Before the Mark, After the Mark: A Genealogy of the House of Panin

The Instrument

A crossbeam, in a house on Mulov Street, cut twice in one week by one hand. The hand belonged to Yerik Panin. The week was the one in which a flood receded far enough that the house he had built could be entered again and lived in.

The first cut marks the water’s height. The second, smaller, sits beside it: his son’s birth, three days before the water crested. Yerik Panin did not write a date beside either mark. There was, by his own household’s account, no book in that house to write one in, and no reason yet to think a hill on the far side of the city would ever ask for one.

This office has never held that beam. It holds an account of it, given by a witness on Mulov Street who watched the household discuss what the beam should be made to prove, and repeats nothing of that account as testimony offered to this office directly. It is entered here as a genealogical instrument on that understanding, and no other.

The Line

Four generations of the House of Panin are known to this record by relation to those two cuts. This record can name one of them.

• Yerik Panin — cut the beam. Father of Grigor and of a daughter not named in what reached this office. Nothing further is known of him: not his trade, not his death, not whether he lived to see the second mark outlast the first as the more consulted of the two.
• Grigor Panin — the subject of this record. Born three days before the flood crested, by the second cut. No year of birth entered in the Register, at any date, in any hand. Living, on Mulov Street, as of this week.
• Grigor’s sister — unnamed. Married four years after her brother’s mark, by the household’s own count. The household does not date her wedding any other way; this office has found no other way to date it either.
• Grigor’s son — unnamed. Apprenticed eleven years after the mark. Trade not given. Whether he is the father of the grandson below, or whether that boy descends through the unnamed sister, this record cannot say and declines to guess.
• Grigor’s grandson — unnamed. Living. Sent, this week, to fetch paper and a pencil, and set to copying his grandfather’s mark by hand.

Order is not in question anywhere in this line. Everything in the House of Panin is before something or after it, four generations running, without a single gap in the sequence. What is missing is not relation. It is number.

What the Recension Wants and What the Beam Has

The Recension asks for a year. A clerk at the district roll said so to Grigor Panin directly, and not unkindly, and he is not the only petitioner she has said it to this week; this office has had reported to it four further households on Guild Row alone taking up floorboards and beam-notches in the same eleven days, hunting the same thing the Panin beam was never cut to give.

A mark records that a thing happened, and where it stands relative to another mark on the same timber. It does not, by itself, record when — not in the Register’s sense of when, which wants a number the Almanac can be checked against. Grigor Panin understood the difference before this office had to explain it to him. He copied the notch’s depth and the distance between the cuts onto paper, not a date, because there was no date on the beam to copy. He has not yet decided whether to bring the copy to the clerk. He is right not to be certain of it. A copy of a mark is not the mark. It carries the shape of the evidence and none of the wood’s own weight, and a clerk who has never seen the beam has no way to tell one from the other by looking at the paper.

This office has met the shape of this problem before this year, in a different house, over a different question, and will meet it again before the Recension closes; it declines to say more of that here, having said what it had to say of it under its own name already.

A Probable Year, Distinguished from a Sworn One

This office holds one instrument the Panin household does not: the Archive’s own roll for the southern wall’s extension, dated with more confidence than most things this Archive keeps, at a little under fifty years past this year, Year 241. Grigor Panin’s household places his mark’s flood before that extension was raised. If both accounts are taken as given — the wall’s roll, sworn; the household’s memory, not — then Grigor Panin’s mark falls at or before Year 191, and this office is willing to enter Year 190 in its own hand as a probable birth year for Grigor Panin, provisional, and to be struck the day a firmer instrument outdates it.

It is not the year the Recension wants. The Recension wants a year sworn to by an examiner or entered at the time by an officer with standing to enter it, and this office has neither to offer. It is the year this Archive is prepared to hold as probable in its own genealogical record, clearly marked as such, distinguished in the entry itself from anything this office would swear to. Whether the Recension’s clerks will accept the distinction, or accept only the number and forget the qualifier attached to it, is not a question this office can answer from its own hill.

What This Record Does Not Have

Of Grigor Panin’s mother, this record has nothing. Not a name, not a mark, not a silence loud enough to note as a silence. She was never entered, by the beam or by anyone who has spoken to this office of the beam, and an absence with no shape to it is not a gap this office can go on describing without inventing the shape itself. It will not.

Of the three unnamed Panins in this line — the sister, the son, the grandson — this office notes only that a family capable of remembering the precise number of days between a flood’s crest and a birth has not, in four generations, thought it equally necessary to write down its own children’s names for a hill they had no reason to visit. The beam remembered what the house needed remembered. It did not remember what the house never expected to be asked.

The grandson is, tonight, still deciding whether to carry a drawing of a notch down the Archive Steps. The beam has not lied to Grigor Panin in fifty years. This is the first record this office has entered that admits the paper might, not through any dishonesty in the boy’s hand, but because a copy is not the thing it copies, and the Recension has not yet said whether it can tell the difference or has simply decided it does not need to.