Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

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 answers 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.