The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [139]
For my parents, I cooked spicy turnips with some mushrooms that an old widow on the second floor grew in kimchi jars. The power was spotty, so it seemed as though the amber light on the phone charger would never switch to green. My mother informed me that on the golf course, with the Foreign Minister of Burundi, Kim Jong Il had shot eleven holes in one. News of all the poverty in South Korea had my father depressed. The loudspeaker had broadcast a big story about starvation down there. The Dear Leader is sending them aid, he told me. I hope they can hang on until reunification. The mushrooms made my urine rusty pink.
Now that the roof was covered with twenty centimeters of soil, all I could think about was getting back to Division 42 to see if Commander Ga was on the road to recovery.
“Not so fast,” my housing-block manager told me the next morning. He pointed off the edge of the roof to a truck full of goats below. Because my parents were infirm, I’d have to do their share. Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University. Instead, we carried them over our shoulders, holding their legs out in front like handles. They’d fight like mad for about ten floors, but then succumb to the darkness of the cement stairwell and finally lower their heads in closed-eyed resignation. Even though the goats appeared to be in a state of total submission, I could tell they were alert and alive because of what you couldn’t see, what you could only feel against the back of your neck: their fast little hearts, fluttering like mad.
It would take weeks for the grass to grow, so a team was formed to make daily missions to Mansu Park to gather foliage for the goats to eat. The manager knew not to push his luck with me. We watched the goats warily circle the roof. One of the little ones got boxed against the ledge and was squeezed off. It was vocal all the way down, but the rest of the goats acted as if it never happened.
I skipped my bath so I could race to the Yanggakdo market. It was shameful how little I got for Comrade Buc’s ring. It seemed that everyone had a wedding ring for sale. Reeking of goat, I rode the subway home with a summer squash, some dried squid, a paper bag filled with Chinese peanuts, and a five-kilo sack of rice. You can’t help but notice how people on the metro have a way of giving you the stink-eye without even glancing your way.
I made a feast for my parents, and we were all in high spirits. I lit a second candle for the occasion. In the middle of dinner, the amber light on the charger turned green. I guess I’d imagined standing on the roof under the stars when I placed my first call with Commander Ga’s phone, like I’d behold the whole universe as I first employed a device that could reach any person on earth. Instead, I toyed with it while we ate, scrolling through the menus. The phone used the Roman alphabet, but I was only looking for numbers, and there was no record of calls coming in or going out.
My father heard the tones that the buttons made. “Have you got something there?” he asked.
“No,” I told him.
For a moment, it felt as though my mother glanced at the phone, but when I looked, she was staring straight ahead savoring the fluffy white rice—ration cards for rice had stopped months ago, and we’d been living a long time on millet. They used to ask where I got the money for black-market food, but they don’t anymore. I leaned toward my mother. I held the phone up and slowly passed it back and forth before her eyes. If she perceived the phone, she showed no sign.
I returned to the keypad. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anyone’s phone number—I didn’t—it was that only at this moment did I realize I had no one to call. There wasn’t a woman, a colleague, or even a relative that I had to contact. Didn’t I have a single friend?
“Father,” I said. He was eating the salty peanuts toasted with chilies that he