The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [150]
“Do you know this one’s story?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a pretty simple tale. Though descended from impure bloodlines, he joined the guerrillas to fight the Japanese. His comrades doubted his loyalties. To prove they could trust him with their lives, he took his own.”
“That story speaks to you?”
“This guy I used to know,” he said. “It spoke to him.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Sun Moon said. “Once a year is all I can take of this place.”
The boy and the girl each held a hand on Brando’s lead as he pulled them deep into the woods. Commander Ga started a fire and showed the children how to notch a tripod to hold a pot over the flames. The pot they filled with water from a stream, and when they found a little pool, they narrowed the water’s exit with rocks, and Ga held his shirt at the pinch point like a sieve while the children walked the pool, trying to scare any fish downstream. They caught a ten-centimeter fingerling in the shirt. Or perhaps it was an adult and the fish here were stunted. He scaled the fish with the back of a spoon, gutted it, and fixed it on a stick for Sun Moon to grill. Once charred, it would go into the stock with the salt.
There were many flowers growing wild, probably owing to the proximity of the cemetery’s bouquets. He showed the children how to identify and pick ssukgat; together they softened the stalks between two stones. Behind a boulder was an ostrich fern, its succulent buds begging to be stripped from their fanlike leaves. As luck would have it, growing at the bottom of the boulder was stone-ear seogi—sharp with the brine of seaweed. They scraped these lichen free with a sharp stick. He showed the boy and the girl how to spot yarrow, and searching together, they managed to find one wild ginger, small and pungent. As a final touch, they picked shiso leaves, a plant left behind by the Japanese.
Soon the pot was steaming, three dots of fish oil turning on the surface as Ga stirred the wild herbs. “This,” Ga said, “is my favorite meal in the world. In prison, they kept us right at the edge of starvation. You could still do work, but you couldn’t think. Your mind would try to retrieve a word or thought, but it wouldn’t be there. There’s no sense of time when you’re hungry. You just labor and then it’s dark, no memory. But on logging details, we could make this. By building a fishfall at night, you could gather minnows all day while you worked. Herbs were everywhere up in the hills, and every bowl of this added a week to your life.”
He tasted the broth, bitter still. “More time,” he said. His wet shirt hung in a tree.
“What about your parents?” Sun Moon asked. “I thought when people were sent to the labor camps, their parents went with them.”
“It’s true,” he told her. “But that wasn’t a concern for me.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she said.
“I guess you could say my folks lucked out,” he said. “What of your parents? Do they live here in the capital?”
Sun Moon’s voice went grave. “I only have my mother left,” she said. “She’s in the east. She retired to Wonsan.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Wonsan.”
She was quiet. He stirred the soup, the herbs rising now.
“How long ago was this?” he asked.
“A few years,” she said.
“And she’s busy,” he said. “Probably too busy to write.”
It was hard to read her face. She looked at him expectantly, as if hoping that he would offer reassuring news. But deeper in her eyes, he could see a darker knowing.
“I wouldn’t worry about her,” he said. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
Sun Moon didn’t look comforted.
The children took turns tasting the soup and making faces.
He tried again. “Wonsan has plenty to keep a person busy,” he added. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The sand is especially white. And the waves are quite blue.”
Sun Moon gazed absently into the pot.
“So don’t believe the rumors, okay?” he told her.
“What are the rumors?” she asked.
“That’s the spirit,” he said.
In Prison 33, all of a person’s self-deceit was slowly broken down, until even the fundamental lies that formed your identity faltered and fell. For Commander Ga, this happened at