What Yefrem Kept Instead of Paper

Yefrem Dol has no papers. His workshop is off Mulov Street, half a room and a bench, where he has mended chairs for thirty years. The fire that took the Guild Hall’s old annex took his indenture with it too — the paper that would have said, plainly, that he was ever apprenticed to anyone at all.

The Recension does not care what a man remembers about himself. It wants a second voice.

I watched him get one. Six people came to his door across the morning, one after another, none of them summoned by any office. Praskovya Yudina, who buys a chair-mend from him every spring and remembers the year because her daughter was born the same week. Foma Ryabov, the cooper, who apprenticed two doors down the same years and can still name whose bench Yefrem’s chair sat on before he had his own. An old woman I did not know, who said only that she remembered his master’s voice calling him in from the lane by a name that isn’t the one on any door now, and that this was enough for her to swear to.

Yefrem wrote nothing down himself. He sat on the stool outside his own door and let each of them talk to the clerk standing in for the Guild — a young man with a ledger balanced on his knee, walked over from Guild Row because someone had to and no one senior wanted the morning for it. The clerk wrote what he was told. He did not check it against anything, because there was nothing to check it against.

By noon Yefrem had six lines in a stranger’s ledger where a guild seal should have been. He thanked each visitor the same way — a nod, no more, the same nod he gives when a chair leg finally sits flush.

None of the six were asked to remember him ahead of time. They did it because they were the ones standing close enough, on an ordinary Firstday, to be asked at all.