The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [141]
The old men turned from their game to observe us.
I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”
He reached out and ruffled my hair.
It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I’d try to sleep, but I’d just lie on my cot puzzling over how Commander Ga had managed to change his life and become someone else. With no record of who he’d been. How do you escape your Party Aptitude Test score or elude twelve years of your teachers’ Rightness of Thinking evaluations? I could sense that Ga’s hidden history was chaptered with friends and adventures, and I was jealous of that. It didn’t matter to me that he had probably killed the woman he loved. How had he found love itself? How had he pulled that off? And had love made him become someone else, or, as I suspected, had love suddenly appeared once he took on a new identity? I suspected that Ga was the same person on the inside but had a whole new exterior. I could respect that. But wouldn’t the real change be, if a person was to go all the way, to get a new inner life?
There wasn’t even a file for this Commander Ga character—I only had Comrade Buc’s. I’d toss and turn for a while, wondering how Ga was so at peace, and then I’d relight my candle and pore over Buc’s file. I could tell my parents were awake, lying perfectly still, breathing evenly, listening to me as I rifled Comrade Buc’s file for any insight into Ga’s identity. I was jealous for the first time of the Pubyok, of their ability to get answers.
And then there came a single clear sound from the phone. Bing, it rang.
I heard the creak of canvas as my parents stiffened in their cots.
The phone on the table began to blink with a bright green light.
I took the phone in my hands and opened it. On its little screen was an image, a photo of a sidewalk, and set in the pavement was a star and in the star were two words in English, “Ingrid” and “Bergman.” It was daylight where this photo was taken.
I turned again to Comrade Buc’s file, looking for any images that might contain such a star. There were all the standard photos—his Party commission, receiving his Kim Il Sung pin at sixteen, his oath of eternal affiliation. I flipped to the photo of his dead family, heads thrown back, contorted on the floor. And yet so pure. The girls in their white dresses. The mother draping an arm over the older girls while holding the hand of the youngest. I felt a pang at the sight of her wedding ring. It must have been a hard time for them, their father newly arrested, and here at some formal family moment without him, they succumbed to “possibly carbon monoxide.” It’s hard to imagine losing a family, to have someone you love just disappear like that. I understood better now why Buc had warned us in the sump to be ready, to have a plan in place. I listened to the silence of my parents in that dark room, and I wondered if I shouldn’t have a plan in place for when I lost one of them, if that’s what Buc meant.
Because Comrade Buc’s family was clustered on the floor, the eye was naturally drawn there. For the first time I noticed that sitting on the table above them was a can of peaches, a small detail in relation to the entire photo. The can’s jagged lid was bent back, and I understood then that the method Commander Ga would use to excuse himself from the rest of his biography, whenever he felt like it, was sitting on his bedside table.
At Division 42, a strip of light was shining underneath the door to the Pubyok lounge. I slipped quietly past—with those guys, you never