The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [100]
One of the Pubyok pulled off a shoe and advanced upon Ga.
“Stop,” I called. “Let him finish.”
The Pubyok hesitated, shoe high.
Ga paid this threat no mind. Was this a result of his pain training? Was he accustomed to beatings? Some people simply feel better after a beating—beatings are often good cures for guilt and self-loathing. Was he suffering from these?
In a calmer voice, we told the Pubyok, “He’s ours. Sarge gave his word.”
The Pubyok backed down, but they joined us at our table, four of them, with their teapot. Of course they drink pu-erh, and they stink of it all day long.
“What is this thing you need?” we asked him.
Commander Ga said, “I need the answer to a question.”
The Pubyok were beside themselves. Never in their lives had they heard such talk from a subject. The team looked my way. “Sir,” Q-Kee said. “This is the wrong road to go down.”
Jujack said, “With all due respect, sir. We should give this guy a sniff of the towering white flower.”
I put my hand up. “Enough,” I said. “Our subject will tell us how he first met Commander Ga, and when he is finished we will answer one question, any question he wishes.”
The old-timers looked on with seething disbelief. They leaned on their hard, ropy forearms, their knotted hands and bent fingers and misgrown fingernails squeezed tight with restraint.
Commander Ga said, “I met Commander Ga twice. The first time was in the spring—I heard he would be visiting the prison on the eve of his arrival.”
“Start there,” we told him.
“Shortly after I entered Prison 33,” he said, “Mongnan started a rumor that one of the new inmates was an undercover agent from the Ministry of Prison Mines, sent there to catch guards who were killing inmates for fun and thus lowering the production quotas. It worked, I suppose—they said fewer inmates were maimed for the sport of it. But the guards thumping on you—when winter came, that was the least of your worries.”
“What did the guards call you?” we asked him.
“There are no names,” he said. “I made it through winter, but afterward I was different. I can’t make you understand what the winter was like, what that did to me. When the thaw came, I didn’t care about anything. I would leer at the guards like they were orphans. I kept acting out at self-criticism sessions. Instead of confessing that I could have pushed one more ore cart or mined an extra ton, I would berate my hands for not listening to my mouth or blame my right foot for not following my left. Winter had changed me—I was someone else now. The cold, there are no words for it.”
“For the love of Juche,” the old Pubyok said. He still had his shoe on the table. “If we were interrogating this idiot, there’d already be a funeral team on its way to retrieve that glorious, glorious actress and her poor tots.”
“This isn’t even Commander Ga,” we reminded him.
“Then why are we listening to him whimper about prison?” He turned to Commander Ga. “You think those mountains are cold? Imagine them with Yankee snipers and B-29 strikes. Imagine those hills without a camp cook to serve you hot cabbage soup every day. Imagine there’s no comfortable infirmary cot where they painlessly put you out of your misery.”
Nobody ever dropped bombs on us, but we knew what Commander Ga was talking about. Once we had to go north to get the biography of a guard at Prison 14-18. All day we rode north in the back of a crow, slush spraying up from the floorboards, our boots freezing solid, the whole time wondering if we were really going to interrogate a subject or if that was just what we’d been told to lure us to prison without a fuss. As the cold froze the turds inside our asses, we could only wonder if the Pubyok hadn’t finally pulled the lever on us.
Commander