Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“I’m Commander Ga,” he told her. “If I want to walk a dog, I walk a dog. Besides, my days are numbered, right?”

“What’s that mean?” the boy asked. “His days are numbered.”

“Nothing,” Sun Moon said.

They walked downhill under the Fun Fair’s idle gondola. With the children of Pyongyang hard at work, the lift chairs creaked in place above them. The zoo, however, was crowded with peasants bused in for their once-a-year trip to the capital. The four of them cut through the woods, dense this time of year, and left Brando tied to a tree so as not to offend any of the veterans paying their respects.

This was the first time he’d entered the cemetery. Sun Moon ignored all the other markers and led them right to the bust of her great-uncle. The bust depicted a man whose face looked Southern in its angles and abruptness of brow. His eyes were almost closed in an expression of certainty and calm.

“Ah,” Ga said. “It’s Kang Kung Li. He charged across a mountain bridge under enemy fire. He took the door off Kim Il Sung’s car and carried it as a shield.”

“You’ve heard of him?” she asked.

“Of course,” Ga said. “He saved many lives. People who break the rules in order to do good are sometimes named after him.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Sun Moon said. “I fear the only people named after him these days are a few measly orphans.”

Commander Ga wandered the rows in stunned recognition. Here were the names of all the boys he’d known, and looking at their busts, it seemed as though they’d made it to adulthood—here they had mustaches and strong jaws and broad shoulders. He touched their faces and ran his fingers in the hangul characters of their names carved in the marble pedestals. It was as if, instead of starving at nine or falling to factory accidents at eleven, they’d all lived into their twenties and thirties like normal men. At the tomb of Un Bo Song, Commander Ga traced the features of the bronze bust with his hand. The metal was cold. Here Bo Song was smiling and bespectacled, and Ga touched the martyr’s cheek, saying, “Bo Song.”

There was one more bust he needed to see, and Sun Moon and the children trailed him through the tombs until he came to it. The bust and the man faced one another but bore no resemblance. He hadn’t known what he’d feel when he finally faced this martyr, but Ga’s only thought was, I’m not you. I’m my own man .

Sun Moon approached him. “Is this martyr special to you?” she asked.

“I used to know someone with his name,” he told her.

“Do you know this one’s story?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a pretty simple tale. Though descended from impure bloodlines, he joined the guerrillas to fight the Japanese. His comrades doubted his loyalties. To prove they could trust him with their lives, he took his own.”

“That story speaks to you?”

“This guy I used to know,” he said. “It spoke to him.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Sun Moon said. “Once a year is all I can take of this place.”

The boy and the girl each held a hand on Brando’s lead as he pulled them deep into the woods. Commander Ga started a fire and showed the children how to notch a tripod to hold a pot over the flames. The pot they filled with water from a stream, and when they found a little pool, they narrowed the water’s exit with rocks, and Ga held his shirt at the pinch point like a sieve while the children walked the pool, trying to scare any fish downstream. They caught a ten-centimeter fingerling in the shirt. Or perhaps it was an adult and the fish here were stunted. He scaled the fish with the back of a spoon, gutted it, and fixed it on a stick for Sun Moon to grill. Once charred, it would go into the stock with the salt.

There were many flowers growing wild, probably owing to the proximity of the cemetery’s bouquets. He showed the children how to identify and pick ssukgat; together they softened the stalks between two stones. Behind a boulder was an ostrich fern, its succulent buds begging to be stripped from their fanlike leaves. As luck would have it, growing at the bottom of the boulder was stone-ear seogi —sharp with the brine of seaweed. They scraped these lichen free with a sharp stick. He showed the boy and the girl how to spot yarrow, and searching together, they managed to find one wild ginger, small and pungent. As a final touch, they picked shiso leaves, a plant left behind by the Japanese.

Soon the pot was steaming, three dots of fish oil turning on the surface as Ga stirred the wild herbs. “This,” Ga said, “is my favorite meal in the world. In prison, they kept us right at the edge of starvation. You could still do work, but you couldn’t think. Your mind would try to retrieve a word or thought, but it wouldn’t be there. There’s no sense of time when you’re hungry. You just labor and then it’s dark, no memory. But on logging details, we could make this. By building a fishfall at night, you could gather minnows all day while you worked. Herbs were everywhere up in the hills, and every bowl of this added a week to your life.”

He tasted the broth, bitter still. “More time,” he said. His wet shirt hung in a tree.

“What about your parents?” Sun Moon asked. “I thought when people were sent to the labor camps, their parents went with them.”

“It’s true,” he told her. “But that wasn’t a concern for me.”

“Sorry to hear that,” she said.

“I guess you could say my folks lucked out,” he said. “What of your parents? Do they live here in the capital?”

Sun Moon’s voice went grave. “I only have my mother left,” she said. “She’s in the east. She retired to Wonsan.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Wonsan.”

She was quiet. He stirred the soup, the herbs rising now.

“How long ago was this?” he asked.

“A few years,” she said.

“And she’s busy,” he said. “Probably too busy to write.”

It was hard to read her face. She looked at him expectantly, as if hoping that he would offer reassuring news. But deeper in her eyes, he could see a darker knowing.

“I wouldn’t worry about her,” he said. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Sun Moon didn’t look comforted.

The children took turns tasting the soup and making faces.

He tried again. “Wonsan has plenty to keep a person busy,” he added. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The sand is especially white. And the waves are quite blue.”

Sun Moon gazed absently into the pot.

“So don’t believe the rumors, okay?” he told her.

“What are the rumors?” she asked.

“That’s the spirit,” he said.

In Prison 33, all of a person’s self-deceit was slowly broken down, until even the fundamental lies that formed your identity faltered and fell. For Commander Ga, this happened at a stoning. These took place near the river, where there were banks of round, water-polished rocks. When a person was caught trying to escape, he was buried to his waist at the water’s edge and at dawn, a slow, almost endless procession of inmates filed by. There were no exceptions—everyone had to throw. If your toss was lackluster, the guards would shout for vigor, but you didn’t have to throw again. He’d been through it three times, but deep in the line, so that what he stoned was not a person but a mass, bent unnaturally to the ground, no longer even steaming.

But one morning, by chance, he was near the front of the line. Traversing the round stones was dangerous for Mongnan. She needed an arm to steady her, and she had him up early, near the front of the line, none of which he minded until he came to understand that the man they were to stone would be awake and have an opinion. The rock was cold in his hand. He could hear the rocks ahead of them finding their homes. He steadied Mongnan as they neared the half-buried man, whose arms were up in a mime of self-defense. He was trying to speak, but something other than words was coming out, and the blood that ran from his wounds was still hot.