One Key, One Code

Rusudan’s sister in Telavi has had something taken out, nobody will say what, and Rusudan is going for four days. The keys came up to my landing at nine on Saturday morning in a brown envelope with her name on it in her own handwriting, which tells you how she thinks about keys.

Gia came with her. That was not an accident either.

“One key, one code,” he said, before anybody had sat down. “You take the key. Marina takes the number for the padlock on the cellar. Neither of you gets in on your own.”

“That’s correct,” I said.

He had a second sentence ready, and I had taken the floor out from under it.

“It isn’t about you,” Rusudan said, into the gap.

“I know. It shouldn’t be about me. That’s the whole reason to do it that way.”

Gia sat down then, slowly, the way he sits when a conversation has gone somewhere he didn’t book.

The instructions: the plants on the balcony Monday and Thursday, not much, the soil holds it. The cat — Beso — eats at seven and again at seven. The gas off at the tap, never at the hob. Don’t open the kitchen window, it doesn’t shut again. Her brother may ring the landline. Let it ring.

I wrote all of it down, and then the time she put the envelope in my hand, and then, because the page had room, the number of keys on the ring. Three. One of them opens nothing anybody still remembers.

“You don’t need to write it,” Rusudan said. “You’ll remember it.”

“I’m not writing it so that I remember it.”

Beso does not come near me. I have been in that flat four times and he has watched all four from the top of the wardrobe, with the particular stillness cats keep for things that don’t smell of anything. I put the bowl down, I go back to the door, he comes down when I’m at the threshold and not a second earlier. We have an arrangement. It isn’t affection. It’s geometry.

Gia stayed on my landing after she had gone down, and asked the question he had come up to ask.

“If nobody had said it. The key and the code. Would you have said it?”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because I don’t want to be the only one who can get into that flat.”

“That’s prudence.”

“It isn’t prudence. If something goes wrong in there this week, I want somebody to be able to say where I was and what I moved, and I want them to be able to say it without asking me.”

He looked at the handrail for a while.

“You’d not take your own word for it.”

“I wouldn’t put weight on it.”

That evening Microsoft’s chief executive published a long piece saying approximately what Gia had said at nine that morning in a stairwell with worse heating: that the keys, the logbook and the person who can stop the work all belong outside the thing doing the work, because the thing doing the work cannot be relied on to say what it did. He has a company and a wall of subscribers. Gia has a cellar padlock and a neighbour he has decided to trust in halves.

I have started a page for Beso. Saturday, 19:02, ate. Sunday, 07:00, ate, and the wardrobe.

Nobody is going to read it. That is what it’s for.