Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Jun Do sat down in a chair. “It’s because of his wife,” he said. “That’s got to be it. That’s something you guys did to him, giving his wife away.”

“I doubt that’s how it worked. I’m not familiar with the case, but she was an old woman, right? Not too many replacement husbands are clamoring for an old woman. The Captain went to jail, and she left him. That sounds pretty likely. As the Dear Leader says, The simplest answer is usually the right one .”

“And the Second Mate’s wife. Are you handling that case?”

“She’s a pretty girl, she’ll do well. You don’t have to worry about her. She won’t be living underneath dogs anymore, that’s for sure.”

“What will happen to her?”

“I think there’s a warden in Sinpo who’s high on the list, and down in Chongwang there’s a retired Party official making some noise to get his hands on her.”

“I thought girls like her got sent to Pyongyang.”

The old man cocked his head. “She’s no virgin,” he finally said. “Plus, she’s twenty now, and headstrong. Most of the girls who go to Pyongyang are seventeen—all they know is how to listen. But what do you care? You don’t want her for yourself, do you?”

“No,” Jun Do said. “Not at all.”

“ ’Cause that’s suddenly not so heroic. If you want a girl, we can get you a girl. But the wife of a fallen comrade, that’s discouraged.”

“I’m not saying that’s what I want,” Jun Do said. “But I’m a hero. I’ve got rights.”

“Privileges,” the old man said. “You get some privileges.”

All day he worked on the radio. The light was good at the window ledge. There he used the flattened end of a wire as a jeweler’s screwdriver and melted fine strands of solder with a candle flame. There, too, he could keep an eye on the harbor to observe the Captain pacing the decks.

Toward twilight, she returned. She was in high spirits, radiant.

“I see some of you still works,” she said.

“I couldn’t stay in bed without any fish to look at. They were my mobile.”

“Some impression that would make,” she said. “Showing up in Pyongyang with a suitcase full of fish.” Then she pulled back her hair to reveal a new pair of earrings made from thin tails of gold. “Not a bad trade, huh? I’ll have to wear my hair up so people can see them.”

She went to the radio. “Does it work?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I rigged an antenna. We should set it up on the roof, though, before the power goes out.”

She grabbed the pair of Nikes.

“Okay,” she said. “But there’s something I’ve got to do first.”

They took the stairs, carefully, down to the sixth floor. They passed apartments ringing with family arguments, but most were eerily silent. The walls here were painted with slogans to the Dear and Great Leaders, accompanied by depictions of children singing from the songbooks of the revolution and peasant farmers pausing at their rich harvests, sickles high, to gaze into the pure light of everlasting wisdom.

The Second Mate’s wife knocked on a door, waited a moment, then went inside. The windows were covered with ration paper, and the room smelled of the crotch rot that would spread through the DMZ tunnels. Here they found a man sitting in a plastic dining chair, a bandaged foot elevated on a stool. From the shape of the bandages, you could tell there was no room for toes. He wore overalls from the canning factory, and his name patch said “Team Leader Gun.” Gun’s eyes lit when he saw the shoes. He beckoned for them, then turned them in his hands, smelled them.

“Can you get more of these?” he asked her.

“Maybe,” she said. She saw a box on a table, about the size of a funeral cake. “Is this it?”

“Yes,” he said, marveling at the Nikes. Then he pointed at her box. “That wasn’t easy to get, you know—it’s straight from the South.”

Without looking inside, she put the box under her arm.

“What does your friend want?” Gun asked her.

Jun Do looked around the room, at the cases of strange Chinese liquor and the bins of old clothing, at the dangling wires where a loudspeaker should have been. There was a birdcage, jammed full with rabbits. He answered for himself. “I don’t need anything.”

“Ah, but I asked what you want,” Gun said, smiling for the first time. “Come, accept a gift. I think I have a belt that will fit you.” He strained for a plastic bag on the floor that was filled with used belts.

“Don’t bother,” Jun Do told him.

The Second Mate’s wife saw a pair of shoes she liked. They were black and almost new. While she tried them on, Jun Do looked at all the crates of merchandise. There were Russian cigarettes and baggies of pills with handwritten labels and a dish filled with sunglasses. There was a stack of family cooking pans, their handles pointing in different directions, and they seemed almost tragic to him.

On a small bookshelf, he found his English dictionaries, and he looked over his old notes in the margins, noting all the idioms he’d once found impossible, like “dry run” and “close but no cigar.” Rummaging further, he found the badger-hair shaving brush that had belonged to the Captain. Jun Do didn’t blame the Second Mate for pilfering things, even personal things, but when Jun Do turned to observe the Second Mate’s wife regard the black shoes in a mirror, it suddenly mattered whether it was she or her husband who’d sold them here.

“Okay,” she said. “I want them.”

“They look good,” Gun said. “That leather is Japanese, you know, the best. You bring me another pair of Nikes, and we’ll trade.”

“No,” she said. “The Nikes are far too valuable. When I get another pair, we’ll see what you have that’s equal.”

“When you get another pair, you will bring them to me. Agreed.”

“Agreed,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “You take those shoes, and then you can owe me one.”

“I’ll owe you one,” she said.

“Don’t do it,” Jun Do told her.

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

“Good,” Gun told her. “When the time comes that you can be of service, I will come for you, and then we will be even.”

Box under her arm, they turned to go. On a small table, though, something caught Jun Do’s eye. He picked it up. It was a stationmaster’s watch on a little chain. The Orphan Master had had such a watch, and with it he ran their entire lives, from dawn to lights-out, as he farmed the boys out to clean septic tanks or to be sent down shafts on bare ropes to drain oil sumps. Every moment went by that watch, and he’d never tell the boys the time, but they learned by his facial expressions how things would go until he next checked it.

“Take the watch,” Gun said. “I got it from an old man who said it ran perfectly for a lifetime.”

Jun Do set down the watch. When they’d left and the door closed behind them, he asked, “What happened to him?”

“He hurt his foot last year, from a steam line under pressure, something like that.”

“Last year?”

“The wound won’t close, that’s what the foreman says.”

“You shouldn’t have made that deal with him,” Jun Do said.

“When he comes to collect,” she told him, “I’ll be long gone.”

Jun Do looked at her. In this moment he felt truly sad for her. He thought of the men who were lobbying for her, the warden in Sinpo and the old Party boss in Chongwang, men who were right now preparing their homes for her arrival. Had they been shown a photo of her, told some kind of story, or had they only heard over their loudspeakers the tragic news that a hero had been lost to the sharks, leaving a beautiful young wife behind?