He adjusted the tail of her bow.
“Please,” he said. “You must perform now. Give the Dear Leader exactly what he wants.”
“I can’t control what I sing,” she said.
Soon, in blue, she was with her husband at the Dear Leader’s side. It was the climax of the accordion number, which found the boys stacked on each other’s shoulders three high. Ga saw that Kim Jong Il’s eyes were lowered, that children’s songs—bouncy, boundless of enthusiasm—truly spoke to him. When the song was finished, the Americans made a clapping motion from which no sound came.
“We must have another song,” the Dear Leader announced.
“No,” the Senator said. “First our citizen.”
“My property,” the Dear Leader said.
“Assurances,” Tommy said.
“Assurances, assurances,” the Dear Leader said. He turned to Commander Ga. “Might I borrow your camera?” he asked.
The smile on the Dear Leader’s face scared Ga anew. Ga took the camera from his pocket and handed it to the Dear Leader, who moved through the crowd toward his car.
“Where’s he going?” Wanda asked. “Is he leaving?”
The Dear Leader climbed into the back of the black Mercedes, but the car didn’t move.
Then the phone in Wanda’s pocket beeped. When she examined its screen, she shook her head in disbelief. She showed it to the Senator and Tommy. Ga motioned for the little red phone. Wanda handed it to him, and there was a picture of Allison Jensen, the Girl Rower, in the backseat of a car. Ga nodded at Wanda, and right in front of her, slipped the phone in his pocket.
The Dear Leader returned, thanking Ga for the use of his camera. “Assured?” he asked.
The Senator made a signal, and a pair of forklifts backed out of the plane’s cargo bay. In tandem, they carried the Japanese background radiation detector housed in a custom crate.
“You know it won’t work,” the Senator said. “The Japanese built it to discover cosmic radiation, not uranium isotopes.”
“All my top scientists would beg to differ,” the Dear Leader told him. “In fact, they’re unanimous in their opinion.”
“One hundred percent,” Commander Park said.
The Dear Leader waved his hand. “But let’s speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let’s have some blues.”
“But where’s the Girl Rower?” Sun Moon asked him. “I must sing the song to her. She’s who you told me to write it for.”
A cross look appeared on the Dear Leader’s face. “Your songs are mine,” he told her. “I’m the only one you sing for.”
The Dear Leader addressed the Americans. “I’ve been assured the blues will speak to your collective American conscience,” he said. “Blues is how people lament racism and religion and the injustices of capitalism. Blues is for those who know hunger.”
“One in six,” Commander Park said.
“One in six Americans goes hungry each day,” the Dear Leader echoed. “The blues is for violence, too. Commander Park, when did a citizen of Pyongyang last commit a violent crime?”
“Seven years ago,” Commander Park said.
“Seven long years,” the Dear Leader said. “Yet in America’s capital, five thousand black men languish in prison due to violence. Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free. And the labor of the condemned does not power the machine of national need.”
The Senator cleared his throat. “As Dr. Song would say, This is most enlightening.”
“You tire of social theory?” The Dear Leader nodded, as if he’d expected more from his American visitor. “Then I give you Sun Moon.”
Sun Moon kneeled down upon the cement runway and placed the guitar on its back before her. In the shade of those who closed the circle around her, she stared silently down at her guitar, as if awaiting some far-off inspiration.
“Sing,” Commander Park whispered. With the toe of his boot, he tapped her in the small of the back. From Sun Moon came a gasp of fear. “Sing,” he said.
Brando growled at the end of his rope.
Sun Moon began playing the neck of the guitar, fretting with the tips of her fingers and plucking with the quill of an eagle-owl feather. Each note sounded discordant from the next, eerie and alone. Finally, in the plaintive rasp of a sanjo nomad, she began to sing of a boy who wandered too far for his parents to find him.
Many citizens leaned in, trying to place the tune.
Sun Moon sang, “A cold wind rose and said, Come, orphan, sleep in my billowing white sheets.”
From this line, the citizens began to recognize the song and the fairy tale it came from, yet none sang the response, “No, orphan child, do not let yourself freeze.” It was a song taught to all the children in the capital, one designed to make some merriment of all the befuddled orphans who scurried through Pyongyang’s streets. Sun Moon sang on, with the crowd clearly unhappy that such a gay song, a children’s song, one that was ultimately about finding the fatherly love of the Dear Leader, should be so gleelessly sung.
Sun Moon sang, “Then a mineshaft called to the child, Come shelter in my depths.”
In his mind, Ga heard the response, “Avoid the darkness, orphan child. Seek the light.”
Sun Moon sang, “Next a ghost whispered, Let me inside, orphan child, and I’ll warm you from within.”
Fight the fever, orphan child, Ga thought. Do not die tonight.
“Sing it properly,” Commander Park demanded.
But Sun Moon carried on, singing in her melancholy way of the arrival of the Great Bear, of the Bear’s special language, of how he took up the orphan child and with his claws cracked the honeybees’ comb. Her voice was edged with the things the song had left out, like the sharpness of those claws, of the stinging swarm of bees. In the sonor of her singing could be heard the insatiability of the Bear, of its unrelenting, omnivorous appetite.
The men in the crowd didn’t shout, “Partake of the Great Bear’s honey!”
The women didn’t chorus, “Share the sweetness of his deeds!”
A shudder of great emotion ran through Commander Ga, but he could not tell why. Was it the song, the singer, that it was sung now and here, or was it the orphan at its center? He knew only that this was her honey, this was what she had to feed him.
By the time the song concluded, the Dear Leader’s demeanor had greatly changed. Gone was his breezy surface and his gestures of delight. His eyes had flattened, his cheeks gone slack.
His scientists reported that, after inspecting the radiation detector, they’d found it intact.
He motioned for Park to fetch the Girl Rower.
“Let’s get this over with, Senator,” the Dear Leader said. “The people of our nation wish to donate some food aid to the hungry citizens of yours. When that’s complete, you may repatriate your citizen and fly off to your more important business.”
When Ga had translated this, the Senator said, “Agreed.”
To Ga, the Dear Leader said only, “Tell your wife to get into red.”
If only the Dear Leader still had Dr. Song, Ga thought. Dr. Song, who moved so fluidly in such situations, for whom such scenes became simply ruffles, so easily smoothed over.
Wanda brushed past him, amazement on her face.
“What the fuck was that song about?” she asked.
“Me,” he told her, but he was off with the boy and the girl and his wife and his dog.
The Pohyon Temple, when they entered it, seemed worthy of prayer, for inside, Comrade Buc had placed a pallet decked with four empty barrels. “Don’t ask anything,” Sun Moon told her children as she tore off the barrels’ white lids. Commander Ga opened his guitar case and from it withdrew Sun Moon’s silver dress. “Leave on your own terms,” he told her, then he swept the girl up and into a barrel. Opening her palm, he placed into her hand the seeds from last night’s melon. The boy was next, and for him, Ga had the whittled trigger sticks, the thread, and the deadweight stone of the bird snare they’d made together.
He stared at the two of them, their heads poking up, forbidden any questions, not that they’d know the right ones to ask, not for a long time, anyway. Ga took a moment to marvel at them, at this rare, pure thing that was coming into being. It was suddenly so clear, everything. There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn’t abandoning, it was saving. He’d been saved, he now saw. A beauty, his mother, a singer. Because of that, a terrible fate awaited—she hadn’t left him behind, she’d saved him from what was ahead. And this pallet, with its four white barrels, he saw it suddenly as the life raft they’d long dreamed of aboard the Junma, the thing that meant they wouldn’t go down with the ship. They’d once had to let it sail away empty, and here it had made its way back. Here it was for the most essential cargo. He reached out and ruffled the hair of these two confused kids who didn’t even know they were being rescued, let alone what from.
When Sun Moon was clad in silver, he spent no time in admiring her. He lifted her high, and once in place, he handed her the laptop.
“This is your letter of transit,” he told her.
“Like in our movie,” she said, and smiled in disbelief.
“That’s right,” he told her. “The golden thing that gets you to America.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “There are four barrels here, one for each of us. I know what’s going through your head, but don’t be stupid. You heard my song, you saw the look on his face.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?” the girl asked.
“Hush,” Sun Moon told her.
“What about Brando?” the boy asked.
“He’s coming,” Ga told them. “The Dear Leader’s going to give him back to the Senator, saying that his nature is too vicious for the peace-loving citizens of our nation.”
The kids didn’t smile at this.
“Will we ever see you again?” the girl asked.
“I’m going to see you,” Ga said, and handed her the camera. “When you take a picture, it shows up on my phone, here.”
“What should we take pictures of?” the boy asked.
“Anything you want to show me,” he said. “Whatever makes you smile.”
“Enough of this,” Sun Moon said. “I did what you asked, I put you in my heart. It’s the only thing I know, not to separate, for everyone to stay together, no matter what.”
“You’re in my heart, too,” Ga said, and at the sound of Comrade Buc’s forklift, he pounded the lids onto the barrels.
The dog found this development quite distressing. Whimpering, Brando circled the barrels, looking for a way in.
Into the fourth barrel, Commander Ga shook out the remaining contents of the guitar case. Photographs fluttered inside, thousands of them, all the lost souls of Prison 33, each with names, dates of entry, dates of death.
Ga swung open the back wall of the temple, then guided Buc in with hand signals.
The color was gone from Buc’s face. “Are we really doing this?” he asked.
“Swing wide around the crowd,” Ga told him. “Make it look like you’re coming from the other direction.”
Buc lifted the pallet and shifted into reverse, but he held the forklift there.
“You’re going to confess, right?” Buc asked. “The Dear Leader’s going to know this is your doing?”
“Trust me, he’ll know,” Ga said.
When Buc backed into the light, Ga was horrified to see how clear it was that people were in the barrels, at least the outlines of them, like willow worms shifting in their white cocoons.
“I think we forgot air holes,” Buc said.
“Just go,” Ga told him.
Out on the runway, Ga found the Dear Leader and Commander Park orchestrating teams of children rolling barrels onto forklift pallets. The children’s motions were choreographed, but without the music of a band behind them, the pantomime resembled the tractor-assembly robot on display at the Museum of Socialist Progress.
With them was the Girl Rower in her golden dress. She stood silently by Wanda’s side, wearing heavy sunglasses behind which her eyes could not be seen. It gave her the effect of looking deeply drugged. Or maybe, Ga thought, that surgery had been done to her eyes.
The Dear Leader came near, and Ga could see that his smile had returned.
“Where is our Sun Moon?” he asked.
“You know her,” Ga said. “She must look perfect. She’ll fuss until perfection is found.”
The Dear Leader nodded at the truth of that. “At least the Americans will soon see her undeniable beauty as she bids farewell to our gruff visitor. Side by side, there will be no question of who is superior. At least I will have that satisfaction.”
“When do I return the dog?” Ga asked.
“That, Commander Ga, will be the final insult.”
Several forklifts raced past Tommy and the Senator, heading off toward the ramp of the plane. The two took an interest in the strange cargo going by—one barrel glowed the vinalon blue of labor-brigade jumpsuits, while another was the nightmare maroon of barbecue beef. When a forklift went past bearing fertilizer toilets, Tommy asked, “Just what kind of aid is this?”
“What does the American say?” the Dear Leader asked Ga.
Ga said, “They’re curious about the variety of aid to be found in our shipment.”
The Dear Leader spoke to the Senator. “I assure you, the only items included are ones that might be needed by a nation plagued with social ills. Do you wish an inspection?”
Tommy turned to the Senator. “You wanna inspect a forklift?” he asked.
When the Senator hesitated, the Dear Leader called for Commander Park to stop one of the forklifts. Ga could see Comrade Buc approaching from the far side of the loitering crowds, but luckily, Park hailed a different forklift—yet this driver, terror on his face, pretended not to hear and drove on. Park hailed another one, and again, the driver feigned utter concentration on the path to the airplane. “Dak-Ho,” Park yelled after him. “I know that’s you. I know you heard me.”
The Dear Leader laughed. He called to Park, “Try using some sweet talk.”
It was hard to tell the emotion on Commander Park’s face, but when he hailed Comrade Buc, it was with authority, and Ga knew that Buc was the man who would stop.
Not ten meters away, pallet hoisted high, Comrade Buc halted his forklift, and it would be clear to anyone who bothered to look upward that human shapes shifted inside.
Commander Ga moved to the Senator, clapping a hand stiff on his back.
The Senator gave him a hard look.
Ga pointed at Buc’s forklift. “This will be an excellent batch of aid to examine, no?” he asked the Senator. “Much better than the contents of that forklift over there, yes?”
It took the Senator a moment to process this. He pointed to the other forklift and asked the Dear Leader, “Is there some reason you don’t want us to inspect that one?”