The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Then he tended to Sun Moon, helping her to the balcony for some fresh air.

  The lights of the city below were glowing beyond their usual hour.

  She leaned against the rail, turning her back to him. It was quiet, and they could hear the children through the wall as they made rocket noises and gave the dog its launch instructions.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “I just need a cigarette, that’s all,” she said.

  “Because you don’t have to go through with it, you can back out and nobody will ever know.”

  “Just light it for me,” she said.

  He cupped his hand and lit the cigarette, inhaling.

  “You’re having second thoughts,” he said. “That’s natural. Soldiers have them before every mission. Your husband probably had them all the time.”

  She glanced at him. “My husband never had a second thought about anything.”

  When he extended the cigarette to her, she looked at the way he held it in his fingers and turned again to face the city lights. “You smoke like a yangban now,” she said. “I like the way you used to smoke, when you were still a boy from nowhere.”

  He reached to her, pulling her hair aside so he could see her face.

  “I’ll always be a boy from nowhere,” he told her.

  She shook her hair back in place, then reached for her cigarette, the V of her fingers indicating where it should be placed.

  He took her by the arm, turned her to him.

  “You can’t touch me,” she said. “You know the rules.”

  She tried to pull loose, but he didn’t let her.

  “Rules?” he asked. “Come tomorrow, we’ll have broken every rule there is.”

  “Well, tomorrow’s not here yet.”

  “It’s on its way,” he told her. “Sixteen hours, that’s how long the flight is from Texas. Tomorrow’s in the air right now, circling the world to us.”

  She took the cigarette. “I know what you’re after,” she said. “I know what you want with your talk of tomorrow. But there’ll be plenty of time, a forever’s worth. Don’t lose focus on what we have to do. So much has to go right before that plane takes off with us.”

  He held his grip on her arm. “What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?”

  “Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

  He let go of her, and she turned to the rail, smoking now. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights of Pyongyang extinguished themselves. As the landscape blacked out, it became easier to see the headlights of a vehicle that was climbing the switchbacks of the mountain toward them.

  “You want me?” she eventually said. “You don’t even know me.”

  He lit his own cigarette. The lights of the May Day Stadium had stayed on, along with the Central Cinema Studio north of town, on the road to the airport. Other than that, the world had gone dark.

  “Your hand reaches for mine when you sleep,” he said. “I know that.”

  Sun Moon’s cigarette burned red as she inhaled.

  “I know that you sleep curled up tight,” he added, “that whether you’re a yangban or not, you didn’t grow up with a bed. You probably slept as a child on a small cot, and though you’ve never spoken of siblings, you probably reached out to touch the brother or sister asleep in the next one.”

  Sun Moon stared ahead, as if she hadn’t heard him. In the silence, he could just make out the sound of the car below, but couldn’t guess at what kind. He checked to see if Comrade Buc had heard the car and was on his balcony, but the house next door was dark.

  Commander Ga went on, “I know you pretended to be asleep one morning to give me more time to study you, to allow me to see the knot in your collarbone where someone had hurt you. You let me see the scars on your knees, scars that tell me you once knew real work. You wanted me to know the real you.”

  “I got those from dancing,” she said.

  “I’ve seen all your movies,” he said.

  “I’m not my movies,” she snapped at him.

  “I’ve seen all your movies,” he went on, “and in all of them, you hair is the same—straight, covering your ears. And yet by pretending to be asleep …” Here he reached into her hair again, fingers finding her earlobe. “… you let me see where your ear had been notched. Did an MPSS agent catch you stealing from a market stall, or were you picked up for begging?”

  “Enough,” she said.

  “You’d tasted a flower before, hadn’t you?”

  “I said stop it.”

  He reached to the small of her back, pulling her till their bodies touched. He threw her cigarette over the balcony, then he held his to her lips so she would understand that they would now share and that each inhale would come from him.

  Their faces were close. She looked up, into his eyes. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she said. “Now that my mother, now that she’s gone, only one person knows who I really am. And it’s not you.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband. What happened to him, what I did—I had no choice. You know that.”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m not talking about him. He didn’t know himself, let alone me.”

  He placed a hand on her cheek and stared into her eyes. “Who, then?”

  A black Mercedes pulled up, parking to the side of the house. Sun Moon glanced over at the driver, who stepped out to hold the door open for her. The driver no longer wore a bandage, but the bend in his nose would be there forever.

  “Our real problem has arrived,” she said. “The man who knows me, he wants me back.”

  She went into the house and retrieved the chang-gi board.

  “Don’t tell the children anything,” she said, and then Ga watched her climb into the car, her face impassive, as if such a car had come for her many times before. Slowly the car backed out, and as its tires shifted from grass to gravel, he heard the grab of the road and knew that the ultimate had been taken from him.

  The Orphan Master had bent his fingers back and removed food from his very hand. And the other boys at Long Tomorrows, as they died in turn, stole from him the notion that your shoulder should be turned against death, that death shouldn’t be treated as just another latrine mate, or the annoying figure in the bunk above who whistled in his sleep. At first, the tunnels had given him nothing but terror, but after a while, they began to take it away until suddenly gone was his fear, and with it inclinations toward self-preservation. Kidnapping had reduced everything to either death or life. And the mines of Prison 33 had drained, like so many bags of blood, his ability to tell the difference. Perhaps only his mother had taken something grander by depositing him at Long Tomorrows, but this was only speculation, because he’d never found the mark it had left … unless the mark was all of him.

  And yet, what had prepared him for this, for the Dear Leader tugging at the string that would finally unravel him? When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose. Sun Moon had told him that. And here it was. To what bunker would she be taken? With what light-hearted stories would she be regaled? What elixir would they sip while the Dear Leader readied himself for more serious amusement?

  Beside him, Ga suddenly noticed, were the children, barefoot on the wet grass. The dog was between them, a cape around its neck.

  “Where did she go?” the boy asked him.

  Ga turned to the two of them.

  “Has a car ever come for your mother at night?” he asked.

  The girl stared straight ahead at the dark road.

  He crouched down, so he was at their level.

  “The time has come to tell you a serious story,” he told them.

  He turned them back toward the light of their home.

  “You two climb into bed. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Then he turned to face Comrade Buc’s house. He had to find a few answer
s first.

  Commander Ga entered through the side door. In Buc’s kitchen, he struck a match. The chopping table was clean, the washing tub empty and upturned for the night. He could still smell fermented beans. He moved to the dining room, which felt heavy and dark. With his thumbnail, he sparked another match and here loomed old furniture, portraits on the wall, military regalia, and the family celadon, all things he hadn’t noticed when they’d sat around the table and passed bowls of peaches. Sun Moon’s home contained none of these things. On Buc’s wall hung a rack of long, thin smoking pipes that formed a history of the family’s male ancestry. Ga had always thought it was random, who lived and died, who was rich or poor, but it was clear these people’s lineage went back to the Joseon Court, that they were descended from ambassadors and scholars and people who’d fought the guerrilla war alongside Kim Il Sung. It wasn’t luck that nobodies lived in army barracks while somebodies lived in homes on the tops of mountains.

  He heard a mechanical sound in the next room, and here he found Comrade Buc’s wife pumping the foot pedal of a sewing machine as she stitched a white dress by candlelight.

  “Yoon has outgrown her dress,” she said, then inspected the seam she’d just sewn by passing the candle down its length. “I suppose you’re looking for my husband.”

  He noted her calm, the kind that came from befriending the unknown.

  “Is he here?”

  “The Americans are coming tomorrow,” she said. “All week he has been working late, preparing the final details of your plan to welcome them.”

  “It’s the Dear Leader’s plan,” he said. “Did you hear a car arrive? It took Sun Moon away.”

  Comrade Buc’s wife turned the dress inside-out to inspect it again. “Yoon’s dress will now go to Jia,” she said. “Jia’s dress will soon fit Hye-Kyo and Hye-Kyo’s will wait for Su-Kee, who barely seems to grow.” She started working the pedal again. “Soon, I’ll be able to fold up another one of Su-Kee’s dresses and put it away. That’s how I mark our life. When I’m old, it’s what I hope to leave behind—a chain of unworn white dresses.”

  “Is Comrade Buc with the Dear Leader? Do you know where they might be? I have a car, if I knew where she was I could—”

  “We don’t tell each other anything,” she said. “That’s how we keep the family safe. That’s how we protect one another.” She snipped a thread, then turned the dress under the needle. “My husband says I shouldn’t worry, that you made a promise to him, that because of your word, none of us is in danger. Is this true, did you give him your promise?”

  “I did.”

  She looked at him, nodded. “Still, it’s hard to know what the future holds. This machine was a bridal gift. I didn’t imagine making this kind of garment back when I took my vows.”

  “When it’s time, when that comes,” he said, “does it matter what you’re wearing?”

  “I used to have my sewing machine in the window,” she said, “so I could look out upon the river. When I was a girl, we used to catch turtles in the Taedong and release them with political slogans painted on their backs. We used to net fish and deliver them each evening to the war veterans. All the trees they now chop down? We planted them. We believed we were the luckiest people in the luckiest nation. Now all the turtles have been eaten and in place of fish there are only river eels. It has become an animal world. My girls will not go as animals.”

  Ga wanted to tell her that in Chongjin, there was no such thing as the good old days. Instead, he said, “In America, the women have a kind of sewing in which a story is told. Different kinds of fabric are sewn together to say something about a person’s life.”

  Comrade Buc’s wife took her foot off the pedal.

  “And what story would that be?” she asked him. “The one about a man who comes to town to destroy everything you have? Where would I find the fabric to tell of how he kills your neighbor, takes his place, and gets your husband caught up in a game that will cost you everything?”

  “It’s late,” Commander Ga told her. “I apologize for bothering you.”

  He turned to go, but at the door, she stopped him.

  “Did Sun Moon take anything with her?” she asked.

  “A chang-gi board.”

  Comrade Buc’s wife nodded. “At night,” she said, “that’s when the Dear Leader seeks inspiration.”

  Ga took a last look at the white fabric and thought of the girl who would wear it.

  “What do you tell them?” he asked. “When you pull the dresses over their heads? Do they know the truth, that you’re practicing for the end?”

  She left her eyes on him a moment. “I would never steal the future from them,” she said. “That’s the last thing I want. When I was Yoon’s age, ice cream used to be free in Mansu Park on Sundays. I would go there with my parents. Now the ice-cream van snatches children and sends them to 9-27 camps. Kids shouldn’t have to contemplate that. To keep my girls away from the van, I boast that peaches are the best dessert, that we have the last canned peaches in Pyongyang and that someday, when the Buc family is at its absolute happiest, we’ll have a feast of peaches that will taste better than all the ice cream in Korea.”

  Brando raised his head when Ga entered the bedroom. The dog no longer wore a cape. The boy and the girl were at the foot of the bed, worry on their faces. Ga sat on the floor beside them.

  Above, on the mantel, was the can of peaches he would take with him tomorrow. How in the world to tell them what he had to tell them? He decided to just take a breath and begin.

  “Sometimes people hurt other people,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate fact.”

  The children stared at him.

  “Some people hurt others for a living. No one takes pleasure from it. Well, most don’t. The story I have to tell is about what happens when two of these people, these men who hurt others, meet.”

  “Are you talking about taekwondo?” the boy asked.

  Ga had to find a way to explain to them how it was he’d killed their father, ugly as that would be. If they left for America believing the lie that their father was still alive, that he loomed as large as the propaganda about him, then, in the children’s memory, that’s who he would become. He’d turn to bronze and bear little resemblance to the real man. Without the truth, he’d be just another famous name, so much chiseling at the base of a statue. Here was the one chance to know who their father really was, a chance Ga never got himself. It was the same with their home—without learning of the hidden DVDs, the contents of the laptop, the meaning of the blue flashes at night, their house on Mount Taesong would turn to watercolor in their memories, becoming as staged as a picture postcard. And if they didn’t know his true role in their lives, he himself would become in their recollections nothing more than a guest who came to stay for some foggy reason, for some vague length of time.

  Yet he didn’t want to hurt them. And he didn’t want to go against Sun Moon’s wishes. Most of all, he didn’t want to put them in danger by changing how they might behave tomorrow. If only he could reveal the truth to them in the future, to somehow have a conversation with their older selves. What he needed was a bottle with a message inside that they’d only be able to decipher years from now.

  The girl spoke. “Did you find out about our mother?” she asked.

  “Your mother is with the Dear Leader,” he told them. “I’m sure she’s safe and will be home soon.”

  “Maybe they’re meeting about a movie,” the girl said.

  “Maybe,” Ga said.

  “I hope not,” the boy said. “If she makes a new movie, we’ll have to go back to school.”

  “I want to go back to school,” the girl said. “I had perfect marks in Social Theory. Do you want to hear Kim Jong Il’s speech from April Fifteenth, Juche 86?”

  “If your mother goes on location,” Ga asked, “who will watch you?”

  “One of our father’s flunkies,” the girl said. “No offense.”

  “Your father,” Ga said.
“That’s the first I’ve heard you speak of him.”

  “He’s on a mission,” the girl said.

  “Those are secret,” the boy added. “He goes on lots.”

  After a silence, the girl spoke up. “You said you’d tell us a story.”

  Commander Ga took a breath. “To understand the story I’m about to tell you, you need to know a few things. Have you heard of an incursion tunnel?”

  “An incursion tunnel?” the girl asked, a look of distaste on her face.

  Ga said, “What about uranium ore?”

  “Tell us another dog story,” the boy said.

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “This time make him go to America, where he eats food out of a can.”

  “And bring back those scientists,” the boy added.

  Commander Ga thought about it a moment. He wondered if he couldn’t tell a story that seemed natural enough to them now, but upon later consideration might contain the kind of message he was looking for.

  “A team of scientists was ordered to find two dogs,” he began. “One must be the smartest dog in North Korea, the other the bravest. These two dogs would be sent on a top-secret mission together. The scientists went to all the dog farms in the land, and then they inspected canine warrens in all the prisons and military bases. First the dogs were asked to work an abacus with their paws. Then they had to fight a bear. When all the dogs had failed the tests, the scientists sat on the curb, heads in their hands, afraid to tell the ministers.”

  “But they hadn’t checked Brando,” the boy said.

  At the mention of his name, Brando twitched in his sleep but did not wake.

  “That’s right,” Commander Ga said. “Just then, Brando happened to be walking down the street with a chamber pot stuck on his head.”

  Peals of laughter came from the boy, and even the girl showed a smile. Suddenly, Ga saw a better use for the story, one that would help them now, rather than later. If in the story he could get the dog to America by stowing itself in a barrel being loaded onto an American plane, he could implant in the children basic instructions for the escape tomorrow—how to enter the barrels, how to be quiet, what kind of movement to expect, and how long they should wait before calling to be let out.