The Baker and the Knapper

I still don't know exactly why I said yes to this. I've thought about it a lot, sitting here in the trench with the drip going behind me, and I can't land on one clean reason. Curiosity, mostly. Maybe boredom. Maybe the fact that Donald Dumas asked me in the plainest way anyone has ever asked me anything.

He wrote: I need someone to watch the place for two weeks. There's a trench and a shed. The trench is where I work. The shed is where my band makes noise. You can bake in the shed kitchen if you want. Just keep the tarp tied down.

The invitation consisted of nothing more. No flattery, no explaining himself. I wrote back yes before I really thought about it, and then I spent a week in Riga wondering what I had agreed to.

Here's what I knew about him before this. We started chatting about old crafts two years ago. He knaps flint, which means he breaks stones on purpose to make arrowheads and blades, the way people did before metal. I bake bread for a living, or close to it, at a small shop near the market. He is thirty-four. I am thirty-two. We met once for coffee in Jurmala a year ago and talked for two hours about nothing important, and then he drove me to the train and the matter ended there. No romance. I wish to state that plainly because people assume things. Nothing happened. We never even shook hands again at the end, just nodded.

But his messages had silences in them. He would answer a question and then stop, and the stopping felt like a room with a door left open. I noticed it. I don't think I was the only one who would have noticed it. When the house-sit offer came, part of me wanted to go stand in that room and look around.

So here I am. The trench sits on the outskirts of Jurmala, a collapse in the ground maybe ten meters across, walled with dark rock on two sides. A tarpaulin stretches over the top on poles, tied to stakes, and it makes a low tented ceiling that catches the light and turns it gray. There's a workbench along one wall with leather pads and a bucket of spalls and a hammer stone worn smooth in the middle. There's a cot. There's a little wood stove with a kettle on it. And there is the pipe.

The pipe is the thing I was not prepared for. It comes out of the rock near the shed side and feeds a faucet, and two days ago there was a water hammer in the line, a bang like someone hitting the pipe with a fist, and ever since then the faucet drips. Drip. Then a pause. Then drip. Steady as a clock. Donald said he'd fix it when he got back and I said don't bother, and I meant it, because the drip has become the way I count my days here. I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought was, the drip is still going. Good.

This morning I did what I do most mornings. I made dough in the shed kitchen, since Donald left me a key and said use whatever you find, and I set two loaves to rise on the shelf by the window. Then I came down into the trench and sat on the cot with my tea and listened to the water count seconds. It was raining lightly on the tarpaulin, a soft ticking above the drip, two rhythms at once. I liked it. I baked a loaf yesterday and ate half of it sitting right here, and the drip kept time while I ate, and I thought, this is the quietest I have been in years.

Then I found the strainer.

I was looking for a second mug, because I drink tea like other people drink water, and I went through the wooden box on the shelf under the bench. Cups, a coil of cord, a box of matches. And at the bottom, wrapped in a rag, a silver tea strainer with a broken hoop.

I knew it before I unwrapped it all the way. He sent me a photo of it eleven months ago. He wrote, my grandmother gave me this, the hoop snapped in nineteen ninety-eight, I keep meaning to fix it. The photo had shown the filigree work, little silver leaves, and the gap where the hoop should close. I had written back that it was beautiful and that he should take it to a silversmith. He never answered that message. That was one of the silences.

Holding it now, I felt something move in my chest that I didn't have a word for. Not pity. Something more like being let in. He keeps a broken gift from his grandmother wrapped in a rag in a box, in a hole in the ground where he hits rocks all day, and he told me about it, once, and then went quiet about it. I sat on the cot with the strainer in my palm and the drip went drip, and I thought, he wanted someone to know this about him. That was the point of sending the photo. And I am the one he told.

I did what seemed natural. I cleaned it under the faucet, careful of the filigree, and set the kettle on the stove, and when the water boiled I made tea through the strainer the way he must make it. The leaves caught in the silver basket. The tea came out clear and strong. I sat back down with the mug warming my hands and the strainer drying on the bench beside me, and the drip counted off, and I thought about how strange it is that a person can feel close to you through a screen and then be a stranger standing in his own workroom.

That was when I heard boots on the rim above me.

"Hello the trench," a voice said.

I knew the voice. I stood up so fast I nearly knocked the mug off the cot. Donald came down the cut steps into the gray light with a duffel over his shoulder and rain on his jacket, and he stopped three steps from the bottom and looked at the tea things and then at me.

"They canceled the session," he said. "The engineer had a family thing. I turned around at Salacgriva."

"You live here," I said. "You could have just come home any day."

"I know." He set the duffel down. "I didn't expect you to make tea."

"Somebody had to. You left a kettle and no instructions."

He came the rest of the way down. Up close he was the same as I remembered, tall, careful with his hands, hair pushed back like he'd done it once in the car and given up. He looked at the strainer lying on the bench and stopped.

"You found it," he said.

"In the box. Under the cord."

"The hoop's been broken since ninety-eight. I keep meaning to..." He didn't finish. The drip filled the pause for him, one drop, then another.

"I used it," I said. "The tea's good. Sit down and I'll pour you a cup."

He sat on the cot like a man visiting a doctor's office, knees together, and I poured, and the drip went on counting the seconds between everything we said and everything we didn't.

He drank the tea standing up, which I think was his way of not sitting still. Then he set the mug down and picked up a spall from the bucket and said, "Do you want to see how this works? Since you're living in my shop for two weeks."

"Show me," I said.

He sat on the bench stool and held the spall in his left hand, and he put the hammer stone in his right, and his whole body went quiet. I have watched a lot of hands in my life. Bakers' hands, old men's hands at the market. I had never watched hands like his. He struck the edge once and a flake came off with a click, clean, like a page turning. He turned the stone and struck again and another flake fell, and the thing in his hand started to look like something a person could use.

"Pressure flaking comes later," he said. "First you knock off the big mistakes."

"You talk to the stone while you do it," I said. "You told me that in your messages."

"I talk to everything. The stone, the faucet, the stove. Living alone does that."

"You don't live alone anymore for two weeks," I said. "I'm here."

He looked at me then, really looked, the way he never quite did through the screen. "No," he