as they had always come, entire and unbidden. What changed was the tenant. Where the appetite had been, something quieter took up residence: a habit of asking, in the half-second before his body answered, the question Adeyemi had installed there, like a man checking a door is truly his to open.
*What is it for?*
He asked it for ten years, in a warehouse with a reluctant stove, under the tuition of a man the record books had finished with and the man himself had finished with the record books. He asked it until asking was no longer a discipline but a reflex, as thoughtless and as total as the gift itself. And if, later, rooms full of strangers would mistake the stillness in him for emptiness, that was only because stillness and emptiness look alike from the outside, the way a tuned piano and a broken one are identical until somebody listens.
The flat was one long room above a shuttered bakery on a Fenwick side street, and it had the acoustics of all such rooms: the pipes announced the neighbours, the neighbours announced the hour, and through the floor, faintly, all day long, came the ghost of the day's bread that was no longer baked there. Tomas had lived in it for six years. He had chosen it the way he chose everything, for the quality of its quiet, and he kept it with the plainness of a man whose riches were stored elsewhere.
He came home that evening with the borrowed gi over his arm and the day still in his shoulders. The academy had emptied slowly after the second round, in the manner of a theatre reluctant to admit the play was half over, and Antoniou had walked him to the door himself and told him the third round would be held at the evening session later in the week, before the whole house. "A thing like this," Antoniou had said, "should either be finished in front of everyone or not finished at all. I have not decided which of those I believe. Come Thursday." Tomas had said that he would, and meant it in the way he meant everything: as a fact about the future he intended to be part of.
He hung the gi over the bathroom door to air. He showered. He made tea in a pot that had belonged to Adeyemi and that he did not think of as a relic, because Adeyemi would have had opinions about relics, and drank the first cup standing at the window while the street below did its evening arithmetic of buses and bicycles and men carrying dinners home in paper bags.
The room's one large piece of furniture was not furniture. Against the long wall stood an upright piano in a state of honourable undress—case open, action drawn out and resting on a trestle, its hammers lined like a choir that had been asked to wait. It was a good instrument, a Bechstein from the years when the name was earned, and Tomas had been restoring it in the hours that other men spend in front of screens: a string a week, a felt a week, no schedule, because the piano belonged to no client and was going nowhere, and he had come to understand that he was restoring it the way other men keep a garden, as a place to put patience. His tools lay on the bench in their order—tuning lever, mutes, the strip of red felt, the fork in its wooden box—and the order was not tidiness but grammar: he needed to be able to think in that room without his hands interrupting.
His phone, face down through the day, offered him the ordinary world when he finally turned it over. A client in the new estates: the upright had gone through the winter badly and Thursday was suggested, was Thursday possible. A second client, cancelling, apologising, rescheduling into next month. He wrote both into the paper diary he kept because Adeyemi had kept one, in pencil, in the hand nobody would have called neat, and put the phone face down again. Nothing in either message knew or cared that their piano tuner had spent the day being taken apart in advance by his own attention, and Tomas found the indifference restful, the way a held note is restful after a difficult chord.