The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [186]
“Nothing but the clothes on my back?” she asked him.
Then a look of dawning crossed her face. She turned and moved quickly to her wardrobe. Here, she stared into the row of choson-ots, each folded over its own dowel. The setting sun was tinted and rich through the bedroom. In this golden, yolk-colored light, the dresses glowed with life.
“How will I choose?” she asked him. She ran her fingers over them. “I wore this one in Motherless Fatherland,” she said. “But I played a politician’s wife. I can’t leave here as that. I can’t be her forever.” Sun Moon studied a simple choson-ot whose jeogori was white and chima was patterned with pale blossoms. “And here’s A True Daughter of the Country. I can’t arrive in America dressed as a peasant girl.” She leafed through all the dresses—Oppressors Tumble, Tyrants Asunder, Hold the Banner High!
“All of your dresses have come from your movies?”
She nodded. “Technically, they’re the property of Wardrobe. But when I act in them, they become a part of me.”
“You have none of your own?” he asked.
“I don’t need my own,” she said. “I’ve got these.”
“What about the dresses you wore before you were in the movies?”
She stared at him a moment.
“Oh, I cannot decide,” she said and closed her eyes. “I’ll leave it for later.”
“No,” he told her. “This one.”
She removed the silver choson-ot he’d selected, held it to her figure.
“Glory of Glories,” she said. “You wish me to be the opera singer?”
“It is a story of love,” he told her.
“And tragedy.”
“And tragedy,” he acknowledged. “Wouldn’t the Dear Leader love to see you dressed as an opera star? Wouldn’t that be a nod to his other passion?”
Sun Moon wrinkled her nose at this idea. “He got me an opera singer to help me prepare for that role, but she was impossible.”
“What happened to her?”
Sun Moon shrugged. “She vanished.”
“Vanished where?”
“She went where people go, I guess. One day she just wasn’t there.”
He touched the fabric. “Then this is the dress to wear.”
They spent the remaining light harvesting the garden, preparing a feast to eat raw. The flowers they turned to tea, and the cucumbers they sliced and let brine in vinegar and sugar water with shredded red cabbage. The girl’s prize melon they broke open on a rock, so that the meat inside tore along the seed lines. Sun Moon lit a candle, and at the table, they started their final dinner with beans, which they shelled and rolled in coarse salt. Then the boy had a treat—four songbirds he’d snared and dressed and cured in the sun with red pepper seeds.
The boy started to tell a story he’d heard over the loudspeaker about a laborer who thought he’d found a precious gem. Instead of sharing the discovery with the leader of his detachment, the laborer swallowed the gem in the hopes of keeping it for himself.
“Everyone’s heard that story,” his sister said. “It turned out to be a piece of glass.”
“Please,” Sun Moon said. “Let’s have a happy story.”
The girl said, “What about the one where the dove flew into the path of an imperialist bullet and saved the life of a—”
Sun Moon raised a hand to stop her.
It seemed the only stories the children knew of had come from the loudspeaker. When Commander Ga was young, sometimes all the orphans had to fill themselves with at the dinner table were stories. In an offhanded way, Commander Ga said, “I’d tell the story about the little dog from Pyongyang who went into space, but I’m sure you’ve heard that one.”
With uncertainty on her face, the girl looked from her brother to her mother. Then she shrugged. “Yeah, sure,” she