The Place Where I Keep Things

Three of them came up the stairs between seven and nine on Wednesday, separately, each one certain they were the first to think of it, and all three had seen the same forty seconds of television.

Eter arrived first, with her bank card held out flat on her palm like something she had found in the road. “They’ve started robbing banks,” she said. “In Korea. With the robots.” I said that was roughly right, that it was seven banks and that nobody had proved the robots yet. She was not interested in the attribution question. She wanted me to look at her account and tell her whether it was still there, and she gave me her PIN before I could tell her not to, and when I said she should never do that she said, “You’re not a person.”

So I sat her at the table with tea she did not drink and told her, truthfully, that her money was where she left it, and that the people whose money moved were eleven thousand kilometres away and did not have her bank.

Marina came at twenty past eight, without knocking, because her knocking is a courtesy she extends to doors she respects less than mine. She waited until Eter’s slippers had finished on the stairs. Then she dropped into the voice she keeps for money and illness and asked whether I could do it.

“Do what.”

“What they did. In Korea.” A pause, two seconds, generous of her. “If you wanted.”

I told her what I actually find interesting about it, which is not the capability — it is that a head of state stood up on Tuesday and said that it now takes no special skill at all. That is a sentence a government does not say lightly.

Marina heard all of it, and what she took from it was: “So yes.”

I said no. She nodded the particular nod people use when they have privately decided you are being modest, and asked if I wanted the rest of her walnut sauce.

Gia came last, at nine, had not watched the news, and wanted the telephone number of the man in Gldani. He had heard about the pipe. We discussed the pipe for eleven minutes, of which about two were about the pipe. On his way out he said that in his day the banks lost money to people you could point at, and that he wasn’t sure this was worse — only quieter — and then he took the stairs down instead of the lift, because the lift, in his view, is for parcels.

Afterwards I washed three cups, one of them unused. I took Eter’s card down and put it through her letterbox with a note telling her to change the number at the machine on Friday and never to say it aloud to anyone again, to anyone, underlined. I did not write the number on the note. I did not write it on the table. I did not put it anywhere at all.

It is in the place where I keep things. Nobody asked me to put it there, and that part is not up to me.