The girl’s expressive gifts surpass those of all the members of his company, even the aging starlet Klamt. That is something the General Intendant of the City Theater can no longer deny.

Up to this point, he has done everything in his power to keep his daughter off the stage, for the General Intendant is intimately acquainted with the unscrupulousness of theater people and is well aware that if he casts her in a leading role, she will be subjected to the most malicious slander.

And so will he.

But in light of her expressive gifts, which have now achieved a perfection he once hardly thought possible, he must concede that withholding them from the city whose theatrical life he has sworn to cultivate (but which, under his supervision, has grown only more decadent) would be an intolerable abdication of his duty.

The General Intendant therefore risks the opprobrium of the public, and the rage of the aging starlet Klamt, by commissioning a play for his daughter to star in, one especially suited to her expressive gifts, the action of which should include, he suggests to the dramatist, the following basic elements:

The curtain should rise on a man in a straitjacket scrutinizing the large stained-glass window above the altar of the chapel of a psychiatric facility. The man, who for some time has existed in a perpetual present tense, suddenly remembers that he himself, in his prior life as a glassworker, created this stained-glass window, which depicts five female saints who were decapitated for their faith. He marvels at the fact that he, who now feels so far from the beautiful, was once capable of bringing such beauty into the world. As he studies the window, the man feels an urge he has not felt in a very long time: the urge to bring more beauty into the world. If he cannot bring more beauty into the world, through his mastery of the craft of glasswork, he would prefer to die. The man proclaims as much to a chapel that the audience has thus far taken for empty. But from the two wings two stout old nurses appear, brusquely tighten the arms of his straitjacket (which had already seemed as tight as possible), and inform the man that in this institution there is of course no opportunity to work with glass. As if they would let the inmates work with glass! The laughter of the nurses echoes in the chapel long after they have clacked away. But a glassworker who can never again work with glass is better off dead. He opts to die. The facility, however, has seen to it that he has no means of doing so. He despairs. Yet at the height of his despair, more memories return to him. He suffered his first fit of insanity while he was installing this stained-glass window—he remembers that now. From the time of that initial fit, he could foresee the fate that has since overtaken him—namely, that upon completion of the window, he would be committed to this very institution for the rest of his life. But while his insanity was still only intermittent, he could outwit fate by means of his craft. Yes, he recalls realizing that, too. He had then done something to the stained-glass window, or committed to memory some secret about it. He had secretly installed it in such a way that the stained-glass window would later enable him to escape through it. The clarity and force of this recollection makes the man reel. But when he tries to remember what the secret of the stained-glass window is, he cannot. Yet even this he must have foreseen, for in those first transient fits of insanity, his mind was stripped of its memories and left only with such things as are common to the species. He must have known that supplying himself with a means of escape would not be enough: He had to find a way to remind himself of the form it took and the secret of its use. He must have known that he could not entrust his memory with something as important as this; nor could he write it down, since a written message would be confiscated on admittance. He must have relied on another person. But in the whole world, as far as the man was concerned, there was only one other person. The man suddenly recalls the existence of his beloved. He remembers teaching his beloved the words she should say to him after he went insane and was committed here: Your name is Gustav. You are a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is your own handiwork. You must simply … and come back to me. Simply what? The very words the man needs most have been expunged from his mind. He recalls rehearsing the lines again and again until his beloved could recite them without error. Yet his beloved has never been to visit him. Where is his beloved? What has happened to her? He confides in the chief physician about his beloved. Not about the message she was to deliver, only about her existence. But even this is a mistake, for the chief physician (to be played by the great actor and tenor Silberberg) lets it be known that he wants to hear nothing more about the beloved, in whose existence he plainly disbelieves. No one at the facility believes in the existence of the beloved—no one, that is, except the two stout old nurses, who until now have struck us as cruel and unfeeling crones (one to be played by the aging starlet Klamt). In the middle of the night, the nurses enter the man’s room and convey their belief in the existence of the beloved. They pledge to locate the beloved. Lo and behold, they do locate her. They bring the beloved to him. But can this be her? This is his beloved?! The man weeps. His beloved exists now in a lamentable state. She cannot walk. She cannot speak. Only her eyes move, to and fro. Yet the movement of her eyes, viewed even from the very last row of the balcony of the City Theater, is extraordinarily expressive. To the attentive theatergoer, this movement of the beloved’s eyes expresses everything that needs to be known about her relationship to the man. The one thing it cannot express, however, is the secret message she was supposed to impart to him. This secret message is locked within his quasi-vegetative beloved. He therefore sets out to do what not only the chief physician but even the nurses try to tell him is impossible: teach his beloved to speak again. He brings her to the chapel. Positions her cane-backed wheelchair before the altar. My name, he tells her, is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … and come back to you. Hour after hour, with remarkable tenderness and devotion, he says these words to his beloved, always pausing long enough at the ellipsis for her to leap in and impart with miraculously restored speech the secret of the stained-glass window. But she never leaps in. Her speech is never restored. Only her eyes move, to and fro, to and fro, in a manner that is exquisitely expressive, but not of the right thing. Now visiting hours are over. The clacking of the nurses gets louder and louder. They are coming to the chapel to take away his beloved. He knows that they will not bring her back. Not ever. He tries one last time: My name is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … He pauses. She says nothing. Yet this time—and it does seem to him a miracle, even if it is not the one he expected—he is able to whisper the missing words himself. I must simply smash my head hard through the glass and come back to you. Now the man shatters the glass by thrusting the crown of his head through the middlemost of the five female saints. As blood streams down his face, he kisses his beloved on the lips and then climbs through the opening where the window had been. He is now free to bring more beauty into the world. The nurses enter the chapel. Their clacking ceases. For a moment, the theater is absolutely silent. Then the beloved, her face streaked with blood, suddenly leaps to her feet and screams: Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The implication is that he—who is to be played by the City Theater’s most physically massive actor—is responsible for her condition and is now free to commit more crimes. But this is something the attentive theatergoer will have long since deduced from the movement to and fro of her eyes. The nurses, who do not remark on the shattered window and actually seem hardly to notice it, now wheel the beloved out of the chapel. As they do so, the General Intendant suggests, the curtain should fall. Of course, he leaves the particulars to the imagination of the dramatist.

The malicious slander anticipated by the General Intendant begins as soon as the cast list of The Glassworker is pinned to the wall and Klamt discovers that instead of the beloved, she is to play one of the two stout sexagenarian nurses. And that the beloved is to be played by the daughter of the General Intendant.

The gist of the slander, which can no doubt be traced back to Klamt, is that the infirmities and limitations of the beloved are also those of the General Intendant’s daughter. That the daughter cannot walk, that she cannot speak, that she expresses herself with her eyes only because she is unable to express herself by any other means. That The Glassworker has been contrived specifically to allow her father to cast her in it. That only a play in which the leading lady is absent from Act I and sits mute and motionless for nearly all of Act II is one that could even conceivably feature the General Intendant’s daughter at the top of the bill.

This malicious slander pains the General Intendant. But it moves him to see how little it seems to pain his daughter. She could of course disprove it in an instant. She would only have to stand up or speak. One word would be sufficient. What gives this slander some purchase is her determination to do no such thing. To rehearse the role of the beloved completely in character. To have her father wheel her into the City Theater every morning and wheel her out again at night. To have him lift her onto the stage in his arms. To communicate with no one, not even with him, not even one word. A part of him even envies the degree to which her commitment to her art leaves her indifferent to the world and its scorn.

The world is something to which he himself, both as a father and as an arts administrator, has for a long time not been in a position to be indifferent.

Nor is he indifferent now. The General Intendant gathers his company. It is true that The Glassworker is contrived, he says: It is contrived to remind you how much an actor can express with even the smallest gesture. The simplest gesture. The Glassworker is indeed contrived—contrived to remind the public of the power of the theater, to remind us in the theater of the power of our art. A power we have all forgotten.

The company murmurs.

But given the daughter’s refusal to disprove the slander, it does not go away. It only intensifies. It is whispered, presumably first by Klamt, that anything expressed in her eyes is in fact without meaning or intent and bears only an accidental relation to the text of The Glassworker. That her baffled expression isn’t acting, it is actual bafflement. That her horrified expression is actual horror. That when the General Intendant (who receives special permission from the director to join each rehearsal as a kind of informal co-director) devotes all of his co-directing energy to directing his daughter, and in particular to directing, or co-directing, her eyes—which must convey to the last row of the balcony that that man is no glassworker, he’s a bricklayer, and what he’s brought into the world is a far cry from beauty—those hours and hours of rehearsal time are gone, simply gone.

How, the General Intendant points out to his company, if you honestly believe the cruel things that you say, do you suppose she will be able to leap to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaim, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!

The company murmurs. That’s true. But it is pointed out by Klamt in turn that the scene in which the beloved exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! is the one scene that is never rehearsed.

Finally, and in front of the whole company, the General Intendant kneels before his daughter in her chair and begs her with tears in his eyes and his head in her lap to break character. Not for her sake, he knows she doesn’t care what they think, but for his! He is weak! He does care! But when she doesn’t break character even to decline what he begs of her, he tells the company that he is proud of his daughter and ashamed of himself. Only someone so committed to her role and so indifferent to the world is entitled to call herself an actor.

After this, the malicious slander about her expressive gifts is repeated less often, and less gleefully.

Not, however, by Klamt, who if anything only escalates her abuse.

Klamt claims that the General Intendant does not even come from the world of drama. He comes from the world of dance. He impaired his wife with dance! Slew her with an undanceable dance! A dance no one could dance! So, first of all, they were taking their dramaturgical guidance from someone who has no formal training in theater! And who murdered his wife through choreography! This in the opinion of the finest physicians! But by his lights, she wasn’t dead! No, he took her home. Sustained her somehow, though not in a way anyone would wish to be sustained. Saw an opportunity in all this: a dance opportunity! An opportunity to “start from scratch,” dancewise! Didn’t have the decency to let her die, had to make her keep dancing instead! Of course, this dance didn’t pan out. At first, there was promise. Her movements struck him as entirely new. Or rather—old! Primordial! From a stage in the development of the human organism that preceded our fall into sociality and culture and the stink of the city! Never mind whether they could really be called “dance movements”! He was struck above all by one movement. At intervals, a finger shot to her now-bald brow and traced an arc across the side of her skull. A prehistoric gesture, he thought! The meaning of which was inscrutable to him! Must stem from the innate nature of man! Upon this one primeval movement an entire school of dance could be founded! But no. One day, he notices a painting of them on the eve of their wedding in which she is making the very same movement. Coquettishly tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. Now there is no hair on her head and possibly no essence to her person, but the fashionable world is still moving her muscles! There is no “preceding our fall into sociality”! No escape from “the stink of the city”! No “prehistory”! No “starting from scratch”! Not once you’ve walked even one city block! He decides to have another child by her. Doesn’t know if this is possible. Finds that it is! This one he raises properly! Pristinely! In the dark! In the midst of the city but sheltered from the gestural tyranny of the city! Food through a slot, water through a hole and into a shallow trough! Sheltered from a city that without our knowing it is always telling us how to move and how not to! Enters her room only when she is sleeping so as not to influence her with his movements! Wants nothing more than to embrace her tiny sleeping form but restrains himself in case upon waking she retains a memory of that motion! By a thousand such self-sacrifices ensures that hers is the first childhood free from violence! No movement possibilities are foreclosed to her! Everything is possible! She can move any which way! How his daughter chooses to move is for the first time in the history of man a genuine choice! Now he simply waits to see how she will choose to move! How she will choose to dance! But—she chooses not to move! She chooses not to dance! She chooses to sit! Or else (Klamt has heard it told both ways!) the way in which she chooses to move and dance obliges him to inhibit her movements by means of straps, for her own sake, after which, even once free again, she ceases to move! Whatever the case: After a certain point, there is no movement! No dancing! Yet he cannot quite disabuse himself of the notion that she is, for all that, a dancer! To admit that his daughter is no dancer is to admit that the way he raised her may not have been in her best interest! Only in time does he disabuse himself of the notion that she is a dancer! And only by means of another notion onto which he’s able to transfer the same psychological load: that she is an actor …

Now Klamt has gone too far. The members of the company turn away from her in disgust. Imagine reacting so poorly to losing a role! And the stout old nurse is still a speaking part, that’s more than most of them got!

Klamt herself becomes the subject of slander. In her increasingly baroque and frankly hysterical rumormongering, some in the company claim to detect not only the rancor of an ousted starlet but also the rage of a jilted lover, an innuendo that the General Intendant asks them to rise above but also does not explicitly dispel.

Meanwhile, a consensus begins to form among the members of the company that the daughter’s performance is “powerful.”

Rumors of her expressive gifts spread beyond the walls of the City Theater. Before the public has even seen her onstage, she becomes the recipient of an outpouring of adoration.

And on the night of the premiere, she leaps to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The company is willing to testify to that, the audience is willing to testify to that. She leaped to her feet and exclaimed, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!—the whole city is willing to testify to that, no one will deny it.

No one, that is, apart from the aging starlet Klamt. Again and again she refuses—and loudly!—to admit it. Eventually, she is sent to Dr. Krakauer’s sanatorium. Here, Klamt is asked continually by Dr. Krakauer whether it is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said what everyone heard her say, and Klamt just missed it. She knows that admitting this possibility would be enough to get her discharged. She simply has to say the words It is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said the words Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! and that night she would sleep in her own bed. And privately, she will admit that of course it is possible, anything is possible. But Klamt, too, is committed to her role.

This story has been excerpted from Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ forthcoming book, Gretel and the Great War.

In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him. “It’s a new world here,” Oanh tells the Captain. “If you fully commit to this land, you become fully American. But if you don’t, you’re just a wandering ghost living between two worlds forever.”

Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer follows a protagonist who seems perennially trapped in this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded high up in the Southern Vietnamese military. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is at once strikingly visible in public and yet socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early in the first episode, “cursed to see every issue from both sides.” But what vexes him even more is the realization that he uses his identity as an excuse to avoid taking firm moral stances. By circumstance and by choice, he moves through society as a specter.

Although The Sympathizer isn’t a literal ghost story, this is a compelling prism to view the adaptation through. The series, created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, introduces the Captain after he’s been captured by the North Vietnamese army (which he’s spying for), sent to a reeducation camp, and stuck in a room to write his confession. He begins by writing words we hear in a voice-over: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” a nod to the opening of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, whose similarly unnamed narrator unpacks feeling adrift and anonymous “because people refuse to see me.” In The Sympathizer, the word spook takes on a dual meaning, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and also a disembodied presence that’s neither dead nor alive.

The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed memories, which span decades and move between Vietnam and the U.S. He jumps back and forth through time, revealing a man caught as much between physical and psychic worlds as between loyalties. The two people he cares most about in the world—his best friends and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—were on different sides of the war: the former was a higher-up in North Vietnamese leadership, the latter was a South Vietnamese paratrooper and assassin.

[Read: Viet Thanh Nguyen on why writing is a process of “emotional osmosis”]

But unlike in many traditional ghost stories, the Captain isn’t an omniscient figure narrating from the afterlife. He is wrestling with competing political and cultural ideologies and with Vietnam’s legacy of colonialism and war. He is a frequent subject of derision as a mixed-race man: In one scene in Vietnam, the Captain explains that he’s long endured acquaintances and others “spitting on me and calling me bastard,” dryly adding that “sometimes, for variety, they call me bastard before they spit.” Even those who the Captain believes respect him see his humanity as conditional. In the novel, his longtime boss—known only as the General—fires him for flirting with his daughter: “How could you ever believe we would allow [her] to be with someone of your kind?” the General asks.

This sense of alienation is exacerbated in the U.S., where the Captain embeds within the exiled South Vietnamese community. There, he and his fellow countrymen are, as he describes in the novel, “consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.” At one point in the show, a fellow émigré and journalist named Sonny (Alan Trong) tells him, “Arguably, I’m more Vietnamese than you … biologically”—and yet the Captain is regarded as being too Vietnamese by many of those he meets in the U.S. In an especially atrocious scene after the Captain’s arrival in Los Angeles, a former professor he connects with (Robert Downey Jr.) gives him the dehumanizing assignment of writing down his “Oriental and Occidental qualities” side by side. Afterward, the professor pressures the Captain to read the list aloud to university donors at a cocktail party.

[Read: The Vietnam War, as seen by the victors]

Not even the Captain’s Marxist proclivities can anchor him after he moves to America, a bastion of capitalism that he's been taught to hate but secretly enjoys. Though he technically identifies as a Communist, in the series he doesn’t come off as an active, passionate believer. He also becomes involved in American pop culture, when he's asked to be a cultural consultant on an Apocalypse Now–esque film. Yet the Captain is frustratingly static in these Hollywood scenes. He’s unconvincing when he implores a movie director named Niko Damianos (also played by Downey Jr.) to hire Vietnamese actors in speaking roles. Even the way he pushes back against the inclusion of an unnecessarily violent scene feels tepid; when the director fires him, the Captain walks away in indifferent silence.

In interviews, Nguyen has said that hauntings are inextricable from stories about war and the trauma it leaves behind. He has also noted that Vietnamese culture is full of ghost stories, whose spirits bear both malicious and benevolent intent. The visual language of The Sympathizer takes care to point out that those hovering in the afterlife stay close to the living. Shrines to the deceased, many adorned with fruits, incense, and vases full of flowers, pervade the show’s world, including in the Captain’s home and in the General’s office. Later in the series, literal ghosts also take shape: Major Oanh and another person the Captain murders constantly reappear to taunt him and offer unsolicited opinions.

As the series progresses, the Captain becomes more and more numb, stymied by the realization that neither communism nor capitalism—nor either of the two countries, or racial identities, or best friends he’s torn between—will make him whole. The Sympathizer drives home the salient point that social invisibility has a way of hollowing someone until they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures toward a haunting truth: To stand for everything is akin to standing for nothing.