and found two small pieces of wood. One was junk pine. The other was chestnut. Pak’s eyes narrowed.
“Whenever I ask you a question and you reach for that damned wood, I know you are about to hide something from me.”
“Not so.”
Some people think I use wood as worry beads. I do not. Beads are generic; wood is particular. Every type of wood has its own personality. I generally do not say this in the presence of strangers because it is not something they like to hear. They find it offensive, or walk away convinced I am being sarcastic. The truth is, with complete access to every type of tree on the planet, you could probably find a wood for every hue of emotion and then some. My grandfather believed wood was as close to goodness as a person could get. He never said it quite that way. What he said was, “You never saw trees abuse each other, did you?” He’d mutter this to me when we walked on summer afternoons, when the road was dusty and the sun was still hot. “Do they speak meanly? Do they lie? Do they grab more than their share, or sit in the shade while others do their work for them?” He’d walk a little more and then turn to me. “Well, do they, boy?”
“No, Grandfather, they do not.” No other answer was possible, or so it seemed to me at the time. It was manifestly true, the wood he worked with, the furniture he made, none of it ever caused trouble in the village or to our neighbors. The only problem I can recall happened one autumn. A visiting political cadre, a young man with a thin-edged smile, looked into Grandfather’s workshop and said, “This furniture of yours is too ornate. It must be cleaner, simpler to match the lives of the people.” My grandfather continued to sand a piece of wood, a piece for a small writing desk that had been commissioned by an official in Pyongyang, an old friend from the days of the anti-Japanese war when they were guerrillas in the mountains near the Amnok River. The sanding seemed to go on for a long time. The cadre looked at me and pointed to his ears, as if to ask whether the old man was deaf. At last my grandfather raised his head. “It isn’t me that makes the shapes. They come from the wood. There’s a certain truth to wood.” He fixed the cadre with a long, level gaze. “Or would that be the responsibility of another department?” The young man nodded slightly. “You’d better find some simpler truths somewhere, or we’ll have to get rid of these trees you’re using and plant new ones, simple ones.” My grandfather returned to his sanding. The cadre went away, and the neighbors walked over, one at a time, to say hello and comment on the desk. We all watched the road for a few months after that, but no one ever came to touch the village trees.
Pak knew I kept a supply of several varieties of wood, small scraps, in the top drawer of the desk in my office. He sometimes complained, but he never told me to get rid of it. When I needed to calm down, or think, or let my mind go free, I’d go into my desk and search around for a piece of wood. Lately, I had started carrying a couple of pieces with me, in case the duty car broke down when we were out of town. We were being called out of town more and more, to manage crowds at train stations or help out if a local security man became sick, or disappeared. The car wasn’t in good repair, and there wasn’t much maintenance going on. I knew we’d get stuck sooner or later. That’s why I had the piece of chestnut. It was cheerful, in its own way. Chestnut could take your mind off of things. It was a treat I had been saving for a bad day. This had all the makings of a bad day, and I hadn’t even been to the Sosan Hotel yet. I put it back in my pocket.
“No,” I said to Pak. “Mun is what he called himself then, too. We didn’t know each other very well. We met just before the operation started, read the file, asked a few questions. The training was only for a couple of weeks. We didn’t talk much. He