The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [11]
Long Tomorrows, when they came to it, looked no bigger than the infirmary.
Jun Do shouldn’t have pointed it out because Gil insisted they go in.
It was filled only with shadows. Everything had been stripped for fuel—even the doorframes had been burned. The roster of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution, painted on the wall, was the only thing left.
Gil didn’t believe that Jun Do had named all the orphans.
“You really memorized all the Martyrs?” he asked. “What about number eleven?”
“That’s Ha Shin,” Jun Do said. “When he was captured, he cut out his own tongue so the Japanese could get no information from him. There was a boy here who wouldn’t speak—I gave him that name.”
Gil ran his finger down the list.
“Here you are,” he said. “Martyr number seventy-six, Pak Jun Do. What’s that guy’s story?”
Jun Do touched the blackness on the floor where the stove had once been. “Even though he killed many Japanese soldiers,” he said, “the revolutionaries in Pak Jun Do’s unit didn’t trust him because he was descended from an impure blood line. To prove his loyalty, he hanged himself.”
Gil stared at him. “You gave yourself this name? Why?”
“He passed the ultimate loyalty test.”
The Orphan Master’s room, it turned out, was no bigger than a pallet. And of the portrait of the tormenting woman, Jun Do could find only a nail hole.
“Is this where you slept?” Gil asked. “In the Orphan Master’s room?”
Jun Do showed him the nail hole. “Here’s where the portrait of my mother hung.”
Gil inspected it. “There was a nail here, all right,” he said. “Tell me, if you lived with your father, how come you have an orphan’s name?”
“He couldn’t give me his name,” Jun Do said, “or everyone would see the shame of how he was forced to raise his son. And he couldn’t bear to give me another man’s name, even a Martyr’s. I had to do it.”
Gil’s expression was blank. “What about your mother?” he asked. “What was her name?”
They heard the horn of the Mangyongbong-92 ferry in the distance.
Jun Do said, “Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything.”
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