The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [98]
I took a sedative myself and then left Commander Ga to sleep through the night. Ideally, the sedative wouldn’t take effect until after I’d made it across town. If things worked out just right, it would kick in after the twenty-second flight of stairs.
COMMANDER GA tried to forget about the interrogator, though Ga could smell the cucumber on his breath long after the man had swallowed his pill and walked out the door. Speaking of Sun Moon had put fresh images of her in Ga’s mind, and that’s what Ga cared about. He could practically see the movie they’d been talking about. A True Daughter of the Country. That was the name of the movie, not Tyrants Asunder. Sun Moon had played a woman from the southern island of Cheju who leaves her family and journeys north to battle the imperialists at Inchon. Cheju, he learned, was famous for its women abalone divers, and the movie opens with three sisters on a raft. Opaque waves capped with pumice-colored foam lift and drop the women. A wave the color of charcoal rolls into the frame, blotting the women from view until it passes, while brutal clouds scrape the volcanic shore. The oldest sister is Sun Moon. She splashes water on her limbs, to prepare herself for the cold, and adjusts her mask as her sisters speak of village gossip. Then Sun Moon hefts a rock, breathes deeply, and rolls backward off the raft into water so dark it should be night. The sisters switch their talk to the war and their sick mother and their fears that Sun Moon will abandon them. They lie back on the raft in a moment filmed from the mast above, and the sisters speak of village life again, of their neighbors’ crushes and spats, but they have gone somber and it is clear that what they are not talking about is the war and how, if they do not go to it, it will come to them.
He’d watched this movie with the others, projected onto the side of the prison infirmary, the only building that was painted white. It was Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, their one day off work a year. The inmates sat on upended pieces of firewood that they’d beaten free of ice, and this was his first look at her, a woman luminous with beauty who plunges into darkness and simply won’t seem to return. The sisters speak on and on, the waves build and break, the patients in the infirmary weakly moan as their blood-collection bags fill, and still Sun Moon will not surface. He wrings his hands at the loss of her, all the prisoners do, and even though she eventually surfaces, they all know that for the rest of the movie she will have that power over them.
It was that night, he now remembered, that Mongnan saved his life for the second time. It was very cold, the coldest he’d ever been, for work was what kept them warm all day, and watching a movie in the snow had allowed his body temperature to dangerously fall.
Mongnan appeared at his bunk, touching his chest and his feet to gauge his aliveness.
“Come,” she said. “We must move quickly.”
His limbs barely functioned as he followed the old woman. Others in their bunks stirred as they passed, but none sat up, as there was so little time for sleep. Together, they raced for a corner of the prison yard that was normally brightly lit and watched by a two-man guard tower. “The bulb to the main searchlight has burned out,” Mongnan whispered to him as they ran. “It will take them a while to get another, but we must be quick.” In the dark, they crouched, picking up all the moths that had fallen dead before the lamp had died. “Fill your mouth,” she said. “Your stomach doesn’t care.” He did as he was told and soon he was chewing a wad of them—their furry abdomens drying his mouth, despite the goop that burst from them and a sharp aspirin taste from some chemical on their wings. His stomach hadn’t been filled since Texas. He and Mongnan fled in the dark with handfuls of moths—wings slightly singed but ready to keep them alive another week.
GOOD MORNING, CITIZENS! In your housing blocks, on your factory floors, gather ’round your loudspeakers for today’s news: the North