Chapter 11
Luca
The passenger window had been stuck since ?tanjel. He’d mentioned it once, in passing, not even to Matej directly, just out loud, as he does when small things break and he’s accepted it.
He finds his car in the morning with the window fixed.
No note. Nothing said at breakfast. Matej pours coffee and talks about the weather coming in from the coast and Luca sits there holding his cup thinking about a window that opens now when it didn’t before.
He drinks his coffee. He listens, or appears to.
He wonders what else Matej has noticed.
His eye moves to the shelf above the door: a hook, a coil of rope, a tin without a label.
Nothing that means anything. But for a moment he is aware of the house not as a backdrop but as a thing that has been gathering someone into it for a long time.
The thought comes sideways, as the inconvenient ones do: that you can walk into a place and belong to it before you understand why.
The house keeps what it gathers. He is less certain it will keep him.
He has started to recognise the trail Matej leaves through the house.
Evidence. A clear sequence of it: limestone dust at the door, a dark smear of machine grease on the edge of the sink, a pale curd-residue on the wooden handle of something left on the counter.
If he follows it, he can reconstruct the morning: tractor first, then the cheese room, then back through the kitchen without washing his hands properly, then out again.
He mentioned this once. Matej looked at the counter and said hm and wiped it with a cloth that was not entirely clean and left.
He has stopped mentioning it. He just reads it now. He doesn’t know when that started, and this is the first morning he hasn’t told himself it doesn’t matter.
The fourth thing he cannot read at all.
A notebook is open on the counter, left there, and he goes to move it before the coffee pot can leave a ring.
Cheese, he assumes, from the columns of dates and weights in Matej’s blunt hand.
Nothing he hasn’t seen. But the margin of the right-hand page has been used for other notes, a few lines crammed sideways, a thought caught before it could escape, no proper paper to hand.
A word he can read: entropy. Under it, Cox / wrong way round.
Then an arrow, and the arrow points back on itself.
A small drawing he takes a second to place: a wheel of cheese in cross-section, or the rings of a tree, or the layers of the dripstone, he can’t tell which, and he suspects it’s meant to be all three.
A number with a question mark. The word equilibrium, underlined twice.
He should be getting on with his day. Instead he stands there, trying to follow the wild track of Matej’s mind as it races off across the margin.
He knows what entropy is. He could give the dinner-party version: everything runs down, the universe cools, the cup of coffee in his hand will never un-cool itself.
He knows who Cox is. What he cannot do is build the bridge between the word and the cheese, the bridge Matej has clearly walked across and out the other side, into a thought of his own.
The pieces are legible. The thinking is not.
He has been picturing a man who makes cheese in a little room next to his kitchen and fixes windows and knows a fact about Roman concrete. Not a man who argues, alone, at a counter, with a physicist on the radio about which way the whole universe is trying to go.
He closes the ledger. He has the uncomfortable sense of having made the man smaller in his head than he was, and of being caught at it, though no one saw.