The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [159]
At Division 42, I went through my daily session with Commander Ga, and except for what happened to the actress and her children, he was all too happy to give the whats and whys and wheres and whens of everything. Once again, he went over how Mongnan had implored him to put on the dead Commander’s uniform, and he reviewed the conversation with the Warden, sagging under the weight of a great rock, that allowed him to walk out of a prison camp. It’s true that when I first imagined Ga’s biography, it was the big moments that loomed large in the chapters, such as an underground showdown with the holder of the Golden Belt. But now it was a much more subtle book I was constructing, and only the hows mattered to me.
“I understand that you talked your way out of prison,” I said to Commander Ga. “But how did you summon the nerve to go to Sun Moon’s house? What did you say to her on the heels of killing her husband?”
Commander Ga had forsaken the bed by now. We leaned against opposite walls of the small room, smoking.
“Where else could I go?” he asked me. “What could I say but the truth?”
“And how did she respond?”
“She fell down and wept.”
“Of course she did. How did you get from there to sharing a cup?”
“Sharing a cup?”
“You know what I’m saying,” I told him. “How do you get a woman to love you, even though she knows you hurt people?”
“Is there someone you love?” Commander Ga asked me.
“I ask the questions around here,” I said, but I couldn’t let him think I had no one. I gave him a slight nod, one that suggested, Are we not both men?
“Then she loves you despite what you do?”
“What I do?” I asked him. “I help people. I save people from the treatment they’d get from those Pubyok animals. I’ve turned questioning into a science. You have your teeth, don’t you? Has anyone wrapped wire around your knuckles until your fingertips swelled purple and went dead? I’m asking how she loved you. You were a replacement husband. Nobody truly loves a replacement husband. It’s only their first family they care about.”
Commander Ga began speaking on the topic of love, but suddenly his voice became static in my ears. I couldn’t hear anything, for a notion had risen in my mind, the thought that maybe my parents had had a first family, that there were children before me that they lost and that I was a late, hollow replacement. That would account for their advanced ages and for the way that, when they looked at me, they seemed to see something that was lacking. And the fear in their eyes—might it not be the unbearable fear of losing me, too, a fear of the knowledge that they couldn’t handle going through such loss again?
I took the underground trolley to Central Records and pulled my parents’ files. All afternoon I read through them, and here I saw another reason that citizen biographies were needed: the files were filled with dates and stamps and grainy images and informant quotes and reports from housing blocks, factory committees, district panels, volunteer details, and Party boards. Yet there was no real information in them, no sense of who these two old people were, what brought them from Manpo to be line workers for life at the Testament to the Greatness of Machines Factory. In the end, though, the file’s only stamp from the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital was mine.
Back in Division 42, I headed to the Pubyok lounge, where I moved my placard “Interrogator Number 6” from “On Duty” to “Off.” Q-Kee and Sarge were laughing together, but when I entered, they went silent. So much for sexism. Q-Kee wasn’t wearing her smock, and there was no missing her figure as she leaned back in one of the Pubyok recliners.
Sarge held up a hand freshly wrapped with tape. Even with a head of silver hair, even in the year of his retirement, he’d broken his hand anew. He made a voice, like his hand was talking. “Did the doorjamb hurt me?” his hand asked. “Or did the doorjamb love me?”
Q-Kee could barely suppress her laughter.
Instead of interrogation manuals,