The Orphan Master's Son (19 page)

All day he worked on the radio. The light was good at the window ledge. There he used the flattened end of a wire as a jeweler's screwdriver and melted fine strands of solder with a candle flame. There, too, he could keep an eye on the harbor to observe the Captain pacing the decks.

Toward twilight, she returned. She was in high spirits, radiant.

“I see some of you still works,” she said.

“I couldn't stay in bed without any fish to look at. They were my mobile.”

“Some impression that would make,” she said. “Showing up in Pyongyang with a suitcase full of fish.” Then she pulled back her hair to reveal a new pair of earrings made from thin tails of gold. “Not a bad trade, huh? I'll have to wear my hair up so people can see them.”

She went to the radio. “Does it work?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I rigged an antenna. We should set it up on the roof, though, before the power goes out.”

She grabbed the pair of Nikes.

“Okay,” she said. “But there's something I've got to do first.”

They took the stairs, carefully, down to the sixth floor. They passed apartments ringing with family arguments, but most were eerily silent. The walls here were painted with slogans to the Dear and Great Leaders,
accompanied by depictions of children singing from the songbooks of the revolution and peasant farmers pausing at their rich harvests, sickles high, to gaze into the pure light of everlasting wisdom.

The Second Mate's wife knocked on a door, waited a moment, then went inside. The windows were covered with ration paper, and the room smelled of the crotch rot that would spread through the DMZ tunnels. Here they found a man sitting in a plastic dining chair, a bandaged foot elevated on a stool. From the shape of the bandages, you could tell there was no room for toes. He wore overalls from the canning factory, and his name patch said “Team Leader Gun.” Gun's eyes lit when he saw the shoes. He beckoned for them, then turned them in his hands, smelled them.

“Can you get more of these?” he asked her.

“Maybe,” she said. She saw a box on a table, about the size of a funeral cake. “Is this it?”

“Yes,” he said, marveling at the Nikes. Then he pointed at her box. “That wasn't easy to get, you know—it's straight from the South.”

Without looking inside, she put the box under her arm.

“What does your friend want?” Gun asked her.

Jun Do looked around the room, at the cases of strange Chinese liquor and the bins of old clothing, at the dangling wires where a loudspeaker should have been. There was a birdcage, jammed full with rabbits. He answered for himself. “I don't need anything.”

“Ah, but I asked what you want,” Gun said, smiling for the first time. “Come, accept a gift. I think I have a belt that will fit you.” He strained for a plastic bag on the floor that was filled with used belts.

“Don't bother,” Jun Do told him.

The Second Mate's wife saw a pair of shoes she liked. They were black and almost new. While she tried them on, Jun Do looked at all the crates of merchandise. There were Russian cigarettes and baggies of pills with handwritten labels and a dish filled with sunglasses. There was a stack of family cooking pans, their handles pointing in different directions, and they seemed almost tragic to him.

On a small bookshelf, he found his English dictionaries, and he looked over his old notes in the margins, noting all the idioms he'd once found impossible, like “dry run” and “close but no cigar.” Rummaging further, he found the badger-hair shaving brush that had belonged to the Captain. Jun Do didn't blame the Second Mate for pilfering things, even personal
things, but when Jun Do turned to observe the Second Mate's wife regard the black shoes in a mirror, it suddenly mattered whether it was she or her husband who'd sold them here.

“Okay,” she said. “I want them.”

“They look good,” Gun said. “That leather is Japanese, you know, the best. You bring me another pair of Nikes, and we'll trade.”

“No,” she said. “The Nikes are far too valuable. When I get another pair, we'll see what you have that's equal.”

“When you get another pair, you will bring them to me. Agreed.”

“Agreed,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “You take those shoes, and then you can owe me one.”

“I'll owe you one,” she said.

“Don't do it,” Jun Do told her.

“I'm not afraid,” she said.

“Good,” Gun told her. “When the time comes that you can be of service, I will come for you, and then we will be even.”

Box under her arm, they turned to go. On a small table, though, something caught Jun Do's eye. He picked it up. It was a stationmaster's watch on a little chain. The Orphan Master had had such a watch, and with it he ran their entire lives, from dawn to lights-out, as he farmed the boys out to clean septic tanks or to be sent down shafts on bare ropes to drain oil sumps. Every moment went by that watch, and he'd never tell the boys the time, but they learned by his facial expressions how things would go until he next checked it.

“Take the watch,” Gun said. “I got it from an old man who said it ran perfectly for a lifetime.”

Jun Do set down the watch. When they'd left and the door closed behind them, he asked, “What happened to him?”

“He hurt his foot last year, from a steam line under pressure, something like that.”

“Last year?”

“The wound won't close, that's what the foreman says.”

“You shouldn't have made that deal with him,” Jun Do said.

“When he comes to collect,” she told him, “I'll be long gone.”

Jun Do looked at her. In this moment he felt truly sad for her. He thought of the men who were lobbying for her, the warden in Sinpo and the old Party boss in Chongwang, men who were right now preparing
their homes for her arrival. Had they been shown a photo of her, told some kind of story, or had they only heard over their loudspeakers the tragic news that a hero had been lost to the sharks, leaving a beautiful young wife behind?

Winding the stairwell to the roof, they pushed through the metal door into darkness and stars. The adult dogs were free and skittish, their eyes locating them. In the center of the roof, there was a screened-in shed to keep insects off the sides of dog—rubbed with coarse salt and crushed green peppercorns—hanging to cure in the ocean air.

“It's beautiful up here,” he said.

“Sometimes I come up here to think,” she said. They looked far out onto the water. “What's it like out there?” she asked.

“When you're out of sight of shore,” he said, “you could be anybody, from anywhere. It's like you have no past. Out there, everything is spontaneous, every lick of water that kicks up, every bird that drops in from nowhere. Over the airwaves, people say things you'd never imagine. Here, nothing is spontaneous.”

“I can't wait to hear that radio,” she said. “Can you get the pop stations from Seoul?”

“It's not that kind of radio,” he said and jammed the antenna through the mesh of the puppy warren, the little dogs scurrying in terror.

“I don't get it.”

Jun Do tossed the cable off the overhang, where they could retrieve it from the window below. “This radio doesn't receive broadcasts,” he said. “It transmits them.”

“What's the point of that?”

“We have a message to send.”

Inside the apartment, his fingers worked quickly to hook up the antenna cable and a small microphone. “I had a dream,” he told her. “I know it doesn't make any sense, but I dreamed your husband had a radio, that he was on a raft, heading into shimmering water, bright like a thousand mirrors.”

“Okay,” she said.

Jun Do turned the radio on and they both stared at the sodium-yellow glow of its power meter. He set it to 63 megahertz, then squeezed the breaker bar: “Third Mate to Second Mate, Third Mate to Second Mate, over.” Jun Do repeated this, knowing that, just as he couldn't hear, the
Second Mate couldn't respond. Finally, he said, “My friend, I know you're out there and you mustn't despair.” Jun Do could've explained how to unbraid a single strand of copper from the battery leads, then connect the strand to both poles so it would heat up enough to light a cigarette. Jun Do could have told the Second Mate how to make a compass from the magnet in the radio's windings, or how surrounding the capacitors is a foil he could flash as a signal mirror.

But the survival skills the Second Mate needed concerned enduring solitude and tolerating the unknown, topics about which Jun Do had some practice. “Sleep during the day,” Jun Do told him. “At night your thoughts will come clear. We have looked at the stars together—chart them each night. If they are in the right places, you're doing fine. Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past. Do not try to picture people's faces—you will despair if they don't come clear. If you are visited by people from far away, don't think of them as ghosts. Treat them as family, ask them questions, be a good host.

“You will need a purpose,” he told the Second Mate. “The Captain's purpose was to get us home safe. Your purpose will be to stay strong so that you can rescue the girl who rows in the dark. She is in trouble and needs help. You're the only one out there who can help her. Scan the horizons at night, look for lights and flares. You must save her for me.

“I'm sorry that I let you down. It was my job to look out for you. I was supposed to save you, and I failed. You were the real hero. When the Americans came, you saved us all, and when you needed us, we weren't there for you. Somehow, one day, I'll make things right.”

Jun Do stopped broadcasting, and the needle on the meter went flat.

The Second Mate's wife just looked at him. “That must have been one sad dream. Because that was the saddest message one person ever sent another.” When Jun Do nodded, she said, “Who was the girl who rows in the dark?”

“I don't know,” he said. “She was just in the dream.”

He handed the microphone to her.

“I think you should say something to him,” he said.

She didn't take it. “This is about your dream, not mine. What would I say?” she asked. “What would I tell him?”

“What would you have told him if you knew you'd never see him
again?” he asked. “Or you don't have to say anything. He told me how much he loved your singing.”

Jun Do went to his knees, turned, and rolled onto the pallet. On his back, he took several large breaths. When he tried to pull the shirt off, he found he couldn't.

“Don't listen,” she told him.

He put his fingers in his ears, the same inside feeling as wearing headphones, and watched her lips move. She spoke only for a little bit, her eyes pointed toward the windows, and when he realized she was singing, he opened his ears and welcomed the sound, a children's lullaby:

Her voice was simple and pure. Everyone knew their lullabies, but how did he know his? Had someone ever sung them to him, from before he could remember?

When she was done, she turned off the radio. The lights would go off soon, so she lit a candle. She came to his side, and there was something new in her eyes. “I needed that,” she said. “I didn't know I needed that.” She took a deep breath. “I feel like something's been lifted.”

“That was beautiful,” he said. “I recognized that lullaby.”

“Of course you did,” she said. “Everyone knows it.” She put her hand on the box. “I've been carrying this around, and not once have you asked what it is.”

“So show me,” he said.

“Close your eyes,” she told him.

He did. First came the unzipping of her canning-line jumpsuit, and then he heard the whole process, the opening of the box, the shuffle of stiff satin, the shush as she stepped into it and drew it up her legs, and then the whisper as it spun on her body, the shimmy of a final position, and then her arms, almost without sound, entering the sleeves.

“You can open your eyes now,” she told him, but he did not want to.

Eyes closed, he could see her skin in long flashes, in the comfortable manner of someone unobserved. She was trusting him, completely, and he wished for anything but to have that end.

She kneeled beside him again, and when he did open his eyes, he saw she was in a shimmering yellow dress.

“This is the kind they wear in the West,” she said.

“You're beautiful,” he told her.

“Let's get that shirt off.”

She slid a leg over his waist, the hem of her dress enveloping his midsection. Straddling him, she pulled his arms till he was sitting up, then taking hold of his shirt, she let the gravity of his return peel it off.

“I can see those earrings from here,” he said.

“Maybe I don't need to cut my hair, then.”

He looked up at her. The yellow of her dress shined in the black of her hair.

She asked him, “How come you never married?”

“Bad
songbun
.”

“Oh,” she said. “Were your parents denounced?”

“No,” he answered. “People think I'm an orphan.”

“That will do it,” she said, then hesitated. “Sorry, that sounded bad, the way I said that.”

What was there to say? Jun Do shrugged at her.