Translated by Eleanor Goodman

A family sits together on a double bed: a man, a woman, and four children. The faces of the adults have an odd cast, the pallor of old potatoes. Just the day before, the children had climbed onto their parents’ spring bed and leapt and crashed about. Now, they are quiet and obedient, watching their mother and father with wide dark eyes.

The father speaks. “Everyone’s here now. Let’s start the meeting.”

The four children have just been called in from the cold, and their faces burn in the warmth of the room. The two older children think to themselves: meetings mean bad news. The eldest is a boy, the second eldest a girl.

The family ought to have been sitting in their proper places in the dining room for it to feel like a meeting. But no one wanted to spend time there, not since the summer. The sun no longer shone into the south-facing room, where layers of yellow and green paper had been pasted over the glass windows. Words were written on the paper, reeking of ink, and every so often a passerby would pronounce the phrases aloud with malevolent pleasure. The family’s dining room had become a place no one wanted to be, yet could not be avoided.

---

The father says, “Before, my work unit would’ve sent someone over to take care of the boiler since it’s gotten cold. But now we know that it’s wrong for our family to expect the working classes to do anything for us. It should never have happened. It was a grievous mistake!”

The eldest boy interrupts him, saying, “But it wasn’t our fault. Who could blame us for having that boiler? It’s the fault of the Japanese devils who built the house.”

The father breaks in, “Lower your voice! We live here, so at this point it’s our fault. Starting tomorrow, the four of you will have to learn how to do real labor. Labor is glorious! You’re not going to school anyway. You, as the oldest, will be responsible for the fire. If it goes out, you’ll have to start up the boiler again. You, as the second oldest, will be responsible for adding coal. And you two young ones will be responsible for cleaning out the ashes. From now on, if your parents aren’t here for any reason, your jobs will stay the same. You’re going to have to remember on your own.”

How could our parents not be here? the four children are thinking. What kind of family has only children and no parents?

Reluctantly, their son says, “The man who came last year had the fire going before dawn. What time do I have to get up to start the boiler?”

The mother speaks for the first time. “I’ll get up with you. We’ll do it together.”

The eldest daughter says, “Dad’s never let us into the boiler room before. I don’t even know when to add the coal. I’m afraid I’ll smother the fire.”

The father says, “On this earth, there are only two words that need concern you: trying hard. The Communist Party cares most about us trying hard. If you try hard, you can learn to do anything. Communists don’t fear death, can you fear a challenge?” They all see that he’s quoting, and there’s nothing more to be said.

The sun had set early that evening. A thin layer of frost coats the windows, the pale rose of dried blood. They haven’t started the boiler yet, and the whole family is shivering to their bones.

The father rises. “Let’s get to bed. It’s warmer under the covers. I’ll fill a hot water bottle for you.”

He sticks the spout of the kettle into the mouth of the ceramic bottle. Heavy and rough-hewn, it looks like a white turtle shell and can turn quite hot with the boiling water.

He listens to the smooth gurgle as he pours. But are there any other sounds? He strains to listen. Since the fall of 1966, he has been waiting in the dark for that catastrophic knock on the door, followed by a mob charging inside shouting his name. His knees will buckle, but then he will rise where he is in his house and shout resoundingly: Here! This short, rehearsed scene is like a snippet from an opera; he has run through it in his head again and again. It is now past the first frost; he’s been nervous ever since the large poplars spread their yellow leaves over the streets.

The hot water bottle has warmed the bed where the four children sleep, and now it is tucked inside the father’s jacket. At last his chest feels solid and warm.

The mother lifts the corner of their green flowered quilt. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

The father whispers, “I just heard people walk past our window, three of them at least.”

And the two of them are abruptly silent and motionless.

---

The family has never dealt with the boiler before. Before dawn, the mother, father, and eldest son are already hard at work, lighting the fragrant kindling, sniffing the stink of coal as it catches. Perhaps the different smells mean that wood likes fire, while coal detests it. In an instant, the room fills with smoke, and the three of them have to wipe away tears.

“Smoke is a good sign,” the father says. “It means the coal hasn’t all been burnt up. If there’s smoke, there’s hope.”

At that moment, there is a knock on the door, the sound traveling down the long dark hallway. The father has been loading coal, and his hands go still. He waits for a moment, then tells them, “Don’t move. And don’t panic. I’ll go answer the door.”

The father looks at the faces of his wife and son hanging there in the billowing boiler smoke like porcelain plates. The knocking is unhurried, even hesitant. He thinks, That sounds like the way I would knock. Who else but me would sound like he’s waiting for the axe to fall?

The father looks at the faces of his wife and son hanging there in the billowing boiler smoke like porcelain plates. The knocking is unhurried, even hesitant. He thinks, That sounds like the way I would knock. Who else but me would sound like he’s waiting for the axe to fall?

He forces the frozen door open. A tall man in a cotton overcoat stands on the step, breathing out round white puffs of breath that disperse to reveal a young face.

“Who are you looking for?” the father asks.

The young man folds the corners of his collar that stand up like the ears of a dog. He says, “I took care of your boiler for you last year. Don’t you remember me?”

They are standing in the doorway. The former Japanese owners had been forced to abandon the old house. They are in what used to be called the vestibule.

The young man continues, “Today is the day when the heat is scheduled to come on. Last year, I came to your house to start up the boiler. I have it in my calendar. So here I am, with my pine starter to get the fire going.”

The father feels horribly embarrassed and stutters out, “But, but, but…” His brain fogs over and he doesn’t know what to say. Finally, trying to be tactful, he says, “But, but only the work units can decide how to deal with the boilers. And this year we’ve decided to start being self-reliant. We’ll deal with the boiler ourselves. This year isn’t like last year. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The young man pulls his hands out from the overcoat’s narrow sleeves. He says, “No matter how different it is, the winter is still going to cold, and you’re still going to have to use the boiler. Right?”

The father lowers his voice and asks, “Did my work unit send you?” As he speaks, he feels the hair on his body stand on end like a hedgehog startled into bristling its spines. He thinks: I can’t believe this guy’s showed up at my door.   

The young man forces his hands back up his sleeves. He says, “I came on my own. I decided not to try to test into school,  college, but I got bored at home. I want something to do.”

The father interrupts him. “But you have to ask permission from your assigned community group. If your group doesn’t agree, comrade, you can’t come here no matter what! Do you think we can just ignore them?”

At that moment, his son comes running down the hallway, shouting, “Dad, the fire’s gone out!”

The smell of coal smoke follows the child all the way to the front door.

The young man says, “I understand what you’re saying. I’m not asking for the fifteen-yuan monthly salary from your work unit. I’ll just help you out for a few days. I don’t even have a work unit, I’m at loose ends right now. Once you know how to run the boiler yourselves, I’ll stop coming.”

The eldest son and his mother stand on the step by the vestibule, joined by his three younger sisters who have just risen. They block out the yellowish light from the room behind them, casting the father and the young man into darkness.

The mother says, “We’re going to be late for work, and I have a meeting this morning.”

The father flinches when he hears the word meeting. He looks at his youngest daughter with her a short cotton coat and hair mussed from sleep. She is painfully thin, a dandelion with its head crowned with fluff. The father says, “How about this. You teach my children what to do and they’ll learn it within a week. Then we won’t trouble you anymore.”

The mother and father wheel their bicycles down the road. At the intersection where they go their separate ways, the father tells her, “If I don’t come home tonight, lock the door and stay inside. Whatever you do, don’t coming looking for me.” Then he says, “That guy who came to take care of our boiler, you don’t think he was sent to spy on us, do you?”

The mother says, “It doesn’t seem like it. Last year he stayed with us for months, and when he wasn’t working the boiler, he just lay in bed reading.”

She gives her husband’s bicycle a push, and he feels the force of his bicycle sliding forward as they part. At that moment, the first snow of the winter begins. Dawn hasn’t completely arrived, and the sky is still navy blue. The snow falls an angle toward the city’s southwestern corner, painting white lines on the sky as though with a pointed wolf’s-hair brush. The snow disturbs the father, and the word meeting prowls through his mind like an enormous beast.

The snow will fall for four days.

---

The father returns home through the snow that evening. The front tire of his bicycle squeaks over the snow as though in pain. He is peddling as slowly as he can, wanting to digest the events of the day so he won’t have to think when he gets home. But there is too much to take in, and his head is still racing as he catches sight of his lit house.

He knocks on the door with his gloved hand, and hears the thumps of children’s footsteps in response. At some point, the ones whom he awaits in terror will stand in this very spot and knock on the door with another kind of force. He can tell that the children are waiting inside the doorway for him.

His glasses fog as he steps inside, and he takes them off to warm them in his hand. Nearsighted, he can’t tell how many children are there, but it seems like a lot. He even senses the milky scent of a baby. Just to be able to come home to his family on such a cold winter’s night moves him deeply. When he sits down and removes his cotton-padded shoes and woolen socks, the four children snatch them up, each child taking one thing to the radiator where the shoes and socks each have their assigned spots in winter, unchanging from year to year.

The younger child says, “Daddy, the boiler man made the boiler go all red inside. I saw it!”

He asks, “Where is he now?”

The children answer in unison, “He’s gone.”

---

The first snowy night in 1966 is peaceful, uneventful.

At nightfall, the girl puts on a red woolen hat and stands in the doorway of her house, watching children rolling snowballs on the street. There isn’t much snow, so the snowballs aren’t very big. The street is covered with abandoned cabbage leaves frozen into the shapes of dead transparent fish.

A raspy voice cries, “The snow can’t stand all this!”

The voice belongs to an old woman waiting under a sugar maple across the street. She has wrapped her neck in a felt scarf, and there is a piece of red cloth pinned to her sleeve. No one knows what she is doing there.

The girl thinks, How could snow stand anyway? It isn’t a child, or a soy sauce bottle. She doesn’t understand what the expression means, that the snow will eventually melt to reveal the filthy street. The girl hopes it will snow every day, so that the snow can stand everything, and everywhere will be white. She has been thoroughly taken in by fairytales like Snow White.

The girl has never felt lonely. By now, she’s used to not playing with the other children. Her mother told her that the wild kids in the street are no good, and she is accustomed to watching them play from afar. There is a tramcar blocked from her sight by some low Russian-style buildings and hanging onion bulbs, and it rumbles over another street, spouting green sparks as it turns a corner.

The girl spots a man coming toward her through the trees and snow. He isn’t wearing a hat, and his hair is covered with snowflakes. He carries what seems to be a heavy blue cloth bookbag. She recognizes the boiler man. He’s come back. And why hasn’t she ever noticed him around before?

He shakes the snow from his hair with both hands when he reaches the courtyard fence. His shoulder blades jut out as he skillfully slips a hand through a crack in the wood and jiggers open the bolt with practiced ease. The girl in the courtyard stares at the man, this unobtrusive boiler man, and feels that she is drifting along with the snowflakes.

The sky slowly darkens. People bicycle home from work, and skid one after another as they turn at the intersection. Someone has deliberately poured water on the street, and the water has become a sheet of ice concealed by more snow. Everyone slips and falls trying to go over it. A few laughing boys hide themselves by the corner. The girl feels she isn’t part of that world. She lives in a separate world, a warm and lovely place. Whenever it snows at night the ground turns brighter than the sky, and now it illuminates her heart.

Her mother is cutting potatoes, which was once the job of the nanny. But she left a few months ago, taking her southern accent with her. Now, when the mother gets off work, she rifles blindly through the kitchen cabinets, talking to herself: “Plates, plates, where did the plates get to?”

The girl takes off her red woolen hat and listens to her mother and the boiler man talking. Her mother is saying, “It’s so late, I’m sorry you came all the way over here.”

The boiler man says, “I was just passing by. I thought maybe two kids couldn’t manage the boiler on their own.”

The mother says, “Dinner’s ready, why don’t you join us?”

The girl thinks, Is he really going to stay and eat?

His fingers are like shiny, just-peeled summer radishes, long and thin.

There is a plate of steamed buns made from rationed flour on the table, along with one small portion of potatoes at each family member’s place. The boiler man resists politely for a while, then gently lowers himself down at the table. The girl has just watched him through the kitchen door as he washed his hands in the sink. His fingers are like shiny, just-peeled summer radishes, long and thin. He sits cautiously at the table across from the girl. If she lifts her gaze, she can see his long narrow face and beard that extends up the sides of his cheeks. This is the first time she has noticed any man aside from her father, and it turns out they wear the same kind of beard.

The windows are covered with a lattice of frost, but at night the room is homey and warm. The frostwork is like hundreds of curling peacock feathers. The white peacock of winter blocks their view, and the deep blue night is a night of peacock feathers. But the girl’s father lowers his head and keeps silent, and the only sound at the table is that of eating. The girl is very careful, trying to eat slowly and quietly. She has always liked the green checkmarks of the plastic tablecloth, and she presses her hands into the pattern, thinking herself quite graceful.

Her father lifts his head and asks, “Daughter, have you finished?”

She immediately pulls her hands back and leaves the table silently, though even she isn’t sure if she has finished.

The books that had once covered the floor of her parents’ bedroom have long since been bundled up and put away. She has done some reconnoitering and found that some of the bundles contain children’s books. She gropes about until she can pull one out, then hurries to her own bed.

There is the sound of porcelain bowl against porcelain bowl. She hears her father speaking in the vestibule: “There’s no need to trouble you again. The children can take care of the boiler now. Everyone says poor children can run a household, even if they’re very young. My children need to catch up.”

The boiler man says, “I’ll come back if I have time, either during the day or maybe a bit later. I’m at loose ends anyway.”

Her father says, “It was terrible last winter, that you had to stay in our outdoor bathhouse. That was very unfair to you. There are many reasons the working class should live in nicer conditions. It was an ideological error on our part, we committed many mistakes.”

The boiler man says, “It was nothing. It’s all the same to me, I can live anywhere.”

And with that, the front door shuts heavily. The young man must be wearing his overcoat with its cotton batting as he treads into the snow. The frostwork is too heavy for the girl to watch through the window. Suddenly she is dizzy, as if she’s gulped down a whole glass of wine.

In the hallway the father asks the mother, “What does this guy’s family do?”

She answers, “I just asked him. His father is a teacher.”

“A teacher? I pity the ones who haven’t found a place to hide.”

The girl hears her father approaching and quickly slides the book she’s taken under the covers. Her father’s shadow falls into the room. He’s carrying the hot water bottle, and he cocks his head to listen. She thinks, this year her father has become very strange.

---

On snowy days, the sky remains so dark that morning and afternoon seem indistinguishable. The girl looks at the clock. It is two o’clock, the time when their house is quietest as the other children nap.

She goes into the bathhouse, whose door hangs loosely on its hinges. The whole outbuilding is barely larger than the single bed frame made with thin slats of wood. The boiler man slept there the whole last winter, to avoid having to get up early and hurry all the way to their house. During the summer, the nanny had stored their large steamer in there, and a few years before that, her mother had used the space to keep a few containers of sugar.

The plaster has flaked off the ceiling in a pattern that looks like a witch’s nose pecking at a large dusty peach.

Now, it is the girl who lies there on the wooden slats. Her body is small and light, and the slats barely squeak beneath her. The plaster has flaked off the ceiling in a pattern that looks like a witch’s nose pecking at a large dusty peach. Did the boiler man sleep on his back facing the witch and peach, just like she is now?

From the bed, she notices an overstuffed blue bookbag lying in the corner of the room, the bookbag the young boiler man was carrying the night before. Next to the bag is a hardbound notebook. To her, at that moment, the bookbag and notebook contain all of the world’s deepest secrets. A vertical line of gold characters on the cover of the notebook reads: How Graceful Are the Rivers and Mountains. She is sure that it is a book of poems about snow, and that the golden words can only belong to a great leader, since only great leaders can write in gold. She opens the book, and finds these words:

            Oh, this is the girl I once loved,

My burning heart once burst for her.

What flames are kept within your breath,

Your deep eyes replete with feeling.

Beneath a strand of amber beads,

Your pale bosom runs with red,

And trembles ever so gently.

Last night, under the cloth-covered table

She delicately stretched her small foot to me.

Alone and sad, I watch and wait,

And wonder if the end is near. 

            What on earth is this? The girl is frightened. She’s never seen characters written like that, in neat lines of pure blue ink. And who on earth did the boiler man write these lines for?

The Red Cliffs is the only book of her father’s that she has looked at, and besides that she has never had another chance to see an adult book. Who is this strange boiler man, writing such disturbing words? She closes the gold-lettered notebook with trembling fingers, and runs back to her own bare slat bed, hearing her heartbeat pounding in her ears. She pulls her quilt over herself and curls up in a ball, tugging the collar of her coat over her face. But something still chases her, and she must fend it off. She thinks, How could a good person write such an awful thing? It must have been written by the worst of the worst, someone who should be tied up and paraded through the streets, his neck hung with a placard as he lowers his head and admits his guilt. It must have been such a person. But those limpid blue characters keep flashing before her eyes, those terrible words.

When the mother comes home from work that night, her two younger daughters run to the door, crying, “Sister’s sick! She’s been lying in bed all afternoon sleeping.”

The mother’s hands still smell of snow as she feels her daughter’s forehead. She says, “You don’t have a fever. Do you have a headache?”

With that, the girl broke into sudden tears.

That night as the snow flurries continue, something startles the whole family awake. There is another family living above them in the two-story house, and in the middle of the night, a banging starts up, the sound of things being tossed around. They hear shouting, and the clomping of many sets of heavy boots. The father stands in the doorway to his children’s room and says, “No matter what happens, you mustn’t cry. We haven’t done anything wrong. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

The eldest son says, “Dad, I can’t sleep.”

His father tells him, “Put some cotton balls in your ears and you’ll fall right back asleep.”

It’s a long while before it falls quiet upstairs again. Snowy nights are always especially peaceful, unless something unusual is happening.

The girl crosses the floor on bare feet and feels for the door to her parents’ room. She hesitates, not sure yet what she intends to do.

Her father’s voice floats to her “Who’s that out of bed? Didn’t I tell you to put cotton in your ears?”

The girl stands there in the darkness. Then she says, “Dad, I did something wrong. I read a really bad thing.” 

The two adults immediately get up and turn on the light.

---

“Don’t we have enough trouble already? The guy seems honest enough, but here he is bringing Pushkin and Lermontov into our house! Does he want to get us killed?” The father flips through the gold-lettered book as though he might give it a good whack.

The two adults carry the notebook and the books from the bookbag into the boiler room and shove them into the wooden coal box. The father says, “I just don’t understand why he’d want to hurt us. There was never any ill will between us.”

A few Japanese kana are etched into the small iron door to the boiler. The father opens the door and shoves the hardbound notebook into a corner of the stove. He fans the coals, but no flames or smoke are to be seen. He rolls up book after book and crams them in. He says, “As if we haven’t suffered enough. If he shows up tomorrow, don’t let him in. Just send him on his way.”

The boiler fire is smothered, and the books won’t light. They lie there in rows, implacable. The father gets up to look for matches, feeling through the whole house. The adults are flustered, and that frightens the girl. Standing by the mouth of the boiler, she feels sure she has done a terrible thing. The books belong to the boiler man, and her father has tossed them into the stove to burn without his permission. Was that the right thing to do? The boiler man will be upset.

This time it is their own book that goes into the fire, burning more readily than the others had. The fire is roaring, and the book only holds its shape for a moment or two.

The father finds some matches, strikes one, and shields the flame with both hands. He tells the girl to open the stove door with an iron hook and then finally the flames find the pages and turn them to ash.

The mother hurries into the room with a book in her hand. “Look, we have a copy of this book, too.”

The father says, “I knew I’d bought Pushkin before. Incredible, we’ve got the same book of his lyric poetry, that very same one!”

And this time it is their own book that goes into the fire, burning more readily than the others had. The fire is roaring, and the book only holds its shape for a moment or two.

For a long time the adults pay no attention to their daughter standing beside the boiler. It’s as though she doesn’t exist, as though she’s just a pocket of warm air in the boiler room. She is very small, and that is all she is, but thankfully on this quiet night she has recognized a hidden danger, told the adults, and let them deal with it.

Her mother notices her there at last. “Go back to bed. Why are you still here, and in bare feet? Quick, go to bed.”

“What is Pushed Ken?” she asks.

Her father nudges her into the hallway, saying, “He’s a bad man who wrote some bad things. And the boiler man copied his words into that notebook. He’s a bad man too, as bad as Pushkin.”

The girl goes straight to bed and tucks her freezing feet under the quilt, but then lies there without sleeping. She feels terribly guilty for betraying the boiler man. But if he’s a good person, why would he write those disgusting words? If anyone is a bad person, truly reprehensible, surely that should be Pushed Ken, not the boiler man.

---

The snow shows no signs of stopping. Occasionally a dusting of bright fluttering snowflakes appear in front of one of the few unbroken streetlamps. Suddenly the lamps go out – dawn is approaching. The smoke that spirals from the chimneys refuses to clear the street, it holds low to the earth as the winter northerners awake.

The young boiler man meanders along as the tofu truck rushes by spouting exhaust and people push bicycles past him, their mouths covered in filthy masks and their nostrils puffing away above the cloth. The early-risers shout after the tofu truck: “Wait, sell us some tofu right here!” They surround the truck, each person holding a container to take home their tofu, the aluminum pots and enamel containers clinking and clanking as they get knocked against each other. The young boiler man goes around the truck, reciting a bit of Russian to himself:

Alone and sad, I watch and wait,

And wonder if the end is near. 

This is his personal silent morning prayer. He is thinking of a faded brown photograph stuck between the pages of the notebook. Today it will find its resting place—he must do it today. The Soviet girl in the picture has two surprisingly thick braids that hang down like hemp ropes. Each time he looks at the picture, he thinks, China has its old local gods and goddesses, but she’s a young Soviet goddess, with those thick luxuriant braids. He had gotten the Soviet goddess’s picture in middle school, when in an effort to improve his Russian, he’d studied at a Sino-Soviet collaborative school up north. Each student had been assigned a Soviet girl or boy as a penpal. The boiler man had ended up with the Soviet goddess’s picture and five of her letters. After a while they’d lost contact, but he’d saved her letters and photograph inside his hardbound notebook.

He had accepted a life without dreams, and since his family background prevented him from testing into college, he’d found a temporary job as a boiler worker. He liked the solitary work, breaking up the slightly damp coal and adding it to the fire, then waiting and listening for the air inside the stove to whip the coal into red embers. The iron mouth would start to whistle with the sounds of burning, and then to sit there and read Turgenev or Lermontov or Pushkin was the best feeling in the world. But this winter is different, different from any previous winter.

The boiler man has already caught sight of the family’s little two-story house. Last year, each time he left that house he would stand on the street for a few moments to watch his handiwork as the chimney spouted out thick curls of smoke. This morning, he walks up quickly and knocks on the door.

“Your Pushkin is in the boiler.”

The young boiler man stares into the father’s angry face.

The father repeats his words, “Your Pushkin is in the boiler. We burned it, along with your books, your notebook, everything. I don’t care how cold it gets, we won’t let you in. Get out of here! You’re not welcome anymore.”

The mother stands behind the heavy padded covering over the doorway. She says, “You have to understand why we’re afraid. Please just take your things and go.”

They both speak quickly and softly.

The boiler man’s hands are stiff with cold as he goes to get his empty bookbag. The door to the house shuts before he’s out the gate, and the yellow lamp shimmering behind the mother and father disappears.

The shivering young man hurries off toward another street. He pulls a coin from his pocket with a frozen hand as the tramcar arrives, and he jumps into the empty car as lightly and nimbly as spring casting off the coat of winter. The empty car shakes even more than usual, and as it goes around a corner the passengers slide along the benches. The boiler man slowly lets out his breath, recalling a scene from a movie in which an old man claps a watchman’s clapper at midnight and cries out: “All’s well!”

Everything’s gone. With a single flame, all really is well.

Through the tramcar’s frost-cleared windshield he watches a propaganda van cut across the tracks. The van has four speakers attached to its roof, one facing in each direction, and four red silk flags flying.

As the boiler man gets off the tramcar the snow suddenly stops, while behind him the tramcar continues to inch its way up the hill. The sky seems very clean and quiet now that its work is done.

The flames had brought back tranquility, and he hadn’t even had to do the deed himself. A faint smile comes to his frozen face, his mouth releasing white vapor that travels for some distance. For the past several months, what he’d carried in his bag was more dangerous than a bomb, more hazardous than a moneyed landowner, and he’d had no idea how to deal with it.

The young boiler man lives in a large Soviet-style building in a room with a cement floor and a shared kitchen at the end of the hall. The bathroom is outside. The area was once used to house iron-fitters, and now a lot of rail-workers live there. The neighborhood is kept under careful watch and there are eyes everywhere. He couldn’t very well light a fire and burn something without attracting attention. He might as well just burn himself alive. Tortured by that bookbag, he had finally thought of the family he’d worked for the year before. His Turgenev, his Lermontov, that photo of the Soviet goddess, the Pushkin he’d copied out. The Japanese-made boiler wouldn’t eavesdrop, or wink knowingly, or inform on him, and as soon as the weather had turned cold, he’d thought of it, the safest graveyard possible.

It is just a shame that he wasn’t able to send them off himself. But having seen the fear on the parents’ faces, he knows he is safe now. It doesn’t matter who did it. What is done is done, just as all matches lead to flame. That sweet little iron-filigreed boiler.

The family continues to live as carefully as ever, and even the smallest child knows how to open the boiler stove door to add coal.

At the dinner table one night, the girl asks her mother, “Is the boiler man going to come again?”

The father and mother answer simultaneously, “No, no, no.”

They turn their lives over and over in the heat like peanuts roasting in a wok, watching what turns hard or darkens, and what gets burnt.

This year, adults have to think of themselves first. If the children aren’t starving or freezing to death, that is good enough. They turn their lives over and over in the heat like peanuts roasting in a wok, watching what turns hard or darkens, and what gets burnt.

Finally one night there comes a knocking on the door, though it isn’t particularly violent. A mob bursts in and takes some of their things, even carrying off one of their Japanese-style dressing tables.

Their ringleader says, “Your house is so ‘clean’, you must’ve already gotten rid of stuff.”

The father says, “What was there to get rid of? There was nothing here to begin with.”

Then the group goes into the boiler room. “Look at the Japanese devils’ boiler! You’ve burnt everything up in here! Admit it! What did you burn?”

The father says, “There was nothing to burn. We’ve just been burning cheap coal, since we haven’t gotten a single piece of the good stuff all winter.”

And finally the mob climbs back into the truck and leaves.

After all this happens, the girl keeps thinking she will run into the boiler man somewhere. But he has disappeared completely. She keeps the fantasy that the poem might have been written for her, that he wrote it for her and is now too embarrassed to face her.

And that’s just what happened. It’s like a fairytale: a little girl in 1966 who believes she’s met a prince who writes a poem for her and then inexplicably disappears, perhaps because of someone called Pushed Ken, and does anyone even know who that is?

In 1966, the father of the family is 38 years old. His wife is 36. The children are 14, 12, 10, and 8. The young boiler man is 21 years old.