mischief on his lips. There was something about him that made you think he was far away in his own mind, that he wasn’t buffeted by the same concerns and worries as everyone else. Halfway through the most serious conversation, he might erupt in rich laughter, throwing you off stride. “Sorry,” he would say. “Something struck me as funny.”
His forehead was almost hidden by a lock of black hair; combed back with his fingers, it always fell down again a moment later. The lines on his face creased when he listened, or pretended to listen. The effect was nothing dramatic, but enough to suggest he was paying attention, concentrating on your words even though he was already four moves ahead of where you imagined you were leading him. At odd moments, seemingly out of sync with anything else, his eyebrows arched and danced, sometimes to show pleasure, sometimes not. Just as he slipped into an ironic observation, one eyebrow would leap straight up. A moment later, his mouth would tighten, a bit, not much. He would puff out his cheeks and look down, as if he regretted his words, or at least their tone. That impressed me probably most of all. He paid attention to delivery; there was never anything unguarded in what he said or, more important, how he said it.
When he felt anxious, which was rare, his right hand held the fingers of the left, a source of comfort, perhaps, or an unconscious effort to hide them from harm, maybe a habit from difficult times. 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 cliché, 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.”
A worse place to hold a conversation, I thought, would have been hard to find. The hut was small, cold, and dark. The only light came from what little remained of a slate gray day seeping through a tiny window on the far wall. The three of us stood bunched together in one corner, squeezed by a square wooden table with one chair. Normally, I would have looked to see what sort of wood the table was. I was too cold to care.
Who would have put furniture in a room so tiny? There was a piece missing from the side of the table, the