is short, and you must join us.”

  Instead, Ga went to the kitchen and stood before the washtub on the floor. The washtub was fixed to a trapdoor that lifted to reveal the ladder down to the tunnel. Ga took a deep breath and descended. He tried not to think of the minehead of Prison 33, of entering the mine in darkness every morning and emerging from the mine in darkness each night.

  Sun Moon brought the boy and the girl. Ga helped them down and pulled a string that turned on the lightbulb. When it was Sun Moon’s turn at the ladder, he told her, “Get the guns.”

  “No,” she said. “No guns.”

  Ga helped her down, and then closed the trapdoor. Her husband had rigged a wire that pulled the pump handle, and in this way, Ga was able to fill the tub with a few liters of water to disguise the entrance.

  The four of them stood by the ladder a moment, their eyes unable to adjust as the bulb swung from its wire. Then Sun Moon said, “Come, children,” and took their hands. They began walking into the darkness, only to realize that, after just fifteen meters, barely enough to get beyond the house and the road out front, the tunnel came to an end.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Sun Moon asked. “Where’s the way out?”

  He walked a little into the darkness toward her, but stopped.

  “There’s no escape route?” she asked. “There’s no exit?” She came to him, her eyes wheeling in disbelief. “What have you been doing down here all these years?”

  Ga didn’t know what to say.

  “Years,” she said. “I thought there was a whole bunker down here. I thought there was a system. But this is just a hole. What have you been spending your time on?” Lining the tunnel were some bags of rice and a couple of barrels of grain, their U.N. seals still unbroken. “There’s not even a shovel down here,” she said. Midway into the tunnel was the sole furnishing, a padded chair and a bookcase filled with rice wine and DVDs. She grabbed one and turned to him. “Movies?” she asked. Ga could tell she would scream next.

  But then they all looked up—there was a vibration, the muted sound of a motor, and suddenly dirt loosened from the roof of the tunnel and fell into their faces. A sort of terror came over the children as they coughed and clutched their dirt-filled eyes. Ga walked them back toward the ladder and the light. He wiped their faces with the sleeve of his dobok. In the house above, they heard a door open, followed by footsteps crossing the wood floors, and suddenly the trapdoor was lifting. Sun Moon’s eyes went wide with shock, and she took hold of him. When Ga looked up, there was a bright square of light. In it appeared the face of Comrade Buc.

  “Please, neighbors,” Comrade Buc said. “This is the first place they’ll look.”

  He lowered a hand to Ga.

  “Don’t worry,” Comrade Buc said. “We’ll take you with us.”

  Commander Ga took the hand. “Let’s go,” he said to Sun Moon, and when she didn’t move, he yelled, “Now.” The little family snapped to and scrambled out of the tunnel. Together, they cut through the side yard and into Buc’s kitchen.

  Inside, Buc’s daughters sat around a table covered in white embroidery. Buc’s wife was pulling a white dress over the last daughter’s head while Comrade Buc brought extra chairs for the guests. Ga could tell that Sun Moon was at the edge of unraveling, but the calmness of Buc’s family wouldn’t allow her to do so.

  Ga and Sun Moon sat across from the Buc family, with the boy and the girl between them, the four of them dusted with dirt. In the center of the table was a can of peaches and the key to open it. They all ignored the crow idling out front. Comrade Buc passed a stack of glass dessert bowls around, and then he passed the spoons. Very carefully, he opened the peaches, so quietly you could hear the key punch and cut, punch and cut, the tin complaining as the key went around the rim in its jagged circle. Very carefully, Buc peeled back the tin lid with a spoon, so as not to come in contact with the syrup. The nine of them sat in silence looking at the peaches. Then a soldier entered the house. Under the table, the boy took Ga’s hand, and Ga gave the small hand a reassuring squeeze. When the soldier came to the table, no one moved. He had no chrome Kalashnikov, no weapon at all that
Ga could tell.

  Comrade Buc pretended not to see him. “All that matters is that we are together,” he said, then spooned a single slice of peach into a glass bowl. This he passed, and soon a circle of glass bowls, a single peach slice in each, was rounding the table.

  The soldier stood there a moment, watching.

  “I’m looking for Commander Ga,” he said. He seemed unwilling to believe that either of these men could be the famous Commander Ga.

  “I’m Commander Ga.”

  Outside, they could hear a winch operating.

  “This is for you,” the soldier said, and handed Ga an envelope. Inside was a car key and an invitation to a state dinner that evening upon which someone had handwritten, Would you do us the pleasure of your company?

  Outside, a classic Mustang, baby blue, was being lowered from the back of the crow. With a winch, the car crawled backward down two metal ramps. The Mustang was just like the classic cars he’d seen in Texas. He approached the car, ran a hand down its fender—though you couldn’t quite see it, there were dimples and troughs attesting to how the body had been fashioned from raw metal. The bumper wasn’t chrome, but plated in sterling silver, and the taillights were made from blown red glass. Ga stuck his head underneath the body—it was a web of improvised struts and welded mounts connecting a handmade body to a Mercedes engine and a Soviet Lada frame.

  Comrade Buc joined him by the car. He was clearly in a great mood, relieved, exuberant. “That went great in there,” he said. “I knew we wouldn’t need those peaches, I just had a feeling. It’s good for the kids though, dry runs like that. Practice is the key.”

  “What did we just practice?” Ga asked him.

  Buc just smiled with amazement and handed Ga an unopened can of peaches.

  “For your own rainy day,” Buc said. “I helped close down Fruit Factory 49 before they burned it. I got the last case on the canning line.” Buc was so impressed he shook his head. “It’s like no harm can come to you, my friend,” he said. “You’ve managed something I’ve never seen before, and I knew we’d be okay. I knew it.”