Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

IN THE MORNING ,Commander Ga woke to the roaring engines of an American military cargo jet. The children were already awake, staring at the ceiling. They knew this wasn’t the once-a-week flight to Beijing or the twice-monthly grasshopper to Vladivostok. The children had never even heard an airplane over Pyongyang, which was restricted airspace. Not once since the American firebombing raids of 1951 had a plane been spotted over the nation’s capital.

He roused Sun Moon and together they listened to it head north, as if it had originated in Seoul, a direction from which nothing was allowed to come. He checked his watch—the Americans were three hours early. The Dear Leader would be furious.

“They’re flying low to announce their arrival,” he said. “Very American.”

Sun Moon turned to him. “So it’s time.”

He looked into her eyes to see what remained of their lovemaking last night, but she was looking forward and not back.

“It’s time,” he said.

“Children,” Sun Moon called, “we’re going on an adventure today. Go put together some food for us.” When they were gone, she pulled on her robe and lit a cigarette at the window, watching the American Goliath lower its landing gear over the Taedong and descend toward the airport. She turned to Ga. “There’s something you need to understand,” she said. “Where the Dear Leader is concerned, there’s only one of me. He has many girls, an entire kippumjo of them, but only I matter. He thinks that I reveal all to him, that emotions cross my face without my control, making me incapable of conspiring against him. I’m the only person in the world he thinks he can trust. ”

“Then today, he will feel the sting.”

“I’m not talking about him,” she said. “This is about you. Understand that if I slip from the Dear Leader’s grasp, someone is going to pay, and that price will be unimaginable. You can’t stay, you can’t be the one who pays.”

“I don’t know where you got these notions about me,” he said. “But—”

“You’re the one with the notions,” she went on. “I think you saw that movie and got it in your head that a noble man stays behind.”

“You’re tattooed on my heart,” he said. “You’ll always be with me.”

“I’m talking about you being with me.”

“We’ll make it work,” he said. “I promise. It will all work out. You’ve got to trust me.”

“It’s that kind of talk that scares me,” she said, and exhaled smoke. “This whole thing feels like some kind of loyalty test. One so sick not even my husband could’ve thought it up.”

How different it was to have warning that your life was about to change, Ga thought, let alone know the moment it would happen. Didn’t Sun Moon understand that? And they had a say in it. He had to smile at the notion that things might, for one morning, bend to their influence.

“That look on your face,” she said. “Even that makes me nervous.”

She came close to him, and he stood to be near her.

“You’re coming with me,” she said. “Understand? I can’t do it without you.”

“I’ll never leave your side.”

He tried to touch her, but she pulled away.

“Why won’t you just say you’re coming?”

“Why won’t you hear what I’m saying? Of course I am.”

She gave him a look of doubt. “My sister, my father, my sister, my mother. Even that cruel husband of mine. One by one, they were stripped from me. Don’t make it happen again. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, not when you have a choice. Just look me in the eyes and say it.”

He did it, he looked her in the eyes. “You said forever, and that’s me, forever. Soon, you’ll never be able to get rid of me.”

After Sun Moon donned her white choson-ot , she hung the red one and the blue one in the back of the Mustang. Ga pulled on his cowboy boots, tucked the can of peaches in his rucksack, and then patted his pocket to make sure he had his camera. The girl chased the dog with a rope to leash it.

The boy came running. “My bird snare’s gone,” he said.

“We weren’t going to bring it anyway,” Sun Moon said.

“Bring it where?” the boy asked.

“We’ll make another sometime,” Ga told him.

“I bet it caught a giant bird,” the boy said. “One with wings so strong that it flew away with my snare.”

Sun Moon stood before the shrine to her husband’s Golden Belt. Ga joined her in contemplating the jewels and golden scrollwork, the way the overall flash of it was bright enough to allow its owner to take any woman in the land.

“Good-bye, my husband,” she said, and turned off the lightbulb that illuminated it. Then she turned to consider for a moment her gayageum case, tall and regal in the corner. So it was pure tragedy on her face when she grabbed instead the simpleton instrument called a guitar .

Outside, he took a photo in front of the bean trellis, its white blossoms open, the tendrils of the girl’s prize melon plant tangling through the white slats. The girl held the dog, the boy a laptop, and Sun Moon the dreaded American instrument. The light was soft, though, and he wished the picture wasn’t Wanda’s, but his.

In his best military uniform, Commander Ga drove slowly away, Sun Moon beside him in the front seat. It was a beautiful morning, the light golden as swallows circled the hothouses of the botanical gardens, their beaks popping like chopsticks at the clouds of insects there. Sun Moon leaned her head against the window and stared with melancholy as they passed the zoo and the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. He knew now that she had no great-uncle buried there, that she was just a zinc miner’s daughter from Huchang, but in the morning glow, he saw how the rows of bronze busts seemed to ignite in unison. He noted how the mica in the marble pedestals sparkled, and he, too, understood he would never again see such a thing. If he was lucky, he’d get returned to a prison mine. Most likely, he’d be sent down into one of the Dear Leader’s interrogation bunkers. Either way, he’d never again taste spruce sap on the wind or smell the brine of sorghum distilling in roadside crockery. Suddenly, he savored the dust the Mustang kicked up and the pound of the tires when they crossed the Yanggakdo Bridge. He saw the emerald flash of every armored plate defending the roof of the Self-Criticism Pavilion, and he took delight in the red glow of the digital baby counter atop the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

To the north, they could see the great American jet steadily circling the airport, looking as if it were on an endless bombing run. He knew he should be teaching the boy and the girl a few words of English. He knew he should be teaching them how to denounce him, should anything go wrong. Yet a sorrow was settling over Sun Moon, and he could attend to nothing but that.

“Have you made friends with your guitar ?” he asked her.

She twanged a single, off note.

He held out his cigarettes. “Can I light you one?”

“Not before I sing,” she said. “I’ll smoke when we’re safely in the sky. On that American airplane, I’ll smoke a hundred of them.”

“We’re going on an airplane?” the boy asked.

Sun Moon ignored him.

“So you’re going to sing the Rower Girl’s farewell?” Ga asked her.

“I suppose I must,” Sun Moon said.

“What is the song about?”

“I haven’t written it yet,” she said. “When I start to play, the words will come. Mostly I’m filled with questions.” She took up her guitar and strummed it once. “How long have I known you?” she sang.