about me. What I’m asking does no harm to the old man. Let him be useful again, really useful, not a musty symbol of a bygone era. For all you know, he might have approved. He approved of almost everything that you did, didn’t he?”

That was meant to get to me. It did. “Damn you.” I thought of stopping there, but then the words boiled over. When other people mentioned my grandfather, I could ignore them, or just walk away like I almost did in Pak’s office with Sohn. That was impossible with my brother. With him it was different, exactly because he planned every word he spoke. Every word, every thought was for him part of an unending war fought against his own existence. But he did not fight on the front lines. He was a sapper who studied the structure, planned where to place the charge, and exploded it to cause maximum destruction. He thought of me as a bridge that had to be brought down to prevent the past from pursuing him.

“We aren’t related anymore.” I had never once thought of saying that, but there was no going back once I heard the words spoken in my own voice. “We aren’t part of the same family. We don’t share the same blood. From now on, we are strangers.”

He was silent, but not with shock or hurt or even with contemplation. I knew what he was doing; he was searching even then for a way to destroy me. There was only one thing left to say, and I might as well say it. “We are nothing to each other,” I said. “You and me, we have nothing in common, and we never did. Do you understand? Can I make it any clearer to you? We are not brothers. We are complete strangers who owe each other nothing. We will not meet. We will not talk. We will not acknowledge each other’s existence. As far as I am concerned, you died and I did not mourn.” He was looking out at the lake, pretending not to hear. I stopped for a moment to consider, but the words were already there, honed and dipped in poison that must have been fermenting for centuries. “Let me tell you this, if I ever find that you haven’t died, if you ever work your way into my sights, if I am ever, for any reason, told to hunt down a man and kill him and it turns out to be you, I will pull the trigger. You hear me? I will pull the trigger.”

That caught his attention. “No doubt you will, little brother.” He got to his feet. “The only question is whether you’ll live long enough to see that day.”

2

I watched him walk down the hill, past the stand of oaks and the line of maples all the way out of the park. I willed myself to be calm, but I had no will left, not for that. I made it a point to draw few lines in my life. Drawing them rarely made sense. People who drew lines became trapped on the wrong side. Things changed, reality shifted, shapes became shadows and shadows faded into night. You can’t see your principles in the dark. But where I did draw a line, I had no intention of erasing it.

At my grandfather’s funeral, a day of bright sunshine, people I had never met before bowed their heads and murmured as they passed by that I should be true to his name. On the day he died, the radio called him the Beating Heart of the Revolution, and all at once, when I heard that, I knew what he had been trying to tell me for all the years I had been in his house. I never saw him bend.

When we were young, not long after the war, my brother came home a few times a year. Whenever he did, my grandfather would become silent. It was a great honor, my brother would say. He was attending the revolutionary school for the children of heroes killed in the war. The students were all orphans, but they had not lost their family, he told us. The fatherland was our family, the party was our future, the Great Leader was the center of our hope. No one could rest on what he had done in the past; it was to the future we owed our lives. To me, it was stirring stuff. My grandfather sat with