The Character Who Talks Back

She went back on Saturday with a plan, which was, she ought to have known, the first mistake.

The plan was small. She had decided, on the bus home from Behr's the night before, that Lentar would benefit from a locksmith. There was no locksmith in Lentar. She had checked, on three visits, by the simple method of walking the streets and looking at signs, and had concluded that the city, for all its scriveners and bakers and the woman who sold the difficult-to-see dried fruit, contained no one whose business was the making and unmaking of locks. This struck her as an oversight. Cities, she had read somewhere, are held together by their locksmiths almost as much as by their bakers; the lock is, in its quiet way, a load-bearing wall too. She had written, on the model side of the notebook, before bed: Add: locksmith. She had then, because she was learning, also written: Name him before you arrive.

She named him on the bus. She named him Tev, on the grounds that the name had the right number of consonants for a man who worked with small metal things, and she gave him, in the notebook, a shop on the south end of the Small Bridge, two rooms above it, a wife called Naima who taught children to read in the afternoons, a limp from a fall off a ladder at nineteen, and a habit of humming, while he worked, a tune Iyla decided not to specify because she suspected the tune would arrive on its own and be better than anything she chose.

She went in. She crossed the Small Bridge — nineteen stones, still, which she counted with the small thankful pleasure of a person whose savings have not been touched in the night — and she turned, at the south end, to look at the shop she had, on the bus, decided would be there.

There was a shop there. It was the right shop. It had the right door, narrow and green, and the right window, small and slightly fogged in the lower left corner where the glass was older than the rest, and a hand-painted sign which read, in the lettering Iyla had not realised she had been picturing until she saw it: Tev. Locks, keys, hinges. Knock loud.

She knocked loud. She had, she realised, knocking, become slightly nervous, in the way one is nervous on the doorstep of a person one has been writing letters to and is about to meet.

The door opened. The man who opened it was not Tev.

That is, he was. He had the right number of consonants about him, and he had the limp — she saw it in the half-second of his stepping back to let her in, a small favouring of the right knee that was so exactly the limp she had written that she felt, briefly, embarrassed, the way one is embarrassed at recognising one's own handwriting on a sign one had forgotten posting. He had the apron, leather, with the small pocket for the small tools. He had, even, the humming, which was a tune in a minor key that she did not know and immediately wanted to.

He had, however, a face she had not written. The face was older than she had imagined Tev, by perhaps fifteen years, and had a beard, which she had not given him, and one ear that came to a slight point at the top, which she had certainly not given him, and an expression that she recognised, with a small descending feeling in her stomach, as the expression of a person who has been waiting for her and has, while waiting, prepared.

"You're late," he said.

"I'm sorry?"

"You're late," he said again, evenly, not as an accusation but as a man timing a soft-boiled egg. He stepped aside. "Come in. Shut it behind you. The hinge is, as you may have noticed, mine."

She came in. She shut it behind her. The hinge made a small competent noise, the noise of a hinge that had been put up by a man who took hinges seriously.

The shop smelled of oil and brass and, underneath, of bread, because Halun's alley was on the other side of the wall and the wall, Iyla now saw, was thin. There was a counter, and behind the counter a wall of small wooden drawers, each labelled in a careful hand. There were two stools. He gestured at one. She sat on it. He did not sit on the other.

"You're Tev," she said, to be sure.

"I am Tev," he said. "Tev son of Halun's father's cousin, which makes me, on the bakers' side, family, which is why the wall is thin on purpose; we lend each other heat. My wife is Naima. She teaches the alphabet to the children of the alley on a Wednesday and a Friday afternoon, in this room, after I have, on those days, gone to the back. I fell off a ladder at nineteen and the knee, as you can see, did not forgive me. I hum, when I work, a tune my mother sang, the name of which I will not tell you because you have not earned it. All of this," he said, "I will grant you. The rest, we are going to have to discuss."

Iyla, on the stool, found that she could not, for a moment, speak.

"The rest," she managed.

"The rest," Tev said. "You wrote me, I take it, on a bus."

"Yes."

"It was kind of you to give me Naima. Naima is an improvement on my life. I will not pretend otherwise. I would like, on her behalf, to thank you. The limp I had already. The shop I had already. The humming I had already. These things you noticed; you did not invent them. You wrote them down, which is a different verb, and which I have, on the whole, no quarrel with. The beard," he added, touching it lightly, "is mine. The ear is mine. The fifteen years are mine. I have, in case it is of interest to you, a mother who is still living, in a village three days' walk to the east, where the river bends; her name is also not yours to know yet. I mention her because you are, I think, about to ask me to do a thing, and I would like you to know, before you ask, that I have a mother."

"I wasn't going to ask you to do anything," Iyla said, which was, she discovered as she said it, untrue. She had been going to ask him, on the third visit, to help her make a key.

Tev looked at her with the patience of a man who had, in his life, listened to a great many people say a great many things they had not, on closer inspection, meant.

"You were," he said, mildly, "going to put me in a story. I can feel it coming the way a man with my knee can feel rain. There is a thing you want from this city which it has not yet given you, and you have decided, sensibly, that the way to get it is through a locksmith, because the thing has a lock on it, or perhaps it is a lock, and you are not yet sure which. I am, in your notebook, the door to that. Yes?"

"Yes," Iyla said. She was, she found, telling the truth because she could not, in this small room with this man's small competent hinge behind her, manage anything else. "I wanted you to make me a key."

"To what."

"I don't know yet."

"Ah," said Tev. "Then we are, you and I, in the same difficulty, because I cannot make a key to a lock I have not seen, and you cannot describe a lock you have not found, and the both of us are sitting here pretending, for the sake of the story, that this is a smaller problem than it is." He smiled, then, for the first time, and the smile was a good one; it had, in it, the warmth of a man who liked his work and was glad, on the whole, to be having this conversation. "I am willing to help you. I am not willing to be moved. Do you understand the distinction?"

"I'm not sure."

"You wrote me," he said, "on a bus, with the intention that I be useful. I am willing to be useful. I am not willing to be only that. If you require, of me, a man who exists in order to hand you a key at the moment a key is required, I will, on the whole, decline. There are, I should tell you, locksmiths in other cities who would take the job. There are not, however, locksmiths in this city, because you have, until last night, not seen fit to put one here, and I am, therefore, the only locksmith you have. This gives me, I think, a small bargaining position."

Iyla, on the stool, began to laugh, and then stopped, because she saw that the laugh was the wrong laugh.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"What for."

"For — for treating you as a — as a—"

"As a hinge," Tev supplied, kindly. "You were going to say hinge. It is a fair word. Do not be sorry for the word. Be careful, in future, about the verb. You may write me down. You may not write me through. Are we, on that, agreed?"

"Yes," Iyla said. "Yes. We're agreed."

"Good," said Tev. He sat, at last, on the other stool, with the small favouring of the knee, and put his hands flat on the counter between them, and looked at her with an attention that she recognised, with a small lurch, as the attention she had been giving the knocker on her own door, and Halun's apron, and the chip on her own mug — the attention of a person who had decided that the thing in front of them was worth seeing properly. He had, she realised, been reading her the way she had been reading the city. The thought sat in her, for a moment, as the small clean dread she had become acquainted with on the wall by Sefra, and then, as she watched it, resolved itself, somewhat to her surprise, into something more like relief.

"Now," Tev said. "Tell me what you want, and I will tell you whether I am willing, and we will, between us, see if there is a story in it that both of us can live in."

"I wanted," she said, slowly, finding the words, "a locksmith because — because there are people who have been coming into this city without me, and I thought, if there were locks, there would be a way to — to know. To know when, and where. Not to keep them out. I don't think I can keep them out. But to know."

Tev was quiet for a long moment. The humming, which had stopped when he opened the door, had not resumed; she understood that this was, in its way, also information.

"That," he said, eventually, "is a better reason than I had expected. I will, on that, work. I will not make you a key today. I will, today, make you a list of the doors in this city that I know about, and we will, you and I, walk them, and I will show you which of them have, on the inside, the kind of scratch that is left by a key that does not, on the whole, belong. Will that do, for a first afternoon."

"That will do," Iyla said.

"Good," said Tev. He stood. He took, from a hook on the wall, a coat. He paused, at the door, with his hand on the hinge he had, evidently, hung himself.

"One more thing," he said.

"Yes."

"My mother's name," he said, "is Iyla."

He said it without looking at her. He said it the way a man drops a stone into a well to find out, by the sound, how deep the well is. Iyla, on her stool, felt the bottom of her ribs go briefly cold, and then, a half-second later, warm, in the particular way a thing goes warm when one has, against expectation, been given a gift.

"I didn't write that," she said.

"No," said Tev. "You didn't. But you might, in time, have. I thought it was, on the whole, fairer to tell you, so that you would know, when you came back next week, which of us had got there first."

He opened the door. The bell, which she had also not written, made a small bright noise. She followed him out into the four-o'clock, and she did not, then or later, write down what the tune was that he began, on the threshold, quietly to hum; she had decided, somewhere between the stool and the street, that there were going to be, from now on, things about Lentar that she would let be Lentar's, in the way one lets a friend have a private joke with a third party, and that this was going to be, on the model side of the notebook, a rule she would put down later, after she had walked the doors with the man who had, with great courtesy and at the cost of approximately fifteen minutes of her plan, declined to be a hinge.