Episode 184 · Six Tables

It was Tesa who threw them out.

Lazar’s car had been gone ten minutes. The guard’s cup was still on the table. Nobody mentioned the man in gray. Krista was wiping a clean counter, and Soles stood at the window with his arms folded, watching the empty curb.

Tesa looked at the two of them for a while from her chair. Then she put her mug down.

— When did you last eat something that wasn’t bread?

— Yesterday, Soles said.

— That was bread.

— It was bread with things on it.

— You’re both going out, Tesa said. To a place with plates. Where somebody else washes them. And you’re going to sit there for two hours and not talk about any of this.

Krista turned around with the cloth still in her hand.

— Tesa.

— I’m serious. Look at him. He’s standing at that window like it owes him money. And you’ve cleaned that counter three times. I counted, because apparently that’s what we do in this house now.

Maxim, from the armchair, lifted the cushion off his face.

— I’ll stay with the dog, he said. The dog and I have an understanding.

— What understanding?

— He lets me use him as a footstool, and I don’t tell anyone how he got the sausage last week.

Lucky, under his foot, did not deny it.

Ten minutes later Soles was trying to put on a clean shirt. He had fastened the buttons one hole out and only noticed when the collar would not lie flat. He was starting again when Krista came to the door.

She did not say anything. She came and did the buttons.

She did them from the bottom up, without hurrying. He could smell the soap in her hair. He studied the ceiling, and his heart did something it had not done with the thread pushing at him.

Last night I cut something out of the air with a knife. Tonight I can’t stand still while someone does up a shirt.

— You’re holding your breath, she said, at the third button.

— It’s the collar.

— I haven’t done the collar yet.

She did the last one at his collar and smoothed it flat with two fingers, and stepped back, and looked at him with her head on one side as if he were an exhibit she had just finished labeling and was not yet sure about.

— You’ll do, she said.

The place was at the end of the tram line, by the river, where the old warehouses had been turned into things with lamps in the windows. It had six tables and a stove and a waiter who was clearly also the cook’s son, because every time he went through the kitchen door someone inside told him to stand up straight. It was the kind of place you went to because it was warm and nobody you knew would be there. There were two other couples and an old man reading a newspaper, folded very small, as though it were a secret.

They took the table by the stove. Soles took the seat against the wall. Krista sat across from him, and then, after a moment, moved her chair a little to the side, so that they were not quite facing each other, and he did not know why that made it easier, but it did.

The waiter brought the menu. It was one page long, handwritten, and someone had spilled something on the corner of it a long time ago.

Soles read it twice. He had counted what was in his wallet before leaving the house. The lamb would leave very little room for losing their argument about dessert. The arithmetic said soup.

— Soup, he said to the waiter.

— And?

— And soup.

The waiter glanced at the prices and was a good enough waiter not to say anything. Krista ordered the lamb. Then she looked at Soles across the table and changed her mind.

— Actually, she said. The soup.

— You don’t have to.

— I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it so you don’t sit there watching me cut meat like a dog under a table.

— I wouldn’t do that.

— You did it to Maxim’s sandwich yesterday.

He had. He had not known anyone had seen.

The soup came. It was good, thick, with bread on the side, and he looked at the bread and Krista looked at the bread and both of them, at the same time, started to laugh. Not loudly. The old man lowered his newspaper an inch and raised it again.

— Tesa will want to know if it counts, Krista said.

— It’s bread with soup on it. That’s different.

They ate. For a while that was enough. The stove ticked and the waiter went in and out and was told to stand up straight, and it was warm, and nobody outside these six tables knew where they were.

On the tram Krista had made a rule: the first one to mention any of it paid for the other’s dessert. Soles had said he wasn’t sure he could afford dessert. That, she said, was the idea.

So they talked about other things, and he found out that he did not know how to.

He had known her for months. He had stood next to her in a temple with the floor singing under their feet. He had trusted her with his back and with the blade and with the night when he could not keep his hand open. He knew how she breathed when she was frightened and how she sounded when she lied. And he sat across a table from her with a spoon in his hand, and realized that he did not know what she did all day when nothing was trying to kill them.

So he asked.

— Tell me about the exhibition.

She looked up from her soup, quickly, as if she had heard a sound in another room.

— Why?

— Because I’ve seen it with the names on, and I don’t know how they get there. You go there every day. You come back with ink on your fingers. I don’t know what you’re doing.

She put her spoon down.

— Are you reading me?

It was a real question. She had seen him go quiet and take the guard apart without touching him, then do it to Lazar. She knew what she was asking.

— No, he said. I’m asking.

He had made himself a rule without saying it aloud. Not the people at his own table. Not the ones he came home to. He left the silence for her answer.

— It’s names, she said, after a moment.

And then she told him. Slowly at first, then faster, the way water comes when you open a valve that has been shut a long time. The garden had photographs. Hundreds of them, going back more than a century, men with spades in front of the greenhouses, women at the potting benches, boys holding watering cans as big as they were. Under every one, on the old labels, the same single word. Staff.

The exhibition had reopened in the winter with forty of them named. There were more than three hundred to go.

She found them in pay books and parish registers and letters, in a cellar that had flooded twice, drying the pages out on racks with a fan in a room nobody else wanted. One of them was the man who had planted the lime trees on the main avenue, and the brass plaque under his trees had spelled his name wrong for ninety years.

— I’m putting them back, she said. Under the pictures. Where people walk. So that when they stop at the lime trees, they read his name the right way around.

She stopped. She looked faintly embarrassed, as if she had shown him something she usually kept in a drawer.

— It’s not very exciting.