The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [127]
Comrade Buc pretended not to see him. “All that matters is that we are together,” he said, then spooned a single slice of peach into a glass bowl. This he passed, and soon a circle of glass bowls, a single peach slice in each, was rounding the table.
The soldier stood there a moment, watching.
“I’m looking for Commander Ga,” he said. He seemed unwilling to believe that either of these men could be the famous Commander Ga.
“I’m Commander Ga.”
Outside, they could hear a winch operating.
“This is for you,” the soldier said, and handed Ga an envelope. Inside was a car key and an invitation to a state dinner that evening upon which someone had handwritten, Would you do us the pleasure of your company?
Outside, a classic Mustang, baby blue, was being lowered from the back of the crow. With a winch, the car crawled backward down two metal ramps. The Mustang was just like the classic cars he’d seen in Texas. He approached the car, ran a hand down its fender—though you couldn’t quite see it, there were dimples and troughs attesting to how the body had been fashioned from raw metal. The bumper wasn’t chrome, but plated in sterling silver, and the taillights were made from blown red glass. Ga stuck his head underneath the body—it was a web of improvised struts and welded mounts connecting a handmade body to a Mercedes engine and a Soviet Lada frame.
Comrade Buc joined him by the car. He was clearly in a great mood, relieved, exuberant. “That went great in there,” he said. “I knew we wouldn’t need those peaches, I just had a feeling. It’s good for the kids though, dry runs like that. Practice is the key.”
“What did we just practice?” Ga asked him.
Buc just smiled with amazement and handed Ga an unopened can of peaches.
“For your own rainy day,” Buc said. “I helped close down Fruit Factory 49 before they burned it. I got the last case on the canning line.” Buc was so impressed he shook his head. “It’s like no harm can come to you, my friend,” he said. “You’ve managed something I’ve never seen before, and I knew we’d be okay. I knew it.”
Ga’s eyes were red, his hair dusted with dirt.
“What have I managed?” he asked.
Comrade Buc gestured at the car, the house. “This,” he said. “What you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“There’s no name for it,” Buc said. “There’s no name because no one’s ever done it before.”
The rest of the day, Sun Moon locked herself in the bedroom with the children, and there was the silence that comes only from sleep. Even the afternoon news on the loudspeaker did not wake them. Down in the tunnel, it was just Commander Ga and his dog, whose breath was foul from eating a raw onion, executing trick after trick.
Finally, when the lowering sun was rust-colored and waxen, amber-bright off the river, they emerged. Sun Moon wore a formal choson-ot the color of platinum, so exquisite the silk shone like crushed diamonds in one flash, then dark as lamp smudge the next. Seed pearls trimmed the goreum. While she prepared the tea, the children positioned themselves on elevated pallets to play their instruments. The girl began with her gayageum, obviously an antique from the days of court. Wrists erect, she plucked in the old sanjo way. The boy tried his best to accompany on the taegum. His lungs were not quite strong enough to play the demanding flute, and because his hands were too small to finger the high notes, he sang them instead.
Sun Moon kneeled before Commander Ga and began the Japanese tea ritual. She spoke as she removed the tea from an alderwood box and infused it in a bronze bowl. “These items,” she said, indicating the tray, the cups, the whisk, the ladle.