The old priest gave it to him when he was twenty. Yellow paper, folded into a triangle a little over three centimetres a side. Three rules: do not open it, do not let it get wet, do not give it to anyone.
He carried it for twenty years. The cloth pouch wore through three times — the first one frayed, the second went through the wash, the third his wife sewed for him.
At forty he wanted to know what was written inside.
The paper was brittle and split along two of the folds as he opened it. He flattened it out.
Blank. Not a mark on it. He checked both sides, held it up to the lamp, tilted it against the light.
He went looking for the temple. There was a six-storey building on the site now with a supermarket on the ground floor. He asked three people. Nobody remembered a temple there.
He folded the paper back along its old creases and put it in the pouch.
The next morning he took it out and felt it through the cloth. It was thicker than it had been.
He opened it. There was writing on it, and the ink was fresh. His name — the name he had used at twenty, before he changed it at thirty-one. Under the name, a date.
The date was twenty years ago. The ninth of the eleventh month. That was the night he rolled a car on the national road. The man in the passenger seat did not get up. He was driving.