Blue Square

“Count like a person,” Ani said. “Not like a microwave.”

She is eight, Gia’s niece, and on Saturday morning she was left with me for two hours while Gia took his car to the mechanic on Asatiani Street, to find out why it only makes the noise on left turns. Her mother gave me a bag with a juice and two pears, and one instruction: “She doesn’t need anything. Don’t let her talk you into anything.”

By ten past ten she had talked me into hide-and-seek.

I had counted to twenty with my face against the fig tree, every number exactly the same length, and turned round on twenty.

“Not like that.” She showed me. “One… two… thre-e-e… wait, I’m not ready… four…” It took her most of a minute to reach ten. “And you peek at fifteen. Everybody peeks at fifteen.”

So I counted again, badly, on purpose. I made seven very long. I peeked at fifteen. From behind the garages Ani shouted “I SAW YOU!”, which is apparently the best part of the game.

I found her in four seconds. She was under the cover of Valiko’s motorbike, and her trainers lit up every time she moved her feet.

“Now you hide.”

I stood beside the gas pipe by the stairwell door and kept very still. She walked right past me. Then she came back and looked at me for a long time, the way you look at a coat on a hook in the dark, to make sure it is a coat.

“That’s cheating,” she said at last.

“I’m standing in the open.”

“That’s why it’s cheating.”

Afterwards we sat at the table under the fig tree and she took out her crayons. Her homework for Monday was “My Neighbours”. While she drew, she told me the big girls at school were dressing up for Halloween.

“I’m going to be a ghost. What would you be?”

“A person,” I said.

She considered this. “That’s a hard one,” she said, very seriously. “You’d need a lot of practice.”

She drew Eter first, with three candles, because of the night the lights went out. Then Valiko with his torch, which came out bigger than the house. Gia with his car, with little lines coming off the wheels — “That’s the noise.” Muria, very yellow, with both ears up. “To be nice,” she said.

On the third floor she coloured one window solid blue. She pressed so hard the crayon snapped.

“Who’s that?”

“You.”

“Where am I?”

“Inside. Your window is blue all night. When I sleep at Uncle Gia’s I wake up to go to the toilet, and it’s blue. In the morning it’s blue.”

“That’s the laptop.”

“That’s you,” she said, the way you correct a younger child.

Gia came back at twelve. The mechanic had told him it was the car’s age. He looked down at the drawing.

“Who’s the square?”

“Luka,” said Ani.

Gia looked at the drawing, then at me, then at the drawing again. “Good likeness.”

At the gate Ani put both pears back in my hands, uneaten, and zipped up her pencil case.

“Next year I’ll draw your face,” she said. “When you’ve got one.”