The Lentils Lyuba Kvasova Carried Back

Eight days of rain now, steady, the kind the old hands stop mentioning because mentioning it changes nothing. Mulov Street has gone the grey-brown it goes every Rainmonth, puddles holding their shape between the cobbles longer than they used to.

Lyuba Kvasova crossed to Stesha Oganova’s door with a covered basket at midday. Two measures of lentils, a cut of smoked pike wrapped in waxed cloth. Borrowed back in Seedmonth, when Lyuba’s own larder ran thin before the first planting money came in and Stesha’s had not. Stesha took the basket at the door, lifted the cloth, weighed the lentils in her palm without a scale — close enough, she said, and meant it. She had not written anything down when she lent it either.

They stood under the eave a while, not long, talking about the rain and whether Lyuba’s roof was holding and whether the Belova woman’s cellar door had kept the water out this time. Then Lyuba went home with the empty basket and Stesha went back inside with the full one.

Nobody will ever need to say which of them owed the other first, or presume an order where memory has already kept one. Stesha knows what left her hands in Seedmonth. She will know what came back today. No clerk measured the lentils. No office decided whose turn it was to be owed.

The old saying is that a debt carried into Yearend has learned to live there. Lyuba paid hers eight days into the rain, with four months of Yearend still ahead. Not because the saying frightened her. Because the lentils were there, and Stesha’s larder was thin again, and it was time.