The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [133]
For now, our dazzling couple was crossing Pyongyang late after an opulent party as, neighborhood by neighborhood, substation power switches were being thrown to cast our sweet city into slumber. Commander Ga drove, while Sun Moon leaned with the turns.
“I’m sorry about your movie,” he said.
She didn’t respond. Her head was turned toward the darkening buildings.
He said, “You can make another.”
She dug through her purse, and then in frustration closed it.
“My husband never let me run out of cigarettes, not once,” she said. “He had some special hiding place for the cartons, and every morning, there was a fresh pack under my pillow.”
The Pyongchon eating district extinguished as they drove through it, and then one, two, three, the housing blocks along Haebangsan Street went black. Nighty-night, Pyongyang. You earned it. No nation sleeps as North Korea sleeps. After lights-out, there is a collective exhale as heads hit pillows across a million households. When the tireless generators wind down for the night and their red-hot turbines begin to cool, no lights glare on alone, no refrigerator buzzes dully through the dark. There’s just eye-closing satisfaction and then deep, powerful dreams of work quotas fulfilled and the embrace of reunification. The American citizen, however, is wide awake. You should see a satellite photo of that confused nation at night—it’s one grand swath of light, glaring with the sum of their idle, indolent evenings. Lazy and unmotivated, Americans stay up late, engaging in television, homosexuality, and even religion, anything to fill their selfish appetites.
The city was in full darkness as they drove by the Hyoksin line’s Rakwan station. Their headlights momentarily illuminated an eagle owl atop the subway’s vent shaft, its beak at work on a fresh lamb. It would be easy, dear citizens, to feel for the poor lamb, plucked so young from life. Or the mama sheep, all her love and labor for nothing. Or even the eagle owl, whose duty it is to live by devouring others. Yet this is a happy story, citizen: by the loss of the inattentive and disobedient lamb, the ones on other rooftops are made stronger.
They began making their way up the hill, passing the Central Zoo, where the Dear Leader’s own Siberian tigers were on display next to the pen that housed the zoo’s six dogs, all gifts from the former king of Swaziland. The dogs were kept on a strict diet of soft tomatoes and kimchi to lessen that animal’s inherent danger, though they will become meat-eaters again when it comes time for the Americans to visit!
In the headlights they saw a man running from the zoo with an ostrich egg in his hands. Chasing him up the hill with flashlights were two watchmen.
“Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?” Commander Ga asked as they drove by. “Or for the men who must hunt him down?”
“Isn’t it the bird who suffers?” Sun Moon asked.
They passed the cemetery, which was dark, as was the Fun Fair, its gondola chairs hanging pure black against a blue-black sky. Only the botanical gardens were lighted. Here, even at night, work on the hybrid crop program continued, the precious seed vault protected from an American invasion by a grand electric fence. Ga glanced at a cone of moths, high in protein, circling in a security light, and he became melancholy as he drove slowly up this last stretch of dirt road.
“This is a fine automobile,” he said. “I will miss it.”
By this, the Commander meant that, though our nation produces the finest vehicles in the world, life is transient and subject to hardships, which is the entire reason the Dear Leader has given us Juche philosophy.
“I’ll pass your sentiments along,” Sun Moon said, “to the next man who finds himself driving it.”
Here, the good actress is agreeing that the car is not theirs, but rather