The sound of water dripping from the eaves grew a little faster every morning.
The market people had been right when they said it was the last cold spell. For the following several days, the cloth stuffed into the window cracks never trembled once, and the snow banked against either side of the blue door melted from the bottom, widening the path a little each day.
The area below my knee only ached on the day after that night. Even so, I developed a habit of checking first thing every morning whether the numbness remained. If it did not, I would let out a breath and get up, never able to tell whether that breath was relief or something else.
The list remained hanging on the wall.
The one line beneath my eight lines remained as well, its box still empty. Every morning, Danika stood before it and scanned it from top to bottom. From behind her, I could not tell whether her eyes stopped on that last line.
The two flat stones beside the stove were still there too. No one touched them during the day, and there was still no need to heat them at night, but their mere presence made the kitchen look a little different from how it had before that night.
Whenever I went to the kitchen for water, I read that line. Each time, I had a similar thought.
I had written the list, but it was the person who had come to learn who did something not on that list, then added it to the list afterward.
The person seated at the table to teach was learning in reverse from the person being taught, but I did not say it aloud. If I did, Danika would bow, and I still did not know how to accept that greeting.
Danika used a piece of charcoal to bring a task from outside the list into it. I had the same charcoal in my inner pocket, but I had only ever used it to write down things others were to do and things I had received.
For those three days, I did not go to the back door. Instead, I spent longer standing in front of the wall, and whenever Danika passed me there, she slowed her steps slightly before returning to her usual pace.
Rather than put what I had learned into words, I put it on paper.
On the evening of the third day, I sat at the table and tore open a remaining corner of the employment agency documents. I used the same charcoal as for the list I had written for Danika, and the same Teyvat script, but this time the reader would be the old man.
I wrote down what a props room worker who could not lift boxes could do in the props room. I had failed to answer that question and turned back from the back door again and again, but the answer had been hanging on the wall from the start. I only had to write it in the same form.
The first line I wrote was lifting boxes. My hand wrote it first, following the order ingrained in my body, and after staring at it for a long time, my mind belatedly drew a line through it with charcoal. From the next line onward, my mind went first.
Counting while seated, writing checklists, polishing candlesticks, polishing glasses, recording chalk marks.
I chose only things I could do while using a cane, and there were five lines. I drew a box before each one. I did not know whether five lines would be worth a position to the old man, but it was better than going without anything written down and turning back again.
Writing those five lines took as long as writing eight. I wrote, erased, and rewrote every line, leaving black smudges where I had erased on the paper.
Once I was done, I slipped it beside the paper in Hangul in my coat’s inner pocket.
As I folded the paper, the small room’s door opened. Danika stood on the threshold, looked once at the charcoal and paper on the table, then looked at me.
"Are you going out tomorrow?"
"Yes. To the theater."
"Understood."
After saying that, Danika turned away, but before she did, she looked once at the list on the wall. Not at my eight lines, but at the one beneath them. Her eyes rested there for a moment, then moved away, and I did not think further about it.
That night, the sound of charcoal from the small room lasted longer than usual. There could not have been much to write about someone going out the next day, but the sound continued for quite a while before stopping. Listening to it, I recited my five lines to myself once more.
The next morning, Danika set out bread earlier than usual.
There were no words. While I put on my coat, she stood my cane beside the door, opened it for me, and bowed at the waist from outside the threshold.
"Have a safe trip."
It was neither Master nor Understood. I had never heard those words since coming to this house, and as I searched for an answer at the threshold, I nodded first.
"I’ll be back."
It was also the first time I had said those words since leaving Seoul. I tried to count when I had first come to have somewhere to say I would return to, then stepped onto the back road.
When I looked back once from the corner, Danika was still standing outside the threshold. Her back was straight, her hands folded before her, and she did not go inside until I had completely turned the corner.
The road was different.
In front of the blue door was as Danika had cleared it, but beyond that, the back road should have been glassy from melting during the day and freezing again overnight. It was not like glass. Every time the tip of my cane touched a stone, it made a sound like stepping on sand. Looking down, I saw a pale powder spread down the middle of the road, about one person wide.
I passed the three spots where my cane had slipped in turn. The first was a crack between the corner stones, the second was in the shadow of a wall, and the third was a hollowed stone beneath the back-door steps. All three were thickly covered in powder, leaving nowhere for my cane to slide.
I assumed the city’s road workers had attended even to the back roads and let it go. Stone paths becoming slippery in the thaw would be the same in any city, and surely there would be people everywhere who scattered powder on such roads.
I did not count out twenty-five minutes again. Walking without counting, the places where I stopped to catch my breath went from two to one.
The snow on either side of the back road had sunk halfway down. Black soil showed beneath the walls, meltwater trickled through cracks in the stones on the slope up toward the theater, and that water in the morning sun made the entire road look slightly wet.
The theater roof I used to see whenever I emerged from the forest at dawn two months ago had worn a cap of snow. Looking up at it from the back road today, one side had been stripped bare, exposing black tiles.
Before the back door were three low stone steps rising from the road. There was no railing. I placed my cane up first and climbed one step at a time. Once I had climbed all three, I looked at the doorknob.
It was a knob I had never even touched on the days I turned back. They said the lock did not turn well in the cold, but perhaps because today was not cold, it was open.
I pushed open the door.
The hallway was dark, and piano music came along the walls.
I had not heard that sound in nearly two months, but my ears recognized it first. Then came the smell of dust and powder, and only then did I hear the sound of my cane echoing through the hallway.
The sound I had first heard in the hospital corridor and turned away from echoed slightly differently here.
Three people passed me as I rounded two corners. Each looked at me once and my cane once. Their eyes resembled the looks I had received during the three days I sat on that stool. One of them greeted me with a tilt of the chin as they passed, and I returned it the same way.
The old man stood outside the props room door.
I did not know whether he had been waiting or had simply come out at that moment. He seemed slightly more bent than before. He held paper instead of a rag, and he was not surprised to see me.
"You came?"
"Yes. Starting today."
"I know."
It was the same thing he had said on my first day of work. Then, he had followed it by telling me to come along, but today he held out the papers in his hand.
There were two sheets. Both bore several folds. One had half a footprint stamped into a corner, and the other had a torn-off edge. I knew what they were without unfolding them.
The Hangul sheet and the Teyvat sheet. I received from the old man the two checklists I had dropped beside the stage and had not known the whereabouts of ever since.
"They were on the floor when we cleared the stage."
"I didn’t know where they’d gone."
"I knew, so that’s enough."
When I unfolded the Teyvat sheet, a footprint ran over more than ten lines of writing, but the words eleven candlesticks were intact beneath it. The Hangul sheet, which no one could have read, was there too.
"I couldn’t read that other sheet. Still, they were your letters, so I kept it with the other one."
"Thank you."
"No need to thank me. Props room papers belong in the props room."
Only after accepting the two sheets did I remember what I had come to do. I took the new paper from my inner pocket and held it out.
"This. I wrote down what I can do."
The old man read the five lines for a long time. I could not tell whether it took him so long because my writing was clumsy or for another reason. His lips moved once as he read.
"Counting while seated."
He passed over the second and third lines without sound, and his lips moved again at the final line: recording chalk marks.
After reading it all, he did not return the paper. He put it in his coat, turned, and went into the props room. Something scraped inside, then he dragged out a chair.
It was not a stool, but a chair with a backrest. One leg bore signs of a newly driven nail, and one side of the backrest was slightly worn, but the old man did not say where it had come from.
He placed the chair in front of the shelves deeper inside the props room. The stool where I had sat for three days remained beside the door, and he did not even look at it.
"Sit there. Counting is done sitting down."
"Sir."
"I’ll take the boxes down. You open them, count them, and write it down. That was your job from the start."
What he said about it being that way from the start was not true. For the first month, I carried boxes and polished candlesticks, and counting had been something squeezed in between. But in this props room, if the old man said it was so, then it became so.
I sat in the chair.
When I leaned against the backrest, the shelves came to eye level. In the two sections that once held eleven candlesticks lined up in a row, I saw boxes now packed tight. Seen while sitting down, the props room stood at a different height than when I viewed it standing, and because the height was different, it felt like another room.
As I wrote the five lines, I had intended to ask the old man to make a place for me. But when I arrived, the place had already been cleared, and my five lines might as well have sat down in the chair he had set out in advance.
He was a particular man who arranged places in his own way, and having worked alone for two months, he must have needed even a pair of hands to count while seated. That was how I understood it, but even so, one thing sitting on my chest eased a little.
It was the weight of being someone who only received. It had not lifted entirely, but today I had held out the paper first, and someone had accepted it.
The old man turned to fetch a rag, then took my five lines back out of his coat. He did not inspect them. He simply hung them on a nail in the wall beside the shelves.
The nail had been there all along, empty because it had nothing to hang from it.
When I sat in the chair, those five lines were at eye level. My eight lines hung on the kitchen wall of the residence, and my five lines hung on the props room wall.
One listed work someone else would do, and the other listed work I had come to do. Both were written with the same charcoal, in the same clumsy handwriting, and both hung from a single nail.
"It’s easier to work if you can look at it hanging there."
That was all the old man said before picking up the rag. He did not mention whether there were any misspelled letters. Danika had said, I can read it, and moved on; the old man moved on without saying anything. They passed over the same handwriting in different ways.
The old man took down a box from the highest shelf.
As he lowered it, he put one hand to his waist. He removed it at once, and the box landed straight on the floor, but I had seen that hand.
"Your back. I heard from Vodianitsa that you took three days off after moving boxes."
"It’s all better."
"It was because you moved everything alone while I was gone."
"Even if you had been here, I would have lifted that box."
As he said that, the old man looked not at the box but at me. It was the same look he had worn when telling me not to quit, though he withdrew his eyes as quickly as he had then.
That was the end of it. For a moment, I wondered whether the troupe’s boxes had really been so heavy, then the thought scattered at the sound of the old man opening the lid.
"And that."
"Yes?"
"You said we should have a drink after the dress rehearsal. We’ll do it after your leg gets better. The liquor isn’t going anywhere."
I nodded instead of answering. I had tried not to wonder what had become of his words that a props room worker was also a troupe worker, but the old man had not cleared away that place. He had merely postponed it.
I counted the contents of boxes all morning.
The old man brought them down; I opened, counted, and recorded them on the Teyvat sheet. The eleven candlesticks and twenty glasses were unchanged, there were five fake flowers, and nothing had broken or gone missing in between.
It felt strangely disappointing and strangely reassuring that the numbers were unchanged. The props room had continued running without me, and its numbers were the same as the numbers I had recorded. My hand trembled a little as I wrote those same numbers again.
"Your hand is shaking."
"It’s been a while since I wrote down props room numbers."
"Is that so?"
Without looking further at my shaking hand, the old man lowered the next box. There were three crowns, including the one with peeling gilding. I wrote three, then added, in small letters beside it as I used to, for the back row.
I briefly wondered whose use for the back row now meant, then set down the charcoal.
At lunchtime, I went out into the hallway.
The sound of golden heels came from the rehearsal room. I pressed myself to the wall as the sound approached. Odette wore rehearsal clothes rather than an overcoat, and she did not slow as she passed me.
Her eyes only lowered once and rose again. They traveled from the tip of my cane, past my left knee, to my shoulder. They were the same eyes that had measured six steps from the house in the forest to the shelves, though they took far less time to measure now.
As she passed, Odette looked once more at the cloth around my cane’s handle. It looked like she was checking whether the cloth she had wrapped there remained in place, and she withdrew her gaze at once.
"I asked the theater director to install a railing on the back-door steps."
Odette left only those words and walked on. Before I could thank her, she rounded the corner. Her heels faded away, and I remained against the wall, recalling the three steps I had climbed that morning.
Odette had already gone to the theater director before I climbed those steps. If asked, she would call it work, and I accepted it that way too.
In the afternoon, the old man sent me toward the stage.
He had to redraw the chalk positions for the next performance. He would draw them standing up, while I was to write down where he had marked them.
Recording chalk marks was the last of my five lines. The old man assigned me that task without even taking the paper from his coat to look at it.
A stool sat in the darkness beside the stage. I did not know who had brought it there. Sitting on it, I could see the entire stage.
Rehearsal was in full swing. The chorus stood in two rows before the back wall, the ballet performers were scattered in front, and there was a piano instead of an orchestra.
Out of habit, I looked first at the end of the back row.
Vodianitsa was not there. An unfamiliar face stood at the end of the back row. Only after looking at that face once more did I move my eyes to the front row, where the person whose ears were covered stood third from the left.
One row forward. The words I had heard atop the sled were standing right there, and it was exactly one row ahead of where I had watched beside the stage before the accident.
Vodianitsa did not see me because she was singing. Then, while turning a page of sheet music, her head turned toward the side of the stage, and I was there where she looked.
Her eyes widened. Her mouth was open because she was singing, and she could not wave because her hands gripped the score. Yet her eyes unmistakably recognized me and stayed there.
At the next phrase, her eyes returned forward. It was right that they should, and I nodded once in the darkness, though there was no way she could have seen it.
The old man had come beside me before I knew it.
"She’s in the front row."
"Yes. I saw."
"In all my time at this theater, I’ve never seen a voice that stood at the end of the back row move even one row forward."
He said that and returned toward the stage. He was the person who had called her voice too good to waste. There was nothing in his voice as he said he had seen that voice move one row forward for the first time. That was simply how he spoke when he was happy.
I wrote down the chalk positions he drew. The second one on the right was half a step inward, and while I recorded that spot, the person who had told me about that half-step was turning in the center of the stage.
Odette passed without stepping on that mark. As before, she remained exactly one step away. Even while turning, her toes never touched the chalk on the floor, but from beside the stage, I could not tell what her feet were measuring as they turned.
The unfamiliar face at the end of the back row appeared to be a newcomer. Their page-turning hand was slower than everyone else’s, their voice jumped out once at the end, and the person at the piano told them to hold back at the end.
The person who had once heard the same words from the same position now stood one row forward and did not turn her head at those words.
While I had been gone, Vodianitsa’s place had moved one row forward, and a chair had been placed in mine. Both places had moved while I did nothing.
When rehearsal ended and Vodianitsa peered through the props room door, I was sitting in the chair with the backrest.
Vodianitsa looked back and forth between the chair and me.
"That chair, was it the old man?"
"Yes."
"And your leg? You walked all the way here?"
"I did. It took twenty-five minutes."
"What about the road? That back road gets more slippery when it thaws."
"It was clear. Someone must have dealt with it for the thaw."
Vodianitsa looked at me briefly, then answered, "I see." Her voice was as bright as usual. She did not ask further, but pressed a hand once against the chair’s backrest.
"Sturdy."
"A new nail was driven into one leg. The old man won’t say where he got it."
"Of course he won’t."
As she always did, Vodianitsa pressed once at her overcoat’s inner pocket. The faint sound of angular tins knocking together came from inside.
She could not stay long because the two-hour forest road awaited her, and as she left, she did not bring up moving one row forward.
She did not ask if I had seen it, either. Her back was that of someone who knew I had.
There was no railing when I descended the back-door steps. It took one more breath to descend the three steps I had climbed that morning with only my cane, and when I looked back after coming down, they were merely three steps.
The road home was covered in the same powder as in the morning, and it glittered slightly in the evening sunlight. Though I did not count twenty-five minutes, the blue door arrived sooner than expected.
When I reached home, the sound of a pot came from behind the blue door.
Danika opened the door, took my cane and stood it up, and did not ask about the theater. A heated compress cloth was already beside the dinner table. Only when I saw it did I realize I had not once checked below my knee all day.
During dinner, I spoke about the chair. I brought it up because I had nothing else to say, but Danika stopped her spoon and listened.
"It’s work where I count while seated. The old man set out a chair for me."
"Understood."
Understood did not belong there, but that was how Danika received it. The next morning, she wrapped two loaves of bread in cloth and put them in my coat’s inner pocket. It was the share for someone who could no longer eat lunch at the residence, though that task was not written on the list on the wall.
My leg did not ache that night. It was not a cold night, the two stones beside the stove remained where they were, cold, and Danika went to the small room after finishing my evening compress. The sound of charcoal came that day as well.
After that, the days began to resemble one another.
They did not resemble each other in the same way as they had two months ago. Back then, the day opened with two hours on the forest road at dawn; now it opened with Have a safe trip. Back then, I carried boxes and rounded corridors; now I sat in a chair and opened the boxes the old man lowered.
I kept the two old checklists beneath the new paper. I took out the footprint-marked Teyvat sheet to compare numbers. There was no occasion to take out the Hangul sheet, but I carried it with the others without throwing it away.
Since I had returned, the wage from the agency papers ended there. The next month’s envelope would hold the value of the boxes I had counted. At that thought, one of the three lines on the Hangul sheet would no longer grow longer, and that alone made the paper feel a little lighter.
The back road grew a little shorter each day. Twenty-five minutes became twenty-three, then twenty. It was not because my leg had healed, but because my cane did not slip on the powder, and every morning the powder was spread there again, even after meltwater had run through the night.
The city’s road workers were diligent.
The people in the corridors grew used to my cane within three days. Those who stared at it on the first day simply passed by on the third. On the fourth, one person asked how my leg was as they passed, which was faster than it had taken for people to greet me with a tilt of the chin during the three days I sat on the stool.
I ate lunch in the chair. When I held out one of the two loaves Danika had packed to the old man, he accepted it, tore off and ate half, then held the other half back out to me. I knew where I had seen that gesture before, but said nothing.
Every evening, I checked off the five lines on the wall. The marks were shaped like the ones Danika made on the residence wall. The only difference was that I was the one making them. On days when there were no chalk marks to record, that line alone went unchecked, and I went home with its box empty.
At lunch on the second day, Vodianitsa came to the props room carrying a tin. She opened its dented lid, placed one in my hand, put one in her own mouth, and instead of saying rehearsal had run late, said that the front row did not fall behind schedule.
As she said it, the hand gripping the tin clenched hard once, then released.
On the third day, the old man brought a troupe document. It was a paper for recording prop numbers to submit to the theater director, something the old man had written until now. He placed it on my lap.
"You write it. Your handwriting is better than mine."
"My handwriting?"
"Even the theater director can’t read mine."
Writing checklists was the second of my five lines. It meant transferring the numbers from my paper onto the troupe’s document. Since a wrong number would go onto the theater director’s pile of papers, my hand shook once more, but after I finished writing, it was steadier than when I signed the agency papers.
The documents that went onto the department head’s desk came back if they had no conclusion, even when the numbers were right. This paper, headed for the theater director’s desk, only needed numbers. It had no space to write a conclusion, and so the hand holding charcoal moved quickly.
Every afternoon, I sat on the stool beside the stage. Recording chalk positions was not necessary every day, but the old man sent me every day and did not say why. From there, I could see the third person from the left in the chorus’s front row.
I added nothing more to the Hangul sheet after that. Not because there was nothing to write, but because I did not know which line the chair, the railing, and the troupe document belonged on. Not knowing, I kept the paper beneath the two old checklists.
The place I had returned to looked different from before I returned. It was the same props room and the same numbers, but the person who once carried things standing now counted while seated; the person who had carried things around two corridors now received them before the shelves; and the forest road two people had walked together two months ago was now walked alone by one person.
I could not decide until the end of that week whether that difference was bad or not.
The railing appeared on the back-door steps on the fourth morning.
A slender iron rail had been fixed beside the three steps. When I gripped it, it did not shake. The troupe had simply done what the troupe was meant to do, and who had put the word in to the theater director had nothing to do with the hand holding the railing.
I gripped the railing on my way down that evening. I had climbed with only one cane, but descending I had one more piece of iron, and needed that much less breath.
The old man lowered boxes every day. Each time, his hand went to his waist and fell away. I watched that hand but did not say anything again.
Saying the same thing twice to a man who said he was completely recovered would not work before the old man.
On the fifth evening, the old man spoke in front of a box.
"Before the next performance, we need to open every box on the upper shelves again. On the first day, we only checked the numbers. We didn’t compare them to the documents. Who knows how many don’t match?"
"Shall we do it tomorrow?"
"Starting tomorrow. It won’t be done in a day."
The old man hung up his rag. It meant he was leaving first. It had always been that order before as well. Then he looked back at the door and added one more thing.
"Don’t try to do everything alone. No boxes."
"All right."
After the old man left, the sounds of footsteps in the corridors dwindled one by one.
The people carrying instruments left first, followed by those carrying clothes. The piano still sounded from the rehearsal room, but the intervals between notes were growing longer. Since Vodianitsa was no longer at the end of the back row, her rehearsals ended earlier than before, and she left as soon as they did because of the forest road.
I remained in my chair.
I could walk the back road alone even in the dark, and Danika would have dinner heated when I arrived home, so being a little late would not cause trouble. Yet I remained because the old man’s words, starting tomorrow, kept pulling my eyes toward the shelves.
Opening boxes was not lifting boxes. Only taking them down from the shelves was lifting them. If they could be taken down, I could open and count them sitting down, but I could not take them down.
One lamp did not cast light all the way to the end of the shelves. I started to put a candle in a candlestick, then stopped.
Before, that candle flame had always stood between someone and me. Today, there was no one to place on the other side.
Listening to the theater empty, I thought about what made this place different from the evenings two months ago. I had been alone then too, and I was alone now. But then I had a stool, and now I had a backrest.
Then a sound came from the door.
It was not footsteps. The corridor was quiet. What I heard was something brushing very lightly against the doorframe, and without lifting my head, I knew the order.
A hand came to the doorframe first, then a white coat. Pale mint-green hair cut neatly at the jaw framed a freckled face looking into the props room, but the small voice that should have come next did not.
Alyosha stood with a hand on the doorframe.
Her eyes came to me, then lowered. My cane was where they stopped.
It leaned upright against the shelf, cloth wrapped around its handle. Alyosha could not have known who had wrapped that cloth, but her eyes did not leave the handle for a long time.
"You came?"
I spoke first. The place where she should have said, You’re alone again, was empty, so I filled it. Alyosha lifted her head at my words, then looked at my cane again.
"...Yes."
"Come in. The old man has gone."
Alyosha crossed the threshold. As she did, her lips moved once. They formed the beginning of some words, then closed. I could guess what those words might have been.
She must have been going to ask whether my foot was all right. She had asked that on the fourth evening two months ago and looked relieved when I answered that it was. But now a cane stood beside that foot, leaving no place for that question to emerge.
"You heard about my leg, right? From the old man?"
"I heard."
"It was on the day of the dress rehearsal. The castle backdrop fell, and that happened. It was the day you weren’t here, Alyosha."
Alyosha did not answer. Even with only the lamp’s light, the center of her yellow eyes seemed split. That shape was clearer than on the evening two months ago when the lamplight had tilted red, but Alyosha lowered her gaze, and I could not see it any longer.
Unable to leave the props room silent, I opened my mouth again. I said it because I thought it might be comforting.
"It was fortunate you weren’t there that day. If you had been, you might have been hurt too. Three of us were beneath it, but the other two were fine and only I ended up like this, so it was all right."
Alyosha’s hand gripped the edge of a shelf.
It stayed there for a long time. I could not tell by lamplight whether it shook. When she lifted her head, the split shape in the center of her eyes was clearer than I had ever seen it, clear enough that I felt I could count each branch. Before I could count them, Alyosha turned away.
"...You call that fortunate?"
"Yes. It was fortunate."
Alyosha wore a face that could neither accept nor return those words. A thought briefly passed through me: there had been this same silence when I called it fortunate before Odette.
When I breathed, my breath showed.
The breath that had only faintly appeared and vanished on the morning back road spread white through the props room. Beyond it, the lamplight tilted red. My gaze went to the cane resting against the shelf.
A red tint had spread along the edge of the cloth around the handle. It was a narrow stain following the weave of the cloth, the same color that had once spread at the edges of the fake flowers.
I assumed the wick was nearly burned down, making the light look that way, and looked into the lamp. When I looked again, the cloth on the handle was its original color.
"The props room is cold even in the thaw."
It was a room within stone walls that warmed later than outside. Alyosha did not answer that either, nor did she raise the collar of her coat.
No breath came from Alyosha.
Alyosha’s eyes went to the chair. She looked at the backrest, at the leg bearing a nail mark, then at the stool still beside the door.
"...There’s a chair?"
"The old man brought it. He said I should sit to count. He said he would take the boxes down himself."
"He did?"
"Yes. He said it was my job from the start."
Alyosha smiled very slightly at that. It resembled the smile from the evening we first met, when she said the old man always says things like that. It vanished just as quickly, and something else came in its place.
Her eyes went to the nail on the wall. The five lines hung there, and Alyosha read them faster than the old man had.
"Polishing candlesticks."
"I only wrote things I could do sitting down."
"I see."
Alyosha spoke without taking her eyes from the five lines. It sounded less like something said to me than something said to the paper.
Alyosha turned toward the shelves.
She took down a box from the highest shelf. It was the box the old man had lowered with a hand at his waist. Alyosha lifted it as easily as she used to, stood holding it for a moment, then placed it on the floor before my chair.
She said nothing. She did not open the lid or look inside. After setting the box down, she took half a step back. It was the distance she had kept behind me in the corridor on the day we first carried boxes.
I reached for my cane to get up. It was a habit left in my body. When a box was placed on the floor, we lifted it together; that had been the order back then. But Alyosha shook her head.
"Please stay seated."
"Still—"
"You said counting is done sitting down."
She gave back to me exactly the words I had carried over from the old man. I put my hand back on my knee.
I opened the lid.
Glasses. They were supposedly used by the leads, each wrapped in cloth. I counted them through the cloth.
There were twenty and none were broken, so I checked the box beside glasses on the Teyvat sheet.
At the sound of my checkmark, Alyosha lifted the box and moved it to a lower shelf. It was where boxes went once their inspection was finished, and Alyosha knew that place without being told.
They were the same hands that, on the evening we polished candlesticks together, placed cleaned ones to the left and uncleaned ones to the right.
Then the next box was placed before me.
Candlesticks. The box that was supposed to keep them upright. When I opened it, they were upright. Eleven. When I marked the sheet, Alyosha moved it, and the next box came.
From the third box on, an order formed.
Alyosha brought boxes down; I opened, counted, and marked them; Alyosha moved them away. It looked the same as the work the old man had done for five days, but after lowering a box, the old man had looked inside himself. Alyosha never looked inside even once.
She left all the counting to me. Before, we had carried and polished things together to finish them in step. Today, the side that lifted and the side that counted were divided, and those two divided sides moved their hands in turn over a single box.
We were not fast.
Alyosha’s hands were at least twice as fast as mine. With those hands, she could have taken down three or four boxes ahead of time while I counted, but she did not.
She stood before the shelves until she heard the sound of my marking the paper, then reached out only then.
Not getting ahead of me was the same as two months ago. But then she had not gotten ahead by doing the same work at the same pace. Today, she did not get ahead by matching different work to my pace.
Alyosha spoke for the first time at the fifth box.
"It’s cloth. The box is large, so it may be difficult to count all at once."
"Should I unfold them?"
"No. I’ll lift them one at a time."
Alyosha lifted the cloths one by one at their ends, and I looked at their lengths and counted from my seat. There were seven.
They were cloths we had once folded side by side one evening. Then, my hands folded half of them. Today, Alyosha’s hands lifted all seven for me to see, and my hand made one mark.
The sixth and seventh boxes were long ones containing backdrops. They were the backdrops the old man had said numbered five large and nine small, but when we opened them, there were four large ones.
"One is missing."
"...The castle. It couldn’t be used anymore."
Alyosha closed the lid after saying that. The hand closing it was slower than usual, and I changed the five on the Teyvat sheet to four.
Using the same hand that had wiped the windows of the castle with three towers to correct that number did not feel strange. It was stranger that it did not feel strange.
From the eighth box onward, there were no words again. The five sounds of lowering, opening, counting, marking, and moving came in turn. Between them was the sound of the lamp wick burning, and at some point, my breath stopped showing.
The ninth box held crowns. There were three, including the one with peeling gilding. As I marked the paper, I considered crossing out the words for the back row, but left them as they were.
The fact that the person who had stood at the end of the back row was now one row forward, and the fact that one crown was still for the back row, had nothing to do with each other.
As I counted the tenth box, I stopped my hand.
There was one more thing to count. Not something in the box, but the person lowering the boxes. Above the tenth box, it occurred to me that I did not know which line to put that person on.
The received line came to mind first. Alyosha was doing in my place what I could not do, so it was something received, and until now, that had been the rule: things received went on the received line. But when I tried to put Alyosha there, something did not fit.
The give-and-take line came to mind as well. I had written Danika on that line because there was a price for teaching her, but there was nothing I gave Alyosha. Counting was my job, not something I was giving this person. So it was not that line either.
This person stood somewhere belonging to no line.
It was not two people carrying one box together, and it was not one person lifting while another received. One person lowered the box and one person counted it, and without either of the two, the box could not go to the lower shelf.
If there were a category called work done together, it belonged there. I had never drawn such a category on paper, so I did not know how to draw it. Without knowing, I opened the tenth box.
The old man had said it was my job from the start, and Alyosha had said that I had said counting was done sitting down.
One person lowered every day the boxes I had once carried, and one person was now lowering those boxes before me. Both pointed toward the same place, but nowhere in the five lines I had made was that place written that way.
"Sang-hyeon."
"Yes."
"There are two more sheets under that paper."
Alyosha was looking at my lap. They were the two old checklists beneath the new paper; the corner of the Hangul sheet stuck out beneath the footprint-marked one.
"The old man said he picked them up from the floor that day."
"I see."
Alyosha looked at that corner as long as she had looked at the fallen papers on the day we first carried boxes. Then, without saying more, she reached for the next box. Before someone who did not pry, I did not have to make an excuse that it was writing from my homeland. That much was the same as then.
From the eleventh box onward, my counting hand grew faster.
Alyosha’s hands grew faster to match, but they did not get ahead. Whatever pace I went, she remained immediately behind it. Whether measuring that distance was her habit or something else, I could not tell.
"You count quickly."
"Only counting. Everything else has gotten slower."
Alyosha did not answer that. She lowered the next box, her hands just a little more careful as she did.
The final box was small. It held fake flowers, five bunches. The tip of the petals on one bunch seemed to retain that old red tinge, but when I looked again as the lamplight shifted, it was only a faded patch.
I marked the sheet.
Alyosha moved the box and turned around before the shelves. The highest shelf was empty, boxes filled the lower shelves in order, and nothing remained on the floor.
"We’re finished."
"Yes, we are."
Alyosha went toward the doorframe. As she had two months ago, she looked back once from there. The center of her yellow eyes had grown fainter than before, and her hand touched the doorframe.
"I’ll come again."
"All right."
"When you’re alone, Sang-hyeon."
They were the same words I had heard after we polished candlesticks together on the night of the performance, but the ending was slightly lower than it had been then. Leaving only those words, Alyosha vanished into the darkness of the corridor.
There were no footsteps.
Both the lamplight and the cloth around my cane’s handle were their original colors.
Still seated in the chair, I looked down at the Teyvat sheet. Every line had been checked, and one five had been corrected to four. I picked up the charcoal to write the number of boxes opened today at the bottom of the paper.
Looking at the lower shelves, I counted. I pointed to the glasses, candlesticks, cloths, two backdrop boxes, crowns, and the things in between one by one, ending with the fake flowers.
There were fifteen.
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