The Mark on Grigor Panin’s Beam

Grigor Panin is old. No one on Mulov Street disputes this. The Register does not know it. He was born, he says, the year the water came to the third step — the flood before the wall’s southern circuit was raised, before anyone thought to write a boy’s birth into a book kept on a hill he had never seen.

His proof is a beam. The main crossbeam of his father’s house, cut with a single deep notch and a mark scratched below it in a hand rougher than his own — his father’s hand, made the week the water dropped and the house could be entered again. One mark for the water’s height. A smaller one beside it, for Grigor, born three days before the flood crested. The family has dated things off that beam for three generations. Before Grigor’s mark. After it. His sister’s wedding was four years after the mark. His son’s apprenticeship began eleven years after it.

The Recension wants a year, not a beam. A clerk at the district roll told him so plainly this morning, not unkindly. He came home and looked at the beam a long time, the way a man looks at something he has never before had to defend. Then he told his grandson to fetch a scrap of paper and a pencil, and copied the notch onto it as best he could — not a date, there was no date to copy, only the depth of the cut and the distance between the two marks — and said the clerk could make of that what she liked.

He has not decided whether to bring it. The beam, he says, has never once lied to him. He is not sure the paper will manage the same.