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.
“You really memorized all the Martyrs?” he asked. “What about number eleven?”
“That’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.
“Here 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 stared at him. “You gave yourself this name? Why?”
“He 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.
“Is 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?”
“He 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 and imploring—couples clasping one another, a sad child—he asked Gil what each one said, but the answers pertained to car insurance and telephone rates. Through a window, they watched Korean women cut the toenails of Japanese women. For fun, they operated a vending machine and received a bag of orange food neither would taste.
Gil paused before a store that sold equipment for undersea exploration. In the window was a large bag made to stow dive gear. It was black and nylon, and the salesperson showed them how it would hold everything needed for an underwater adventure for two. They bought it.
They asked a man pushing a cart if they could borrow it, and he told them at the supermarket they could get their own. Inside the store, it was almost impossible to tell what most of the boxes and packages contained. The important stuff, like radish bushels 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. Gil at least had someone to buy a souvenir for.
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 and talking.
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.”
“Easy for you,” Jun Do said. “You don’t have to overpower someone tonight. Then get her across town. And if we don’t find Officer So on that beach—”
“Like that would be the worst thing,” Gil said. “You don’t see anyone around here plotting to escape to North Korea. You don’t see them coming to pluck people off our beaches.”
“That kind of talk doesn’t help.”
“Come, drink up,” Gil said. “I’ll get the singer into the bag tonight. You’re not the only guy capable of beating a woman, you know. How hard can it be?”
“I’ll handle the singer,” Jun Do said. “You just keep it together.”
“I can stuff a singer in a bag, okay?” Gil said. “I can push a shopping cart. You just drink up, you’re probably never going to see Japan again.”
Gil tried to speak to the Japanese women, but they smiled and ignored him. Then he bought a drink for the bartender. She came over and talked with him while she poured it. She was thin shouldered, but her shirt was tight and her hair was absolutely black. They drank together, and he said something to make her laugh. When she went to fill an order, Gil turned to Jun Do. “If you slept with one of these girls,” Gil said, “you’d know it was because she wanted to, not like some military comfort girl trying to get nine stamps a day in her quota book or a factory gal getting married off by her housing council. Back home pretty girls never even raise their eyes to you. You can’t even have a cup of tea without her father arranging a marriage.”
Pretty girls? Jun Do thought. “The world thinks I’m an orphan, that’s my curse,” Jun Do told him. “But how did a Pyongyang boy like you end up doing such shitty jobs?”
Gil ordered more drinks, even though Jun Do had barely touched his. “Going to that orphanage really messed with your head,” Gil said. “Just because I don’t blow my nose in my hand anymore doesn’t mean I’m not a country boy, from Myohsun. You should move on, too. In Japan, you can be anyone you want to be.”
They heard a motorcycle pull up, and outside the window, they saw a man back it in line with a couple of other bikes. When he took the key from the ignition, he hid it under the lip of the gas tank. Gil and Jun Do glanced at one another.
Gil sipped his whiskey, swishing it around then tipping his head to delicately gargle.
“You don’t drink like a country boy.”
“You don’t drink like an orphan.”
“I’m not an orphan.”
“Well, that’s good,” Gil said. “Because all the orphans in my land-mine unit knew how to do was take—your cigarettes, your socks, your shoju. Don’t you hate it when someone takes your shoju? In my unit, they gobbled up everything around them, like a dog digests its pups, and for thanks, they left you the puny nuggets of their shit.”
Jun Do gave the smile that puts people at ease in the moment before you strike them.
Gil went on. “But you’re a decent guy. You’re loyal like the guy in the martyr story. You don’t need to tell yourself that your father was this and your mother was that. You can be anyone you want. Reinvent yourself for a night. Forget about that drunk and the nail hole in the wall.”
Jun Do stood. He took a step back to get the right distance for a turnbuckle kick. He closed his eyes, he could feel the space, he could visualize the hip pivoting, the leg rising, the whip of the instep as it torqued around. Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn’t acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that “take” was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.
When Jun Do opened his eyes, Gil suddenly realized what was about to happen.
He fumbled his drink. “Whoa,” he said. “My mistake, okay? I’m from a big family, I don’t know anything about orphans. We should go, we’ve got things to do.”
“Okay, then,” Jun Do said. “Let’s see how you treat those pretty ladies in Pyongyang.”