The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [18]
“You don’t know how Pyongyang works,” Gil said. “Once the other ministers see her, they’ll all want their own opera singers.”
A cold, white spray slapped them. It made Rumina inhale sharply, as if every little thing was trying to take her life. She turned to Jun Do, glaring again. She was about to say something, he could tell—a word was forming on her lips.
He unfolded his glasses, put them on—now he could see the bruising on her throat, the way her hands were fat and purple below the tape on her wrists. He saw a wedding ring, a birth-surgery scar. She wouldn’t stop glaring at him. Her eyes—they could see the decisions he’d made. They could tell it was Jun Do who’d picked which orphans ate first and which were left with watery spoonfuls. They recognized that it was he who assigned the bunks next to the stove and the ones in the hall where blackfinger lurked. He’d picked the boys who got blinded by the arc furnace. He’d chosen the boys who were at the chemical plant when it made the sky go yellow. He’d sent Ha Shin, the boy who wouldn’t speak, who wouldn’t say no, to clean the vats at the paint factory. It was Jun Do who put the gaff in Bo Song’s hands.
“What choice did I have?” Jun Do asked her. He really needed to know, just as he had to know what happened to the boy and the girl at the end of the aria.
She raised her foot and showed Jun Do her toenails, the red paint vibrant against the platinum dark. She spoke a word, then drove her foot into his face.
The blood, it was dark. It trickled down his shirt, last worn by the man they’d plucked from the beach. Her big toenail had cut along his gums, but it was okay, he felt better, he knew the word now, the word that had been upon her lips. He didn’t need to speak Japanese to understand the word “die.” It was the ending to the opera, too, he was sure of it. That’s what happened to the boy and the girl on the boat. It wasn’t a sad story, really. It was one of love—the boy and the girl at least knew each other’s fates, and they’d never be alone.
THERE WERE many kidnappings to come—years of them, in fact. There was the old woman they came upon in a tidal pool on Nishino Island. Her pants were rolled up and she peered into a camera mounted on three wooden legs. Her hair was gray and wild and she went without protest, in exchange for Jun Do’s portrait. There was the Japanese climatologist they discovered on an iceberg in the Tsugaru Strait. They plucked his scientific equipment and red kayak, too. There was a rice farmer, a jetty engineer, and a woman who said she’d come to the beach to drown herself.
Then the kidnappings ended, as suddenly as they’d begun. Jun Do was assigned to language school, to spend a year learning English. He asked the control officer in Kyongsong if the new post was a reward for stopping a minister’s son from defecting. The officer took Jun Do’s old military uniform, his liquor ration card and coupon book for prostitutes. When the officer saw the book was nearly full, he smiled. Sure, he said.
Majon-ni, in the Onjin Mountains, was colder than Chongjin had ever been. Jun Do was grateful for the blue headphones he wore all day, as they drowned out the endless tank exercises of the Ninth Mechanized, which was stationed there. The school officials had no interest in teaching Jun Do to speak English. He simply had to transcribe it, learning vocabulary and grammar over the headphones and, key by clacking key, parroting it back on his manual typewriter. I would like to purchase a puppy, the woman’s voice would say over the headphones, and this Jun Do would tap out. At least near the end, the school got a human teacher, a rather sad man, prone to depression, that Pyongyang had acquired from Africa. The man spoke no Korean, and he spent the classes asking the students grand, unanswerable questions, which greatly increased their command of the interrogative mode.
For four seasons, Jun Do managed to avoid poisonous snakes, self-criticism sessions, and tetanus, which struck soldiers