Chapter Sixty
She has been sitting on it for thirteen weeks.
She asked me in June, at this table, with her chin on the wood, whether she was allowed to change it. I said yes. She said, all of it. I said, all of it.
And then she went away and thought about it for the whole of the summer, and she did not mention it once, and neither did I, and I have discovered that I am capable of not mentioning a thing for thirteen weeks and that it is the hardest work I have ever done, harder than the floor, harder than the report, harder than standing in front of four hundred people in my own building with my hands on a lectern.
Ines asked me in July why I did not simply raise it.
I said, because she is not deciding it, she is surveying it, and you do not walk up to somebody who is surveying and tell them what they are going to find.
Ines said, listen to yourself.
She tells me on a Tuesday in September, over a plate of eggs, in nine words, with her mouth full.
“I am going to have the other one as well.”
I put the pan in the sink.
I run water into it, and I do not turn round, and I count to five with my hands in cold water, because if I turn round now with my face doing what my face is doing she will file it, and she files everything, and in nine years she will take it out of the jar and look at it.
“Which one,” I say.
“You know which one.”
“Say it.”
“Kastellanos,” Sophia says. “With the K.”
She has been able to spell it since March. She spells it out loud to people who have not asked. It is a very long word for the box on a form and she has strong opinions about the boxes on forms.
I dry my hands.
I sit down opposite my daughter at a kitchen table in Milan, and I go into it the way you go into a wall you do not know the depth of, which is slowly, with a small tool, at the corner, where it will not matter if you are wrong.
“You are keeping Lindqvist.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because it is on the drawings,” she says, “and because you need it. And because if there are two of us with it then there is a spare.”
I let that go past me.
“And the other one,” I say.
She eats another piece of egg.
“Sophia.”
“What.”
“Why the other one.”
And my daughter, who is five and a half years old and who has her father’s way of putting a fork down before she says a true thing, puts her fork down.
“Nobody was using it,” she says.
The fridge is doing what it does. There is a man in the street with a trolley and one bad wheel and he comes past at this time every morning and he has done for six years.
“That is not a reason,” I say.
“It is a reason.”
“It is a description.”
She looks at me, and she is annoyed, in the specific and delighted way of a person who has been given a real problem, and she thinks about it with her whole face.
“It is not on anything,” she says.
“What is not.”
“His name.” She counts it off, and she does it on her fingers, and she has clearly done this before, in her head, in bed, more than once.
“It is not on the gate. It is not on the ships, Theo says they painted them again. It is not on the report, that is yours. It is not on the drawings. It is not on the door of the office. It is in the book in the trade column and the book is finished and it is in a drawer.”
She stops.
“It is not on his own house,” she says. “He has not got one.”
I do not say anything.
“He is the custode,” Sophia says. “The custode does not go in the book. He is the book. You told him that.”
“I did.”
“So it is nowhere,” she says. “It is a whole name and it is nowhere, and it is a good one, it is nine letters, and it is just lying about.”
And I sit at my kitchen table with my hands flat on the wood.
“Sophia,” I say, and I am extremely careful, and I am not careful enough. “Are you doing it for him.”
And she looks at me as though I have drawn a window on the wrong side of a wall.
“No,” she says. “It is mine now.”
She picks her fork back up.
“You can tell him if you like,” she says, with her mouth full. “I do not mind. But he is not to say anything about it, because he will do the thing with his face, and I do not want him to do the thing with his face at breakfast.”
I get up.
I go to the sink and I run the water again and I put my hands under it and I stand there for a while with my back to the room and the tap going.
I did not build that.
I have thought about it a great many times since, at four in the morning, in a boatyard, in a shed that smells of oak and linseed, and it is the only thing in my whole life I have ever been glad to have had no hand in at all.
Nobody was using it.
She went and looked. She went and looked at every place in the world where a man’s name might be, the way I go along a wall with my knuckles, and she found that there was not one, and she has been carrying it around all summer like a piece of stone she picked up in a yard, and this morning she put it in her pocket.
I do not tell him for three days.
When I do tell him, in the yard, at seven o’clock, with the hat in his hand, he does exactly the thing with his face.