And in the spring, Tomas had been graded.
He had asked — insisted, in his quiet way, which over a year the academy had learned was the loudest way he had — on being examined like anyone else: the full syllabus, in front of Antoniou and two examiners from outside, with his name at the bottom of the list in Hannah's handwriting and no asterisk. He had stood the whole examination in the plain clothes of a candidate, and if his hands were steadier than most, it did not save him from Sato, who had somehow got himself appointed to the panel and whose scoresheet, afterwards, was the most demanding document ever produced about one man's falling: *arrives early with the hip. Teaches while examined, which is irregular, and correct.* Duarte had scored him highest and written nothing at all in the comments box, which for Duarte was an oration. Marsh had written, in pencil, *About time*, and then crossed it out and written *Pass*.
Antoniou tied the belt himself. His hands were not entirely steady, and he did not apologise for it, and Tomas did not pretend not to notice. "Yusuf would have had something to say about receipts," Antoniou said, finishing the knot. "I find I am old-fashioned. I like a man to have one." Tomas wore it the way he wore everything, without flourish, and the following Thursday he taught the beginners in it, and nobody in the class treated the hour any differently, which he counted among the great compliments of his life.
Hannah had the desk laid out by eight, and by nine she had the measure of the day the way she had the measure of everything, from behind a list.
"Forty-one names," she told Tomas, when he came in with the tea she pretended she had not been waiting for. "Longest list we've ever had. Three of them wrote on the form — I am not joking, I checked twice — that they were applying because they'd heard about the Thursday class. Heard about it. Like it was a band." She tapped the list with her pen. "A year ago I had to ring round the other gyms and beg people to send us candidates so the panel wouldn't look foolish. Now I have a waiting list for the assessment for a free scholarship and a waiting list for falling over on Thursdays, and my life's work is complete and I can die."
"Don't die before three," Tomas said. "You have the water jug."
On the corner of her desk, wrapped in the remains of its parcel paper, sat the new edition of the academy's manual, delivered that week: a plain, heavy book, the method set out in order the way methods are, hundreds of pages of other men's and women's hands arriving in the correct sequence. On the cover, where for thirty years one surname had ridden alone, there were now two, in the same size of type, which Antoniou had apparently fought the publishers about at some length and at his own expense. Tomas had been given the first copy off the pile and had taken it home and put it on the shelf beside his own notebook, and had not yet been able to open it past the title page, where Yusuf's name stood in print for the first time since before Tomas was born. Some things a man reads slowly, the way he had once read the notebooks. Some things he is still reading.
So when the assessment day came round again — the annual scholarship assessment, adults only, the posters back up in the window and Hannah's desk laid out with its lists and its water jug and its long institutional patience — Tomas was standing on the inside of it, which still, at odd moments, took him by surprise.
The candidates arrived in the morning as candidates do. The confident ones first, loud with their own kit, known to each other from other gyms. Then the sponsored ones, with letters. Then the ones who had trained alone in garages and gardens for years and held their experience the way you hold a bird — carefully, and slightly afraid of being laughed at for having it. Tomas ran the basics warm-up for the first group because Antoniou had asked him to, and if anyone among the black belts thought it strange that the morning now began with the floor, and with breathing out, and with the hips before the hands, nobody said so. It was simply how the morning began now. It had the force of a tradition, which is only a habit that has been loved long enough.