Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“Let me guess,” Commander Ga said. “It is then that the wife begins to suspect this is not her real husband, and when she has her proof, she must decide whether to sacrifice her personal happiness for the good of the people.”

“Is the script that obvious?” she asked. “So obvious that a man who has seen but one movie can guess its content?”

“I only speculated on the ending. Perhaps there is some twist by which the farm collective meets its quota and the woman can be fulfilled.”

She exhaled. “There is no twist. The plot is the same as all the others. I endure and endure and the movie ends.”

Sun Moon’s voice in the dark was freighted with sorrow, like the final voice-over of Motherless Fatherland during which the Japanese tighten the chains to prevent the character from hurting herself during all the future escapes she would attempt.

“People find your movies inspiring,” he said.

“Do they?”

“I find them inspiring. And your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That’s better than the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That there’s no point to it. It’s just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone.”

She said nothing. He tried again.

“You should be flattered,” he told her. “With all that demands the Dear Leader’s attention, he has spent the week composing a new movie for you.”

“Have you forgotten that this man’s prank got you beaten in front of all the yangbans of Pyongyang? Oh, it will give him no end of delight to watch me act my heart out in another movie that he will never release. It will be of endless amusement to him to see how I play a woman who must submit to a new husband.”

“He’s not trying to humiliate you. The Americans are coming in two weeks. He’s focused on humiliating the greatest nation on earth. He replaced your husband in public. He took Comfort Woman from you. He’s made his point. At this stage, if he really wanted to hurt you, he’d really hurt you.”

“Let me tell you about the Dear Leader,” she said. “When he wants you to lose more, he gives you more to lose.”

“His grudge was with me, not you. What reason could he have to—”

“There,” she said. “There is the proof that you don’t understand any of this. The answer is that the Dear Leader doesn’t need reasons.”

He rolled to his side, so he faced her eye to eye.

“Let’s rewrite the script,” he said.

She was silent a moment.

“We’ll use your husband’s laptop, and we’ll give the new version a plot twist. Let’s have the peasants meet their quotas and the wife find her happiness. Perhaps we’ll have that first husband make a surprise return in the third act.”

“Do you know what you’re talking about?” she asked. “This is the Dear Leader’s script.”

“What I know about the Dear Leader is this: satisfaction matters to him. And he admires crafty solutions.”

“What’s it matter to you?” she asked. “You said after the Americans came, he was going to get rid of you.”

He rolled to his back. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s that.”

Now he was quiet.

“I don’t think I’d have the first husband return from the war,” she said. “Then there would be a showdown, and that would appeal to the viewer’s sense of honor, rather than duty. Let’s say that the manager of another farm collective is jealous of the burned man’s success. This other manager is corrupt and he gets a corrupt Party official to sign a warrant for the woman’s husband to be sent to a reeducation camp as punishment for his previous low quotas.”

“I see,” Commander Ga said. “Instead of the woman being trapped, now it is the burned man who has a choice. If he admits he is an imposter, he may leave freely with his shame. But if he insists he is her husband, with honor he goes to the camp.”

Sun Moon said, “The wife’s almost positive that beneath the burns this husband is not hers. But what if she’s wrong, what if he’s just been hardened by the savagery of war, what if she lets the father of her children be sent away?”

“Now there is a story of duty,” he said. “But what happens to the woman? In either outcome, she is alone.”

“What happens to the woman?” Sun Moon asked the room.

Brando stood. The dog stared into the dark house.

Commander Ga and Sun Moon looked at one another.

When the dog started growling, the boy and the girl woke. Sun Moon pulled on her robe while Commander Ga cupped a candle and followed the dog to the door of the balcony. Outside, the bird snare had tripped, and in the loop a small wren thrashed wildly, flashes of brown and gray feathers, streaks of pale yellow. He handed the candle to the boy, whose eyes were wide with amazement. Ga took the bird in his hands and removed the slipknot from its leg. He spread its wings between his fingers and showed them to the children.

“It worked,” the girl said. “It really worked.”

In Prison 33, it was dangerous to get caught with a bird, so you learned to dress one in seconds. “Okay, watch close,” Ga told the children. “Pinch the back of the neck, then pull up and turn.” The bird’s head snapped off, and he tossed it over the rail. “Then the legs come off with a twist, as do the wings at the first joint. Then put your thumbs on the breast and slide them away from one another.” The friction tore the skin and exposed the breast. “This meat is the prize, but if you have time, save the rest. You can boil the bones, and the broth will keep you healthy. For that, just send your finger into the abdomen, and by rotating the bird, all the insides come out at once.” Ga slung his finger clean, and by turning the skin inside out, it stripped all at once.

“There,” he said. Ga held the bird out for them again. It was beautiful, the meat pearlescent and pink, fanned over the finest white bones, the tiny tips of which leaked red.

With a thumbnail he scraped along the sternum and removed a perfect almond of translucent breast meat. This he placed in his mouth and savored, remembering.

He offered the other breast, but the children, stunned, shook their heads. This, too, Ga ate, then tossed the carcass to the dog, who crunched it right down.

CONGRATULATE one another, citizens, for high praises are in order on the occasion of the publication of the Dear Leader’s latest artistic treatise, On the Art of Opera . This is a sequel to Kim Jong Il’s earlier book On the Art of the Cinema , which is required reading for serious actors worldwide. To mark the occasion, the Minister of Collective Child Rearing announced the composition of two new children’s songs—“Hide Deeply” and “Duck the Rope.” All week, expired ration cards may be used to gain admittance to matinee opera performances!

Now, an important word from our Minister of Defense: Certainly the loudspeaker in each and every apartment in North Korea provides news, announcements, and cultural programming, but it must be reminded that it was by Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s decree in 1973 that an air-raid warning system be installed across this nation, and a properly functioning early-warning network is of supreme importance. The Inuit people are a tribe of isolated savages that live near the North Pole. Their boots are called mukluk. Ask your neighbor later today, what is a mukluk? If he does not know, perhaps there is a malfunction with his loudspeaker, or perhaps it has for some reason become accidentally disconnected. By reporting this, you could be saving his life the next time the Americans sneak-attack our great nation.