Episodul 185 · On the Account

— How did you find out it was spelled wrong?

She stared at him.

— What?

— The lime tree man. How did you know the plaque was wrong?

So she told him that too. A baptism record, and a letter from his wife, and a seed order with his signature on it, three different hands spelling the name the same way, against one brass plate. She drew the letters on the tablecloth with her finger to show him where the plate had gone wrong. He watched her finger and not the letters. He did not hear all of it. He heard enough.

She was still talking when the waiter came for the bowls. She stopped, noticed they were empty, and turned back to Soles. He waited for her to go on.

— Nobody asks that, she said quietly. How I found it. They ask what it’s for.

— I know what it’s for.

— Do you?

— It’s so he gets his name back.

The waiter, who had been standing there with the bowls for some time, cleared his throat.

— Dessert?

Soles waited for Krista to order. She waited just long enough to make him regret it.

— He’ll have the cake, Krista said. He’ll pay for mine.

— I didn’t say anything.

— You thought about the man in the gray coat just now. It was all over your face. That counts.

It had not been. He had been thinking about the lime trees. He paid for the cake anyway.

It had started to snow while they were inside, the soft heavy kind that comes straight down when there is no wind, and the street along the river had gone quiet under it.

They walked back toward the tram stop because neither of them suggested taking a taxi. Krista had his sleeve, and she had taken hold of it at the restaurant door without asking and not let go. They walked slowly. He had stopped looking for the next tram.

At the corner a man was salting the steps of a closed shop, one scoop at a time, as if the snow might notice and stop. Krista watched him all the way past, and Soles watched her watching. For the length of a street, that was the whole of what either of them had to do.

— You didn’t eat the cake, she said.

— I paid for the cake. That was the deal.

— The deal was you eat the cake.

— Then you misread the contract.

— I don’t misread contracts. I read them very carefully and then other people sign them.

He laughed, and she kept hold of his sleeve.

The lamps along the embankment had rings of snow around them. The river was black and moving under the snow, steaming a little at the edges where the warehouses let their warm water out into it, and he looked at it and thought, without wanting to, of another river three hundred kilometers away doing the same thing for no reason at all. Then Krista’s hand tightened on his sleeve, and he stopped thinking about it.

She had stopped walking. They were under one of the lamps. The snow was coming down through the light all around them, slow and close, and catching in her hair and not melting.

— Soles.

— What?

— You thought about it again.

— I did.

— You owe me another cake.

— I’ll put it on the account.

She did not laugh. She was looking at him, under the lamp, with her head a little on one side, the way she had looked at him in the bedroom doorway with her fingers on his collar. As if he were something she had been working on for a long time, a page out of a flooded cellar, and she had just got the last of the letters dry and could finally read what it said.

He left his hand at his side and let her take the time she wanted. For once he could wait without trying to work out what another person would do next.

She kissed him.

It was not graceful. He put his arms around her. She had to reach up and he had to bend, and somewhere in the middle of it their noses argued, and she laughed against his mouth, and he laughed back, and then neither of them was laughing. The snow came down. A tram went past along the far side of the embankment, lit and empty, ringing its bell at nobody.

When she stepped back she kept hold of his coat, two fingers in the front of it, as if he might go somewhere.

— That’s been on the account a long time, she said.

— I know.

— You could have said something.

— I was busy getting shot at.

— That’s not an excuse. Maxim gets shot at and he still finds time to complain about everything.

He bent and kissed her again, mostly so she would stop being right, and it went better the second time, and the tram came back the other way and rang its bell at them, and this time it was not ringing at nobody.

The house was dark when they got back except for the lamp in the living room. Maxim was asleep in the armchair with his foot on Lucky, who was asleep too, and who opened one eye at them and closed it again with the air of a dog who has been promised something and will collect in the morning. There was a note on the kitchen table in Tesa’s square, furious handwriting.

Took the tram home. Maxim’s asleep. Don’t wake him, he snores like a truck and he’s proud of it. Wash the mugs. — T.

Krista read it over his shoulder and put it face down.

— She’s lined them up by the sink, she said. So we’ll know if we skip one.

Mina lifted her head from the sofa, saw who it was, and thumped her tail twice against the cushion without getting up.

He washed the mugs. She dried them. Neither of them said much. When they were done she went down the hall toward the bedroom, and he stood in the kitchen with the towel, the way he had stood in this kitchen the night they had first come back from the prison field, listening to the house. The clock. The refrigerator. Maxim snoring like a truck, proudly.

That night, a long time ago now, she had gone to bed before him and not asked him to come.

She stopped in the bedroom doorway and looked back down the hall at him.

— Come on, she said.

He went.