The warehouse had been a joinery once, and it kept the habits of its first life: it smelled of sawdust that no sweeping could entirely evict, and its roof, in rain, conducted a private percussion that Adeyemi claimed to find useful for teaching rhythm. He had laid the mats himself, second-hand and mismatched, over boards he had levelled with a patience Tomas would spend a decade learning to recognise as the whole of the man's method in a single gesture. There was a stove that took an hour to persuade. There was a kettle. There were no mirrors, no banners, no photographs on the walls, because, Adeyemi said, a room should not applaud you; applause made a student perform, and performance was a debt the body collected later, with interest.
Tomas came in the evenings, after days spent inside other people's pianos, with sawdust of a different trade under his fingernails. He was nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one. The years did not arrange themselves into terms or belts. They arranged themselves into seasons of the same few rooms of the art, entered again and again at greater depth: how to fall, until falling was a place he could go on purpose; how to stand, until standing was a decision and not an accident; how to be gripped, thrown, pinned, and held, and to keep, through all of it, the small clear interior quiet that Adeyemi called the listening room.
"You cannot hear a man while you are shouting over him," Adeyemi said, more than once, usually while Tomas was underneath some immovable arrangement of the old man's weight, discovering the truth of it at first hand. "Your body is doing the shouting. Stop the shouting first."
For one whole winter, when Tomas was twenty, Adeyemi forbade him to answer anything. He was thrown, swept, pinned, and held, evening after evening, and permitted only to arrive correctly at the ground and to breathe and to notice. It was the hardest discipline of his life precisely because it looked like nothing, and there were nights he bicycled home through the wet streets convinced the old man was simply amusing himself. What the winter built, though he had no word for it until years later, was the floor of the gift: a body that did not panic could not be rushed into spending itself, and attention that was not spent on survival was free to do its real work. By spring he could tell, blindfold, from the first pressure of a grip, which of six throws was being prepared for him. Adeyemi, informed of this, received the news as a man receives word that a roof has stopped leaking. "Good," he said. "Now you can begin."
What neither of them had a name for, in the beginning, was the speed of the taking-in. Adeyemi would show a technique once—once, at working pace, without ceremony—and Tomas would produce it back to him with the joints of it in the right places, not polished, but entire, the way a tune comes back from a piano after a single hearing in another room. At first Adeyemi treated this as a parlour quality, useful and suspect in equal measure. He tested it the way he tested everything: without announcing the test. He began to borrow. From old judo, from the deep drawers of his competitive years, from the games of dead teachers—he would produce, on a Tuesday, some antique of a counter or a turn he had not performed in thirty years, perform it once, and say nothing, and the following week Tomas would hand it back to him with the dust off it, and twice—then three times, then as a habit—he would hand it back with something added: the place where it could be answered. The counter inside the technique, found unaided, growing out of the technique like a shoot out of a stem.
It was Adeyemi who finally named it, on an evening when the rain was doing its work on the roof and Tomas, at twenty-three, had just returned a particularly sly old turn and then, unprompted, shown him its undoing.
"The doctors have a phrase," Adeyemi said. "Movement memory. They use it small, for patients, for rehabilitation. What you have is the thing itself with the volume left on." He turned his cup in his hands. "Do you know what it is, truly? It is not memory. Memory is a cupboard. Yours is a door. A thing comes in through your eyes and it is already standing in your body, asking what it is for. Most men spend ten years carrying a technique from the eye to the hip. For you there is no journey. There is only the question of what you will do, now that it costs you nothing to know."
"I didn't do anything to get it," Tomas said.