The handwriting filled the pages edge to edge. Class plans in neat columns. Attendance lists, names in alphabetical order, ticks and crosses. Drills described in words and in small, patient diagrams, arrows bending like rivers. And in the margins — Tomas watched Antoniou see it, watched his whole body change when he saw it — in the margins there was a second hand, heavier, slanted, impatient, the ink a different blue.
"My father's hand," Antoniou said. It was not a question.
"They wrote them together, some of these," Tomas said. "Yusuf kept all of it. Even the arguments. Especially the arguments, I think. There's a page further in where they filled three margins disagreeing about a warm-up." He said it gently, and Antoniou laughed once, unwillingly, the way a man laughs at a graveside at something true.
Page by page, then: the fees column, with sums so small they read like a misprint. The note of the first class ever taught in the building — four students, a borrowed floor, rain coming through one corner of the roof, and underneath, in Yusuf's hand: *We begin anyway. The room is good.* A list of names Antoniou half-knew from childhood dinners, men and women who had been young once in this hall and had gone on to be old somewhere else. Sketches of grips. A child's height marked — no. A student's progress, month by month, in sentences of devastating plainness: *Afraid of falling. Falling anyway. Not afraid. Teaching the new ones to fall.*
"These are the academy's," Antoniou said at last, and closed the book with infinite care, as if the pages might object. "The early ones. This is our first decade. I have — the academy has photographs, Mr Reiner, and a charter, and my father's trophies in a case I never open. We do not have this. We never had this. I thought it had all gone with him, or never existed outside his— " He did not finish. "Why did he keep them? All those years. Why did he never — he could have burnt the lot of them, and no one would have blamed him. I would not have blamed him."
"I asked him once," Tomas said. "Near the end, when the box came to me. I asked why he never brought them back himself. He said a thing handed back has to be asked for, or it's only an argument starting again. He said the room would ask when it was ready to hear the answer." Tomas looked at the mats through the office doorway, at the class changing over, the evening light going. "I think he knew it might not be in his lifetime. He kept them anyway. That was his way of asking."
Antoniou's hands rested on the closed notebook. He was fifty-nine years old and the founder's son and the founder of the place in every way that mattered, and for a moment he looked like none of those things, only like a man who had been handed a letter forty years late.
"Leave them with me," he said. "A few days. I need — " He stopped himself, and began again, more honestly. "Leave them with me."
"They're yours," Tomas said, and stood, and put his coat on, and left the box on the office floor where he had set it down, because there was nothing else in the conversation that needed carrying. "They've been yours longer than they've been mine."
He let himself out through the hall while the senior class was bowing off, and nobody laughed, and nobody needed to; a room full of tired adults nodded at a piano tuner carrying nothing at all, and that was an ordinary thing, and it was enough.
Antoniou read until the caretaker knocked. He read the first notebook through and then again more slowly, and near the back, on a page Yusuf had ruled off and headed with a date, he found a class his father had taken alone, described in his teacher's fair, unforgiving hand, and at the foot of it a single sentence:
*G. took the class tonight. He is better with the frightened ones than I am. I am writing it here so that I remember to envy him less.*
Antoniou sat with that for a long time, in the emptying building, with the box at his feet and both men's handwriting open under the lamp, and he did not close the book until the hall outside was dark.
On the Saturday, Antoniou cancelled the last ten minutes of the open class and asked everyone to stay.