Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“In this whole stupid country,” Jun Do said, “the only thing that made sense to me were the Korean ladies on their knees cleaning the feet of the Japanese.”

“I could take you to the South Korean embassy tomorrow. It’s just a train ride. In six weeks you’d be in Seoul. You’d be very useful to them, a real prize.”

“Your mother, your father,” Jun Do said. “They’ll get sent to the camps.”

“Whether you’re a good karaoke singer or bad, eventually your number comes up. It’s only a matter of time.”

“What about Officer So—will some fancy whiskey make you forget him digging in the dark of Prison 9?”

“He’s the reason to leave,” Gil said. “So you don’t become him.”

“Well, he sends his regards,” Jun Do said and dropped the loop of nylon over Gil’s head, pulling the slack so the strap was snug around his neck.

Gil downed his whiskey. “I’m just a person,” he said. “I’m just a nobody who wants out.”

The bartender saw the leash. Covering her mouth, she said, “Homo janai.”

“I guess I don’t need to translate that,” Gil said.

Jun Do gave the leash a tug and they both stood.

Gil closed his watercolor tin, then bowed to the bartender. “Chousenjin ni turesarareru yo,” he said to her. With her phone, she took a picture of the two of them, then poured herself a drink. She lifted it in Gil’s honor before drinking.

“Fucking Japanese,” Gil said. “You’ve got to love them. I said I was being kidnapped to North Korea, and look at her.”

“Take a good, long look,” Jun Do said and lifted the motorcycle key from the bar.

Past the shore break, they motored into swells sharpened by the wind—the black inflatable lifted, then dropped flat in the troughs. Everyone held the lifeline to steady themselves. Rumina sat in the nose, fresh tape around her hands. Officer So had draped his jacket around her—except for that, her body was bare and blue with cold.

Jun Do and Gil sat on opposite sides of the raft, but Gil wouldn’t look at him. When they reached open water, Officer So backed off the engine enough that Jun Do could be heard.

“I gave Gil my word,” he told Officer So. “I said we’d forget how he tried to run.”

Rumina sat with the wind at her back, hair turbulent in her face. “Put him in the bag,” she said.

Officer So had a grand laugh at that. “The opera lady’s right,” he said. “You caught a defector, my boy. He had a fucking gun to our heads. But he couldn’t outsmart us. Start thinking of your reward,” he said. “Start savoring it.”

The idea of a reward, of finding his mother and delivering her from her fate in Pyongyang, now made him sick. In the tunnels, they would sometimes wander into a curtain of gas. You couldn’t detect it—a headache would spike, and you’d see the darkness throb red. He felt that now with Rumina glaring at him. He suddenly wondered if she didn’t mean him, that Jun Do should go in the bag. But he wasn’t the one who beat her or folded her up. It wasn’t his father who’d ordered her kidnapping. And what choice did he have, about anything? He couldn’t help that he was from a town lacking in electricity and heat and fuel, where the factories were frozen in rust, where able-bodied men were either in labor camps or were listless with hunger. It wasn’t his fault that all the boys in his care were numb with abandonment and hopeless at the prospect of being recruited as prison guards or conscripted into suicide squads.

The lead was still around Gil’s neck. Out of pure joy, Officer So leaned over and yanked it hard, just to feel it cinch. “I’d roll you over the side,” he said. “But I’d miss what they’re going to do to you.”

Gil winced from the pain. “Jun Do knows how to do it now,” he said. “He’ll replace you, and they’ll send you to a camp so you never talk about this business.”

“You don’t know anything,” Officer So said. “You’re soft and weak. I fucking invented this game. I kidnapped Kim Jong Il’s personal sushi chef. I plucked the Dear Leader’s own doctor out of an Osaka hospital, in broad daylight, with these hands.”

“You don’t know how Pyongyang works,” Gil said. “Once the other ministers see her, they’ll all want their own opera singers.”

A cold, white spray slapped them. It made Rumina inhale sharply, as if every little thing was trying to take her life. She turned to Jun Do, glaring again. She was about to say something, he could tell—a word was forming on her lips.

He unfolded his glasses, put them on—now he could see the bruising on her throat, the way her hands were fat and purple below the tape on her wrists. He saw a wedding ring, a birth-surgery scar. She wouldn’t stop glaring at him. Her eyes—they could see the decisions he’d made. They could tell it was Jun Do who’d picked which orphans ate first and which were left with watery spoonfuls. They recognized that it was he who assigned the bunks next to the stove and the ones in the hall where blackfinger lurked. He’d picked the boys who got blinded by the arc furnace. He’d chosen the boys who were at the chemical plant when it made the sky go yellow. He’d sent Ha Shin, the boy who wouldn’t speak, who wouldn’t say no, to clean the vats at the paint factory. It was Jun Do who put the gaff in Bo Song’s hands.

“What choice did I have?” Jun Do asked her. He really needed to know, just as he had to know what happened to the boy and the girl at the end of the aria.

She raised her foot and showed Jun Do her toenails, the red paint vibrant against the platinum dark. She spoke a word, then drove her foot into his face.

The blood, it was dark. It trickled down his shirt, last worn by the man they’d plucked from the beach. Her big toenail had cut along his gums, but it was okay, he felt better, he knew the word now, the word that had been upon her lips. He didn’t need to speak Japanese to understand the word “die.” It was the ending to the opera, too, he was sure of it. That’s what happened to the boy and the girl on the boat. It wasn’t a sad story, really. It was one of love—the boy and the girl at least knew each other’s fates, and they’d never be alone.

THERE WERE many kidnappings to come—years of them, in fact. There was the old woman they came upon in a tidal pool on Nishino Island. Her pants were rolled up and she peered into a camera mounted on three wooden legs. Her hair was gray and wild and she went without protest, in exchange for Jun Do’s portrait. There was the Japanese climatologist they discovered on an iceberg in the Tsugaru Strait. They plucked his scientific equipment and red kayak, too. There was a rice farmer, a jetty engineer, and a woman who said she’d come to the beach to drown herself.

Then the kidnappings ended, as suddenly as they’d begun. Jun Do was assigned to language school, to spend a year learning English. He asked the control officer in Kyongsong if the new post was a reward for stopping a minister’s son from defecting. The officer took Jun Do’s old military uniform, his liquor ration card and coupon book for prostitutes. When the officer saw the book was nearly full, he smiled. Sure , he said.

Majon-ni, in the Onjin Mountains, was colder than Chongjin had ever been. Jun Do was grateful for the blue headphones he wore all day, as they drowned out the endless tank exercises of the Ninth Mechanized, which was stationed there. The school officials had no interest in teaching Jun Do to speak English. He simply had to transcribe it, learning vocabulary and grammar over the headphones and, key by clacking key, parroting it back on his manual typewriter. I would like to purchase a puppy , the woman’s voice would say over the headphones, and this Jun Do would tap out. At least near the end, the school got a human teacher, a rather sad man, prone to depression, that Pyongyang had acquired from Africa. The man spoke no Korean, and he spent the classes asking the students grand, unanswerable questions, which greatly increased their command of the interrogative mode.