Sanel knew the answer before the host finished the question. He wrote the novel's title on the slip and pushed it towards his partner Irma. She added their initials. It was their first quiz at the bookshop that moved shelves aside and set up tables in the evenings. Sanel liked reading during breaks between truck journeys. Irma knew geography. They seemed a perfectly respectable team until his former teacher recognised him.
Mr Žunić sat at the neighbouring table. He approached smiling and said he had not expected Sanel somewhere like this. Literature had not been his strength at school. Sanel said school was twenty-five years ago. His teacher patted his shoulder as though accepting a joke and returned to his companions. Irma noticed Sanel wrote his next answer smaller than the previous one.
When they took the lead, the teacher raised a hand. He said phones should be checked, especially for the team that suddenly knew everything. He looked at Sanel. Their phones were in a bag beneath the table, under the rule applying to everyone. The host asked whether he had reason for suspicion. The teacher replied that he had known the man since school. The bookshop fell into that uncomfortable silence in which an adult is publicly returned to a child's chair.
Sanel reached towards the bag, ready to hand over his phone simply to end the discomfort. Irma did not stop his hand. She asked the teacher whether he knew any book Sanel had read since school. He said that was not the point. Sanel put the bag back beneath the table. He told the host he could apply the same rule to everybody, but he would not accept a special search based on one man's memories.
The quiz continued. They did not win because they missed the final two answers. For a moment that even relieved Sanel, then he grew angry with himself. He did not want his own mistake to become a gift to someone else's conviction. On the way out his teacher said he had meant nothing personally. Sanel replied that personal was precisely what he had meant, since he had mentioned no conduct from that evening.
Irma suggested going elsewhere next time. Sanel looked at the poster for the next quiz and said he would come back after all. He liked the bookshop. Walking to the car he recounted the novel from the first question, too lengthily and with too many minor characters. She listened until she had to admit she was lost. He laughed and began again, more simply this time.