Episode 130 · A Hand's Breadth

Tesa remained standing between them, breathing hard, her good fist still clenched. She was looking toward the corner of the building. Toward the place where the black car had gone.

— I could have followed him, she said. Before. I could hear him all the way to the canal.

— I know.

— Now I can’t hear him anymore. He’s going and I can’t hear him anymore.

She opened her fist slowly, finger by finger, as she did when the gloves came off after a match. She looked at her hand. Then she bent over the broad man, who sat on the asphalt with his hands against his jaw, and touched his shoulder once, lightly, with her good hand.

— This is what we do where I come from, she told him. After.

The man looked at her without understanding anything.

The officers came running from the main steps, three of them, with the investigator behind, walking, not running. They hauled the two men from the asphalt and took them toward the side door, the one the lawyer had come out through, hands behind their backs. The man in the jacket looked back at Soles all the way until he went inside.

The investigator stopped beside Soles. He looked at the cut in his jacket at the shoulder, then at his hand, which was trembling now, afterward, the way it had not trembled during the fight.

— Did the knife touch you?

— No.

— Did you touch him?

Soles thought of a hand’s breadth.

— No, he said.

The investigator watched him for a while. Then he nodded toward the side door.

— Come on. I’ll clean your hand. Your stitches have come apart again.

They had not. Soles looked at his palm and saw that they had not. The investigator was looking too and saw the same thing, and still he took Soles by the elbow and led him toward the door, and only in the corridor did Soles understand why.

The basement corridor smelled of fresh whitewash and coffee reheated twice. The cell doors were iron, painted green, each with a square window at eye level. The investigator walked to the last one and stopped. He did not open the window. He only stepped aside and looked elsewhere, toward the stairs at the end of the corridor.

Soles went to the door and looked in.

The cell was small and white, with an iron bed fixed to the wall and a narrow window high near the ceiling through which a strip of morning light fell. Varren sat on the bed wearing a gray shirt that was not his, his hands clasped between his knees. Beside the bed, leaning against the wall, stood the wooden folding chair.

Varren stood. He did not look toward the door. He took the chair, unfolded it with a dry wooden snap, and set it in the middle of the cell facing the wall where the light fell. He moved it a little farther left until it sat exactly inside the strip of light. Then he sat on it with one hand on his knee and stayed there, back to the door, face in the sun, motionless, the way he sat in the evening beside the water.

Soles watched him for a long time. Varren did not turn. Perhaps he did not know he was being watched. Perhaps he did.

The investigator coughed softly toward the stairs.

Soles moved away from the door. The two of them walked toward the end of the corridor without speaking, and halfway there Soles stopped and looked back once, at the green door, at the square window.

He understood him. He knew why the chair, why the strip of light, why his back to the door. He knew all of it.

He did not forgive him.

He climbed the stairs toward the light.

Maxim started the boat engine one Sunday at the end of October, on the canal behind his yard, from a wooden boat he did not own and had borrowed from a neighbor who no longer used it.

He sat at the stern with his ankle in a cast stretched along the bench and his crutches lying in the bottom of the boat. Soles sat at the bow. Tesa and Krista sat on the bank on a blanket, the thermos between them, watching the two men the way you watch two children who want to show you something they built themselves.

— If it doesn’t start, Tesa said, I’m leaving.

— It’ll start, Soles said.

— You said the same thing about the hatch.

— The hatch held.

— On the hinge side.

Maxim pulled the cord. The engine coughed, choked, fell silent. Maxim looked at Soles. Soles looked at the engine. He did not bend down to listen. He could no longer hear the bubbles. The man who heard them had withdrawn from the garden three weeks ago, and now Soles had to remember what he had learned from him the way you remember a foreign language you have not spoken in a long time.

— The choke, he said. It’s closed too far.

Maxim opened the choke halfway and pulled again.

The engine started. It ran rough, with a cloud of blue smoke and the sound of a broken sewing machine, but it started and kept running, and the boat moved away from the bank, slowly, across the green canal water. Tesa whistled. Krista clapped twice, the thermos between her knees.

Maxim kept one hand on the control and looked straight ahead down the canal with the face he wore when he looked at the road. He was not smiling. Soles knew him well enough now to know he was not smiling precisely because he wanted to.

— Nothing wrong with it now, Soles said.

— Shut up, Maxim said.

They went to the first bridge and back beneath the willows along the bank, the blue smoke trailing behind them over the water. When they came back, Maxim stopped the engine and remained like that for a while in the silence that followed, the boat rocking gently beside the bank.

— Dorin said he wants another delivery every week, he said. Fridays.

— And?

— I told him yes.

— And?

Maxim looked at him.

— And I wrote it in the notebook. On the front page.

He did not say that on the same page, beneath Friday, he had written Soles in smaller letters, like a client. Soles knew. He had seen the notebook open on the truck seat and had not looked any longer. Some things need to be seen once. That is enough.