The Oprah Master's son

TO SURVIVE IN THE WORLD'S MOST

MYSTERIOUS TOTALITARIAN STATE

A MAN MUST FIND COMFORT

IN DOING WHAT HE'S TOLD

J

un Do's mother was a singer. That was all Jun Do's father, the Orphan Master, would say about her. The Orphan Master kept a photograph of a woman in his small room at Long Tomorrows. She was quite , lovely—eyes large and sideways looking, lips pursed with an unspoken word. Since all beautiful women in the provinces get shipped to Pyongyang, that's almost certainly what had happened to his mother. At night, the Orphan Master would drink, and from the barracks, the orphans would hear him weeping and lamenting, striking half-heard bargains with the photograph.

As the oldest boy at Long Tomorrows, Jun Do had respon­sibilities—apportioning the food, assigning bunks, renaming the new boys from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution. Even so, the Orphan Master took care to show no

favoritism to his son. When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spent the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the rungs.

Occasionally, a factory would adopt a group of kids, and in the spring, men with Chinese accents would come through to make their selections. Otherwise, anyone who could feed the boys and provide a bottle for the Orphan Master could have them for the day.

In the year Juche 85, the floods came. Three weeks of rain. Terraces collapsed, earth dams gave, villages cascaded into one another; yet the loudspeakers said nothing. The army was busy trying to save the Sungli 58 factory from the rising water, so the Long Tomorrows boys were given ropes and gaff poles to try to snare people from the Chongjin River before they were washed into the harbor. The water was a roil of timber, petroleum tanks and latrine barrels. A tractor tire turned in the water along­side a Soviet refrigerator. A young woman rose from the water, and the orphan called Bo Song gaffed her arm—right away he was jerked into the current. Bo Song had come to the orphanage a frail boy, and when they dis­covered he had no hearing, Jun Do gave him the name Un Bo Song, after the 37th Martyr of the Revolution, who'd famously put mud in his ears so he couldn't hear the bullets as he charged the Japanese.

Still, the boys shouted "Bo Song, Bo Song!" as they ran the riverbanks, tracing the patch of river where Bo Song should have been. They ran past the outfall pipes of the Reunifica­tion Steelworks and along the muddy berms of the Ryongsong's leach ponds. The boys stopped at the harbor, its dark waters ropy with corpses, thousands of them in the throes of the waves.

Though they didn't know it, this was the beginning of the famine—first went the power, then the train service. One day the fishing fleet went out and didn't come back. With winter came black finger, and the old people went to

sleep. These were the first months. The loudspeakers called the famine an Arduous March, but the voice was piped in from Pyongyang. What was happening to them didn't need a name—it was every fingernail you chewed and swallowed, every lift of an eyelid, every trip to the latrine, where you tried to shit out wads of balled sawdust. When the Orphan Master burned the bunks, the boys slept around a potbel­lied stove and knew it was their last night. In the morning, he flagged a military truck and piled them in. There were only a dozen boys left. All orphans are eventually destined for the army, and this was how Jun Do, at 14, became a tun­nel soldier, trained in the art of zero-light combat.

A tunnel was where Officer So found him, eight years later. The old man actually came underground to get a look at Jun Do, who'd spent the night in an underpass that went 10 kilometers beneath the DMZ, almost to the suburbs of Seoul. When exiting a tunnel, they would walk out backward to let their eyes adjust, and Jun Do almost bumped into the officer, an older man whose big rib cage showed he had come of age before the Chollima campaigns, in the good times.

"Are you Pak Jun Do?"

When Jun Do turned, a circle of light glowed behind the man's close-cropped white hair. The skin on his face was darker

than that on his scalp or jaw, mak­ing it look like he had just shaved off a beard. "That's me," Jun Do said.

"That's a Mar-tyr's name," Officer So said. "Is this an orphan detail?"

Jun Do nod­ded. "It is," he said. "But I'm not one."

Officer So tossed him a sack. In it were blue jeans, a yellow shirt with a polo pony and shoes called Nikes that Jun Do recog­nized from long ago, when the boys of Long Tomorrows were used to welcome ferryloads of Jap­anese Koreans who had been lured back from Japan with prom­ises of Party jobs and apartments in Pyongyang. The orphans waved welcome banners and sang Party songs so that the perfect boys with their new sneakers would descend the gangway,

despite the horrible state of Chongjin and the transport trucks that were waiting to take them all to the camps.

Jun Do held up the yellow shirt. "What am I supposed to do with this?" he asked.

"It's your new uniform," Officer So said. "You don't get seasick, do you?"

They took a train to the eastern port of Kinjye, where they commandeered a fishing boat, the crew so frightened they wore their Kim II Sung pins all the way across the sea to the coast of Japan. Officer So had also recruited a man named Gil, a sour, starch-faced translator just older than Jun Do who had previously worked in the minefields. They were going to get someone and bring him back.

"So what's this job that's worse than disarming land mines?" Jun Do said. The white foam of the breakers was sweeping into the boat.

"Mapping them," Gil said.

"What, with a sweeper?"

"Metal detectors don't work," Gil said. "The Americans use plastic mines now. We made maps of where they prob­ably were. When a tree root forces your step, that's where we assume a mine and mark it down. After a while, it gets pretty easy to figure out a popping gallery." (continued on page 131)

ORPHflN MflSTER'S

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Jun Do knew who got the worst jobs— tunnel recon, submarines, mines, biochem. "So you're an orphan," he said.

Gil looked shocked. "Not at all. Are you?"

"No," Jun Do said. "Not me."

They could see the lights of a town, but the captain would go no farther. "This is Japan," he said. "I don't have charts for these waters."

"I'll tell you how close we get," Officer So said to the captain.

There was a little skiff attached to the side of the boat, and when they were nearer the shore, Officer So directed the fishermen to lower it. To the west, the sun was setting over North Korea, and it was cooling down now, the wind shifting directions. It was Jun Do's first time on the water, and he had liked the two-day voyage across, the motion of the ship and that it had no loudspeaker. But the skiff was tiny, Jun Do thought, barely big enough for one person, let alone three and a struggling kidnap victim.

Gil kept trying to get Jun Do to repeat phrases in Japanese. Good evening— Konbanwa. Excuse me, I am lost—Chotto sumimasen, michi ni mayoimashita. I have lost my cat—Walashi no neko ga maigo ni narimashita.

Officer So pointed the nose toward shore, pushing the outboard motor, a tired Soviet Vpresna, way too hard. The boat would lean shoreward when lifted by a swell, then rock back toward the open water as the wave set it down again.

Gil took the binoculars, but instead of training them on the beach, he studied the tall buildings of the city's neon downtown.

"I tell you," Gil said. "There was no Arduous March in this place."

Officer So said to Gil, "Tell him what 'How are you?' is again."

"Ogenki desuka?" Gil said.

"Ogenki desuka?" Jun Do repeated. "Ogenki desuka?"

"Say it like 'How are you, my fellow citi­zen?' Ogenki desuka?" Officer So said. "Not like 'How are you? I'm going to pluck you off this fucking beach.'"

Gil fixed on something. He wiped the lenses of the binoculars, but really it was too dark to see anything. He handed them to Jun Do. "What do you make out?" he asked.

A lighter blur against a darker blur: a male figure moving along the beach, near the water.

Back in Panmunjom, Jun Do's squad swept every tunnel under the DMZ once a month. They worked without lights, jogging for kilometers in complete dark, using their red lights only when they reached a tunnel's end and needed to inspect its seals and trip wires. They worked as if they might encoun­ter the South Koreans at any point and trained daily in zero-light hand-to-hand. It was said that the ROK soldiers had infrared and American night-vision goggles.

Something fluttered at the edge of the lens: an animal racing down the beach toward the man, a big dog the size of a wolf. The man did something and the dog ran away.

Jun Do turned to Officer So. "There's a

man. He's got a dog with him."

Officer So sat up; he put a hand on the outboard engine. "Is he alone?"

Jun Do nodded.

"Is the dog an Akita?"

Jun Do didn't know his breeds. Once a week, the orphans cleaned out a local dog farm. Dogs were filthy animals that would lunge for you at any opportunity—you could see where they'd attacked the posts of their pens, chewing through the wood with their fangs. That was all Jun Do needed to know about dogs.

Gil said, "The Japanese train their dogs for little talents. Say to the dog, 'Nice doggie, sit.' Yoshi Yoshi. Osuwari. Hawaii desu ne."

"Enough," Officer So said. "It's time to get that language school a new Japanese teacher."

They were close enough now to see the man watching them from the shore. When Jun Do felt the boat start to go over, he leapt out to steady it, and though it was only waist deep, he went down hard in the waves. The tide rolled him along the sandy bottom before he came up coughing.

The man on the beach didn't say anything. It was night now, with just enough glow to the sky that a dog could still locate a yellow ball.

Jun Do took a deep breath, then wiped the water from his hair.

"Konbanwa," he said to the stranger. "Odenki kesuda?"

"Ogenki desuka," Gil said.

"Desuka," Jun Do repeated.

The dog came running back with its ball.

For a moment, the man didn't move. Then he took a step backward.

"Get him," Officer So shouted.

The man bolted, and Jun Do gave chase in wet jeans, his shoes caked with sand. The dog was big and white, bounding with excitement. The Japanese man ran straight down the beach, nearly invisible but for the dog moving from one side of him to the other. Jun Do ran for all he was worth. In die tunnels, he had developed a sense of people he couldn't see. He focused only on the heartbeat-like thumps of feet padding ahead in the sand.

From ahead came the body thud of some­one falling in the dark, a familiar sound. Jun Do came to a rest where the man was righting himself. His face was ghostly with a dusting of sand. Their joined breath was white in the dark.

The truth was that Jun Do had never done very well in tournaments. In the dark, maximum extension was what mattered— haymaker punches and great, whirling roundhouse kicks. In a tournament, though, judokas could see moves like that coming from a mile away. But a man on a beach at night, standing on the balls of his feet? Jun Do executed a spinning back-kick to the head, and the stranger went down.

The dog was filled with energy, pawing at the sand near the unconscious man. Jun Do wanted to throw the ball, but he didn't dare get near its teeth. Near the ball he saw a glint in the dark sand—the man's glasses, it turned out. He put them on, and the fuzzy glow above the dunes turned into crisp points of light in people's windows. Instead of huge housing blocks, the Japanese lived in smaller, individual-size barracks.

Jun Do pocketed the glasses, took up the

man's ankles and began pulling him like a sled. When Jun Do looked over his shoulder, the dog was growling in the man's face and using its paws to scratch his cheeks and fore­head. Jun Do lowered his head and pulled.

When finally he found the boat in the dark, he let the deadweight fall into its alu­minum cross members. The man opened his eyes once and rolled them around.

"What the hell did you do to his face?" Gil asked.

"Where were you?" Jun Do asked. "That guy was heavy."

"I'm just the translator," Gil said.

Gil and Jun Do spun the boat to face the waves. They got battered while Officer So pull-started the motor. Over the outboard, they could hear the dog barking on the beach.

They stayed at a Songun base, not far from the port of Kinjye. It was surrounded by the earthen bunkers of surface-air missiles, and when the sun set, they could see the white rails of launchers glowing in the moonlight. They'd locked the Japanese man in one of the hot boxes in the drill yard, and Gil was out there, practicing his Japanese through the slop hole in the door. Officer So shook his head, like now he'd seen it all.

Because they'd been to Japan, they had to bunk apart from the regular KPA soldiers, in the infirmary. It was a small room with six cots, a lone cabinet filled with blood-taking instruments and an old Chinese refrigerator with a red cross on its door. There was one patient, a small soldier of about 16, bones knit from the famine. He lay on a cot, teeth chattering. Their cigarette smoke was giv­ing him coughing fits. They moved his cot as far away as possible in the small room, but still he wouldn't shut up.

There was no doctor. The infirmary was just a place where sick soldiers were housed until it was clear they wouldn't recover. If the young soldier hadn't improved by morn­ing, the MPs would hook up a blood line and drain four units from him. Jun Do had seen it before, and as far as he could tell, it was the best way to go. It took only a couple minutes—first they got sleepy, then a litde dreamy looking, and if there was a last little panic at the end, it didn't matter because they couldn't talk anymore, and finally, before lights out, they looked pleasantly confused, like a cricket with its antenna pulled off.

The camp generator shut down—slowly the lights dimmed, the fridge went quiet. Officer So and Jun Do took to their cots.

Late in the night, Gil stumbled in. He opened the fridge, which was forbidden, and placed something inside. Then he flopped onto his cot. Gil slept with his arms and legs sprawled off the edges, and Jun Do could tell that as a child, Gil must've had a bed of his own.

Jun Do and Officer So stood in the dark and went to the fridge. When Officer So pulled its handle, it exhaled a faint, cool breath. In the back, behind stacks of square blood bags, Officer So fished out a half-full bottle of soju. They closed the door quickly because the blood was bound for Pyongyang, and if it spoiled, there'd be hell to pay.

They took the bottle to the window. Far in the distance, dogs were barking in their

warrens. Behind them, Gil began gassing in his sleep.

Officer So laughed. "I don't think old Gil's used to a diet of millet and pumpkin-rind soup."

"Who is he?" Jun Do asked.

"The spoiled kid of some minister. Or so they tell me. Sent him here to toughen him up. You know—the hero's son's always the meekest." Officer So drank. "But forget about him. One mission, and we'll never see him again."

Jun Do drank, his stomach clutching at the fruit, the alcohol.

"What's the mission?" he asked.

"First, another practice run," Officer So said. "Then we're going after a special some­one. The Tokyo Opera spends its summers in Niigata. There's a soprano. Her name is Rumina."

The next drink of soju went down smooth. "Opera?" Jun Do asked.

Officer So shrugged. "Some big shot in Pyongyang probably heard a bootleg and had to have her."

"Gil said he survived a land-mine tour," Jun Do said. "For that, they sent him to lan­guage school. Is it true—does it work like that? Do you get rewarded?"

"Why, you got your heart set on some­thing?" Officer So asked. "You even know what you'd want?" Jun Do shook his head. "Then don't worry about it."

Officer So walked to the corner and leaned over the latrine bucket. He braced himself against the wall and strained for a long time. Nothing happened.

"I pulled off a miracle or two in my day," he said. "I got rewarded."

He came back and drank the rest of the bottle, saving only a swish in the bottom. This he poured, a dribble at a time, over the dying soldier's lips. Officer So clapped him good-bye on the chest, then he stuffed the empty bottle in the crook of the boy's sweat-soaked arm.

They commandeered a new fishing boat, made another crossing. Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish.

There was a famous resort on this island, and Officer So thought they could catch a tourist alone on the beach. But when they reached the lee of the island, there was

an empty boat on the water, a black Avon inflatable, six-man, with a 50-horse Honda outboard. They took the skiff over to inves­tigate. The Avon was abandoned, not a soul upon the waters. They climbed aboard, and Officer So started the Honda engine. He shut it down. He pulled the gas can out of the skiff, and together they rolled it in the water—it filled quickly, going down ass-first with the weight of the Vpresna.

"Now we're a proper team," Officer So said as they admired the modern boat.

A diver surfaced.

Lifting his mask, he showed a look of uncer­tain wonder to discover three men in his boat. But he handed up a sack of abalone and took Gil's hand to help himself aboard. The diver was larger than any of them, and fit.

Officer So spoke to Gil, "Tell him our boat was damaged, that it sank."

Gil spoke to the diver, who gestured wildly and laughed.

"I know your boat sank," Gil translated. "It almost landed on my head."

Then the diver noticed the fishing vessel in the distance. He cocked his head at it.

Gil clapped the diver on the back and said something to him. The diver stared hard at Gil's eyes and then panicked. Abalone div­ers, it turned out, carried a special kind of knife on their ankles, and Jun Do was a long time in subduing him. Finally, Jun Do took the diver's back and began to squeeze, the water wringing from his wet suit as the scis­sors choke sunk in.

Officer So had caught a pretty good gash in the forearm. He closed his eyes at the pain of it. "More practice," is all he could say.

They put the diver in the hold and contin­ued to the mainland. That night, offshore from the town of Fukura, they put the Avon in the water. Next to Fukura's long fishing pier there was a summer amusement park, with strung lanterns and old people singing karaoke on a public stage. Here Jun Do and Gil and Officer So hovered beyond the beach break, waiting for the monkeyish organ music of the midway to stop, for the neon piping on the roller coaster to go dark. A solitary fig­ure stood at the end of the pier. When they saw the red of a cigarette, they knew it was a man. Officer So started the engine.

They motored in on idle, the pier tow­ering as they came astern of it. "Use your Japanese," Officer So told Gil. "Tell him you lost your puppy or something. Get close. Then—over the rail. It's a long fall, and the water's cold. When he comes up, he'll be fighting to get in the boat."

Gil stepped out when they reached the beach. "I've got it," he said. "This one's mine."

"Oh, no," Officer So said. "You both go." He turned to Jun Do. "And wear your damn glasses."

The two of them crossed the tide line and came to a small park. Here were benches and a little plaza, a shuttered tea stand. There was no statue, no way to tell what the square glorified. The trees were full with plums, so ripe the skins broke and juice ran in their hands. It seemed impossible, a thing not to be trusted. A grubby man was sleep­ing on a bench, and they marveled at it, a person sleeping any place he wished.

Gil stared at all the town houses around them. They looked traditional, with dark beams and ceramic roofs, but you could tell they were brand-new.

"I want to open all these doors," he said. "Sit in their chairs, listen to their music."

Jun Do stared at him.

"You know," Gil said. 'Just to see."

The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. His men would vie to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They'd come back with stories of machines that handed out money and peo­ple who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never went up. He had wanted no part of it.

Jun Do threw away his half-eaten plum. "I've had better," he said.

On the pier, they walked planking stained

from years of bait fishing. Ahead, at the end, they could see a face, lit blue by a mobile phone.

'Just get him over the rail," Jun Do said.

There were empty bottles on the pier, cigarette butts. Jun Do was walking calmly forward, and he could feel Gil trying to copy him. From below came the throaty bubble of an outboard idling. The figure ahead stopped speaking on the phone.

"Dare da?" a voice called to them. "Dare na no?"

"Don't answer," Jun Do whispered.

"It's a woman's voice," Gil said.

"Don't answer," Jun Do said.

They were upon her. She was small under the coat. When she opened her mouth to scream, Jun Do saw she had fine metalwork all along her teeth. They gripped her arms and

muscled tier up on tne ran.

"Zenzen oyogenain desu," she said, and though Jun Do could speak no Japanese, he knew it was a raw, imploring confession, like "I'm a virgin."

They threw her over the rail. She fell away silent, not a word or even the snatching of a breath. From below came a splash and the gunning of an outboard.

"Where is she?" Jun Do asked.

Gil was staring into the water. "She went down," he said.

Jun Do turned to Gil. "What did she say?"

Gil said, "She said, 'I can't swim.'"

"She can't swim?" Jun Do asked. He imag­ined her down there with her big coat like a sail in the current, her body rolling along the sandy floor. "She said she couldn't swim and you didn't stop me?"

Gil said, "Throwing her over, that was the plan."

That was the end of their practice. It was time to get the opera lady. Officer So was to cross the Sea of Japan on a fishing ves­sel while Jun Do and Gil took the overnight ferry from Chongjin to Niigata. At midnight, with the singer, they would meet Officer So on the beach. Simplicity, Officer So said, was the key to the plan.

It was late morning when they entered Bandajma Port—the customhouses display­ing their international flags. With forged documents, in polo shirts, jeans and Nikes, they descended the gangway into downtown Niigata. It was a Sunday.

Making their way to the auditorium, Jun

Do saw a passenger jet crossing the sky, a big plume behind it. He gawked, neck craned— amazing. So amazing he decided to feign normalcy at everything, like the colored lights controlling the traffic or the way buses kneeled, oxenlike, to let old people board. Of course the parking meters could talk, and the doors of businesses opened as they passed. Of course there was no water barrel in the bathroom, no ladle.

The matinee was a medley of works the opera troupe would stage over the coming season. All the singers took turns offering brief arias. Gil seemed to know the songs, humming along with them. Rumina—small, broad-shouldered, with dark eyes under sharp bangs—mounted the stage in a dress the color of graphite.

She sang in Italian and German and

Japanese. When finally she sang in Korean, it became clear why Pyongyang had chosen her. Her voice light now, she sang of two lov­ers on a lake. The girl had a white hanbok, the boy a soulful stare.

After the concert, they walked the city in a trance. For fun, they operated a vending machine and received a bag of orange food neither would taste.

They asked a man pushing a cart if they could borrow it, and he told them they could get their own at the supermarket. Inside the store, it was almost impossible to tell what most of the packages contained. The impor­tant stuff, like bushels of radishes and buckets of chestnuts, were nowhere to be seen. Gil purchased a roll of heavy tape and, from a section of toys for children, a little watercolor set in a tin. Then they paused before a store

that sold equipment for undersea explo­ration. In the window was a large black nylon bag made to stow dive gear. The salesperson showed them how it would hold every­thing needed for an underwater adven­ture for two.

Darkness fell, store­fronts lit suddenly with red-and-blue neon and the willows were eerily illuminated from below. Car headlights flashed in his eyes. Jun Do felt exposed, singled out. Where was the curfew? Why didn't the Japanese respect the dark like normal people?

They stood outside a bar, time yet to kill. Inside, people were laughing.

Gil pulled out their yen. "No sense taking any back," he said. Inside, he ordered whiskeys. Two women were at the bar as well, and Gil bought their drinks. They smiled and returned to their conversation.

"Did you see their teeth?" Gil asked. "So white and perfect, like children's teeth." When Jun Do didn't agree, Gil said, "Relax, yeah? Loosen up. I'll get the singer into the bag tonight. You're not the only guy capable of beating a woman, you know."

Rumina lived in an artists' village behind a series of cottages ringing a central hot spring. They could see a stream of steaming water, mineral white, running from the bathhouse down bald, bleached rocks to the sea.

They hid the cart, and Jun Do boosted Gil over the fence. When Gil came around to open the metal gate for Jun Do, Gil paused a moment and the two regarded each other through the bars before Gil lifted the latch to let Jun Do in.

Tiny cones of light illuminated the flagstone path to Rumina's bungalow. Above them, the dark green and white of magnolia blocked the stars. In the air were pine and cedar, some­thing of the ocean. Jun Do tore two strips of duct tape and hung diem from Gil's sleeves.

Gil's eyes were thrilled and disbelieving. "So we're just going to storm in there?" he asked.

"I'll get the door open," Jun Do said. "You get the tape on her mouth."

Jun Do pried a large flagstone from the path and carried it to the door. He placed it against the knob, and when he direw his hip into it, the door popped. Gil ran toward a woman sitting up in bed, iridescent by the light of the television. Jun Do watched from the doorway as Gil got the tape across her mouth, but then in the sheets and the softness of the bed, he lost the upper hand. She got his collar, which she used to off-balance him, and pulled out a clump of his hair. Finally, he found her neck. They went to the floor, where he worked his weight onto her, the impact making her feet curl. Jun Do stared at her toes: The nails had been painted bright red.

At first, Jun Do had been thinking, Grab her here, pressure her there, but as the two rolled, he could see that she had wet her­self, and the rawness of it, the brutality of what was happening was newly clear to him. Gil was bringing her into submission, taping her wrists and ankles, and she was kneeling now as he laid out the bag and unzipped it. He pressed the fabric of his pants against his groin so she could see the outline of his erection. Jun Do took off his glasses.

Quickly, they stole through her posses­sions. Gil pocketed yen and a necklace of red-and-white stones. On a table were med­icine bottles, cosmetics, a stack of family photos. Jun Do didn't know what to grab.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Gil asked.

"I don't know," Jun Do told him.

The cart, overburdened, made loud clack­ing sounds at every crease in the sidewalk. Bundles of cardboard lined the streets. Dishwashers hosed down kitchen mats in the gutters. A bright, empty bus whooshed past. Gil's shirt was torn. It looked like he was wearing makeup that had smeared. A clear yellow fluid had risen through the scab where his hair was missing.

Gil told him to turn left, and there, down a steep hill and across a parking lot, was the beach. The cart wanted free—Jun Do dou­bled his grip on the handle. He had to lean back; his feet skidded. "Gil, help me here."

"Gil!" he yelled as the cart broke away. He ran after it as it barreled downhill, wobbling with speed, and struck the curb. The black bag was pitched onto the sand.

Jun Do ran onto the beach, passing the bag and noting the odd way it had settled. Down at the waterline, he scanned the waves for Officer So. He checked his pockets—he had no map, no watch, no light. Hands on knees, he couldn't catch his breath. No Gil.

He went to the bag, rolled it over. He unzipped it some, heat pouring out. He pulled the tape from her face, which was abraded with nylon burns. She spoke to him in Japanese.

"I don't understand," he said.

In Korean, she said, "Thank God you rescued me."

He studied her face. Raw and puffy—how babylike it was.

"Some psychopath stuck me in here," she said. "Thank God you came along."

Jun Do looked again for any sign of Gil, but he knew there wouldn't be.

"Thanks for getting me out of here," she said. "Really, thanks for setting me free."

Jun Do tested the strip of tape with his fingers, but it had lost much of its stickiness. A lock of her hair was fixed to the tape. He let it go in the wind.

He zipped her back in and dragged the bag to the waterline. The ocean, frothy cold, washed over his shoes as he scanned the waves for Officer So. When a wave reached high upon the sand and licked the bag, she screamed. He had never heard such a shriek.

Past the shore break, they motored into swells sharpened by the wind. Every­one held the lifeline to steady themselves. Rumina sat in the nose, fresh tape around her hands. Officer So had draped his jacket around her—except for that, her body was bare and blue with cold.

Jun Do and Gil sat on opposite sides of the raft, but Gil wouldn't look at him. He had been found in the same whiskey bar, laugh­ing with the bartender, and retrieved with a noose made from fishing line. When they reached open water, Officer So backed off the engine enough that he could be heard. "You're soldierly," he told Jun Do. "When it comes time to dispense, you dispense."

"I gave Gil my word," he told Officer So. "I said we'd forget how he tried to run."

Rumina's hair was turbulent in her face. "Put him in the bag," she said.

Officer So had a grand laugh at that. "The opera lady's right," he said. "You caught a defector, my boy. Start thinking of your reward."

"You don't know how Pyongyang works," Gil said. "Once the other ministers see her, they'll all want one."

"You don't know anything," Officer So said to Gil. "You're soft and weak. I fucking invented this game. I kidnapped Kim Jong Il's personal sushi chef. I plucked the Dear Leader's own doctor out of an Osaka hospi­tal, in broad daylight, with these hands."

Jun Do felt Rumina glaring at him. He sud­denly wondered if she didn't mean him—that he, Jun Do, should go in the bag. It was as if she knew everything he had done. That it

was he who'd picked which orphans ate first, he who assigned the bunks nearest the stove. He who had chosen the boys who got blinded by the arc furnace and the boys who were at the chemical plant when it made the sky go yellow. He who'd sent Ha Shin, the boy who wouldn't speak, who couldn't say no, to clean the vats at the paint factory. It was Jun Do who put the gaff pole in Bo Song's hands.

A cold, white spray slapped them. It made Rumina inhale sharply, like every little thing were trying to take her life.

Jun Do was charged with transporting Gil to the military base at Rason. They took the afternoon train from Chongjin. At the sta­tion, families were sleeping under cargo platforms, waiting for darkness so they could make the journey to Sinuiju, which was just a swim across the Yalu River from China.

They had walked from the Port of Chongjin on foot, passing the Reunification Smelter, its great cranes rusted in place, the copper lines to its furnace long since pilfered for scrap. Apartment blocks stood empty, their windows butcher-papered. All the trees had been cut during the famine, and now, years later, the saplings were uniform in size, trunks ankle-thick, their clean stalks popping up in the oddest places, one tree bursting from an outhouse where a human skeleton had shit its indigestible seed.

Long Tomorrows, when they came to it, looked no bigger than the infirmary.

Jun Do shouldn't have pointed it out, because Gil insisted they go in.

Everything had been stripped for fuel— even the picture frames of the Dear and Great Leaders had been burned. The roster of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution, painted on the wall, was the only thing left.

Gil didn't believe that Jun Do had named all the orphans.

"You really know all the Martyrs?" he asked. "What about number 11 ?"

"Ha Shin," Jun Do said. "When he was captured, he cut out his own tongue so the Japanese could get no information from him. There was a boy here who wouldn't speak—I gave him that name."

Gil ran his finger down the list.

"Here you are," he said. "Martyr number 76, Pak Jun Do. What's his story?"

Jun Do touched the black spot where the stove had once been. "Even though he killed many Japanese soldiers," he said, "the revolutionaries in Pak Jun Do's unit didn't trust him because he was descended from a long line of royals. To prove his loyalty, he hanged himself."

Gil stared at him. "You gave yourself this name? Why?"

"Because his blood was pure," Jun Do said. He took Gil by the arm. "Let's go."

First, diough, Jun Do leaned his head into the Orphan Master's room. The space, it turned out, was no bigger than a pallet. And of the portrait of the tormenting woman, Jun Do could find only a nail hole.

From The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea by Adam Johnson, currently available from Random House.

THE DARK WATERS PYWITH ORPSES.

HPUSANDS

THE THROES OF THE WAVES.

The tunnels always ended

with a ladder leading up to

a rabbit hole. His men would

slip out and wander South

Korea for a while. Jun Do

wanted no part of it.

Everything had been stripped

for fuel—even the picture

frames of the Dear and

Great Leaders had been

burned. The roster on the

wall was the only thing left.