Our bodies freeze. We look at the boys face. Even with his swollen face and black eyes, we have no problem telling that he has the face of the dictator, young and rebellious, just as in the illustrations in the books about the dictators heroic childhood. The boy stands up and limps to his mother. We look at his face in awe, not daring to move when he spits bloody phlegm at our feet.
Remember this face, the boy says. You will have to pay for this one day. He picks up a couple of sparrows and walks away with his mother. We watch them supporting each other like husband and wife.
FOR YEARS WE do not know if it is a blessing or a disaster that a boy with the dictators face lives among us. We treat the boy and his mother as the most precious and fragile treasure we have, never breathing one word about them to an outsider.
It may not be a good thing, our old people warn us, and tell us the story of one of our Great Papas, who happened to have the same nickname as the emperor and was thrown into a well to drown. There are things that are not allowed to exist in duplicates, the old people say.
Yet none of us dares to say one disrespectful word about the boys face. As he grows older, he looks more and more like the dictator. Sometimes as we walk past him in the street, there is a surge of warmth in our chests, as if the dictator himself were with us. This is the time when the dictator becomes larger than the universe in our nation. Illiterate housewives who have used old newspapers as wallpaper and who have, accidentally, reversed the titles with the dictators name in them are executed. Parents of little first-graders who have misspelled the dictators name are sent to labor camps. With the boy living among us, we are constantly walking on a thin layer of ice above deep water. We worry about not paying enough respect to the face, an indication of our hidden hatred of the dictator. We worry about respecting that face too much, which could be interpreted as our inability to tell the false from the true, worshipping the wrong idol. In our school the teachers never speak one harsh word to him. Whatever games the students play, the side without him is willing to lose. When he graduates from the high school, the Revolution Committee has meetings for weeks to discuss what is an appropriate job for a young man with a face like his. None of the jobs we have in town is safe enough to be given to him. Finally we think we have come up with the best solution to the problem we elect him as the director of the advisory board to the Revolution Committee.
The young man prospers. Having nothing to do, and not liking to kill his time over cups of tea with the old board members, he walks around town every day, talking to people who are flattered by his greetings, and watching the female sales assistants in the department store blush at his sight. His mother is in much better shape now, with more color in her face. The only inconvenience is that no girl will date the young man. We have warned our daughters that marrying him would either be the greatest fortune or the greatest misfortune. Born into a town where gambling is genuinely disapproved of, none of us wants to marry a daughter off to a man like him.
THE DAY THE dictator dies, we gather at the town center and cry like orphans. On the only television set our town owns, we watch the whole nation howling with us. For three months we wear black mourning armbands to work and to sleep. All entertainments are banned for six months. Even a year or two after his death, we still look sideways at those women who are growing bellies, knowing that they have been insincere in their mourning. Fathers of those children never receive respect from us again.
It is a difficult time for the young man. Upon seeing his face, some of us break into uncontrollable wails, and he himself has to spend hours crying with us. It must have tired him. For a year he stays in his own room, and the next time we see him, walking toward the town center with a small suitcase, he looks much older than his age of twenty-eight.
Is there anything wrong? we greet him with concern. Dont let too much grief drag you down.
Thank you, but I am in a fine state, the young man replies.
Are you leaving for somewhere?
Yes, I am leaving.
Where to? We feel a pang of panic. Losing him at this time seems as unbearable as losing the dictator one year ago.
Its a political assignment, the young man says with a mysterious smile. Classified.
Only after he is driven away in a well-curtained luxury car (the only car most of us have ever seen in our lives) do we catch the news that he is going to the capital for an audition as the dictators impersonator. It takes us days of discussion among ourselves to figure out what words like audition and impersonator mean. In the end the only agreement we come to is that he is going to become a great man.
Now that he has disappeared from our sights, his mother becomes the only source for stories of him. A proud mother as she is, every time we inquire of her regarding his whereabouts, she repeats the story of how she gazed at the late dictators face day and night when her son was growing inside her. You know, its like he is the son of our great leader, she says.
Yes, all of us are sons of our great leader, we nod and say. But surely he is the best son.
The mother sighs with great satisfaction. She remembers how in the first few years after her son was born, women of her age produced baby after baby, putting framed certificates of mother heroes on their walls and walking past her with their eyes turning to the sky. Let time prove who is the real hero, she would think and smile to herself.
Yes, all of us are sons of our great leader, we nod and say. But surely he is the best son.
The mother sighs with great satisfaction. She remembers how in the first few years after her son was born, women of her age produced baby after baby, putting framed certificates of mother heroes on their walls and walking past her with their eyes turning to the sky. Let time prove who is the real hero, she would think and smile to herself.
Then she tells us about her son, every bit of information opening a new door to the world. He rode in the first-class car in a train to the capital, where he and other candidates have settled down in a luxury hotel, and are taken to the dictators memorial museum every day, studying for the competition.
Are there other candidates? we gasp, shocked that she may not be the only woman to have studied the dictators face during pregnancy.
I am sure he is the one they want, the mother says. He says he has total confidence, when he looks at the leaders face, that he is going to be the chosen one.
In the years to come, some among us will have the chance to go to the capital and wait in a long line for hours to take a look at the dictators face. After his death, a memorial museum was built in the center of our nations capital, and the dictators body is kept there in a crystal coffin. Let our great leader live for ten thousand years in the hearts of a hundred generations is what the designer has carved into the entrance of the museum. Inside the entrance we will pay a substantial fee for a white paper flower to be placed at the foot of the crystal coffin, among a sea of white flowers. For a brief moment, some of us will wonder whether the flowers are collected from the base and resold the next day, but instantly we will feel ashamed of ourselves for thinking such impure thoughts in the most sacred place in the world. With the flowers in hand we will walk into the heart of the memorial, in a single hushed file, and we will see the dictator, lying in the transparent coffin, covered by a huge red flag decorated with golden stars, his eyes closed as if in sleep, his mouth in a smile. We will be so impressed with this great mans body that we will ignore the unnatural red color in his cheeks, and his swollen neck as thick as his head.
Our young man must have walked the same route and looked at his face with the same reverence. What else has passed through his heart that does not occur to us? we will wonder.
He must have felt closer to the great man than any one of us. He has the right to feel so, chosen among tens of candidates as the dictators impersonator. How he beat his rivals his mother never tells us in detail, just saying that he was born for the role. Only much later do we hear the story: our young man and the other candidates spend days in training, and those who are too short or too weak-built for the dictators stature (even they, too, have the dictators face) are eliminated in the first round, followed by those who cannot master the dictators accent. Then there are the candidates who have everything except a clean personal history, like those born to the landlord class. Thanks to the Revolution Committee in our town, which has concealed the history of our young man being the son of an executed counterrevolutionary, he makes it into the final round with three other men. On the final day, when asked to do an improvised performance, the other three candidates all choose to quote the dictator announcing the birth of our communist nation (which is, as you remember, also the beginning of our young mans own journey), while he, for reasons unknown, says, A man cannot conceal his reactionary nature forever, just as a widow cannot hide her desire to be fucked.
For a moment, he is horrified by his blunder, and feels the same shame and anger he once felt as a dead sparrow turned cold between his fingers. To his surprise, he is chosen, the reason being that he has caught the essence of the dictator, while the other three only got the rough shape. The three of them are sent with the rest of the candidates for plastic surgery, for, as our old men have said, there are things that are not allowed to exist in duplicate.
OUR YOUNG MAN becomes the sole face that represents the dictator in the nation, and thus start the most glorious years of his life. Movies about the dictator, starring our young man, are filmed by the government-run movie factories. Back in town, we cram into our only theater and watch the movies, secretly blaming our mothers or wives for not having given birth to a great face.