The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [137]
“Commander Ga said to me, Look how it’s white and chalky. This rock is all we care about now. Have you seen some rock like it in the mine? I nodded. That made him smile. The scientists said this was the right kind of mountain, that this stuff should be down there. Now I know it is.
“What is it? I asked him.
“It’s the future of North Korea, he said. It’s our fist down the Yankees’ throat.
“Ga turned to the Warden. This inmate is now my eyes and ears around this place, he said. I’ll be back in a month, and nothing will happen to him in the meantime. You’re to treat him how you’d treat me. Do you hear? Do you know what happened to the last warden of this prison? Do you know what I had done to him? The Warden said nothing.
“Commander Ga handed me the electronic machine. I want to see a white mountain of this when I return, he said. And if the Warden sets this rock down before I get back, you’re to tell me. For nothing is he to let go of that rock, you hear? At dinner, that rock sits on his lap. When he sleeps, it rises and falls on his chest. When he takes a shit, the rock shits, too. Ga pushed the Warden, who stumbled to keep his balance under the load. Then Commander Ga made a fist—”
“Stop,” Sun Moon said. “That’s him. I recognize my husband.”
She was quiet a moment, as if digesting something. Then she turned to him in the bed, bridging the space between them. She lifted the sleeve of his nightshirt, fingered the ridges of the scars on his biceps. She put her hand flat on his chest, spreading her fingers across the cotton.
“It’s here?” she asked. “Is this the tattoo?”
“I’m not sure you want to see it.”
“Why?”
“I’m afraid it will frighten you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can show me.”
He pulled off his shirt, and she leaned close to observe in the low light this portrait of herself, forever fixed in ink, a woman whose eyes still burned with self-sacrifice and national fervor. She studied the image as it rose and fell on his chest.
“My husband. A month later he came back to the prison, yes?”
“He did.”
“And he tried to do something to you, something bad, didn’t he?”
He nodded.
She said, “But you were stronger.”
He swallowed.
“But I was stronger.”
She reached to him, her palm coming lightly to rest on his tattoo. Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who’d quietly started weeping for reasons she didn’t understand?
I ARRIVED home from Division 42 tonight to discover that my parents’ vision had become so bad that I had to inform them night had fallen. I helped them to their cots, placed side by side near the stove, and, once settled, they stared at the ceiling with their blank eyes. My father’s eyes have gone white, but my mother’s are clear and expressive, and I sometimes suspect that maybe her vision isn’t as ruined as his. I lit a bedtime cigarette for my father. He smokes Konsols—that’s the kind of man he is.
“Mother, Father,” I said. “I have to go out for a while.”
My father said, “May the everlasting wisdom of Kim Jong Il guide you.”
“Obey the curfew,” my mother said.
I had Comrade Buc’s wedding ring in my pocket.
“Mother,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, son.”
“How come you never found a bride for me?”
“Our first duty is to country,” she said. “Then to leaders, then to—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Then to Party, then to the Charter of the Workers’ Assembly, and so on. But I was in the Youth Brigade, I studied Juche Idea at Kim Il Sung University. I did my duty. It’s just that I have no wife.”
“You sound troubled,” my father said. “Have you spoken to our housing block’s Songun advisor?” I saw the fingers twitch on his right hand. When I was a boy, one of his gestures was to reach out with that hand to ruffle my hair. That’s