In January, a week before he was due to start, he got the bundle out of the box himself and unwrapped it on the kitchen table, next to the two papers, which were still lying in the cupboard among the notebooks.
"Look," he said. "The number matches."
The number on the issue slip and the number pressed into the tang under the paint matched. He had found it himself, scraping the paint off with a needle, and by the look of it he had spent more than one evening on it.
We sat at the table, and between us lay the knife, two papers and the spool.
In all those weeks he had not once shouted and had asked almost nothing, apart from that Sunday evening, and I had had time to decide he would never ask now. It turned out he had simply been scraping paint.
That was when I asked.
"Why did your father leave you a bookbinder's knife if he never bound a single book himself?"
Igor did not answer at once.
I sat with my hands on the table and did not once think about what I wanted to hear. That turned out not to be a feat but simply work: not to think about what I have been used to thinking about all my life. It is like not touching a bad tooth with your tongue.
"I don't know," he said. "He never told me anything about it. He didn't talk much about work at all."
He turned the knife over.
"Maybe he wanted me to have a choice." Igor thought a bit more. "And maybe he just couldn't throw it out. I couldn't have either."
And that was all.
Then he wrapped the knife in the same cloth and said:
"Let it lie here. It's his."
The spool he put in his pocket.
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