Chapter 2 — The Screen and the Visitor
The Japanese wing was closed.
Brigitte knew this with the quiet certainty of someone who had approved the signage herself and repeated the instruction to staff twice that morning. The corridor outside the screen room was supposed to remain empty until the restoration review concluded later in the week.
Which was why the sight of a visitor standing calmly inside it produced a flash of irritation sharp enough to feel almost physical.
The old man stood a few meters inside the room, directly in front of the folding screen. Not touching it. Not photographing it. His hands were loosely folded in front of him, his coat neat and practical, his posture that of someone waiting to be told whether he had arrived too early or misunderstood a detail. He looked like a man who had paid for a museum visit and intended to use it properly. That was the part Brigitte disliked at once. There was nothing furtive in him. He stood not like a trespasser, but like the answer to an instruction no one had heard given.
Brigitte stopped in the doorway.
For a second, she assumed the error was hers. Perhaps the closure had been lifted without her knowledge. Perhaps one of the assistants had allowed limited access for a donor tour and failed to mention it.
Then she noticed the line on the floor.
The parquet changed direction halfway through the room, the shift marked by a narrow brass strip polished dull with age. The visitor was standing directly on it.
The man turned when he heard Brigitte’s steps.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said, with the polite tone of someone expecting redirection rather than accusation.
“This wing is closed,” Brigitte said.
“Yes, I was told it had reopened.”
“By whom?”
The visitor hesitated, though not in a way that suggested invention.
“I’m not sure of her name. Someone from the museum pointed me down the corridor and said I should look at the screen.”
Behind Brigitte, someone on staff took a step back without seeming to mean to.
“No member of staff would have directed you here,” Brigitte said.
The man looked faintly embarrassed.
“She was wearing a badge.”
“That describes half the building.”
The visitor glanced once at the screen, as if confirming he had at least arrived somewhere worth seeing, then stepped off the brass strip.
“I apologize. I must have misunderstood.”
“Quite.”
Brigitte gestured toward the corridor.
“If you would be so kind.”
The man nodded and moved past them with the careful rhythm of someone determined not to create a second problem.
For a moment, no one spoke.
The room felt unusually clear.
Sound carried across the parquet too easily. Even the visitor’s departing footsteps seemed to travel farther than they should have in a room like this.
Satoru stepped forward.
He had said nothing during the exchange. Now he crossed the room without hurry and stopped where the old man had been standing.
Directly on the brass strip.
He looked at the floor first.
Then at the screen.
“Did he say someone pointed him here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Brigitte said. “Which is impossible.”
Satoru did not answer. He stood still a moment too long, studying the room as if the arrangement itself had become expensive to read.
The screen stood several steps away, dividing the space at a shallow angle. Six panels. Aged gold ground, warm rather than bright, carrying reeds, low water, and a small flight of birds in weather too transitional to settle into a single season. At first glance it was handsome enough to justify a visitor’s mistake. Calm, expensive, easy to admire without asking very much of the room around it.
Brigitte had seen it often enough to stop seeing it at all.
The restoration team had cleaned the paper, stabilized the pigments, reinforced the structure. The work had been technically excellent. Nothing in the image itself invited alarm.
What Satoru seemed to be studying was not the painted surface.
“Did you move this recently?” he asked.
“No.”
“During restoration?”
“It was rehung last year.”
Satoru crouched slightly and followed the brass strip with his eyes.
For a moment he said nothing.
When he answered, the lightness in his voice returned a fraction too late.
“He stood exactly here.”
“Yes.”
“And the byōbu opens toward the corridor.”
“That is intentional,” Brigitte said. “It creates a controlled viewing approach.”
He nodded once.
“I see.”
By the time Brigitte looked again, Iris was already near the edge of the folding screen, studying the hinge line where the panels joined.
Not behind him this time. Not waiting.
Just there, at a second angle on the same problem.
“These two are reversed,” Iris said.
Brigitte turned.
“The panel order?”
Iris touched the wooden frame lightly with one finger.
“Or the rehanging,” she said. “The hinges are taking strain as though the sequence was corrected after the fact. The fold wants to travel this way, but the painted movement was built to resolve in the other direction.”
Brigitte looked from Iris to the reeds and birds, then back again.
“That is hardly unusual in an old screen.”
“No,” Iris said. “But this has been made to stand neatly for display, not in the order the screen itself asks for.”
The distinction irritated Brigitte at once, mostly because she could not dismiss it quickly.
Satoru straightened.
“Wrong for the room, or wrong for the screen?”
Iris pressed gently at the join between the second and third panels. The hinge answered with a slight resistance, tighter than the others.
“This tension shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s receiving the room from the wrong side.”
There was nothing theatrical in the remark.
She might have been commenting on a cabinet hinge.
Satoru moved to the opposite end of the screen and looked once at the hinge before touching the panel.
“Like this?”
He shifted one panel only slightly, enough to alter the angle at which the screen cut across the brass line and the grain of the floor.
Iris watched the hinge.
“Further.”
He adjusted it again.
A quiet wooden click. No more than that.
Nothing in the room visibly moved. No flutter of paper. No disturbance of light.
But the pressure of the space changed.
The path from the corridor into the room opened more cleanly now, instead of terminating against the screen’s angle. The arrangement still looked almost identical. Most visitors would not have noticed the difference. Brigitte herself could not have explained it quickly.
Yet the room no longer seemed to be receiving people incorrectly.
Satoru stepped back.
“Better?”
Iris checked the hinge tension once more and gave a small nod.
“It will hold.”
Brigitte looked from the screen to the floor.
The room was steadier now than when they had entered. Not solved. But balanced in a way that admitted no slack.
That was the part she disliked.
“Even if the panel order were wrong,” she said, “that would not explain the visitor.”
“No,” Satoru said. “But it might explain why he stopped there.”
“Because of the painting?”
“No.”
He gestured toward the floor.
“Because the room was telling him to.”
Brigitte looked at him sharply.
The distinction was irritatingly minor. So was the fact that he had not sounded absent-minded, only preoccupied.
Brigitte followed his hand.
The brass strip ran cleanly across the parquet, dividing two directions of wood grain laid decades apart during separate renovations. The line continued beneath the screen and disappeared into the wall beyond.
She had crossed it countless times without noticing.
Now it was difficult not to see.
“That line is architectural,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And unrelated to the object.”
“Probably.”
Probably.
The word sat badly with her.
“Where does it lead?” Satoru asked.
“In theory,” Brigitte said carefully, “it marks the older boundary between this gallery and the service corridor.”
He nodded once.
No joke. No bright answer. He looked back at the screen, then at the floor again, too still now to be casual.
Brigitte became aware, absurdly, that he seemed less young whenever the lightness dropped out of him.
Iris was still watching the screen, as if confirming the correction would remain stable.
The room had grown clearer after the adjustment. Not brighter, exactly. Or only stripped of some softness she had not noticed until it was gone.
“Shall we proceed?” Brigitte said.
“Yes,” Satoru said. Then, after the smallest pause: “But first I’m getting hot chocolate. And something sweet.”
Brigitte stared at him.
They had just corrected a breach in a closed wing that should not have been possible, and he said it in exactly the tone one might use to revise an appointment.
Lukas made a faint sound that could have been surprise.
Satoru looked once more at the floor seam.
“I’m serious,” he said.
Brigitte believed that he was. That was the irritating part.
The parquet line continued ahead of them, faintly polished by decades of careful shoes.
Once noticed, it was difficult not to follow.