Tomas, kneeling, still breathing evenly, looked past him — not rudely, but the way a man looks for the person to whom an answer is actually owed — to the referee's table, where George Antoniou stood with the stopwatch forgotten in his fist and thirty years standing behind his eyes.
Antoniou answered for him. Quietly. To Duarte, to the room, to himself.
"That," he said, "was taught in this building. Before you were born. By a man I have not heard named in this room for twenty years."
He came around the table then, slowly, like a man crossing a river on stones he is no longer sure of, and stopped at the edge of the mat, and looked down at Tomas with an expression in which recognition and grief and something very close to accusation were all fighting for the same face.
"Who taught you that?" he said.
"Yusuf Adeyemi," Antoniou said.
He said it to the mat, to the two men on it, to the room, in the voice of a man reading an inscription off a stone he had believed was lost. The name went around the hall the way names do when they are heavier than the air: most of the students had never heard it, and knew from the faces of the few who had that they were in the presence of something with a history. Hannah Weiss wrote it down on the corner of the scoresheet, out of some reflex of record-keeping, and then stopped, pen held above the paper, uncertain whether she had been given a result or a confession.
"That counter," Antoniou said. "The roll-through. The pin that accompanies. I have not seen it done in thirty years, and I have never seen it done by anyone who did not learn it from him. There was only ever one source for it. It was his. He invented it out of his own body, out of the way he was built, and he taught it to perhaps a dozen men in his life, and every one of them is old now, or gone." He stopped at the edge of the mat, and the question he had already asked stood between them still, waiting to be answered properly this time. "So I will ask you again, and I would like the truth. Who taught you?"
Tomas had risen to his knees, and then to his feet, with the unshowy care of a man leaving an instrument in its case. He looked tired for the first time that evening — not in his body, which had the settled quiet it always had, but somewhere behind the eyes, where a door he had kept shut for a long time was about to be opened by someone else's hand.
"He did," Tomas said.
The room made a sound that was not a sound.
"He was my godfather," Tomas said. "He and my father were friends from before I was born — boys together, on another continent, and then again here, by accident, the way men of that generation found each other in new countries. When I was nineteen I went to work in a piano shop in the old market, and in the evenings I went to him. He had a storeroom behind a warehouse on Dock Street — mats, a kettle, a radio that only worked when it chose to. He taught there. Not a school. There was never a school. There was a room, and him, and whoever he had decided to let in, and in eleven years I was mostly the only one who stayed."
"Eleven years," Antoniou said.
"Three evenings a week. Sometimes four, when the shop was quiet." Tomas's hands, at his sides, opened and closed once, slowly, the way they did over a keyboard when he was deciding where a piece of work began. "He was the only teacher I have ever had. Everything I did tonight — everything I did in all three rounds — is his. The things that looked like mine are his with my body's accent. That's all."
"And the watching," Antoniou said. It was not quite a question. "The eyes. The hips, never the hands. The—" He searched for the shape of it, a physician searching for a diagnosis he already knows. "You see a thing once."
"I see a thing once," Tomas said, simply, as a man confirms the colour of his own eyes. "It isn't cleverness. I want to be clear about that, because people make it sound like a gift, and it never felt like one in his room. Bodies stay with me. A man's movement goes into me the way a piece of music does, whole, with the fingering attached. He found it in me the first year — he stopped