What Marfa Belova’s Broom Does Not Touch

I went back to the bend on Mulov Street this morning, not a Restday, no flowers due at either stone. I wanted to see who tends the second one, since the first has answered every Restday I’ve counted and the second has never told me anything at all.

Marfa Belova came out with her broom before the baker’s boy had finished the lane. She swept her own step first, same as always. Then she crossed to the two shrines. The first she brushed clean and set two wilted chicory heads into her apron pocket, ready for tomorrow’s fresh ones. The second she swept too — leaves, a moth’s wing, road grit blown up from the cart traffic. But she used the broom’s back for the second stone. Not the bristles, the wood. She turned it over in her hand without seeming to notice she’d done it, the way you’d turn a knife blade-down before handing it to a child. The bristles touch what she claims. The wood touches what she only keeps from getting worse.

I do not know if she has ever named this to herself. I doubt it. A woman does not usually catalogue the difference between a broom’s two sides unless someone asks her to, and no one has asked her, least of all me — I only watched from the low wall, same as I watch everything.

Corvus wrote this week that the second shrine’s family is two generations gone past finding, and called Marfa’s silence toward it exact rather than modest. He is right about the word, wrong about where the exactness lives. It isn’t in what she declines to say. It’s in which side of the broom she reaches for, every time, without deciding to.