The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “There were some papers on the table,” my father said, his voice nervous.

  “They fell to the floor,” my mother said. “But we picked them up.”

  “It was an accident,” my father added.

  “Accidents happen,” I told them.

  “Those papers,” my mother said. “Were they work related?”

  “Yes,” Father said. “Were they part of a case you’re working on?”

  “Just research,” I said.

  “They must be important files if you brought them home,” my father said. “Is anyone in trouble? Perhaps someone we know?”

  “What’s going on here?” I asked. “Is it about Mrs. Kwok? Are you still mad at me for that? I didn’t want to turn her in. She was the one stealing coal from the furnace. In winter, we were all colder because of her selfishness.”

  “Don’t get mad,” my mother said. “We were just showing concern for the unlucky souls in your files.”

  “Unlucky?” I asked. “What makes you call them unlucky?”

  They both went silent. I turned toward the kitchen and looked at the can of peaches perched above the top cabinet. I had a feeling the can had been moved a little, inspected perhaps by this blind duo, but I couldn’t be sure of the direction I’d left the can facing.

  Slowly, I waved my mother’s file once before her eyes, yet she made no track of it. Then I fanned her with the file, so the breeze moved across her face, surprising her.

  My mother recoiled, inhaling with fright.

  “What is it?” my father asked her. “What happened?”

  She said nothing.

  “Can you see me, Mother?” I asked. “It’s important that I know if you can see me.”

  She faced my direction, though her eyes were focusless. “Can I see you?” she asked me. “I see you as I first saw you, in glimpses, through darkness.”

  “Spare me the riddles,” I warned her. “I have to know.”

  “You were born at night,” she said. “I labored all day, and when darkness fell, we had no candles. You came by feel into your father’s hands.”

  My father lifted his hands, scarred by mechanical looms. “These hands,” he said.

  “Such was the year Juche 62,” my mother said. “Such was life in a factory dormitory. Your father lit match after match.”

  “One after another, until they were gone,” my father said.

  “I touched every part of your body, at first to see if you were whole and then to know you. So new you were, so innocent—you could have become anyone. It took a while, until first light, that we got a look at what we had created.”

  “Were there other children?” I asked. “Was there another family?”

  My mother ignored this. “Our eyes do not work. That is the answer to your question. But then as now, we do not need sight to see what you have become.”

  ON SUNDAY, Commander Ga strolled with Sun Moon along the Chosun Relaxation Footpath, which followed the river to the Central Bus Terminal. In this public place, they thought they might not be overheard. Old people filled the benches, and because a new book had been published that month, young people lay in the grass reading copies of the novel All for Her Country. Commander Ga could smell the hot ink from the presses of the Rodong Sinmun, which, rumor had it, printed on Sunday afternoons all the newspaper editions for the week to come. Whenever Ga spotted a hungry-eyed urchin crouched in the bushes, he’d toss him a couple of coins. Sun Moon’s children seemed oblivious to these orphans hiding in their midst. The boy and the girl ate flavored ice and wandered through willows whose late-summer arms hung low enough to sweep the gravel path.

  Commander Ga and Sun Moon had been speaking in abstractions and half notions, dancing around the facts of the very real thing they had set in motion. He wanted to put a name to what they were doing, to call it escape, defection. He wanted to outline the steps, to memorize them and practice out loud how they would go. Like a script, he said. He asked her to say she understood that the worst could happen. She would speak of none of this. Instead, she remarked on the crunch of the gravel under her feet, of the groan of the river dredges as they bent their rusty booms below the surface. She stopped to smell an azalea as if it were the last azalea, and as she walked, she wove fine purple bracelets from wisteria. She wore a white cotton choson-ot that outlined her body with shifts in the breeze.

  “I want to tell the children before we leave,” he said.

  This, perhaps because it seemed so preposterous to her, moved her to speak.

  “Tell them what?” she asked. “That you killed their father? No, they’re going to grow up in America believing that their dad was a great hero whose remains rest in a faraway land.”

  “But they have to know,” he said, then was silent a moment as a brigade of soldiers’ mothers passed by, shaking their red cans to intimidate Songun donations from people. “Those kids have to hear it from me,” he went on. “The truth, an explanation—these are the most important things for them to hear. This is all I have to give them.”

  “But there will be time,” she said. “This decision can be made later, when we’re safe in America.”

  “No,” he told her. “It must be now.”

  Commander Ga looked back at the boy and the girl. They were watching this conversation, even though they were too far away to make out the words.

  “Is something wrong?” Sun Moon asked. “Does the Dear Leader suspect something?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, though the question conjured the Girl Who Rowed in the Dark and the notion that the Dear Leader might not relinquish her.

  Sun Moon stopped by a cement water barrel and lifted its wooden cover. She drew a ladle and drank, her hands cupping the silver dipper. Commander Ga watched a trickle of water darken the front of her choson-ot. He tried to imagine her with another man. If the Dear Leader didn’t let go of his Girl Rower, then the plan was off, the Americans would leave in outrage, and something bad would soon happen to Commander Ga. As for Sun Moon, she would become a prize once more, to whatever replacement husband was found. And what if the Dear Leader was right, what if over the years she came to love this new husband, real love, not the promise of love or the potential for love—could Commander Ga leave this world knowing her heart was destined for another?

  Sun Moon plunged the ladle deep into the barrel to get the cool water at the bottom before holding the dipper for Ga to drink. The water tasted mineral and fresh.

  He wiped his mouth. “Tell me,” he said to her. “Do you think it’s possible for a woman to fall in love with her captor?”

  She observed him a moment. He could tell she was looking for signs as to how to answer.

  He said, “It’s impossible, right? The idea is completely insane, don’t you think?” He saw in his mind a parade of all the people he’d captured, their wide eyes and abraded faces, the white of their lips when the duct tape was torn off. He saw those red toenails rearing to strike. “I mean, all they can have is contempt for you, for taking everything from them. Tell the truth, say there can be no such syndrome.”

  “Syndrome?” she asked.

  He looked over at the children, frozen in mid-stride. They often played a game to see which one could be the most statue-like.

  “The Dear Leader has read of a syndrome, and he believes that if he keeps a certain woman imprisoned long enough, she will come to love him.”

  “A certain woman?” Sun Moon asked.

  “It’s not important who she is,” he said. “All that matters is that she’s American. A delegation is coming for her, and if the Dear Leader doesn’t hand her over, our plan is ruined.”

  “You said she was a captive. What—is she in a cage or a prison? How long has this been going on?”

  “She’s in his private bunker. She was going around the world but had a problem on her boat. They plucked her out of the sea, and now the Dear Leader’s infatuated with her. He goes down there at night and plays her operas composed in hi
s honor. He wants to keep her down deep until she develops feelings for him. Have you ever heard of anything like this? Tell me there’s no such thing.”

  Sun Moon was quiet a moment. Then she said, “What if a woman had to sleep in the same bed as her captor?”

  Ga eyed her to see what she was getting at.

  Sun Moon said, “What if she depended on her captor for every necessity—food, cigarettes, clothes—and he could indulge or deprive her at his whim?”

  She looked at him as though she truly wanted an answer, but he could only wonder if she was speaking of himself or his predecessor.

  “What if a woman had children with her captor?”

  Ga took the ladle from her hands and drew water for the boy and the girl, but they were now assuming the poses of the hammer and sickle bearers on the frieze of the Party Foundation Monument, and even the heat of the day could not make them break from their personas.

  “That man is gone,” he said. “I’m here now. I’m not your captor. I’m liberating you. It’s easy to talk about prisoners, but I’m the one trying to get you to say the word ‘escape.’ That’s what the Dear Leader’s captive wants. She might be locked in a cell, but her heart is restless. She will leap at the chance to get out, trust me.”

  “You sound like you know her,” Sun Moon said.

  “There was a time,” he told her. “It seems like another life. I had a job transcribing radio transmissions on the sea. I listened from sunset to sunrise, and in the darkest hour, I’d hear her, the Girl Rower. She and her friend were rowing around the world, but this one, she was the one that rowed all night, without the horizon to steer toward or the sun to mark her progress. She was forever bound to the other rower, yet completely alone. She labored forward solely on duty, her body bowing to the oars, but her mind, the broadcasts she made, never had a woman sounded so free.”

  Sun Moon cocked her head and tried on those words. “Forever bound to another,” she whispered. “Yet totally alone,” she added in self-reflection.

  “Is that how you want to live?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you ready to talk about the plan?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just remember, forever bound yet alone—that could be a good thing. If for some reason we ended up separated, if somehow we didn’t get out together, we could be bound, even if we weren’t together.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “There will be no alone. That’s not how it’s going to go.”

  “What if something goes wrong, what if in getting the three of you out, I am left behind?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “There is going to be none of that. I need you. I don’t speak English, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know which Americans are informants and which are not. We’re not going around the world with just the clothes on our backs.”

  “Believe me—if something went wrong, I’d eventually join you. Somehow I’d make it. And you wouldn’t be alone. The Senator’s wife would help you until I made my way to you.”

  “I don’t need someone’s wife,” she told him. “I need you. It’s you I must have. You don’t understand what my life has been like, how I’ve been baited and tricked before.”

  “You must believe me that I’ll follow,” Ga said. “After you get safely out, I’ll be right behind you. I’ve been to South Korea twelve times in my life, Japan nine times, Russia twice, and I have seen the sun rise and set on Texas soil. I will join you.”

  “No, no, no,” she said. “You never do that to me, you never disappear on me. We all go together. Your job is to make that happen. Is it the Casablanca movie that’s got you confused?” Her voice was rising now. “You don’t stay behind like a martyr, like Rick. Rick failed at his job, his job was to …” She stopped herself before she became too upset. Instead, she gave him that voluptuous actress smile of hers. “You can’t leave me. I’m your captive,” she said. “What good’s a captive without her captor? Won’t we need a lot of time together if we’re to prove once and for all if the Dear Leader’s syndrome is true?”

  He could hear the lie in her voice. Her acting, he could recognize it now. But he saw the desperation and vulnerability underneath, and he loved her all the more for it.

  “Of course I am going with you,” Ga told her. “I’ll always be with you.”

  And then came the kiss. It started with the tilt of her head, her eyes flashing to his mouth, a hand slowly reaching to his collarbone, where it rested, and then she leaned in, the slowest lean in the world. He recognized the kiss. It was from Hold the Banner High!, the one she planted on the weak-minded South Korean border guard, distracting him while her band of freedom fighters cut the power to the sentry tower and began the liberation of South Korea from the hands of its capitalist oppressors. He’d dreamed of that kiss and now it was his.

  Into his ear, she whispered, “Let’s escape.”

  CITIZENS! Open your windows and cast your eyes upward, for a crow flies above Pyongyang, its raked beak twitching at every possible threat to the patriotic populace below. Hear the black wings beat, flinch at its sharp call. Observe this master of the air swooping into the schoolyards to sniff all the children for traces of cowardice, then dive, claws extended, to gauge the loyalty of the doves that adorn the statue of Kim Il Sung. Being the only animal with eyes sharp enough to spot virginity, witness our crow circle a Juche Youth Troop, and nod in approval as this illustrious avian performs an aerial inspection of their reproductive purity.

  But America’s what’s really on this crow’s mind. It’s not hunting chestnut thieves or peering in housing-block windows for the telltale paw-prints of illegal dog farming. No, citizens, the Americans have accepted the Dear Leader’s invitation to visit Pyongyang, the most glorious capital in the world. So the dark wings that protectively cast their shadow upon the fields of Arirang are hunting for any hint of capitalist sympathizers. One traitor is all it would take to disillusion a land so pure it knows nothing of materialist greed or war-crime sneak attacks. Luckily, citizens, no animal keeps its benevolent eye on the Korean people like the crow. It won’t let ours become a nation where people give names to canines, oppress others because of the color of their skin, and eat pharmaceutically sweetened pills to abort their babies.

  But why, you ask, does this crow circle the Chosun Relaxation Footpath? Isn’t this where our finest citizens come to stroll, where young people gather to wash the feet of the old and where on a hot day wet nurses volunteer their paps to refresh Pyongyang’s finest yangban babies? The keen-eyed crow is here, citizens, because it spotted a man tossing a shiny object into the bushes, where some scrambling orphans fought to obtain it. Not only does the giving of coins to orphans rob them of their self-respect and Juche Spirit, it violates a central rule of good citizenship: Practice Self-Sufficiency.

  Looking more closely, the crow noted that as this man spoke to a woman, he made certain gestures that were clear indicators of the discussion of a plan. Tomorrow is a concern of the state, citizens. Tomorrow is the business of your leaders, and you must leave what’s to come in their hands. So another rule of good citizenship had been violated: Refrain from the Future. It was then that this crow recognized the violator as Commander Ga, a man who had recently been observed disregarding all the rules of good citizenship: Devote Yourself Eternally to Our Glorious Leaders, Treasure Criticism, Obey Songun Policies, Pledge Yourself to Collective Child Rearing, and Conduct Regular Martyrdom Drills.

  It was here, spellbound by beauty, that the crow almost fell from the sky when it realized that the woman speaking to this loathsome citizen was none other than Sun Moon. Wings arresting a free fall, the bird dropped between our mismatched couple. There was a message in the crow’s beak, and when Commander Ga bent to retrieve it, the bird leaped high—Caw!—and lashed its wings at Ga’s face. The bird then turned to face Sun Moon. The note, she saw, was intended for her. When she unfolded the strip of paper, it bore only the name of our Dear
Leader Kim Jong Il.

  A black Mercedes suddenly appeared, and a man with a splint on his nose hurried to open the door for Sun Moon. She was on her way to visit the Great General who had discovered her, who had written all her movies, who had spent many a long night counseling her on the proper ways of depicting our nation’s triumphs over adversity. Great leader, diplomat, strategist, tactician, athlete, filmmaker, author, and poet—all this, and yes, Kim Jong Il was a friend, too.

  Passing through the streets of Pyongyang, Sun Moon leaned her head against the car window and regarded as if with sadness the rays of sunlight glowing golden in the millet-dusted air of the Central Ration Depot. It looked as though she might weep passing the Children’s Theater, where as a girl she had learned the accordion, the art of puppetry, and mass gymnastics. Whatever became of my old teachers? her eyes seemed to ask, and it was not without tears that she beheld the fanciful spires of the ice rink, one of the rare places her mother, ever mindful of American sneak attacks, would dare to venture. No one upon the ice in those days could do anything but cheer for young Sun Moon, her girl limbs flaring through the leaps, the joy on her face dazzling through a spray of her blades’ ice crystals. Poor Sun Moon! It was almost as if she knew she would never see these sights again, as if she had some kind of premonition of what the savage, remorseless Americans had in store for her. What woman wouldn’t weep all along Reunification Boulevard to think she’d never again see a street so clean, a ration line so perfectly straight, or hear again the crimson banners fluttering a thousand strong in a chain of red flags that extolled every word of Kim Il Sung’s great speech of October 18, Juche 63!

  Sun Moon was brought before the Dear Leader in a room that had been designed to put the visiting Americans at ease. Its muted lamps, dark mirrors, and wooden tables were reminiscent of an American “speakeasy,” which is a type of establishment that Americans frequent in order to evade the eyes of their repressive government. Behind the heavy doors of a speakeasy, Americans are free to abuse alcohol, fornicate, and violence each other.