The City of Lentar

The first thing was the smell, which was not a smell she had written. She had written bakers and the smell of bakers was there, yes, dutiful, the warm yeasted under-smell that any city with bread does eventually offer up; but underneath the bread there was a smell she had not put on the page at all, a sharp green smell like crushed stems, and under that a thinner, drier smell that took her a moment to place and that turned out, when she placed it, to be the smell of paper. A great deal of paper. Paper warmed by sun and handled often. The city smelled, she thought, of having been read.

She was standing at the edge of the square. The square was, as promised, not square; it sprawled the way a puddle sprawls, finding the low places. The stones were pale and worn in the middle and rougher at the edges, as written, and she had the small uncomfortable pleasure of an architect walking through a building she had only ever seen in elevation, finding that the floor was, in fact, where she had put it. The fountain was where she had put it too, low and circular, three steps down to a dry basin, and a child was sitting on the lip of it eating something wrapped in a leaf, and the child had not been in the notebook, and the leaf had not been in the notebook, and the way the child swung her heels against the stone with the exact rhythm of a child anywhere bored in the late afternoon had certainly not been in the notebook, and Iyla, standing very still at the edge of the square in clothes she did not remember changing into — a long loose tunic the color of weak tea, over narrower trousers, the sleeves of the tunic surprisingly heavy at the cuff — felt the small clean fear of a person who has discovered that her draft has been edited by a hand she does not recognize.

She did what she had trained herself to do, which was to notice. She put her hands on her hips, which was what she did with her hands when she did not yet know what to do with them, and she walked.

The stalls sold, she was relieved and faintly insulted to find, things. They sold cloth in stacks that leaned like books; they sold copper pans hung in graduated sizes so that the wind played a small soft scale across them; they sold something pickled in jars the color of weak honey, and something dried in long pale ropes that she eventually identified as a kind of bean; they sold needles stuck in a folded square of felt; they sold cages — she stopped, because cages — they sold small cages, but the cages were empty and stacked, and the woman selling them was, on closer inspection, selling the cages themselves, not whatever might go in them, and was explaining this with some patience to a man who appeared to want a bird. The man wanted a bird. The woman did not sell birds. The woman sold the house of a bird, and what he put in it was, with respect, his business. Iyla, eavesdropping shamelessly, decided she approved of the woman, and added her, silently, to a list she had not realized she was keeping.

It was at the third stall that she understood about the money.

The third stall sold the pickled thing, and she had stopped at it because she wanted, suddenly and irrationally, to taste it, and she had reached for the small leather purse she did not remember being given but which was, when she patted herself for it, at her hip; and she had opened the purse and found in it three coins, which were not coins she recognized, and one folded slip of soft paper, which she did not at first understand. She held a coin out. The woman behind the stall — broad, sun-creased, with sleeves rolled to the elbow and the forearms of a person who lifted jars for a living — looked at the coin, and then at Iyla, and said, "Coin's all right. You could tell me something instead, though, if you'd rather."

Iyla said, "I'm sorry?"

"A story," the woman said, as if Iyla had not heard rather than not understood. "Coin does for the brine. That's fair, the brine costs me to make. But you give me something and I'll put a bit of the green one in as well — that jar there." She nodded at a smaller one, paler, the color of a bruised pear. "Trying to shift it before it turns. Coin or a story, suit yourself. I'm not fussed."

Iyla, who had a great deal of time and was abruptly aware that she had been spending most of her life pretending otherwise, said, "What kind of story."

The woman shrugged. "True one. Short. Don't matter what it's about, much. Just one I've not heard. I get a lot of them about husbands. Not another husband today, if it's all the same to you."

"What if it's not very good?"

"Then it's not very good," the woman said, and shrugged again. "I've heard worse standing here. Go on."

Iyla stood for a moment with the coin warm in her hand. She thought about her mother, who would have offered, in this situation, the story about the cat and the curtain; she thought about Mr. Behr, who would have offered the story about the man who came in every Thursday for a year to buy the same book and never read it; she found, with a small private surprise, that she did not want to offer anyone else's story. She wanted to offer one of her own. She thought for a moment, the woman watching her with the unhurried patience of a person who had watched many people think, and then she said:

"When I was nine I stole an apple from an orchard in a book. I didn't know I was doing it. I thought I was just reading. Years later I went back and got the apple, properly this time, and ate it. It tasted exactly the way I had imagined it would when I was nine. I have not decided yet whether that means I have a very good imagination or whether the apple was very patient."

The woman behind the stall did not laugh, which Iyla found, on balance, a relief; she did something better, which was to go still for a half-second with the small fixed attention of a person putting a thing on a shelf where she could find it again, and then she nodded once, briskly, and reached for the smaller pale jar.

"Right," she said. "Green one's yours. Brine too. Hold your hand out."

Iyla held out her hand. The woman put a small pickled something into it, and then a smaller paler something, and Iyla put both into her mouth at once because she did not trust herself to be polite about them separately, and the brine was sharp and the green one was sweet under the sharp, and she stood at the stall with her eyes watering slightly from the sourness and the woman watching her with a steady appraising warmth, and she understood, in the way she sometimes understood the structure of a poem on a second reading, what the city was doing.

It was not, she saw, that they did not use coin. The coin was real; it was in her purse; the woman had said coin's all right and meant it. It was that the coin was the floor and the story was the ceiling, and the room between them was where the city actually lived. The coin paid for the brine because the brine cost something to make and the woman had to eat. The story paid for the green one, the thing the woman was trying to move before the turn, the thing that was, in some sense, surplus — and the surplus was given, here, in exchange for the one thing a market full of strangers could not otherwise generate, which was the small private fact of one stranger having been, briefly, known by another. They had decided, somewhere in their history, that the surplus of the city would not be hoarded into coin and counted; it would be spent into story and remembered. It was, Iyla thought, walking on with the taste of the green one still bright on her tongue, a choice. A city was always a choice. A market was always a choice. You could not look at what a place charged for and what it gave away and not, eventually, see what it thought a person was for.

She tested it, because she could not help herself; she had not stopped being a scientist merely because she had become, apparently, a tourist with a purse. At the cloth stall she offered coin and was given cloth, briskly, without ceremony — a transaction so ordinary it could have happened in any city anywhere. At the copper stall she offered coin and a remark — a small observation about the way the pans hung — and the seller, a thin man with a wandering eye, gave her the small pan she had asked about and then, after a moment's consideration, polished a smudge off a second one and pressed it into her hand without comment, the way you might tip a waiter who had made you laugh. At the needle woman's stall she offered a story — the one about Mr. Behr and the man with the Thursday book, which she gave away with a small pang of betrayal and a larger pang of pleasure — and the needle woman listened with her head tilted and at the end of it took a needle from the felt, considered it, took a better needle from a different part of the felt, and gave Iyla the better needle, and would not take the coin Iyla then tried, out of habit, to press on her.

"You've paid," the needle woman said, mild, almost reproving, and put her hands behind her back so the coin had nowhere to go. "Don't go paying again. It muddles the count."

"What count?" Iyla said, before she could stop herself.

The needle woman looked at her with the particular expression of a person who had been asked, by a foreigner, what a fork was for. "The books," she said. "Everyone keeps a book. You'll have one too, I expect, if you stay. Mine's down at the scrivener's, third street. I go Saturdays." She paused. She added, with a small kindness Iyla felt physically, the way she had felt the dust-gold warmth on her face stepping in, "You're new. You'll get one. Don't worry over it."

Iyla said, "Thank you," because she did not know what else to say, and walked on with the better needle wrapped in a scrap of paper in her palm and a feeling in her chest like a struck bell.

There was a book. There were, presumably, many books — a city's worth, a scrivener on the third street, a whole accounting of who had told whom what and what it had been worth and what had been given back. The city paid its debts in stories and kept track. It was not a free-for-all of vague generosity; it was a ledger. The thought delighted her so much she had to stop walking for a moment and lean against a wall, which turned out to be the wall in the bakers' alley, the wall with the long crack down it in the shape, if you were generous, of a river. She put her hand on the crack. The wall was warm. The wall acknowledged her, she thought, and chose to be generous back.

She stood there for a while with her hand on the wall and let herself, for the first time since stepping through, simply be in the place rather than take notes on it. The light was going the dust-gold she had written, and the carts were, in fact, kicking up the dust she had written, and somewhere — not the bakers, somewhere further — a man was calling a single repeated word in a voice that sounded like a man who had been calling that word at that hour for thirty years. A woman went past her in the alley carrying a stack of folded cloth so tall it bent her sideways. Two children ran past chasing a third child who was not running fast enough to be properly chased and was clearly enjoying being almost caught. The sleeves of the woman with the cloth, Iyla noticed — and she felt, faintly, the satisfaction of a hypothesis confirmed — the sleeves of the woman with the cloth had small loops sewn into the cuffs, and through the loops were threaded slim wooden pegs, and from the pegs hung small cloth pouches, and the pouches plainly held the woman's day: her coins, her chit from the scrivener, a folded heel of bread for later. The sleeves did work. The sleeves were where you kept yourself when both your hands were full of someone else's cloth. Iyla looked down at her own cuffs — heavy, as she had noted, at the wrist — and found the loops, and found, threaded through one of them, a slim wooden peg, from which hung nothing yet.

She had not been given anything to hang on it. The city was, evidently, waiting to see what she would carry.