The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [140]
“Why would I contact anyone?” he asked. “I have no need.”
“It’s not need,” I said. “It’s want, like you’d want to call a friend or a relative.”
“Our Party comrades fulfill all our needs,” my mother said.
“What about your aunt?” I asked my father. “Don’t you have an aunt in the South?”
My father’s face was blank, expressionless. “We have no ties to that corrupt and capitalist nation,” he said.
“We denounce her,” my mother said.
“Hey, I’m not asking as a state interrogator,” I told them. “I’m your son. This is just family talk.”
They ate in silence. I returned to the phone, moving through its functions, all of which seemed disabled. I dialed a couple of random numbers, but the phone wouldn’t connect to the network, even though I could see the cellular tower from our window. I turned the volume up and down, but the ringer wouldn’t sound. I tried to employ the little camera feature, but it refused to snap a photo. It looked like I would be selling the thing after all. Still, it irked me that I couldn’t think of one person to call. I went through a mental list of all my professors, but my two favorites got sent to labor camps—it really hurt to add my signature to their writ of sedition, but I had a duty, I was already an intern at Division 42 by then.
“Hey, wait, I remember,” I said. “When I was a boy, there was a couple. They’d come over and the four of you would play cards late into the night. Aren’t you curious what happened to them? Wouldn’t you contact them if you could?”
“I don’t believe I’ve heard of these people,” my father said.
“I’m sure of it,” I told him. “I remember them clearly.”
“No,” he said. “You must be mistaken.”
“Father, it’s me. There’s no one else in the room. No one is listening.”
“Stop this dangerous talk,” my mother said. “We met with no one.”
“I’m not saying you met with anyone. The four of you would play cards after the factory closed. You would laugh and drink shoju.” I reached to take my father’s hand, but the touch surprised him, and he recoiled. “Father, it’s me, your son. Take my hand.”
“Do not question our loyalties,” my father said. “Is this a test?” he asked me. He looked white-eyed around the room. “Are we being tested?” he asked the air.
There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family. I was eight when my father had this talk with me. We were under a tree on Moranbong Hill. He told me that there was a path set out for us. On it we had to do everything the signs commanded and heed all the announcements along the way. Even if we walked this path side by side, he said, we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands. On Sundays the factories were closed so the air was clear, and I could imagine this path ahead stretching across the Taedong Valley, a path lined with willows and vaulted by singular white clouds moving as a group. We ate berry-flavored ices and listened to the sounds of old men at their chang-gi boards and slapping cards in a spirited game of go-stop. Soon my thoughts were of toy sailboats, like the ones the yangban kids were playing with at the pond. But my father was still walking me down that path.
My father said to me, “I denounce this boy for having a blue tongue.”
We laughed.
I pointed at my father. “This citizen eats mustard.”
I had recently tried mustard root for the first time, and the look on my face made my parents laugh. Everything mustard was now funny to me.
My father addressed an invisible authority in the air. “This boy has counterrevolutionary thoughts about mustard. He should be sent to a mustard-seed farm to correct his mustardy thinking.”
“This dad eats pickle ice with mustard poop,” I said.
“That was a good one. Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded