The Board of Seol Education Holdings adopted its resolution on the twentieth of January, in the same room, at the same walnut table, and it took eleven minutes.

Hajin was there, in the third chair on the left. He had been asked to attend as a courtesy. He sat with his hands open on the wood and listened to a document being read that he had had a share in drafting, in a plain grey voice, by a man who did not look up. It said that the Seol Scholarship Fund would be administered by an independent Council, answerable to the Board only through its annual report. It said that the office of the Steward would be restored to its original terms, and its holder protected against removal except by a majority of two thirds. It said that the discretionary reserve would be placed under the review of a person of standing from outside the family. And it said that the Resolution of the fourth of December, concerning a programme to be known as the Merit Pool, was rescinded in its entirety, and that no part of it should be revived.

It passed without a division. The chair at the head of the table, with the brass nameplate and the hot cup of tea, was occupied by an old woman who had refused, on the advice of three physicians, to be absent.

At the foot of the table, in the Steward's chair, sat a woman in a charcoal suit with her hands folded and her vote still suspended until March. She did not look at him. She did not need to. He could feel the sleeve of her coat at the edge of his own, a hand's breadth away, and when the Chairman asked whether any director had a remark, and none had, she lifted her right hand from the blotter, quite openly, in front of the whole Board, and laid it over his.

Nobody said anything.

Director Jang, at the far end, who had once said *hawkers* to a chandelier, studied the ceiling with the fixed attention of a man who has found something remarkable in the plaster.

The first week of February came in clear and hard and bright, with a high pale sky and a wind that had no snow in it.

They went up the hill on a Tuesday, in two cars. Mr. Kwak drove the first, with Ahreum and Narae in the back and a great deal of lofty discretion in the set of his shoulders. Hajin and Taewon followed in the second, because Taewon had said that he would not be left to be the third person in a car with two women who were both in the habit of saying nothing, and had added that he intended to take notes.

The gate pillars stood where they had stood for a century. The zelkova was bare against the sky, every black twig drawn with a hard fine line, and under it the blue railing glittered with a thin hoar. Principal Moon was waiting on the steps in an overcoat and a muffler, and this time he came down to meet them. He did not carry an umbrella, and he did not talk. He bowed to each of them in turn, to the depth that he would have given to a visiting minister, and when he straightened his thin hair was lifting in the wind and his eyes were wet.

"I have had them clear it," he said. "The east court. I thought that it would be better if there were no one about."

They walked.

It was a plain thing. There was no ceremony in it. Five people in winter coats going along the flank of a school at ten in the morning, past the glass of the Scholarship Wing, where nineteen small lamps burned in a long row in the daylight, and a girl at the end desk looked up from a notebook and saw them and half rose and was waved down. Past the empty court. Past the kiosk with its shutter drawn. Narae walked in front with her head tilted a fraction to the left, counting. Moon went at her shoulder, a little behind, as one goes at the shoulder of someone whom one is not certain one has the right to accompany.

"I should like to tell you what the Board has decided," said Moon, "and what I have done. I have done it badly. It has been a long time since I decided anything."

"Go on," said Narae.

"The Scholarship Wing is not to be altered. It is to stay exactly as it is. The nineteen desks. The mural." He swallowed. "There is to be an additional room. The Council has voted the funds. I thought that it should be quiet, and that it should have a door that does not lock, and that it should be somewhere that a person might go if the common room were too loud, or if she did not wish to be seen."

"A reading room," said Taewon.

"Yes." The Principal's voice cracked. "I could not think where. I walked round the grounds for a week. I could think of nothing that was not a classroom."

He stopped.

They had come round the corner of the low flat-roofed block, to the back, where the ground fell away toward a stretch of dead grass and a row of dustbins. There was a squat grey-green door in a concrete wall. It was fastened with a plain iron hook through an eye. And Hajin, who had been looking at the frosted ground a pace ahead of him and thinking of nothing at all, felt the whole length of his body go still.

"No," he said.

He said it quite gently. It was not a protest. It was the sound of a man who has recognised a place, and is saying so.

"I did not ask this of you," said Hajin.

"No," said Moon, very low. "You did not. Nobody did. I thought of it on the second of January, in the dark, when I was putting the negatives in their box. I thought that it was the only room in this school that anybody had ever really needed." He looked at his hands. "If you tell me that I am wrong, I shall put it somewhere else. I should not be hurt. I am very much afraid that I have been wrong about most things, and I have only lately noticed."

Hajin did not answer.

He stood in the thin bright wind and looked at the door. It was only a door. The hook was iron and a little rusted, and the green paint had weathered to the colour of moss. He thought of a boy with a foil parcel and his arms across his stomach. He thought of a bucket under a high window, and a girl on it, with a pencil in her left hand, who had never once, in the whole of her life, come in.

"May I ask Dr. Ko," he said, "whether she would open it with me?"

She did not answer at once.

Narae stood with her hands in the pockets of her grey coat and her head a little on one side. She looked at the door for a long moment, and then, in a way that he had not expected, at him. It was the dark level look that she had given a roomful of directors, and it went over his face from the brow to the mouth, and it was not unkind.

"I have never been in it," she said.

"No."

"I knew of it. Everybody did. It was where one went." Her mouth moved, very slightly. "I was a girl who did not go anywhere. I sat in a classroom, and ate my lunch from a paper bag at my desk, and kept my chair in square. I told myself that it was efficiency." She drew one hand out of her pocket. "I have thought of that desk for twelve years. I did not think of this room at all. I find that I should like to see it."

"Then I shall not go in first," said Hajin.

She made a small dry sound. "You are a great deal less irritating than you were in October."

"I have been told that it is the effect of a ledger."

She put her hand on the iron hook. He put his, beside it, not touching, on the cold wall. And Ahreum, who had stopped a pace behind them with her coat buttoned to the chin and her glasses misting in the wind, said nothing, and did not step forward, and he understood that she had decided to stand where she had stood once before, outside the threshold, a pace back, with her hands in her pockets. It was the kindest thing that anyone had ever done for him in front of a door.

They lifted the hook together. It came out of its eye with a small dry scrape.

It was a room.

They stood on the threshold and looked at it. It was long and narrow, and cold, and it smelled of rubber and chalk and old dust. The tower of faded blue mats still leaned against the left-hand wall. The rack of deflated balls stood at the back. The net had gone. And high in the end wall, small and square and netted with wire, was a single window, through which the thin February sun came down in a clean pale square and lay across the boards.

By the door, upended, stood a plastic milk crate. It was red.

Narae went in first. She went quite slowly, ducking a little under the low lintel, with her hands in her pockets, and stopped in the middle of the floor. She did not touch anything. She turned once, with her face lifted, and he saw her eyes go round it: the mats, the window, the pale square of light, the crate. She stood with her head tilted, as a person stands who is listening to a sound at a great distance.

"It is smaller than I thought," she said.

"Yes," said Hajin.

"It is very ordinary."

"It was a very ordinary place," said Hajin, "where a very ordinary boy sat for three months."

She turned her head. She looked at him across the width of the boards, for rather a long time, with the square of light between them, and then she nodded, once, like a person receiving a measurement.

"Then I think that it should stay as it is," said Narae. "I should like the mats. I should like the window. I should like a lamp, and two chairs, and a shelf, and a rug on the floor, and I should like nothing else." She looked at the crate. "I should like that left by the door, in the same place. It does not need a name. I do not want a plaque. I do not want it to be called anything at all."

"Dr. Ko" said Moon, from the threshold.

"The Council has asked me to serve as independent adviser to the Fund," said Narae. "I have said that I shall, on conditions. It was the first." She turned. "Principal. It is a room where a person goes who does not wish to be seen. I should like it to remain a room where nobody is told why."

"It shall be so," said Moon, and put his hand over his eyes.

Hajin walked into the room.

He did it slowly, in the thin cold light, with his hands at his sides. He crossed the boards to the middle of the floor, to the place where a square of sun lay, and stood in it. It was warm. It was only a patch of light. It lay on his shoes and on the hem of his coat, and when he lifted his face he could see the wire in the glass, a fine dark diamond lattice, and beyond it a piece of pale sky.

He thought of a girl on a bucket, looking in.

He did not cross his arms. He had noticed it, in the lobby of the hospital, and the corridor, and at his own kitchen counter, a little more each week, that the old fold had begun to slacken. He stood in the middle of the store-room in the sun, with his hands hanging open at his sides, and looked at a window, and found that he was not afraid of it. He was only very tired, and a good deal lighter, as a man is who has set down a thing at a place that he had always supposed was the end of the road, and has found that it is simply a room, with a door, and a lamp to be bought.

A letter came on the fifteenth.

It was delivered to the Maru reception desk by hand, in a plain white envelope, with no return address, and Dahye Lee brought it up herself, in her grey cardigan, with the expression of a young woman who has been told by three different people to be very careful. He opened it standing, at the window, with the river going by below.

It was one page, in a clumsy hand, written with a ballpoint pen that had skipped. It had been posted from Frankfurt.

*Hajin-ssi. I do not know whether I am entitled to use the name. I have been trying to write this for three weeks and have started eleven times. I am Do Kangmin. I work now for my father's firm in Germany, in a department that I will not describe. I saw the forum on New Year's Day. I did not sleep for two nights.*

*I do not remember being cruel. That is the worst thing that I can tell you. I remember being bored. I remember that it was Monday, and that someone had said that the scholarship boy would be an easy thing to do, and that I said yes because it was a Monday. I remember the form in my bag, which a girl handed me in the corridor the Friday before, with your name already typed. I did not ask who had typed it. I did not read it. I held it up.*

*I am sorry. I do not ask you to answer. I think that it would be a bad idea for me to ask for anything. I only wished it to have been said, by me, once, on a piece of paper, so that it is not a thing that was only ever said about me.*

*Do Kangmin.*

He read it twice.

He did not feel what he had always supposed that he would. He had imagined this letter in the dark of a hundred nights, and in the imagining it had always arrived with a flourish, written in a trembling hand on heavy paper, begging for mercy, and he had refused it with a courtesy so exact that it flayed. This was not that. It was a page of a ballpoint pen from a man of twenty-seven who did not remember being cruel, because it had not been important enough to remember. He thought that it was the most terrible thing that he had ever been told about the cafeteria. He thought that he should not have been able to bear it ten years ago, and that he could bear it now, and that it was not forgiveness, and it was not its opposite.

He folded it in three.

He did not answer it. He did not throw it away. He took the three pieces of paper that were already in the inside pocket of his coat, an old brown one, a creased white one, and a soft one from Mokpo, and he laid the fourth beside them, and buttoned the coat. It was a kind of ledger, he thought. He should have to find a column for it.

Taewon came in at six with a paper bag and a face of elaborate neutrality, and sat down on the arm of the unused couch.

"The Commission's chair telephoned the office at four," he said. "He asked for you. I told him you were in a meeting. I was not lying. You were in a meeting with a chair."

"I know. Ms. Park told me."

"Did she tell you what he said?"

"She said that it was good." Hajin took the bag. It had an egg sandwich in it. "She would not tell me more. She said that it was in the nature of a courtesy, and that I should be sent a letter."

"Chair Hwang is a man who does not telephone." Taewon rubbed the back of his neck. "I eavesdropped. I am not ashamed. He said that the Commission's preliminary view of the pilot would be revised in March, in a sense favourable to both parties. He said that it was *exceedingly rare* to see a respondent in an inquiry plead his own fault in public, and that it had been noted. He said that the Commission had been moved to reflect that the object of data protection was, after all, the children." He grinned, crookedly. "He used the word *moved*. I think that he had to lie down afterwards."

Hajin laughed. It came out of him easily. It did not crack in the middle.

"Eat that," said Taewon. "Then I have a thing to say, and I am going to say it before you tell me not to."

"Go on."

"You have not told her."

Hajin did not move. He sat on the edge of his desk with half an egg sandwich in his hand and the lamp making a small gold island on the blotter, and the three pens lying in a row at his elbow, longest to shortest, as they had lain every day for ten years.

"I did not say what," said Taewon.

"No."

"You are going to tell me that you do not know what I mean."

"I am not." He put down the sandwich. "I know what you mean."

He did. It had been a fact of his life since a Tuesday morning at half past six, when a woman's sixth page had said that she did not want to say that she loved him in the same breath as asking for his vote. He had read it aloud to a kitchen. He had sat on a bench in a corridor and held it between two hands. He had said *Ahreum* a thousand times, in a number of voices, and *I am here*, and *yes*, and *noted*. He had written an item in a ledger. And he had never, in so many words, in the plain English of a man who had learned it in a store-room, said the thing in return.

"She said it first," said Hajin. "In a letter. I thought that it was enough."

"It is not enough," said Taewon, very kindly. "You of all people know that. You have said it to me in a bus." He stood. "I am not going to tell you when. I am only going to say that you are a man who made a rule that you would not ask her for anything. I think that you made it very well. I think that it has begun to be a hiding place."

Hajin put his hand over his eyes.

"I shall tell her," he said.

"Good," said Taewon. "I have a bet with Min. I should like to win it."

"What is the stake?"

"Dinner," said Taewon. "At the Director's, in her kitchen, with the sesame seed. I am told that it is a very small black eye."

The telephone lit on the blotter at ten to ten, after Taewon had gone.

He had been looking at the window. The river lay below in its long black ribbon, strung with the lamps of its bridges. Somewhere on the far bank, behind a rank of towers, a hill stood against the sky, and he found that he could look at it. He did not know when that had begun. He had stood at the glass for a quarter of an hour with his hands in his pockets, and the thing he was looking at was a dark line against a dark sky, with a few lit windows on its crest, and it was only a hill.

He took up the telephone.

It was not a long message. It had come from a number that he knew by heart, and it was written in the plain small upright style of a woman who had put a great deal of thought into four words and had decided to send them without any ornament at all.

*Mrs. Bu's house. Tomorrow?*

He stood quite still.

It was a question. It had a mark at the end of it, and it had not been arranged. It asked for nothing but that he say yes or no. He read it twice. He thought of a tin roof, and a stove, and a paper door that did not lock. He thought of a small gold ring with a seam round its bevel, and of a woman on the edge of a mattress, saying, in a level voice, *After the ninth.*

It was the seventeenth of February. It was a good deal after the ninth.

He did not delay. He did not draft it three times and tear it up. He put his thumb to the glass, and typed with a hand that was perfectly steady, in the hard upright style that she had once told him was easier to find:

*Yes. What shall I bring?*

The answer came before he had set the telephone down. It was one word, and it appeared on the small bright screen under the lamp, as plain as a stone.

*Nothing.*