"No," Adeyemi said. "That is exactly the danger we will speak of next week."
The lesson of the following week took a month, and it began with a visitor. They were rare—a handful of old men, mostly, contemporaries of Adeyemi's who came to drink tea and argue about championships forty years gone—but this one was younger, a senior student from a city club, broad and credentialed and full of the cheerful confidence of a man who has been told, accurately, that he is good. He asked to train. Adeyemi, watching Tomas over the rim of his cup, said yes to the training and said nothing else at all, and Tomas understood later that the old man had seen the whole lesson standing in the doorway and had simply allowed it to arrive.
It lasted eleven minutes. The visitor was good; that must be said. But everything he owned, Tomas took in as it was offered, and answered, and answered again, each time cleaner, until the visitor's whole game lay on the mat around him in pieces and the man was breathing through his mouth with a fixed, bright smile that was not a smile. Tomas felt it happening and felt—this is the part he would remember with shame for years, in the small hours—*pleasure* in it. The completeness of it. The appetite of the door standing open. He reached, at the end, for one answer too many, a flourish, a counter designed not to finish the exchange but to exhibit it, and Adeyemi's voice came from the side of the mat, very quiet.
"Enough."
They drank tea afterward, all three of them, because Adeyemi's rules about tea after training had no exceptions, and the visitor left with courtesy intact in both directions and something damaged in his that he would carry home in the car. When the door had closed, Adeyemi washed the cups, and dried them, and hung the towel, and only then spoke.
"You believe I stopped you to protect him," he said. "I stopped you to protect the thing in you. Listen to me now, because I will say this once and then I will trust it to you. A gift that costs nothing to use will be used for nothing, by degrees, until one day you are a man who enters rooms looking for people to take apart, and calls it honesty. I have known that man. Half the world of my youth was that man, in very good gis." He set the last cup down with care. "So here is the law of this room, and it outlives this room. What you can see, you may use to protect—to protect a person, a position, a moment that would otherwise break something. And you may use it to learn. You may never use it to make another man small. Not in anger. Not in jest. Not," he said, "because the room would applaud, and not because for eleven minutes it feels like flying. If a man is taken apart in your hands, it must be because the taking-apart was the work. Never because it was the pleasure."
Tomas said, "I understand," in the voice of a twenty-three-year-old, which is the voice of a man who understands the sentence.
"You understand the sentence," Adeyemi agreed, not unkindly. "The understanding of the rest of it will take the years it takes. That is what the years are for."
The years did their work. The visitor never returned, and Tomas, in time, came to count that as the first entry in a ledger he kept privately, of things his gift had cost other people before he learned its price. The training went on—through Tomas's journeyman years, through his first small flat, through Adeyemi's gradual slowing, the old man's hands growing deliberate as instruments being laid down one by one in their case.
In the last winter of the training, the old man taught him one final thing, and he taught it the way he had taught the first lesson eleven years before: once, at working pace, without ceremony. It was a counter out of the family's oldest line of the art, a turning answer to a whole family of committed attacks, so unfashionable that the modern game had forgotten it existed. Tomas took it in, entire, and gave it back with its counter folded inside it, and Adeyemi stood a long moment with his hands at his sides. "Keep that one oiled," he said at last. "It belongs to a room I hope you never stand in. But rooms decide for themselves, sometimes, who stands in them." He did not say which room he meant, and Tomas, who by then knew the value of an unanswered question, did not ask. The counters still came to Tomas