The Door

Low over the roofs the sun hung and had not yet gone down, and Dritan stood in it, the sun warm on his black hair. The brown jacket sat on him. He had worn it into a good many cellars by now.

The street was narrow and quiet, a row of houses with small gardens and a child’s chalk marks on the sidewalk. He had walked from the tram stop without hurrying. He had checked the street twice, and the number three times, and it was the right door.

Beside the bell, on a small brass plate, was a name. It was not the name on the screen.

He looked at it for some time. Names, where he came from, were descent, and did not come off. Perhaps humans changed theirs now and then, for the pleasure of it, as they changed their shirts. He did not think about it further, because he had a speech, and the speech was in order. In his quarters, on the tram, in the dark of the yard, he had said it a thousand times. He would ask her whether she remembered a night, years ago, at a feeding point in the hills. He would ask her what it had meant.

He rang the bell.

Footsteps, and a child’s voice somewhere inside, and the door opened. A woman was in it with a baby on her hip and a dishcloth over her shoulder. With flour on one sleeve and the end of a tune still in her mouth, she was older. Her hair was cut to the chin, and the low sun found the copper in it and the gray among the copper. The baby, looking at him with the grave interest of someone with no opinions yet, had her amber eyes.

“Good day,” she said, cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

She smiled, and there was the gap between her front teeth.

His eyes went past her shoulder into the front room. There was a shelf, and on the shelf photographs in cheap frames: a wedding, a man in a dark suit, a girl of three or four in a paper crown, and the same girl smaller, in a blanket. He counted without meaning to. The girl was younger than his wait.

Behind the frames, partly hidden, sat an enamel pin, a china figure, and a small lacquered box with a crest on the lid, catching the last of the sun from the window. He would have known the crest across any room.

The speech was gone. He looked for it and there was nothing. His hands had gone cold. Then he was looking at the box.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you... I wonder if you are a fan of the Fisniket line. I can get hold of things. Pins, boxes. An autograph, even.” He had heard the girls say it, wanting one. “A real one.”

She looked at him, puzzled. Then she turned her head, and followed his eyes to the shelf, and laughed.

“Oh. Those.” She shifted the baby to her other arm. “I used to be such a fangirl. I wrote to the whole family once. Three pages to Progon Fisniket, can you imagine. I never sent it, of course.” Dritan was glad. A letter like that would never have reached the family. It would have reached the list. “Not anymore, though,” she said. She looked up from the shelf, smiling. “Thank you. Is there anything else I can—”

She stopped.

Her eyes went over his face slowly, the way one reads a line in a language one used to know, and stayed on his eyes. They were brown in the low sun, and had not been brown then. It did not seem to matter. Nothing in his face had aged. Hers had. Something came up in it all the same, a heat, quick and wide awake, and for a moment the girl in the chair was standing in the door.

“Did we meet again?” she said.

He had a speech for a great many things, and none for this. Behind her was the front room: the dishcloth on her shoulder, the cheap frames, a man’s coat on a hook. Yes was a short word. His mouth opened for it. He knew where a yes would go once it had left him, and on whom it would land. All contacts, the slip had said.

“No,” he said. “Just have a good life. Goodbye.”

He walked to the end of the path and stopped at the gate, and looked back. She had not gone in. She stood with one hand on the frame and the baby on her hip and looked down the path at him, a moment longer than a stranger had any reason to. Then the baby stirred and made a sound, and she turned her head, and was only a mother again, and the door closed.

In the front window a lamp came on, and a shape crossed it with the baby on its arm. His face was wet. He did not wipe it. His father had said he would be back in a few decades. He did not think so.

He stood while the sun went down behind the roofs. He was still standing there when the last of the light had left the sky. Then he wiped his face with the back of his hand.

He turned the corner, and ahead of him the long street ran down toward the lit part of the city, and he was already walking.