The Glove That Waited for a Hand

People leave all sorts of things at the inn: a pipe, a belt, a knife with someone else's blood on it, a sin that clings to a shot glass. But the day before yesterday, under a bench, I found a glove of goat leather. It wasn't lying there. It was waiting. The fingers were curled as if they had just been holding someone's wrist and didn't want to let go.

I picked it up with two fingers, and the cold went not into my palm but higher, past the elbow, up to the shoulder. The glove gave off a smell of well-stone, graveyard clay and a frozen body that no one had yet washed, but that no one called by name anymore. Inside lay a damp little notebook. The pages reeked of old mould. I set the glove down by the stove. And something tapped softly with a fingernail from inside. Then I opened the notebook.

The first lines were even, almost clerical. Further on the letters shrank, twisted, crawled downward. I don't know whether it was a confession. Perhaps a record of a man losing himself. So I am not telling this in my own words. I am only reading what was left in that notebook. And it began like this.

I was a scribe at a small manor above the Smotrych, where the lord's ambition smelled of mouse droppings in the cupboards, and the books of debts and rents lay like the dried hides of human vanity. That autumn I rode through wet fields and still believed that my hand was my instrument.

In the evening we stopped for the night, and in the dark entry hall of a coaching inn by the old bridge, where wet cloaks steamed on pegs and the floor breathed of swamp and horse harness, I found a glove under a bench. The goat leather was soft as a severed eyelid. I put it on - out of curiosity, and because my fingers were numb from the rain.

The leather pressed itself to my wrist not like a garment but like a stranger's thought remembering its own shape. I wanted to pull it off. I tugged - and suddenly felt that I was pulling not the glove but my own skin. The fingers beneath it moved by themselves, as if someone inside were trying on my joints. At first I felt no pain. A rustling. As if dry poppy seed were being poured back and forth under the glove.

Then a fine itch began in my palm, deep and unbearable, as if the itch were in the very place where my will was fastened to my fingers. And I understood: it was not me that itched. I ordered my fingers to clench. They did not obey. Only the tendons under the skin drew taut, like strings on a bad instrument, and the thumb slowly touched the forefinger. Not by my will. Not by my habit. Not by my fear.

I must have groaned, because the voices beyond the door fell silent. A strip of yellow light seeped into the entry hall, the door creaked, and the master of the house stood on the threshold with a burning splinter. He did not ask what had happened. He only raised the flame to my hand and said: "Sir, I see your hand is not listening to you." In the firelight I caught a strange gleam in his eyes.

There was too much knowledge in those words for a man with tar under his fingernails. That night I lay down on the bench with my right hand on my chest, like someone else's instrument in its case. Sleep did not come. Instead I fell through into a sticky darkness that smelled of camphor, raw earth and the wet linen they cover a man with before burial. Then the fingers under the glove began to count my ribs. Once. A second time. A third. Not to know the body. To test the door.

I opened my eyes and saw a shadow in the corner. It had no figure. Only intent. It waited the way black water waits under thin ice. At dawn I took out the book of debts, to write a few lines about the night and my own disgrace. I still thought that writing would give me back my order. But the moment I laid the quill on the table, my right hand took it before I had time to want to. And began to write. Not I.

It drew the plan of a building that could not exist in the village: columns without a roof, stairs that led not upward but under the earth, and gates drawn one inside another, as if every door hid a still deeper darkness behind it. The quill scratched the paper so quietly, so stubbornly, as if someone on the dark side of the page were begging to be let out. And then the hand went still and wrote evenly beneath the plan:

the body is a door, and a door does not ask permission of the one who lives inside. I went to a healer. He rubbed my wrist with camphor, set leeches on it, whispered prayers as dryly as if he were grinding chalk. When he touched the glove, his face went grey. He bowed to my hand. Not to me. "The gentleman is not ill," he whispered. "Illness would be a mercy. Your hand already has another master."

Coming out from the healer's, I wanted to go back to the coaching inn, take my bag and flee wherever the horses were looking. But my body was no longer taking counsel with me. At the graveyard the body stopped. The hand rose toward the old icon on the gate, but did not touch the wood. It only traced a circle in the air. At first there was nothing there. Then the space darkened and deepened, as if someone had peeled a thin painted skin off the world.

I saw the village from the wrong side: forests of canvas, a sun of yellow glass, people on threads feigning breath, marriage, hunger and prayer. I looked for the one who pulls. But above it all no puppeteer could be seen. It was as if the threads themselves craved to pull. One was already passing through my hand. The notebook broke off with the words: "I do not live.

I hang on an invisible thread." For a long time I looked at the glove by the stove. Its fingers had already opened. As if someone had let go of a stranger's wrist. Or perhaps made ready to take a new one.