Peter Comes · Eleven Steps From the Edge · Pulse Beat
He arrived in the second summer, thin, grey-haired, with a stick. Tashi saw him from the school window, walking up the dusty track from the bus, with a rucksack too big for him, and for a moment did…
He arrived in the second summer, thin, grey-haired, with a stick.
Tashi saw him from the school window, walking up the dusty track from the bus, with a rucksack too big for him, and for a moment did not recognise him at all. Then the man lifted his left hand to shade his eyes, and Tashi saw the three missing fingers.
They stood facing each other in the yard, as the children, sensing something, hung back on the veranda.
"I came," said Peter, in his careful English, "to tell you something that I could not write."
"Come and sit," said Tashi.
On the wooden bench in the shade, with tea, Peter told him. After the accident he had not been able to work. He had been a banker. He had left the bank. He had sat in a flat in Munich for a year looking at the wall, until a counsellor, a patient woman, had told him that guilt was a way of keeping a dead person alive.
"I have been trying to be worth it," said Peter. "I do not know how. I thought, I will come and ask you."
Tashi looked at the three missing fingers for a long time. "Stay for a month," he said. "Teach the boys German."