On the morning of the third day, dust had drifted all the way into the back alley.
By the time I stepped out through the blue door, two loaves of bread were already in my inner pocket. Danika said nothing that morning about how late I had come home the night before, and her "Take care" was no different from any other morning.
A thin layer of gray lay over the powder in the back alley. It looked like dust had crossed the theater wall during the night and settled there; whenever the tip of my cane passed through it, white and gray mixed together.
When I pushed open the back door, the dust at the end of the corridor was lighter than yesterday. Lighter, though still thick enough to be visible floating in the lamplight.
Two workers came walking out from deeper in the corridor. Each carried a coil of rope over his shoulder, but the bundles were smaller than yesterday’s, and the smell of fresh hemp lingered after they passed.
I passed the paper on the wall. The three names were unchanged, as was the smeared charcoal of the crookedest name among them.
When I opened the props room door, the old man was standing before the shelves. White dust had settled over the twenty goblets he had laid down yesterday, and he was picking them up one by one, blowing on them, wiping them with a cloth, and laying them back down.
"You’re here? Close the door."
"They said they were only hanging half today."
"Even if they only hang half, the dust isn’t cut in half. I told you that yesterday."
When I sat down, the box of candlesticks that had been pushed against the wall was at my feet. When I opened it, dust had settled equally over the polished and unpolished ones, so I could no longer tell which was which.
I started wiping them again from the first. The sound of the old man blowing on goblets alternated with the sound of me polishing candlesticks, and besides those two sounds, there was only the wick of the lamp burning.
I did not put the polished candlesticks on the shelf, but placed them directly back in the box. Yesterday had taught me that dust would simply settle on them again if I put them out, so today I did not even look toward the shelves.
The rehearsal room was quiet. The sound that had carried down the corridor from morning onward yesterday was absent today, and the old man did not turn his head in that direction either.
As I wiped the fourth candlestick, a sound came from the rehearsal room. A voice rose above the piano, but it broke in the middle instead of reaching high, and after listening for several measures, I realized it was not Vodianitsa’s voice.
Without stopping the hand that was blowing on a goblet, the old man said, "A different voice today."
"There are three names on the demonstration list. I don’t know the other two."
"Neither of them is from the front row."
That was all he said before laying the goblet down on the shelf. The old man said nothing further about how his claim that the front row would go first had been wrong both yesterday and today, and I picked up the next candlestick.
Before noon, the props room door opened.
The clatter of angular metal entered before the person did, and then Vodianitsa came in, wearing a coat over her rehearsal clothes, and closed the door. She had not come once all day yesterday, but today, before it was even noon, she sat on the stool beside the door.
"Have you eaten?"
"Not yet. What about rehearsal?"
"I’m last."
Vodianitsa put the tin on her lap and said, "Last again."
She did not smile as she said it. When she had leaned against the wall beside the rehearsal room door and said my turn got pushed back, and when she had stood three or four steps from the paper on the wall inside the back entrance and asked if I had eaten, her mouth had been smiling. Today, it was simply closed.
Her voice was different too. The bright, quick sound came out cracked, with a thin fissure in the middle of the words I’m last, and perhaps Vodianitsa heard it herself, because she gave a dry cough.
"The person at the piano posted an order beside the rehearsal room door. We’re supposed to rehearse in that order until the demonstration, and mine is at the very bottom."
"But you rehearsed all day yesterday."
"Yesterday nobody had written anything down. Starting today, they say we go in the written order. The person at the piano wrote it, sure, but everyone in the troupe knows whose will is behind that paper."
Vodianitsa stopped there and opened the lid of her tin. Her hand was slow as she closed it again without taking out even one piece.
"They say it’ll be my turn only after everyone else is finished. After sunset."
"That’s when there’ll be the most dust."
"I know. That’s why my throat is like this."
"Who told them to write it that way?"
"They won’t say. Even if they did, there’s nothing you could do, and nothing I could do either."
After saying that, Vodianitsa straightened her back on the backless stool. Whenever she had said there was nothing that could be done before, there had always been a smile propping up those words. This time, there was nothing behind them.
The old man clicked his tongue once, stopping halfway through blowing on a goblet. His eyes were not on Vodianitsa but toward the rehearsal room beyond the wall, and after that he silently picked up the next goblet.
I remembered what the old man had said yesterday. He had said that singing with the door open in all that dust would ruin someone’s throat, and that someone from the props room had no authority to close the rehearsal room door. Both had proved true today.
I could not close the rehearsal room door. It belonged to the person at the piano, and it was the door I had been told not even to stand in front of. But the props room door was different.
It was a door I opened and closed every day. I had learned over the course of yesterday that closing it kept out some of the dust, and in the evening, after the old man hung up his rag and left, I was the only one left in this room.
"Excuse me."
Vodianitsa lifted her head while holding the tin.
"What if you practiced here this evening? After the old man leaves. If we close the door, there’ll be less dust than in the rehearsal room."
"Here? Singing?"
"There’s no piano, but I’ll hold your sheet music. And I’ll leave the lamp lit."
After saying it, my mouth went dry. I did not know what it meant within the troupe for someone from the props room to offer up the props room, and belatedly looked toward the old man. He did not stop wiping the goblet.
Vodianitsa looked at the old man, then back at me.
"He won’t say anything?"
The old man did not answer. The sound of him laying the clean goblet on the shelf was slightly louder than usual.
"I’ll come this evening."
Rising to her feet, Vodianitsa shook the tin. At least the sound it made inside was the same as always.
"Go swallow something for your throat."
"Water is enough. There’s some in the rehearsal room."
Vodianitsa left, and the door closed.
After laying a goblet down on the shelf, the old man looked toward the rehearsal room beyond the wall.
"If she waits until sunset with that throat, no sound will come out of her by evening."
"That’s why I told her to practice here."
"You did that, not me."
He said that and picked up another goblet. He was not the sort of person who would ever say he had given permission, so I took those words as permission.
I did not know if water really would be enough, but I knew there was one thing better than plain water.
It was the sweet thing I had put into the bitter tea at the tea shop yesterday. I had asked for it without knowing what it would change, and learned that sweetness followed after the bitterness.
I did not know what that sweetness would do for a cracked throat, because I had never tried it.
I thought about it several more times while polishing the candlesticks. Since coming to the theater, the only place I had gone during work by taking half an hour away was the candy stall.
At midday, I told the old man I would be gone for half an hour. Without asking where I was going, he picked up his rag, and I tore one loaf in half and left his portion on top of the box lid.
The street by the main entrance was bright beneath the midday sun. Black traces of melted snow remained on the stone pavement, but their edges were drying, ringed in white.
The tea shop was emptier than yesterday. The apron-wearing owner was wiping a table when she looked from me to my cane, then jerked her chin toward the window.
"Yesterday’s seat is open."
The little vase on the window table was still there from yesterday. Sunlight came through the window, but the gold that had pooled around the edges of the dry petals was gone; the flowers were merely old, withered flowers.
"I’m not here to sit down. I was wondering if I could buy a little honey."
"Honey?"
"The thing you put in my tea yesterday. Not much."
The owner looked at me for a moment before going into the back. When she returned, she held a small bottle barely two finger joints tall, its mouth plugged with cloth and half-filled with something yellow.
"I poured some out for you. I don’t normally sell it, so I won’t charge much."
I gave her coins. My counting hand did not shake, and while taking the money, the owner glanced once more toward the window table.
"Is that person not coming? The one you were with yesterday?"
"We weren’t together."
"Really? Still, come again. Whether it’s the two of you or just you."
I put the bottle into my inner pocket. It sat beside the remaining bread, the cloth, and the folded paper, but it was small enough that it did not bulge the pocket.
As I left the tea shop, I pressed the spot through my coat where the bottle rested. Only after taking my hand away did I realize it was exactly where Vodianitsa always pressed after putting her tin away.
On my way back, I looked inside the theater’s main entrance. The doors that only opened on performance days were half-open because of the workers, and beside a pillar within, I could see steam rising from an iron stove.
It seemed to be where the workers warmed their hands. A soot-blackened kettle sat atop it, so I decided that was where I would get hot water that evening.
When I returned to the props room, the old man was gone, and so was the bundle from the shelf. The bundle had been put into the box with the checklist, and even when the old man returned, he said nothing about it.
The half loaf I had left on the box lid was gone too. It seemed the portion I had left for him had reached him.
The afternoon passed slowly. While I polished candlesticks and put them in the box, two unfamiliar voices from the rehearsal room rose and fell in turns, with the piano occasionally pausing between them.
After putting away all eleven candlesticks, I took out the checklist the old man had placed in the box yesterday and marked them beside the entry for candlesticks. Unlike yesterday, when the numbers looked like two lines, today they were one.
Whenever the ceiling rumbled from the stage, the goblets on the shelf knocked together, and each time, the old man raised his head and lowered it again.
As the sun began to set, the old man hung his rag on the nail in the wall.
Yet he did not leave right away. He went to the shelf and began picking up the twenty goblets laid there one by one and placing them in their box. He did not say why he was putting away in the evening the goblets he had polished and laid out that morning.
After he had put all twenty away and closed the lid, he rested his hand on top of it once before taking it away and walking toward the door.
"Good night. Keep the door closed while you do it."
"Yes. See you tomorrow."
Neither of us said what the it was in his instruction to keep the door closed while doing it. The old man went into the corridor, and the door shut.
I did not understand then why he had put the goblets away. There was always a reason for the things the old man did in silence, and usually, I came to understand that reason by myself later.
Once I was alone, I remained seated and pushed the two boxes on the floor toward the wall, making space for one person to stand between the shelves. I also turned up the lamp wick.
As the footsteps in the corridor dwindled one by one, I went to get hot water.
In the room by the main entrance, one worker sat before the stove and did not rise even when he saw me. He took a cup from the shelf, wiped the inside with his sleeve, and tilted the kettle. While he did, he gave my cane a brief glance before looking away.
Carrying the cup back through the corridor took twice as long as the trip there. I supported the cup with the hand not holding my cane and walked close to the wall; when I passed behind the stage, something fell from above and settled as dust in the cup.
Back in the props room, I scooped the dust from the cup with my finger. Into the water, whose steam had nearly died down, I poured half the little bottle of honey and swirled the cup until it dissolved.
When the door opened, Vodianitsa came in wearing rehearsal clothes with her coat draped over one arm and several sheets of music in her hand.
She closed the door, hung her coat over the stool, and instead of saying there was less dust, took a deep breath.
"Finished?"
"Finished. They did it twice, then said everyone had to go home and ended it."
Her voice was more cracked than it had been at noon, enough that I could hear what sort of two times those had been. Rather than sit on the stool, Vodianitsa stood between the shelves.
I held out the cup.
"Have this first. It’s probably lukewarm now."
Vodianitsa took the cup. It was the same hand that had received the plain hot water I boiled for her when she returned hoarse on the evening of the third week, but unlike then, she did not drink it at once. She looked into it.
"What did you put in it?"
"A little honey."
"Where did you get honey?"
"I bought it at the tea shop near the main entrance."
"You went to a tea shop?"
"Yesterday. The old man sent me home early."
Vodianitsa did not pry any further and drank. She swallowed half of it in one go, and when she pulled the cup away, the voice that came out was slightly less broken.
"Sweet."
"I thought it might be better than plain water."
"You boiled me plain water too."
Vodianitsa drank the remaining half. That was how I learned that she remembered that cup of plain water as well.
She ran her finger along the honey left at the bottom of the cup and put it in her mouth. I took the empty cup and put it on the shelf.
I moved the lamp to the end of the shelf so that its light fell toward the chair. Only after taking the sheet music Vodianitsa held out did I understand what I had meant when I said I would hold it.
I opened it, held it before my chest, and adjusted the angle so that the lamplight fell on the paper. Vodianitsa stood two steps away and looked at the score, while I looked at her chin beyond the paper.
"Just hold it like that. Don’t move."
"Okay."
"I’ll play the piano part in my head."
The score was a mixture of lyrics and notes, and it took time to read. As I stumbled over the first line, Vodianitsa drew in a breath.
The first phrase stayed low for a long time. While it remained low, it was no different from the sound that had carried into the corridor yesterday, but hearing it from two steps away was different in volume before anything else.
The shelves vibrated. As her voice rose, the lid of the candlestick box trembled, and then I saw the lamp glass shake.
Only then did I understand why the old man had put all twenty goblets into their box and closed the lid.
It was the voice that had made frost tremble on the window of the house in the woods. When that voice came from this narrow room inside stone walls, it went no farther than shaking the glass, and the goblets in the lidded box made no sound at all.
The sound reached the end and came back down.
When Vodianitsa exhaled and cleared her throat, it sounded less rough than before.
"Again."
This time I followed the words. I lost my place several times while trying to find on the page where the song had reached, but the words at the rising part were written stretched longer than the other lines.
The hand holding the score did not move. The rising part lasted a little longer on the second attempt, and the lamp glass trembled again. Watching that trembling, I forgot that the arm holding the score had gone numb.
When the third run ended, Vodianitsa leaned her back against the shelf.
"Wait a second."
She took out her tin from the coat draped over the stool. She put one in her mouth and looked at me, but with both hands holding the score before my chest, I did not have a free hand.
"Isn’t holding that tiring?"
"I’m fine."
"Liar. Your arms are shaking."
I looked at my arms. Both arms holding the score were trembling faintly, though I had not known it until Vodianitsa said so.
"You don’t have a hand free. Open your mouth."
"What?"
A candy went into my open mouth.
Vodianitsa’s fingers touched my lips and fell away, leaving an amber-colored piece on my tongue.
No one had put something into my mouth since the day my fever broke, when I had been fed soup. Then it had been a spoon. Now it was fingers.
My hands holding the score froze, and the words on the page blurred. I could neither spit it out nor swallow it, so I left it beneath my tongue, and the sweetness spread with the taste that had sat beneath my pillow for two days.
While I kept from spitting it out, Vodianitsa, with an expression as though nothing had happened, rolled her own candy in her cheek and tipped her chin at the music. I remained sitting with the paper raised until the blurred words returned.
"I’ll do it again."
Before the fourth run, I could not open my mouth because of the candy, so I only nodded.
When the fourth song reached its rising part, the top of the shelf shook. The dust that had been resting there untouched since yesterday fell all at once, settling over my head, shoulders, and the score in white.
Without stopping her song, Vodianitsa smiled only with her eyes. It was a smile she had not possessed at noon.
I did not shake out my hair. I thought it might make the score tremble, so I held the paper straight with the dust still on me.
After the fifth run, Vodianitsa opened the door only a handspan. The room was stuffy with the two of us and one lit lamp, and cold air from the corridor entered through the gap.
Golden heel-clicks passed through that gap. They did not slow before the props room door, but a single glance entered through the opening.
That glance took in both me, dust-covered and holding sheet music, and Vodianitsa standing between the shelves. Odette’s face was the same face it always was. She dipped her head the slightest amount and passed on.
Vodianitsa, with her back to the door, did not see her. Only I watched the heel-clicks recede, until Vodianitsa drew another breath and I lowered my gaze to the score again.
The sixth run reached the end and descended, so smooth that it was hard to believe it came from the same throat that had produced the cracked sound I heard at noon. Vodianitsa spent a long time catching her breath after coming down, then smiled.
Sweat had beaded on her forehead. In the cold room enclosed by stone walls, Vodianitsa wiped away that sweat with the back of her hand.
"That’s enough. We’ll stop there today."
Still standing between the shelves, Vodianitsa looked up at the props room ceiling.
"It resonates in here. Better than the rehearsal room."
"Maybe because of the stone walls."
"The stone walls make it cold, but they resonate well."
Vodianitsa lowered her eyes from the ceiling and looked at me.
"And it’s better because you’re here. When I’m alone, I don’t know where I went wrong."
"I don’t know where you went wrong either."
"Your face knows even if you don’t. Your eyebrows move at the rising part."
I had not known my eyebrows moved. The person who could identify a wrong letter just from the sound of branches on the forest road was doing the same thing today by watching my eyebrows.
"How’s your throat?"
"It’s okay. Better than before."
Her warning not to believe someone when they said they were okay had been meant for me, but her voice itself supported Vodianitsa’s claim that she was okay.
I gave the sheet music back. As Vodianitsa dusted off the paper, she looked at my head.
"Your hair’s white."
"It came down from the shelf."
"Shake it out."
"When I get home. If I do it here, it’ll just settle again."
Vodianitsa smiled. The smile absent at noon appeared for the second time that evening, and as she put on the coat draped over the stool, the hand that tucked the tin into her inner pocket had returned to its usual speed.
I held out the small bottle I had put on the shelf. Half the honey was still left.
"Have it before rehearsal tomorrow."
Vodianitsa held the bottle up once to the lamplight, tucked it into the same inner pocket as her tin, and pressed that spot through her coat with her palm.
"Can we do this tomorrow too?"
"If the old man doesn’t say anything."
"He won’t. You saw him earlier."
Vodianitsa opened the door. The corridor was pitch-black, and beyond it lay two hours of forest road, but she did not say she was late.
"It’s late to take the forest road."
"It’s the thawing season. If there’s no snow, it won’t even take two hours."
"Even so."
"You’re not the one who gets to say even so."
Vodianitsa turned around from the threshold.
"Tomorrow evening."
"Okay."
Quick, light footsteps passed down the corridor and out the back door. As I extinguished the lamp and closed the door, dust from above settled onto my shoulders. I descended the three back steps leaning on the railing, still covered in it.
The back alley was dark, and powder shoved aside beneath the tip of my cane. Light shone through the window in the blue door, and before I could even turn my key, the door opened from within.
Danika took my cane and stood it up. The hand she had extended to take my coat stopped in front of my hair, and her gaze followed the dust from my hair to my shoulders, then from my shoulders to my sleeves.
"It’s construction dust. It poured down from a shelf in the props room."
Danika only nodded once and took my coat. She said nothing about my lateness, as she had said nothing the previous night, and her hand was more careful than usual as she hung the coat on its nail.
The soup had been warmed. While I ate, Danika stood in the kitchen and looked at my hair. As always, those eyes held nothing, and they did not turn elsewhere.
Thinking dust might fall whenever I lowered my head to eat the soup, I lifted the bowl toward my mouth. Nothing fell from my hair as I did, and the fact that it did not fall bothered me more.
For a moment, I thought I should wash it in the morning. But if I slept on the pillow with hair like this, it would turn gray, and Danika would see the gray pillow in the morning.
Once I had finished the soup, Danika cleared the bowl and went outside to bring in firewood. In the meantime, I stood before the basin in the kitchen. The water was still warm, having been heated for Danika’s evening compresses.
I scooped up water in the dipper and tried to bend my head over the basin, but I stopped there.
To bend at the waist, my left knee needed to bend too, and that knee was still not good at bending. My cane stood against the wall, and holding the rim of the basin with one hand, I froze halfway into a bow.
In that position, I lifted the dipper and poured water over my head. The water only wet the back of my hair and ran down onto the floor, while the wet dust clung more tightly to my head.
Before I could scoop up a second dipperful, I heard a voice behind me.
"May I wash you?"
I could not turn around. I thought my knee might not hold if I turned only my head in that half-bent posture, and once again, I had no idea when Danika had come to stand behind me.
I’m sorry rose first in my throat, followed by I’m fine. Both were words Vodianitsa had told me not to accept from Danika and not to believe; both were words I had said countless times in this house.
Both words reached my mouth and stopped. In the place where they stopped, there was only the dust stuck to my hair, the knee that would not bend, and my back, unable to bend any farther while holding the dipper.
"...Please."
Even after I said it, I did not know which of those two words it had pushed aside to come out. It was an unfamiliar word, and there was nothing I could add after it.
Almost everything I had said to Danika in this house had been either that I was fine or that I was sorry. The only time I had ever asked her to do something was when I wrote the day’s tasks on paper and hung it on the wall, and then I had spoken as someone teaching her. This was different.
Behind me, someone drew in a breath.
"Understood."
Danika’s hand raised me by the shoulder, put my cane into my hand, and pulled over a chair to set beside the basin. All three things were done between two breaths.
"Please sit."
When I sat, my head came level with the basin. Danika stood behind me and cupped my forehead in her palm, inclining my head forward.
I heard Danika roll up her sleeves. She did not tell me to close my eyes, but I closed them before the water came, and the firelight made the insides of my eyelids red.
Water came over my head. It was not water falling straight from the dipper, but water caught in her palms and allowed to flow, and while it traveled from my crown to the nape of my neck, her fingers entered my hair.
The water was the same temperature as when she wrung out compress cloths. Neither hot nor lukewarm, it was a temperature Danika had adjusted every day at the pot, and now it came to my hair.
Danika did not say a single word as she washed me. There was no master, no are you all right; only her hands moved, and in the kitchen there were only the sounds of water and firewood cracking in the stove.
My body flinched the instant her fingers entered. Danika must have noticed, but her hands did not stop. When they entered a second time, my body remained still.
Her fingers found each place where dust had clumped and loosened it one by one, never pulling hard. When they touched the nape of my neck, only her fingertips touched, rather than her entire palm.
The palm supporting my forehead was harder than one might expect of a maid’s hand, but the strength with which it held up my head was as light as the fingers untangling my hair.
I did not realize my shoulders had been tense until they began to loosen. As warm water passed over my neck twice, then three times, my shoulders lowered on their own.
The sound of water dripping from my hair came from inside the basin. While listening to it, the props room and the back alley receded far away, leaving only the kitchen, the basin, and the person behind me.
With my eyes closed, I did not see the basin water turn gray. I did not open them even when I heard Danika replace it with fresh water.
I started to remember when someone had last washed my hair, then stopped. If I remembered at all, it would have been when I was young, and the hands from then were not these hands.
The final water passed over my nape. After it had all run down, Danika’s fingers combed my hair back from my forehead, and that touch was the end.
A towel covered my head. Danika pressed down over the towel to absorb the water, removed and folded it, then pressed again.
When I opened my eyes, the basin held clear water. I could not see Danika’s face behind me, only the wet forearms beneath her rolled-up sleeves.
"May I wash your hands too?"
The same question came once more, and rather than answer, I held out my hand. Charcoal was black beneath my fingernails, and dust had settled gray over it.
Danika immersed my hand in the basin water. She stroked down each finger with her own fingers and pushed beneath my nails with her thumb.
The charcoal did not come out no matter how she pressed, but Danika did not stop at the places it would not come out. She simply moved on. Her hands were not hands that tried to erase even the charcoal marks.
A faint scar from the accident remained on my left palm. Danika’s thumb slowed slightly when it passed there, but she showed no other reaction.
Danika’s eyes were on my hand, but they still held nothing.
"May I wash your feet as well?"
The short question startled me. My hair was something I could not wash on my own, and I had entrusted my hands to her simply because I had already held them out. But my feet were still something I could wash myself.
I did not know how to entrust something I could do myself to another person’s hands.
"My feet..."
I started to say my feet were fine, but the words broke off there. They were one of the two phrases that had reached my mouth and stopped earlier, so I could not finish them.
Danika neither hurried me nor backed away. She waited on her knees beside the basin, and that waiting lasted longer than a question.
I nodded. Danika seemed to take the nod as understood, because she immediately reached for my bootlaces.
Danika’s hands removed my left boot and sock first, following exactly the order she used each evening. When she placed that foot into the basin, one hand supported it beneath the shin.
I laid my cane across my knees and gripped both sides of the chair. I held on only because there was nowhere else to hold, but the force in my hands was clearer than it had been while she washed my hair.
I had not entrusted my feet to someone else’s hands since Vodianitsa changed the cloth around my frozen feet when my fever was going down. Since I injured my leg, a compress cloth had been wrapped around that place every day, but then Danika had looked only at the cloth, and the foot beneath it had remained mine.
Today, that foot rested in the water over Danika’s hand, while warm water wrapped around my shin.
The skin at the two places where the bone had fused was darker than elsewhere. Those dark places wavered beneath the water, and Danika’s hands passed around them as though they knew where they were.
It was the place that had felt heavy since I came back from the tea shop yesterday. As that weight, unchanged through the night and morning, slowly eased beneath the warm water, Danika’s hands stroked only around it, slowly.
I did not pull my foot away. Even in my embarrassment, my leg remained in the water, and before the water cooled, Danika poured in more hot water with the dipper.
Danika did not look at my face. The person who had not looked at my leg while wrapping the compress cloth looked only at my feet today, and because of that, she could not know from her side what my face looked like.
I looked at the ceiling. The kitchen ceiling in the residence had beams like the house in the woods, so I began counting them. But after I reached five, there were no more to count.
While changing the water, Danika placed my foot on a towel. When she put it back into fresh water, her fingers entered and left between my toes one by one.
I did not count how many breaths I took. The water did not cool in that time, and Danika’s hands never hurried to the end.
My right foot was finished faster than my left. Danika wrapped both feet in the towel, gently pressed over them with her palms, then took her hands away.
"It will ache less tomorrow."
"...Okay."
This person knew through the compress cloth that it ached the day after cold weather. Today had not been cold, yet Danika said that, and it did not seem like it would be wrong.
The hand holding the towel rose toward my shoulders, then paused for the space of one breath. It did not touch my shoulders, but folded the towel and placed it beside the basin.
While Danika carried the basin outside to throw out the water and came back in, I looked down at my towel-wrapped feet. My head, hands, and feet all felt light at once.
Dry socks were placed at my feet. While I put on the socks that had been set down without a word, Danika was already washing the basin, and the sound she made was nearly silent.
Once I had put on both socks, I thanked her back as she washed the basin. Without stopping her hands, Danika only bowed at the waist, as though that was what she did every time she was told she had worked hard.
I looked at the list on the wall. Nowhere among its nine lines was there anything about what had happened that night, and only the person who wrote it would know whether another line would be added at the bottom the next morning.
Danika took my coat down from the nail and carried it outside, saying she would wash it on the next day off and would only shake the dust out today.
When she returned, she held a sheet of paper.
It was folded paper. The folds were neat, but it had become wrinkled while sitting at the bottom of my inner pocket under bread and cloth, and yellow grease stains showed through every crease.
It was the paper I had wrapped eight cookies in and brought back from the back-door steps. I had folded it neatly and put it into my inner pocket that day, never taking it out again, and today I had put the bottle of honey beside it too.
Danika held the paper in both hands. She did not open it or hold it to her nose, and without asking what had been wrapped in it, she looked at me.
"May I throw this away?"
"Ah, that..."
The words did not come right away. To explain why I wanted to keep an empty sheet of grease-soaked paper, I would have had to begin with the eight cookies eaten on the back-door steps, and I had never told that story in this house.
"Keep it."
"Understood."
Danika set the wrinkled paper on the table and smoothed it with her palm. As she folded it in half, then in half again, she pressed each corner with her fingernail. Her hands were one degree more meticulous than the hands that usually wrapped bread.
The folded paper was placed beside my charcoal on the table. After that, Danika did not look at it again.
Then, in the kitchen where she had kept track of everything down to the stove at night, a sound not on the list began. There was the sound of something flat, rather than a pot, being placed over the fire, then the sound of a bag of flour opening, and after that, no sound at all for a long time.
A little later, a smell came. It was the smell of flour cooking, with a burnt scent mingled at the end, and for a moment I remembered the cookies that had supposedly turned to stone in some household’s kitchen.
From the chair in front of the stove, I could only see Danika’s back as she stood in the kitchen, and I could not guess what she was baking at this hour.
Flour clung to Danika’s sleeve when she turned around carrying a plate. Since coming to this house, I had never seen her stand before me with anything on her maid uniform, yet Danika did not look at her sleeve and simply set the plate on the table.
There were five cookies, each half the size of a palm. Every one had a different shape, and one was blackened around the edge. I stared at the plate for a long time because that shape looked familiar somehow.
There was only one plate. I could not tell from the plate alone whether Danika had set aside a portion for herself, and she did not sit across from me but stood as she always did.
"I baked them."
"At this hour?"
"Please eat."
She did not say why she had baked them. As always, there was nothing written on Danika’s face, and it was a face that would not answer even if I asked, so I picked one up.
It was salty.
Salt had gone in where sweetness should have been. They cracked more easily beneath my front teeth than the first cookies I had received, but on my tongue, the taste was closer to salty bread than cookies, and that saltiness drove out the spot where candy sweetness had remained.
I ate it all. The second and third were salty too. I took a sip of water after the fourth, and after swallowing the fifth, the plate was empty.
Danika looked at the empty plate, then at me.
"Is it salty?"
"It is."
"...Understood."
Her answer came more slowly than usual. Leaving only those words behind, Danika took the plate and went to the kitchen. She did not say she was sorry.
From the kitchen came the sound of two jars being picked up and set down alternately for a long while, before it finally stopped.
There had been an evening when she asked if the soup was salty. The next day, the soup had been bland, and only the day after that had it been right.
It seemed she was practicing cooking. I could not guess whether she would bake cookies again the next day, so I rose from the stove and went to the large room.
Before bed, I looked at the table. The folded paper remained beside the charcoal, and the charcoal was the thick charcoal Danika had bought for me because she said the old pieces had gotten short.
Candlelight leaked from beneath the door of the little room. The scratch of charcoal continued longer than usual, but from beyond the wall, I could not know whether Danika had much to write because she had learned much today. Sleep came before the sound stopped.
When I woke in the morning, I checked from below my knee downward. There was no ache. Just as Danika had said.
When I entered the kitchen, the shelves had changed.
Paper labels had been attached to every jar and bottle. On each fingernail-sized slip, attached without missing a single one from the salt jar and sugar jar to the small bottles beside them, were one or two neatly written characters.
Every paper was cut to the same size, with straight corners. There were no scissors out in the kitchen, and I did not know when during the night she had cut and attached them all.
Salt.
It took only one breath to read those two characters. The first words I had read in this land had been those two characters attached to an empty salt bottle. Today, the same two characters were attached in Danika’s handwriting to a full jar.
The jar beside it said sugar, but the jar with less in it than yesterday was the salt jar. As I read the two in turn, last night’s saltiness returned to my mouth, and I remembered Danika’s back as she carried the plate into the kitchen.
My dusted coat hung from the nail by the door. When I brushed its sleeve, nothing came away onto my palm.
Danika was wrapping bread with her back to the shelf. The sleeve that had been dusted with flour the night before was clean. She mentioned neither the labels nor the cookies, and the hand that wrapped two loaves in cloth and put them into my inner pocket was the same as every other morning.
"Take care."
"I’ll be back."
On the fourth day, the powder in the back alley was white again. It seemed no dust had crossed the theater wall the night before, and only white powder pushed aside wherever the tip of my cane passed.
There were many people in the corridor instead of dust. Four workers were carrying long wooden supports toward the stage, followed by the theater director, who had come out from the morning.
The old man was inside the props room. He was taking out the twenty goblets he had put in the box yesterday and setting them on the shelves. This time, he stood them upright instead of laying them down.
The old man lifted one goblet, held it to the light, and set it down.
"Not broken."
"Yes. Because you put them away."
"Goblets belong in boxes. Laying them out on shelves was the mistake."
He said that and stood up the next goblet.
"They say they’re raising the rigging today. Once it’s raised, the floor will be clear."
"Okay."
"They dragged bundles of rope around and erased all the chalk markings, so go write them down again where they were last time. I’ll draw them later."
Writing down the chalk-marking positions was the last of the five lines hanging on the wall. I put the checklist and charcoal in my inner pocket and took up my cane.
The rehearsal room stood in the corridor between the props room and the stage. Since the day the ropes were lowered, I had had no reason to go toward the stage, so I had not passed this door in several days. Today, the door was closed, and it was quiet inside.
The sheet of paper posted on the wall beside the door was not the theater director’s paper. It was smaller than the paper on the wall just inside the back entrance, the handwriting was different, and names ran down it from top to bottom.
It was the order Vodianitsa had spoken of yesterday. She had said it was posted by the person at the piano, but I had not had reason to see it then and had heard of it only from Vodianitsa’s mouth.
I searched from the top down for a name I could read. Names from the chorus and ballet were mixed together, so there were more unfamiliar names than familiar ones, and the one name I knew should have been at the bottom.
It was not at the bottom.
It was third from the top. Vodianitsa’s name was written there, but the handwriting was not crooked.
It was not Vodianitsa’s hand. It was unlike the crooked writing at the bottom of the demonstration list, where charcoal had smeared, and unlike the hand of the person at the piano who had written the rest of the names on this paper.
It was unlike the handwriting on the labels attached to the kitchen jars that morning too: neat handwriting I had never seen before.
The name that had originally occupied that spot had been rubbed black with charcoal until the letters could no longer be read, and beside it, Vodianitsa’s name had been written in neat handwriting.
The paper did not say who had changed it. A name that should have been at the bottom was now third, and the name that had been third was erased, but neither the hand that erased it nor the hand that wrote the new name was known to someone from the props room.
I touched the rubbed-out place with my fingertip. Charcoal still came off on it. It had not been erased long ago.
I adjusted my grip on my cane as I stood stopped before the paper. I was on my way to record the chalk positions, and the old man would be waiting, but my feet would not leave that paper.
Then a sound came from behind the closed door.
The piano began first, and then a voice rose over it. It was the voice I had heard on the sixth run in the props room yesterday evening, but in that voice coming from beyond the closed door at such an early hour, there was not a single crack anywhere.
The person who had been last was singing in the morning.
The sound reached its rising part and remained there. Beyond the closed door, it did not come down again for a long time.
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