The Orphan Master's Son (41 page)

From somewhere below came the sound of a truck engine. Vehicles rarely came up the mountain, so Ga peered down into the woods, hoping to catch sight of it through a break in the trees.

“You don't have to worry,” Ga said to her. “The truth is that the Dear Leader has an assignment for me, and when that's over, I expect you won't see me again.”

He looked at her, to see if she'd registered what he'd said.

“I've worked with the Dear Leader for many years,” she told him. “Twelve motion pictures. I wouldn't be so sure about what he does or doesn't have in mind.”

The sound grew until the engine was unmistakable, a heavy diesel with a low grind in the gearing. From the house next door, Comrade Buc stepped out onto his balcony and stared down into the woods, but he didn't need to spot the truck for a grim look to cross his face. He and Ga caught each other's eyes in a long, wary glance.

Comrade Buc called to them, “Come join us, there's little time.”

Then he went inside.

“What is it?” Sun Moon asked.

Ga said, “It's a crow.”

“What's a crow?”

At the railing, they waited for the truck to pass into a visible stretch of road. “There,” he said when the black canvas of its canopy flashed through the trees. “That's a crow.” For a moment the two of them watched the truck slowly climb the switchbacks toward their house.

“I don't get it,” she said.

“There's nothing to get,” he said. “That's the truck that takes you away.”

In 33, he'd often fantasized about what he'd have grabbed from the aircraft hangar if he'd had even a minute's notice that he was headed for a
prison mine. A needle, a nail, a razor, what he wouldn't have given for those things in prison. A simple piece of wire, and he'd have had a bird snare. A rubber band could have triggered a rat trap. How many times he longed for a spoon to eat with. But now he had other concerns.

“You take the kids into the tunnel,” Ga said. “I'll go and meet the truck.”

Sun Moon turned to Ga with a look of horror on her face.

“What's happening?” she asked. “Where does that truck take you?”

“Where do you think it takes you?” he asked. “There's no time. Just take the kids down. It's me they're after.”

“I'm not going down there alone,” she said. “I've never even been down there. You can't abandon us in some hole.”

Comrade Buc came onto his balcony again. He was buttoning his collar. “Come over,” he said and threw a black tie around his neck. “We are ready over here. Time is short, and you must join us.”

Instead, Ga went to the kitchen and stood before the washtub on the floor. The washtub was fixed to a trapdoor that lifted to reveal the ladder down to the tunnel. Ga took a deep breath and descended. He tried not to think of the minehead of Prison 33, of entering the mine in darkness every morning and emerging from the mine in darkness each night.

Sun Moon brought the boy and the girl. Ga helped them down and pulled a string that turned on the lightbulb. When it was Sun Moon's turn at the ladder, he told her, “Get the guns.”

“No,” she said. “No guns.”

Ga helped her down, and then closed the trapdoor. Her husband had rigged a wire that pulled the pump handle, and in this way, Ga was able to fill the tub with a few liters of water to disguise the entrance.

The four of them stood by the ladder a moment, their eyes unable to adjust as the bulb swung from its wire. Then Sun Moon said, “Come, children,” and took their hands. They began walking into the darkness, only to realize that, after just fifteen meters, barely enough to get beyond the house and the road out front, the tunnel came to an end.

“Where's the rest of it?” Sun Moon asked. “Where's the way out?”

He walked a little into the darkness toward her, but stopped.

“There's no escape route?” she asked. “There's no exit?” She came to him, her eyes wheeling in disbelief. “What have you been doing down here all these years?”

Ga didn't know what to say.

“Years,” she said. “I thought there was a whole bunker down here. I thought there was a system. But this is just a hole. What have you been spending your time on?” Lining the tunnel were some bags of rice and a couple of barrels of grain, their U.N. seals still unbroken. “There's not even a shovel down here,” she said. Midway into the tunnel was the sole furnishing, a padded chair and a bookcase filled with rice wine and DVDs. She grabbed one and turned to him. “Movies?” she asked. Ga could tell she would scream next.

But then they all looked up—there was a vibration, the muted sound of a motor, and suddenly dirt loosened from the roof of the tunnel and fell into their faces. A sort of terror came over the children as they coughed and clutched their dirt-filled eyes. Ga walked them back toward the ladder and the light. He wiped their faces with the sleeve of his
dobok
. In the house above, they heard a door open, followed by footsteps crossing the wood floors, and suddenly the trapdoor was lifting. Sun Moon's eyes went wide with shock, and she took hold of him. When Ga looked up, there was a bright square of light. In it appeared the face of Comrade Buc.

“Please, neighbors,” Comrade Buc said. “This is the first place they'll look.”

He lowered a hand to Ga.

“Don't worry,” Comrade Buc said. “We'll take you with us.”

Commander Ga took the hand. “Let's go,” he said to Sun Moon, and when she didn't move, he yelled, “Now.” The little family snapped to and scrambled out of the tunnel. Together, they cut through the side yard and into Buc's kitchen.

Inside, Buc's daughters sat around a table covered in white embroidery. Buc's wife was pulling a white dress over the last daughter's head while Comrade Buc brought extra chairs for the guests. Ga could tell that Sun Moon was at the edge of unraveling, but the calmness of Buc's family wouldn't allow her to do so.

Ga and Sun Moon sat across from the Buc family, with the boy and the girl between them, the four of them dusted with dirt. In the center of the table was a can of peaches and the key to open it. They all ignored the crow idling out front. Comrade Buc passed a stack of glass dessert bowls around, and then he passed the spoons. Very carefully, he opened the peaches, so quietly you could hear the key punch and cut, punch and cut, the tin complaining as the key went around the rim in its jagged circle.
Very carefully, Buc peeled back the tin lid with a spoon, so as not to come in contact with the syrup. The nine of them sat in silence looking at the peaches. Then a soldier entered the house. Under the table, the boy took Ga's hand, and Ga gave the small hand a reassuring squeeze. When the soldier came to the table, no one moved. He had no chrome Kalashnikov, no weapon at all that Ga could tell.

Comrade Buc pretended not to see him. “All that matters is that we are together,” he said, then spooned a single slice of peach into a glass bowl. This he passed, and soon a circle of glass bowls, a single peach slice in each, was rounding the table.

The soldier stood there a moment, watching.

“I'm looking for Commander Ga,” he said. He seemed unwilling to believe that either of these men could be the famous Commander Ga.

“I'm Commander Ga.”

Outside, they could hear a winch operating.

“This is for you,” the soldier said, and handed Ga an envelope. Inside was a car key and an invitation to a state dinner that evening upon which someone had handwritten,
Would you do us the pleasure of your company?

Outside, a classic Mustang, baby blue, was being lowered from the back of the crow. With a winch, the car crawled backward down two metal ramps. The Mustang was just like the classic cars he'd seen in Texas. He approached the car, ran a hand down its fender—though you couldn't quite see it, there were dimples and troughs attesting to how the body had been fashioned from raw metal. The bumper wasn't chrome, but plated in sterling silver, and the taillights were made from blown red glass. Ga stuck his head underneath the body—it was a web of improvised struts and welded mounts connecting a handmade body to a Mercedes engine and a Soviet Lada frame.

Comrade Buc joined him by the car. He was clearly in a great mood, relieved, exuberant. “That went great in there,” he said. “I knew we wouldn't need those peaches, I just had a feeling. It's good for the kids though, dry runs like that. Practice is the key.”

“What did we just practice?” Ga asked him.

Buc just smiled with amazement and handed Ga an unopened can of peaches.

“For your own rainy day,” Buc said. “I helped close down Fruit Factory
49 before they burned it. I got the last case on the canning line.” Buc was so impressed he shook his head. “It's like no harm can come to you, my friend,” he said. “You've managed something I've never seen before, and I knew we'd be okay. I knew it.”

Ga's eyes were red, his hair dusted with dirt.

“What have I managed?” he asked.

Comrade Buc gestured at the car, the house. “This,” he said. “What you're doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“There's no name for it,” Buc said. “There's no name because no one's ever done it before.”

The rest of the day, Sun Moon locked herself in the bedroom with the children, and there was the silence that comes only from sleep. Even the afternoon news on the loudspeaker did not wake them. Down in the tunnel, it was just Commander Ga and his dog, whose breath was foul from eating a raw onion, executing trick after trick.

Finally, when the lowering sun was rust-colored and waxen, amber-bright off the river, they emerged. Sun Moon wore a formal
choson-ot
the color of platinum, so exquisite the silk shone like crushed diamonds in one flash, then dark as lamp smudge the next. Seed pearls trimmed the
goreum
. While she prepared the tea, the children positioned themselves on elevated pallets to play their instruments. The girl began with her
gayageum
, obviously an antique from the days of court. Wrists erect, she plucked in the old
sanjo
way. The boy tried his best to accompany on the
taegum
. His lungs were not quite strong enough to play the demanding flute, and because his hands were too small to finger the high notes, he sang them instead.

Sun Moon kneeled before Commander Ga and began the Japanese tea ritual. She spoke as she removed the tea from an alderwood box and infused it in a bronze bowl. “These items,” she said, indicating the tray, the cups, the whisk, the ladle. “Do not be fooled by them. They are not real. They are only props from my last movie,
Comfort Woman
. Sadly, it never premiered.” She steeped the tea, making sure it turned clockwise in a bamboo cup. “In the movie, I must serve afternoon tea to the Japanese
officers who will afterward make me their business for the rest of the evening.”

He asked, “Am I the occupying force in this story?”

She turned his cup slowly in her hands, awaiting the proper infusion. Before handing it to him, she cast her breath once upon the tea, rippling the surface. The cape of her
choson-ot
spread in a shimmer around her. She passed him his tea and then bowed, down to the wooden floor, the full form of her body displaying itself.

Her cheek against the wood, she said, “It was only a movie.”

While Sun Moon retrieved his finest uniform, Ga drank and listened. In the sideways light, the windows to the west gave the illusion that he could see all the way to Nampo and the Bay of Korea. The song was elegant and clean, and even the children's off notes made the music pleasingly spontaneous. Sun Moon dressed him, and then standing, pinned the appropriate medals to his chest. “This one,” she said, “came from the Dear Leader himself.”

“What was it for?”

She shrugged.

“Pin it at the top,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows at his wisdom and complied. “And this one was presented by General Guk for unspecified acts of bravery.”

Her attention and beauty had distracted him. He forgot who he was and his situation. “Do you think,” he asked, “that I am brave and unspecified?”

She buttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and gave a final pull on his tie.

“I do not know,” she said, “if you are a friend of my husband or an enemy. But you are a man, and you must promise to protect my children. What almost happened today, it can't happen again.”

He pointed at a large medal she had not pinned on him. It was a ruby star with the golden flame of Juche behind it. “What's that one?” he asked.

“Please,” she said. “Just promise me.”

He nodded, and he did not leave her eyes.

“That medal was for defeating Kimura in Japan,” she said. “Though really it was for not defecting afterward. The medal was just part of a package.”

“A package of what?”