"And the belt," he said at last, because it was the smallest question and therefore the one he could lift. "All week this room has been laughing at a man with no belt. You are telling me that Yusuf Adeyemi's only student — a man he taught for eleven years — has no belt."
"He never graded me," Tomas said. "It wasn't neglect, and it wasn't a test I failed. Near the end I asked him about it once — not because I wanted it, but because I thought he might want the thing completed, the way you finish cataloguing a man's work. He looked at me the way he looked at a piano that someone had polished instead of tuned." Tomas's voice, for the length of one sentence, took on the faintest shape of another man's cadence, and everyone in the hall heard the ghost move through it. "'Belts are for rooms like this one,' he said. 'Rooms with registers, and certificates, and photographs on the wall. I am teaching you for the rooms that are not like this.'" Tomas's own voice returned. "So I have no belt. It isn't a statement. It's just the way he left the work. I came here this week to be evaluated for a scholarship like everyone else. The rest of it — him — wasn't a secret I was keeping." He looked around the hall, at the chairs, at the walls, at the three black belts, with an expression of perfect, unaccusing clarity. "It just never came up. Nobody asked who taught me. Everybody asked what I was wearing."
Antoniou closed his eyes. For a moment the founder of the academy stood in the centre of his own hall like a man alone in it.
"Ask him," he said, to no one, to himself, to thirty years. "God forgive us. We never asked him."
The hall emptied the way theatres empty, in a slow reluctance. Hannah Weiss, who had seen twenty years of gradings and fights and ceremonies through that doorway, performed the office of the evening without being asked: she brought water, she brought Tomas's bag from the wall, she told the last of the students, kindly and without negotiation, that the academy was closed. One by one the three black belts came to do what the evening now required of them, and each did it in the only currency he had.
Sato came first, because Sato's debts were intellectual and he paid intellectual debts promptly.
"I want to correct my understanding of the first round," he said, standing at the precise distance of a man delivering a seminar note. "I believed you improvised a counter to my entry. You did not improvise it. You had completed watching me before I had completed moving — my own technique, handed back to me from the reverse angle, by a man who had seen it once, in the warm-up, while I believed I was merely demonstrating." He considered his next sentence as if it cost by the word. "I have spent fifteen years believing that what I do cannot be answered the first time it is seen, because the first sight of it is the advantage. You have shown me that the belief is a comfort, not a fact. I do not enjoy the discovery." A beat. "I am grateful for it. That is the accurate statement. I am grateful for it."
"You were the hardest of the three to listen to," Tomas said. "Everything you do is quiet until it's finished. He used to say the quiet ones are whole novels."
"Then I am sorry you had to read me at sight," Sato said, and bowed — not deeply, not theatrically, exactly the depth of the truth — and Tomas, who had been taught by a man from a tradition where such things are grammar, bowed back to the same depth, and it was finished between them, in the only language either fully trusted.
Marsh came second, the way a large man enters a small room: carefully, and damaging nothing only by great attention. He had clearly rehearsed something in the corridor and lost most of it on the way in.
"Right," he said. "So. The door, the first day — I was the one who laughed loudest. I want that on the record, it was me. And the warm-up thing, your — in the second round I said to Rafael, I said it in front of people, I said the first round was a trick. A setup." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, which was where, in his own round, the evening's argument had finally landed. "There's no version where I come out of that well, so I'm not going to build one. I'm sorry. It was — I saw a man in a charity-shop jumper with no belt and I did the sum a child does. I'm sorry."