The summer before Chung and I joined the army together, we were both sent to a large cooperative farm about a hundred kilometers away to help tend the fields. Twice a month, when propaganda teams came by, we could sit on rough benches after dinner to watch a silent film playing shadows on the cracked wall of a whitewashed shed. The crickets sang but then grew still, listening to the click-click-click of the sprockets being torn, one after another, by the old projector. That was how Chung’s eyes flickered when he looked at you, a broken film playing on a hot summer night.

I turned back to gaze out the window. No, I decided, the man in the aisle was a stranger; we didn’t know each other. His smile meant nothing. At last I dozed, until with a groan and hiss of brakes the coaches bumped each other in protest, then came to rest. Stepping down to the platform, I shouldered my bag and made my way to the square in front of the station, wondering where to go to escape the windy gloom that swept the city. I set off toward a small restaurant a few blocks away, near the Koryo Hotel, where they served plain food, simple and cheap, a bowl of soup and, if they had any, a piece of fish. I needed something to wash the dust out of my throat. I needed to sit where the diners ate quietly, a place where, unlike in Beijing, people didn’t chatter loudly to no purpose. The street was deserted; no neon signs assaulted the dark. Two cars passed slowly, their lights off. It felt good to be home.

3

Min stood in the doorway of my office, watching me sand a scrap of oak. It was from the side of a blanket chest we’d found in an apartment abandoned by a smuggling ring. They might have been Ukrainian; we never knew for sure. The place had been empty for weeks. The smugglers knew we were on their trail almost before we realized they existed. It hadn’t bothered me, missing a band of foreign crooks, but the Ministry wasn’t pleased. Everyone who worked on the case eventually found an unflattering note in his file. The gang had used an axe on the blanket chest and on the few other pieces of furniture in the apartment as well. It was their way of telling us to keep our distance. The chest deserved better. I salvaged what I could; no sense wasting completely good oak.