Episode 251 · Out in the Street

On Saturday the doctor came back to the house at eight, as he had promised, and this time he did not unwind the bandage slowly.

Tesa held out her hand before he asked.

— Make a fist.

She made most of one. The last two fingers stopped short of her palm and stayed there, trembling, until she let them open.

— Tomorrow, she said. Ask me tomorrow.

The doctor did not smile. He pressed along the knuckles one by one, the way he had the day before, and Soles watched his lips move as he counted. Then he wrapped the hand again, though there was less of it to wrap.

He packed his bag. On the back of his own hand a knuckle had split in the cold, raw at the edges, exactly as it had been yesterday. Soles saw it. So did Krista; her pen stopped on the page.

When the door had shut behind him, she went to her bag and came back with an older notebook, the cover gone soft with handling. She opened it on the table beside yesterday’s.

Soles knew the pages before she turned them toward him. The prison. Four mornings of times and small notes in her narrow hand. T. both hands on the bag. S. elbow, full extension.

She laid the new page beside the old one. The times were closer together.

— Same thing, she said. Faster.

— What thing? Maxim asked.

— Whatever was in the air near that wing. We all felt better and nobody knew why. I wrote it down because it was strange.

She tapped the back of her own hand, where the doctor’s knuckle had split.

— His didn’t get better. Ours do.

— Only us, Tesa said.

— Only people like us.

Soles went up to fetch his coat. Halfway up the stairs he realized he had not put a hand to his ribs. Since Thursday every step had caught him under the left arm. Now there was nothing. He opened and shut his hands. The palms that had stuck to their wrappings every morning since the rope moved without pulling.

On the landing he turned his head, as he did a dozen times a day, to put the street on his right side. The right ear gave him nothing. It never would. Whatever was in the air mended what was already mending. It did not give back what was gone.

Mina was asleep against the radiator, beside the bowl with her name on it. He still did not know who had written it.

When he came down, Tesa was standing at the window. She had slept with it open, though the room was cold. At the end of the street the river lay under its steam.

— I want to go back down, she said.

— You can’t hold a rope.

— Not to do anything. Just to see the shelf again. Sit there a while.

She said it lightly, the way she said most things, and she was smiling at the steam.

Soles remembered the truck. The Hunter’s warning, which he had repeated to them himself. It won’t feel like pulling.

— Tesa.

— I know, she said, without turning around. I’m telling you so you’ll stop me.

Down the street, a man began to shout a name.

Not loudly. Over and over, the same two syllables, the way someone calls a child in from a yard.

Maxim was at the door first. Krista took her notebook. Soles buckled the blade on as he went down the steps. Tesa came last, her bandaged hand held against her coat. The shouting came from below, toward the river, and they went down the street after it.

The street ran down to the river between two rows of narrow houses. The frost lay white on the cobbles, on the sills, on the lids of the bins.

Halfway down, the frost stopped.

It stopped in a line, as clean as if someone had drawn it. White stones, then black ones, wet, with a thin steam lifting off them. Soles felt the warmth on his face from three paces away, the way you feel a kitchen when somebody opens the door.

The man who had been shouting stood at the line in his slippers.

— My wife. She went for bread. She’s just there. She won’t come.

She was just there. Sitting on a front step twenty meters in, her shopping bag on her knees, her face turned up into the steam.

She was not alone. A coalman sat on the shafts of his handcart with his cap in his lap. A boy sat on the curb with his school bag between his boots. None of them moved, except to breathe, and they breathed slowly.

At the far end, where the street met the embankment, the air above the drain grate had a seam in it.

Pale. Narrower than a door. The steam that drifted across it stretched into bright threads and broke.

— That’s not under the river, Maxim said.

— No.

It had come up. Out of the water, out of the rock they had pulled on, into a street where people went for bread.

Soles had gone down for one cut.

— Same air, Krista said. She had the notebook open and was not writing in it.

Tesa stepped over the line.

He saw her do it. One step, easy, the way you step into a warm bath. Her shoulders came down. Her bandaged hand opened at her side.

— Oh, she said softly. Oh, that’s nice.

Soles had her belt before he knew he had moved. The same grip as on the slope. He pulled. She came back one step, then another, and when her heel crossed onto the frost she turned on him with her good fist half raised.

Then she saw his face, and lowered it.

— Sorry, she said. I told you to stop me.

— You did.

The dark blade leaned on his hip, toward the seam, the way it had leaned in the steam. He kept his hands where they were. Anything he gave this place, it would drink.

— Look at their mouths, Maxim said quietly.

The boy’s lips were gray. So were the coalman’s.

Twenty meters. Three people. No rope. And every step in there would be the step Tesa had just taken.

Boots on the cobbles behind them. Four men from the detachment, one with a roll of yellow tape. The cleaners from the back row.

The one with the tape walked past Soles without looking at him. He ran it across the street along the frost line, from a lamppost to a drainpipe, waist high, and the husband was left standing on the cold side of it.

— Step back, sir.

— My wife’s in there.

— Nobody goes in.

He did not look at the step, or the boy.

— Chief’s orders.

He tied off the tape. Then he stood with his hand resting on it, his face turned toward the warm air, and Soles watched his eyes half close.

On the step, the woman set her shopping bag down beside her. She stood up, unhurried, and began to walk toward the seam, the way people walk home.

Soles lifted the tape.