It was Duarte who picked up Tomas's form. Hannah had left the clipboard momentarily on the desk's edge, and Duarte turned it toward himself with one finger, the way a man turns a wine list.
"Reiner," he read. "Piano tuner." He said it to Marsh, not to Tomas. "Thirty years old. Previous training —" He paused, and the pause did more work than the words. "Private instruction. Unspecified." He set the clipboard down. "Eleven years of forms and nobody has ever heard of it."
Marsh laughed. "Unspecified," he said. "I had unspecified training too. Mine was called Saturday."
"Gentlemen," Hannah said mildly, from behind the desk, "the forms are not reading material."
"No, of course," Duarte said. He looked at Tomas then, properly, for the first time — took in the plain grey sweater, the canvas trousers, the soft shoes worn thin at the heel, the duffel bag that had been mended at one corner with darker thread. Tomas was not a large man. He was not even an average one. His build was the build of his trade: narrow, economical, everything in him arranged for reach and fine control rather than force, and standing among the applicants in their new tracksuits he looked less like a fighter awaiting assessment than a tradesman who had come to service an instrument in the corner.
"Forgive me," Duarte said, in the tone of a man forgiving no one. "It's only that the scholarship is for training. Real training. The notice says commitment rather than accomplishment, yes — but it assumes a beginning that exists. You understand. A man should know whether he is — how do I say — built for the thing he asks for."
"I understand the question," Tomas said.
It was not an answer, and Duarte registered that it was not an answer, and smiled at it the way fencers smile at a guard they intend to go through.
"And the piano," Marsh said, "that's fingers, isn't it. Delicate work." He held up his own hands, which were not delicate. "On the mat it's different. On the mat, things get hold of you."
"Yes," Tomas said. "I expect they do."
Sato had said nothing. He stood a little apart with his arms folded, studying Tomas with an attention that was almost respectful and entirely cold, the way an engineer studies a bridge he believes will fail — not with pleasure, but with professional interest in the manner of the failing.
"You have no belt," Sato said at last. It was not a question, but Tomas treated it as one.
"No."
"No gi in the bag?"
"A towel," Tomas said. "And a change of shirt."
Sato nodded slowly, as if a figure in a column had been confirmed. "Eleven years of private instruction and no grade. In my experience, men who train where nobody can watch them grade themselves generously."
Around the benches, the other applicants were looking at the floor, at the door, at their own hands — anywhere that allowed them to not be part of this. The physiotherapist woman had gone slightly pink with the embarrassment people feel on behalf of strangers. Tomas noticed all of it and filed it where he filed most things, behind the part of his attention that was listening to the room itself: the hum of the strip lights, the creak of the old floor under the mats, somebody upstairs dropping something heavy and swearing softly. Rooms had acoustics. He had spent his working life learning that you could not judge an instrument by the photograph of it, or a hall by its reputation. You had to be in it. You had to hear what it did with sound.
"You don't say much," Duarte observed.
"No," Tomas said. "Not before I've heard anything."
It came out plainer than he intended, and for an instant Duarte's smile thinned, because plain statements are harder to laugh at than boasts. Then he shrugged, turned away, and began an anecdote for Marsh about a man at a tournament in another city who had arrived with a black belt bought from the internet — the story was clearly meant to travel the last three feet to Tomas's bench and be heard there. Marsh laughed on cue. Sato looked out of the window.
Hannah called the first group through — numbers one to four — and the benches stirred. Tomas stood with the others who remained, took off his sweater, folded it once, and laid it on his duffel with the sleeves aligned. It was a small, unremarkable act of tidiness, and he did it the way he set his tools out on the lid of a piano: in order, without waste, each thing where his hands would find it.