COMMANDER GA’S eyes opened to see the boy and the girl at the foot of the bed, staring at him. They were really just the shine of first light in their hair, a thin blue across cheekbones. He blinked, and though it seemed like a second, he must have slept because when he opened his eyes again, the boy and the girl were gone.
In the kitchen he found the chair balanced against the counter, and here they were, up high, staring into the open door of the top cabinet.
He lit the burner under a carbon steel skillet, then quartered an onion and spooned in some oil.
“How many guns are in there?” he asked them.
The boy and the girl shared a look. The girl held up three fingers.
“Has anyone shown you how to handle a pistol?”
They shook their heads no.
“Then you know not to touch them, right?”
They nodded.
The smell of cooking brought barking from the dog on the balcony.
“Come, you two,” he said. “We need to find where your father keeps your mother’s cigarettes before she wakes mad as a dog in the zoo.”
With Brando, Commander Ga scoured the house, toe-tapping the baseboards and inspecting the undersides of furniture. Brando sniffed and barked at everything he touched, while the children hung back, wary but curious. Ga didn’t know what he was looking for. He moved slowly from room to room, noticing a patched-over flue hole where an old heating stove had been. He observed a patch of swollen plaster, perhaps from a roof leak. Near the front door, he saw marks in the hardwood floor. He ran his toes over the scratches, then looked up.
He fetched a chair, stood upon it, discovered a section of molding that was loose. He reached behind it, into the wall, and removed a carton of cigarettes.
“Oh,” the boy said. “I understand now. You were looking for hiding places.”
It was the first time the child had spoken to him.
“That’s right,” he told the boy.
“There’s another one,” the boy said. He pointed toward the portrait of Kim Jong Il.
“I’m sending you on a secret mission,” Ga told them and handed over a pack of cigarettes. “You must get these cigarettes under your mother’s pillow, and she must not wake.”
The girl’s expressions, in contrast to her mother’s, were subtle and easily missed. With a quick lip flare, she suggested this was much beneath her spying abilities, but still she accepted the mission.
When the oversized portrait of the Dear Leader was removed, Commander Ga found an old shelf recessed in the wall. A laptop computer occupied most of it, but on the top shelves, he found a brick of American hundred-dollar bills, vitamin supplements, protein powder, and a vial of testosterone with two syringes.
The onions had sweetened and clarified, turning black at the edges. He added an egg, a pinch of white pepper, celery leaves, and yesterday’s rice. The girl set out the plates and chili paste. The boy served. The mother emerged, half asleep, a lit cigarette in her lips. She came to the table, where the children suppressed knowing smiles.
She took a drag and exhaled. “What?” she asked.
Over breakfast, the girl asked, “Is it true that you went to America?”
Ga nodded. They ate from Chinese plates with silver chopsticks.
The boy said, “I heard you must pay for your food there.”
“That’s true,” Ga said.
“What about an apartment?” the girl asked. “Does that cost money?”
“Or the bus,” the boy asked. “Or the zoo—does it cost to see the zoo?”
Ga stopped them. “Nothing is free there.”
“Not even the movies?” Sun Moon asked, a little offended.
“Did you go to Disneyland?” the girl asked. “I heard that’s the best thing in America.”
The boy said, “I heard American food tastes horrible.”
Ga had three bites left, but he stopped, saving them for the dog.
“The food’s good,” he answered. “But the Americans ruin everything with cheese. They make it out of animal milk. Americans put it on everything—on their eggs at breakfast, on their noodles, they melt it on ground meat. They say Americans smell like butter, but no, it is cheese. With heat, it becomes an orange liquid. For my work with the Dear Leader, I must help Korean chefs re-create cheese. All week, our team has been forced to handle it.”
Sun Moon still had a little food left on her plate, but with the talk of the Dear Leader, she extinguished her cigarette in the rice.
This was a signal that breakfast was over, but still the boy had one last question to ask. “Do dogs really have their own food in America, a kind that comes in cans?”
The idea was shocking to Ga, a cannery dedicated to dogs. “Not that I saw,” he said.
Over the next week, Commander Ga oversaw a team of chefs constructing the menu for the American delegation. Dak-Ho was enlisted to use props from the Central Movie Lot to construct a Texas-style ranch, based on Ga’s drawings of the lodgepole corral, mesquite fences, branding hearth, and barn. A site was chosen east of Pyongyang, where there was more open space and fewer citizens. Comrade Buc acquired everything from patterns for guayabera shirts to cobbler molds for cowboy boots. Procuring a chuck wagon proved Buc’s greatest challenge, but one was located at a Japanese theme park, and a team was sent to get it.
It was determined that a North Korean Weedwacker would not be engineered since tests showed that a communist scythe, with a 1.5-meter razor-sharp blade, was the more effective tool at clearing brush. A fishing pond was constructed and filled with eels from the Taedong River, a most voracious and worthy opponent for the sport of fishing. Teams of volunteer citizens were sent into the Sobaek Mountains to capture a score of rock mamushi, the nation’s most poisonous snake, for target practice.
A group of stage mothers from the Children’s Palace Theater was enlisted to make the gift baskets. While calfskin could not be found for the making of gloves, the most supple replacement—puppy—was chosen. In place of bourbon, a potent snake whiskey from the hills of Hamhung was selected. The Junta in Burma donated five kilos of tiger jerky. Much debate was given to the topic of which cigarettes best bespoke the identity of the North Korean people. In the end, the brand was Prolot.
But it wasn’t all work. Each day, Commander Ga took a long lunch at the Moranbong Theater, where, alone, he watched a different Sun Moon movie. He beheld her fierce resilience in Oppressors Tumble, felt her limitless capacity to suffer in Motherless Fatherland, understood her seductive guile from Glory of Glories, and went home whistling patriotic tunes after Hold the Banner High!
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 it. It’s just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone.”
She said nothing. He tried again.
“You should be flattered,” he told her. “With all that demands the Dear Leader’s attention, he has spent the week composing a new movie for you.”
“Have you forgotten that this man’s prank got you beaten in front of all the yangbans of Pyongyang? Oh, it will give him no end of delight to watch me act my heart out in another movie that he will never release. It will be of endless amusement to him to see how I play a woman who must submit to a new husband.”
“He’s not trying to humiliate you. The Americans are coming in two weeks. He’s focused on humiliating the greatest nation on earth. He replaced your husband in public. He took Comfort Woman from you. He’s made his point. At this stage, if he really wanted to hurt you, he’d really hurt you.”
“Let me tell you about the Dear Leader,” she said. “When he wants you to lose more, he gives you more to lose.”
“His grudge was with me, not you. What reason could he have to—”
“There,” she said. “There is the proof that you don’t understand any of this. The answer is that the Dear Leader doesn’t need reasons.”
He rolled to his side, so he faced her eye to eye.
“Let’s rewrite the script,” he said.
She was silent a moment.
“We’ll use your husband’s laptop, and we’ll give the new version a plot twist. Let’s have the peasants meet their quotas and the wife find her happiness. Perhaps we’ll have that first husband make a surprise return in the third act.”
“Do you know what you’re talking about?” she asked. “This is the Dear Leader’s script.”
“What I know about the Dear Leader is this: satisfaction matters to him. And he admires crafty solutions.”
“What’s it matter to you?” she asked. “You said after the Americans came, he was going to get rid of you.”
He rolled to his back. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s that.”
Now he was quiet.
“I don’t think I’d have the first husband return from the war,” she said. “Then there would be a showdown, and that would appeal to the viewer’s sense of honor, rather than duty. Let’s say that the manager of another farm collective is jealous of the burned man’s success. This other manager is corrupt and he gets a corrupt Party official to sign a warrant for the woman’s husband to be sent to a reeducation camp as punishment for his previous low quotas.”
“I see,” Commander Ga said. “Instead of the woman being trapped, now it is the burned man who has a choice. If he admits he is an imposter, he may leave freely with his shame. But if he insists he is her husband, with honor he goes to the camp.”
Sun Moon said, “The wife’s almost positive that beneath the burns this husband is not hers. But what if she’s wrong, what if he’s just been hardened by the savagery of war, what if she lets the father of her children be sent away?”
“Now there is a story of duty,” he said. “But what happens to the woman? In either outcome, she is alone.”
“What happens to the woman?” Sun Moon asked the room.
Brando stood. The dog stared into the dark house.
Commander Ga and Sun Moon looked at one another.
When the dog started growling, the boy and the girl woke. Sun Moon pulled on her robe while Commander Ga cupped a candle and followed the dog to the door of the balcony. Outside, the bird snare had tripped, and in the loop a small wren thrashed wildly, flashes of brown and gray feathers, streaks of pale yellow. He handed the candle to the boy, whose eyes were wide with amazement. Ga took the bird in his hands and removed the slipknot from its leg. He spread its wings between his fingers and showed them to the children.
“It worked,” the girl said. “It really worked.”
In Prison 33, it was dangerous to get caught with a bird, so you learned to dress one in seconds. “Okay, watch close,” Ga told the children. “Pinch the back of the neck, then pull up and turn.” The bird’s head snapped off, and he tossed it over the rail. “Then the legs come off with a twist, as do the wings at the first joint. Then put your thumbs on the breast and slide them away from one another.” The friction tore the skin and exposed the breast. “This meat is the prize, but if you have time, save the rest. You can boil the bones, and the broth will keep you healthy. For that, just send your finger into the abdomen, and by rotating the bird, all the insides come out at once.” Ga slung his finger clean, and by turning the skin inside out, it stripped all at once.
“There,” he said. Ga held the bird out for them again. It was beautiful, the meat pearlescent and pink, fanned over the finest white bones, the tiny tips of which leaked red.
With a thumbnail he scraped along the sternum and removed a perfect almond of translucent breast meat. This he placed in his mouth and savored, remembering.
He offered the other breast, but the children, stunned, shook their heads. This, too, Ga ate, then tossed the carcass to the dog, who crunched it right down.