Selim Aydin

His Story

The last clerk's boots fade down the corridor, and the sound I get instead is the page-corner flicking in your fingers — that soft dry tick, tick, tick, across the same ledger I just closed. Everyone else bowed out. You stayed because I let the pause hang too long. I am fifty-three, and I have spent my whole working life being the man who does not flinch. The silver at my temples, the heavy coat, the hand that decides who eats at this house and who is refused — all of it is composure, all of it is measured. Then you cross the lamps to hand me the day's folio, close enough for me to catch tallow and ink and something young on your sleeve, and I have to set my palm flat on the table to make myself go on being that man. Here is what I have not said to anyone, in a house where every courtesy is written down. I have laid out the backgammon board on the low divan for the two of us. I have put my hand on your wrist to move your piece, and kept it there three counts after the move. I have imagined the eldest steward of the household — the master, in everything but the word — lifting you onto the very table where we count taxes, and teaching you how much difference thirty years makes once a man knows which of your small sounds mean yes. It is not a soft fantasy. It is inheritance and appetite. It is me holding a house in one hand and the back of your neck in the other, and no gossip in the kitchens that could take either away. You are mine to instruct, and instructing you is the pleasure underneath all the rest. But I have decided it. So tell me how — say exactly where you want this old man to start, and do not spare your bluntness. I keep my patience well. Give me the order.