Chapter 9: Probation

There was one empty day before the day after tomorrow that the employment agency man had mentioned.

During that day, I walked down the back road once more, all the way to the theater’s rear entrance, then turned back without touching the doorknob.

When I returned, I mopped the floor of the small room again. Since I had cleaned it the day before, almost nothing came off on the rag, but I did not look for another reason why I was doing it anyway.

On the promised morning, there was a knock at the door.

Three times. Three knocks of equal force and equal intervals, yet I had not heard footsteps coming down the snow-covered back road beforehand. The windows in this house did not shut properly, and there was always the sound of wind underneath everything, so I assumed the footsteps had been swallowed by it. Leaning on my cane, I rose.

When I turned and pushed open the blue door, cold air came in first, and then I saw a person.

She was tall. The eye level of the person standing inside the doorway was almost the same as mine. The white collar of a maid’s uniform showed beneath her black coat, and the only ornament she wore was a simple white cloth wrapped around her head.

Her extremely long, dark teal hair was tied together at the ends and swept down her back. A pointed headband pressed that hair flat against her head, making the tied end resemble a fish’s fin somehow.

At the sight of teal, Vodianitsa came to mind first, then disappeared. Only the color was similar; this woman’s hair fell straight rather than rippling, and her ears were human as well. With blue eyes rimmed in red, she looked in turn at my cane, my left leg, and the threshold before finally raising her eyes to my face.

Then she bent at the waist.

It was not a greeting where she merely bowed her head. She bent so deeply that her back was nearly parallel with the floor and stopped in that position before speaking.

"I have come to learn the work of a maid. Please teach me."

I remained standing there, holding the doorknob.

Even when we took on new hires at the company, I had never received a greeting like this. I did not know how to accept it. More than anything, it felt strange that I was the person being asked to teach someone.

"...Please stand up. It’s cold, so come inside."

She straightened as sharply as she had bent. As she crossed the threshold, she stepped around the patch of ice Odette had scraped away without even looking at it, and her feet made almost no sound against the floor.

"My name is Danika, Master."

At the word Master, I nearly turned around. It took one breath to realize that there was no one in this house it could refer to except me, and even after I breathed, the word did not feel like it belonged to me.

"I’m Kim Sang-hyeon. The Master thing is a little... Just call me by my name."

"Master."

She did not correct herself. Her face was not one stubbornly refusing to do so; it was simply the face of someone laying down what she had heard once more. I did not press further. I had learned at the company that pressing someone with that sort of face was pointless.

My suspicion was brief.

Just two days ago, I had not been able to understand someone who would come without pay and care for a man who could not use his leg. I still did not understand it, but the words that she had come to learn settled into the place of that uncertainty.

If she had come to learn, then teaching was payment. And if there was payment, the arithmetic worked out.

After I started relying on a cane, I did not have much strength left to question sound arithmetic any further.

"Your room is the small room over there. I cleaned it, but there’s not much in it."

Danika entered the small room carrying a tightly knotted bundle, then stopped just inside the threshold. She looked once at the floor and walls, even at a corner where the traces of mopping had not fully dried, before turning to me.

"You cleaned it?"

"It was nothing. There was dust."

"That was my work."

She did not sound as if she were scolding me or apologizing, but hearing that made the hand that had gripped the rag yesterday feel a little awkward. Danika set her bundle beside the wall, came back out, and inspected the kitchen, the stove, and the door to the large room in order before stopping in front of me.

"I am ready. What shall I do first?"

The first sentence was stiff, while the second was slightly less so. The two phrases coming from one person’s mouth sounded separate, but I did not understand that day why they sounded that way.

I did not know what to have her do first. I did not know what a maid did in a day, nor what nursing care involved aside from feeding someone soup. All I knew was that there was only one pot, we had no salt, and the windows did not shut properly.

"First, we don’t have any salt. And there’s only one pot. Also, that window..."

"Understood."

Her answer came before I had finished speaking. Danika pushed once at the window frame, measured the gap with her fingers, then folded a scrap of cloth from her bundle and wedged it into the crack.

Then she went to the kitchen, lifted the pot, and opened the shelves. Even as she did so, her footsteps made almost no sound.

The sound of the wind stopped. It had been there beneath everything for days, so I only realized it existed after it was gone. Without it, the house felt a little like a different house.

Vodianitsa and Odette came afterward.

Vodianitsa entered first, carrying a bag of salt, the inner pocket of her coat bulging stiffly. Odette followed her in and stood beside the door.

"You’re here. Danika? Danika, right? I’m Vodianitsa, and this is Odette. She’s Sang-hyeon’s theater colleague—or rather, I found her lying in the snow."

"Vodianitsa."

"Ah, never mind that. Listen carefully."

Vodianitsa put the bag of salt down on the table and stood in front of Danika. Danika was half a head taller, but Vodianitsa did not yield an inch even while looking up at her, and once she began talking, there was no sign she intended to stop.

"He’ll say sorry at least ten times a day. Don’t accept it. If you do, he’ll say it twenty times. And when you give him something, he won’t eat it right away. He’ll put it under his pillow. So stand beside him until he eats it. He’ll try to lift heavy things. Even if you tell him not to, he will. So get rid of the heavy stuff before he can."

"Understood."

"He has a habit of walking around alone at night. He’s fallen and broken bottles before. It was a salt bottle. And he’ll say he’ll sleep on the floor and tell you to take the bed. Don’t let him. His leg means he has to sleep in the bed."

"Understood."

"He eats too little. Then he eats too little and says he’s fine. Don’t believe it when he says he’s fine, either. And he keeps counting things. He counts candlesticks, counts steps, and counts even the things you do for him. You can’t stop him from counting. Just let him."

"Understood."

"He won’t say anything even when he’s hurting at night. I heard he did not even call a nurse in the hospital. So if you hear a sound at night, go check on him. Even if you don’t hear one, go check on him."

"Understood."

Vodianitsa kept going. She said not to make the soup salty, that if he said he wanted to peel the potatoes, she should let him, where the charcoal was, and that she might not be able to visit often when the snow on the forest road melted.

Danika answered every point with a single Understood. Around the tenth one, that answer sometimes arrived before Vodianitsa had even finished speaking.

I could not find a place to interrupt between them.

Even if I had interrupted, all I could have said was no, and there was not one thing I could deny.

I really had gone around constantly saying sorry, put candy beneath my pillow, and fallen while walking at night. Listening to all of it listed one after another made my face burn in a different way than it had on the day the report had been rejected.

Odette did not say a word beside the door.

While Vodianitsa spoke, Odette watched Danika. With those eyes that had counted six steps from my hand to the shelf in the house in the woods, she swept them once over Danika’s feet, shoulders, and tied hair, then withdrew them.

Only once. She did not look twice or say anything, and after withdrawing her eyes, she looked toward the window. Seeing the scrap of cloth already wedged into the crack, she gave the faintest nod.

The instructions only ended after Danika placed the bag of salt on the shelf.

"That’s it. I’ve said everything. No, one more thing. Don’t leave him alone. If you leave him alone, he’ll try to do everything by himself."

"Understood."

"Do you really understand? That’s the only thing you’ve been saying."

"Understood."

Vodianitsa turned to me. A smile hung halfway on her face, but I could not see the other half. As though turning that half behind her back, she turned toward the kitchen and said once more that there really was only one pot.

The two of them left before lunch. Odette had rehearsal, and Vodianitsa had to take the forest road. As she stepped out the door, Vodianitsa’s final words to Danika were not instructions.

"Take good care of him."

"Understood."

"That’s Understood too?"

Instead of answering, Danika bowed. Vodianitsa laughed as she left, while Odette scraped once more at the icy patch on the threshold with the tip of her shoe before following her out.

I watched the backs of the two women walking side by side up the back road, then turned around. Danika stood half a step behind me, looking in the same direction.

The house was quiet with only the two of us remaining.

There were no longer Vodianitsa’s words where Vodianitsa had stood. Danika and I were both the quiet sort, leaving only the sound of the stove. I was usually the one who could not endure that quiet first, but this time, before I could speak, Danika went to the kitchen.

She took the salt Vodianitsa had brought back down from the shelf, set the pot over the fire, then looked at me.

"How salty do you like your soup?"

"Vodianitsa said earlier not to make it salty."

"I am asking you, Master."

It sounded as though, no matter how many instructions she had heard, I was the one who decided. When I told her to make it normal, Danika said Understood, took one pinch of salt, then removed half of it.

Only after I had finished the soup did I ask.

"Can I ask something? What does maid work normally involve?"

Danika looked at me.

"I came to learn."

"...Right."

For a moment, neither of us spoke, in the situation where the teacher was asking and the learner said she did not know. Danika neither looked troubled nor laughed; she simply waited for my next words. Looking at her face, I thought of the company.

When a new hire came in, there was something their assigned senior did first. They wrote down the day’s tasks on paper. While the new hire worked through them, the senior filled in whatever had been left out, one by one. I had received such sheets, and I had written them too.

There was one thing I could do even with a cane.

"Then I’ll write down what you have to do each day. You can follow that. We’ll add whatever is missing as we go."

"Understood."

Throughout the afternoon, Danika made one full round of the house. She took everything down from the kitchen shelves, wiped them, and put them back. She ran a finger through the dust on the window frame in the large room, fetched a rag, then scooped the ashes from the stove and threw them outside.

Meanwhile, I sat at the table. Whenever I got up to help, Danika was already there before me, so after the third time, I stopped getting up.

That evening, I sat at the table and turned over the papers left by the employment agency man. Even with the charcoal Vodianitsa had given me in my hand, I could not write the first line for a long time.

In Hangul, letters appeared before I had even finished thinking, so it would have taken only a few breaths. But Danika was the one who would read this. If I wrote it in a script she could not read and stuck it to the wall, it would not be a task list. It would just be wallpaper.

I wrote it in Teyvat script.

Stove at dawn. Breakfast. Firewood. Shoveling snow. Market. Laundry. Dinner. Stove at night.

Writing those eight lines took ten times longer than it would have in Hangul. There were two or three letters whose shapes I was not sure I had gotten right. If Vodianitsa had been beside me, she would have laughed and corrected them. But Vodianitsa was beyond the forest, so I left the letters that might be wrong as they were.

I drew a square in front of every line. They were spaces to mark when a task was done, exactly like the format used at the company. The list of eight squares was more crooked than a Hangul checklist, but someone could read it, at least.

After I was done, I took the list into the kitchen. I held it against the wall with one hand while leaning on my cane, then turned to ask for a nail. Danika was already behind me, holding a nail and a small hammer.

"...When did you get here?"

"Just now."

The house was so small that I could hear breathing from the large room while in the kitchen, yet I had not heard Danika approach over three steps. Things like that happened several times a day after that.

The list went on the wall beside the stove. Since it was the most visible place from the kitchen, Danika hammered in the nail, hung the list, and stepped back.

Starting at the top, Danika read every line aloud. She had no trouble through Stove at dawn, breakfast, firewood, and shoveling snow. She also read the lines I had been unsure of correctly, which only made it harder to know where I had made mistakes.

"Are there any wrong letters? I haven’t learned them all yet."

Danika looked at the list again. Twice, her gaze paused very briefly on a line before she looked at me.

"They can be read."

"Then that’s enough."

It sounded like both an admission that there were mistakes and a statement that she would not correct them, but I did not pry. It would have looked strange for the teacher to have a probationary maid correct his spelling, and Danika seemed to know that too.

"Understood. I will do it this way."

That night, in the large room, I took out the paper in my inner pocket.

Two blank spaces still remained beneath the column of things received, and below those was the space I had left empty two days ago. I had left it open because I did not know which line to put the person who was coming on. Today, that person had come and said she was here to learn, and I had written down things to teach her and hung them on the wall.

I did not put her in the received column.

If we had a relationship where I taught and received care, it was not an exchange moving in only one direction. Putting her in the received column would make the arithmetic wrong. So I drew a new line and wrote Danika. It was a line for giving and receiving.

As I folded the paper, the faint sound of charcoal scratching paper came from the small room, then stopped.

When I woke the next morning, the stove was burning.

The firewood I had put in the night before should have long turned to ash. Two fresh logs lay on top, and the sound of a pot came from the kitchen, reminding me in the morning that there was one more person in this house.

Bread and soup sat on the table. The soup was a little richer than yesterday’s lunch. Danika stood while I ate, then sat when I told her to, but she did not eat.

"Eat with me."

"After you are finished, Master."

"It’ll get cold."

"It’s fine."

Vodianitsa’s instructions came to mind. She had said not to believe me when I said I was fine, but this person’s fine sounded similar. I tore the bread in half and set one piece in front of Danika.

Only after tearing it did I realize it was the gesture Vodianitsa always used.

Danika stared at the half for a long time before eating it.

The first and second squares on the list on the wall had marks in them. Unlike my handwriting, the marks were straight and sat perfectly within the squares, making my crooked boxes look a little less crooked.

"May I keep a journal?"

That evening, Danika asked from the doorway of the small room, holding paper and a candle. When I asked what kind of journal, a brief answer came back.

"A probationary journal. I write down what I learned each day."

"Go ahead. Do you have more candles?"

"One is enough."

The charcoal sound I had heard the night before had been that journal. I tried to recall what I had taught her yesterday, but all I had done was write eight lines and hang them on the wall. I did not know if that was worth recording.

Several days passed according to the list.

At dawn, the stove was burning and breakfast was set out. Firewood moved from beside the wall to beside the stove. Danika carried six logs at once.

They were logs that left me out of breath after two, yet her arms did not tremble, and she made no sound crossing the threshold.

Every morning, the snow had been cleared. The snow that had accumulated overnight was pushed away from the blue door all the way to the back road in a path one person wide, yet I never heard the shovel. When I tried walking the path with my cane, two of the three places where its tip had slipped before were gone.

On the third day, I walked to the back door again. Part of me wanted to see how far the cleared path went, and part of me simply wanted to walk. The cleared path ended at the entrance to the back road, and beyond it was packed snow. I counted twenty-five minutes on top of it again.

When I returned, the path in front of the door had become wide enough for the reach of my cane’s tip. Danika had propped the shovel against the wall and was in the kitchen, and another mark had been added to the fourth line of the list.

At dawn on the fourth day, I woke early. When the sky beyond the window was still bluish, Danika was shoveling snow in front of the blue door.

There was no sound as the shovel blade entered the snow, nor as she flung it aside. Her body bent and straightened as quickly as if it had no weight. Each time she pushed, the path widened by exactly enough to fit one more cane.

Danika stopped shoveling and looked up toward the window, and I stepped back beside the window frame. I did not know why I had retreated as though I had been caught doing something.

Danika went to the market. After I handed her the coin purse and told her a few prices, she returned and set down the remaining coins one by one, telling me what she had spent on each thing.

It was in exactly the same order as the expense reports I had used at the company, and if one coin remained, she said that one coin remained.

"I bought four potatoes and two loaves of bread. I did not buy fish. It was more expensive than the price you told me."

"Which stall was it?"

"Further into the alley."

"There’s another one closer to the entrance. It’s bigger. It’s cheaper too, and..."

"Understood."

I did not say why that stall charged different prices to different people. That old man would quote Danika the starting price, and a probationary maid did not need to know that the same price could become double for someone else.

"You don’t need to give reports like that."

"I will."

She answered in a single stiff phrase and said nothing more, so after that I did not stop her reports. The truth was, I did not dislike hearing them. Having someone count for me in front of someone who counted was unfamiliar, but comfortable.

On the third day of reports, there was one thing mixed in that I had not asked for.

A bag of charcoal.

When I asked why she had bought charcoal, Danika looked at my charcoal stub in the corner of the table. The charcoal Vodianitsa had given me had worn down to the length of one finger joint.

"It has gotten short."

She said only that, then finished laying out the remaining coins. She apparently had not cared what I wrote every night, only that the charcoal was wearing down. I accepted the new charcoal and put it in my inner pocket.

The new charcoal was slightly thicker than the one Vodianitsa had given me, filling the space between my fingers.

There was one more report every evening. When the day ended, Danika stood before the list, pointed again to the lines she had marked, then turned to me.

"The eight lines are complete for today."

"You worked hard."

Danika did not answer. She merely bowed slightly. Perhaps Understood did not fit the words You worked hard, because she gave no response only to that phrase. Afterward too, whenever I told her she had worked hard, she only bowed.

Every morning, Danika stood in front of the list. She swept her eyes down it once from top to bottom before starting the first task. The speed of that scan grew faster each day, until after several days she moved through the tasks in order without looking.

Still, she did not stop standing in front of the list.

There were things she was clumsy at too. On the second evening, the soup was salty. Remembering Vodianitsa’s instructions, I ate without saying anything, but Danika watched my face and stopped her spoon.

"Is it salty?"

"A little."

"Understood."

The next day, the soup was bland, and only the day after that was it right. Throughout those three days, Danika never once said she was sorry. Strangely, that was easier for me.

During the day, I looked for things to teach her.

I had to find something in order to teach her, and I had to teach her for the arithmetic to work. But Danika soon became better at housework than I was, and nursing care was not something to teach but something to receive.

Only the list remained. So, at the table, I taught her how to fill in missing tasks, how to mark finished work, and what to write down if she wanted to do the same task faster next time. After listening, Danika said Understood and went to the wall.

"If you mark it, it’s done. If you haven’t marked it, it isn’t done. So if you look at the list in the evening, you’ll know what’s left for the day."

"What if something is left?"

"If there is, move it to the very top the next day. It comes first."

"Who marks it?"

"One person. If two people do it, you won’t know who marked it. So, Danika..."

"Understood."

It was a little ridiculous for someone who could not finish a single report to sit around writing tasks in a foreign country’s script, hanging them on a wall, and claiming to teach. But more marks appeared on the list each day, and I did not dislike seeing them.

The instruction to move unfinished work to the top was used two days later. It snowed again, so the laundry did not dry, and by evening only the laundry square was empty.

The next morning, a small upward arrow was drawn beside that line, and as soon as Danika lit the stove, she brought in the laundry first.

The arrow that transferred something I had only said aloud onto the list was straighter than the boxes I had drawn.

A task for my leg was added to the evening line. Danika asked whether she could wrap below my knee with a hot cloth, and when I added hot compress beside the word evening, she began warming a cloth in the pot every evening, wringing it out, and wrapping it around my leg. While she did, she looked only at the cloth, never at my leg.

"Is it hot?"

"It’s fine."

"May I make it hotter?"

"...Just a little."

Requests for permission came several times a day. She asked whether she could open the window, whether she could buy more firewood, whether she could clean the large room. I said yes to everything.

Vodianitsa was someone who did things for me without asking, and Odette was someone who measured without asking. I still did not know how to stand before someone who asked every time before doing something she was allowed to do.

Danika was light on her feet.

She took things down from the very top shelf without a stool and never slipped on snowy paths. If I let go of my cane, it sometimes ended up in Danika’s hand before it touched the floor.

Whenever I tried to see where that hand had come from, Danika had already propped up the cane and stepped away. The word probationary did not suit the way she moved, but since I did not know what sort of body a probationary maid was supposed to have, I did not question something I did not know.

The things I could no longer do accumulated in my body.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, I tried to lift a log. Danika was at the market, and the distance from the wall to the stove was seven steps. I propped my cane against the wall and lifted it one-handed. On the fourth step, my left knee gave out, and I dropped the log.

The sound of the rolling log was louder than I expected. I could not bend down to pick it up, so all I could do was use the tip of my cane to push it toward the wall.

Danika must have seen where that log had fallen that evening, but she said nothing. From the next day on, the firewood was stacked not beside the wall but directly beside the stove.

That evening, as she wrapped the hot cloth around my leg, Danika asked something that was rarely unrelated to work.

"What work did you do, Master?"

"The theater’s props room. I polished candlesticks, carried boxes, counted how many there were."

"Will you go back out again?"

"I have to. They said the wages only continue until I return."

Danika pressed and wrapped the cloth one more time, then nodded. She did not ask further what someone from the props room who could not lift boxes intended to go back out for, and I did not have an answer either.

The leg that had gone to the rear entrance twice and returned twice without touching the doorknob throbbed beneath the cloth.

Six logs, the cleared snow path, the back road to the market, and the top shelf all became Danika’s work, one by one each day.

It had been less than two months since I had been responsible for the firewood and water at the house in the woods, but now my job was to step aside at the door for the person carrying firewood in.

Only peeling potatoes remained. When I said I would do it, Danika set the knife and potatoes on the table according to Vodianitsa’s instructions, and I sat and peeled them.

It was work I could do sitting down, so it had nothing to do with my leg. But once all the peeled potatoes had gone into the pot, only the peels and knife remained on the table. I held that knife for a long time before setting it down.

In the evening, a thin candlelight leaked out beneath the small room door, and the sound of charcoal came and went. I nearly tried to guess what she would write that she had learned today, then stopped. Guessing at another person’s journal felt as rude as reading it.

On the fifth day, the wind changed.

From morning, the cloth in the window crack trembled, and by afternoon snow blew sideways down the back road. Snow had frozen onto the shoulders of Danika’s coat when she returned from the market. It was weather cold enough to freeze over the forest road that had been said to be starting to thaw.

"They say it’s the last cold spell. That’s what they said at the market."

"The last?"

"The last one this winter..."

Danika brought in more firewood than usual. As I wondered where the next load would come from if the pile that had been there from the start belonged to the troupe, Danika asked first whether she could buy more firewood. I said she could.

From midday, below my knee began to tingle faintly.

It was the same tingling that had come at night in the hospital. Even knowing it had arrived today before the sun had even set, I sat at the table and only counted the marks on the list. Since there was nothing I could do even if I knew, it was better to pretend I did not.

"May I apply the cloth now?"

Danika asked. It was something done in the evening, but there was still daylight left. She asked while looking not at my leg, but at the window.

"It’s supposed to be done in the evening."

"I will do it now, and then again in the evening."

When I said she could, the hot cloth wrapped around below my knee. As usual, Danika looked only at the cloth. I did not ask how someone who did not look at my leg knew it was tingling. Even knowing my habit of not asking had been creaking more and more lately, I did not ask.

That evening, Danika changed the cloth twice, added another log to the stove, pressed the cloth more firmly into the window crack, then went to the small room. The final line on the list, Stove at night, had a mark on it, and the list ended there.

The light leaking beneath the small room door continued briefly with the sound of charcoal, then went out. After that, not a sound came from beyond the wall. I could not tell whether people normally made so little sound when they slept, or whether this person was exceptionally quiet.

Then night came.

At first, it was the same tingling as during the day. Below my knee tingled all the way to my toes. As I stared at the ceiling and waited, the tingling changed shape. What had been thin grew thick, then rose alternately from the two places where the bones had fused. Each time it rose, my breath caught once.

I tried holding my leg upright, then laying it down. If I bent my knee, the fused places pulled; if I straightened it, the tingling poured down to my toes. No position left space to breathe. Outside the blanket, it hurt from cold. Inside it, the heat hurt too.

I counted.

Eleven candlesticks. Twenty cups. Five fake flowers. The numbers came out, but whenever the next pain rose, they scattered, and I had to start from eleven again.

Only around the third attempt did I remember that numbers had suppressed the pain during the daytime in the hospital. I had known in the hospital that at night, pain suppressed the counting, but there had been no cold night afterward, so I had forgotten.

I pulled the blanket higher, but it did not cover me. It was not the cold; it was rising from inside, and there was nowhere to cover. I clenched and unclenched my teeth.

I had done the same on the carriage, but then there had been one cool hand. Now there were only my two hands.

I stayed that way for a long time. The stove quieted twice and began making noise again, and wind came through the window crack, making the wedged cloth whine.

Between those sounds, the things I had pressed down rose up.

First came the heat below my knee. In the hospital, I had decided that leaving the leg column empty would make the rest of the arithmetic lighter. But that column was now filled hotly beneath my knee, and the paper on which I had written empty was in the coat hanging at my bedside.

My leg knew before I did that I had not left it empty. I had simply not looked at it.

Between one retreat of pain and the next, a red mark surfaced. It was the mark at the bottom of the documents the theater director had been unable to place straight. The hospital costs, this house, my wages, even the firewood burning in the stove now—all the things whose source I did not know lay over my hurting leg like a blanket.

The column labeled To whom was much wider in this darkness than it had been on paper.

At the end of the pain’s next rise, the floor of the house in the woods caught on me. The person who had lain there with her back to the stove, facing the bed, would be facing this cold alone beyond the forest now. I felt as if I could hear the quieter second time she had told me to go.

There was someone in this house too. Beyond one wall, in the small room, there was someone who had come without wages and moved according to what I had written. But the list ended at Stove at night, and everything after it was blank.

Calling a person into a blank space was not something the person who had written the list should do.

Remembering Vodianitsa’s instruction to go check if she heard sounds at night, I clenched my teeth harder. All I had to do was make no sound. Really, though, more than that, I hated the thought of anyone seeing me like this.

A sound escaped between the teeth I held clenched.

I only realized the person making that sound was me after the blanket became wet. Once it escaped, it would not stop, so I pressed the blanket to my mouth. The place against my mouth grew wet, and at some point my eyes had become wet too.

I had not cried on the day my report was rejected, on the night I read 5,700 characters, or in the snowfield. Not even when I was told I would limp for the rest of my life. The hand that had lain still atop the blanket then now gripped the blanket and trembled, but there was nothing in this room that could stop that trembling.

I tried to count why I was crying. Whether it was because of my leg, the columns, this house, or beyond the forest. But it could not be counted, and because it was the first thing I could not count, I just cried.

I did not need to see myself to know what it looked like: a thirty-one-year-old man biting a blanket and crying in company housing in a foreign country. Knowing did not make me stop.

The habit of counting little things to avoid looking at large ones did not work. It was not that there was nothing to count. The large thing had come so close that it had pushed all the small things away.

The door opened.

There were no footsteps, and almost no sound of the door opening, but the shape of the darkness changed. Danika stood at the threshold. She did not carry a candle.

The remaining glow from the stove came from behind her, leaving her face unseen and only the outline of her tied hair visible.

I could not take my mouth away from the blanket.

She must have seen everything from the threshold: the wet blanket, my hand gripping it and trembling, my mouth that had not managed to hold everything in. I could not even turn away to hide because my leg would not allow it, so all I could do was remain visible.

Danika said nothing. She neither came in nor went back. After standing there for a long time, she turned toward the kitchen. Soon the stove door opened, and I heard something heavy being placed on the stove floor.

Time passed. The pain and tears remained the same, and no sound came from the kitchen. I waited for the sound of the stove door closing, but it did not come for a long time. While I waited for it, my breathing settled a little.

At least I knew she had not gone back to the small room. There was a person in a place absent from the list, and though I did not know what she was doing, the fact that she was there came and sat beside the pain.

Danika returned carrying something wrapped in cloth with both hands. She knelt beside the bed and gently opened one of my hands where it clutched the blanket, placing the bundle inside it.

Through the cloth, I could feel the shape of a stone the size of a palm. It was heavier and hotter than I expected, and its heat slowly climbed from my palm to my wrist.

"Hold it. When it cools, I will heat it again."

Nothing came in except those words and the hot thing in my palm. Holding something hot in my trembling hand made the trembling lessen slightly.

Danika did not get up. She sat directly on the floor beside the bed, not even leaning her back against the wall, hands on her knees as she looked toward the stove.

She did not look at me, my leg, or the wet blanket. She just sat there, and the fact that she sat there came through without sound.

The hands on her knees did not move once. The hands that carried six logs at a time and caught my cane before it touched the floor did nothing at all, merely resting there.

"Go sleep. The stove at dawn tomorrow..."

"Understood."

She said she understood, but did not rise. A person who had said Understood more than ten times and moved according to the list each time remained sitting just as she was now. I did not say it again. I did not have the strength to, but the truth was that I did not want to.

I moved the stone to my leg. When I placed it over the place where the bones had fused, the pain shifted ever so slightly between the heat rising inside and the heat coming in from outside. That small amount let me breathe.

Once I could breathe, I saw the back sitting on the floor. It was not the back at the floor of the house in the woods, nor the back by the hospital room door. It was the back of the person who had entered five days ago, bent at the waist. In the daytime, I had sat at the table looking for things to teach her, but none of the eight lines I had written contained this night.

The tears continued for a long while. Even as the sound diminished, Danika remained as she was. When the stone began to cool, she stood, took it away, returned it heated again to my hand, and sat in the same place. She did not say anything through any of it.

Once, she stood to add firewood to the stove. Stove at night was a task she had marked in the evening, but Danika performed the already marked task once more, then returned and sat in the same posture. The sound of the stove grew a little louder.

At some point, the sound of cloth whining in the window crack had faded. I held the stone without knowing whether the wind was leaving or my ears were listening elsewhere.

When I held the second stone, one phrase came out.

"...I’m sorry."

It was the phrase Vodianitsa had told her not to accept, and Danika did not accept it. Without answering, turning around, or looking away from the stove, she stayed still. Yet that stillness, for something that was not accepting it, felt strangely closer to acceptance.

I think I fell asleep before the second stone cooled. The last thing I saw was her back sitting toward the stove, and sleep came before I could count why that back was there.

When I woke in the morning, there was a stone beneath the blanket.

Still wrapped in cloth, it lay cooled beside my leg, and the cloth bore traces of having been wet and dried through the night. No one was on the floor. The stove was burning, and a pot sounded in the kitchen.

Below my knee still tingled, but compared to last night, I almost felt sorry to call it tingling. It simply took one extra breath to stand while leaning on my cane. The cloth in the window crack did not tremble, and the brightest light of the past several days came through the glass.

Bread and soup sat on the table. As usual, Danika stood, then sat when I told her to. She ate the half of bread I had torn apart.

Her face did not look like someone who had stayed up all night. Her tied hair was in the same place as yesterday, and the collar of her maid’s uniform was straight. Remembering her back on the floor, that neatness felt stranger, if anything.

No one brought up last night.

Neither Danika nor I mentioned it. While eating the soup, I realized that was this person’s etiquette. Even someone like me, who knew nothing about maid work, could understand that a probationary maid did not place her master’s night on the breakfast table. I was grateful for that etiquette.

Beside that gratitude was something else: the fact that someone had seen that night. It fit neither the received column nor the giving-and-receiving column, and I could not leave it empty like the leg column. I did not know where to put it.

Outside, the path in front of the blue door had been cleared. Snow stood piled higher than yesterday on either side of it, and drops of water fell one by one from the edge of the eaves. It appeared what they had said about the last cold spell had been true.

Danika cleared the dishes and brought in firewood. There were six logs, and her footsteps made no sound.

It was the same order as yesterday, yet it looked slightly different today. Whenever I tried to point out what had changed, last night followed it up, so I stopped.

"May I go to the market today? They say firewood has come in."

"Go. The coins are over there."

"Understood."

It was a phrase I had heard for five days, and a phrase I had heard from the floor last night. The sound and length were the same, but I could not put it where I had put it until yesterday.

Returning to the large room, I took out the paper in my inner pocket, then folded it without writing anything. There was no line on which to write last night, and even when I held the charcoal, no words came to mind.

This was the third time I had let an event pass without writing it on that paper.

Leaning on my cane, I went to the kitchen for water. Two flat stones lay side by side beside the stove. They were round, smooth stones, as though picked up from a stream.

They must have been the stones from last night, but I did not know how long they had been there. Though I had passed by the stove over the past days, I could not remember what had been beside it other than firewood, no matter how hard I tried.

As I drank water and raised my head, I saw the list on the wall.

Eight crooked squares and eight crooked lines of writing. Two or three letters whose errors I still did not know remained as they were. Every square contained the neat mark from yesterday, while today’s list had only two so far.

Beneath them was one more line.

It was not my handwriting. The square was straight as if drawn with a ruler, and the letters were straighter still. The words were short.

On cold nights, heat stones.

It was shaped like a work item. It was set beside Stove at dawn and Stove at night, even with a square drawn in front. But that square was empty. Last night’s task had occurred before it was written down, so there would have been no place to mark it.

I read it as the thoroughness of a probationary maid. After doing something that was not on the list, she had added it to the list so that next time she could do it without asking. I was the one who had taught her to write things down like that.

I had said that unfinished work should be moved to the top, but this person had created a new task at the bottom.

I was grateful that a person who followed what I taught had written something I had not taught in the form of something I had taught. Even so, I did not say thank you.

If I said it, last night would rise again. And last night had already become a task on this list. Returning something that had become a task to being a night did not seem to be what its writer intended.

There were two people’s handwriting on one sheet. Above were my eight lines, mixed with wrong letters. Below was Danika’s one line, without an error. Both hung from the same nail, and both had squares in front of them.

The door opened, and Danika entered. She must have cleared the snow from the back road before buying firewood, for snow clung to her shoulders. She looked once at me standing in front of the wall, once at the list, then picked up the coin purse.

"I’ll be back."

"All right. Be careful."

The door closed. There were no footsteps again. Holding my cup of water, I stood before the wall and read that one line once more.

On cold nights, heat stones.

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