Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Comrade Buc pretended not to see him. “All that matters is that we are together,” he said, then spooned a single slice of peach into a glass bowl. This he passed, and soon a circle of glass bowls, a single peach slice in each, was rounding the table.

The soldier stood there a moment, watching.

“I’m looking for Commander Ga,” he said. He seemed unwilling to believe that either of these men could be the famous Commander Ga.

“I’m Commander Ga.”

Outside, they could hear a winch operating.

“This is for you,” the soldier said, and handed Ga an envelope. Inside was a car key and an invitation to a state dinner that evening upon which someone had handwritten, Would you do us the pleasure of your company?

Outside, a classic Mustang, baby blue, was being lowered from the back of the crow. With a winch, the car crawled backward down two metal ramps. The Mustang was just like the classic cars he’d seen in Texas. He approached the car, ran a hand down its fender—though you couldn’t quite see it, there were dimples and troughs attesting to how the body had been fashioned from raw metal. The bumper wasn’t chrome, but plated in sterling silver, and the taillights were made from blown red glass. Ga stuck his head underneath the body—it was a web of improvised struts and welded mounts connecting a handmade body to a Mercedes engine and a Soviet Lada frame.

Comrade Buc joined him by the car. He was clearly in a great mood, relieved, exuberant. “That went great in there,” he said. “I knew we wouldn’t need those peaches, I just had a feeling. It’s good for the kids though, dry runs like that. Practice is the key.”

“What did we just practice?” Ga asked him.

Buc just smiled with amazement and handed Ga an unopened can of peaches.

“For your own rainy day,” Buc said. “I helped close down Fruit Factory 49 before they burned it. I got the last case on the canning line.” Buc was so impressed he shook his head. “It’s like no harm can come to you, my friend,” he said. “You’ve managed something I’ve never seen before, and I knew we’d be okay. I knew it.”

Ga’s eyes were red, his hair dusted with dirt.

“What have I managed?” he asked.

Comrade Buc gestured at the car, the house. “This,” he said. “What you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“There’s no name for it,” Buc said. “There’s no name because no one’s ever done it before.”

The rest of the day, Sun Moon locked herself in the bedroom with the children, and there was the silence that comes only from sleep. Even the afternoon news on the loudspeaker did not wake them. Down in the tunnel, it was just Commander Ga and his dog, whose breath was foul from eating a raw onion, executing trick after trick.

Finally, when the lowering sun was rust-colored and waxen, amber-bright off the river, they emerged. Sun Moon wore a formal choson-ot the color of platinum, so exquisite the silk shone like crushed diamonds in one flash, then dark as lamp smudge the next. Seed pearls trimmed the goreum . While she prepared the tea, the children positioned themselves on elevated pallets to play their instruments. The girl began with her gayageum , obviously an antique from the days of court. Wrists erect, she plucked in the old sanjo way. The boy tried his best to accompany on the taegum . His lungs were not quite strong enough to play the demanding flute, and because his hands were too small to finger the high notes, he sang them instead.

Sun Moon kneeled before Commander Ga and began the Japanese tea ritual. She spoke as she removed the tea from an alderwood box and infused it in a bronze bowl. “These items,” she said, indicating the tray, the cups, the whisk, the ladle. “Do not be fooled by them. They are not real. They are only props from my last movie, Comfort Woman . Sadly, it never premiered.” She steeped the tea, making sure it turned clockwise in a bamboo cup. “In the movie, I must serve afternoon tea to the Japanese officers who will afterward make me their business for the rest of the evening.”

He asked, “Am I the occupying force in this story?”

She turned his cup slowly in her hands, awaiting the proper infusion. Before handing it to him, she cast her breath once upon the tea, rippling the surface. The cape of her choson-ot spread in a shimmer around her. She passed him his tea and then bowed, down to the wooden floor, the full form of her body displaying itself.

Her cheek against the wood, she said, “It was only a movie.”

While Sun Moon retrieved his finest uniform, Ga drank and listened. In the sideways light, the windows to the west gave the illusion that he could see all the way to Nampo and the Bay of Korea. The song was elegant and clean, and even the children’s off notes made the music pleasingly spontaneous. Sun Moon dressed him, and then standing, pinned the appropriate medals to his chest. “This one,” she said, “came from the Dear Leader himself.”

“What was it for?”

She shrugged.

“Pin it at the top,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows at his wisdom and complied. “And this one was presented by General Guk for unspecified acts of bravery.”

Her attention and beauty had distracted him. He forgot who he was and his situation. “Do you think,” he asked, “that I am brave and unspecified?”

She buttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and gave a final pull on his tie.

“I do not know,” she said, “if you are a friend of my husband or an enemy. But you are a man, and you must promise to protect my children. What almost happened today, it can’t happen again.”

He pointed at a large medal she had not pinned on him. It was a ruby star with the golden flame of Juche behind it. “What’s that one?” he asked.

“Please,” she said. “Just promise me.”

He nodded, and he did not leave her eyes.

“That medal was for defeating Kimura in Japan,” she said. “Though really it was for not defecting afterward. The medal was just part of a package.”

“A package of what?”

“This house,” she said. “Your position, other things.”

“Defect? Who would leave you?”

“That is a good question,” she said. “But at the time, my hand was not yet Commander Ga’s.”

“So I beat Kimura, huh? Go ahead and pin it on me.”

“No,” she said.

Ga nodded, trusting her judgment.

“Should I wear the pistol?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Before leaving, they stopped to regard, behind a casing of glass and illuminated by a spotlight, the Golden Belt. The display was positioned to be the first thing a visitor noticed when entering the house. “My husband,” Sun Moon said … but did not finish the thought.

Her mood lightened in the car. The sun was going down but the sky was still pale blue. Ga had driven only trucks in the military, but he got the hang of it, despite how the Mercedes engine jammed the little Lada gearbox. The interior, though, was beautiful—mahogany dash, mother-of-pearl gauges. At first, Sun Moon had wished to sit in the backseat by herself, but he talked her into the front, saying that in America the ladies drive with their men. “Do you like this car, the Mustang?” he asked her. “The Americans make the best cars. This one is quite revered there.”

“I know this car,” she said. “I have been in it before.”

“I doubt that,” Ga said. They were winding down the mountain, driving just fast enough to elude the dust cloud behind them. “This is surely the only Mustang in Pyongyang. The Dear Leader had it custom built to embarrass the Americans, to show them we could make their own car, only better, more powerful.”