The Character Who Talks Back

She went back on Saturday with a plan, which was, she ought to have known, the first mistake.

The plan was small. She had decided, on the bus home from Behr's the night before, that Lentar would benefit from a locksmith. There was no locksmith in Lentar. She had checked, on three visits, by the simple method of walking the streets and looking at signs, and had concluded that the city, for all its scriveners and bakers and the woman who sold the difficult-to-see dried fruit, contained no one whose business was the making and unmaking of locks. This struck her as an oversight. Cities, she had read somewhere, are held together by their locksmiths almost as much as by their bakers; the lock is, in its quiet way, a load-bearing wall too. She had written, on the model side of the notebook, before bed: Add: locksmith. She had then, because she was learning, also written: Name him before you arrive.

She named him on the bus. She named him Tev, on the grounds that the name had the right number of consonants for a man who worked with small metal things, and she gave him, in the notebook, a shop on the south end of the Small Bridge, two rooms above it, a wife called Naima who taught children to read in the afternoons, a limp from a fall off a ladder at nineteen, and a habit of humming, while he worked, a tune Iyla decided not to specify because she suspected the tune would arrive on its own and be better than anything she chose.

She went in. She crossed the Small Bridge — nineteen stones, still, which she counted with the small thankful pleasure of a person whose savings have not been touched in the night — and she turned, at the south end, to look at the shop she had, on the bus, decided would be there.

There was a shop there. It was the right shop. It had the right door, narrow and green, and the right window, small and slightly fogged in the lower left corner where the glass was older than the rest, and a hand-painted sign which read, in the lettering Iyla had not realised she had been picturing until she saw it: Tev. Locks, keys, hinges. Knock loud.

She knocked loud. She had, she realised, knocking, become slightly nervous, in the way one is nervous on the doorstep of a person one has been writing letters to and is about to meet.

The door opened. The man who opened it was not Tev.

That is, he was. He had the right number of consonants about him, and he had the limp — she saw it in the half-second of his stepping back to let her in, a small favouring of the right knee that was so exactly the limp she had written that she felt, briefly, embarrassed, the way one is embarrassed at recognising one's own handwriting on a sign one had forgotten posting. He had the apron, leather, with the small pocket for the small tools. He had, even, the humming, which was a tune in a minor key that she did not know and immediately wanted to.

He had, however, a face she had not written. The face was older than she had imagined Tev, by perhaps fifteen years, and had a beard, which she had not given him, and one ear that came to a slight point at the top, which she had certainly not given him, and an expression that she recognised, with a small descending feeling in her stomach, as the expression of a person who has been waiting for her and has, while waiting, prepared.

"You're late," he said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Late." He stepped aside. "Come in. Shut it. Hinge is mine."

She came in. She shut it behind her. The hinge made a small competent noise, the noise of a hinge that had been put up by a man who took hinges seriously.

The shop smelled of oil and brass and, underneath, of bread, because Halun's alley was on the other side of the wall and the wall, Iyla now saw, was thin. There was a counter, and behind the counter a wall of small wooden drawers, each labelled in a careful hand. There were two stools. He gestured at one. She sat on it. He did not sit on the other.

"You're Tev," she said, to be sure.

"Tev. Yes." He set his hands on the counter. "Halun's father's cousin's boy. Bakers' side. Wall's thin on purpose — we share heat. Wife's Naima. Teaches the alphabet here Wednesdays and Fridays, after I clear out the back. Knee's from a ladder. I was nineteen. It hasn't forgiven me. I hum when I work. My mother's tune. You won't get the name of it. You haven't earned it." He looked at her steady. "That much, you can have. The rest we'll talk about."

Iyla, on the stool, found that she could not, for a moment, speak.

"The rest," she managed.

"The rest. You wrote me on a bus."

"Yes."

"Naima's a kindness. I'll thank you for Naima. Limp was mine, though. Shop was mine. Humming was mine. You only noticed those — you didn't put them in me. That's fine. No quarrel there." He touched the beard. "Beard's mine. Ear's mine. The fifteen years are mine. My mother's alive, three days east, where the river bends. Her name's also not yours. I bring her up because you're about to ask me to do a thing, and I want it on the table first — I have a mother."

"I wasn't going to ask you to do anything," Iyla said, which was, she discovered as she said it, untrue. She had been going to ask him, on the third visit, to help her make a key.

Tev looked at her with the patience of a man who had, in his life, listened to a great many people say a great many things they had not, on closer inspection, meant.

"You were," he said. "I can feel it the way I feel rain — in the knee, before it comes. You want a thing this city hasn't given you. You reckon it's behind a lock, or it is a lock, you're not sure. I'm the door. Yes?"

"Yes," Iyla said. She was, she found, telling the truth because she could not, in this small room with this man's small competent hinge behind her, manage anything else. "I wanted you to make me a key."

"To what."

"I don't know yet."

"Right. Then we're stuck the same way. I can't cut a key to a lock I haven't seen. You can't name a lock you haven't found. And we're both sat here pretending that's small." He smiled, then, for the first time, and the smile was a good one; it had, in it, the warmth of a man who liked his work and was glad, on the whole, to be having this conversation. "I'll help where I can. I won't be pushed about. Those aren't the same thing."

"I'm not sure I see it."

"You wrote me to be useful. I'll be useful. I won't be only that. You want a man who stands here to hand you a key when a key's wanted — no. There are locksmiths in other cities who'd take that work. There aren't any in this one, because till last night you didn't see fit to put one here. So you're stuck with me. The only one you've got."

Iyla, on the stool, began to laugh, and then stopped, because she saw that the laugh was the wrong laugh.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"What for."

"For — for treating you as a — as a—"

"Hinge," Tev supplied. "You were going to say hinge. Fair word — I hang things, I hold them shut. Don't be sorry for it." He set a thumb flat on the counter, as if pinning something there. "But you don't get to file me down to suit the door. Write me, fine. Just don't — bend me. We agreed?"

"Yes," Iyla said. "Yes. We're agreed."

"Good." He sat, at last, on the other stool, with the small favouring of the knee, and put his hands flat on the counter between them, and looked at her with an attention that she recognised, with a small lurch, as the attention she had been giving the knocker on her own door, and Halun's apron, and the chip on her own mug — the attention of a person who had decided that the thing in front of them was worth seeing properly. He had, she realised, been reading her the way she had been reading the city. The thought sat in her, for a moment, as the small clean dread she had become acquainted with on the wall by Sefra, and then, as she watched it, resolved itself, somewhat to her surprise, into something more like relief.

"Now," Tev said. "Tell me what you want. I'll tell you if I'll do it. Then we sort out something that holds for the both of us."

"I wanted," she said, slowly, finding the words, "a locksmith because — because there are people who have been coming into this city without me, and I thought, if there were locks, there would be a way to — to know. To know when, and where. Not to keep them out. I don't think I can keep them out. But to know."

Tev was quiet for a long moment. The humming, which had stopped when he opened the door, had not resumed; she understood that this was, in its way, also information.

"That's a better reason than I'd had down for you," he said. "I'll work on that. No key today. Today I make you a list — the doors in this city I know about. We walk them. I show you which ones have a scratch on the inside from a key that's no business being in them. Good for a first afternoon?"

"That will do," Iyla said.

"Good." He stood. He took, from a hook on the wall, a coat. He paused, at the door, with his hand on the hinge he had, evidently, hung himself.

"One more," he said.

"Yes."

"My mother's name. It's Iyla."

He said it without looking at her. He said it the way a man drops a stone into a well to find out, by the sound, how deep the well is. Iyla, on her stool, felt the bottom of her ribs go briefly cold, and then, a half-second later, warm, in the particular way a thing goes warm when one has, against expectation, been given a gift.

"I didn't write that," she said.

"No. But you might've, in time. Fairer you knew before you tried. So when you come back you'll know which of us got there first."

He opened the door. The bell, which she had also not written, made a small bright noise. She followed him out into the four-o'clock, and she did not, then or later, write down what the tune was that he began, on the threshold, quietly to hum; she had decided, somewhere between the stool and the street, that there were going to be, from now on, things about Lentar that she would let be Lentar's, in the way one lets a friend have a private joke with a third party, and that this was going to be, on the model side of the notebook, a rule she would put down later, after she had walked the doors with the man who had, with great courtesy and at the cost of approximately fifteen minutes of her plan, declined to be a hinge.