Naming as Building

She went back to Lentar on a Wednesday, with a list in her pocket and a knife, metaphorically speaking, on the table between herself and the part of her that wanted to stay.

The list of small specific true things had, by Wednesday, eleven entries. The knocker on her door was a hand holding a small round fruit, she had decided, after standing on her landing for four full minutes; she had not been able to say, with any confidence, whether the fruit was a pomegranate or a peach, and had written fruit (round, possibly pomegranate) in the way one writes a name one has not, quite, caught at a party. The chip on her mug was on the right side as you drank from it, not the left. The man at the corner shop was called Mr. Aydin and had a daughter at university in Leeds. She had collected these things the way Kettle, presumably, collected smells: not because they were beautiful but because they were hers, and because Maro had said, without saying, that they were the rope.

She went in through the notebook, with the new page open and the kitchen door locked and a second kettle on a timer, because she had decided, on the walk home from the soup place, that she would no longer rely on her own kettle as a clock. Lentar received her the way it had received her each time before, which is to say without making a fuss about it. The dust-gold afternoon. The fountain. The loop at her cuff, still empty.

She had come, this time, with an intention. She had come to find out what happened if she named a thing.

She chose, for the experiment, the smallest available thing. There was, at the corner of the market square, a cat. The cat was the colour of a wet roof and had been there, she was almost sure, on each of her previous visits, although she had not, on any of those visits, paid it the kind of attention a cat is owed. It was sitting now on the low wall by the fountain, with its paws tucked under it in the way of a cat that has decided to be, for the afternoon, a loaf.

"You," Iyla said, quietly, the way one speaks to a cat one does not want to frighten, "are called Mehri."

The cat looked at her. The cat had, she noticed, one eye slightly paler than the other, a detail she would have sworn, on oath, had not been there a moment before, and which she understood, with the small clean dread she was learning to recognise, had either always been there or had arrived in the half-second between her saying the name and the cat hearing it.

She wrote in the notebook, on the Lentar side, which was the side she had begun, without quite deciding to, to keep separately: Cat by the fountain. Mehri. Left eye paler. Wet-roof grey.

She walked on. She was, she realised, slightly out of breath, in the way one is out of breath after lifting a thing that turned out, on the lift, to be heavier than it had looked.

The baker, when she got to the alley, was at her door. She had been, on previous visits, just the baker, in the way characters in a book one is reading for the first time are the baker until the writer condescends to tell one their name. Iyla had been, she now saw, lazy about this. She had been treating Lentar the way a tourist treats a country: as a backdrop with extras.

"Good afternoon," she said.

"Good afternoon," the baker said.

"What is your name," Iyla said.

The baker looked at her with the small surprise of a person who has been asked a question whose answer she has, until that moment, been carrying without knowing it. "Halun," she said, after a beat that Iyla felt, in her sternum, as the small click of a lock turning. "Halun, daughter of Vesh."

Iyla wrote it down. She wrote down also, because she had developed, in the soup place, the habit, the colour of the apron Halun was wearing (a brown so dark it had a green in it, the way a forest floor has a green in it) and the burn on the back of her left hand, low, near the wrist, which had the shape of a small comma.

"How long," Iyla said, carefully, "have you been called Halun."

The baker considered. The consideration took, Iyla thought, slightly longer than such considerations should. "Always," Halun said, at last, with the small puzzled smile of a person being asked, in her own kitchen, whether her hands are her own. "It is the name my mother gave me."

"And your mother."

"Is Vesh," Halun said. "Vesh, daughter of Halun. We alternate. It is the custom, in the alley."

Iyla wrote custom in the alley: alternation Halun / Vesh, mother to daughter. She wrote it the way one writes a thing one did not invent and which has, nevertheless, just been given to one to hold. The loop at her cuff felt, for the first time since she had noticed it, slightly less empty, in a way she could not have explained and did not, at that moment, try to.

She walked the city for an hour, by what she estimated was the city's hour. She named, in that hour, eleven things. She named the fountain Sefra, because the word arrived in her mouth before she had thought of any other, and she did not, on reflection, want to choose against the word the city had, apparently, been waiting to hear. She named the bridge at the south end of the market the Small Bridge, because it was, and because she had learned, by then, that an honest name held better than a clever one. She named the wind that came down the bakers' alley in the late afternoon the four-o'clock, on the grounds that it was, and on the grounds that the baker, when she had said it experimentally aloud, had nodded as if Iyla had at last got around to acknowledging a neighbour. She named a tree she had not previously noticed the leaning one. She named, with some hesitation, the man on the coin Aren the Second, on the grounds that this was what the coin said, and that to fail to ratify what the coin said felt, suddenly, like a discourtesy to whatever had stamped it.

After each name, the thing named became, in a way she could only describe to her notebook as louder, more itself. The fountain, after Sefra, had a specific sound, where before it had had the generic sound of fountains. The bridge, after Small Bridge, had a specific number of stones in its parapet, which she counted, and which were nineteen, and which she suspected would, on her next visit, also be nineteen, in a way the things she had not named might not, she now feared, be anything at all.

She tested this, because she was, still, the woman who had designed the apple protocol. She walked back to a stall she had passed earlier, a stall selling what she had vaguely thought of as some kind of dried fruit, and which she had not named, and which she had not, on passing, looked at properly. The stall was there. The fruit was there. The fruit was, she found when she tried to look at it, difficult to look at; her eye slid off it the way an eye slides off a face in a crowd one has no reason to single out. She could say, of the fruit, that it was dried, and that it was, broadly, fruit. She could not have said its colour without choosing one, in the way one chooses, and she understood, choosing, that she was not remembering but supplying.

She did not name the fruit. She wrote, in the notebook: Unnamed things in Lentar are provisional. They exist, but they exist at the resolution of the glance. Named things harden. And then, underneath, because she was learning: Naming is not decoration. Naming is the load-bearing wall.

She thought, walking back toward Sefra, about her flat. About the knocker she had stood under for four minutes and not been able, with confidence, to describe. About the man at the corner shop she had been calling, for six years, the man at the corner shop, and who had become, on Tuesday evening, in the space of one deliberate question, Mr. Aydin, daughter at Leeds, and who had, at the moment of becoming so, also become, in some way she could feel in her chest, a person it would now be harder for the tax to take from her. She thought about the practice Kettle had described, of writing the list before and reading it after. She understood, suddenly, that the practice was not a trick for surviving the trips. It was the trips, in miniature, conducted on this side. Every name she gave a thing in her own life was a small bridge with a counted nineteen stones in it. Every thing she failed to name was a stall of dried fruit, sitting where her eye would slide off it the next time she came home tired.

She wrote in the notebook, on the side she kept for what she was choosing to call the model, although she had not yet admitted to anyone, not even Kettle, that she was keeping such a side: Language is infrastructure. The named city stands. The unnamed city is weather. This is true in Lentar. It is also, I am increasingly afraid, true at home.

She sat on the wall by Sefra. Mehri the cat, who had not moved, opened the paler eye and closed it again, in what Iyla chose, generously, to read as approval. She stayed for a few more minutes, because she had decided, on the walk to the soup place, that she would in future leave Lentar slightly before she wanted to, in the way one leaves a party slightly before one wants to, so that the party would, in memory, want her back rather than be glad to see the back of her. She counted the stones of the Small Bridge from where she sat: nineteen. She said, under her breath, Halun, daughter of Vesh. Sefra. The four-o'clock. The leaning one. Mehri. The names sat in her mouth the way the list of small specific true things sat in her pocket — as ballast, as rope, as the unromantic and entirely load-bearing fact that a thing with a name is harder to lose than a thing without one.

Then she went home, and she stood in front of her own blue door, and she looked, with the attention she had given the baker's apron, at the knocker, and she wrote in the notebook, finishing at last the sentence she had begun on Friday: The knocker on my door is a hand holding a pomegranate, with the seeds showing at the split. She had not, before that moment, known about the seeds. She suspected, putting the notebook away, that the seeds had always been there, and that she was only, now, the kind of person who had got around to noticing them; but she allowed, also, with a small honest unease, the possibility that she had just, in the act of writing the sentence, put them there, and that the door was, from this evening on, going to be a door with seeds in its knocker because she had said so, and that this was, on the whole, a responsibility she was going to have to learn to carry without flinching.

She locked the door behind her. She wrote seeds on the list, after pomegranate. She made tea. The kettle, this time, did not boil dry, because she had, before going, set a second one on a timer, which was, she understood now, also a kind of name: a small specific true arrangement she had made, on purpose, in cash, before the power could ask her to pay by surprise.