After watching him for a few days, I realized that when he paused to think, he always lined up his hands against each other, one finger at a time, meticulously, deliberately. Once everything was perfectly aligned, five fingertips against their twins, it meant he had decided what he wanted to say. Then he put his hands down on the table again, where they lay still, completely comfortable and at ease.

"I thought I was going to die up there." The foreigner spoke English with a slight accent. Even after two weeks accompanying him several hours a day, I hadn't been able to place the source. I had heard all sorts of accents before, but none like this. It nagged at me, not being able to place him. His documents said he was from Switzerland. Maybe, but somehow I doubted that was the whole story.

From the beginning, as we stood around waiting for his bags at the airport, he spoke in a soothing cadence, a voice so smooth I wondered if he swallowed a bit of silk every morning-silk pills, maybe. Without fail, he turned complex thoughts into short, simple sentences so I could translate for Pak. That alone told me he had done this many times before. It was not the mark of a tourist, or even a businessman. Western businessmen sometimes spoke slowly, like we were idiots, but there was always an aura of tension around them, a slight odor of calculation. They couldn't help themselves. Not this visitor. He stood casually in the immigration line, he shook our hands casually when we introduced ourselves, but this was not a casual visit. In the dreary, dangerous winter of 1997, he had been put in our care, under the protection of the Ministry of Public Security. This was inexplicable, at least to me. We didn't babysit foreigners, we followed them at a discreet distance. If Pak knew anything, as usual he wasn't saying.

"The wind never let up." The foreigner took off his scarf. "From down below maybe you couldn't tell. The trees lower down didn't move much from what I could see, but the wind near the top was like a knife." He laughed. "That's a cliche, isn't it? I'm sorry. But it cut through my coat, cut through my gloves. You people may be used to this weather. I'm not."