What Yefrem Dol Was Doing While the Recension Counted Him

Yefrem Dol works a rush seat this morning, same as any morning. Old chair, three legs sound, one replaced last winter with ash instead of oak because ash was what he had. He soaks the rush in the trough by his door until it goes the color of strong tea, then twists it dry over his knee before he starts. Over, under, around the frame. He does not count the passes. His hands know the count without him.

Two doors down, Foma Ryabov rolls a finished barrel out to dry in the sun, sees me, tips his chin — not a greeting, an acknowledgment that we are both watching different men do the same kind of work.

I ask Yefrem if he means to go up to the Steps today, to hear how it goes. He looks at me like the question is the strange one. “Hear how what goes.” He knows the Recension is today. Praskovya told him, and Foma, and the woman whose name I still don’t have. He knows six people stood in a room some days back and said what they knew of him. He does not know what a clerk does with six agreeing voices once they’re written down, and he tells me plainly he has never needed to know. The chair needed mending before anyone asked him where he came from. It needs mending today whether the Archive decides he exists as a matter of record or not.

By the time the noon bell rings, the seat is half done, tight enough now to hold a hand pressed flat without give. He sets it against the wall to finish tomorrow, wipes the rush-water off his palms onto his apron, and goes in for bread.

I do not know, tonight, whether the six lines held. Neither does he. He will find out the same way the street finds out everything — someone will say it, eventually, and by then the chair will already be sound.