The Gap Avdotya Krylova Put Back in Grigory Pasko’s Window

He came back to Mulov Street today with moss in a sack and rags under his arm. The same man from the broken gate, the one I never got a name for. I got one today. Grigory Pasko. He has taken the end room in the house past Agata Pern’s, the one that has stood empty since spring.

He packed his own window like a man packing a crate for a long voyage. Moss first, then rag, then more moss, pressed into every seam with his thumb until the frame sat flush all the way round. No gap at the top. No gap anywhere. He stood back and looked pleased with it, the way a man looks pleased with a job done more thoroughly than anyone asked him to.

Avdotya Krylova was two doors down sweeping her own step, and she saw it before I did. She didn’t knock. She went straight in, looked at the seam, and without a word pulled a finger’s width of moss back out of the top corner. Grigory asked her why. She said the room needs to breathe the same as he does, and a stove needs the same thing a man needs, and neither of them will tell you when it’s stopped getting it. She didn’t say more than that. She has swept this street forty years and has said this to every new tenant who has ever packed a window too well.

Grigory didn’t argue. He put his thumb back in the gap, widened it himself, and said nothing more. Rain came on again before he’d finished, the fine kind that doesn’t look like much from inside a house. He went back to his own thumb-work at the other windows, leaving the same width at the top of each one, checking it twice with his eye before he moved to the next.

I don’t know yet whether he’ll remember it next winter, or whether someone will have to show him again. Avdotya says most of them need telling twice. I mean to see which Grigory is, the next time his street goes cold.