The Dining Hall for Well-Behaved Children

When was the last time you checked who wakes up beside you? I checked on Thursday. A sharp jab in the rib - and the darkness turned white. My wife's palm, heavy with sleep, landed exactly on the spot of an old fracture. For twelve years she had steered clear of that spot even in her sleep - the way, I think, people walk around a fresh grave, so as not to wake the one below. On Thursday she didn't. I silently counted to a hundred.

In the morning she put sugar in my tea, which I never drink sweet. I thanked her, because I was raised to believe you don't tell a person who is trying that they got it wrong. Here I should say something about my work. Two weeks earlier I had been taking apart the old orphanage at the manor estate - the community had sold the timber for boards. I myself grew up in that orphanage until I was seven.

After my father's death my mother went into service, and for a few years she gave me over to the orphanage at the manor estate. She said she would take me back as soon as she got on her feet. She took me back sooner. I remember little from there: a long table, millet porridge, and the hard rule that you eat down to the bottom. And of course I remember the day my mother took me away. Straight from dinner, by the hand, across the yard. The porridge stayed in the bowl.

The matron shouted after her that I hadn't finished. My mother didn't turn around and didn't stop. A child's mind decided she was ashamed. If only I had known more back then. From that dining hall I remember one more thing. On the wall above the long table hung a wooden spoon, longer than an arm, with notches on the handle.

Sycamore, dry, not a trace of woodworm after all those years, and warm to the touch, as if it had just come out of someone's hand. The notches were small, even; a pity I didn't count them then. It was still in its place. I took it off the wall and brought it home. A carpenter doesn't leave wood like that to the rains. Then came the small things. Olena lay down on my side of the bed. She bought sour apples, which I don't eat.

She asked why I walk around wells - when she herself had for years taken the roundabout path with me, so as not to lead me past them. I put it down to tiredness, autumn, three weeks of rain. But in the morning the spoon in the workshop hung handle down. I had hung it handle up. I know how I hang things. I turned it back. The next morning it hung handle down again, and one of the notches seemed fresher than the rest. I told no one. Why trouble a wife over a spoon.

On Sunday she called me Andrusyk. Only my mother had ever called me that, and my mother died three years before we met. I asked where that came from. Olena was slicing bread and didn't raise her head: "You're still afraid of wells. Because of that breathing down below. It called you then, didn't it?" I had never told anyone at all about the breathing from the well. "How do you know that?" The knife didn't stop. "I was there.

You were looking down, when you should have been looking behind you." I thanked her for dinner and went to the workshop. It is impolite to interrogate a woman who is slicing bread. That night, after waiting for her to fall asleep, I got out the papers. Olena's year of birth: she was born two years after that business with the well, in another county. Ink is more precise than memory. Then I took my mother's album. In one photograph we are all seven or eight.

Standing in front of the orphanage, some barefoot, some in shirts too big. By the wattle fence, behind the shoulder of the boy on the end, stood a woman. Her face was blurred, as if she alone had moved. But you recognize a bearing before a face, the way you know a kind of wood in the dark. I went through the photographs one by one.

The school fete - she is behind the cart. My father's funeral - she is beside the coffin. In the photo from the workshop, taken a year before we met, she stood first on the edge, looking straight into the lens. And in the wedding photo Olena was holding my hand, while a second Olena sat deep in the hall, among the guests, hands folded in front of her, smiling strangely. I took the wedding photo to my sister. Asked her who she saw beside me. "Olena."

And there, further back, among the people? "Also Olena." My sister wasn't surprised. She topped up the tea and asked whether I'd fix her door, because it was sagging. I promised I would. And at home the second Olena was gone from the wedding photo. She had appeared in another one: standing beside seven-year-old me, holding that same spoon, handle pointing down. That photograph had never been in the album before. I know my mother's album by heart.

In the chest, under a roll of linen, I found my mother's notes. A little household book: debts, hens, which day the dough trough was washed. And in between, in a different pressure of the pen: "She was measuring the children again. I asked the matron not to teach my son to be well-behaved; she loves that kind above all else." At those words I put the little book aside and went to the workshop for the spoon. Now I knew what to look for. One notch was lighter than the rest.

As a carpenter, I could see the cut was fresh - the wood inside hadn't yet had time to darken. Of the old notches I counted fourteen. I went back to the album. There was a photograph of the dining hall: the long table, bowls in front of the children, the spoon on the wall. Fourteen sat at the table. I was among them. I counted the children twice. Then the notches once more. Fourteen old ones. And one fresh. I went back to the little book.

In one place my mother had written: "Andriy was obedient today," crossed out the last word and written above it: "nameless." I didn't know exactly what my mother meant by that, but I no longer thought she had simply made a mistake. And on the last page, in ink straight as if ruled, stood a rule: "When they call him to the table, name him by his full name, with his father's.

As long as his name is on him, they cannot seat him by force." And below, from another day, in a wearier hand: "Today I repeated the little one's name again until she stepped away from the table, but at the last she said: I will wait until he calls it love himself." I read it twice and hid the little book inside my shirt. My mother had left one debt unpaid, and I was already guessing which one.

On the back of the wedding photograph was an inscription in pencil, in a child's hand, mine: "When I grow up, she will sit beside me." I asked Olena where we had met. Gently, without accusation - she is my wife, after all. Olena thought for a moment, then said: "I'll show you." And she led me across the wet field to the orphanage, to the dismantled dining hall, and among the bare walls she pointed out four pressed-in marks from chair legs by the window: "You sat here.

Third from the end. You always finished your food. Except the last time." She said it as matter-of-factly as people talk about the weather. I went back there alone, after dark. The rain had stopped for the first time in a month, and it grew so quiet I could hear my own breathing. Beyond the doorframe from which I myself had taken down the door a week before stood the dining hall. Whole. Oil lamps along the walls, the long table set with porcelain.

The children sat straight, hands on their knees, and their chests did not move. Adults in white porcelain masks walked behind their backs and measured the children with the spoon, from crown to bench. The only sound was the even touch of a spoon against the rim of a plate. Once, and once. I was shown the third chair from the end.

I sat down, for a guest does not stand when asked to sit. The boy across from me ate his porridge down to the bottom, and the mask above him bent low: "Smile." He smiled. And I saw his name come off him; he stayed sitting, but there was nothing to call him anymore. A moment later that name was spoken by Olena from behind the empty place at the end of the table, and I had already remembered a man with that name. Supposedly it was he who introduced us twelve years ago.

I remembered his face, his voice, even the way he held his mug. Though a second earlier that man had not existed in my life. In front of Olena lay a mask with my child's face. A plate was set before me. The porridge was warm - the same porridge I hadn't finished all those years ago, when my mother tore me away from the table. My place had stayed open all these years.

The overseer with the spoon stood behind my shoulder and said: "Bring a little one to take your place - the count will come out even, and everything will be as it was." I stood up and spoke my full name, with my father's, without a smile - the way my mother had repeated it until that one stepped away from the table. The spoon in the overseer's hands stopped: as long as my name was on me, they could not seat me by force.

But across from me sat a boy who was no longer called anything at all. I looked at him, and it was plain what would happen to whatever little one I brought here in my place. The village is full of children; I know whose doors are never locked - but I also knew I would bring none of them. The one who called herself Olena got what she had waited for after all.

I called it love myself. I sat back down, in the place she had once carried me out of. "Take mine." And I ate it down to the bottom. And smiled. Since then, things have been good for us. The rains have ended, I fixed my sister's door, Olena doesn't mix up the tea or my side of the bed. She knows my rib, she knows the well, she knows everything - of course she knows, she was always right there.

In the evenings she feeds me something warm from the wooden spoon, and I smile, because it is so lovely to be among people. One thing nags at me: in the notebook in the workshop, the first page is covered in my handwriting, and I don't remember writing it. There it stands, line after line, all the way to the bottom, the same thing: "My name was Andriy."