The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [153]
Sun Moon took a hard look at them. “My word,” she said. “They’re starving. There’s nothing to them.”
The girl turned to her father. “We’re not starving, are we, Papa?”
“Of course not,” the father said.
“Right before our eyes,” Sun Moon said. “Starving to death!”
Sun Moon flashed them the back of her hand and pointed at a ring. “Diamond,” she said, and after wresting it off, she placed it in the hands of the frightened mother before her.
Ga advanced and took back the ring. “Don’t be a fool,” he told Sun Moon. “This ring was a gift from the Dear Leader. Do you know what would happen if they got caught with a ring like this?” In his pocket, Ga had some military won, not much else. He took his boots off. “If you want to help them,” Ga told Sun Moon, “they need simple things they can barter at the market.”
The boy and the girl removed their shoes, and Ga also offered his belt. Sun Moon contributed earrings. “There’s a pot of soup,” Sun Moon said. “It’s good. Just follow the stream. Keep the pot.”
“That dog,” the father said. “I thought it was escaped from the zoo.”
“No,” Ga told him. “He’s ours.”
“You don’t have an extra one, do you?” the father asked.
That night, Commander Ga hummed along as Sun Moon sang the children to sleep. “The cat’s in the cradle,” she sang, “the baby’s in the tree.” Later, when they’d climbed into bed, Sun Moon said to him, “Do you think the Dear Leader’s line should be read ‘Love knows no replacement,’ as if it’s unthinkable to search for a substitute for love, or ‘Love knows no replacement,’ suggesting that love is sentient and is itself at a loss to comprehend its absence?”
“I have to tell you the truth,” he said to her.
“I’m an actress,” she said. “The truth is all that matters to me.”
He didn’t hear her roll to her side, so he knew they both stared into the same darkness above. He was suddenly scared. His hands gripped the sheets.
“I’ve never been to Wonsan,” he said. “But I’ve sailed past it many times. There are no umbrellas in the sand. There are no lounge chairs or fishing poles. There are no old people. Wherever the grandparents of North Korea go, it’s not Wonsan.”
He tried to listen for her breathing, but couldn’t even hear that.
At last, she spoke to him.
“You’re a thief,” she said. “You are a thief who came into my life and stole everything that mattered to me.”
The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw. The children were deft at quietly migrating to whatever room she wasn’t in. Once, she ran out of the house screaming, only to lie weeping in her garden. She came back in to argue with the loudspeaker. Then she threw them out of the house so she could bathe, and standing in the grass together, Commander Ga and the children and the dog stared at the front door, behind which they could hear her furiously scrubbing every inch of her skin. The children soon wandered down the hill, practicing “hunt” and “fetch” with Brando by tossing melon rinds into the trees.
Commander Ga stood to the side of the house, where Comrade Buc found him. Buc kept his Ryoksong beer in a shady patch of tall, cool grass. He offered Ga one. Together they drank and stared up at Sun Moon’s balcony. She was up there in her house robe, smoking and running lines from Ultimate Sacrifices, but every word she read with anger.
“What happened?” Buc asked him.
“I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”
Sun Moon held the script with one hand and raised the other high. Cigarette in her mouth, she tried to find her motivation in a line:
“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!
“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!
“The true first husband of all women is the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!”
“Did you hear what the Dear Leader wants to do now?” Buc asked him. “He wants to give the Americans a branding demonstration.”
“Ha,” Commander Ga said. “I’m sure the cattle