"It will be reprinted," Antoniou said. "With two. The publishers have been informed; they were more gracious about it than I deserved. The history on our own wall comes down this week and goes back up true. And there will be a class — I have not decided its shape yet — on where what we do actually came from, because some of you have been executing another man's sentences for years without knowing his name, and a technique without its history becomes a superstition." He almost smiled. "Yusuf used to say that. It is in the notebooks, in both their hands, which tells you whose line it probably was first. I will not make that mistake on his behalf again."
The class bowed off in near silence. People went out slowly, in twos, talking low, and more than one of them stopped on the way to the changing rooms and stood a moment in front of the photograph wall, reading the frames in their new order, like people re-reading a familiar page and finding a line they had somehow never seen.
Antoniou came to the workshop on a wet morning, which nobody had ever done before, and stood dripping politely just inside the door while Tomas explained that he could not shake hands because his were full of piano.
The workshop was not really a workshop. It was the back room of a music shop on the high street, rented by the month, containing two uprights in pieces, a grand action on a bench under a sheet, shelves of felts and bridle tapes and centre pins in labelled tins, and a kettle. Tomas worked there three days a week and tuned in people's houses the other three, and the room smelled of wood dust and the particular glue that piano men have used for a hundred years. Antoniou, in his good coat, looked like a man who had wandered into the wrong century and decided to be gracious about it.
"I won't keep you," he said. "I have come to make you an offer that is not the scholarship."
"You've made me that one," Tomas said. "Twice."
"This is a different species." Antoniou turned his hat in his hands. "The beginners' fundamentals class. Adults, first year, Thursday evenings — the assessment hour. Our Mr Ellery has taught it for six years and he is moving to the coast in the spring, and I find I do not want to fill the post from the usual list. I want you to teach it. One evening a week. Standard instructor's rate, paid monthly, on the books like anyone else's." He paused. "It is the class for people standing where you stood. I would like the first thing they learn in my building to be taught by the man the building failed at the door."
Tomas set down the hammer he was holding, very carefully, on a piece of felt.
"Mr Antoniou," he said. "I don't have a belt."
"I know what you don't have."
"The people who laughed at me have belts. Black ones. The people I'd be teaching would ask what I am, and the honest answer is that my teacher is dead and he never graded me, and there is no certificate and no — " He stopped. He had not known he was going to say any of that out loud, and certainly not to this man, and he looked at his own hands as if they had betrayed him in a minor way.
Antoniou waited. He was good at waiting; it was the thing thirty years of other people's confessions in an office had taught him, and he used it now without mercy and without cruelty.
"Yusuf used to say a belt is a receipt," Tomas said at last. "It proves a transaction happened. He said he had no receipts to give me because nothing between us was a transaction. At the time I thought that was beautiful. Some days since he died I have thought it was — " he searched — "inconvenient. A man needs a receipt sometimes. At doors." He looked up. "You are asking me to stand at the front of a room in your academy, with no receipt, and teach."
"I am asking you to stand at the front of a room in my academy and teach beginners how not to be hurt and how not to hurt anyone," Antoniou said. "I have seen your receipts, Mr Reiner. I watched three of them get written across my best men, one round at a time, under rules I set myself. The paper kind can be arranged if you ever want it — a grading, properly done, in front of