On Friday night it snowed again, and Seol Ahreum, who had a rule against telling anyone what she wanted for dinner, found herself in her own kitchen at six o'clock with two bowls, one rice cooker, and a man in the doorway asking whether he might be of use.

"You may wash the rice," she said.

"I have never washed rice in this kitchen."

"You have washed rice in yours. Three times, under the cold tap, I am told, in the manner of a person who has read the leaflet." She did not turn round. "The rule tonight is that we do not speak of tomorrow. Not the Board, not the vote, not the ninth floor. I have made a ledger entry for it. It is the only item in the left-hand column."

"What does it say?"

"*Nothing.*"

He laughed. It was a low, startled, entirely private sound, and she heard him cross her small floor in his stockinged feet and take the bag of rice from the counter with an air of grave and solemn purpose. He had left his coat on the hook. He had left, she supposed, a great many other things on it. In the lamplight over the sink he rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and the old white seam across the back of his knuckle came up pale against the skin, and she looked at the onion that she was chopping until she was quite sure that it was an onion.

Her grandmother had come home that morning.

It had been done with a great deal of ceremony and a very small amount of fuss. Two porters, a wheelchair, Nurse Baek in her good coat with a case of tablets held against her chest like a hymnal, and Min walking behind with a face of such perfect blankness that it sang. They had carried her up the steps of the old house in Seongbuk-dong at eleven o'clock, in a rug, in the snow, and she had been put to bed in her own room with the clock in the sitting room striking a correct hour through the wall. She had asked for tea. She had been told that she could not have tea. She had said that she should like it noted that she had asked. Then she had slept for eight hours with her hand on the steel lunch box, and Min in a chair at the foot of the bed, and nobody had been permitted to say that it was a little like a ship coming into harbour.

She did not say any of it. She had made a rule.

They ate at the low table, on cushions, with the lamp on the shelf and the curtain drawn against the weather. It was a plain meal: radish soup, a rolled egg that he had turned in the pan himself and burned, in the honest manner, on one end, and rice. She had put a single black seed in the middle of his bowl. He looked at it for some time, as one looks at a small round eye that has been put there to see that one finishes, and then he ate every grain, and put the seed in his mouth last.

"It is a good seed," said Hajin, gravely.

"It is only sesame."

"That is what I thought about the lunch box."

She put her hand over her mouth.

They talked about nothing, and it was the best talk that she had ever had.

He told her about his mother's tree in Cheongdo, which had been planted in the year of his third company and had borne for the first time the autumn after the sleet. He said that she had telephoned that morning to ask whether it was true that he was eating, and he had said that it was, and she had said, *Who is cooking?*, in the voice of a woman who has been told a great many things by her son and has learned to listen for the one that is missing. He told her that he had said, *A friend.* She had said, *Is she tall?* He had said that she was not. His mother had said, quite calmly, *Bring her at the persimmons.*

"I did not say yes," said Hajin. "I said that I would ask."

"Ask what?"

"Whether you would come."

She set down her cup.

"In November," he said. "To a village at the end of a bus line, in a house with a tin roof and a crate on the step. She will give you a persimmon in a twist of newspaper. She will look at you for some time without speaking, and then she will say that you are too thin, and give you another." His voice was quite steady and his ears had gone red. "I am told that it is the whole of her opinion of anyone. I thought that you should have warning."

"Hajin."

"You need not answer tonight."

"Yes," said Ahreum.

He looked up.

"I should like to come in November. I shall be too thin. I shall take the second persimmon." She had not meant to say it so soon. It had come up out of her whole, like the answer to a sum, and she heard it lie on the table between the bowls and found that she did not want to take any of it back. "Put it in the ledger. Item twenty-five. *His: asked. Hers: yes. November.*"

He did not write it down. He put his hand flat on the low table, palm up, among the cups, and she laid her own across it, and neither of them said anything for rather a long time.

The stool in his kitchen was still turned with its back to the window. He told her that, too, in the end. He said it to the rice bowl, in the tone of a man mentioning a thing that has just occurred to him. He said that he had not turned it. He said that he thought it would take some time. She said that there was no hurry, and that it was only a stool, and that it would face the river when it was ready, and that she should like to be there. He said that she would be.

She showed him the ring at ten.

She had not planned it. She sat on the edge of the mattress in the lamplight with her glasses pushed up into her hair and her hands in her lap, and the snow whispering on the other side of the curtain, and found that her left thumb had begun to turn the gold band on her right hand, a quarter turn and back. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the shelf and a cup of barley tea. He had been looking at her thumb for some time. He did not say so.

"It was my great-grandmother's," said Ahreum.

He set down the cup.

"She was a very small woman. She had a hand like a bird's. When my grandmother had it made over for me, at seventeen, the jeweller said that it could be taken in, and my grandmother said that it should be left as it was. I did not know why. I think she thought that I should grow into it." She turned it again. "I have never grown into it. It turns when I am afraid."

"I have seen it turn."

"I know." She lifted the hand, and held it in the light. "Look at the bevel. At the top. Do you see the line?"

He came across the floor on his knees. He did not take her hand. He bent his head a little, a hand's breadth from it, with the grave attention of a man looking at a stranger's handwriting, and she watched him find it: a seam so fine that it might have been a scratch, a hairline round the plain flat face of the gold, where the bevel met the band.

"It is a lid," said Ahreum.

His breath stopped.

"It was made for hair. A lock, or a very small photograph. My great-grandmother wore her husband's in it, I believe, until she died." She spoke in her level report voice, to the lamp. "I took the ring from my grandmother's dressing-table on the night of the cafeteria. She did not notice. It was a Monday. I had your answer in my hand, in my school bag, folded so small that I had to fold it again, and I did not know where to put it, and I thought, a ring."

He did not move.

"I have kept it there for ten years," she said. "I have opened it four times. I did not open it when I stood in the corridor outside Room 903. I did not open it in the sleet. I think that I am afraid that it will say something different if I look." She closed her fingers. "I said that I should show you after the ninth. I should like to keep that. I should like to be able to put it in your hand, on a day when nothing else is happening."

"After tomorrow," said Hajin.

It was not a question, and it was not a promise. He said it as one says the name of a place on a map, quite quietly, so that she should know that it was there. He did not touch the ring. He lowered his face, very gently, and laid his forehead for a moment against the back of her hand, above the gold, and she felt his breath on her knuckles, and the small dry shake of a man who is not quite weeping.

"Thank you," he said, into her hand.

She put her left palm on the back of his head, in the soft cropped hair, and held it there.

"I am afraid of tomorrow," said Ahreum.

She had said that she would not speak of it. She had made a ledger entry. She heard it come out of her and did not stop it, and she thought that perhaps it was what the entry had been for, an empty column in which to put the thing that would not stay out of it.

"I am not afraid of the vote. I have counted it nine times, and it is eleven point four, and the Chairman has promised, and an old man called Gwon is bringing a schedule in a satchel." She looked at the wall. "I am afraid of her face."

"Yurim's."

"My grandmother's." She swallowed. "I shall stand in a room tomorrow in front of a woman who called me Unnie for twenty years and say what I know, and my grandmother will be sitting at the head of the table in a wheelchair, and she will hear it. Every word of it. She will hear what was done to Narae. What was done in her house, in her name, with her signature at the foot. She will hear what her own brother's son has done with the Fund that she gave her life to. And I do not know what her face will do."

"No."

"I have never in my life seen her cry." It broke in the middle. "I do not know what I shall do if I do."

He lifted his head. He sat back on his heels in front of her, with his hands open on his knees, and the lamplight lay along the side of his face. He did not say *it will be all right.* He did not say *I shall look after you.* She watched him not say them.

"I shall be beside you," said Hajin. "Not in front. I shall be so near that you will be able to feel the sleeve of my coat. I do not know what I can do about her face. I do not think that anyone can. I think that one only stands in the same room, and is afraid in the same place."

"It is what I asked."

"It is what you asked," said Hajin. "I find that it is the only thing I have ever been any good at."

She laughed. It was a wet, startled, unsteady sound, and he smiled at her, crookedly, with his eyes shining, and she saw how young he was, and how tired, and how entirely she wished that he would stay.

"Will you stay?" said Ahreum.

"Are you asking?"

"Yes."

"Then yes," said Hajin.

She took off her glasses herself.

She laid them on the shelf, beside the book that had been lent and not returned, with one arm tucked under the other, and the room went soft and gold at its edges, a place of lamp and shadow and the grey cover of the bed. He was a clear shape in the middle of it, near, with his face turned up. She put out her hand and laid it against his cheek, along the line of the jaw, where the stubble was rough, and felt him turn into it, very slightly, as a thing turns toward a window.

"May I kiss you?" said Ahreum.

"Always," said Hajin. And then, as she bent: "I mean that you need not ask. I find that I like being asked."

"Then I shall ask."

It was a long, quiet kiss, and it tasted of barley and winter. She felt his hand come up, slowly, to cup the back of her head, and stop, and wait, and she said against his mouth, "Yes," and it went on. When she drew back, an inch, to breathe, his forehead rested against hers, and she heard him say, very low, "Is this all right?"

"I shall tell you if it is not."

"You will?"

"I am learning," said Ahreum, "to say it."

He made a small sound that was half a laugh and half something else. His hands were not quite steady. She knew that, and it undid her more than any boldness could have done. He undid the buttons of her cardigan one at a time, with the exact attention of a man handling something that was entrusted to him, and stopped at each, and looked at her, and she nodded, and he went on. When he came to the cuff of her left sleeve, the one that she had held for twenty-one years, he paused. He turned back the wool, twice, very gently, in a neat fold, the way that a woman had once done it in a hall, and then he laid his lips against the inside of her wrist.

She stopped breathing.

It was not the same. It was nothing like a stair, or a suitcase, or a door that swung. It was warm and slow and entirely present, a man's mouth against the place where she had held herself, and it said, quite plainly, without any word at all, *you may let go of this.*

"Hajin," she said. It came out cracked.

"I am here."

"I know," said Ahreum, and found that her eyes were wet, and that she was smiling. "I know that you are."

After that there were not many sentences. She lay with her back against the grey cover and the lamp turned low, in the quiet of the snow, and let herself be looked at. It was a thing that she had never allowed. She had stood in rooms all her life with her face composed and her back to a wall, and she lay now with her hair loose on a pillow and her hands open and a man's face above her in the gold dark, and found that she could bear it. She could bear it very well. She could bear to be seen entirely, and to see, and there was nothing between them but the warm small distance of breath. He asked, and she answered. He moved slowly, and with great care, and each time that she said *yes*, or *there*, or his name, she felt something give a little further down, like ice in a river in the first week of spring.

When it came, it came quietly, as the sea turns at the top of the tide. It rose, and held, and let go. She heard herself say his name against his shoulder, and heard him say hers, low, as if it were a thing that he wished to be sure of. And afterwards they lay together in the warm dark, with the snow whispering, and the lamp ticking as it cooled, and neither of them said that it had been anything at all, because it had been the plainest thing that either of them had ever done.

He slept.

It happened as it had happened before, all at once, in the middle of a breath. His face turned into the pillow, and his hand lay across her wrist, and she felt the whole length of him go quiet like a house when the last lamp goes out. She lay on her side and watched him. His hands were open. They lay on the grey cover with the palms upward and the fingers loosely curled, and she looked at them for a long time, and thought that she had never seen anything so entirely trusting in her life.

She did not get up.

She thought of it, a little. There was a pad of the Fund's paper on the low table, and a steel pen. She had always done her thinking at three in the morning in a small gold circle of lamplight with a letter growing under her hand. She lay quite still and let the thought go by. There was nothing to write. There was nothing to hide from the man who slept with his hands open beside her. Everything that she knew was in a hard black case, or in a ring, or in the head of an old woman asleep two streets away in a bed with a steel lunch box. She had said it all. It was a very odd sensation, to lie in the dark with nothing in her pockets.

She reached over, very quietly, to the little black notebook on the floor beside the mattress. She did not open it. She laid her hand flat on its cover, as one lays a hand on a sleeping animal, and wrote nothing, and put it back.

Then she slept as well.

She woke at ten to three, and the dark had changed.

She knew it before she knew why. The room was blue and cold. The snow had stopped, and a flat grey light had come up behind the curtain from the lamps in the street, and it lay along the floor in a long thin bar. The man beside her lay on his back with one arm flung out, breathing quietly. She lay and looked at the ceiling, and her heart was going slow and hard, like a fist on a door.

*Tomorrow.*

It was a very small word. It had no weight at all, and it sat on her chest like a stone. She saw a long walnut table, and a chair with a brass nameplate, and an old woman in a rug. She saw a pale ribbon. She saw the clock in a sitting room that had been right for eight days. She had told herself in the bath, and in the lift, and across a bowl of rice, that she was ready, and she lay in the blue dark with her hands clenched and knew that it was not true.

She turned her head.

He was awake.

She did not know when. His eyes were open, and quite clear, and he was looking at her in the bar of grey light with an expression that she could not read, and had not moved at all. He had not made a sound. He lay with his arm flung out and his palm turned up on the cover, and she understood that he had been lying so for some time, with the whole of his attention on her breathing, as a man lies who has been told that something he loves is asleep.

"Hajin," said Ahreum.

"I am here."

"I am afraid."

It came out in a whisper. It was the plainest sentence that she had ever said. It did not have an object, or a clause, or a ledger. It lay on the blue air between them like a small dropped thing, and she waited, with her hands knotted in the cover, for it to be answered with something clever.

"I know," said Hajin.

He sat up. He did it slowly, so that she should have time to move, and she did not. He drew her against him, with one arm behind her shoulders, and the other round her back, and her face went into the hollow of his throat as it had in a kitchen with the water running. His skin was warm. She could feel his heart, going slow and steady, and the faint rough scrape of his jaw against her hair.

"Be afraid with me," he said.

She made a small broken sound.

"I do not know how to take it away. I should like to, and I cannot. I can only be afraid in the same bed." His voice was low and not quite steady. "I have been afraid of that room since I was seventeen. I shall go into it tomorrow with my knees shaking. I should like to have somebody beside me who knows that."

"Noted," said Ahreum.

It was a very small word, and it was not a wall. It was a breath, laid on his collarbone in the dark, and it meant exactly what she had told him that it would. *I have seen this. It happened. I am here.* She felt the whole of his body take it, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and she felt the small quick shiver go down between his shoulder blades. And he did not flinch. He held her closer, with his chin on her hair, and said, quite softly, in a voice that shook:

"Noted."

They stayed like that for a long time. Neither of them said that it would be all right. The grey light from the street crept up the wall. Somewhere far below a snow plough went by, with its yellow lamp turning, and its low grinding roar rose and faded, and was gone.

At ten past six the telephone rang on the floor.

She had slept again, for an hour, against his shoulder, and it was a sound that went into her like cold water. She reached for it. She saw the name before she was awake, and her heart did a thing that it had not done since a hospital corridor, and she put it to her ear with a hand that shook.

"Director," said Mr. Kwak.

His voice was low, and grave, and quite without its usual composure. Behind it, very faint, she heard the tick of a cooling engine.

"Mr. Kwak. What has happened?"

"Nothing, Director. Nothing at all. Forgive me. I did not like to telephone before six." He cleared his throat. "It is only that I came to the house at five, as I was told, to bring the car round for the Chairwoman at half past eight. And she was at the gate."

Ahreum sat up.

"She was in her coat, Director. The grey one, with the collar. Nurse Baek was holding her arm and weeping, and Min was behind with the wheelchair, and the Chairwoman said, quite pleasantly, *Mr. Kwak, you will be so kind as to open the door.*" His voice thinned. "I said that it was a quarter past five. I said that the meeting was at ten. She said that she was aware of the hour."

"Is she"

"She is in the back seat. She has been there since six. She will not let me drive. She says that she wishes to be at the tower before anyone else, so that she may be seen to have been there first." Mr. Kwak stopped. When he spoke again his voice had gone very strange. "She has the box on her knees, Director. Your grandfather's. She has it in both hands, with the cloth on top, as one carries a thing across a road. She will not put it down."

She could not speak.

"She says that she will not be late," said Mr. Kwak. "She says to tell you that it is the ninth."

Beside her, in the blue dawn, a man in a grey bedroom had lifted his head from the pillow. His hair stood up. His face was very bare. He looked at her, and at the telephone, and asked nothing. He only held out his hand, palm up, on the cover, between them, in the cold first light, and waited for her to put hers into it.