"I am a beginner here," Noor said.
"That's a very careful sentence," Jonas said. "I noticed the other one too. 'I trained, long ago.'" He set his hands lightly on his own knees, not yet working, taking the measure of the next thirty seconds with professional relish. "My whole game is being where people don't expect. Entries they don't see until the notification arrives." He used his own joke from the week before without a flicker of embarrassment; it was clear he had been using it on himself all weekend, honing it. "I've been thinking about it since Thursday. Your guard. Ben's arm. The thing is, I don't drive in like Ben. Nobody's channelling me anywhere. I come underneath."
"Jonas," said Helen, "the clock does not care for monologues."
"Starting now, then." He smiled at Noor — a true smile, containing respect and hunger in equal parts — and the whistle went, and Jonas Feld moved.
His favourite entry was a thing she had watched twice in Thursday's class and once, slowed by memory, all Sunday morning in her kitchen: a feint at the collar with the right hand to draw the eyes up, a drop of the left shoulder, and then the dive rolling under the guard's right side, inverting through his own shoulder to arrive beneath the hips where his leg entanglements lived, sudden as a knot in a shoelace. It was fast. It was genuinely, beautifully fast, faster than anything Ben's timetable could have imagined, and it depended on exactly one fact about the world: that the guard player would react to the feint, would answer the raised hand with raised hands and lifted attention, and would therefore be looking in precisely the wrong direction when the floor changed sides.
Noor had not watched the hands since she was twelve years old. Watch the hips, Layla used to say, in the Beirut courtyard, in the Paris studio, tapping her own hipbones with two fingers like a woman knocking on a door. The hands lie beautifully. The hips have no talent for fiction. They announce the body's true intentions a half-beat before the body performs them, and a half-beat, at this altitude, is a wide and well-lit country in which an experienced player can move furniture.
Jonas feinted. His right hand rose and offered its beautiful lie, and Noor, who had seen the offer twice in class and a dozen times in the theatre of her own memory, did not take it. Her eyes stayed low and her hands stayed home, elbows resident at her ribs where promises could be kept. His left shoulder dipped for the dive; his hips — his honest, untalented hips — declared the roll a full half-beat early, rotating toward her right. And Noor was simply, quietly, already elsewhere in the geometry: her guard opened not in retreat but in invitation declined, her right leg clearing the line of his dive the way a gate clears a road, her hips turning with him and then past him, so that his rolling entry, that sudden knot, arrived in an empty room. He inverted superbly into the space she had just vacated, and found — the room saw it arrive on his face in real time — that her guard had re-formed behind his entry, that his own momentum had delivered his near arm across her centre as he came up out of the roll, extended in the vulnerable transit between one position and the next, and that she had been holding, all along, the unhurried grip that turned transit into capture.
Her legs closed. Her right hand took his wrist; her left hand found its figure-four through his elbow, threading the grip her aunt had named, in the old judo vocabulary, the question asked with the whole arm. The shoulder lock assembled the way the arm lock had assembled for Ben: not fast, but early. Jonas rolled once more, instinctively, a technician's reflex to unwind the pressure by following it — and found the lock travelled with him like a shadow, because it was not built on the floor. It was built on him.
At twenty-one seconds, with his shoulder approaching the polite end of its range and Noor's face perfectly calm and her pressure as measured as a nurse's, Jonas Feld tapped — once on the mat, twice, laughing even as he did it, a startled, delighted, thoroughly unembarrassed laugh that went around the silent room like a window being opened.