a session and did a technique I had never seen, once, at full speed, and told me to give it back to him, and I could. And then he told me the rule that governed everything after." For the first time that evening, Tomas almost smiled. "He said: then you will spend your life being tempted to answer men before they have finished speaking. You will not. You will listen with your body, to the end of every sentence, and you will use what you hear to learn, and to protect. Never to decorate yourself. Those were his words. Decorate. He had a horror of decoration."
Duarte had sat up on the mat. He had not gone back to his corner; there did not, any longer, seem to be corners. "He was a world medallist," he said. It was half statement, half appeal. "Adeyemi. There are photographs. The old men in my own gym — men from his time — they speak of him like weather. And then he stopped. He vanished out of the sport like a stone out of a boat. Nobody knew—" He looked at Tomas with an expression in which the evening's defeat was rearranging itself into a different shape. "He was teaching. The whole time everyone thought he'd vanished. He was teaching you."
"He wasn't hiding," Tomas said. "He was done with being watched. There's a difference." He said it without reproach, as information. "He had given the sport his youth and it had taken it in the way it takes everything, and one day he decided that whatever he had left to teach, he would teach at the speed of a kettle. I happened to be the boy in the storeroom. It could have been anyone willing to stand still long enough."
"Did he ever speak of this place?" Antoniou asked. "Of us. Of — my father."
"Once," Tomas said. "In eleven years, once. We were watching the river from the warehouse door — the storeroom faced the water — and he said there had been a room by another river, when he was young, and a man in it he called the proprietor, who had the loudest laugh in the building and the worst left knee. He said the room and he had disagreed about what a school was for. That was all. There was no bitterness in it, Mr. Antoniou. I want you to have that accurately. It sounded the way a man sounds about weather from a country he no longer lives in. He'd finished with it. Everyone in this room spent thirty years believing there was a wound. There was a door he had closed, that's all, and closed doors were his whole religion."
At the side of the mat, Marsh let out a long breath through his nose, like a man setting down a weight he had denied carrying. Sato stood with his arms folded, his analyst's face doing its work, fitting the week into its true shape — the first round, his own signature entry handed back to him from the reverse angle by a man who had seen it once, in the warm-up, ten minutes before. He nodded once, slowly, at the floor, as if a sum had finally come out even.
"When?" Antoniou said. His voice had gone quiet enough that the room leaned towards it. "When did he— Tomas. When did we lose him?"
"Last spring," Tomas said. "He was seventy-one. He taught on the Tuesday, in the storeroom, the whole session, and he made the tea afterwards the way he always did, and he told me my left side was still a half-second behind my honesty, which was his way of saying goodbye to no one in particular. He died at home, in his sleep, on the Friday. There was no announcement. His family — he has a sister, abroad — arranged everything privately, the way he would have wanted it. I played at the funeral. Not the piano. I tuned the piano in the hall where they held it, and then I played it. It seemed the correct division of labour between us." He stopped. "I didn't know there was anyone to tell. I didn't know this room still counted as his people. He never spoke of it. That's the truth of it, and I'm sorry for the way you've learned it."
Antoniou stood with his hands hanging uselessly, a tall man made suddenly and visibly older, not by the news but by the arithmetic of it: a death a year old, arriving tonight, by hand, like a letter that had been carried in a stranger's coat.