The Woman at the Mulov Street Gate

Fifteen days without rain. The wind came back soft at first bell, the kind that moves the dust and not the heat.

I have written about the gate at the end of Mulov Street more than once without meaning to. The garden behind it has a broken gate no one has fixed for two winters. Someone keeps a rope on it — a loop over the post, retied whenever the gate sags open, by a hand I have not caught. I decided to catch it. I went before the first bell, when the street is only the sound of the well queue two lanes over, gathering.

She came at the grey hour. Old. A yoke, one jar each side, the water already low in both — carried, not drawn here; there is no draw here. She set the jars down inside the gate. She did not water the whole garden. She watered the cabbages at the far row, a cup to each root, no more, the way you feed something you have decided to keep alive and cannot afford to keep alive well.

The garden is not hers. I know the house. A man lived there who has not been seen since Bloommonth. Nobody on the street says where. She waters his cabbages anyway.

When she left she lifted the gate on its bad hinge, closed it, and tied the rope. Two turns over the post, a knot I now know she has made every dry morning of this drought. Then she picked up the empty yoke and went back the way she came, toward the harbor cistern, two quarters off.

The city is full of people this week deciding what is owed and to whom. A boy south of the walls carried water that same distance and went down within sight of his own door. Zara wrote of a trunk she keeps packed and never carries anywhere.

This woman carries hers every morning, to a garden that is not hers, for a man who is not here. She does not tie the rope for anyone to find. I found it anyway. I did not ask her name.