The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [156]
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.