Episode 208 · Come Back as Him

At nine o’clock on Friday, the gate with no name on it opened, and the guard walked out.

He walked out in his own coat, buttoned to the neck, with his shoelaces back in his shoes and a brown envelope held against his chest in both hands, the way a man carries something he has been told is important and does not yet believe. He stopped on the sidewalk outside the gate. He looked left, toward the cement works, and right, toward the last tram stop. He looked as if he had been let out of a building into a country he did not know.

Soles had been inside since seven.

He had signed the papers in the office with two chairs on the wrong side of the desk. He had read every one of them, slowly, the way he read a contract for a job he did not want to lose, and the man in gray had let him, with every appearance of patience. Three months, renewable. Wherever directed. Alone. No disclosure. A phone that would ring when it rang. In exchange: one man released, with a pension and a letter stating that he had never been there, and one house removed from a list.

He had asked what happened to the man who had walked in at six the day before, soaking wet, in a sweater that was not his.

— He’ll be useful again, the man in gray had said. He’s always been very useful.

That was all. Soles had signed.

Now he stood just inside the gate with his hand in his pocket and watched the guard on the sidewalk, and did not go out. It was not his moment. It belonged to someone else.

The sister came across the road at a run.

She did not look for traffic. A car braked and sounded its horn and she did not hear it. She reached the guard and stopped a meter from him, as if she were afraid he would break, and then she did not stop, and she had her arms around his neck and the brown envelope crushed between them, and the guard stood with his arms at his sides for a long moment, and then lifted them, slowly, and held on.

Behind her, Maxim’s truck was parked half on the sidewalk with its engine running. Tesa was standing beside it with her hands at her sides. Maxim was in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield at nothing at all, the way he looked when he did not trust his own face.

The guard let go of his sister and looked past her, at the truck, and his lips moved.

— One, he said, looking at Tesa.

He found Maxim behind the windshield.

— Two.

He turned and found Soles, inside the gate.

— Three.

Then he looked for the fourth. Soles watched him do it. He watched the guard’s eyes go along the sidewalk, and across the road, and back to the truck, and into the cab, looking for a woman with a notebook who had stood at the washroom pillar with her watch and helped them bring him out. She was not there. The guard’s face did what it had done in the corridor, when the shadow at the glass had been only one: it fell, very slightly, the face of a man whose count has come out short.

— Where’s the fourth? he said.

Nobody answered him. Tesa looked at Soles. Maxim did not take his eyes off the windshield.

Soles walked out through the gate.

At the edge of it he looked back, once, because something made him. On the third floor, the window where he had seen the guard’s little plant now had a bare sill. In the window beside it, a man stood with his hands at his sides in a dark sweater that was too big for him. He did not wave. He only looked down at the gate and the street and the man walking out of it, the way he looked at everything, taking measurements. Then he stepped back from the glass, and the window was only a window.

— She’s at work, he said. She sends her love.

It was the first lie he had told since he signed. It was much easier than the last one. That frightened him more than anything that had happened inside.

— Get in, Maxim said through the window, to all of them, in the short voice. Before somebody in there changes their mind.

They took the guard home in the truck, all of them squeezed into the cab, the sister on Tesa’s knee, the guard by the window with his envelope in his lap, counting the tram stops under his breath. The upstairs apartment had a new lock on the door, and a balcony door that had been fixed, and on the kitchen table a clean vase with nothing in it.

The sister made tea, because it was what you did. She put out a cup for each of them, then set one more beside the vase. She looked at the extra cup for a moment and left it empty. The guard sat at the kitchen table with his envelope unopened in front of him and his hands around the cup, and looked at each of them in turn, and kept arriving at three.

Tesa found Soles on the landing, where he had gone to stand because the kitchen was too small for what was in it.

She did not lean on the wall. Her sleeves were pushed up, and the marks on her forearm had gone yellow at the edges. She stood square in front of him with both hands loose at her sides, the way she stood before a bell.

— When? she said.

— Tomorrow. The last train north. That’s when he wants me out of the city.

— For three months.

— To start.

— And you can’t say where.

— I don’t know where. He said the phone will ring.

Tesa looked at him for a long time. He let her. She was one of the people he had promised himself he would not read, and he kept the promise, and it cost him something to keep it, standing there, knowing exactly how easy it would be.

— I watched you on the ice, she said. In my head. From what you told us. You made the turn work. Not every time. But you found it when you needed it. And then you went back for him. I was proud of you, and I’m still angry that I had to be proud of you from my kitchen.

— I know.

— And then you came home and did the one thing I never taught you.

She did not say what it was. She did not need to. He had heard Krista’s door close at ten to six.

— Listen to me, Tesa said. You’re going somewhere to do something I can’t see, for people I don’t trust, and you’re going to come back. When you come back, you come back the same man. The one who pulled him out of the river. Not the other one.

— Which other one?

— The one who sat in your kitchen at six this morning and decided it was simpler.

She stepped back.

— Come back as him, she said, and you’re not welcome in my gym.

It was the hardest thing anyone had ever said to him, and she said it gently.

He heard footsteps on the stairs below.

Slow ones. Someone climbing all the way to the landing, not hurrying, a step at a time. Tesa heard them too, and turned her head, and something in her face changed.

Krista came around the last turn of the stairs with her coat buttoned all the way up and a paper bag from the bakery on the corner of her own street in one hand, and stopped on the landing below them.

She did not look at Soles. She looked past him, at the open door of the apartment, at the kitchen table, at the guard.

The guard looked up from his cup and saw her in the doorway, and his lips moved, and his whole face cleared, like a sky after rain.

— Four, he said.

Krista smiled at him. It was a real smile, and none of it was for Soles. She went past him into the kitchen without touching him, and put the buns on the table, and sat down beside the guard, and asked him how he was, and listened to the answer.

Soles stood on the landing with Tesa and listened to the count come out right, and to the woman who had made it come out right, and understood that she had come for the guard, and not for him.

It was exactly what he would have wanted her to do. It was the worst thing that had happened all day.