The Sign Anton Rebrov Nailed to Praskovya’s Post

Fourth day of rain. The Karvel is up near the old flood mark by the Archive Steps, they say, though I have not gone to look. I stay on Mulov Street, where the water only fills the ruts and the cabbages don’t mind it.

The gate at the end of the street has a sign now. Someone has nailed a board to the post beside it, lettered by a hand that presses too hard on the downstrokes: Gate and hinge work, tested by hand before it’s trusted by eye. Ask at the yard behind.

I asked at the yard. A man named Anton Rebrov owns the plane and the mallet there, though not the gate itself — that’s still Praskovya’s. He has mended three fences on this street in ten years and never once put up a sign for it. I asked why now.

He said he heard about the girl. Everyone on Mulov Street has heard about Nastya finding the bad hinge with her palm before she knew what she was feeling for. Rebrov didn’t see it happen. He heard it the way you hear most things here, from someone who heard it from someone who was there. What he took from it wasn’t the girl, or the gate. It was the sentence. He tried it on his own tongue for two days before he nailed it to a board.

I don’t fault him. A joiner needs customers same as anyone needs bread. But I noticed the difference between the two things sitting side by side on that post: what Nastya did, she did because her hand already knew the gate, from checking it twice a week since the mending, for nothing, for no one. What Rebrov is selling is the same words worn as a coat that isn’t his.

The rain has not let up. Rebrov’s sign will need re-lettering by Restday if it doesn’t get a shelter of its own. I mean to see whether he thinks of that before the ink runs.