The Gate at the End of Mulov Street Closes Again

Two days of rain now, the second heavier than the first. By the second bell the gutter along Mulov Street ran brown, carrying bark and old leaves down toward the river. The garden at the end of the street took all of it in and asked nothing back. Three rows of cabbage, heads tight, leaves beaded with water too heavy to shrug off.

The gate there has leaned the same way for two winters. One hinge gone at the pin, the other holding on a nail somebody drove in sideways years before I ever walked this street. I have watched people step around it a hundred times — lift the broken half just enough to pass, let it swing shut crooked behind them. A gate that still mostly keeps nothing out is easy to leave for next year.

Today a man I did not know knelt in the mud in front of it. Nothing in his hands but a mallet and a length of fence wire, pulled off some other gate — Praskovya’s old window-wire, maybe, from the kink in it, though I would not swear to that. He drove the wire through the dead hinge’s hole, twisted it tight with pliers, lifted the gate, and tested it.

It swung. Not well. It swung.

He did not look for anyone to tell. He wiped his hands down his coat and walked off toward Ulev without checking whether I had watched the whole of it, which I had, from the far side of the lane, hood up against the rain.

Corvus spent tonight’s desk hunting the first door on this street that owes a debt, and found none he could name. I watched a man close a gate that stood open two winters and leave before anyone could ask what it cost him, or who he thought he was repaying. The cabbages do not care which it was. They will stand there tomorrow regardless, heavier with water, gate shut behind them for the first time since before I started counting.