The final was set for nine in the morning, in the Foundation's boardroom. I left the house just after seven, not from any fear of being late, but because I wanted to walk through the city while it was still mine.
Heidelberg in the morning was empty and honest: the cobbles shone from the night's rain, a tram rustled past with two sleepy passengers, the bakeries smelled of warm bread, and the river carried the grey light along so calmly that it clearly cared nothing for any foundation. On my phone lay a message from my mother, sent at six fifty: "Carbs eaten? Rhetorical question. Toast in foil, right-hand pocket of the rucksack." The toast was there. My mother never relied on rhetoric.
I checked the time not by my phone but by the clock on the school tower, as I had done all my first life, and I smiled: the clock was running its eternal two minutes fast. For ten years it had lied in exactly the same way, and there was more reliability in that than in certain kinds of truth. By the tower I was already late, although in reality I had arrived before everybody else.
In the Foundation's corridor, by the tall doors of the boardroom, Konstantin Eisenberg was waiting, in a suit that sat on him the way clothes sit when they have been bought not for the occasion but to the measure of a life. He nodded to me without a smile, but without coldness either:
"Nervous?"
"Counting."
"Counting what?"
"My breathing. Four counts. It helps."
He looked at me with the interest of a person accustomed to being answered in formulas of politeness:
"I'll take that on board. In our family nerves are considered bad form, so nobody ever taught me what to do with them."
The boardroom smelled of wax and printer's ink. Five chairs stood at the long table. On it were a carafe, glasses and my papers in a neat stack. The panel consisted of the grey-haired woman with an X-ray gaze, the two experts from the first interview, a man in glasses I did not know and, at the far end, Mrs von Ahlenberg representing the board of trustees. Naturally she was here: In rooms like that there is always a price.
Over the next hour my application was combed through question by question: budget, partner schools, paying the mentors, sustainability without the founder. The man in glasses asked me to confirm the authorship of the methods, and I opened the charter at the signatures page: every card, every ladder, every technique carried a name, including clause nine with Hanna's surname on it. He nodded as though ticking a box on an invisible list of his own. About Mila I spoke without papers: how she had explained apples to the cat until division stopped being frightening, and how her mother had brought a cake to the shop. The man in glasses wrote down the word "cake" and underlined it. Foundations, perhaps, have memory hooks of their own.
Then Mrs von Ahlenberg spoke:
"Ms Mohr makes a coherent impression. But the panel is aware that the school's most promising candidate this year was left without a nomination because of an episode in which Ms Mohr's name figured. Tell me," she smiled immaculately, "your project is about support. Why did you refuse support to the person who needed it most of all?"
The room did not stir. One of the experts lowered his eyes to his papers with that particular diligence people bring to looking away while somebody else's duel unfolds in front of them. The question was beautifully built: any answer in my own defence would sound like selfishness, any answer in his would be an admission of guilt. I took a breathing pause, four counts, not because I did not know the answer, but because I had a right to the pause and was using that right for the first time.
"Because what I was doing was not support," I said. "Support is visible, recorded and rewarded, whether in money, time returned, or at least thanks said aloud. Invisible help with no name attached corrupts them both: one of them unlearns how to work, the other unlearns how to live. My project is about exactly that. I did not refuse a person. I refused an arrangement."
"An arrangement," Mrs von Ahlenberg repeated, weighing the word as a jeweller weighs metal.
"An arrangement," I confirmed. "As for the person, last week I explained to him how to ask for support properly. He has signed up with student support and put in his papers for the next cycle. On his own. It is in the school records."
She sat back in her chair, and I could not read whether I had won or lost. I read something else instead: she would check. And the records would tell her exactly what I had told her. The grey-haired woman looked at the clock, then at me:
"One last question, Ms Mohr. We shall read your essay on invisible labour in an hour. But answer me briefly, and now: who supported you?"
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