Igor came out wiping his hands and saw Safonov.
"Oh. Good evening."
"Good evening, Igor Ilyich."
They shook hands. Igor looked at me, then at him again, and I could see he was trying to work out how long the man had been standing there.
"Have you been waiting long? Why didn't you say." He turned to me: "Why didn't you call me?"
I said he had been working.
"I wasn't waiting for you," said Safonov. "I'm here on my own business."
And then Igor did something I hadn't expected and couldn't have foreseen, because he did it simply and without any preparation, the way he does everything.
"But you asked in the autumn whether any of the father's things were left." He went behind the partition. "Some are. I'll show you, perhaps you'd know."
He took off four lasts, moved the shelving aside, pulled out the box and got out the bundle. All that took him less than a minute, because he was doing it in his own shop, where everything lies where it lies.
He unwrapped it on the bench.
Safonov came over, bent down and looked without touching. He looked a long time.
"That's a paring knife," he said at last. "For thinning leather. You skive the edge down so it will fold."
"That's just what I say, it isn't ours."
"It isn't yours." Safonov straightened up. "That one's from the workshops. They were issued there against signature, and they had a number, here, at the tang, only on this one it's worn off or painted over."
He looked at the pale patch at the tang and said nothing about it.
Igor stood waiting, and you could see he was pleased: the thing had a name at last.
And then Safonov asked the question.
He did not ask me, and he asked it matter-of-factly, looking at the knife, the way one asks about a matter that has long failed to add up.
"Why did your father leave you a bookbinder's knife if he never bound a single book himself?"
I was standing at the counter, three metres away or so, holding on to the edge.
Igor did not answer at once. He picked up the knife, turned it over, laid it back on the cloth.
"I don't know," he said. "I never thought about it."
"I don't know either," said Safonov. "That's why I keep coming."
He told Igor the same thing he had told me: about the transfer, about the consent form, about a man signing and not coming. He told it evenly and briefly, and when he got to the paper he said:
"I left you a copy in the autumn."
Igor looked at me.
He did not look at once and not sharply. First he thought, then he turned his head and looked, and his face was not angry but the way it is when he doesn't understand a mechanism.
"He didn't," I said.
It came out by itself. I didn't even decide.
Safonov looked at me. Then at Igor.
Outside in the yard someone slammed a boot lid loudly.
"It happens," he said at last. "I'll make a new one."
He buttoned his coat, put on his hat with both hands and said goodbye, and Igor saw him to the door, and they talked about something else there, and I stood looking at the knife lying on the cloth on the bench.
Then Igor came back, wrapped up the knife and put it away in the box.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"You're white."
"Tired."
He believed it. He always believes it.
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