Tomas at the Bookshop

He came in on the Wednesday, at twenty past four, which Iyla noted later because the clock above the till at Behr's was one of the small unreliable particulars of her life she had decided, on Maro's advice, to start checking against itself daily, and she had checked it at four because Mr. Behr had been making tea, and the clock had said four, and the kettle had agreed. Twenty minutes later the bell over the door did the small dry rattle it did when a person came in who had not, in opening the door, allowed for the bell, and Iyla looked up from the trolley of returns she was sorting and saw Tomas.

He was, she registered, exactly as she had last seen him at the long table in the reading room: the dark coat buttoned the same number of buttons, the hands clean and ink-free in the way of a man who handled cards rather than books, the face composed in the small unremarkable way of a face that had been composed, on purpose, every morning of its adult life. He did not look at the shelves. He did not look at her. He looked, briefly, at Mr. Behr behind the counter, and what crossed his face in that look was not surprise but the small narrow recognition of a man who had expected to find a particular person in a particular place and was confirming, without pleasure, that he had found him. He walked, without hurrying and without dawdling, to the counter, where he set down, in the small clear space between the till and the bowl of brass keys Mr. Behr kept for reasons he had never explained, a thin manila wallet, and from the wallet drew one index card, and laid it on the wood.

He laid it the way Penn laid things. That was the part Iyla noticed first: the small clean placing, the right-angle alignment to the edge of the counter, the absence of any flourish that might have suggested the card was being presented rather than simply set down. He stepped back, one step, and put his hands in his coat pockets, and waited.

Iyla came over. There was no version of the next minute in which she did not, and the not-coming-over would have been the longer route, and she had grown tired, this week, of taking the longer routes.

The card was hers. She knew it before she read it, because the upright near-black hand on it was Tomas's, but the phrase under his hand, set in quotation marks in the small careful way he set quoted things, was hers, and she recognised it with the small specific shock of meeting one's own handwriting in another hand: but who told her she was allowed to want it, and on whose authority does she keep wanting? Underneath, in his hand, the cataloguing: book, page, date — a library copy of Middlemarch, page two hundred and something, an autumn she had been nineteen in. One classifying word at the bottom right corner. The word was address.

The wallet, beside it, had not closed flat. Other cards showed at the edge — not hers; older. The topmost of them was the colour of weak tea where the cream of it had aged, and the hand on it was not Tomas's. Iyla saw, before she made herself look away, three things: a date in the nineteen-sixties, the word ANCHOR in small capitals along the upper margin, and at the bottom, in a hand she had watched, for seven years, write prices on the inside flap of secondhand books, the signature B—.

She did not, she found, look up at Mr. Behr. Tomas had seen her see it. That, she understood, was also part of what he had come to do.

"Good afternoon," Tomas said.

"Mr. Aldenor," Iyla said.

"I won't keep you long. I am not here on Saroya's behalf. I want that understood at the start. Saroya does not know I have come, and would, if she knew, have asked me not to. I am here because the conversation she has been having with you has gone on, in my estimation, somewhat longer than the matter warrants, and I have come to clarify the matter, on my own authority, so that you and I both know where it stands when she next sits down at your table."

He did not raise his voice. He had not, Iyla realised, raised his voice in any of the times she had heard him speak, including the afternoon at the long table when he had shown her her own name in the ledger with the closed field blank; and the not-raising was not a temperament but a method, and the method was older than he was.

"The card," he said, with one small nod toward the counter, "is yours. It is the original. I took it out of the drawer this morning. There are, in the drawer it came from, three hundred and forty-one others in the same hand, and there are, in the drawers along the same wall, in other hands and from other readers, a number I will not bore you with. I have brought you this one because it is, in my judgement, the clearest of the addresses you wrote at nineteen — clearer than the Bulgakov, clearer, even, than the one in the back of the Eliot you have not, I believe, looked at since. Whoever holds it can write to you through it. I am, at the moment, the person who holds it. I am setting it down, here, on Mr. Behr's counter, because I would like you to understand, plainly and without my having to put it less plainly later, that the holding of it is not a thing Saroya controls."

He paused. He did not pause for effect. He paused because he had finished a clause, and was waiting for it to land.

"Saroya is the Society's most reasonable representative. She is the one we send when we wish a conversation to be had at a table, with tea, in a tone. She is very good at it. I have known her for twenty-two years and I have, in those twenty-two years, watched her do this work with more care than the work has, in many cases, deserved. I am telling you this because I would like you to know that my respect for her is not in question, and that what I am about to say is not said against her, but past her. Saroya has been negotiating with you. I have come to say that the negotiation, from the Society's side, is one of several available approaches, and that the choice of approach is not, finally, hers to make, and was never going to be."

Mr. Behr, behind the counter, had not moved. Iyla was aware of him in the small peripheral way she was aware, in any room, of Mr. Behr — the steadiness of him, the way the shop tended to arrange itself around the place where he was standing, the small constant fact of his attention — and she registered now, without turning her head, that the steadiness had not changed but the quality of the attention had, in the way a room's air does not change temperature but changes pressure when a window opens somewhere on another floor.

"The Society," Tomas said, "is a hundred and eighty-four years old. It is forty people, in the count Saroya gave you, and a number larger than forty, in the count I keep. It contains, in its membership, people who would not, on being told what you have done at the green door at the south end of Lentar, ask to come to your table on a Friday. They would ask other questions. They would not ask them of you. They would ask them of the room, and the room would, in due course, answer them, because that is what the room is for. I am not threatening you. I am describing a structure. The structure existed before you wrote in your first margin, and it will exist after you write in your last, and the part of the structure that is currently sitting across from you at a café once a week, drinking tea and being reasonable, is a thin and somewhat decorative part of it."

He looked, for the first time, at the card on the counter. He did not touch it. He looked at it the way a man looks at a piece of evidence he has placed in a courtroom and does not, now, need to gesture toward.

"I will leave the card. I am leaving it deliberately, in your custody, in Mr. Behr's shop, on Mr. Behr's counter" — and here his eyes lifted, briefly, past Iyla — "because I want it understood that I could, had I chosen, have kept it; and that I am choosing, at this moment, to put it down where you can see it, on the small straightforward calculation that a person who knows where the address is, is better placed to think clearly about what is written to it next. I would prefer you to think clearly. Saroya would prefer it also. On that, at least, she and I agree."

He stepped back another half-step. He did not put his hand out. He did not say anything further about Lentar, or about the green door, or about the lock Tev had built or the small drawn open door she had pencilled beside the visitor's mark; and the not-saying was the point, and the card on the counter was the saying, and everything she had done in the last fortnight had been read, filed, classified, and was now being handed back to her in a single rectangle of cream cardstock as a way of telling her, without raising his voice, that she had been read.

"Mr. Aldenor," said Mr. Behr.

It was the first word he had spoken since Tomas had come in, and he spoke it in the small ordinary voice with which he ordinarily spoke, the voice he used on customers and on the kettle and on Iyla when she came in damp from the rain; and Tomas turned his head, with the small precise attention of a man who registered a new speaker the way he registered a new card, and waited. Something in him, very briefly, adjusted — the small involuntary correction of a man addressed by name from a quarter he had filed, long ago, as inactive.

Mr. Behr came around the end of the counter and walked, three steps, into the small clear space of floor between Tomas and Iyla, and stopped there, and turned, slightly, so that he was facing Tomas and not Iyla; and from beneath the collar of his cardigan he drew up, on its length of dark cord, the brass key, and closed his hand around it at the level of his belt, where it was visible to Tomas without being shown to him; and he stood there, between them, with his hand on the brass key, and did not, for the moment, say anything else.