side closest the window, as if something had stuck its head in and taken out a bite. Not a rough cut but a clean, symmetrical bite. I looked again at the wood. It was only pine, and not very good pine, either. I was going to freeze to death under a lousy, sappy pine table. I looked more closely. Maybe it had been gnawed, though the light was fading so fast I couldn’t tell for sure. Who ate tables? I thought back to woodworking tools my grandfather had used—cutting tools, chisels, planes. Every night, they were lined up on the wall of his workshop. It was a pleasant, peaceful place, cool in the summer, fragrant with resin that seeped from the pieces of newly cut wood. “You have to keep things neat,” he’d say as he finished putting everything in its place. “Life may not be like that, not for humans, anyway. You’ll find that out someday, to your sorrow. But there is order everywhere else around us. You’ll never come across a disorderly forest, and I’m not talking about trees standing in rows and saluting, either.” He’d point to the tools. “Put them back where they belong,” he’d say. “Let them get a rest, refresh their spirit.” Once the implements were in place, he’d brush the sawdust into a pile and put it in a barrel that sat in the corner. “People don’t treat things right anymore,” he’d say, “don’t ask me why.”
The foreigner’s voice brought me back to the hut. “Why are we standing?” I’d never heard someone sound so friendly even though he was shouting. We had to get out of this place. Everything about it was wrong. We had no psychological edge in here for making this man explain—without games or irony or coatings of vocal friendship—what the hell he had been doing on the mountain in this weather. Trying to start any sort of a serious interrogation, even a short one, was impossible. We might as well be on a minibus in a gale. I had the feeling the foreigner thought he could leave anytime he wanted, just get off at the next stop and disappear into the swirling darkness. There wasn’t even any way to lock the door. It barely shut, and the wind made it rattle and shake the whole time he spoke. “Why are we standing around? There’s nowhere to go for the moment,” he said. It was his way of making sure we knew the score was even—we were trapped just like he was, all equally uncomfortable, and nothing would change that. He looked at us and smiled faintly. It might be two against one, but minus ten centigrade was a good leveler of odds and he knew it. When neither Pak nor I moved, he squeezed himself into the chair. I watched him put his fingers together. He had something more to say.
“Presumably, you’ll kick me out of the country. Just as well, you’ll hear no complaints from me. To tell the truth, I’m anxious to get back to where it is warm, maybe stretch out on a beach and have suntan oil rubbed onto my chest by someone.” He held my eye for a moment and smiled as the wind tore at the roof. Then he turned to Pak. “Someone wearing a bikini.”
Pak moved from one foot to the other. The floor was radiating cold up through the soles of our boots so that my shinbones were starting to ache. “If it were up to me,” Pak said, “you’d be on a plane right away. Even better, you’d have been gone yesterday. But that won’t happen. So your beach will have to wait. You’ll need something warmer than a bikini back in Pyongyang, because they say it’s going to be a cold winter. There will be lots of questions, and they won’t be politely asked, not like the inspector here does. Questions every day, all day, morning, noon, and night. Sun? Even in the unlikely event there are windows in the room you’ll get, you won’t see much sun.” Pak took off his hat and fiddled with the snap for a moment. I knew he was figuring out exactly how to phrase what he wanted to say next. “You were supposed to stay close. That was the agreement. You stay with us; we keep you safe. That’s how it was going to work. An hour here or there out of touch we could explain if we had to. But