Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Ga advanced and took back the ring. “Don’t be a fool,” he told Sun Moon. “This ring was a gift from the Dear Leader. Do you know what would happen if they got caught with a ring like this?” In his pocket, Ga had some military won, not much else. He took his boots off. “If you want to help them,” Ga told Sun Moon, “they need simple things they can barter at the market.”

The boy and the girl removed their shoes, and Ga also offered his belt. Sun Moon contributed earrings. “There’s a pot of soup,” Sun Moon said. “It’s good. Just follow the stream. Keep the pot.”

“That dog,” the father said. “I thought it was escaped from the zoo.”

“No,” Ga told him. “He’s ours.”

“You don’t have an extra one, do you?” the father asked.

That night, Commander Ga hummed along as Sun Moon sang the children to sleep. “ The cat’s in the cradle ,” she sang, “ the baby’s in the tree. ” Later, when they’d climbed into bed, Sun Moon said to him, “Do you think the Dear Leader’s line should be read ‘Love knows no replacement,’ as if it’s unthinkable to search for a substitute for love, or ‘Love knows no replacement,’ suggesting that love is sentient and is itself at a loss to comprehend its absence?”

“I have to tell you the truth,” he said to her.

“I’m an actress,” she said. “The truth is all that matters to me.”

He didn’t hear her roll to her side, so he knew they both stared into the same darkness above. He was suddenly scared. His hands gripped the sheets.

“I’ve never been to Wonsan,” he said. “But I’ve sailed past it many times. There are no umbrellas in the sand. There are no lounge chairs or fishing poles. There are no old people. Wherever the grandparents of North Korea go, it’s not Wonsan.”

He tried to listen for her breathing, but couldn’t even hear that.

At last, she spoke to him.

“You’re a thief,” she said. “You are a thief who came into my life and stole everything that mattered to me.”

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw. The children were deft at quietly migrating to whatever room she wasn’t in. Once, she ran out of the house screaming, only to lie weeping in her garden. She came back in to argue with the loudspeaker. Then she threw them out of the house so she could bathe, and standing in the grass together, Commander Ga and the children and the dog stared at the front door, behind which they could hear her furiously scrubbing every inch of her skin. The children soon wandered down the hill, practicing “hunt” and “fetch” with Brando by tossing melon rinds into the trees.

Commander Ga stood to the side of the house, where Comrade Buc found him. Buc kept his Ryoksong beer in a shady patch of tall, cool grass. He offered Ga one. Together they drank and stared up at Sun Moon’s balcony. She was up there in her house robe, smoking and running lines from Ultimate Sacrifices , but every word she read with anger.

“What happened?” Buc asked him.

“I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”

Sun Moon held the script with one hand and raised the other high. Cigarette in her mouth, she tried to find her motivation in a line:

“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!

“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!

“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!”

“Did you hear what the Dear Leader wants to do now?” Buc asked him. “He wants to give the Americans a branding demonstration.”

“Ha,” Commander Ga said. “I’m sure the cattle are lining up to volunteer.”

At the sound of his laugh, Sun Moon stopped reading and turned. Seeing him standing there, she threw the script off the balcony and went inside.

Ga and Buc watched the cloud of paper flutter through the trees.

Comrade Buc shook his head in disbelief. “You really upset her,” he said. “You know how long she’s been waiting for this movie?”

“She’ll be rid of me soon enough, and her life will return to normal,” Ga said, and despite himself, there was a sadness to his voice.

“Are you joking?” Buc asked. “The Dear Leader has declared you the real Commander Ga. There’s no way he can get rid of you now. And why would he want to? His nemesis is gone.”

Ga drank from his beer.

“I found his computer,” he said.

“Are you serious?” Buc asked.

“Yeah. It was hidden behind a painting of Kim Il Sung.”

“Is there anything on there you can use?”

“It’s mostly loaded with maps,” Ga said. “There’s a lot of technical data, flowcharts, blueprints, things I can’t make sense of.”

“Those maps are the uranium mines,” Buc said. “Your predecessor was in charge of every excavation site. Plus, he oversaw the entire processing network—ore to refinement. I procured everything for him. You ever try to buy aluminum centrifuge tubes over the internet?”

“I thought being the Minister of Prison Mines was supposed to be a symbolic post, nothing more than signing the paperwork to keep the convict labor coming.”

“That was before the uranium was discovered,” Buc said. “You think the Dear Leader would hand Ga the keys to the nuclear program? If you want, I’ll explain it all. We can go through the laptop together.”

“You don’t want to see it,” Ga said. “There are also pictures.”

“Of me?”

Ga nodded. “And a thousand other men.”

“He didn’t do to me what those photos make it look like.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, this is something you should hear,” Buc said. “He was going to man-attack me, he said. But once he beat me down, once he had me where he could do anything he wanted, he lost interest. All he wanted then was an image to remember me by. I can’t imagine how good it must have felt, to take the life from that man. He tried to do it to you, right?”

Ga didn’t say anything.

Buc said, “You can tell me, can’t you? How you finished him off? Seeing as you’re in the mood to tell the truth.”

“It’s not a big story,” Ga said. “I was in the bottom level of the mine. The ceilings were low, and there was only one droplight in each chamber. Water rained through cracks in the ceiling, and it was hot, everything was steam. There were several men down there, and we were looking at a vein of white rock. That was the goal, getting the white rock out. Then Commander Ga appeared in the room. Suddenly he was there, dripping with sweat.

“ You’ve got to know the men under you , Ga said to me. You’ve got to know their hearts. Victory from without comes from victory within .

“I pretended I didn’t hear him.

“ Grab a man , Commander Ga told me. That one there , let’s know the heart of that one .

“I beckoned one of the men over.

“ Grab him! Commander Ga shouted. Grab him so he believes it. Take him so there’s no doubt in his mind .

“I approached the man. He saw the look on my face, and I saw the look on his. He turned from me and I took his back, wrapping him with my arms. When I looked back to see if this was sufficient for the Commander, I saw that he was now naked, his uniform a pile on the ground.

“Commander Ga spoke as if nothing was different. You’ve got to do it like you mean it , he’s got to believe there’s no escape. That’s the only way you’ll know if he likes the idea . Commander Ga put his arms around the midsection of another inmate. You’ve got to get ahold of him. He’s got to know you’re stronger , that there’s no way out. Maybe it’s only when you grab him by the backside that he gives in to what he really wants and then his arousal betrays him .