On the ninth day he telephoned Hannah, because Antoniou had known he would, and Hannah had known too, and the form she sent him was already half completed in her handwriting.
His conditions, when he gave them, were few and plainly meant. Beginners only, and a first-year class in truth, not in name — nobody was to be sent to his hour as a punishment or a spectacle. Fourteen students at most, because a man cannot watch more than fourteen people fall. The door of the hall to stay open, so that nobody ever again had to decide whether they were expected. And no photographs for the academy's pages, not of him, not yet. Antoniou agreed to all of it over the telephone in under a minute, and then said, in the tone of a man laying down a card he had been holding with great patience, "The rate is the senior rate, Mr Reiner. I will not argue about it, and neither will you. Yusuf's student is not a favour this school does itself. He is a teacher it employs."
Tomas wrote the first lesson in his own notebook, in the evenings, in pencil.
It took him four nights to write one page. *Falling,* he wrote. *Standing. Breathing out. The hips before the hands. Nobody in this room is behind anybody else.* He crossed out the last sentence twice and wrote it a third time and left it. He wrote out what Yusuf had written out for him, years before, in the early pages of his own training, and his handwriting slowed as it always did when it came to the borrowing, because some sentences a man copies the way he would carry water.
The night before the first class he laid out his clothes on the chair in his small flat: plain dark trousers, a plain shirt, the shoes he would change out of at the door. He set the alarm he did not need. He made tea and did not drink it and stood for a while at the window over the sleeping street, a slight man of thirty with his teacher's words in a notebook and his teacher's absence in the next room, and he was not afraid, exactly. He was listening — to the building across the city, to the year gone, to himself — the way he had been taught to listen to everything that mattered.
With his body. First, and then with everything else.
He was at the hall an hour early, which Hannah had predicted to the minute, and he changed the room the way a man tunes before a concert: without hurry, and in an order nobody else would have chosen. He laid the beginners' mats in the centre, away from the wall of mirrors, so that nobody would have to watch themselves learning. He put the chairs for bags and coats along the short wall instead of the long one, so that the door, when it opened, opened onto space and not onto a gauntlet of other people's belongings. He filled the kettle in the little kitchen. He left the hall door open — that had been agreed, and written down, and he found he was glad of it in a way that had nothing to do with agreements, because an open door makes a different sound in a building than a closed one, and people deciding whether to come in can hear it from the corridor.
They came the way beginners come anywhere: in twos, mostly, because courage is easier shared, and too early, because beginners would rather be embarrassed by punctuality than by lateness. Fourteen names on Hannah's list, fourteen adults, and Tomas — who had watched rooms all his life from the edges of them — read them as they arrived the way his teacher had taught him to read anything: by where the weight was.
Eddie, sixty-three, a retired bus driver, with hands like rope and a joke ready for every occasion including, especially, his own expense. Denise, a nurse of forty-four who worked nights and had the careful quiet of people who are used to being woken for emergencies. A big man called Paul, thirty-eight, a warehouse foreman, who stood looking at the mats the way a man looks at a frozen lake he has been told will hold him, and who said, to no one in particular, "I've not been on the floor since I was about nine. Not on purpose." A baker's assistant of thirty-one who smelled faintly of vanilla. A tall engineer. A woman of fifty-seven who apologised to the door frame when she brushed it, and then to Tomas for apologising. Nobody under thirty, nobody certain, nobody — and Tomas noticed this with something that felt, absurdly, like pride in a room he did not own — nobody performing.