The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Petulance crossed the Dear Leader’s face. To Sun Moon, he said, “And yet last night you pleaded for the safety of this man—an orphan, a kidnapper, a tunnel assassin.”

  Sun Moon turned and stared at Commander Ga.

  The Dear Leader took her attention back with his voice. “Last night, I had a roster of gifts and delights prepared for you, I canceled an opera for you, and you thanked me by begging on his behalf? No, do not pretend a dislike of imposters.”

  The Dear Leader looked away from her, and Sun Moon followed his face, desperate to get him to lock eyes with her. “It is you who made him my husband,” she said. “It is because of you that I treat him so.” When he finally looked at her, she said, “And it is you who can unmake it.”

  “No, I never gave you away. You were taken from me,” the Dear Leader said. “In my own opera house, Commander Ga refused to bow. Then he named you as his prize. In front of everyone, he called your name.”

  “That was years ago,” Sun Moon said.

  “He called for you and you answered, you stood and you went with him.”

  Sun Moon said, “The man you speak of is dead now. He’s gone.”

  “And yet you don’t return to me.”

  The Dear Leader stared at Sun Moon to let that sink in.

  “Why do we play these games?” she asked. “I’m right here, the only breath-drawing woman on earth worthy of you. You know that. You make my story a happy one. You were there at the start of it. And you are the end of it.”

  The Dear Leader turned to her, ready to listen more, doubt still in his eyes.

  “And of the Girl Rower?” he asked. “What do you propose for her?”

  “Hand me a knife,” Sun Moon said. “And let me prove my loyalty.”

  The Dear Leader’s eyes went wide with delight.

  “Withdraw your fangs, my mountain tiger!” he declared. He stared into her eyes. More quietly, he said, “My beautiful mountain tiger.” Then he turned to Commander Ga. “That’s quite a wife you have,” he said. “Outside, peaceful as the snows of Mount Paektu. Inside, she’s coiled like a rock mamushi, sensing the imperial heel.”

  The Senator with his entourage presented himself. Bowing slightly to the Dear Leader, he said, “Mr. General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.”

  The Dear Leader responded in kind: “The Honorable Senator of the democratic state of Texas.”

  Here, Commander Park came forward, shuttling several young gymnasts before him. Each child carried a tray bearing a glass of water.

  “Come, it is a warm day,” the Dear Leader said. “You must refresh yourselves. Nothing invigorates like the restorative waters of the sweet Taedong.”

  “The most medicinal river in the world,” Park said.

  One of the children raised a glass to the Senator, who had been staring at the sight of Commander Park, at the way the sweat beaded on his face, then ran diagonally along the ridges of his scars. The Senator took the glass. The water had a cloudy, jade tint.

  “I’m sorry for the location,” the Senator said, taking a tiny sip before returning the glass. “The pilot feared the plane was too heavy for the tarmac near the terminal. Apologies, too, for circling so long. We kept calling the control tower for landing instructions, but we couldn’t raise them on the radio.”

  “Early, late, here, there,” the Dear Leader said. “These words have no meaning among friends.”

  Commander Ga translated for the Dear Leader, adding his own words at the end: “Were Dr. Song here, he would remind us that it is the American airports that impose control, while all are at liberty to land in North Korea. He would ask if that wasn’t the more democratic transportation system.”

  The Senator smiled at this. “If it isn’t our old acquaintance Commander Ga, Minister of Prison Mines, master of taekwondo.”

  A wry smile crossed the Dear Leader’s face.

  To Ga, he said, “You and the Americans look like old friends.”

  “Tell me,” Wanda said. “Where is our friend Dr. Song?”

  Ga turned to the Dear Leader. “They ask after Dr. Song.”

  In broken English, the Dear Leader said, “Song-ssi have become longer no.”

  The Americans nodded with respect that the Dear Leader would respond personally with the sad news and that he would do so in the language of his guests. The Senator and the Dear Leader began speaking quickly of national relations and the importance of diplomacy and bright futures, and it was difficult for Ga to translate fast enough. He could see Wanda staring at Sun Moon, at her perfect skin in a perfectly white choson-ot, the jeogori of which was so fine it seemed to glow from within, all while Wanda herself wore the woolen suit of a man.

  When all were smiles, Tommy intervened and addressed the Dear Leader in Korean. “From the people of the United States,” he said, “we offer a gift—a pen of peace.”

  The Senator presented the pen to the Dear Leader, adding his hopes that a lasting accord would soon be signed with it. The Dear Leader accepted the pen with great fanfare, then clapped his hands for Commander Park.

  “We offer a gift as well,” the Dear Leader said. “We, too, have a gift of peace,” Ga translated.

  Commander Park advanced with a pair of rhinoceros-horn bookends, and Ga understood that the Dear Leader wasn’t here to toy with the Americans today. He meant to inflict pain.

  Tommy advanced to intercept the gift while the Senator himself pretended not to see it.

  “Perhaps,” the Senator said, “it is time to discuss the matter at hand.”

  “Nonsense,” the Dear Leader said. “Come, let us rejuvenate our relations over music and food. Many surprises lie ahead.”

  “We’re here for Allison Jensen,” the Senator said.

  The Dear Leader bristled at the name. “You’ve been flying for sixteen hours. A lifting of the spirits is in order. What person has too little time for children’s accordions?”

  “We met with Allison’s parents before we left,” Tommy said in Korean. “They’re quite worried for her. Before we proceed, we’ll need assurances, we’ll need to speak to our citizen.”

  “Your citizen?” the Dear Leader snapped. “First you will return what was stolen from me. Then we will discuss the girl.”

  Tommy translated. The Senator shook his head no.

  “Our nation rescued her from certain death in our waters,” the Dear Leader said. “Your nation trespassed into our waters, illegally boarded our ship, and stole from me. I get back what you thieved before you get back what I saved.” He waved his hand. “Now for entertainment.”

  A troupe of child accordion stars raced forward, and with expert precision, began playing “Our Father Is the Marshal.” Their smiles were uniform, and the crowd knew the moments to clap and shout “Eternal is the Marshal’s flame.”

  Sun Moon, her own children behind her, was glued to the little accordionists, all working in perfect unison, their whole being contorted to project glee. Silently, she began to weep.

  The Dear Leader took note of her tears, and the fact that she was once again vulnerable. He signaled to Commander Ga that it was time to prepare for Sun Moon’s song.

  Ga led her past the crowds to the edge of the runway, where there was nothing but grass, strewn with rusted airplane parts, all the way to the electric fence that surrounded the airfield.

  Slowly, Sun Moon turned, taking in the nothingness around them.

  “What have you gotten us into?” she asked. “How are we going to get out of this alive?”

  “Calm,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

  “What if he hands me a knife, what if it’s some kind of loyalty test?” Then her eyes went wide. “What if I’m given a knife and it’s not a test?”

  “The Dear Leader’s not going to ask you to kill an American, in front of a senator.”

  “You still don’t know him,” she said. “I’ve seen him do things, before my eyes, at parties, to friends, to enemies. It doesn’t matter. He can
do anything, anything he wants.”

  “Not today. Today, we’re the ones who can do anything.”

  She laughed a scared, nervous laugh. “It sounds good when you say things like that. I really want to believe them.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Did you really do those things?” she asked. “Did you really hurt people, kidnap them?”

  Commander Ga smiled. “Hey, I’m the good guy in this story.”

  She laughed in disbelief. “You’re the good guy?”

  Ga nodded. “Believe it or not, the hero is me.”

  And here they saw, nearing them at only a couple of kilometers an hour, Comrade Buc atop a low-belly hoist made for lifting aircraft engines. Suspended from its chains was Sun Moon’s changing station.

  “I needed a bigger machine,” Buc called to them. “We spent all night building this thing. No way I was leaving it behind.”

  When the temple was dropped, the wood shuddered and groaned, but Sun Moon’s silver key turned in the lock. The three of them stepped inside, and Buc showed them how the back wall of the changing station opened on a hinge, like a corral gate, big enough to allow the blades of a forklift to enter.

  Sun Moon reached to Comrade Buc. With her fingertips, she touched his face and stared into his eyes. It was her way of saying thanks. Or maybe it was good-bye. Buc held her gaze as long as he could, then turned and ran toward his forklift.

  Sun Moon changed before her husband without shame, and while she was tying her goreum, she asked him, “You really have no one?” When he didn’t answer, she asked, “No father for guidance, no mother to sing to you? No sisters at all?”

  He adjusted the tail of her bow.

  “Please,” he said. “You must perform now. Give the Dear Leader exactly what he wants.”

  “I can’t control what I sing,” she said.

  Soon, in blue, she was with her husband at the Dear Leader’s side. It was the climax of the accordion number, which found the boys stacked on each other’s shoulders three high. Ga saw that Kim Jong Il’s eyes were lowered, that children’s songs—bouncy, boundless of enthusiasm—truly spoke to him. When the song was finished, the Americans made a clapping motion from which no sound came.

  “We must have another song,” the Dear Leader announced.

  “No,” the Senator said. “First our citizen.”

  “My property,” the Dear Leader said.

  “Assurances,” Tommy said.

  “Assurances, assurances,” the Dear Leader said. He turned to Commander Ga. “Might I borrow your camera?” he asked.

  The smile on the Dear Leader’s face scared Ga anew. Ga took the camera from his pocket and handed it to the Dear Leader, who moved through the crowd toward his car.

  “Where’s he going?” Wanda asked. “Is he leaving?”

  The Dear Leader climbed into the back of the black Mercedes, but the car didn’t move.

  Then the phone in Wanda’s pocket beeped. When she examined its screen, she shook her head in disbelief. She showed it to the Senator and Tommy. Ga motioned for the little red phone. Wanda handed it to him, and there was a picture of Allison Jensen, the Girl Rower, in the backseat of a car. Ga nodded at Wanda, and right in front of her, slipped the phone in his pocket.

  The Dear Leader returned, thanking Ga for the use of his camera. “Assured?” he asked.

  The Senator made a signal, and a pair of forklifts backed out of the plane’s cargo bay. In tandem, they carried the Japanese background radiation detector housed in a custom crate.

  “You know it won’t work,” the Senator said. “The Japanese built it to discover cosmic radiation, not uranium isotopes.”

  “All my top scientists would beg to differ,” the Dear Leader told him. “In fact, they’re unanimous in their opinion.”

  “One hundred percent,” Commander Park said.

  The Dear Leader waved his hand. “But let’s speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let’s have some blues.”

  “But where’s the Girl Rower?” Sun Moon asked him. “I must sing the song to her. She’s who you told me to write it for.”

  A cross look appeared on the Dear Leader’s face. “Your songs are mine,” he told her. “I’m the only one you sing for.”

  The Dear Leader addressed the Americans. “I’ve been assured the blues will speak to your collective American conscience,” he said. “Blues is how people lament racism and religion and the injustices of capitalism. Blues is for those who know hunger.”

  “One in six,” Commander Park said.

  “One in six Americans goes hungry each day,” the Dear Leader echoed. “The blues is for violence, too. Commander Park, when did a citizen of Pyongyang last commit a violent crime?”

  “Seven years ago,” Commander Park said.

  “Seven long years,” the Dear Leader said. “Yet in America’s capital, five thousand black men languish in prison due to violence. Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free. And the labor of the condemned does not power the machine of national need.”

  The Senator cleared his throat. “As Dr. Song would say, This is most enlightening.”

  “You tire of social theory?” The Dear Leader nodded, as if he’d expected more from his American visitor. “Then I give you Sun Moon.”

  Sun Moon kneeled down upon the cement runway and placed the guitar on its back before her. In the shade of those who closed the circle around her, she stared silently down at her guitar, as if awaiting some far-off inspiration.

  “Sing,” Commander Park whispered. With the toe of his boot, he tapped her in the small of the back. From Sun Moon came a gasp of fear. “Sing,” he said.

  Brando growled at the end of his rope.

  Sun Moon began playing the neck of the guitar, fretting with the tips of her fingers and plucking with the quill of an eagle-owl feather. Each note sounded discordant from the next, eerie and alone. Finally, in the plaintive rasp of a sanjo nomad, she began to sing of a boy who wandered too far for his parents to find him.

  Many citizens leaned in, trying to place the tune.

  Sun Moon sang, “A cold wind rose and said, Come, orphan, sleep in my billowing white sheets.”

  From this line, the citizens began to recognize the song and the fairy tale it came from, yet none sang the response, “No, orphan child, do not let yourself freeze.” It was a song taught to all the children in the capital, one designed to make some merriment of all the befuddled orphans who scurried through Pyongyang’s streets. Sun Moon sang on, with the crowd clearly unhappy that such a gay song, a children’s song, one that was ultimately about finding the fatherly love of the Dear Leader, should be so gleelessly sung.

  Sun Moon sang, “Then a mineshaft called to the child, Come shelter in my depths.”

  In his mind, Ga heard the response, “Avoid the darkness, orphan child. Seek the light.”

  Sun Moon sang, “Next a ghost whispered, Let me inside, orphan child, and I’ll warm you from within.”

  Fight the fever, orphan child, Ga thought. Do not die tonight.

  “Sing it properly,” Commander Park demanded.

  But Sun Moon carried on, singing in her melancholy way of the arrival of the Great Bear, of the Bear’s special language, of how he took up the orphan child and with his claws cracked the honeybees’ comb. Her voice was edged with the things the song had left out, like the sharpness of those claws, of the stinging swarm of bees. In the sonor of her singing could be heard the insatiability of the Bear, of its unrelenting, omnivorous appetite.

  The men in the crowd didn’t shout, “Partake of the Great Bear’s honey!”

  The women didn’t chorus, “Share the sweetness of his deeds!”

  A shudder of great emotion ran through Commander Ga, but he could not tell why. Was it the song, the singer, that it w
as sung now and here, or was it the orphan at its center? He knew only that this was her honey, this was what she had to feed him.

  By the time the song concluded, the Dear Leader’s demeanor had greatly changed. Gone was his breezy surface and his gestures of delight. His eyes had flattened, his cheeks gone slack.

  His scientists reported that, after inspecting the radiation detector, they’d found it intact.

  He motioned for Park to fetch the Girl Rower.

  “Let’s get this over with, Senator,” the Dear Leader said. “The people of our nation wish to donate some food aid to the hungry citizens of yours. When that’s complete, you may repatriate your citizen and fly off to your more important business.”

  When Ga had translated this, the Senator said, “Agreed.”

  To Ga, the Dear Leader said only, “Tell your wife to get into red.”

  If only the Dear Leader still had Dr. Song, Ga thought. Dr. Song, who moved so fluidly in such situations, for whom such scenes became simply ruffles, so easily smoothed over.

  Wanda brushed past him, amazement on her face.

  “What the fuck was that song about?” she asked.

  “Me,” he told her, but he was off with the boy and the girl and his wife and his dog.

  The Pohyon Temple, when they entered it, seemed worthy of prayer, for inside, Comrade Buc had placed a pallet decked with four empty barrels. “Don’t ask anything,” Sun Moon told her children as she tore off the barrels’ white lids. Commander Ga opened his guitar case and from it withdrew Sun Moon’s silver dress. “Leave on your own terms,” he told her, then he swept the girl up and into a barrel. Opening her palm, he placed into her hand the seeds from last night’s melon. The boy was next, and for him, Ga had the whittled trigger sticks, the thread, and the deadweight stone of the bird snare they’d made together.

  He stared at the two of them, their heads poking up, forbidden any questions, not that they’d know the right ones to ask, not for a long time, anyway. Ga took a moment to marvel at them, at this rare, pure thing that was coming into being. It was suddenly so clear, everything. There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn’t abandoning, it was saving. He’d been saved, he now saw. A beauty, his mother, a singer. Because of that, a terrible fate awaited—she hadn’t left him behind, she’d saved him from what was ahead. And this pallet, with its four white barrels, he saw it suddenly as the life raft they’d long dreamed of aboard the Junma, the thing that meant they wouldn’t go down with the ship. They’d once had to let it sail away empty, and here it had made its way back. Here it was for the most essential cargo. He reached out and ruffled the hair of these two confused kids who didn’t even know they were being rescued, let alone what from.