Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“What did the guards call you?” we asked him.

“There are no names,” he said. “I made it through winter, but afterward I was different. I can’t make you understand what the winter was like, what that did to me. When the thaw came, I didn’t care about anything. I would leer at the guards like they were orphans. I kept acting out at self-criticism sessions. Instead of confessing that I could have pushed one more ore cart or mined an extra ton, I would berate my hands for not listening to my mouth or blame my right foot for not following my left. Winter had changed me—I was someone else now. The cold, there are no words for it.”

“For the love of Juche,” the old Pubyok said. He still had his shoe on the table. “If we were interrogating this idiot, there’d already be a funeral team on its way to retrieve that glorious, glorious actress and her poor tots.”

“This isn’t even Commander Ga,” we reminded him.

“Then why are we listening to him whimper about prison?” He turned to Commander Ga. “You think those mountains are cold? Imagine them with Yankee snipers and B-29 strikes. Imagine those hills without a camp cook to serve you hot cabbage soup every day. Imagine there’s no comfortable infirmary cot where they painlessly put you out of your misery.”

Nobody ever dropped bombs on us, but we knew what Commander Ga was talking about. Once we had to go north to get the biography of a guard at Prison 14-18. All day we rode north in the back of a crow, slush spraying up from the floorboards, our boots freezing solid, the whole time wondering if we were really going to interrogate a subject or if that was just what we’d been told to lure us to prison without a fuss. As the cold froze the turds inside our asses, we could only wonder if the Pubyok hadn’t finally pulled the lever on us.

Commander Ga went on, “Because I was new, I was housed next to the infirmary, where people complained all night. One old man in there was a particular pain in the ass. He wasn’t productive because his hands no longer worked. People might have covered for him, but he was hated—one of his eyes was cloudy, and he only knew how to accuse and demand. All night the guy would moan an endless series of questions. Who are you ? he’d call to the night. Why are you here? Why won’t you answer ? Week after week, I’d wonder when the blood truck would finally come to shut him up. But then I started to think about his questions. Why was I there? What was my crime? Eventually, I began to answer him. Why won’t you confess ? he’d call out, and through my harmonica barracks, I’d shout, I’m ready to confess , I’ll tell everything . These conversations made people nervous, and then one night, I got a visit from Mongnan. She was the oldest woman in the camp, and she’d long ago lost her hips and breasts to hunger. Her hair was cut like a man’s, and she kept her palms wrapped with strips of cloth.”

Commander Ga continued with his story of how he and Mongnan sneaked out of the barracks, past the mud room and water barrels, and if we perhaps didn’t say it, we all must have been thinking that the name Mongnan meant “Magnolia,” the grandest white flower of them all. That’s what our subjects say they see when the autopilot takes them to the apex of pain—a wintry mountaintop, where from the frost a lone white blossom opens for them. No matter how their bodies contort, it is the stillness of this image they remember. It couldn’t be so bad, could it? A single afternoon of pain … and then the past is behind you, every shortcoming and failure is gone, every last bitter mouthful of it.

“Outside, past my rising breath,” Commander Ga continued, “I asked Mongnan where all the guards had gone. She pointed toward the bright lights of the administration buildings. The Minister of Prison Mines must be coming tomorrow , she said. I’ve seen this before. They’ll be up all night cooking the books .

“ So? I asked her.

“ The Minister is coming , she said. That’s why they’ve worked us so hard , that’s why all the weak have been thrown in the infirmary . She pointed to the warden’s complex, every light burning bright. Look at all the electricity they’re using , she said. Listen to that poor generator. The only way they can light this whole place is with the electric fence off .

“ So what , escape? I asked. There’s nowhere to run .

“ Oh , we’ll all die here , she said. Rest assured. But it won’t be tonight .

“And suddenly she was moving across the yard, stiff-spined but quick in the dark. I caught up with her at the fence, where we squatted. The fence was two fences, really, a parallel line of concrete posts strung with cables on brown ceramic insulators. Inside was a stretch of no-man’s-land, teeming with wild ginger and radishes that nobody lived to steal.

“She moved to reach through the wires. Wait , I said. Shouldn’t we test it? But Mongnan reached under the fence and pulled out two radishes, crisp and cold, which we ate on the spot. Then we began digging the wild ginger that grew there. All the old ladies in camp got placed on grave detail—they buried the bodies where they fell, just deep enough that the rain wouldn’t seep them out. And you could always tell ginger plants whose tap root had penetrated a corpse: the blooms were large, iridescent yellow, and it was hard to jerk loose a plant whose roots had hooked a rib below.

“When our pockets could hold no more, we ate another radish and I could feel it cleaning my teeth. Ah , the joys of a scarcity distribution , Mongnan said and finished the radish—root, stem, and blossom. This place is a lecture on supply and demand. Here is my blackboard , she said, looking to the night sky. Then she put a hand on the electric fence. And here is my final exam. ”

In the cafeteria, Q-Kee jumped up. “Wait,” she said. “Is this Li Mongnan, the professor who was denounced, along with her students?”

Commander Ga stopped his story. “A professor?” he asked us. “What was her subject?”

It was a tremendous gaffe. The Pubyok just shook their heads. We had just given our subject more information than he’d given us. We dismissed both interns and asked Commander Ga to please continue.

“Were her students transported?” Ga asked. “Had Mongnan outlived them at Prison 33?”

“Please continue,” we requested. “When you’re done, we’ll answer one question.”

Commander Ga took a moment to digest this. Then he nodded and continued. “There was a pond in which the guards raised trout to feed to their families. The fish were counted every morning, and if one went missing, the whole camp would starve. I followed Mongnan to the low wall of the circular pool, where she crouched and reached over to snatch a fish from the black water. It took a couple tries, but she had a net rigged from a hoop of wire, and the fabric wrapped around Mongnan’s hands gave her a good grip. She held a trout behind the pectoral fins—so healthy, so perfectly alive. Pinch it here , just up from the tail , she said. Then massage it here , behind the belly. When you feel the egg pocket , squeeze . Mongnan lifted the fish high and then milked an apricot-colored stream of eggs into her mouth. She tossed the fish back.

“Then it was my turn. Mongnan snatched another fish and showed me the slit that marked it as female. Pinch hard , she cautioned, or you’ll get fish shit . I squeezed the fish, and a shot of eggs sprayed my face, surprisingly warm. Gelatinous, briny, unmistakably alive, I smelled it on my cheeks, then, wiping, licked my palms. With practice, I got the knack. We milked the eggs of a dozen fish, stars crossing the sky as we sat there, stunned.