Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

The daughter held a wooden tray. On it was a steaming towel, which he used to wipe the dust from his face and neck, the backs of his hands. Upon the boy’s tray were various medals and pins placed there by his father. Commander Ga emptied his pockets onto the tray—some military won, subway tickets, his Ministry ID card—and in the commingling of these everyday objects, the two Commander Gas were one. But when a coin fell to the floor, the boy flinched in fear. If the ghost of Commander Ga was anywhere, it was here, in the worried posture of the children, in the punishment they seemed convinced was continually at hand.

Next his wife held open a dobok like a drape, so that he could disrobe before them in privacy. When the dobok was cinched, Sun Moon turned to the children.

“Go,” she told them. “Go practice your music.”

When they were gone, she waited for the sounds of their warm-up scales before speaking, and then, when their notes seemed too soft, she made for the kitchen, where the loudspeaker was playing, and she was sure not to be overheard. He followed her, watched her cringe when she recognized that over the loudspeaker the new opera diva was singing Sea of Blood .

Sun Moon relieved him of his weapon. She opened the cylinder and assured herself the chambers were empty. Then she gestured at Ga with the butt of the gun. “I must know how you came by this pistol,” she said.

“It’s custom made,” he said. “One of a kind.”

“Oh, I recognize the gun,” she said. “Tell me who gave it to you.”

She pulled a chair to the counter and climbed atop it. She reached high to place the gun in the top cupboard.

He watched her body elongating, taking a different shape under her choson-ot . Its hem lifted to show her ankles, and there she was, the whole weight of her balanced upon poised toes. He regarded that cabinet, wondering what else it might contain. Commander Ga’s pistol was in the backseat of the Mercedes, yet he asked, “Did your husband carry a gun?”

“Does,” she said.

“Does your husband carry a gun?”

“You’re not answering my question,” she said. “I know the gun you brought home, we’ve used it in a half-dozen movies. It’s the pearl-handled pistol that the cold-blooded, cowboyish American officer always uses to shoot civilians.”

She stepped off the chair, and dragged it back to the table. There were marks on the floor showing this had happened many times before.

“Dak-Ho gave this to you from the prop warehouse,” she said. “Either he’s trying to send me some kind of message, or I don’t know what’s going on.”

“The Dear Leader gave it to me,” he said.

A pain crossed Sun Moon’s face. “I can’t stand that voice,” she said. The new diva had made it to the aria celebrating the martyred sniper teams of Myohyang. “I have to get out of here,” she said and stepped outside onto the deck.

He joined her in the warm afternoon sunlight, the view from the top of Mount Taesong encompassing all of Pyongyang. Below them swallows turned in the air above the botanical gardens. In the cemetery, old people prepared for their deaths by opening lantern-paper parasols and visiting the graves of others.

She smoked a cigarette as her eyes got wet, her makeup soon running. He stood next to her at the rail. He didn’t know if you could tell whether an actress was really crying. He only knew, real or fake, the tears were not for her husband. Perhaps she wept because she was thirty-seven now or because friends no longer visited, or for the way her children in their play theater punished the puppets for talking back.

“The Dear Leader told me he was writing a new movie role for you.”

Sun Moon turned her head to exhale smoke. “The Dear Leader only has room in his heart for opera now,” she said, and offered him the last draw of her cigarette.

Ga took it and inhaled.

“I knew you were from the country,” she said. “Look at how you hold that cigarette. What do you know of the Dear Leader or whether a new movie will happen or not?”

Ga reached for her cigarettes and lit a new one, for himself.

“I used to smoke,” he said. “But in prison, I lost the habit.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me, prison?”

“They showed us a movie in there. It was A True Daughter of the Country .”

She planted her elbows against the balcony rail and leaned back. It lifted her shoulders high, made visible the blades of her pelvis through the white of her choson-ot . She said, “I was just a kid when I made that movie, I didn’t know anything about acting.”

She gave him a look, as if to ask, how was the movie received?

“I used to live by the sea,” he said. “For a short time, I almost had a wife. I mean, maybe. It could have been. She was the wife of a shipmate, quite beautiful.”

“But if she was a wife, she was already married,” Sun Moon said and looked at him, confused. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Oh, but her husband disappeared,” Commander Ga said. “Her husband just went off into the light. In prison, when things were not so good, I tried to think of her, my almost wife, my maybe wife, to keep me strong.” An image of the Captain came to him, of the Captain’s wife tattooed on the Captain’s ancient chest—how the once-black ink had turned blue and hazy as it migrated under the old man’s skin, a watercolor where indelibility had been, leaving only the stain of the woman he loved. That’s what had happened to the Second Mate’s wife in prison—she’d gone out of focus, she’d seeped from his memory. “Then I saw you on the movie screen, and I realized how plain she had been. She could sing, she had ambitions, but you showed me that she was only an almost beauty, a maybe beauty. The truth was that when I thought of the missing woman in my life, it was your face that I saw.”

“This almost-maybe wife,” she said. “What happened to her?”

He shrugged.

“Nothing?” she asked. “You never saw her again?”

“Where would I see her?” he asked.

Though he hadn’t noticed, Sun Moon perceived her children had stopped playing their instruments. She went to the door and shouted until they resumed.

She turned to him. “You should probably tell me why you were in prison.”

“I went to America, where my mind was soiled by capitalist ways.”

“California?”

“Texas,” he said. “Where I got the dog.”

She crossed her arms. “I don’t like any of this,” she said. “You must be part of my husband’s plan, he must have sent you as some kind of stand-in—otherwise, his friends would have killed you. I don’t know why you’re here, saying these things to me, and no one has killed you.”

She gazed toward Pyongyang, as if the answer were there. He watched emotions cross her face like weather—uncertainty, like clouds blotting the sun, gave way to a wince of regret, eyes twitching, as with the first drops of rain. She was a great beauty, it was certainly true, but he saw now that what made him fall in love with her in prison was this, the way what was felt in her heart came instantly to her face. That was the source of her great acting, this thing that couldn’t be faked. You’d have to have twenty tattoos, he realized, to capture her moods. Dr. Song had made it to Texas, where he’d eaten barbecue. Gil had gotten to sip scotch and make a Japanese bartender laugh. And here he was, on Commander Ga’s balcony with Sun Moon, tear streaks on her face, backdropped by Pyongyang. It didn’t matter what happened to him now.

He leaned toward her. That would make the moment perfect, to touch her. Everything would be worth it if he could wipe a tear from her cheek.