第74章 An Examination Is Arranged

Daylight over the endless Belarusian plain was the colour of dishwater, and the dining car at midday held exactly five people: a conductor eating standing up, two traders arguing happily about tyres, and, at the table by the window with three glasses of tea already poured and steaming, the Teacher. He had chosen the seat facing the door. His coat was folded beside him with the sleeves arranged, his hands rested on the cloth clean to the quick, and his forgettable face wore the expression of a man attending a recital at which his own student is performing. He indicated the third glass with two fingers. "Sit, reader. The traders have tyres; we have authorship. Both conversations benefit from tea." Viktor sat. Down the length of the car the swaying made the tea tremble in concentric rings, and beyond the window the country scrolled past, black and white, fence post, birch, fence post, a horizon built to make human figures look like misprints. "You boarded my train," Viktor said. "Our train. I told you on the water: your acquaintance books us both seats whenever we travel, and he has done for thirty years, and I have never once learned to refuse a reserved seat; refusing them hurts the road's feelings." The Teacher turned one glass ninety degrees, aligning it with the table edge, registrar-handed. "So. Terms, since we are here and daylight is being spent either way. The wall will be read. That is fixed now; the correction column has fixed it; other parties are converging with clipboards. The only question your presence can still influence is the grammar of the reading — singular or plural. I propose plural. Joint invigilation: I supply the chart, which lives in me now, burned in, every bearing and interval, safer than paper; you supply the authority of the corpus and the confirmation your registrar carries; together we produce a reading that neither of us can afterwards disown. Custody of findings split, certificates co-signed. We finish the founder's map, and we control, between us, every document the story will ever need. Roads run on maintenance, reader. So do truths." "And the thirteenth name?" "Ah." For a moment the mild face did something unguarded, quick as a fish turning under ice. "You noticed that I keep it in my pocket. Yes. The forgery stands ready to give him any face I choose, and the exposure will come on whatever schedule I choose, and I have discovered — fifty years of discovery, reader, it is the only subject on which I am an original — that owning a man's afterlife is the nearest a mirror comes to having a reflection. Your grandfather freed his brother with that name. I intend to be freed by it. You may price that however your conscience likes; I have priced everything else in my life and can wait out your arithmetic." "The readings belong to rooms," Viktor said. "Not to contracts. I will read the wall in public, with witnesses, or not at all — and if you read it alone first, in the dark, whatever you find becomes yours the way stolen letters are yours: completely, and worthless." "Worthless." The Teacher smiled with no muscle moving where a lie could live. "I have a room. It has witnesses. One of them is meeting you tomorrow at an institute, an old woman who smells of paste and power; another signs his name as a service number and pours excellent tea in minor stations. You believe you are being courted by institutions, reader. You are being introduced to rival examiners. Everyone wants the examination proctored; nobody has asked the candidates whether they wish to be graded." He drank, set the glass down aligned with the table edge again. "Very well. Public reading, joint hands, witnesses from whichever services attend. I accept your grammar — because I have read your habits, and your habit is honesty performed so carefully it functions as strategy, and such honesty needs a witness more than it needs a lawyer. Tomorrow night, then, at their dark. Until then, one payment in good faith, freely given, as I returned your panels freely." He laid a slip of paper on the table, folded once. "Entry four-four-seven. The clerk. Name, rank, posting, death — your Volkov's index ends at the grave's edge, because indexes end there. Mine does not. I visited him in the autumn of 1979, the week after they closed the lid. Someone should have; no one else living knew he needed visiting. The address is on the paper. Do with it what your family does with debts." Viktor did not touch the slip. "Why give me this?" "Because you will need to understand, at the wall tomorrow, what kind of man guards paperwork for thirty years and stamps permits with one hand and ruins with the other, and understanding him requires knowing how he ended: alone, in a district of graves that all lean the same way, wind, you understand, not remorse." The Teacher rose, took his folded coat, and paused, and for one moment the forgettable face looked out of itself the way it had on the jetty, patient as solvent. "He believed to the end that he had guarded a road. Perhaps he had. Roads keep everyone's secrets, reader; that is what makes them roads. Ask your grandfather's chart sometime why it runs east past a graveyard of clerks." He moved off down the swaying car, nodding to the tyre traders like a neighbour, and Viktor sat with the tea going cold and the slip of paper lying on the table between the aligned glasses, and did not touch it for a long time, because in his trade, things offered freely are priced most carefully of all. He passed the Teacher's compartment on the way back, because the trade also teaches you to walk past doors slowly. The door stood open a hand's width, drawn by the heating draught, and inside, laid face-down on the lowered bunk with a towel under it, waited a stretched panel. Cedar, museum grade, the corner chamfered in the old Vienna manner. Sixty-one by eighty-six centimetres. Even from the corridor, even face-down, even unfinished, it breathed the specific silence of a canvas stretched by hands that had been stretching this particular size for twenty years. And on the pillow above it, placed one by one, nine sunflower seeds lay in a row, spaced unevenly, gaps deliberate, a rhythm waiting to be tapped out by someone with time and a rail card and no talent whatsoever for beginning anything except endings. Viktor walked on. Behind him the wheels changed their song as the line bent north, and he understood, with the professional chill of a man who has finally seen the full width of the easel, that the Teacher was not practising for the reading. He was painting it.