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Turkey had gotten into the habit of arriving early to these things, mostly because the coffee ran out fast and the coffee was the only part of it he actually liked. The building was one of those glass and concrete places that felt like it had been designed by someone who hated warmth, all pale corridors and doors that closed with a soft pneumatic sigh, and at seven in the morning the whole east wing was empty except for a cleaning cart parked outside the men's room. He filled a paper cup, found it too thin to hold properly, and stood there by the machine waiting for it to cool while his reflection floated in the black window across the hall. Red. The crescent sitting slightly off-center on his face the way it always did, the way that used to bother him when he was younger and now just was. He looked tired. He always looked tired at these, and he'd stopped pretending it was jet lag.
He was humming.
He noticed it the way you notice you've been chewing the inside of your cheek, halfway through and without any beginning, and he stopped, and then a few seconds later he was doing it again. It was a slow thing, five or six notes that went up and then folded back down on themselves, and it had a little hitch in the middle where the melody sagged before it lifted. He had no idea what it was. Probably something from a taxi radio. He'd been in a lot of taxis this month.
"Where did you learn that."
He turned around too fast and slopped coffee over his knuckles, which stung, which annoyed him more than the voice did. Armenia was standing about four meters back down the corridor with a folder under one arm and his coat still on, and he had clearly been standing there a while, because there was no sound of a door and no sound of footsteps and Turkey would have heard both.
"Good morning to you too," Turkey said. He shook his hand out. "You want coffee? It's terrible."
"Where did you learn that." Armenia hadn't moved. His colors were sharp under the fluorescents, the red band across his brow reading almost brown in that light, and there was that thin pale seam down the side of his throat that he never covered even in winter. He was looking at Turkey the way you look at a wallet on the ground that might be a trap.
"Learn what?"
"You were humming."
"Was I." Turkey turned back to the machine and pressed the button for a second cup he didn't want, just so his hands had a job. "I hum. It's a bad habit. My people are musical, it's genetic." That was supposed to be a joke and it came out flat, and he heard it land flat, and he made himself take a sip of the coffee he'd just burned his hand on. It was scalding. "Radio, probably. I've been in Tbilisi three days, everything there sounds like everything else."
The folder came down onto the little table by the machine with a slap that made the sugar packets jump. Armenia crossed the distance in about four steps and Turkey had a bad half-second of thinking he was going to get hit, which was stupid, because Armenia had never once hit him in this life and had considerably better reasons to and better opportunities than a corridor with a camera in the corner of it.
"Hum it again," Armenia said.
"No."
"Why not."
"Because you're doing this," Turkey said, gesturing at all of him with the paper cup, "and I don't like it, and it's seven in the morning."
Armenia's mouth did something that wasn't a smile. Up close he smelled like cold air and the outside, cigarette smoke in the wool of his coat although he'd quit, or said he'd quit, or the last one had quit and this one had picked it back up, who could keep track. "You don't know what it is," he said. It wasn't a question and he said it slowly, like he was checking the load on something. "You genuinely don't know what it is."
"It's a song. There are a lot of songs."
"Hum it again and I'll leave you alone."
Turkey looked at him. He thought about the schedule, the eleven o'clock, the fact that he'd have to sit two seats down from this man for four hours and listen to a Swede talk about water infrastructure. He thought, with the small unkind part of himself that he'd inherited fully intact from every version of himself that had ever existed, that Armenia was going to make this into something, because Armenia made everything into something, because that was the whole architecture of him.
He hummed it. Badly, self-consciously, the six notes and the sag in the middle.
Armenia went very still. Not dramatic, nothing theatrical, he just stopped doing all the small things people do while standing, and the corridor got quiet enough that Turkey could hear the coffee machine ticking as it cooled.
"There's a second verse," Armenia said.
"It's from a taxi."
"It is not from a taxi."
"You don't know what's on the radio in Tbilisi."
"There is no recording of that song," Armenia said. "There is no recording. There is no sheet music. It was not written down. It was sung in one province by one set of people and I have spent, do you understand me, I have spent time looking, actual years of actual attention, because I remember the shape of it and I cannot remember the words, and there is no one left who could tell me the words." He said all of this quite calmly, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted, and then he said, "So. Where did you learn it."
Turkey put the cup down. Some coffee went over the rim and pooled around the base and he watched it spread instead of looking up. His chest had gone tight in the specific way it did before a memory-bleed, that pressure behind the sternum like a hand pushing out, and he hated it, he hated it more than almost anything, because it never came with context. It came sideways. It came as a smell or a temperature or the weight of a coat he'd never owned.
"I don't know," he said.
"Try."
"I said I don't know."
"You do though," Armenia said. "That's the thing. You do know. It's in there. You just don't go and look, because you've never once in your entire existence gone and looked, you have a whole room in your head with the door shut and you've built a very nice life out here in the corridor." He tilted his head. "Am I being unfair?"
"You're being loud."
"I'm not being loud at all. Nobody's here." Armenia glanced up at the camera in the corner, without much interest, and then back. "Do you want to know what I think?"
"No."
"I think you learned it from me."
Turkey laughed. It came out wrong, too short, and he heard how bad it sounded. "That's the most insane thing you've ever said and you've said a lot."
"Not from me," Armenia said, and he tapped two fingers against his own chest, right over the tricolor, "from me. You understand the difference, I know you do, don't stand there and be thick with me. Somebody sang it. Somebody sang it enough times, close enough, for it to get into you and stay there through, what, six of you? Seven? It got through all of that. Do you know how much has to be sung to survive that kind of transfer? That's not a taxi. That's not a radio in a taxi in Tbilisi. That's somebody sitting near you for a long time."
The pressure behind Turkey's sternum went from a hand to a fist. He turned around and set both palms on the little table and breathed, and Armenia let him, which was the first mercy he'd offered and it was clearly tactical.
Because he could see it. Not properly, never properly, it was never a scene the way it was for humans, no faces, no rooms, just the fact of a thing arriving fully formed and already true: a courtyard with a wall the color of dust, and the awareness that the singing was happening somewhere behind him and had been happening for a while, and that he had liked it, and that he had never once said so, because saying so would have been a form of admission he wasn't willing to make even then. He'd liked it. That was the detail his body had kept. Not the words. He'd liked it and he'd stood there with his back turned pretending to look at something else.
"You're pale," Armenia said, from somewhere behind his shoulder, and there was nothing kind in his voice but there was something interested, which was almost worse.
"The coffee's bad."
"Sure."
"It's actually genuinely bad, I'm not being poetic."
"You've never been poetic in your life," Armenia said. "Which is a shame, because you had good poets. You still do. I read them. I read them in the original, in fact, which I'm sure you'll find charming."
Turkey straightened up and turned around. "What do you want," he said. "Right now, in this hallway, in the next ninety seconds before someone from Norway comes in here and asks about the biscuits. What do you actually want from me."
"I want you to say it."
"Say what."
"You know what."
"I don't."
"You do," Armenia said, and now something did move in his face, something quick that got shut down fast. "You knew before I opened my mouth. You knew the second you stopped humming. That's why you stopped. That's why you spilled your coffee. You've got the thing in your throat right now and you're swallowing it and I can watch you doing it, it's not subtle, you've never been subtle, your whole style is to be enormous and loud and to stand in the doorway so nobody can see past you."
"That's a very nice speech."
"I've had a long time to write it."
"Yeah," Turkey said. "I bet you have. I bet you've got a whole shelf."
Armenia's jaw tightened. He picked his folder back up off the table, and Turkey thought for a second that was it, that he'd overplayed and the man was leaving, and he felt a lurch of something that was not relief. But Armenia only moved the folder to his other arm and said, in a much smaller and much worse voice, "It was probably the last one. Statistically. Given how much of it there is in you." He looked at the wall somewhere past Turkey's shoulder. "That's the part I keep getting stuck on. Whoever sang that near you, I can't ask them. I can't ask them because of you. I don't mean you, I mean, obviously I mean you. You see the problem."
"That wasn't me."
"There it is," Armenia said. "God. There it is, right on time, I could set a watch."
"It wasn't." Turkey heard his own voice go up and hated it. "I'm not, I don't have, I don't have that. I don't have those memories. You're standing there telling me I've got a room with the door shut, I'm telling you there's no room. It's not a decision. I'm not sitting on it. There's nothing there."
"Then how do you know the tune."
Turkey opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.
"That's my whole point," Armenia said. "That's the only point I have ever made and I have made it in about nine languages. You don't get to keep the nice part. That's what makes me insane, that's the thing, if you'd kept none of it, fine, honestly, fine, I could work with clean amnesia, I could hate you in a very simple way and go home. But you kept the song. Out of all of it. You kept the one thing that was pleasant to be near and you dropped everything with a weight on it, and you didn't even do it deliberately, that's what makes it obscene, you didn't even have to try. It just sorted itself that way inside you." He made a short flat gesture with one hand. "That's what you are. That's the whole species trait. You are a man who remembers the music."
The corridor door at the far end opened. Somebody's shoes, somebody's lanyard clicking against a badge, a woman's voice saying something about the third floor to a person who wasn't in the corridor yet. Turkey watched Armenia's face reassemble itself into the neutral thing he wore for cameras, watched him take a step back and become a person waiting for coffee, and it happened in maybe a second and a half and it was one of the more impressive things Turkey had ever seen.
Norway came in, took a biscuit, asked about the biscuits, and left.
"I don't know how to give you what you want," Turkey said, when the door had sighed shut again. He said it to the coffee machine.
"You can't. That's fine, I stopped expecting it around ninety years ago, you can relax." Armenia set the folder down again. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets and stood there with his shoulders up around his ears, and Turkey noticed, irrelevantly, stupidly, at the worst possible moment, that he'd gotten his hair cut since Vienna and it suited him, and Turkey shoved that observation into the sea. "Hum it again."
"You said you'd leave me alone if I did."
"I lied. Hum it."
He hummed it. It came easier the second time, the sag in the middle sitting where it was supposed to sit, and about four notes in Armenia's mouth moved, silently, following.
"That's the first verse," Armenia said, when it ended. "It's about a bird that comes to the window. It's not deep. It's a song for getting a child to stop crying, it doesn't have to be deep." He rubbed his thumb along the underside of his own jaw, along that pale seam. "The second verse goes down instead of up. Here."
He sang it. Quietly, barely more than breath, the volume of a man singing in a stairwell who doesn't want the stairwell to hear him, and it did go down, the melody stepping backwards off its own edge and finding something lower to stand on, and the words were words Turkey knew the sound of without knowing the meaning of, which was an unbearable state to be in and which he stood in anyway, holding a paper cup, in a hallway, at seven in the morning.
When it finished, neither of them said anything for a while.
"Now you know it," Armenia said. "Now it's in you too. This one, I mean. Not just whatever's left in the walls." He picked the folder up for the third time. "I want you to have it. I want it sitting in there for the next four hundred years, going through every single one of you, and I want every single one of you to hum it in a hallway somewhere and not know why."
"That's a curse."
"Yes," Armenia said. He was already walking. "It's the only one I know how to cast."
Turkey stayed where he was until the coffee in his hand went cold enough to drink, and he did not go up to the third floor, and around the time the eleven o'clock started he caught himself doing it again, the second verse this time, the part that went down, and he pressed his knuckles against his mouth in the empty corridor and kept going anyway.