The Orphan Master's Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

stared at him. “You gave yourself this name? Why?”
    â€œHe passed the ultimate loyalty test.”
    The Orphan Master’s room, 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.
    â€œIs this where you slept?” Gil asked. “In the Orphan Master’s room?”
    Jun Do showed him the nail hole. “Here’s where the portrait of my mother hung.”
    Gil inspected it. “There was a nail here, all right,” he said. “Tell me, if you lived with your father, how come you have an orphan’s name?”
    â€œHe couldn’t give me his name,” Jun Do said, “or everyone would see the shame of how he was forced to raise his son. And he couldn’t bear to give me another man’s name, even a Martyr’s. I had to do it.”
    Gil’s expression was blank. “What about your mother?” he asked. “What was her name?”
    They heard the horn of the
Mangyongbong-92
ferry in the distance.
    Jun Do said, “Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything.”

    That night Jun Do stood in the dark stern of the ship, looking down into the turbulence of its wake.
Rumina
, he kept thinking. He didn’t listen for her voice or let himself visualize her. He only wondered how she’d spend this last day if she knew he was coming.
    It was late morning when they entered Bandai-jima Port—the customs houses displaying their international flags. Large shipping vessels, painted humanitarian blue, were being loaded with rice at their moorings. Jun Do and Gil had forged documents, and in polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers 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, so all the singers took turns offering brief arias. Gil seemed to know the songs, humming along with them. Rumina—small, broad-shouldered—mounted the stage in a dress the color of graphite. Her eyes were dark under sharp bangs. Jun Do could tell she’d known sadness, yet she couldn’t know that her greatest trials lay ahead, that this evening, when darkness fell, her life would become an opera, that Jun Do was the dark figure at the end of the first act who removes the heroine to a land of lament.
    She sang in Italian and then German and then Japanese. When finally she sang in Korean, it came clear why Pyongyang had chosen her. The song was beautiful, her voice light now, singing of two lovers on a lake, and the song was not about the Dear Leader or defeating the imperialists or the pride of a North Korean factory. It was about a girl and a boy in a boat. The girl had a white
choson-ot
, the boy a soulful stare.
    Rumina sang in Korean, and her dress was graphite, and she might as well have sung of a spider that spins white thread to capture her listeners. Jun Do and Gil wandered the streets of Niigata held by that thread, pretending they weren’t about to abduct her from the nearby artists’ village. A line kept ringing in Jun Do’s mind about how in the middle of the water the lovers decide to row no further.
    They walked the city in a trance, waiting for dark. Advertisements especially had an effect on Jun Do. There were no ads in North Korea, and here they were on buses and posters, across video screens. Immediate andimploring—couples clasping one another, a sad child—he asked Gil what each one said, but the