Episodul 45 · A Place at the Table

Tesa climbed down from the windowsill and came to the table. She studied the invoice from above with her good eye, her mouth tight.

— My brother was on guard duty on the northern bank, she said. That autumn. The night shift.

Krista looked up at her. She didn’t say she was sorry. She only said:

— I know. I checked. His name is on Banks’s time sheets for those months. He’s the only night guard listed there.

Tesa planted her palms on the edge of the table and stayed bent over it, as if she had just finished a long set at the punching bag.

— So it’s true, she said. All of it.

— The fraud is real, Soles said.

Tesa turned her head toward him.

— Don’t start.

— I’m not starting. I’m saying what’s on the table. An invoice, a truck, and a guard. Not my father.

— Your father’s in Kerr’s confession.

— Exactly.

They looked at each other across the table. Maxim looked between them, then put his cup down.

— The invoice. What do we do with the invoice?

— This is the depot register’s copy? Soles asked.

— The invoice and the register, Krista said. I’ve sent both to the investigator. The copies stay with me.

Krista closed the folder and placed her hands on top of it, one over the other.

— I’m not publishing it yet. I want the second name before they know what I’m looking at.

— So you keep quiet, Tesa said.

— No.

Krista looked straight at her.

— The committee asked me to take the photographs of the work sites out of the exhibition. I won’t. They stay on the wall, with the dates under them. Not a word more. Just the dates. Whoever wants to understand will understand.

Maxim gave a low whistle.

— And the sponsors?

— They might pull out.

Krista shrugged, a small, precise gesture.

— Then the exhibition gets smaller. But it happens.

Tesa straightened. She was looking at Krista differently now, the way she had looked at Soles at the gym, after the fists touched.

— One more thing, Krista said. I’m adding another name to the board for the garden’s people.

She didn’t say whose. She didn’t need to.

Tesa looked away toward the dark window.

— He wasn’t a gardener, she said after a while. Her voice had grown hoarse.

— He guarded the garden, Krista said. On paper, other people were stealing from it. He guarded it. To me, that earns him a place on the board.

Tesa gave no answer. She returned to the windowsill and sat facing the glass. In its reflection, Soles watched her wipe her nose with the back of her hand, slowly, twice, careful of the tape.

Maxim shifted his chair out of Soles’s way.

— If anyone else comes, they’re standing.

— We invited someone else, Krista said.

— Good. He can stand.

Krista got up. She went to the cupboard, took out a fifth mug, and set it on a corner of the table.

The doorbell rang.

Krista opened the door. Varren stood on the landing with a paper bag of warm bread in one hand and a folding wooden chair in the other.

— I suspected you didn’t have five chairs, he said, smiling.

— I don’t, Krista said, stepping aside to let him in.

Varren unfolded the chair by the corner of the table, where the fifth mug already stood. He put the bread in the middle and tore it into pieces with his hands, for everyone, before sitting down. He gave Soles the piece with the thickest crust, as a matter of course.

Tesa turned from the window and looked at him over her shoulder.

Maxim looked at the chair Varren had brought.

— Show-off.

Varren passed him the bread.

They moved their cups and made room.

— V —

There were no knots in the cord.

The instructor tied it around his left wrist, twice, tight, with the hands of a man who had done it hundreds of times. It was black and thin, made from something that would neither break nor fray. In the windowless hangar, eleven men held their rolled sleeves above the same bare cord.

Eleven remained out of sixty.

The young man felt the weightless cord like a hand on his wrist.

— Before we had a name, the instructor said, we were hunters. Forest men with no master, who kept the count on their own bodies. Later they gave us a name, in a city tongue. Hunters. Then they took the name away too, because it no longer suited anyone. Now no one calls us anything.

He walked slowly along the line, studying each of them.

— You wear no insignia. You appear on no list. If you die, no one ever knew you. This is what you get in return.

He stopped at the end of the line and raised his own left hand. His cord could scarcely be seen anymore. It was thick and knotted, like an old root wound around a stone.

— You tie the first knot today, he said. Not for someone else. For yourselves. For the person you were until this morning. Those are the ones you carry.

Each of them tied his own first knot with his teeth, as they had been shown. The young man tightened his and felt something settle in his chest, heavy and still, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake.

He had been chosen. For the first time in his life, someone had pointed to him out of a line of men and said: him.

In the unit, the voices fell quieter than they did anywhere else.

Not as they had beneath the ice. But sleep, meals, running and the firing range followed an order he did not decide. Strong feeling had little room in it. The garden still waited when he slept; he no longer went looking for its figures.

He was best at what could not be taught. The others learned to hold their breath before firing. He had been doing it since he was nine. The others learned not to panic in a dark room full of armed men. He no longer knew how to panic. The others learned to notice exits, weapons, people’s hands. All his life, he had watched for what other people lacked, and a man missing a weapon was as plain to him as one missing a blanket.

His brothers told him he was frightening. They said it laughing over meals, their mouths full. He laughed with them.

The kid was the youngest of the eleven. He talked too much, slept too little, and sometimes cried in his sleep without knowing it. The young man heard him from the bunk below. In the morning, he never mentioned it. He only left the cup of tea the kid always forgot beside his mess tin.