The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  He paused, waiting to see if Sun Moon would encourage the story or not.

  When she didn’t speak, he went on. “Your husband had an electronic device. He went down the rows of men, pointing it at their chests. When held up to most men, the box was silent. But for some, it made a staticky sound. This was what happened to me, when he aimed the device at my lungs, it crackled. He asked me, What part of the mine do you work in? I told him the new tier, down in the subfloor. He asked me, Is it hot down there, or cold? I told him Hot.

  “Ga turned to the Warden. That’s enough proof, yes? From now on, all work will focus on that part of the mine. No more digging for nickel and tin.

  “Yes, Minister Ga, the Warden said.

  “It was only then that Commander Ga seemed to notice the tattoo on my chest. A disbelieving smile crossed his face. Where did you get that? he asked me.

  “At sea, I said.

  “He reached out and held my shoulder so that he could get a good look at the tattoo over my heart. I hadn’t bathed in almost a year, and I’ll never forget the look of his white, buffed fingernails against my skin. Do you know who I am? he asked. I nodded. Do you want to explain that tattoo to me?

  “All the choices that came to me seemed like bad ones. It’s pure patriotism, I finally said, toward our nation’s greatest treasure.

  “Ga took some pleasure in that answer. If you only knew, he told me. Then he turned to the Warden. Did you hear that? Ga asked him. I think I have discovered the only damn heterosexual in this whole prison.

  “Ga took a closer look at me. He lifted my arm and noticed the burn marks from my pain training. Yes, he said in recognition. Then he took hold of my other arm. He turned it so he could study the circle of scars. Intrigued, he said, Something happened here.

  “Then Commander Ga took a step back, and I could see his rear foot go light. I lifted my arm just in time to block a lightning-fast head kick. That’s what I was looking for, he said.

  “By resetting his teeth, Commander Ga made a piercing whistle, and we could see that on the other side of the prison gate, Ga’s driver opened the trunk to his Mercedes. The driver pulled something out of the trunk, and the guards opened the gate for him. He came our way, and whatever he had, it was extremely burdensome.

  “What’s your name? Ga asked me. Wait, I don’t need it. I’ll know you by this. He touched my chest with a lone finger. He said to me, Have you ever seen the Warden set foot in the mine?

  “I looked at the Warden, who glared at me. No, I told Commander Ga.

  “The driver came to us, carrying a large white stone. It must have weighed twenty-five kilos. Take it, Commander Ga told the Warden. Lift it up, so everyone can see it, and with much difficulty, the Warden worked the stone up to his shoulder, where it perched, bigger than his head. Commander Ga then pointed the detector at the stone, and we all heard the machine go wild, ticking with energy.

  “Commander Ga said to me, Look how it’s white and chalky. This rock is all we care about now. Have you seen some rock like it in the mine? I nodded. That made him smile. The scientists said this was the right kind of mountain, that this stuff should be down there. Now I know it is.

  “What is it? I asked him.

  “It’s the future of North Korea, he said. It’s our fist down the Yankees’ throat.

  “Ga turned to the Warden. This inmate is now my eyes and ears around this place, he said. I’ll be back in a month, and nothing will happen to him in the meantime. You’re to treat him how you’d treat me. Do you hear? Do you know what happened to the last warden of this prison? Do you know what I had done to him? The Warden said nothing.

  “Commander Ga handed me the electronic machine. I want to see a white mountain of this when I return, he said. And if the Warden sets this rock down before I get back, you’re to tell me. For nothing is he to let go of that rock, you hear? At dinner, that rock sits on his lap. When he sleeps, it rises and falls on his chest. When he takes a shit, the rock shits, too. Ga pushed the Warden, who stumbled to keep his balance under the load. Then Commander Ga made a fist—”

  “Stop,” Sun Moon said. “That’s him. I recognize my husband.”

  She was quiet a moment, as if digesting something. Then she turned to him in the bed, bridging the space between them. She lifted the sleeve of his nightshirt, fingered the ridges of the scars on his biceps. She put her hand flat on his chest, spreading her fingers across the cotton.

  “It’s here?” she asked. “Is this the tattoo?”

  “I’m not sure you want to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid it will frighten you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can show me.”

  He pulled off his shirt, and she leaned close to observe in the low light this portrait of herself, forever fixed in ink, a woman whose eyes still burned with self-sacrifice and national fervor. She studied the image as it rose and fell on his chest.

  “My husband. A month later he came back to the prison, yes?”

  “He did.”

  “And he tried to do something to you, something bad, didn’t he?”

  He nodded.

  She said, “But you were stronger.”

  He swallowed.

  “But I was stronger.”

  She reached to him, her palm coming lightly to rest on his tattoo. Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who’d quietly started weeping for reasons she didn’t understand?

  I ARRIVED home from Division 42 tonight to discover that my parents’ vision had become so bad that I had to inform them night had fallen. I helped them to their cots, placed side by side near the stove, and, once settled, they stared at the ceiling with their blank eyes. My father’s eyes have gone white, but my mother’s are clear and expressive, and I sometimes suspect that maybe her vision isn’t as ruined as his. I lit a bedtime cigarette for my father. He smokes Konsols—that’s the kind of man he is.

  “Mother, Father,” I said. “I have to go out for a while.”

  My father said, “May the everlasting wisdom of Kim Jong Il guide you.”

  “Obey the curfew,” my mother said.

  I had Comrade Buc’s wedding ring in my pocket.

  “Mother,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “How come you never found a bride for me?”

  “Our first duty is to country,” she said. “Then to leaders, then to—”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Then to Party, then to the Charter of the Workers’ Assembly, and so on. But I was in the Youth Brigade, I studied Juche Idea at Kim Il Sung University. I did my duty. It’s just that I have no wife.”

  “You sound troubled,” my father said. “Have you spoken to our housing block’s Songun advisor?” I saw the fingers twitch on his right hand. When I was a boy, one of his gestures was to reach out with that hand to ruffle my hair. That’s how he would reassure me when neighbors went away or we witnessed MPSS men pulling citizens off the subway. So I knew he was still in there, that despite the distemper of his patriotism, my father was still my father, even if he felt the need to hide his true self from everyone, even me. I blew out the candle.

  When I left, though, when I stepped out into the hall and closed the door and turned the lock, I didn’t walk away. Quietly, I placed my ear to the door and listened. I wanted to know if they could be themselves, if they could let down their guard when they were finally alone in a dark and silent room and could speak as husband and wife. I stood like that a long time, but heard nothing.

  Outside on Sinuiju Street, even in the dark, I could see that troops of Juche girls had chalked the sidewalks and walls with revolutionary slogans. I heard a rumor that one night an entire troop fell into an unmarked construction pit on Tongol Road, but who knows if that’s true. I headed for the Ragwon-dong district, where long ago the Japanese built slums to house the most defiant Koreans. That’s where there’s an
illegal night market at the base of the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel. Even in the darkness, the outline of the hotel’s rocket-shaped tower stands black against the stars. As I crossed the Palgol Bridge, pipes were dumping sewage from the backs of pastel housing blocks. Like gray lily pads, shit-streaked pages of the Rodong Sinmun newspaper slowly spread across the water.

  The deals take place around the rusted elevator shafts. Guys on the ground floor arrange terms and then yell up the shaft to cohorts who deliver the goods—medicines, ration books, electronics, travel passes—with buckets on ropes. A few guys didn’t like the looks of me, but one was willing to talk. He was young, and his ear had been notched by MPSS agents who’d picked him up for pirating before. I handed him Commander Ga’s phone.

  Real quick, he opened the back, pulled the battery, licked its contacts, then checked the number on the internal card. “This is good,” he said. “What do you want for it?”

  “We’re not selling it. We need a charger for it.”

  “We?”

  “Me,” I said. I showed him Comrade Buc’s ring.

  He laughed at the ring. “Unless you’re selling the phone, get out of here.”

  Several years ago, after an April Fifteenth ceremony, the whole Pubyok team got drunk, and I took the opportunity to lift one of their badges. It came in handy every now and then. I pulled it out now and let it gleam in the dark. “We need a phone charger,” I said. “You want your other ear notched?”

  “Little young to be a Pubyok, aren’t you?”

  The kid was half my age.

  With my authority voice, I said, “Times change.”

  “If you were Pubyok,” he said, “my arm would already be broke.”

  “Pick the arm, and I’ll oblige,” I said, but even I didn’t believe me.

  “Let me see this,” he said and took the badge. He studied its image of a floating wall, felt the weight of the silver, ran his thumb against the leather backing. “Okay, Pubyok,” he said. “I’ll get your phone charger, but keep the ring.” He flashed the badge at me. “I trade for this.”

  The next morning, a pair of dump trucks pulled up and offloaded mounds of dirt on the sidewalks outside the Glory of Mount Paektu Housing Block, 29 Sinuiju Street. My work at Division 42 usually got me out of tasks like this, but not this time, the housing committee manager told me. Grass into Meat was a citywide campaign, it was out of his hands. The manager was generally leery of me because I’d had a few of the tenants sent away, and he thought I lived on the top floor out of paranoia, rather than to protect my parents from some of the building’s bad influences.

  I found myself in a two-day human chain that moved buckets and jerry cans and shopping bags filled with earth up the stairwell to the roof. Sometimes there was a voice in my head that narrated events as they unfolded, as if it were writing my biography as I was living it, as if the audience for such a life’s story was only me. But I rarely got the chance to put this voice to paper—by the end of the second day, when I got down to the first floor and found myself last in line to bathe in what was now cold, gray water, the voice had vanished.

  For my parents, I cooked spicy turnips with some mushrooms that an old widow on the second floor grew in kimchi jars. The power was spotty, so it seemed as though the amber light on the phone charger would never switch to green. My mother informed me that on the golf course, with the Foreign Minister of Burundi, Kim Jong Il had shot eleven holes in one. News of all the poverty in South Korea had my father depressed. The loudspeaker had broadcast a big story about starvation down there. The Dear Leader is sending them aid, he told me. I hope they can hang on until reunification. The mushrooms made my urine rusty pink.

  Now that the roof was covered with twenty centimeters of soil, all I could think about was getting back to Division 42 to see if Commander Ga was on the road to recovery.

  “Not so fast,” my housing-block manager told me the next morning. He pointed off the edge of the roof to a truck full of goats below. Because my parents were infirm, I’d have to do their share. Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University. Instead, we carried them over our shoulders, holding their legs out in front like handles. They’d fight like mad for about ten floors, but then succumb to the darkness of the cement stairwell and finally lower their heads in closed-eyed resignation. Even though the goats appeared to be in a state of total submission, I could tell they were alert and alive because of what you couldn’t see, what you could only feel against the back of your neck: their fast little hearts, fluttering like mad.

  It would take weeks for the grass to grow, so a team was formed to make daily missions to Mansu Park to gather foliage for the goats to eat. The manager knew not to push his luck with me. We watched the goats warily circle the roof. One of the little ones got boxed against the ledge and was squeezed off. It was vocal all the way down, but the rest of the goats acted as if it never happened.

  I skipped my bath so I could race to the Yanggakdo market. It was shameful how little I got for Comrade Buc’s ring. It seemed that everyone had a wedding ring for sale. Reeking of goat, I rode the subway home with a summer squash, some dried squid, a paper bag filled with Chinese peanuts, and a five-kilo sack of rice. You can’t help but notice how people on the metro have a way of giving you the stink-eye without even glancing your way.

  I made a feast for my parents, and we were all in high spirits. I lit a second candle for the occasion. In the middle of dinner, the amber light on the charger turned green. I guess I’d imagined standing on the roof under the stars when I placed my first call with Commander Ga’s phone, like I’d behold the whole universe as I first employed a device that could reach any person on earth. Instead, I toyed with it while we ate, scrolling through the menus. The phone used the Roman alphabet, but I was only looking for numbers, and there was no record of calls coming in or going out.

  My father heard the tones that the buttons made. “Have you got something there?” he asked.

  “No,” I told him.

  For a moment, it felt as though my mother glanced at the phone, but when I looked, she was staring straight ahead savoring the fluffy white rice—ration cards for rice had stopped months ago, and we’d been living a long time on millet. They used to ask where I got the money for black-market food, but they don’t anymore. I leaned toward my mother. I held the phone up and slowly passed it back and forth before her eyes. If she perceived the phone, she showed no sign.

  I returned to the keypad. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anyone’s phone number—I didn’t—it was that only at this moment did I realize I had no one to call. There wasn’t a woman, a colleague, or even a relative that I had to contact. Didn’t I have a single friend?

  “Father,” I said. He was eating the salty peanuts toasted with chilies that he loved. “Father, if you were to contact someone, anyone, who would it be?”

  “Why would I contact anyone?” he asked. “I have no need.”

  “It’s not need,” I said. “It’s want, like you’d want to call a friend or a relative.”

  “Our Party comrades fulfill all our needs,” my mother said.

  “What about your aunt?” I asked my father. “Don’t you have an aunt in the South?”

  My father’s face was blank, expressionless. “We have no ties to that corrupt and capitalist nation,” he said.

  “We denounce her,” my mother said.

  “Hey, I’m not asking as a state interrogator,” I told them. “I’m your son. This is just family talk.”

  They ate in silence. I returned to the phone, moving through its functions, all of which seemed disabled. I dialed a couple of random numbers, but the phone wouldn’t connect to the network, even though I could see the cellular tower from our window. I turned the volume up and down, but the ringer wouldn’t sound. I tried to employ the little camera feature, but it refused to snap a photo. It looked like I would be selling the thing after all. Still, it irked me that I couldn�
��t think of one person to call. I went through a mental list of all my professors, but my two favorites got sent to labor camps—it really hurt to add my signature to their writ of sedition, but I had a duty, I was already an intern at Division 42 by then.

  “Hey, wait, I remember,” I said. “When I was a boy, there was a couple. They’d come over and the four of you would play cards late into the night. Aren’t you curious what happened to them? Wouldn’t you contact them if you could?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve heard of these people,” my father said.

  “I’m sure of it,” I told him. “I remember them clearly.”

  “No,” he said. “You must be mistaken.”

  “Father, it’s me. There’s no one else in the room. No one is listening.”

  “Stop this dangerous talk,” my mother said. “We met with no one.”

  “I’m not saying you met with anyone. The four of you would play cards after the factory closed. You would laugh and drink shoju.” I reached to take my father’s hand, but the touch surprised him, and he recoiled. “Father, it’s me, your son. Take my hand.”

  “Do not question our loyalties,” my father said. “Is this a test?” he asked me. He looked white-eyed around the room. “Are we being tested?” he asked the air.

  There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family. I was eight when my father had this talk with me. We were under a tree on Moranbong Hill. He told me that there was a path set out for us. On it we had to do everything the signs commanded and heed all the announcements along the way. Even if we walked this path side by side, he said, we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands. On Sundays the factories were closed so the air was clear, and I could imagine this path ahead stretching across the Taedong Valley, a path lined with willows and vaulted by singular white clouds moving as a group. We ate berry-flavored ices and listened to the sounds of old men at their chang-gi boards and slapping cards in a spirited game of go-stop. Soon my thoughts were of toy sailboats, like the ones the yangban kids were playing with at the pond. But my father was still walking me down that path.