The Orphan Master's Son (51 page)

Sun Moon spent that evening in the bedroom. Commander Ga made the children cold noodles for dinner, which the boy and the girl kept dangling above Brando's nose so they could witness the dog's powerful teeth snapping them down. Only when the dishes were cleared did Sun Moon emerge in her bathrobe, puffy-faced, smoking. She told the children it was time to sleep, then spoke to Ga.

“I must see this American movie,” she said. “The one that's supposed to be the best.”

That night, the children slept with the dog on a pallet at the foot of the bed, and when Pyongyang went black, they lay side by side on the bed and inserted
Casablanca
into the laptop. The battery indicator said they had ninety minutes, so there would be no stopping.

Right away, she shook her head at the primitive nature of black-and-white photography.

He translated on the fly for her, converting the English to Korean as fast as he could, and when the words wouldn't come, he simply had to move his fingers, and they transcribed the lines.

For a while, her face was sour. She criticized the movie for moving too quickly. She labeled everyone in it an elite, drinking all day in fancy clothes. “Where are the common people?” she asked. “With real problems?” She laughed at the premise of a “letter of transit” that allowed anyone who possessed it to escape. “There is no magic letter that gets you out.”

She told him to stop the movie. He wouldn't.
But it was giving her a headache
.

“I cannot tell what this movie glorifies,” she said. “And when will the hero make his appearance? If no one breaks into song soon, I am going to bed.”

“Shh,” he said to her.

It was hurting her to watch, he could tell. Every image was a challenge to her life. The complicated looks and shifting desires of the characters were breaking her down, yet she had no power to stop it. As the beautiful actress Ingrid Bergman spent more time on screen, Sun Moon began questioning her, coaching her. “Why doesn't she settle down with the nice husband?”

“The war is coming,” Ga told her.

“Why does she gaze at the immoral Rick that way?” she asked, even as she gazed at him, too. Soon, she stopped seeing the ways he profiteered off others and filled his safe with currency and spread bribes and lies. She only saw how he reached for a cigarette when Ilsa entered the room, how he drank when she left it. The ways in which no one seemed happy spoke to Sun Moon. She nodded at how all the characters' problems originated in the dark capital of Berlin. When the movie went back in time to Paris, where the characters smiled and wanted only bread and wine and each other, Sun Moon was smiling through her tears, and Commander Ga stopped translating for whole passages when all that was needed were the emotions crossing the faces of this man Rick and the woman Ilsa who loved him.

At the end of the movie, she was inconsolable.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, but she did not respond.

“My whole life is a lie,” she said through tears. “Every last gesture. To think I acted in color, every garish detail captured in color.” She rolled to him, so she was looking up into his eyes. She grabbed his shirt, wrenching the fabric in both hands. “I must make it to the place where this movie was made,” she said. “I have to get out of this land and make it to a place where real acting exists. I need a letter of transit and you must help me. Not because you killed my husband or because we will pay the price when the Dear Leader casts you aside, but because you are like Rick. You are an honorable man like Rick in the movie.”

“But that was just a movie.”

“No it wasn't,” she said, defiance in her eyes.

“But how would I get you out?”

“You are a special man,” she said. “You can get us out. I'm telling you you must.”

“But Rick made his own decision, that was his to make.”

“That's right, I have told you what I need of you, and you have a decision to make.”

“But what about us?” he asked.

She looked at him as if now she understood how it would work. That she now knew her fellow actor's motivation, and the plot would follow from that.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“When you say, get us out, do you mean
us
, does that include me?”

She pulled him closer. “You are my husband,” she said. “And I am your wife. That means us.”

He stared into her eyes, hearing the words he hadn't known he'd been waiting his whole life to hear.

“My husband used to say that one day it would all end,” she said. “I'm not waiting for that day.”

Ga placed his hand on her. “Did he have a plan?”

“Yes,” she said. “I discovered his plan—passport, cash, travel passes. The plan included only him. Not even his children.”

“Don't worry,” he said. “My plan won't be like that.”

I WAS AWAKE
in the middle of the night. I could feel that my parents were, too. For a while, I heard the boots of a Juche Youth Troop heading toward one of those dark, all-night shock rallies in Kumsusan Square. Heading to work in the morning, I knew I'd pass those girls on the way home, faces blacked by fire smoke, slogans painted down their thin arms. Most of all, those wild eyes. I stared at the ceiling, imagining the nervous hooves of baby goats above, always taking shuffle steps since it was too dark for them to see the edge of the roof.

I kept thinking how much Commander Ga's biography was like my own. Both our names were essentially unknown—there was nothing by which friends and family could call us, there was no word to which our deepest selves could respond. And then there was the way I was coming to believe that he didn't know the fates of the actress and her children. True, he seemed to move forward under the belief that all was well with them, but I don't think he had any idea. Much like myself—I created biographies of my subjects, which basically documented their lives up to the point they met me. Yet I had to admit, I'd never followed up on a single person who left Division 42. Not one biography had an epilogue. Our most important connection was how, to be given a new life, Ga had to take one away. I proved that theorem every day. After years of failure, I now understood that by writing Commander Ga's biography, maybe I was also writing my own.

I stood at the window. By the merest of starlight, I urinated into a wide-mouthed jar. A sound rose from the street below. And then something happened to let me know, despite the darkness, despite the kilometers between me and the nearest farm, that the nation's rice stalks were golden-tipped and it was harvest season again: two dump trucks pulled up across Sinuiju Street, and with bullhorns, the Minister of Mass Mobilization's men rousted all the occupants of the Worker's Paradise Housing
Block. Below, my neighbors in their bedclothes were slowly packed into trucks. By dawn they would be bent over, ankle deep in paddy water, receiving a daylong remedial lesson on the word “toil,” which is the source of all food.

“Father,” I spoke into the dark room. “Father, is it just about survival? Is that all there is?” I could feel the jar warm in my hand as I carefully screwed the lid back on. When the trucks pulled away, the only sound left was the slight whistle of my father breathing through his nose, a sure sign he was awake.

In the morning, another member of my team was missing. I can't say his name, but he was the one with the thin mustache and the lisp. He'd been out a week, and I had to assume it was more than being pressed into a harvest detail. It was likely I wouldn't see him again. He was the third this month, the sixth this year. What happened to them, where did they go? How were we going to replace the Pubyok when they retired if we were only a couple of men and a pair of interns?

Nonetheless, we took the gondola to the top of Mount Taesong. While Jujack and Leonardo searched Comrade Buc's house, Q-Kee and I swept Commander Ga's residence, though it was hard to focus. Every time you looked up, there through the grand windows was the skyline of Pyongyang below. You had to gasp at the sight of it. The whole house had a dreamlike quality to it—Q-Kee just shook her head at the way these people had their own bedroom and kitchen. They shared a commode with no one. Dog hair was everywhere, and it was clear they kept such an animal simply for personal amusement. The Golden Belt, in its glowing case, was something we were frightened to inspect. Even the Pubyok hadn't touched it on their initial sweep.

Their garden had been picked clean—there wasn't so much as a pea to take home to my parents. Had Commander Ga and Sun Moon taken fresh food with them, expecting a journey, perhaps? Or did Ga intend the food for his getaway? In their scrap heap was the rind of a whole melon and the fine bones of songbirds. Had they been more deprived than their fancy
yangban
house suggested?

Under the house, we found a thirty-meter tunnel stocked with rice sacks and American movies. The escape hatch was across the road, behind
some bushes. Inside the house, we discovered some standard hiding compartments in the wall, but they were mostly empty. In one, we found a stack of South Korean martial-arts magazines, very illegal. The magazines were well worn and depicted fighters whose bodies rippled with combat. With the magazines was a lone handkerchief. This I lifted, looking for a monogram. I turned to Q-Kee. “I wonder what this handkerchief is doing—”

“Drop it,” Q-Kee told me.

Right away, I let go, and the handkerchief fell to the floor. “What?” I asked.

“Don't you know what Ga must have used that for?” she asked me. She looked at me like I was one of the blind new puppies in the Central Zoo. “Didn't you have brothers?”

In the bathroom, Q-Kee indicated how Sun Moon's comb and Commander Ga's razor shared the edge of the sink. She'd come to work sporting a black eye, and I'd pretended not to notice, but in front of a mirror, there was no way to avoid it.

“Did someone try to hurt you?” I asked her.

“What makes you think it wasn't love?”

I laughed. “That would be a new way to show affection.”

Q-Kee cocked her head and regarded me in the mirror.

She lifted a single glass from the sink ledge and held it to the light.

“They shared a rinse cup,” she said. “That's love. There are many proofs.”

“Is it proof?” I asked her. I shared a rinse cup with my parents.

In the bedroom, Q-Kee surveyed things. “Sun Moon would sleep on this side of the bed,” she said. “It is closer to the toilet.” Then Q-Kee went to the little table on that side of the bed. She opened and closed its drawer, knocked on the wood. “A smart woman,” Q-Kee said, “would keep her condoms taped to the underside of this table. They wouldn't be visible to her husband, but when she needed one, all she had to do was reach.”

“Condoms,” I repeated. All forms of birth control were strictly illegal.

“You can get them at any night market,” she said. “The Chinese make them in every color.”

She turned over Sun Moon's bedside table, but there was nothing underneath.

I turned over Commander Ga's bedside table as well—nothing.

“Trust me,” Q-Kee said. “The Commander had no need for birth control.”

Together, we pulled the sheets from the bed and got down on our knees to identify hairs on the pillows. “They both slept here,” I declared, and then we ran our fingertips across each centimeter of the mattress, sniffing and eyeballing everything for even the smallest sign of spoor. It was about halfway down the mattress that I came across a scent the likes of which I'd never encountered. I felt something primal in my nostrils, and then a bright light flashed in my mind. The scent was so sudden, so foreign, that I couldn't find the words, I couldn't have alerted Q-Kee even if I'd wanted to.

At the foot of the bed, we both stood.

Q-Kee crossed her arms in disbelief. “They slept together, but no
fucky-fucky.
”

“No what?”

“It's English for ‘sex,' ” she said. “Don't you watch movies?”

“Not those kinds of movies,” I said, but the truth was I hadn't seen any.

Opening the wardrobe, Q-Kee ran a finger across Sun Moon's
choson-ots
until it came to rest at an empty dowel. “This is the one she took,” Q-Kee said. “It must have been spectacular, if these are the ones she left behind. So Sun Moon wasn't planning on being gone long, yet she wanted to look her best.” She gazed at the lustrous fabrics before her. “I know every dress she wore in every movie,” she said. “If I stood here long enough, I'd figure out the missing dress.”

“But harvesting the garden,” I said. “That suggests they
were
planning on being gone a long time.”

“Or maybe it was a last meal, in her best dress.”

I said, “But that only makes sense if—”

“—if Sun Moon knew what was going to happen to her,” Q-Kee added.