The photograph arrived the following morning in Freya's courier envelope, though arrived is a weak word for a thing so long in transit: it had crossed thirty years, one ocean, a brother's death, a daughter's childhood and a ferry dispatcher's detective work to get from a Gothenburg sports annual to the corridor wall of a converted cannery in Oregon. Freya had found it the way she found everything that year, by refusing to be put off — a Swedish archivist, a scanned page, a print made at the good shop on Front Street and framed, at her own expense and over her mother's shrug, in plain black wood that matched the older frames. It showed a young woman in a ring that no longer existed, gloves up, chin down, twenty-four years old and standing in the exact pocket of space she would still be standing in three decades later, and beneath it, on a small brass plate Freya had ordered with a dispatcher's precision about words, it said only: GRETA LINDQVIST — GOTHENBURG — 21–0 — NEVER KNOCKED DOWN.
They hung it on a Thursday morning, before opening, Diane and Eddie and Freya and Greta herself, because Greta had insisted — the one insistence anyone could coax out of her about the whole affair — that if a thing of hers was going on her wall, she would hold the level for it herself. Dane's poster hung midway along the corridor, the big glossy promotional sheet from the regional card, The Weather in a storm of manufactured lightning. The blank space, the one she had dusted around for three years and never once explained, was beside it. Not above it: Greta was exact about that, with the spirit level in her own hands and her eye along the wall. "Not above," she said. "He is twenty-seven and still becoming. It is not his fault where his poster was put, and I did not come back to stand on anybody." So the young Wall of Gothenburg went up level with The Weather, frame to frame, shoulder to shoulder, 1998 beside next season, the undefeated beside the still-learning, and Eddie drove the picture hook home with two taps of the hammer and stood back. "There," said Freya quietly. "It was always your space." "Yes," said Greta, and handed back the level. "I know. I was keeping it clean." Diane, who had a club to open, permitted herself one unbusinesslike moment and put her hand briefly on Greta's shoulder, and then the four of them stood in the corridor looking at the wall the way people look at a harbour when a ship they know has come in: not with excitement, exactly, but with the deep, plain satisfaction of a thing being, at last and without argument, in its correct place. Greta took her duster from her pocket — she had a shift; the morning was already spoken for — and began, methodically, at the far end of the wall, to dust the champions, all of them now, in order, her own young face among them, neither first nor last, at the same height of hand as all the rest. It took the usual time. It had always taken the usual time; that was the secret the wall had kept for three years, that one of its frames had been tended all along by the woman inside it, waiting — not for rescue, not for recognition, not for a young man's education in humility — but simply for the wall to be complete. "You have been dusting yourself for three years," Freya said, behind her, half laughing, half not. "Of course," said Greta, and moved to the next frame. "Somebody should. It is a good photograph. The girl in it knew what she was doing."
The fundamentals class met on Tuesdays and Fridays at seven in the morning, in the small training room at the back of the Northgate Athletic Club, the one with the cannery's old hoist still bolted to the ceiling and windows that faced the harbour, so that the first hour of the day came in grey and then gold across the mats. It was women only, by Greta's stipulation and Diane's immediate agreement — not because women needed sheltering from anything, Greta said, when the flyer was being argued over, but because a person learns footwork faster in a room where nobody is performing, and beginners of every kind deserved one room in the building where the only audience was the harbour. Diane had proposed the class in the new year. Greta had considered it for the length of one shift — she considered everything for the length of one shift, measuring new ideas against the floor like a distance she intended to keep — and had accepted on two conditions that were, by then, entirely in character. She would teach it two mornings a week, no more. And she would keep one cleaning shift, hers, Thursday nights, because, as she explained to a baffled Rick Sorensen, a person should be able to tell the difference between the work she chose and the work she had escaped, and she had never escaped the cleaning. She had only ever been on her way through it.