He was early, of course. He sat in the car park for nine minutes with the engine off, watching the evening classes come and go through the glass doors of Stonebridge Martial Arts, and then he lifted the box out with both arms and carried it in under the eyes of everyone in the hall.
It was heavier than paper should be. That was what people always said about it, and it was wrong; it was exactly as heavy as paper is, and the weight was only the years.
Hannah met him at the desk. She looked at the box, and then at him, and whatever she had decided not to say on the telephone stayed unsaid; she only held the office door for him, which was kindness enough.
George Antoniou was standing when Tomas came in, which Tomas had never seen him do for anyone. There was a letter on the desk in a cream envelope, already open, and beside it two glasses of water, one of which Antoniou pushed a half-inch in Tomas's direction as he sat down. Tomas set the box on the floor beside his chair, carefully, the way you set down a sleeping animal.
"The scholarship is yours," Antoniou said. No preamble; he was a man who had rehearsed speeches all his life and had learned, late, to distrust them. "Fees paid for two years. Full equipment. The stipend, monthly, as advertised. The panel was unanimous — I want you to know that the three of them were the first three signatures." He turned the letter around on the desk so that Tomas could read it, though Tomas did not at first look down. "It's yours by right, Mr Reiner. You were assessed. You were the assessment."
Tomas looked at the letter then. His name was typed on it, and the academy's name, and figures, and a date, and the signatures at the bottom in three different inks, and fourth beneath them Antoniou's own. He read it with the care he gave to other people's documents, and then he folded his hands on his knees.
"Thank you," he said. "Please thank the panel for me. I can't take it."
Antoniou had clearly prepared for gratitude, and possibly for tears; he had not prepared for this. "You can't — " He stopped. "Mr Reiner. You came here to be assessed for that scholarship. That is the entire purpose of the day. You stood in my hall and you — " He gestured, once, helplessly, at the wall between the office and the mats, at everything that had happened on the other side of it. "You cannot decline an assessment you asked for. It isn't done."
"I didn't come for the scholarship," Tomas said.
The room went very quiet. Through the wall came the muffled counting of a class, the slap of bodies on mats, the ordinary evening of the place, going on.
"I came because it was the only door into this building that was open to the public," Tomas said. "I checked. A man can't just walk in off the street and ask to speak to the founder. But anyone may present himself for assessment. So I presented myself." He put one hand flat on the lid of the box beside his chair, not opening it, the way you rest a hand on a shoulder. "I came to bring these home, Mr Antoniou. The assessment was how I got through the door. I'm sorry for the — " He searched for the word and rejected two. "For the method. It seemed more honest than a letter. Yusuf always said a letter can be filed. A man in the room has to be answered."
Antoniou looked at the box for a long time.
"Open it," he said at last, quietly. "Please."
The lid was stiff. Inside, packed tight as bricks, were the notebooks: exercise books with marbled covers, cloth-bound ledgers gone soft at the corners, a sheaf of loose pages held in a folder of oiled card. Tomas lifted the first one out and laid it in Antoniou's hands — not the topmost of his own years, but the earliest in the box, the one he had chosen that morning out of all of them to be the first thing the man saw. Its cover was darkened where hands had held it for decades. On the flyleaf, in a young man's careful hand, was a name and a year and the words *Stonebridge — first winter*.
Antoniou opened it the way Tomas had known he would: like a man opening a door he had himself locked.