The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [138]
When I left, though, when I stepped out into the hall and closed the door and turned the lock, I didn’t walk away. Quietly, I placed my ear to the door and listened. I wanted to know if they could be themselves, if they could let down their guard when they were finally alone in a dark and silent room and could speak as husband and wife. I stood like that a long time, but heard nothing.
Outside on Sinuiju Street, even in the dark, I could see that troops of Juche girls had chalked the sidewalks and walls with revolutionary slogans. I heard a rumor that one night an entire troop fell into an unmarked construction pit on Tongol Road, but who knows if that’s true. I headed for the Ragwon-dong district, where long ago the Japanese built slums to house the most defiant Koreans. That’s where there’s an illegal night market at the base of the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel. Even in the darkness, the outline of the hotel’s rocket-shaped tower stands black against the stars. As I crossed the Palgol Bridge, pipes were dumping sewage from the backs of pastel housing blocks. Like gray lily pads, shit-streaked pages of the Rodong Sinmun newspaper slowly spread across the water.
The deals take place around the rusted elevator shafts. Guys on the ground floor arrange terms and then yell up the shaft to cohorts who deliver the goods—medicines, ration books, electronics, travel passes—with buckets on ropes. A few guys didn’t like the looks of me, but one was willing to talk. He was young, and his ear had been notched by MPSS agents who’d picked him up for pirating before. I handed him Commander Ga’s phone.
Real quick, he opened the back, pulled the battery, licked its contacts, then checked the number on the internal card. “This is good,” he said. “What do you want for it?”
“We’re not selling it. We need a charger for it.”
“We?”
“Me,” I said. I showed him Comrade Buc’s ring.
He laughed at the ring. “Unless you’re selling the phone, get out of here.”
Several years ago, after an April Fifteenth ceremony, the whole Pubyok team got drunk, and I took the opportunity to lift one of their badges. It came in handy every now and then. I pulled it out now and let it gleam in the dark. “We need a phone charger,” I said. “You want your other ear notched?”
“Little young to be a Pubyok, aren’t you?”
The kid was half my age.
With my authority voice, I said, “Times change.”
“If you were Pubyok,” he said, “my arm would already be broke.”
“Pick the arm, and I’ll oblige,” I said, but even I didn’t believe me.
“Let me see this,” he said and took the badge. He studied its image of a floating wall, felt the weight of the silver, ran his thumb against the leather backing. “Okay, Pubyok,” he said. “I’ll get your phone charger, but keep the ring.” He flashed the badge at me. “I trade for this.”
The next morning, a pair of dump trucks pulled up and offloaded mounds of dirt on the sidewalks outside the Glory of Mount Paektu Housing Block, 29 Sinuiju Street. My work at Division 42 usually got me out of tasks like this, but not this time, the housing committee manager told me. Grass into Meat was a citywide campaign, it was out of his hands. The manager was generally leery of me because I’d had a few of the tenants sent away, and he thought I lived on the top floor out of paranoia, rather than to protect my parents from some of the building’s bad influences.
I found myself in a two-day human chain that moved buckets and jerry cans and shopping bags filled with earth up the stairwell to the roof. Sometimes there was a voice in my head that narrated events as they unfolded, as if it were writing my biography as I was living it, as if the audience for such a life’s story was only me. But I rarely got the chance to put this voice to paper—by the end of