44. Rock, Paper, Scissors

Johann arrived in Reval three days later, unannounced, with a thin excuse about an aunt in Kalamaja whom he did not visit once during his stay.

„I could not sit in Dorpat,“ was all he admitted, „with that canvas in the next street and no one to speak to about it.“

Mihkel took him to the market square on Saturday, partly for the herring and the wool, mostly to give his friend something loud to look at.

Near the weighing house a cooper had set a barrel on end and chalked a board against it. Eight men, eight coins into a clay pot, and the pot to whoever remained. Stone, paper, shears— a children's game the town had lent to grown men, who took it far more seriously.

„The first pair!“ the cooper bellowed, and the square obliged him with a crowd.

Johann was enchanted at once. He shouted advice at strangers, accused a fishmonger of cowardice, and declared after each round that he had known it all along.

Mihkel watched differently. He watched the hands.

Every man threw three times at most— once in the first round, once more if he survived it, a third time if he reached the end. Three decisions, and then the game was finished with him. By the second contest of the afternoon Mihkel had taken out his notebook and begun to write them down: eight columns, three letters each, the whole day reduced to a small grid of hands.

He was not predicting anyone. He had no intention of returning next week to catch these men in their habits. The games were already played; the coins were already spent.

But a question had arrived and would not leave: if I had stood in the first place on that board, knowing everything I now know— which three throws would have carried me through all three rounds?

It was not a matter of guessing. Each answer changed the next question. Beat the second man, and one opponent waits; the other half of the board resolves without you, quietly, by its own rules, and delivers whoever it delivers. Foresight was the wrong word. It was bookkeeping performed forwards.

That night, in his childhood room, with the Logic Mill four days' road away beneath its canvas, Mihkel wrote the rules as though writing for the Mill, and then—having no Mill— obeyed them himself, slip by slip, refusing to skip ahead.