IT WAS afternoon, the sun bright and heatless through the windows. Commander Ga sat between the boy and the girl, the three of them watching Sun Moon restlessly wander the house, her hands lifting certain objects that she seemed to consider anew. The dog followed her, sniffing at everything she touched—a hand mirror, a parasol, the kettle in the kitchen. It was the day before the Americans were to arrive, the day before the escape, though the children didn’t know that.
“What’s wrong with her?” the boy asked. “What’s she looking for?”
“She acts like this before she starts a new movie,” the girl said. “Is there a new movie?”
“Something like that,” Ga told them.
Sun Moon came to him. In her hands was a hand-painted chang-gi board. The look on her face said, How can I abandon this? He’d told her that they could take nothing with them, that any keepsake might signal their plan.
“My father,” she said. “It’s all I have of him.”
He shook his head. How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live—you could see it go out of him—when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away.
“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.”