The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [145]
Each morning before work, when the trees were alive with finches and wrens, Commander Ga taught the children the art of fashioning bird snares from delicate loops of thread. With a deadfall stone and a trigger twig, they each set a snare on the balcony rail and baited it with celery seeds.
After he arrived home in the afternoons, Commander Ga taught the children work. Because they’d never tried work before, the boy and the girl found it new and interesting, though Ga had to show them everything, like how to use your foot to drive a shovel into dirt or how you must go to your knees to swing a pick in a tunnel. Still, the girl liked to be out of her school uniform and she wasn’t afraid of tunnel dust. The boy relished hauling buckets of dirt up the ladder and muscling them out back to the balcony, where he slowly poured them down the mountainside.
While Sun Moon sang the children nightly to sleep, he explored the laptop, which mostly consisted of maps he didn’t understand. There was a file of photographs, though, hundreds of them, which were hard to look at. The pictures were not so different than Mongnan’s: images of men regarding the camera with a mixture of trepidation and denial toward what was about to happen to them. And then there were the “after” pictures, in which men—bloodied, crumpled, half-naked—clung to the ground. The images of Comrade Buc were especially hard.
Each night, she slept on her side of the bed, and he slept on his.
Time to get some shut-eye, he’d say to her, and she’d say, Sweet dreams.
Toward the end of the week, a script arrived from the Dear Leader. It was called Ultimate Sacrifices. Sun Moon left it on the table where the messenger had placed it, and all day she approached it and retreated, circling with a fingernail fixed in the space between her teeth.
Finally, she sought the comfort of her house robe and took the script into the bedroom, where with the aid of two packs of cigarettes she read it over and over for an entire day.
In bed that night, he said, Time to get some shut-eye. She said nothing.
Side by side, they stared at the ceiling.
“Does the script trouble you?” he asked. “What is the character the Dear Leader wishes you to play?”
Sun Moon pondered this awhile. “She is a simple woman,” Sun Moon said. “In a simpler time. Her husband has gone off to fight the imperialists in the war. He had been a nice man, well liked, but as manager of the farm collective he was lenient and productivity suffered. During the war, the peasants almost starved. Four years pass, they assume he is dead. It is then that he returns. The husband barely recognizes his wife, while his own appearance is completely different—he has been burned in battle. War has hardened him and he is a cold taskmaster. But the crop yields increase and the harvest is bountiful. The peasants fill with hope.”
“Let me guess,” Commander Ga said. “It is then that the wife begins to suspect this is not her real husband, and when she has her proof, she must decide whether to sacrifice her personal happiness for the good of the people.”
“Is the script that obvious?” she asked. “So obvious that a man who has seen but one movie can guess its content?”
“I only speculated on the ending. Perhaps there is some twist by which the farm collective meets its quota and the woman can be fulfilled.”
She exhaled. “There is no twist. The plot is the same as all the others. I endure and endure and the movie ends.”
Sun Moon’s voice in the dark was freighted with sorrow, like the final voice-over of Motherless Fatherland during which the Japanese tighten the chains to prevent the character from hurting herself during all the future escapes she would attempt.
“People find your movies inspiring,” he said.
“Do they?”
“I find them inspiring. And your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That’s better than the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That there’s no point to