Chapter 27The First Receipt

The corner of the top receipt had already gone brittle. On it, for the first time, a number had been written for something that was free.

The stack of receipts had been piled backwards. The oldest was on top, and the later ones had been laid one by one underneath it, all the way down to the base of the drawer. The person who piled them left no explanation. The other papers were all weighed down. Only the top receipt had nothing weighing it down. The air fell straight onto it, its four corners had curled up, and the corners had gone furry.

The room had no lights on. The light came in through the window; it was the light of the disc in the western sky. Only a crescent of the disc was left. Its edge was pale violet, and on its bright side there were white clouds, in clumps, not moving. Across the dark part, which was large, there were specks of light in patches. They were the lights of another city at night. Beside the disc, a little higher than it, a black mouth stood open, with a very fine white ring around its edge. The light fell on the wooden top of the counter and made a very faint strip of brightness. A crack ran across the window glass, slanting down from the upper left corner, and dust had settled in the crack. Under the counter was a row of drawers. The top one had no lock. It pulled out, and the receipts were inside. The copper handle of the drawer had gone dull.

There were other things in the drawer: a ruler, snapped short; two paper clips, hooked together; a ballpoint pen; and a stack of library cards, pulled out and stacked very neatly. The receipts lay beside them.

It was a standard form. At the top of the page, in four characters, was printed “Price Registration”. In the top right corner was a round stamp. The lettering on the stamp had smudged, and only the ring of its border was left. Below were the fields: Number, Item, Quantity, Unit price, Applicant (position), Signatory, Remarks. The Number box was empty. No one had filled it in. The lines were grey and the lettering was black, and the ink had formed a thin crust on the paper. The lower half of the form carried four rules, printed so small that you had to bring your face close to read them.

The Item box read: one public reading room (with its tables, chairs, light fittings and shelf boards, books not included).

Quantity: one.

Unit price: one cent per day.

One cent. Written in that box, it was small enough to be almost nothing but a symbol. The figure would buy neither a sweet nor a chair.

In the Applicant box was written: Librarian. It was a position, not a name. The form printed “Position” there, not “Name”, and what had been filled in was also a position. The writing was in pencil and had been rubbed out once. Where it had been rubbed, a layer of white dust had been left on the paper.

In the Signatory box was a single signature. The strokes had been pressed so hard that they went into the paper, and the back of the sheet was dented, groove after groove. The ink had dried, but the dents were still there.

The Remarks box held only two characters: temporary. The writing was very small, and the strokes all ended evenly.

A strip was missing from the lower right corner. The gap was straight, both ends even, as if it had been cut with a ruler pressed along the edge. The back had originally been blank.

※

He had once been in charge of registration at the community office. Public property went into the register, and every item had to be copied out once by his own hand: the number of a well, the reading on an electricity meter, how many shelf boards a bookcase had, how many legs a chair had, how many knocks were on the corners of a reading table. The register had a black cover, worn to a greyish white. One column in it was headed “Owner”. In that column he wrote the same word every time: unclaimed.

Later, the things in the register marked unclaimed vanished, one after another.

The well at the street corner was stripped in a single night: the pump, the pipes and the valves had all been taken. Only a ring of bricks was left around the well-head, with mud in the joints that had not been swept clean. He went to look again later. The line in the register had not been changed. The Owner column still said unclaimed, though the well no longer had a pump. On the bricks of the well-head someone had drawn a circle in white lime. There was no writing inside the circle, and the rain had already washed the lime thin.

On one stretch of street the power was gone. The lamp posts had been taken down one at a time, and the bulbs, the wire and the switch boxes were gone too. The bases of the lamp posts were left on the ground, in a row, numbered, and no one came to take them away. That stretch of street stayed dark for three months before anyone reported it. The people who lived there took torches with them when they went out at night. At the corner they shone the torch once, then put it away again.

In autumn, a library that was still open had likewise lost its chairs, its light bulbs and its shelf boards in a single night. The hooks on the wall were still there, and so were the nails where pictures had hung. The person who opened the door the next morning walked in and saw four walls.

Two people took that library apart. They pushed a handcart with an old blanket spread on it. When they loaded the chairs, the blanket was pressed underneath, with one corner sticking out, and they did not turn back to fetch it.

By late autumn, eighty-one lines in the register had one more word after them: gone. He had written each one himself, to the right of the Owner column, one by one, all very small.

He had copied out the register for the library that was still open three times. Each time the page numbers were right, and in each copy the Owner column said the same word.

The people who took things apart were not bad. Most of what they carried away was for mending things, or for putting up a shed. No one had claimed those things. No one was responsible for making sure they stayed.

The two characters for unclaimed meant one thing in the register: it could be taken away.

That afternoon he stood for a long time at the office window. A dead plant stood on the sill, its soil dry. Outside, in the street, people were carrying chairs, trip after trip, from one end to the other, and the people carrying them did not look up.

That spring, the librarian of the library that was still open came to the office.

She was the first person to reach the library each day. Before it was fully light she swept the steps, then crouched down and brushed the fallen leaves away from the stone by the door, and only then opened the door. Seven keys hung on her key ring, and only one of them was for this room. A pencil was tucked into the pocket of her work uniform, and as she walked it swayed and knocked against the edge of the pocket. Each day she drew the library cards out one at a time and slotted them back in by number. Any card she had put in the wrong place, she searched for again, one card at a time.

What she asked was specific: how a room could have one person who was responsible for it. The office issued the forms, and the Signatory box could be signed by only one person. That was the person she had come to find.

He wrote the unit price on the form. What he wrote was: one cent per day.

In the Applicant box she wrote in pencil. What she wrote was the position, three characters. She got the second character wrong, rubbed it out and wrote it again.

Then he signed. While he signed, she stood on her side of the counter, looking at the form, not at his hand. When he had finished, he cut a strip from the lower right corner of the receipt. The cut was made with a ruler pressed along it, and he did not give her the strip he had cut off. When the form was handed back to her, a corner was missing. She folded it once and put it into the pocket of her work uniform. The pencil slid out of the pocket. She caught it and pushed it back in.

Later, that form went back into the drawer, to its old place.

And so he put a price on something.

This time, in the register, he did not write unclaimed in the Owner column. What the column said was: one cent per day.

He chose the library that was still open, on the north side of the street, four minutes’ walk from the metro entrance. The price was written very low, so low that no one would bother to pay it seriously. The meaning of the price was simple: before you take a thing, you pay. Whoever paid had to be responsible for it. No one would stop, for one cent, to take a chair apart, so that night the chairs in that library were all still there.

The next morning she came to open up and found the chairs all where they had been. She straightened one of them, and only then opened the door.

The price had saved it, once.

※

Then the price learned to grow on its own.

The second receipt was printed. The paper was new and white, and had not gone brittle. The line printed on it read: wear and tear, two cents per day. It covered the legs of the chairs and the life of the light bulbs. Every day someone sat, and every day something wore down.

In the month the second receipt came, she wound tape round the legs of the chairs, the few that the sitters leaned on most. The tape was grey, and the places it was wound stood one layer higher than the rest.

The line on the third receipt read: management, four dollars per day. It covered the key, the person who opened and locked the door, the hours each morning when she came to open up, and the broom that swept the steps. The broom was her own. No one had ever put a figure on it for her. This line had counted it in.

In the month the third receipt came, she began opening an hour earlier. It was still dark. The leaves on the steps were wet, and when she brushed them aside, her fingers went cold first.

The line on the fourth receipt read: opportunity, thirty-one dollars per day. It covered the sum the room would bring in each day if it were let. Even if the room was not let, that sum still had to be counted. The light from the window, the place of the counter, the three steps at the door, were all things that could be let. Even if they could not be let, they still had to be counted.

On the day the fourth receipt came, a person stood at the foot of the steps and asked whether a stall could be set up in the room. She said no; the room was not hers. The person looked at the door for a while longer, then went away.

Each line had been added on, and no one had written a single character in that column. The printed letters were all the same size, and the figures on every line sat on one straight line. On the first day of each month a sheet was pushed through the letter slot in the bottom of the door. There was no envelope and no sender. There was one line giving the date on the paper, and one new figure. The metal flap of the letter slot was newly fitted, and it shone more than the door frame. The flap was spring-loaded. Each time a sheet came through, the flap gave a clang, and only after the clang did the paper drop to the floor. The timing was very exact: on the first day of each month, not a minute early and not a minute late. The last line, in small print, read: “Issued by the altar. No extra charge.”

Each time a line was added, a strip was cut from the edge of a sheet on the altar’s side, carrying the figure for that line, and it was threaded into the gaps in his joints. One hung there, then another. The first was the strip missing from the lower right corner. It was threaded into the joint of his right index finger, and the strip said: one cent. Looking up across the steps, you could see his hand hanging loose at his side, with white things dangling from the joints.

The market altar stood on Liberty Island. Its ground was split by a ring of cracks, and its stone was greyish white. Fine grass grew in the cracks, and the light from the numbers had bleached each blade white. Green and red numbers jumped up out of the cracks, one square at a time, climbing up the beam of light. There was no sound from that side. When the numbers jumped, only the crack lit up. When they reached the very top, one square stopped jumping. In that square was this reading room, and its figure had become thirty-five dollars and three cents. Below it were other lines: some were for a well, some for a street, some for other cities, one line pressed on top of another, all of them added later. The position of the top square had never changed. No one kept watch over the altar. The stone of the steps was very clean, as clean as if someone had just wiped it.

One cent, two cents, four dollars, thirty-one dollars. Added together, the four figures made the figure in that square. Each figure stood where it belonged.

By the time of the fourth receipt, the receipts in the drawer had been pressed into a small stack, their edges even.

※

That day, he meant to cancel the price.

He drew a blank form out of the drawer and began on the back. The layout followed the front: Item, Applicant (position), Signatory. In the Item box he wrote three characters: reading room. When he came to the Applicant box, the pen stopped. He had written only half a character, and the nib lifted from the paper.

The half character was still there on the back.

He had drawn the layout of the revocation form himself, copying the front. He had ruled the lines with a ruler, and one of them had come out crooked. The heading read: “Application to Revoke a Price”. The crooked line ran exactly beneath the half character.

Later he went to the altar anyway and sent the application in. In the Applicant box, the altar did not wait for him to finish writing. It filled the box itself, with the signatory’s position. The writing in the square changed, once, and then changed back, leaving only one sentence: “The applicant and the signatory may not be the same person.” The line held only that sentence, and the spacing between the letters was all even.

He did not go a second time.

The altar’s numbers did not need anyone to read them. When the writing in the square had finished changing, the numbers began to jump again, and it was other lines that jumped.

The four rules in the lower half of the front were all printed, each one easy to read. The first: a price is approved by the signatory, and there is only one signatory. The second: any change to a price must be put forward by the payer. The third: a price that is still unsettled may not be revoked. The fourth: the applicant and the signatory may not be the same person.

A revocation had to be put forward by the payer. The payer owed money, and a person who owed money could not put it forward. The only signatory was him, and the fourth rule said that the one who put it forward and the one who signed could not be the same. So the box that could sign could not also put it forward. The box that could put it forward was in debt, so it could not put it forward either. Not one word of the four rules was wrong. He has stood outside the fourth rule ever since, right up to today. The words of the fourth rule had been printed, every stroke the same weight, and not one stroke had been written by hand.

On the day he signed the first receipt, he held the pen too tightly. The barrel pressed into the web of his right hand and left a white mark. The mark took two days to turn red, and it did not fade after that. In the Remarks box it said temporary, in very small writing. The hand that held the pen had used a great deal of force, and the paper did not say so.

The pen on the counter was a ballpoint with a clear barrel. The barrel had a shallow dip running round its middle, a little thinner than at either end. That pen is still in the drawer now, lying beside the receipts.

The mark could not be seen from outside.

Later, the grip of the torch pressed on exactly the same place.

※

The first to be unable to pay that price was the person who opened the door first each day.

The people who came in did not pay. Those who came to read, who sat by the window to write, who lay on a reading table for a while, paid nothing. What was paid for was the room. The one who paid for it was the person who opened the door first each day and locked it last.

Among the people who came to read was an old man, who sat beside the third table each day, reading the same newspaper, the previous day’s edition. There was a young man who came to write. When he finished, he folded the paper and took it with him. She had never seen what he wrote. Sometimes the paper was not taken, and was left on the table. She gathered it up and tucked it in behind the library cards. A student dozed on a reading table. On waking, the student pushed the chair back to where it had been, and only then left. None of them had paid anything.

She paid out of her wages. In the month the two-cent line was added, she could pay it; the loose change on the counter was just enough. In the month the four-dollar line was added, she took her pay slip to the counter and checked it figure by figure. The pay slip was a sheet of paper, issued once a month, with the figures printed in the lower right corner. The figures on the pay slip had not changed. Only, below them, there was one more line of deductions. On the day the thirty-one-dollar line was added, she did not check. She put that printed sheet into the drawer with the others, pressing it down until it reached the bottom of the drawer.

From then on, on the first day of each month, she took out the new sheet, checked it against her pay slip, and put it back. When she put it back, she always put it at the very bottom.

On the counter was a tin box for loose change, and the box was empty. On the lid a slip of paper had been stuck. Its writing was in pencil, and it could no longer be read.

Owing money, she could not put the revocation forward.

The lettering over the door had been taken down, and only four screw holes were left. There were three steps, and the corners of the middle one had been worn round. Through the glass doors from outside, the tables and chairs could still be seen. There were twelve reading tables. Their tops were scratched, some of the scratches deep, made by pen points pressing down. A coat hung over the back of one chair, and no one had taken it. The bookshelves were empty, their boards still fixed to the wall, one board after another. On the third shelf there was a row of faint marks, pressed in by the spines of books. You could count them, book by book. On the floor were the marks of table legs, four to each table, in rows, and you could count twelve tables. Four light bulbs were still in the ceiling, with dust inside their glass shades. Inside the door, a photocopy of a sheet was stuck up: a copy of the printed fourth sheet. Its corner had curled, and no one had peeled it off.

※

On the morning the library closed, she swept the steps as usual, then crouched down, brushed the fallen leaves away from the stone, and only then opened the door.

That day a leaf lay beside the stone, pressed under it, with only one edge showing. She did not sweep it away. She brushed it to one side.

It grew dark early that day. People came up from the metro entrance in batches and walked past the foot of the steps, and no one stopped.

She was the last to leave. Before going out, she checked each window in turn. The bolts were all shot home. She went through the things in the drawer: the ruler laid flat, the ballpoint put back beside the ruler, the paper clips hooked into a chain, the library cards squared up, the receipts put back on the bottom of the drawer. She switched off the light. The switch was on the inside of the door. She pressed it down, and the button did not spring back. She pressed it again with her fingertip, and only then did it spring back. She stood inside the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. In the dark, the shadows of the tables and chairs were all the same height.

She took a photocopied sheet out of the counter drawer, went to the inside of the door, and pinned it up. It was a copy of the printed fourth sheet. She used four drawing pins. She pinned it flat, and pinned every corner.

A broom leaned by the door. Its handle had a shiny ring where hands had gripped it. She did not take it with her. She leaned it back in its old place by the door.

She came out and pulled the door to behind her. It was a pair of glass doors. The lock was brass, and the teeth of the key had worn round. The door handle had been rubbed bright. She turned the key twice, pulled it out, closed her hand around it, and walked down to the foot of the steps. The key pressed a fine mark into her palm.

The street lamp by the door had come on and shone onto the steps. The steps were dry, and the marks of the morning’s sweeping could no longer be seen.

At the foot of the steps, by the wall, there was a stone, a little whiter than the others. She crouched down and pressed the key under the stone, leaving a length of cord outside. The cord was old and had faded, and one end was tied to the key.

She did this in case anyone still needed to come in.

She stood by the stone for a while before she left.

On top of the stone lay a layer of dust. It was white, its edges were even, and no one had brushed it away. Beside the stone was a small heap of dry leaves, not piled high.

The stone is still there. The key is still under the stone at the foot of the steps by the door, long since rusted solid.