CHAPTER 27 #3
He stands at the stool with the cotton paper folded against his thigh. The left hand is at the bridge of his nose. The breath is six in and eight out. He does not raise his voice. He has not raised his voice in fifteen years.
"He died on a Wednesday in November. " Gabriel keeps his eyes on the floor. His voice is quiet. The Naples-prison clip is in the spaces between the words. "The day we name our books here is a Wednesday in November. " He breathes. "He would have laughed."
The smallest grief I have ever heard him register lives in the second sentence.
I know what the line means because he told me, four years ago, on the eighth night after he came to the United States, the story of the Wednesday-naming and the Sicilian capo's hand on the cover of a notebook in a Naples cell.
Nikolai knows what the line means. Alexei sits outside the meaning of the line, but he knows the sound of a brother whose witness has died.
He stands up at the foot of the daybed and crosses the room and stops three feet from Gabriel and sets his palm to the iron of the orchid shelf at the height of Gabriel's shoulder and does not speak.
The witness work holds. I have been kneeling to give a vow and standing to hold a brother’s grief; both ask the same thing of my hands — steady, open, warm. The vow is given and the news has come and the geometry is holding both.
Elena rises from the daybed slowly with her left hand on her flank and crosses to Gabriel.
She walks; the walking is hers. She stops in front of him and puts both her hands on his face.
She holds his face in silence for ten seconds.
Then she lets go and she steps to his right side and she sits on the iron stool beside his and she puts her right hand on the back of his left hand on the cotton paper at his thigh and she leaves it there.
I hold still. The light on the leather of the Moscow surgeon's medical kit on the lower shelf is shifting now and will be off the leather by fifteen-hundred.
I have watched it shift for nine years. The light is going to shift today as it shifts every day.
The man in the photograph and the man on the page in Naples are going to be the witnesses of a long afternoon.
— — —
Kostya comes for Elena at fifteen-forty.
The cardigan is back on her shoulders. The medallion at her sternum.
The yellow pencil through the knot at her nape, set back into the hair by her own hands.
The pulse at her throat is calm. The count has stayed with me.
Alexei walks her to the door. He kisses the medallion through the chain and replaces it.
He says, low, into her ear, "Stay good for me until tomorrow night.
Keep the count until then," and she nods and steps onto the landing and the elevator takes her down.
Alexei goes with her. Nikolai checks the gallery-glass key in the keeper of the navy strap before he fastens the Patek back on his left wrist. He says, at the door, "Stefan.
The first beat. Thank you," and he goes.
Gabriel stays.
He sits at the orchid stool with the cotton paper in his right hand and the leather notebook from his lab-coat pocket open on his left thigh.
He has held the cotton paper closed since the first reading.
I make a second pot of espresso. I bring him the refilled podstakannik.
I set it on the iron stool's small ledge.
I keep silent. I have kept silent since he said he would have laughed.
I take a breath. One. Two. Three. Four. The count keeps moving.
"Brother. " I keep my voice at the volume he keeps his. "You knew him."
He looks at the cotton paper in his right hand. He turns it once. He sets it down on the small ledge of the iron stool beside the podstakannik. He breathes.
"I knew him. " The two words have the prison in them.
"We will bury his books well."
He looks at me. The dark brown eyes hold mine.
He nods, once. He picks the cotton paper back up and he folds it once more, into thirds, and he slides it into the leather notebook on his thigh between two pages I cannot read because I do not read Italian at speed, and he closes the notebook.
He puts his left hand flat on the cover.
He says, in Italian, words that are not for me — they are for the man in his pocket and the man in the photograph on the shelf both — and then he stops, and he keeps his left hand on the cover of the notebook, and he sits.
The light moves off the iron of the daybed and onto the wall behind it. The afternoon is the afternoon. The next four beats are coming.
I refill his podstakannik again. He drinks.
He stays silent. I am content with that.
The vow is given. The book is open in his lap.
The chest under my shirt is doing what it knows how to do.
The cord at my left wrist is where it was when I came in this morning.
The fourth strand is the one that tells you the count keeps coming, and it does, and it is hers, and it is his too, and it holds for all of us.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The next four are hers.