Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“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.

“A chamber pot,” the boy said. “How did that happen?”

“How do you think?” Ga answered.

“Yech,” the boy said.

“Poor Brando didn’t know who had turned out the lights,” Ga said. “Everything echoed inside the pot. He wandered down the road, bumping into things, but the scientists thought he had come to take the tests. How brave of a dog to voluntarily face a bear, the scientists thought. And how smart to put on armor!”

Both the boy and the girl laughed large, natural laughs. Gone was the worry on their faces, and Ga decided that perhaps it was better for the story to have no purpose, that it be nothing other than the thing it was, spontaneous and original as it wandered toward its own conclusion.

“The scientists hugged each other in celebration,” Ga continued. “Then they radioed Pyongyang, reporting that they’d found the most extraordinary dog in the world. When the American spy satellites intercepted this message, they—”

The boy was tugging Ga’s sleeve. The boy was still laughing, there was a smile on his face, but he had turned serious somehow.

“I want to tell you something,” the boy said.

“I’m listening,” Ga said.

But then the boy went silent and looked down.

“Go on,” the girl said to her brother. When he wouldn’t answer, she said to Ga, “He wants to tell you his name. Our mother said it was okay, if that’s what we wanted to do.”

Ga looked at the boy. “Is that it, is that what you want to tell me?”

The boy nodded.

“What about you?” Ga asked the girl.

She, too, glanced down. “I think so,” she said.

“There’s no need,” Ga said. “Names come and go. Names change. I don’t even have one.”

“Is that true?” the girl asked.

“I suppose I have a real one,” Ga said. “But I don’t know what it is. If my mother wrote it on me before she dropped me off at the orphanage, it faded away.”