Chapter 1 The Expeditor

Ostrenza woke early and lied about it. By six the fish market on the Long Quay had finished its loudest hour, and the men who had spent it shouting over crates of silver scad were already drinking coffee in the shade with their hands still smelling of brine. Yva Beran walked past them without looking, because looking was a habit that cost money, and reached the customs gate at four minutes past six with her collar up and her satchel clamped against her hip. She had been Yva Beran for four years and three months. The figure mattered. She kept it the way other women kept a rosary, counting without any need to move her lips, and she could have told you the same about the number of times she had crossed the Selnik border on a false stamp, and the number of people in Ostrenza who believed the woman she was pretending to be, and the number of those who were wrong to believe it. Before Yva there had been a different woman with a different name in a different city, doing much the same job for much the same office, and before that woman there had been a person who was still, somewhere under all of it, Vesna Kolar: thirty-six years old, no children, one mother recently in the ground, a rented flat in Vetrana with a plant in the window that she had asked a neighbour to water and that the neighbour had, in the end, allowed to die. The customs queue shuffled. At the front desk a clerk named Peras was already arguing with a broker about a weight discrepancy on a consignment of tinned olives, and the argument had the ritual quality of a morning prayer, and would end, as it always did, in the broker paying and Peras stamping. Vesna waited her turn with her papers in her left hand and her attention in three places at once: on Peras, on the two men behind her who had arrived together and were pretending not to be together, and on the window above the arch, where the glass showed a slice of harbour and a sliver of the hillside quarter of Bellver behind it. "Beran," Peras said when she reached him. "You are early." "The Aldina sails at ten. If the bond paperwork slips, the pumps sit in the yard another week, and the consignee starts writing letters." Peras looked at her papers the way he looked at everyone's papers, with the particular boredom of a man who had decided years ago that boredom was the only armour worth wearing. "Pumps," he said. "Agricultural. For the irrigation scheme at Mardan." "Everyone in this city is in agriculture," Peras said, and stamped the manifest, and she was moving before the ink had finished drying, because the trick with a lie that has been told four hundred times is to be bored of it yourself. Boredom was the safest emotion in her repertoire. It never asked to be explained. Outside, the sun had cleared the harbour wall and the city began to show its true colours, which were not the colours of the postcards. Ostrenza sold an idea of itself — blue water, ochre walls, a cathedral with a green copper dome where the tourists queued in August — and lived a different life inside that idea. The Marisian republic had been in some stage of argument with itself for a century, and the argument had produced customs officers who took bribes and police officers who did not, ministers who were honest to the point of foolishness and ministers who were not, and a port that sat at the hinge of a continent's small wars. Anything could move through Ostrenza if it was stamped and crated and called something else. Anything at all, provided the paperwork was dull enough. That was the arrangement that had brought the Cartage Office here twenty-two years ago, though the Cartage Office did not put its name on the leases. Officially the office inspected the tonnage of coastal trade and settled the tolls. Actually, in a third-floor room in Vetrana with a locked cabinet and a standing rule about not writing anything down, it did something else with the same budget. Vesna's own arrangement was narrower and older than the office's. Four years ago she had been given a flat, a job, a name, and a telephone number that answered in an emergency and at no other time, and she had been told, in a room with the curtains drawn, that the work would take three years and would end with a list of names and a quiet departure, and that she would be paid in a currency she could not spend without leaving the country. She had said yes because someone had to, and because the woman who said yes was not the woman who had to live in the flat afterwards, and that had seemed, at the time, like a professional advantage. She walked the long way back to the office. Habit, not caution; caution was something you used on days when you noticed it. The way you actually survived was by arranging your life so that the noticing never had to happen. She bought bread at the kiosk by the harbour office, exchanged four words with the woman who had sold her bread for three years, and took the stairs to Molsen & Ryde at the second floor, where seventeen people made a living out of other people's cargo and one of them was her. The new clerk had arrived while she was out. That was the first thing she noticed, and she noticed it the way she noticed a shifted chair or a letter opened at the wrong fold — not with alarm, with interest. "Young," said Zlata Molsen from behind the accounts ledger, without looking up. Molsen was the Ryde half of the firm, sixty-one, and the only person in Ostrenza who had ever asked Yva Beran a question about her childhood. "Says he is from Kaldar. Say hello to him. I want him doing the Verano file by Thursday and I want you to show him how we keep it." "Which part of Kaldar," Vesna asked, because it was the kind of question Yva Beran would ask. "Near the cistern. His uncle is a plumber." Molsen turned a page. "Show him the file." The young man was sitting at the desk nearest the window with his hat on the desk and his hands folded, doing the thing that young men do when they want to look as though they have been waiting patiently for a long time. He was perhaps twenty-three. He stood when she came in, which was the right instinct in the wrong country, and said his name was Andrija, and that he hoped he would not be a nuisance. "Show me your hands," Vesna said. He showed her his hands. No calluses on the palms, a burn scar on the left thumb, ink on the right middle finger. A man who had never carried a crate and had recently been writing a great deal. The Kaldar story would hold or it would not, and it was not her job that day to find out. "You file by consignee, then by date," she said. "Never by value. If you sort by value, somebody in the yard can read the whole year of a competitor's trade off your shelf in one glance, and Molsen will know, and you will not be here for Thursday." Andrija nodded and wrote that down, which was exactly what an instructed clerk would do, and exactly what a trained one would not, because writing down a rule about value was itself a record about value. She filed the thought where she filed such things and did not look at him again for the rest of the morning. At half past twelve, the harbour bell rang twice. She put down her pen, said she was going for the mail, and went down to the Long Quay, where a tally clerk named Rasim Okmen was checking crates against a clipboard with the slack, unhurried motion of a man who had been counting things on this quay for eleven years. Their paths crossed the way the paths of strangers cross, and in the crossing he put a folded receipt into her palm with the flat of his hand. She did not read it there. She read it in the stairwell, standing between two floors where the light was bad, and it was not a receipt. It was a tally sheet from the night shift, and along the bottom edge, in pencil, in Rasim's small careful hand, was one line: Pumps are not pumps. Eight days. She folded it back along its original creases and put it in the lining of her satchel and went up to the office and worked, quietly, for six hours, and did not permit herself to think about the phrase again until the shutters came down on the harbour and the lamps went on over the water and the city, having finished its morning of lies, settled into its evening of the same. ---