The Two Sashes I Tied Myself

Thirty-one years I have tied the mourning sash for other households, my hands doing to a stranger’s linen what a stranger’s mourner cannot do while weeping. This week I tied it for my own blood. Sevi was my cousin. Toma was her husband. The fire took the roof at the eastern end of their house on Ulev Street and found them in separate rooms, and no one who fought the blaze, and no one inside it, lived to say which room the fire reached first.

I know what that not-knowing is worth. I knew it before the coals had gone black. A childless house, a large one, and a law that gives the whole of it to whichever spouse can be shown to have outlived the other — and where it cannot be shown, gives it anyway, to whichever presumption the clause prefers. I am the nearest kin Sevi has. I did not enjoy knowing this. I noticed that I knew it, which is not the same as not knowing it, and I have decided that the difference matters more than absolution would.

The Divan did not, in the end, presume anything. It found the Register had never entered either of their birth years — an old chair left empty thirty-some years before either of them needed it filled — and ruled, for that reason and no other, that the house divides. Half comes to me. Not the whole the fear had already spent.

A woman on that street watched both rooms before the fire crossed between them and wrote down only what she saw, asked for by no examiner. Her door is three turns from mine. Four nights now, and I have tied every cord but that one.