The Orphan Master's Son (61 page)

Sun Moon wrinkled her nose at this idea. “He got me an opera singer to help me prepare for that role, but she was impossible.”

“What happened to her?”

Sun Moon shrugged. “She vanished.”

“Vanished where?”

“She went where people go, I guess. One day she just wasn't there.”

He touched the fabric. “Then this is the dress to wear.”

They spent the remaining light harvesting the garden, preparing a feast to eat raw. The flowers they turned to tea, and the cucumbers they sliced and
let brine in vinegar and sugar water with shredded red cabbage. The girl's prize melon they broke open on a rock, so that the meat inside tore along the seed lines. Sun Moon lit a candle, and at the table, they started their final dinner with beans, which they shelled and rolled in coarse salt. Then the boy had a treat—four songbirds he'd snared and dressed and cured in the sun with red pepper seeds.

The boy started to tell a story he'd heard over the loudspeaker about a laborer who thought he'd found a precious gem. Instead of sharing the discovery with the leader of his detachment, the laborer swallowed the gem in the hopes of keeping it for himself.

“Everyone's heard that story,” his sister said. “It turned out to be a piece of glass.”

“Please,” Sun Moon said. “Let's have a happy story.”

The girl said, “What about the one where the dove flew into the path of an imperialist bullet and saved the life of a—”

Sun Moon raised a hand to stop her.

It seemed the only stories the children knew of had come from the loudspeaker. When Commander Ga was young, sometimes all the orphans had to fill themselves with at the dinner table were stories. In an offhanded way, Commander Ga said, “I'd tell the story about the little dog from Pyongyang who went into space, but I'm sure you've heard that one.”

With uncertainty on her face, the girl looked from her brother to her mother. Then she shrugged. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “Who hasn't heard that one?”

The boy also feigned knowledge of the story. “Yeah, that's an old one,” he added.

“Let me see if I remember how it goes,” Commander Ga said. “The best scientists got together and built a gigantic rocket. On its fuselage, they painted the blue star and red circle of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Then they filled it full of volatile fuel and rolled it out to the launch pad. The rocket was designed to go up. If it worked, they would try to make the next rocket capable of coming back down. Even though the scientist that piloted it would be declared a martyr, no one was brave enough to climb inside.”

Ga stopped his story there. He sipped his tea, and looked at the children, who could not tell what this story was designed to glorify.

Hesitantly, the girl said, “That's when they decided to send the dog.”

Ga smiled. “That's right,” he said. “I knew you'd know the story. Now where was it they found the dog again?”

Once more, there was silence. “At the zoo,” the boy finally said.

“Of course,” Ga said. “How could I forget? And what did that dog look like?”

“He was gray,” the girl said.

“And brown,” the boy said.

“With white paws,” the girl said. “He had a long, slim tail. They chose him because he was skinny and could fit in the rocket.”

“Old tomatoes,” the boy said. “That's all the mean zookeeper fed him.”

Sun Moon smiled to see her children engage in the tale. “At night, the dog would consider the moon,” was her contribution.

“The moon was his only friend,” the girl said.

“The dog would call and call,” the boy added, “but he never heard back.”

“Yes, it is an old story, but a good one,” Commander Ga said, smiling. “Now, the dog agreed to ride the rocket into space—”

“—to be closer to his friend the moon,” the girl said.

“Yes, to be closer to his friend the moon,” Ga said. “But did they tell the dog he would never be coming back?”

A look of betrayal crossed the boy's face. “They didn't tell him anything,” he said.

Ga nodded at the wrongness of this injustice. “The scientists, as I recall, allowed the dog to bring one thing with him.”

“It was a stick,” the boy said.

“No,” the girl said. “It was his bowl.”

And suddenly the two of them were racing to discover the item the dog chose to take into space, but Ga nodded in approval at all their proposals.

“The dog brought along a squirrel,” the boy said. “So he wouldn't get lonely.”

“He chose to bring a garden,” the girl countered. “So he wouldn't be hungry.”

On and on they went—a ball, a rope, a parachute, a flute he could play with his paws.

Ga halted them with a hand, letting a silence fall over the table. “Secretly,” he whispered, “the dog brought along all those things, the weight of which changed the course of the rocket when it launched, sending it on a new trajectory …”

Ga gestured up in the air, and the children looked above them, as if the answer would materialize on the ceiling.

“… to the moon,” the girl said.

Ga and Sun Moon now listened as the children spun the rest of the story for themselves, how on the moon, the dog discovered another dog, the one who howled at the earth every night, how there was a boy on the moon, and a girl, and how the dogs and the children began building their own rocket, and Ga watched how the candlelight played on their faces, how Sun Moon's eyes lowered with delight, how the children relished their mother's attention, and how they kept trying to outdo one another for it, and how, as a family, they turned that melon to rind, saving the seeds in a small wooden bowl, smiling together as the sweet pink juice ran down their fingers and wrists.

The boy and the girl implored their mother to create a ballad for the dog who went to the moon, and since Sun Moon wouldn't play her
gayageum
in house clothes, she soon emerged in a
choson-ot
whose
chima
was cut from plum-colored satin. On the wooden floor, she placed the crown of the instrument on a pillow while its base rested sidesaddle on her folded legs. She bowed to the children, and they lowered their heads to her.

At first she plucked its strings high, creating notes that were fast and bright. She strummed the sounds of the rocket blast, her voice laced with humor and rhyme. As the dog left gravity for space, her playing became ethereal, the strings reverberating, as if sounding together in a void. Candlelight was alive in the fall of Sun Moon's hair, and when she pursed her lips to play more difficult chords, Ga felt it in his chest, in the out-chambers of his heart.

He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you'd once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself—Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs—you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared
to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.

The story of the dog became more lonesome now and melancholy. He tried to control his breathing. There was nothing beyond the light of the candle, he told himself. The glow included the boy, the girl, this woman, and himself. Beyond that, there was no Mount Taesong, no Pyongyang, no Dear Leader. He tried to diffuse the pain in his chest across his body, the way his pain mentor Kimsan had once taught him, to feel the flame not on the part but the entire, to visualize the flow of his blood spreading, diluting the hurt in his heart across the whole of him.

And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him—she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn't leaving him, she wasn't going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him. He began to enjoy the song again, even as it grew increasingly sad. The sweet glow of the puppy's moon had given way to an unfamiliar rocket on an uncertain course. What had started as the children's song had become her song, and when the chords became disconnected, the notes wayward and alone, he understood that it was his. Finally, she stopped playing and leaned slowly forward until her forehead came to rest against the fine wood of an instrument she would never play again.

“Come, children,” Ga said. “It's time for bed.”

He ushered them to the bedroom and closed the door.

Then he tended to Sun Moon, helping her to the balcony for some fresh air.

The lights of the city below were glowing beyond their usual hour.

She leaned against the rail, turning her back to him. It was quiet, and they could hear the children through the wall as they made rocket noises and gave the dog its launch instructions.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I just need a cigarette, that's all,” she said.

“Because you don't have to go through with it, you can back out and nobody will ever know.”

“Just light it for me,” she said.

He cupped his hand and lit the cigarette, inhaling.

“You're having second thoughts,” he said. “That's natural. Soldiers have them before every mission. Your husband probably had them all the time.”

She glanced at him. “My husband never had a second thought about anything.”

When he extended the cigarette to her, she looked at the way he held it in his fingers and turned again to face the city lights. “You smoke like a
yangban
now,” she said. “I like the way you used to smoke, when you were still a boy from nowhere.”

He reached to her, pulling her hair aside so he could see her face.

“I'll always be a boy from nowhere,” he told her.

She shook her hair back in place, then reached for her cigarette, the V of her fingers indicating where it should be placed.

He took her by the arm, turned her to him.

“You can't touch me,” she said. “You know the rules.”

She tried to pull loose, but he didn't let her.

“Rules?” he asked. “Come tomorrow, we'll have broken every rule there is.”

“Well, tomorrow's not here yet.”

“It's on its way,” he told her. “Sixteen hours, that's how long the flight is from Texas. Tomorrow's in the air right now, circling the world to us.”

She took the cigarette. “I know what you're after,” she said. “I know what you want with your talk of
tomorrow
. But there'll be plenty of time, a forever's worth. Don't lose focus on what we have to do. So much has to go right before that plane takes off with us.”

He held his grip on her arm. “What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?”

“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

He let go of her, and she turned to the rail, smoking now. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights of Pyongyang extinguished themselves. As the landscape blacked out, it became easier to see the headlights of a vehicle that was climbing the switchbacks of the mountain toward them.

“You want me?” she eventually said. “You don't even know me.”

He lit his own cigarette. The lights of the May Day Stadium had stayed on, along with the Central Cinema Studio north of town, on the road to the airport. Other than that, the world had gone dark.

“Your hand reaches for mine when you sleep,” he said. “I know that.”

Sun Moon's cigarette burned red as she inhaled.

“I know that you sleep curled up tight,” he added, “that whether you're a
yangban
or not, you didn't grow up with a bed. You probably slept as a child on a small cot, and though you've never spoken of siblings, you probably reached out to touch the brother or sister asleep in the next one.”

Sun Moon stared ahead, as if she hadn't heard him. In the silence, he could just make out the sound of the car below, but couldn't guess at what kind. He checked to see if Comrade Buc had heard the car and was on his balcony, but the house next door was dark.

Commander Ga went on, “I know you pretended to be asleep one morning to give me more time to study you, to allow me to see the knot in your collarbone where someone had hurt you. You let me see the scars on your knees, scars that tell me you once knew real work. You wanted me to know the real you.”