The Orphan Master's Son (32 page)

“He's worthless,” Q-Kee muttered.

She was right. It had been a long day. Up top, on ground level, the rust-colored light of afternoon would be stretching long now through downtown Pyongyang. It was time to call it quits and get home before the power went out.

“Wait,” Jujack said. “Just give us something, Commander Ga.”

The subject seemed to like being called Commander Ga.

Jujack went on, “Just tell us what you were dreaming about. Then we'll take you to a room.”

“I was driving a car,” Commander Ga said. “An American car.”

“Yes,” Jujack said. “Keep going. Have you really driven an American car?”

Jujack was one fine intern—he was the first minister's boy who'd ever been worth a damn.

“I have,” Commander Ga said.

“Why not start there, why not tell us about driving an American car?”

Slowly, he began to speak. “It's nighttime,” he said. “My hand shifts through the gears. The streetlights are off, electric buses are crammed with third-shift factory workers, silently racing down Chollima Street and Reunification Boulevard. Sun Moon is in the car with me. I don't know Pyongyang.
Left
, she says.
Right
. We are driving to her house, across the river, on the heights of Mount Taesong. In the dream, I believe that this night will be different, that when we arrive home she will finally let me touch her. She is wearing a platinum
choson-ot
, shimmery as crushed diamonds. On the streets, people in black pajamas dart into our path, people carrying bundles and groceries and extra work to take home, but I do not slow. I am Commander Ga in the dream. My whole life, I've been steered by others, I've been the one trying to escape from their paths. But Commander Ga, he is a man who steps on the gas.”

“In the dream, have you just become Commander Ga?” we asked him.

But he kept going, as if he didn't hear us. “We cut through Mansu Park, mist from the river. In the woods, families are stealing chestnuts from the trees—the children running through the branches, kicking the nuts down to parents who crack them open between rocks. Once you spotted a yellow or blue bucket, they all came into focus—once your eyes adjusted they were everywhere, families risking prison to steal nuts from public parks.
Are they playing some kind of game?
Sun Moon asked me.
They are so amusing
,
up in the trees in their white bedclothes. Or maybe it's athletics they're performing. You know
,
gymnastics. It's such a treat
,
this kind of surprise. What a fine movie it would make—a family of circus performers who practice in the trees of a public park at night. They must practice in secret because a rival circus family is always stealing their tricks. Can't you just picture this movie
, she asked me,
up on the screen?
The moment was so perfect. I would've driven off the bridge and killed us both to make that moment last forever, such was my love for Sun Moon, a woman who was so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like.”

The five of us stood there in awe of the story. Commander Ga had certainly earned his sedative. I gave Q-Kee a look that said,
Now do you understand the subtle art of interrogation?

You shouldn't be in this business if you don't find your subjects endlessly interesting. If all you want to do is rough them up. We determined that Ga was the type to tend his own wounds, so we locked him in a room with some disinfectant and a bandage. Then we traded our smocks for vinalon coats and discussed his case as we reclined on the steep escalators that led down into the Pyongyang Metro. Notice how our subject's identity shift is near total—the imposter even dreams he is Commander Ga. Notice, too, how he began his story as a love story might open, with beauty and an insight that combined pity with the need to protect. He does not start his story by admitting where he really got this American car. He does not mention that they are driving home from a party, hosted by Kim Jong Il, where Ga was assaulted for the amusement of the guests. It slips his mind that he has somehow disposed of the husband of this woman he “loves.”

Yes, we know a few of the facts of Ga's story, the outside of it, if you will. The rumors had been swirling around the capital for weeks. It was the inside we'd have to discover. I could already tell this would be the biggest, most important biography we'd ever write. I could already picture
the cover of Commander Ga's biography. I could imagine the subject's true name, whatever that would turn out to be, embossed on the spine. Mentally, I had already finished that book. I was already placing that book on a shelf and turning out the lights and then closing the door to a room where the dust snowed through the darkness at a rate of three millimeters per decade.

The library is a sacred place to us. No visitors are allowed, and once a book is closed, it never gets opened. Oh, sure, sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we're story takers, not storytellers. We're a far cry from the old veterans who spin weepers to passersby in front of the Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.

The Kwangbok station, with its beautiful mural of Lake Samji, is my stop. The city is filled with wood smoke when I emerge from the subway into my Pottongang neighborhood. An old woman is grilling green-onion tails on the sidewalk, and I catch the traffic girl switching her blue sunglasses for an amber-tinted nighttime pair. On the streets, I barter the professor's gold pen for cucumbers, a kilo of U.N. rice, and some sesame paste. Apartment lights come to life above us as we bargain, and you can see that no one lives above the ninth floor of their apartment buildings. The elevators never work, and if they do, the power's bound to go out when you're between floors and trap you in a shaft. My building's called the Glory of Mount Paektu, and I'm the sole occupant of the twenty-second floor, a height that makes sure my elderly parents never go out unattended. It doesn't take as long as you'd think to climb the stairs—a person can get used to anything.

Inside, I'm assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment's hardwired loudspeaker. There's one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang, everywhere but where I work, as it was deemed the loudspeakers would give our subjects too much orienting information, like date and time, too much normalcy. When subjects come to us, they need to learn that the world of before no longer exists.

I cook my parents dinner. When they taste the food, they praise Kim Jong Il for its flavor, and when I ask after their day, they say it certainly wasn't as hard as the day of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, who carries the fate of a people on his back. Their eyesight failed at the same time, and they have become paranoid that there might be someone around they
can't perceive, ready to report them for anything they say. They listen to the loudspeaker all day, hail me as
citizen!
when I get home, and are careful to never reveal a personal feeling, lest it get them denounced by a stranger they can't quite lay their eyes on. That's why our biographies are important—instead of keeping things from your government by living a life of secrecy, they're a model of how to share everything. I like to think I'm part of a different tomorrow in that regard.

I finish my bowl on the balcony. I look down upon the rooftops of smaller buildings, which have all been covered with grass as part of the Grass into Meat Campaign. All the goats on the roof across the street are bleating because dusk is when the eagle owls come down from the mountains to hunt. Yes, I thought, Ga's would be quite a story to tell: an unknown man impersonates a famous one. He is now in possession of Sun Moon. He is now close to the Dear Leader. And when an American delegation comes to Pyongyang, this unknown man uses the distraction to slay the beautiful woman, at his own peril. He doesn't even try to get away with it. Now that's a biography.

I've attempted to write my own, just as a means of better understanding the subjects I ask to do so. The result is a catalog more banal than anything that comes from the guests of Division 42. My biography was filled with a thousand insignificances—the way the city fountains only turn on the couple of times a year when the capital has a foreign visitor, or how, despite the fact that cell phones are illegal and I've never seen a single person using one, the city's main cellular tower is in my neighborhood, just across the Pottong Bridge, a grand tower painted green and trimmed in fake branches. Or the time I came home to find an entire platoon of KPA soldiers sitting on the sidewalk outside Glory of Mount Paektu, sharpening their bayonets on the cement curb. Was it a message to me, to someone? A coincidence?

As an experiment, the biography was a failure—where was the
me
in it, where was I?—and of course it was hard to get past the feeling that if I finished it, something bad would happen to me. The real truth was that I couldn't stand the pronoun “I.” Even at home, in the privacy of my own notepad, I have difficulty writing that word.

As I sipped the cucumber juice at the bottom of my rice bowl, I watched the last light play like a flickering fire on the walls of a housing block across the river. We write our subject biographies in the third person, to
maintain our objectivity. It might be easier if I wrote my own biography that way, as though the story wasn't about me but about an intrepid interrogator. But then I'd have to use my name, which is against the rules. And what's the point of telling a personal story if you're only referred to as “The Interrogator”? Who wants to read a book called
The Biographer
? No, you want to read a book with someone's name on it. You want to read a book called
The Man Who Killed Sun Moon
.

In the distance, the light reflecting off the water flashed and danced against the housing block, and I had a sudden idea.

“I forgot something at work,” I told my parents and then locked them in.

I took the subway across town, back to Division 42, but it was too late—the power went out when we were deep in the tunnel. By the light of matchbooks, we all poured out of the electric train cars and filed along the dark tracks to the Rakwan station, where the escalator was now a ramp of stairs, to climb the hundred meters to the surface. It was full dark when I made it to the street, and the sensation of emerging from one darkness to another was one I didn't like—it felt like I was in Commander Ga's dream, with flashes of black and buses cruising like sharks in the dark. I almost let myself imagine there was an American car out there, moving just beyond my perception, following me.

When I woke Commander Ga, his fingers were transcribing his dream again, but this time in a slow and slurred manner. We North Koreans do know how to make a world-class sedative.

“When you said you met Sun Moon,” I said, “you mentioned she was on the side of a building, right?”

Commander Ga only nodded.

“They were projecting a movie on the wall of a building, yes? So you first met her through a film.”

“A film,” Commander Ga said.

“And they picked the infirmary because its walls were white, which means you were outside when you saw the movie. And the snow was heavy because you were high in the mountains.”

Commander Ga closed his eyes.

“And the burning ships, this was her movie
Tyrants Asunder
?”

Commander Ga was fading, but I wasn't going to stop.

“And the people moaning in the infirmary, they were moaning because
this was a prison, wasn't it?” I asked him. “You were a prisoner, weren't you?”

I didn't need an answer. And of course, what better place to meet the real Commander Ga, the Minister of Prison Mines, than in a prison mine? So he'd met them both there, husband and wife.

I pulled Commander Ga's sheets high enough to cover his tattoo. I was already starting to think of him as Commander Ga. When we finally discovered his real identity, it was going to be a shame, for Q-Kee was right—they'd shoot him in the street. You don't kill a minister and then escape from prison and then kill the minister's family and still get to become a peasant in a rural farm collective. I studied the man before me. “What did the real Commander Ga do to you?” I asked him. His hands raised above the sheets and he began typing on his stomach. “What could the Minister have done that was so bad you killed him and then went after his wife and kids?”

As he typed, I stared at his eyes, and his pupils weren't moving behind the lids. He wasn't transcribing what he saw in his dream. Perhaps it was what he heard that he'd been trained to record. “Good night, Commander Ga,” I said, and watched as his hands typed four words, and then paused, waiting for more.

I took a sedative myself and then left Commander Ga to sleep through the night. Ideally, the sedative wouldn't take effect until after I'd made it across town. If things worked out just right, it would kick in after the twenty-second flight of stairs.

COMMANDER GA
tried to forget about the interrogator, though Ga could smell the cucumber on his breath long after the man had swallowed his pill and walked out the door. Speaking of Sun Moon had put fresh images of her in Ga's mind, and that's what Ga cared about. He could practically see the movie they'd been talking about.
A True Daughter of the Country
. That was the name of the movie, not
Tyrants Asunder
. Sun Moon had played a woman from the southern island of Cheju who leaves her family and journeys north to battle the imperialists at Inchon. Cheju, he learned, was famous for its women abalone divers, and the movie opens with three sisters on a raft. Opaque waves capped with pumice-colored foam lift and drop the women. A wave the color of charcoal rolls into the frame, blotting the women from view until it passes, while brutal clouds scrape the volcanic shore. The oldest sister is Sun Moon. She splashes water on her limbs, to prepare herself for the cold, and adjusts her mask as her sisters speak of village gossip. Then Sun Moon hefts a rock, breathes deeply, and rolls backward off the raft into water so dark it should be night. The sisters switch their talk to the war and their sick mother and their fears that Sun Moon will abandon them. They lie back on the raft in a moment filmed from the mast above, and the sisters speak of village life again, of their neighbors' crushes and spats, but they have gone somber and it is clear that what they are not talking about is the war and how, if they do not go to it, it will come to them.