The place was a warehouse his godfather had converted, years before, in the canal district — one long room with a sprung floor he had laid himself and mats over it, a stove, a kettle, a shelf of cups, and nothing on the walls at all, which Tomas would only later understand was a position and not an oversight. There were no photographs. There was no flag. There was a blackboard with the chalk worn to stubs, and on the first Thursday it was blank.
"Take off your shoes," Adeyemi said. "Stand there." He indicated the centre of the mats with two fingers, not unkindly. "No. Not like a soldier. Like a man waiting for a bus. Good. Now I am going to push you."
He pushed — not hard, a palm at the shoulder, a question rather than an assault — and Tomas, who had braced for it with everything he had, went backward two steps with his arms windmilling, furious at the indignity of it.
"Again," Adeyemi said. "And this time—" he pushed again, identically, and Tomas braced again, harder, and went backward again, and something in the old man's face settled into an expression Tomas would come to know well: the expression of a man whose suspicion has been confirmed and who is not pleased about it. "You see your problem. You are fighting the push before it exists. Your shoulders argue with me. Your neck argues with me. By the time my hand arrives, you have spent everything on the argument, and there is nobody home to receive the actual information."
"What information?" Tomas said, breathing hard, humiliated in a way that had nothing to do with falling. "It's a push."
"It is never a push," Adeyemi said. "It is a sentence about where a man intends to go, written in his hands. You cannot read it if you are shouting over it." He came and stood in front of him, close, and put his own palm up, open, an invitation rather than a threat. "Push me."
Tomas pushed. Adeyemi did not appear to move at all, and yet the push went past him, into a small, precisely offered absence at his shoulder, and Tomas stumbled forward into the space and was caught — caught, held upright a moment by an old man's forearm, as casually as a coat is caught on a hook.
"There," Adeyemi said. "That is the whole curriculum. Everything else is footnotes. You do not need to be stronger than the push. You need to be standing where the push is finished." He released him. "Again. And this time — do not listen with your ears, Tomas. Do not listen with your cleverness, or your grief, or your opinion of me. Listen with your body. It is the only part of you that has never once lied about what is happening."
They did it forty times. On the twelfth, Tomas's shoulders stopped arguing. On the twentieth, he went backward only one step. On the thirty-first, his hip did something he had not instructed it to do — a small, turning give, born somewhere below thought — and the push travelled past him into the offered absence and he stayed standing, blinking, with his heart going like a drum. Adeyemi watched this happen and was very quiet.
"Again," he said finally. And then, once more, and then he did something he would almost never do in all the years that followed: he showed Tomas a thing twice. A short sequence — a step, a turn of the hip, a hand changing its grip in the air — performed once, at teaching speed, without a word of explanation. "Show me," he said.
Tomas showed him. Exactly. The step, the turn, the grip changing in the air at the same height, in the same rhythm, complete as an echo is complete. The warehouse was silent except for the stove. Adeyemi looked at the boy for a long time, and whatever he saw there he put away, the way a man puts away a letter he intends to answer later.
"Interesting," he said at last, and turned to the kettle, and the lesson continued with breakfalls, and he never mentioned it again — not that night, and not for three more years. "Same time Thursday. Bring a towel. And Tomas —" at the door, with the canal dark outside and the first rain beginning to tick against the warehouse windows, "— what happens in this room is for this room. The world has had enough of me, and I have had enough of the world. We will just be two men, and the work. Is that acceptable?"
"Yes," Tomas said, not knowing what he was accepting, which is the only way anyone ever accepts anything that matters.
"Good." Adeyemi locked the door behind them both. "Then we begin properly next week. This week was only standing."