The Orphan Master's Son (5 page)

That night Jun Do stood in the dark stern of the ship, looking down into the turbulence of its wake.
Rumina
, he kept thinking. He didn't listen for her voice or let himself visualize her. He only wondered how she'd spend this last day if she knew he was coming.

It was late morning when they entered Bandai-jima Port—the customs houses displaying their international flags. Large shipping vessels, painted humanitarian blue, were being loaded with rice at their moorings. Jun Do and Gil had forged documents, and in polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers they descended the gangway into downtown Niigata. It was a Sunday.

Making their way to the auditorium, Jun Do saw a passenger jet crossing the sky, a big plume behind it. He gawked, neck craned—amazing. So amazing he decided to feign normalcy at everything, like the colored lights controlling the traffic or the way buses kneeled, oxenlike, to let old people board. Of course the parking meters could talk, and the doors of businesses opened as they passed. Of course there was no water barrel in the bathroom, no ladle.

The matinee was a medley of works the opera troupe would stage over the coming season, so all the singers took turns offering brief arias. Gil seemed to know the songs, humming along with them. Rumina—small, broad-shouldered—mounted the stage in a dress the color of graphite. Her eyes were dark under sharp bangs. Jun Do could tell she'd known sadness, yet she couldn't know that her greatest trials lay ahead, that this evening, when darkness fell, her life would become an opera, that Jun Do was the dark figure at the end of the first act who removes the heroine to a land of lament.

She sang in Italian and then German and then Japanese. When finally she sang in Korean, it came clear why Pyongyang had chosen her. The song was beautiful, her voice light now, singing of two lovers on a lake, and the song was not about the Dear Leader or defeating the imperialists or the pride of a North Korean factory. It was about a girl and a boy in a boat. The girl had a white
choson-ot
, the boy a soulful stare.

Rumina sang in Korean, and her dress was graphite, and she might as well have sung of a spider that spins white thread to capture her listeners. Jun Do and Gil wandered the streets of Niigata held by that thread, pretending they weren't about to abduct her from the nearby artists' village. A line kept ringing in Jun Do's mind about how in the middle of the water the lovers decide to row no further.

They walked the city in a trance, waiting for dark. Advertisements especially had an effect on Jun Do. There were no ads in North Korea, and here they were on buses and posters, across video screens. Immediate and
imploring—couples clasping one another, a sad child—he asked Gil what each one said, but the answers pertained to car insurance and telephone rates. Through a window, they watched Korean women cut the toenails of Japanese women. For fun, they operated a vending machine and received a bag of orange food neither would taste.

Gil paused before a store that sold equipment for undersea exploration. In the window was a large bag made to stow dive gear. It was black and nylon, and the salesperson showed them how it would hold everything needed for an underwater adventure for two. They bought it.

They asked a man pushing a cart if they could borrow it, and he told them at the supermarket they could get their own. Inside the store, it was almost impossible to tell what most of the boxes and packages contained. The important stuff, like radish bushels and buckets of chestnuts, were nowhere to be seen. Gil purchased a roll of heavy tape and, from a section of toys for children, a little watercolor set in a tin. Gil at least had someone to buy a souvenir for.

Darkness fell, storefronts lit suddenly with red-and-blue neon, and the willows were eerily illuminated from below. Car headlights flashed in his eyes. Jun Do felt exposed, singled out. Where was the curfew? Why didn't the Japanese respect the dark like normal people?

They stood outside a bar, time yet to kill. Inside, people were laughing and talking.

Gil pulled out their yen. “No sense taking any back,” he said.

Inside, he ordered whiskeys. Two women were at the bar as well, and Gil bought their drinks. They smiled and returned to their conversation. “Did you see their teeth?” Gil asked. “So white and perfect, like children's teeth.” When Jun Do didn't agree, Gil said, “Relax, yeah? Loosen up.”

“Easy for you,” Jun Do said. “You don't have to overpower someone tonight. Then get her across town. And if we don't find Officer So on that beach—”

“Like that would be the worst thing,” Gil said. “You don't see anyone around here plotting to escape to North Korea. You don't see them coming to pluck people off our beaches.”

“That kind of talk doesn't help.”

“Come, drink up,” Gil said. “I'll get the singer into the bag tonight. You're not the only guy capable of beating a woman, you know. How hard can it be?”

“I'll handle the singer,” Jun Do said. “You just keep it together.”

“I can stuff a singer in a bag, okay?” Gil said. “I can push a shopping cart. You just drink up, you're probably never going to see Japan again.”

Gil tried to speak to the Japanese women, but they smiled and ignored him. Then he bought a drink for the bartender. She came over and talked with him while she poured it. She was thin shouldered, but her shirt was tight and her hair was absolutely black. They drank together, and he said something to make her laugh. When she went to fill an order, Gil turned to Jun Do. “If you slept with one of these girls,” Gil said, “you'd know it was because she wanted to, not like some military comfort girl trying to get nine stamps a day in her quota book or a factory gal getting married off by her housing council. Back home pretty girls never even raise their eyes to you. You can't even have a cup of tea without her father arranging a marriage.”

Pretty girls?
Jun Do thought. “The world thinks I'm an orphan, that's my curse,” Jun Do told him. “But how did a Pyongyang boy like you end up doing such shitty jobs?”

Gil ordered more drinks, even though Jun Do had barely touched his. “Going to that orphanage really messed with your head,” Gil said. “Just because I don't blow my nose in my hand anymore doesn't mean I'm not a country boy, from Myohsun. You should move on, too. In Japan, you can be anyone you want to be.”

They heard a motorcycle pull up, and outside the window, they saw a man back it in line with a couple of other bikes. When he took the key from the ignition, he hid it under the lip of the gas tank. Gil and Jun Do glanced at one another.

Gil sipped his whiskey, swishing it around then tipping his head to delicately gargle.

“You don't drink like a country boy.”

“You don't drink like an orphan.”

“I'm not an orphan.”

“Well, that's good,” Gil said. “Because all the orphans in my land-mine unit knew how to do was take—your cigarettes, your socks, your
shoju
. Don't you hate it when someone takes your
shoju
? In my unit, they gobbled up everything around them, like a dog digests its pups, and for thanks, they left you the puny nuggets of their shit.”

Jun Do gave the smile that puts people at ease in the moment before you strike them.

Gil went on. “But you're a decent guy. You're loyal like the guy in the martyr story. You don't need to tell yourself that your father was this and your mother was that. You can be anyone you want. Reinvent yourself for a night. Forget about that drunk and the nail hole in the wall.”

Jun Do stood. He took a step back to get the right distance for a turnbuckle kick. He closed his eyes, he could feel the space, he could visualize the hip pivoting, the leg rising, the whip of the instep as it torqued around. Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn't acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that “take” was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.

When Jun Do opened his eyes, Gil suddenly realized what was about to happen.

He fumbled his drink. “Whoa,” he said. “My mistake, okay? I'm from a big family, I don't know anything about orphans. We should go, we've got things to do.”

“Okay, then,” Jun Do said. “Let's see how you treat those pretty ladies in Pyongyang.”

Behind the auditorium was the artists' village—a series of cottages ringing a central hot spring. They could see the stream of water, still steaming hot, running from the bathhouse. Mineral white, it tumbled down bald, bleached rocks toward the sea.

They hid the cart, then Jun Do boosted Gil over the fence. When Gil came around to open the metal gate for Jun Do, Gil paused a moment and the two regarded one another through the bars before Gil lifted the latch and let Jun Do in.

Tiny cones of light illuminated the flagstone path to Rumina's bungalow. Above them, the dark green and white of magnolia blocked the stars. In the air was conifer and cedar, something of the ocean. Jun Do tore two strips of duct tape and hung them from Gil's sleeves.

“That way,” Jun Do whispered, “they'll be ready to go.”

Gil's eyes were thrilled and disbelieving.

“So, we're just going to storm in there?” he asked.

“I'll get the door open,” Jun Do said. “Then you get that tape on her mouth.”

Jun Do pried a large flagstone from the path and carried it to the door. He placed it against the knob and when he threw his hip into it, the door popped. Gil ran toward a woman, sitting up in bed, illuminated only by a television. Jun Do watched from the doorway as Gil got the tape across her mouth, but then in the sheets and the softness of the bed, the tide seemed to turn. He lost a clump of hair. Then she got his collar, which she used to off-balance him. Finally, he found her neck, and they went to the floor, where he worked his weight onto her, the pain making her feet curl. Jun Do stared long at those toes: the nails had been painted bright red.

At first, Jun Do had been thinking,
Grab her here
,
pressure her there
, but then a sick feeling rose in him. As the two rolled, Jun Do could see that she had wet herself, and the rawness of it, the brutality of what was happening, was newly clear to him. Gil was bringing her into submission, taping her wrists and ankles, and she was kneeling now, him laying out the bag and unzipping it. When he spread the opening for her, her eyes—wide and wet—failed, and her posture went woozy. Jun Do pulled off his glasses, and things were better with the blur.

Outside, he breathed deeply. He could hear Gil struggling to fold her up so she would fit in the bag. The stars over the ocean, fuzzy now, made him remember how free he'd felt on that first night crossing of the Sea of Japan, how at home he was on a fishing vessel. Back inside, he saw Gil had zipped the bag so that only Rumina's face showed, her nostrils flaring for oxygen. Gil stood over her, exhausted but smiling. He pressed the fabric of his pants against his groin so she could see the outline of his erection. When her eyes went wide, he pulled the zipper shut.

Quickly, they went through her possessions. Gil pocketed yen and a necklace of red and white stones. Jun Do didn't know what to grab. On a table were medicine bottles, cosmetics, a stack of family photos. When his eyes landed on the graphite dress, he pulled it from its hanger.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Gil asked.

“I don't know,” Jun Do told him.

The cart, overburdened, made loud clacking sounds at every crease in the sidewalk. They didn't speak. Gil was scratched and his shirt was torn. It looked like he was wearing makeup that had smeared. A clear yellow fluid had risen through the scab where his hair was missing. When the cement sloped at the curbs, the wheels had a tendency to spin funny and spill the cart, the load dumping to the pavement.

Bundles of cardboard lined the streets. Dishwashers hosed down kitchen mats in the gutters. A bright, empty bus whooshed past. Near the park, a man walked a large white dog that stopped and eyed them. The bag would squirm awhile, then go still. At a corner, Gil told Jun Do to turn left, and there, down a steep hill and across a parking lot, was the beach.

“I'm going to watch our backs,” Gil said.

The cart wanted free—Jun Do doubled his grip on the handle. “Okay,” he answered.

From behind, Gil said, “I was out of line back there with that orphan talk. I don't know what it's like to have parents who are dead or who gave up. I was wrong, I see that now.”

“No harm done,” Jun Do said. “I'm not an orphan.”

From behind, Gil said, “So tell me about the last time you saw your father.”

The cart kept trying to break loose. Each time Jun Do had to lean back and skid his feet. “Well, there wasn't a going-away party or anything.” The cart lurched forward and dragged Jun Do a couple of meters before he got his traction back. “I'd been there longer than anyone—I was never getting adopted, my father wasn't going to let anyone take his only son. Anyway, he came to me that night, we'd burned our bunks, so I was on the floor—Gil, help me here.”