The Orphan Master's Son Read Online Free PDF

“Mayumi?” Jun Do pushed some buttons to make it stop. When he leaned over the rail, the boat was rising and falling in the swells.
    â€œWhere is she?” Jun Do asked.
    Officer So was staring into the water. “She went down,” he said.
    â€œWhat do you mean she went down?”
    He lifted his hands. “She hit and then she was gone.”
    Jun Do turned to Gil. “What did she say?”
    Gil said, “She said,
I can’t swim.
”
    â€œÂ â€˜I can’t swim’?” Jun Do asked. “She said she couldn’t swim and you didn’t stop me?”
    â€œThrowing her over, that was the plan. You said stick to it.”
    Jun Do looked into the black water again, deep here at the end of the pier. She was down there, that big coat like a sail in the current, her body rolling along the sandy floor.
    The phone rang. It glowed blue and vibrated in Jun Do’s hand. He andGil stared at it. Gil took the phone and listened, eyes wide. Jun Do could tell, even from here, that it was a woman’s voice, a mother’s. “Throw it away,” Jun Do told him. “Just toss it.”
    Gil’s eyes roamed as he listened. His hand was trembling. He nodded his head several times. When he said,
“Hai,”
Jun Do grabbed it. He jabbed his finger at the buttons. There, on its small screen, appeared a picture of a baby. He threw it into the sea.
    Jun Do went to the rail. “How could you not keep count,” he yelled down to Officer So. “How could you not keep count?”

    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 in hand, they would meet Officer So on the beach. Simplicity, Officer So said, was the key to the plan.
    Jun Do and Gil took the afternoon train north to 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 Tumen River from China.
    They made for 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 ration outlet windows butcher-papered. There was no laundry hanging to dry, no onion smoke in the air. 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—in rain barrels and storm drains, 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.
    It was filled only with shadows. Everything had been stripped for fuel—even the doorframes 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.
    â€œYou really memorized all the Martyrs?” he asked. “What about number eleven?”
    â€œThat’s 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.
    â€œHere you are,” he said. “Martyr number seventy-six, Pak Jun Do. What’s that guy’s story?”
    Jun Do touched the blackness on the floor 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 an impure blood line. To prove his loyalty, he hanged himself.”
    Gil