The father's box stands under the bench on the right, and it is opened rarely.
Inside are three tins of nails of a kind you can no longer buy, a dozen lasts that have long since fitted no foot at all, and a bundle. The box is heavy, wooden, with hollows instead of handles, and it has always stood there: when I first came into the shop, and afterwards, all twelve years.
That evening Igor went out to the yard to deal with the gate. It sticks in damp weather, and that takes a while: first he looks it over, then he goes for the hammer, then he explains to the neighbour why it sticks, then the neighbour explains it to him.
I turned the sign around, took off my overall, and instead of going home I went behind the partition and sat down on Igor's stool.
His stool is low, cut down to the bench, and from it everything in the shop looks different. I sat and looked at the box for a couple of minutes.
Then I pulled it out and unwrapped the cloth.
Why I did it I still cannot explain. My hands moved before I had decided, and there was nothing to decide: the knife lay as it has lain for forty years, and I think that was exactly what I had come to make sure of.
A thin blade. A long, even bevel. A handle polished to a shine in one place and matt everywhere else. Something pale had dried at the tang, unlike any of our glues.
What it is called I have known for eight years: that same evening I found one online, by the picture, on the third try. I did not tell Igor, then or later.
He came in while I was holding the knife, and I had time neither to wrap it up nor to invent a reason for going into the father's box.
"The father's," I said first, because in cases like this it pays to speak first.
"The father's," he agreed, and took the knife from me, straight by the handle, properly, like a tool and not like a keepsake. He held it, tested the bevel with his thumb and turned it to the light. "Listen. It isn't a shoemaker's at all."
"You've called it the father's knife as long as I've known you."
"Well, it was in the father's box."
Igor did not take his eyes off the bevel, long and even, the way none of our tools are, and he spoke slowly, the way he speaks when he is reading a thing.
"Ground for thin leather. You skive the edge down to nothing with this, so the leather will fold, and you won't get through our stock with it, it'll roll over on the first pair. And here, at the tang, this pale stuff. Not ours."
"Whose, then?"
I asked for nothing, but sometimes it is quicker to say something than to be noticeably silent.
"That it doesn't say," said Igor.
He turned the knife a little longer, tested the bevel a second time, and I could see he was about to say something more.
I took the knife from him, laid it on the cloth and wrapped it as it had been. Igor watched but did not interfere.
I knew the question word for word and had known it a long time. It is short.
Why did your father leave you a bookbinder's knife if he never bound a single book himself?
Instead I put the bundle back in the box, pushed the box shut with my foot and said that the man was coming about the door closer on Thursday. Igor replied that the man had come in March and that the door had been worse ever since. Then we turned off the lights, he checked the back door, I checked the front, and we walked home across the yard, where the neighbour was still standing by the gate wanting to explain to both of us why it sticks.
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