Episode 207 · Twelve Beds and a Bottle

By the end of his first week in Vatra, Varren had filled seven of the twelve beds in the old seamen’s hostel, on the east bank below the bridge.

He had not meant to. That was nearly true. The clerk at the customs house, the one whose chair no longer let him down, had mentioned that the hostel had been empty for two winters and that its key hung behind his desk. Varren had not asked for the key. The clerk had given it to him, the way people gave him things.

Then the people had come.

Not many. A retired tram driver whose hands had been warm since the river stopped freezing, so warm that his wife would no longer hold them. A woman from behind the bakery who heard faint singing in her kitchen. A boy of seventeen who counted the ice floes from the bridge every morning and could not stop. They had heard there was a man by the river who did not laugh at things like that.

Varren knew what each was missing before they told him.

The tram driver was missing someone to shake his hand. Varren shook it every morning, a moment longer than a handshake needed. The woman was missing someone to sit in her kitchen and say yes, I hear something too, which was not even a lie. The boy was missing a reason to count. Varren put him in charge of the stove: coal, minutes, the thermometer by the door, all in a notebook. He had not missed a morning since.

They were better. They slept. They ate the bread Halloran sent across and refused to be paid for. The voices in Varren’s garden were quiet in the hostel, almost as quiet as on the pontoon, and he moved among the beds in the evening with the feeling he had looked for all his life: of being exactly where he was needed.

Zora came on the sixth evening with soup she said Halloran had made, though it had too much pepper to be Halloran’s.

She watched from the doorway for a long time. She watched him put a cup down beside the singing woman without asking, tea without milk, exactly how she took it.

— She didn’t tell you that, Zora said later, at the stove, quietly. How she takes her tea.

— No.

— You just knew.

— I notice things.

— You notice what people haven’t got, she said. And then you’re the one who’s got it.

She said it the way she read a figure off the measuring board, carefully, aloud, so that she would remember it. Then she ladled the soup and told the boy a joke about ducks that made him drop the coal scuttle.

Varren laughed too. But the thing she had said stayed in the room with them, like a draft under a door.

There was another draft he did not mention to her. The dark van from the hotel had driven past the hostel twice that week, slowly, the way a man drives past a house he is thinking of buying. Both times a man in a good coat had looked up at the windows, and Varren had not stepped back.

He found the eighth one on the pontoon steps at one in the morning.

He had gone down because he could not sleep, and the river was the only place where the voices left him alone. A young man was already there, halfway down the concrete steps, back very straight, a bottle between his boots, not leaning on anything. He did not turn around.

— If you’re the man with the chair, he said, I’m not interested. I’ve got my own step.

— I’m not here for you.

— Everybody’s here for somebody. That’s the whole problem with people.

Varren came down three steps and sat, not too close.

— There’s a rail, he said. It’s warmer than it looks.

— I don’t lean on things, the young man said. Walls especially. You never know who’s on the other side.

He said it like a joke, and did not laugh. He had a face that had been handsome before he started drinking and might be again if he stopped.

— You were here the night it stopped freezing, Varren said.

It was not much of a guess. Everyone in Vatra knew the witness had been drunk, and had told the whole bakery he had heard the river sigh, and that nobody had believed him.

— I was here every night, the young man said. That night the river did something interesting for once. Then I made the mistake of mentioning it.

— Zora believed you.

— Zora believes thermometers. It’s not the same as believing people. It’s better, actually.

He drank, without hurry.

— And since then, Varren said, you’ve been hearing something.

The young man went still. Not the stillness of surprise. The stillness of a man who has been hit in a place he thought was covered.

— There’s a man in my head, he said at last, very evenly, who’s trying to remember a name. He’s been trying for weeks. He’s very polite about it. He never gets there. I drink until he stops trying. It’s the only arrangement we’ve managed.

Varren knew what this one was missing: a night when the man in his head did not try. He could give him that. A warm room, a boy who counted coal, a hand on his shoulder in the evening, and in a month this young man would not be able to imagine sleeping anywhere else.

He opened his mouth to offer it.

— Don’t, the young man said.

Varren closed his mouth.

— I can see you doing it, the young man said. You’ve got a look. Like a man measuring a door for a curtain. I don’t need you. I’ve got a bottle. It’s cheaper and it doesn’t watch me sleep.

Then he looked at the black water for a long moment, and something in his face gave a little.

— I’ll take the bed, he said. If there is one. Not the help. Just the bed.

— There’s a bed. By the window. Away from the wall.

The young man looked at him properly for the first time, a short, suspicious look, as if Varren had guessed something he had not been told.

— Fine, he said. But I’m not singing around the stove. I’ve heard about the stove.

He stood, and the bottle tipped over, and neither of them reached for it.

At the top of the steps, a man was waiting.

Varren had not heard him come. Good wool, the coat the men in the van wore, and a way of standing: his weight back on his rear heel, as if the ground in front of him had not been decided yet.

— You’re the one from the bakery, the man said to Noct’s back. The river. Someone would like to hear about it properly.

— Someone can read the papers.

— Tonight. It won’t take long.

He came down two steps and took the young man’s arm.

Noct turned into the grip instead of away from it. His free hand came up under the man’s elbow, short and flat, and the man went sideways into the rail with a grunt. It was not a drunk’s movement. It was not a young man’s either. It was economical, almost bored, the movement of someone who had done it in snow and in mud, and Noct looked down at his own hands afterward as though they had told a joke without him.

The man recovered faster than he should have. He came off the rail low, took Noct around the body and drove him back, one step, two, until Noct’s shoulders hit the wall beside the stair.

Noct made a sound Varren would remember. Not pain. Terror. The wall at his back, the whole cold weight of it, and his hands flat against it as if it might open.

Varren went down between them.

He did not take the man’s wrist, though he could have closed it to splinters. He did not lift him, though he could have put him in the river. He put himself where the next blow was going and let it land.

It took him in the mouth. He tasted blood. He did not step back, and he did not step forward. He stood on the stair with his hands open at his sides and watched the man’s weight settle onto that back heel again.

He came to collect a drunk. Not to fight two men on a stair under a bridge.

Up on the bridge a car went over, and its lights swept the steps.

The man looked at the blood on Varren’s lip, at Noct against the wall, and decided. He straightened his good coat.

— Daylight, he said to Noct, and went up without hurrying.

Noct came off the wall slowly, one hand still behind him on the concrete, as if checking it would hold.

— Away from the wall, Varren said. I told you.

— Noct, the young man said, holding out his hand without looking. Since you’re going to ask.

Varren took it.

And the patient one, the voice that had stood beside its plant in his garden since he could remember, that had stood forward in a yard with no windows and in the back of a bakery and on a frozen river, went entirely still. Not quiet. Still, the way a man goes still when he hears footsteps on a stair he has not climbed in years.

Noct laughed at something, short and dry, at nothing Varren had said, at the river perhaps, or at himself.

Varren had never seen him before in his life, and he would have known that laugh anywhere.