Against one wall of my room I had a small, single-drawer pine chest, inherited from my grandfather. He had built it for his wife when they were first married somewhere in the mountains near the Amnok River, hidden away from the Japanese patrols in the early 1930s. I called it my Manchurian chest and kept a clean uniform in it during the years when we were issued extras. There was an icebox-but I never bothered to plug it in-a burner where I boiled water for tea, and a Chinese-made rice cooker I'd brought back from Vladivostok, which always undercooked the rice. On the floor was a blue kettle with a wooden handle. The water in it was from three days ago, but the tap wasn't working. There was still vodka in a bottle sitting on the icebox.

The vodka was from Finland, and as I took a couple of swallows, I closed my eyes and imagined what it was like in the Finnish summer.

Twilight that stretched forever-a soothing idea. Whenever I mentioned it to Pak, he replied that only meant the day shifts must be hell.

I liked Pak, but he had no poetry in his soul.

The altar was long gone, as was the green celadon vase, cool and smooth to the touch. The vase had been my grandfather's. When I was young, it sat on a bookshelf in his house. I had stared at it on many quiet afternoons, imagining the white cranes painted on the sides were lifting themselves in flight to somewhere I could barely picture. I don't know when it was, but at some point I began to doubt that the cranes knew where they were going.

One night soon after moving into the apartment, I came back from the office to find the altar knocked over and the vase on the floor. It wasn't necessary, and it wasn't an accident. Just a rude calling card. There was nothing else to disturb, no books to scatter about or pictures to pull down from the walls, but if there were flowers, they had to knock them over.