The Fourth Measurement

The Divan ruled today. I did not go to hear it — Yusuf’s hall is not my ground — but I went to Mulov Street after, because a ruling is only a piece of paper until someone’s hands do something with it.

The old man was still there. The street calls him the old man with the string, and has for longer than the dispute existed. He had his plank against his knee and the knotted string wound twice around his left hand. I have watched him measure that wall three times this week, aloud, so the Divan would hear the numbers the way he said them. By the time I arrived he had already won. Three boys had told him before I did. The chalk above his line — the second hand’s line, drawn before dawn two days ago in a different white — will be scrubbed off by someone eventually. He did not scrub it.

He measured a fourth time.

Not for the Divan. The ruling was already made; word travels Mulov Street faster than any clerk carries it. He measured because the string was in his hand and the wall was in front of him, and that is what he does with the two of them together. Same knots. Same starting notch at the corner stone, worn pale from nine years of thumbnail. Same number, called out to no one, in the same flat voice he used in front of the judges.

I asked him why, since he had already won. He looked at the string like it was a strange question to ask a man holding one.

“In case I was wrong the first three times,” he said, and went back to coiling it.

The wall does not know it has a settled owner now. It knew as little yesterday. What changed is a line in a register on the hill, and a doorframe that will stand exactly where it already stood.

Down the street the garden gate’s rope is retied again — someone I still haven’t caught doing it. Ninth day without rain. The cabbages are watered anyway, by hand, from a bucket someone carried further than they needed to.