I liked the place. People said hello when they passed you in the hall, partly to make sure you didn't knock them over in the dark corridors, but also from friendliness. A group of old ladies, widows of war veterans, was assigned rooms on the lower floors so they wouldn't have to walk up so many stairs. In good weather they sat outside and watched the road that ran in front of the building. They enjoyed the idea of having an inspector from the Ministry of People's Security living in their building; they thought it gave the place a certain status and imagined that if word spread it would keep the area free of burglars.
Soon after I moved in, a few of them cornered me to insist it was not right that I was unmarried. They waved aloft a list of girls for me to meet. Heading the list, they said, was a beauty from Kaesong, a good cook whose noodle dishes were worthy of the country's old capital and would be waiting for me each night. I told them that if I got married, it would mean moving out of my tiny single room, and if I moved away, which I certainly would, they would be left without a resident police inspector. I never saw the names of the girls, nor heard again of noodles.
My apartment was simple, but it was home and it was enough. For a while, I kept a small altar for my parents near the door. I even had a vase with a flower to remind me of the countryside where I had grown up, a small valley an hour's walk from the nearest town, with nothing but dirt paths and rice fields shimmering in the afternoon sun. My balcony was unsafe to stand on; the birds perched on what remained and chattered at sunset. The couple next door, though, had a good balcony.
Our side of the building faced south, and in the sunlight they grew flowers in pots of every size and description. On Monday mornings, rain or shine, the wife left a fresh red flower outside my door. She had plenty of colors to choose from; she always gave me red.
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. Otherwise, what was the point of rousting the room? Once I saw the vase hadn't been damaged, I decided to forget the whole thing. Having the room searched didn't bother me. Whoever did it wasn't trying to be subtle. I figured maybe it was a drill, to show me how rooms looked after a search if you didn't do your job right. Or maybe it was a mistake: The wrong file got pulled, and when they walked into my room they realized they had made a trip for nothing, so they let off some steam.
The second time I found the vase on the floor, I wrote them a note.
Pak called me into his office and told me that had demonstrated poor judgment, but I heard no trace of anger or warning in his voice as he stood behind his desk to deliver the scolding. After the third time, I just took the vase to work and put it away in my file cabinet.
6
I was back in our building at 1:45. I stood in the doorway to Pak's office, smoothing an oblong chip of persimmon wood with my fingers while I waited for Pak to get off the phone. I always carry a small piece of wood, the size of a matchbook, in my pocket. If you roll a piece of wood around in your fingers, eventually it finds the shape it wants to be and then starts smoothing itself. Every type of wood is different. Some take months to settle down; some can't wait to slough off the bad years.
I started doing it on sentry duty in the army to keep the circulation in my fingers. After I began work in the Ministry as an inspector, I discovered that while I was sitting at my desk, reviewing a file of unrelated facts, it helped me focus. Some people find it amusing; they call it my dirty habit. Other people can't stand it, which can be useful during an interrogation. I just have to lean against the wall, not saying anything, turning the wood over in my fingers, and they get nervous.
Pak was pleased to see me, until he glanced at my lapel.
"Don't blame me," I said. "They took the pin. Kang probably has it on his desk. Look, I don't want to get you in trouble. Why don't I put in for a transfer, maybe up north, to Kanggye?"
I put the persimmon wood back in my pocket. I'd been working it for a couple of months and it was only just getting calm. Persimmon usually goes faster than that. It's pretty wood if you treat it the right way. Otherwise it tends to be gaudy. You can't be sure you've found the heart with persimmon; it just wants to please. Walnut is different. My grandfather used to tell me that walnut couldn't give a damn. If you were going to match wits with walnut, he'd say, you'd better be serious.
"Pyongyang is getting too bourgeois. The traffic ladies won't even let you ride across the street. Incidentally, I think one of them almost smiled at me."
Pak ran his hand through his hair, a nervous habit he developed after his son died a year ago in a military training accident near the front.
Pak was going gray, though he wasn't that much older than I was, maybe five or six years. His hair was too long for a chief inspector. Recently, notes about "grooming" had been showing up in his file during the quarterly evaluations, but he didn't care. Ever since his son died, he had been stepping on rules.
I never met Pak's son. When he was still little, I returned from a liaison trip abroad with a present, a boxed set of tiny metal cars made in Japan. One of the cars was yellow; it was a bus. The others were red. The tiny doors even opened, and the black tires went around. Pak thanked me and said he was sure the boy would enjoy the cars, but a couple of weeks later I found the unopened box in the trash. I knew Pak wasn't worried about having goods from the outside, and I knew he was fiercely attached to the boy, always wanted the best for him. I didn't mention it, but that was the last time I brought back any gifts from a trip. Right after the boy died, I could sense Pak wanted to tell me something. Once or twice a week, always when the sun was getting low in the sky, he'd show up at my door and start a conversation, then fall silent. "Nothing, forget it," he'd say at last. "You got any of that damned Finnish vodka around?"
"Kanggye?" Pak said now, a surprised look on his face. "No, not Kanggye. Kanggye is full of hicks and crooks. You'd drop dead of boredom, or worse. Let's go for a walk."