Chapter 2 The Tally Clerk

Rasim Okmen counted things for a living and had been counting them, in one way and another, since he was fourteen. In that time he had counted oranges, scrap, hides, timber, cement, four hundred thousand tins of fish, and, once, a consignment of what the manifest called sewing machines and what the crates, opened by accident, revealed to be sewing machines. He was the kind of man who noticed the difference between a crate that had been loaded by a crane and one that had been loaded by men who did not want the weight recorded. That was the whole of his usefulness to anyone, and it had cost him more than he liked to count. He lived in Kaldar, in two rooms above a bakery, with his wife Nevena and their two boys and his mother, and on the evening of the second day he came home later than usual because of the meeting, and when he came in Nevena was mending a shirt by the window and did not look up. "There is bread," she said. "I ate on the quay." "No," she said. "You did not." He sat down and ate the bread. On the table between them lay the day's accounting: what the boys had eaten, what the coal had cost, what was still owed to the woman with the stall. Nevena kept it in a notebook because she had decided long ago that a household that did not write down its numbers was a household that would be surprised. He had married her for many reasons and had never told her that her habit of writing things down was the first of them. "Did you hear about Vlatko," she said. That was the other thing about her; she always got the news first, from the market, which in Kaldar functioned as a second government. "What about him." "His brother says he is in the hospital in Bellver. He says he fell from the scaffold at the coal quay." Rasim had seen Vlatko three days earlier, standing on the coal quay, not near any scaffold, talking to two men in grey jackets. He had noted it in passing the way he noted everything, and then he had gone home and eaten dinner, and now he sat with bread in his hand and understood that the note he had given the woman from Molsen & Ryde had been right, and that it was going to cost somebody more than a fall from a scaffold. He said nothing. He had learned, in eleven years on the quay and three years as the other kind of clerk, that saying nothing was a skill he could not afford to lose for a single hour. In the morning he went to work, and at the eighth hour, when the harbour bell rang twice, he was standing where he was always standing, and the woman from Molsen & Ryde walked past with her satchel on her arm and did not look at him, and he said, to the crate in front of him, and at a volume designed for the crate alone, "They moved the pumps to the third basin. Night shift. Not the manifest." She kept walking. That was answer enough. He had told her the one thing he knew that mattered, and she had heard it, and now they would both go on being strangers until the next time. He had been doing this for three years, and the fear had stopped being fear and had become something more like weather, something you noticed every day and dressed for and complained about and nevertheless lived inside without expecting it to end. He went home at nine. Nevena had kept his dinner warm, which was her way of saying that she had been worried, since she had never been able to say it with words. They ate, and she sewed, and the boys fought over a ball until she took the ball away and made peace, and at half past ten there was a knock at the door. Rasim did not move for a moment. Then he stood and opened it. The man outside was thin and neat, in the grey jacket that Rasim had seen on the coal quay, and he had a second man with him who stood half a step back and said nothing. The neat man smiled apologetically and held up a clipboard. "Tally discrepancy," he said. "Third basin. We would like to go over the count with you." "Not tonight," Rasim said. "I have not been at the third basin this month. I will come to the office on Thursday." "You have been at the third basin," the neat man said, still smiling, "because the pumps were moved there on your advice, and the count you gave the yard was short by eleven units. We would like the eleven units. In person, tonight, or on Thursday in a different way." Behind Rasim, in the warm room, his mother had started to hum, which was what she did when she was frightened and did not want the children to know. He said he would come Thursday. The neat man nodded, thanked him, and went down the stairs with his second, and the sound of their feet went away into the alley, and Nevena sat with the shirt in her lap and did not ask him anything, because she had already worked out that the answer would be a lie, and she had decided, long ago, that if he was going to lie to her he should at least be allowed to keep it simple. He did not sleep. At four in the morning he got up, dressed, and went out through the bakery, and walked through Kaldar to the quay, and found the woman from Molsen & Ryde where she was always to be found at that hour, standing under the harbour office lamp with a cup of coffee she had bought from nobody, looking at the water. "You have to understand what it is I am saying," he told her, quietly, "because I am going to say it once. They know I told somebody. They do not know who. On Thursday they will take me to the third basin and they will ask me a question, and I do not have a lie that is better than the truth, and after that I do not expect to go home." She looked at the water for a long moment. He had noticed, over three years, that she never looked at him when the conversation became serious, and had decided that this was not evasion. It was the way some people gripped a table before they delivered bad news. "Then we are not going to be here on Thursday," she said. He felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight for a month, and hated himself for it. He had promised Nevena, when he started, that he would stop before it went this far, and here he was, four years past that promise, standing on the quay at dawn letting a stranger from a freight office tell him about his own future. "Where will I be," he said. "Somewhere else," she said. "Which is a poor answer, and I am sorry for it, and it is the only one I have this morning." Rasim looked at the water with her for a while, because there was nothing else to look at that time of day, and then he said, in the tone of a man reading out a column of figures, that he had catalogued three ways out of Kaldar in eleven years of loading and unloading and that he would tell them to her if she wanted them. He told them. The first was the lane behind the bakery, which the two men in the grey jackets already knew. The second was the cistern yard, which had one gate and no second exit and was therefore a place to be caught rather than a place to leave by. The third was the drainage cut under the tannery flats, which carried the rain off the slope and came out on the harbour road below the coal merchant's yard, and which he had walked twice, both times as a boy, both times on a dare, and had never mentioned to anyone including his wife. "You have been keeping a count of exits," she said. "I am a clerk," he said. "A count of exits is a count of what is not there yet." ---