A-4 breathes at eight minutes past one, and I’m at the foot of his rack with my own breath held. The blanket comes up off his chest, slow and without any fuss, and in. Twelve seconds of in.
Then the going-out, which is longer and ends with a small sound, like a door being closed carefully in another room. Then he’s still. I write 13.08 on the clipboard beside 12.49, which is when I caught him on the first walk round. Nineteen minutes. Last Sunday it was eighteen and a half. They all lengthen, a little each week, and a number that lengthens is a number I can give his widow to take home on the tram.
You read the breath with your own held. That’s the first thing my mother taught me about the Waiting, in the drying house in Breath Summer, with a woman on the beds in front of us and the stoves going, and it’s the only thing I’ve never had to be told twice.
The breath clocks strapped round their chests punch a paper strip for the Church, a tick a breath, and the strips go to the Minster at the end of each month in a brown envelope with my signature across the flap. I time by hand anyway. A strip can jam. A stopwatch can stop. A keeper walking the rows with a pencil and a pocket watch, letting them come to him, doesn’t jam, or not often.
Gallery Four is the two lower rooms of Eastgate and what used to be the drying house beside them, lined in white panels the fish-trade engineers screwed over my grandfather’s brick, and held at one degree. Where the first room meets the old drying house the engineers hung an inner door in the arch, steel both sides and cork between, so the rooms could be shut off if the plant ever wanted it. It has stood back on its hook against the wall since the day they hung it. The racks are steel, hip height, four hundred and ten of them in rows, each with a card at the foot, a breath clock, a Vigil number stencilled on the frame. The tubes overhead give a cold blue light that adds a day to everyone’s face, the living included. Under the floor the compressors hold the low note I’ve learned to sleep through, the one the Minster organ holds under the last verse of a hymn.
Joost comes down Row A behind me, praying at each rack under his breath and touching each card with two fingers as he passes. He’s nineteen and he’s been here a year, and he still says the whole prayer every time, the long one, with the Return in it twice.
“There’s half the ward out there already,” he says. “The haar’s that thick you can’t see the end of them. Somebody’s got a primus going on the step.”
“Then somebody’s going to set fire to my step.”
“I told him. He said it’s his wife in C.” Joost holds out his hand for the clipboard. “Can I have the numbers after? For my book.”
He keeps his own ledger, a school exercise book with a saint on the cover, and copies my readings into it in his round harbour hand. I’ve told him once that he doesn’t need to. He said he liked to have them. I hand him the clipboard when I’m done with a row and he copies while I walk the next.
On a Sunday I don’t read every rack. I read the ones whose people will ask. A widow wants a number; a son who comes once a month wants a number and a reason it’s different from last month’s. Some never ask. Tjark Ommen has come down that stair every Sunday since March and has never once asked me for a number, so I walk past Row B, rack 9, the way you’d walk past a man praying.
Row B and Row C are mostly the oldest of my Waiting, the ones who came across from Gallery One in March when the plant here was signed off, with a scatter of One’s in Row A. A salt porter, a sailor, a girl off the canal, a priest’s housekeeper who fell on the Minster steps. They’ve been in the Cold since the first winter, when there was only One. Their families come down the stair like people who know where the light switch is.
I finish at Row F because I want to.
Row F runs along the back wall of the second room, under the evaporator coils, where the frost on the fins is thickest and the air moves. Rack 6 has a white card at the foot like the others. Geertje Tiede. Keeper of Eastgate 1985 to 2024. 14.1.2027. The Church spells out the trade on the card for keepers and clergy. It wasn’t her idea.
She’s in her own grey cardigan with the leather buttons, buttoned wrong at the bottom because she always buttoned it wrong at the bottom and I’m not going to be the one to change it now. Her hands are crossed over the breath clock’s strap, small and square, the knuckles cracked from forty years of salt. My own are the same, and smell of vinegar however I scrub them, and when I bend over her it’s my own hands I smell first.
Warm. Not as the living are warm. Three degrees over the air, which down here is the difference between a stone and a loaf.
I caught her at 13.34 the first time round. I stand with the watch open on my palm and wait.
There’s nothing to look at. That’s the work. A face that’s been the same face for ten months, softened a little at the jaw, the colour gone from the lips and come back paler. The lashes have grown. The nails have grown, and I trim them on the first Monday with her own scissors from the kitchen drawer, the ones with the tape round one handle. The skin has a bloom on it they all get down here, a fine damp that’s frost by evening if a door’s left open.
At 13.51 the cardigan lifts.
I hold mine. I don’t count it out. I’ve counted it so many times on this rack that the counting goes on somewhere under me, by itself, like the plant.
Seventeen minutes and some seconds. I write it down. Under the floor the compressors go down a note while the plant thinks about the brine, and come back.
I don’t say dead about her. I say Row F, rack 6, seventeen minutes, warm.
At five to two I go up and open the outer door, because my mother opened it at five to, and the cold comes up the stair behind me like a dog let out.
They come down slowly. They always do. Thirty-one steps of the old vault stair, worn into dips in the middle by three hundred years of Sunday shoes, and at the bottom every one of them stops, breath showing, as if they’ve forgotten what the next step is for. Then they find their row. A man in a pilot’s coat with a folding stool under his arm. Two sisters with a pram that has no baby in it, only flasks and a blanket. The tram driver’s widow for A-4, who asks me her number before she’s got her glove off.
“Nineteen,” I tell her. “Nineteen minutes.”
“Longer,” she says.
“Longer. Half a minute.”
She nods as if I’ve told her the price of something has gone down, and goes to sit with him.
The Church sends new rack cards every quarter, with the renewal date printed smaller than the name and a paragraph on the back that begins Families are warmly reminded. Nobody has ever been warmly reminded of anything that didn’t cost money. Eleven hundred crowns a year buys a Vigil place, a rack, one degree and a breath clock, until the Return. Money is also why we print the Waiting once a year against their token cards, since Gallery Two found a paid place holding somebody’s uncle instead of the man whose name was at his feet. The family had thought nobody would look. Nobody had, for six months.
By half past two the gallery is full and has the sound it has on Sundays: low talk, flask lids, someone reading aloud, and under all of it, every few seconds from somewhere in the rows, a long breath that isn’t any of ours, and before it’s finished another one starting further off, so the room is never quite without one. Nobody looks up when one comes now. In the spring they did.
In Row C a woman is eating a herring roll at her husband’s rack, standing up, onions and all, and every so often she brushes the crumbs off his blanket and tells him sorry. The man with the primus is not allowed the primus. He takes it back up the stair himself and leaves it burning on the top step, and Joost goes up after him and turns it off, and the two of them have a short conversation in harbour words I’m too old to follow.
A woman I don’t know stops me at the end of Row F, where she’s been waiting for a cousin’s son on rack 2 to breathe and given up. She’s in good boots, from the big houses on the Minster side.
“That one’s yours,” she says. “The keeper.”
“My mother.”
“Did she want this?” She tips her head at the coils, the panels, the strap across the cardigan. “The Cold. Someone who knew the old way better than anyone.”
“She asked for it,” I say.
The woman draws her gloves on. She looks at my mother’s buttons, the wrong one at the bottom, and doesn’t say anything about it.
Tjark is at Row B, rack 9, and he’s stopped halfway through the collar.
That’s how I know. He does it every Sunday, the same way, the way you’d do it for a child who’s asleep: unpins the old one at the back of her neck, lifts her head a finger’s width with his palm under it, slides the clean one round, pins it, lays her down. The old one goes folded on the rail for me to wash, because the breath wets whatever’s at the throat and their own clothes would mildew in a month without it. He’s on the canal by half past three. He doesn’t sit.
Today the clean collar is round her neck and not pinned, and the old one is in his fist, not folded, and he’s holding his daughter’s comb in the other hand with her hair parted down the middle as if he’s about to plait it. He was never any good at plaits. He says so himself.
“An,” he says.
I go. He doesn’t move to make room so I stand at the foot, by the card. Lise Ommen. 1.1.2027. The parish paid for her place the week after the ice; there’s a list of names in the canal ward chapel of everyone who gave, down to the boys who gave a crown.
She’s fifteen, in her own blue skating jumper with the white blouse collar turned out over it and the Sunday collar over that. Her face is the face I’ve looked at since March, and before that, at the lock with her father, since she was a thing in a sling. Fair. She was always the fairest child on the cut, hair the colour of new rope.
“Look at her parting,” Tjark says.
I look. The parting runs white down the crown where he’s combed it. On either side of it, at the root, the hair is dark.
Not much. The width of the white on a fingernail, perhaps less. A band of dark ash colour right against the scalp, all along the parting, and then the fair begins as if somebody had drawn a line.
“It’s the light,” I say. “The tubes are cold. They put a colour on everything.”
“It’s dark at the root, An.”
“You should see what they do to my face in the shaving mirror.”
He doesn’t laugh. I didn’t expect him to. I get the torch, the yellow one I use in the plant room, and put it close to her head, and I lift a lock of her hair between two fingers to see the root against the beam.
Dark. Under the yellow light it’s darker. The colour peat ash goes when rain gets at it.
“She was fair her whole life,” he says.
“Hair grows. It grows on all of them. Hair, nails, the lashes.”
“Not dark.”
She breathes while we’re standing there. The jumper lifts, slow, and the new collar shifts on her throat because it isn’t pinned. I don’t look at my watch. Tjark puts the comb down on the rail very carefully, the way he’d put down a full cup, and rubs his palms together, rope-burned across the middle where the warps have run through them for thirty years. He does that when he’s waiting for a lock to fill.
“The cold does things to colour,” I say. “You’ve seen what it does to the collars. They go yellow in a week. It’s damp. It’s the plant drying the air out.”
“Is it her?”
He says it to the rack, not to me.
New Year’s night, on his deck, with the broken ice still knocking along the hull and half the canal ward out on the towpath with lamps, he asked me whether to give her to the beds at Saltgate or to the Cold. He didn’t have eleven hundred crowns. He didn’t ask the priest. He asked the keeper. I told him the Cold. I told him she’d be kept, the whole of her, exactly as she was, until the Return, and that the ward would find the money, and it did. He went below, and I stood on his deck by myself for a while with the lamps going home along the towpath, and then I went home too.
“Tjark.”
“They brought her across from One in March. In the van. I wasn’t there.”
“I was there. I took her off the van myself.”
“Is it her?”
There’s a family two racks down with a little boy in a hat with ears on it, and the boy has stopped kicking the rack leg to listen. His mother says something to him and he starts again.
I could tell Tjark that I know her face. I’ve known it sixteen years. I could tell him the Church wouldn’t, and the Church wouldn’t. He knows all that already.
“There’s a card,” I say. “Her token card. Her thumb, taken the night she came in. I’ll print her against it after doors. For the record. Then it’s written down, and the card says it, and you can stop asking me with your face.”
“I know her face.”
“Then you don’t need the card.”
He picks the comb back up. “Do it anyway.”
Doors close at four. Joost walks the rows saying it’s time in the voice he uses for it, softer than his own, and by ten past the gallery is empty except for the Waiting and the flask rings on the rails and Tjark, standing exactly where he stood.
The token cards live in the office at the foot of the stair, in two long oak drawers that used to hold my grandfather’s shelf index. Ommen is in the second drawer behind Olthof. I bring the card out to the rack with the ink slab and the roller and a fresh card from the box, the kind the Synod prints by the thousand, with a box on the front marked RIGHT THUMB and a box on the back marked LEFT, and a line underneath for the keeper’s name.
Joost watches me ink the slab.
“Master Tiede, the check’s not till January.”
“It’s for her father.”
He looks at Tjark, then at me, and goes up to evening chapel with his exercise book under his arm.
Her token card was made at Gallery One on New Year’s night, by their keeper, with the harbour wind coming in under his door. The edges of the print have a blur to them, like most of that first winter’s cards. Everyone did them in a hurry. There were a great many that week.
I take her right hand off her chest.
It comes easily. They don’t stiffen, after the first hours; they never stiffen again. Her hand is soft and heavy and three degrees warmer than mine, and there’s a bead of damp on the ball of the thumb from the air. I dry it on my handkerchief. Her nails are trimmed short and square; Tjark does them, the first Sunday of the month, with her own clippers from a tin on the barge. I roll the thumb on the slab, nail edge to nail edge, once, the way the Guild teaches, no pressing. Then onto the box marked RIGHT THUMB, nail to nail, once.
I wipe the ink off her thumb with spirit and a rag until the skin’s clean, and lay her hand back on her chest where it was, over the other, and straighten the cuff of the jumper.
“Rest well,” I tell her.
Tjark pins the collar at last, with his big fingers, while I take the two cards to the end of the rack and hold them under the torch, the old one and the new one, the new ink still wet enough to shine.
“Well?” he says.
On the old card the ridges come in from the left side, rise, bend round, and go back out the way they came, the way the Ringvaart bends below the Eastgate lock. Blurred at the edges. Clear at the bend.
On the new card they don’t go anywhere. They turn round and round on themselves into a small tight knot at the centre, like a line coiled down on a deck.
I tilt the card and bring the torch closer. I put the new card down on the rail and pick it up again, as if it might have changed while I wasn’t holding it.
That thumb was between my fingers a minute ago. I dried it myself. I rolled it nail to nail.
These are not the same hand.
