The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
was saying. There isn’t enough dinner for three, I thought uncharitably as I
knocked at her door.
She opened it warily and greeted me with a strained smile. I leaned forward
to kiss her, and she blocked me, her hand flat on my chest as she turned
her head to the side and gave a quiet, tight-lipped double hum of refusal.
When I stood back, confused, she opened the door and invited me in. Sitting
on her couch, a mug of tea in his lap and a kindly, open expression on his
bearded, craggy face, was the man from the Trout.
“Paul, this is Jaan’s brother, Tonu.” He rose slowly and creakily, exhaling
with effort, to greet me, but he gripped my hand firmly, exerting a surprising
amount of strength through a hand that was all callus and knobby bone. He
looked like a combination of a lion and a bird, with watchful, bright blue eyes
set on either side of an aquiline nose and above a poorly trimmed beard that
seemed of a single piece with his shaggy white hair.
“You are Paul?” he asked in a booming and strongly accented voice. An
odor of age and pipe rose and reached me just before he did. “My name is
Tonu Pühapäev. Your friend and I, we have been holding a sort of remembrance—a
small wake, you might say—for my poor younger brother.”
“Nice to meet you. I didn’t know Jaan had any family.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Not many family, of course. Just me now. One old man
and another.” He chuckled absently, patted the pockets of his baggy corduroy
trousers, and withdrew a stubby brown pipe, a packet of Shipman’s
tobacco, and a box of wooden matches. “You also were knowing my brother?”
His mustache and the beard near his mouth were yellowed, and he had to run
the match over the flint three times before he finally struck a flame. When he
lit the bowl of his pipe, he sat back down as carefully and hesitantly as he had
stood. Next to him on the couch was a burled mahogany walking stick with a
round silver head and a broad black rubber tip.
“No, I never did, unfortunately. I’m sorry for that.”
“Paul is the reporter I was telling you about,” Hannah said. “The one
working on an obituary for Jaan for our local newspaper.” I wondered about
the ethics of deceit by omission: she knew—didn’t she?—that it wasn’t an
obit anymore. Maybe I would have corrected her (or maybe not) had Tonu
not started speaking again so quickly.
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