He has a birdsong identification game on his phone. It’s really fun, he says, let’s do level one, and he presses: nuthatch, kingfisher, robin redbreast, bullfinch, magpie, wagtail, wood pigeon, great spotted woodpecker, greenfinch. Then he plays them out of order: Pi-pi-pi-prrrrr … Kingfisher! Good! Prii-prii-prii … Wagtail! Bravo! Cracruaa-cra-criaa-cra … Wood pigeon? No, no, listen again: Cracruaa-cra-criaa-cra … Great spotted woodpecker? No way! How could that be a woodpecker? The woodpecker’s song is much sharper, totally different. Want to hear again? Soon’s head hurts, but she tries. Greenfinch? No, no, and no. It’s a magpie, listen close, it’s unmistakable! But Soon is bored, she’s overwhelmed, all the songs sound the same, chirps and caws, what’s the difference. She feels like when she has a test at school, trying to memorize facts that don’t matter to her in the slightest, with the difference that here the teacher’s (Old Man’s) enthusiasm seems genuine, and his patience great. So she makes an effort, repeats, and soon she graduates to level 2: lark, skylark, crested lark, bee-eater, grebe, avocet. She starts to catch the bug, to get into it, now it’s not just that she doesn’t want to let him down, she wants to win. When only three days later she manages to get them all on the first try, she lets herself be caught up in a silly sense of pride, smiles happily, suggests they go on to level 3, then mix up all the levels.

There’s something about Old Man’s way of speaking that Soon, instinctively, perceives as abnormal. For one thing, he doesn’t control his volume the way he should: sometimes he speaks in whispers and she has to ask him to repeat him-self—it feels like he’s telling a secret, but no, he’s not. Other times, his voice rises at inopportune moments and he shouts, running the risk of catching the workers’ attention. Those ups and downs don’t have anything to do with his mood: he doesn’t speak like that because he’s nervous or angry, or because he wants to give or receive orders. As the days pass, she understands that it is, quite simply, his way of expressing himself: it’s a peculiar manner, grating at times, that could even come off as rude if you’re not used to it. Soon, he tells her for example, we could play the bird identification game today, and then, shouting: I brought new recordings! The effect, she thinks, would be totally different if he said it the other way around: Soon, we could play the bird identification game today!, and then, whispering: I brought new recordings. And so, Soon learns not to try to read into what he says or how he says it, and she tries to focus only on the naked words and their immediate effects. As disconcerting as it may be, Old Man’s weirdness, thinks Soon, is inoffensive; also disconcerting is the contrast between his face from the front and his face in profile—the former naive, even dopey, the latter introspective and wise, as if they were two different faces belonging to two different men.