Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Ga placed his hand on her. “Did he have a plan?”

“Yes,” she said. “I discovered his plan—passport, cash, travel passes. The plan included only him. Not even his children.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “My plan won’t be like that.”

I WAS AWAKE in the middle of the night. I could feel that my parents were, too. For a while, I heard the boots of a Juche Youth Troop heading toward one of those dark, all-night shock rallies in Kumsusan Square. Heading to work in the morning, I knew I’d pass those girls on the way home, faces blacked by fire smoke, slogans painted down their thin arms. Most of all, those wild eyes. I stared at the ceiling, imagining the nervous hooves of baby goats above, always taking shuffle steps since it was too dark for them to see the edge of the roof.

I kept thinking how much Commander Ga’s biography was like my own. Both our names were essentially unknown—there was nothing by which friends and family could call us, there was no word to which our deepest selves could respond. And then there was the way I was coming to believe that he didn’t know the fates of the actress and her children. True, he seemed to move forward under the belief that all was well with them, but I don’t think he had any idea. Much like myself—I created biographies of my subjects, which basically documented their lives up to the point they met me. Yet I had to admit, I’d never followed up on a single person who left Division 42. Not one biography had an epilogue. Our most important connection was how, to be given a new life, Ga had to take one away. I proved that theorem every day. After years of failure, I now understood that by writing Commander Ga’s biography, maybe I was also writing my own.

I stood at the window. By the merest of starlight, I urinated into a wide-mouthed jar. A sound rose from the street below. And then something happened to let me know, despite the darkness, despite the kilometers between me and the nearest farm, that the nation’s rice stalks were golden-tipped and it was harvest season again: two dump trucks pulled up across Sinuiju Street, and with bullhorns, the Minister of Mass Mobilization’s men rousted all the occupants of the Worker’s Paradise Housing Block. Below, my neighbors in their bedclothes were slowly packed into trucks. By dawn they would be bent over, ankle deep in paddy water, receiving a daylong remedial lesson on the word “toil,” which is the source of all food.

“Father,” I spoke into the dark room. “Father, is it just about survival? Is that all there is?” I could feel the jar warm in my hand as I carefully screwed the lid back on. When the trucks pulled away, the only sound left was the slight whistle of my father breathing through his nose, a sure sign he was awake.

In the morning, another member of my team was missing. I can’t say his name, but he was the one with the thin mustache and the lisp. He’d been out a week, and I had to assume it was more than being pressed into a harvest detail. It was likely I wouldn’t see him again. He was the third this month, the sixth this year. What happened to them, where did they go? How were we going to replace the Pubyok when they retired if we were only a couple of men and a pair of interns?

Nonetheless, we took the gondola to the top of Mount Taesong. While Jujack and Leonardo searched Comrade Buc’s house, Q-Kee and I swept Commander Ga’s residence, though it was hard to focus. Every time you looked up, there through the grand windows was the skyline of Pyongyang below. You had to gasp at the sight of it. The whole house had a dreamlike quality to it—Q-Kee just shook her head at the way these people had their own bedroom and kitchen. They shared a commode with no one. Dog hair was everywhere, and it was clear they kept such an animal simply for personal amusement. The Golden Belt, in its glowing case, was something we were frightened to inspect. Even the Pubyok hadn’t touched it on their initial sweep.

Their garden had been picked clean—there wasn’t so much as a pea to take home to my parents. Had Commander Ga and Sun Moon taken fresh food with them, expecting a journey, perhaps? Or did Ga intend the food for his getaway? In their scrap heap was the rind of a whole melon and the fine bones of songbirds. Had they been more deprived than their fancy yangban house suggested?

Under the house, we found a thirty-meter tunnel stocked with rice sacks and American movies. The escape hatch was across the road, behind some bushes. Inside the house, we discovered some standard hiding compartments in the wall, but they were mostly empty. In one, we found a stack of South Korean martial-arts magazines, very illegal. The magazines were well worn and depicted fighters whose bodies rippled with combat. With the magazines was a lone handkerchief. This I lifted, looking for a monogram. I turned to Q-Kee. “I wonder what this handkerchief is doing—”

“Drop it,” Q-Kee told me.

Right away, I let go, and the handkerchief fell to the floor. “What?” I asked.

“Don’t you know what Ga must have used that for?” she asked me. She looked at me like I was one of the blind new puppies in the Central Zoo. “Didn’t you have brothers?”

In the bathroom, Q-Kee indicated how Sun Moon’s comb and Commander Ga’s razor shared the edge of the sink. She’d come to work sporting a black eye, and I’d pretended not to notice, but in front of a mirror, there was no way to avoid it.

“Did someone try to hurt you?” I asked her.

“What makes you think it wasn’t love?”

I laughed. “That would be a new way to show affection.”

Q-Kee cocked her head and regarded me in the mirror.

She lifted a single glass from the sink ledge and held it to the light.

“They shared a rinse cup,” she said. “That’s love. There are many proofs.”

“Is it proof?” I asked her. I shared a rinse cup with my parents.

In the bedroom, Q-Kee surveyed things. “Sun Moon would sleep on this side of the bed,” she said. “It is closer to the toilet.” Then Q-Kee went to the little table on that side of the bed. She opened and closed its drawer, knocked on the wood. “A smart woman,” Q-Kee said, “would keep her condoms taped to the underside of this table. They wouldn’t be visible to her husband, but when she needed one, all she had to do was reach.”

“Condoms,” I repeated. All forms of birth control were strictly illegal.

“You can get them at any night market,” she said. “The Chinese make them in every color.”

She turned over Sun Moon’s bedside table, but there was nothing underneath.

I turned over Commander Ga’s bedside table as well—nothing.

“Trust me,” Q-Kee said. “The Commander had no need for birth control.”

Together, we pulled the sheets from the bed and got down on our knees to identify hairs on the pillows. “They both slept here,” I declared, and then we ran our fingertips across each centimeter of the mattress, sniffing and eyeballing everything for even the smallest sign of spoor. It was about halfway down the mattress that I came across a scent the likes of which I’d never encountered. I felt something primal in my nostrils, and then a bright light flashed in my mind. The scent was so sudden, so foreign, that I couldn’t find the words, I couldn’t have alerted Q-Kee even if I’d wanted to.

At the foot of the bed, we both stood.

Q-Kee crossed her arms in disbelief. “They slept together, but no fucky-fucky. ”

“No what?”

“It’s English for ‘sex,’ ” she said. “Don’t you watch movies?”

“Not those kinds of movies,” I said, but the truth was I hadn’t seen any.