The Shrine on the Low Corner of Mulov Street

Two days of rain, and last night the low corner off Mulov Street stood four fingers deep by morning. The shrine there is nothing much — a plank shelf nailed into the wall of the Orlev house, three candle stubs, a chipped saucer for offerings, a strip of red cloth gone pink with age. It sits at knee height. The water found it before the first bell.

I watched Fedra Orlev move it. She did not carry it far. She lifted the plank whole, candle stubs and all, and set it on the sill of the ground-floor window, a hand’s width higher, out of the water’s reach for now. She scraped the mud off the saucer with her thumb and did not replace the cloth, only wrung it out and hung it back on the same nail to dry. New candles, the old ones too far gone to light. She did this in perhaps four minutes, without hurrying, the way she has moved that shrine before — I have seen the nail holes in the wall, three of them, each one a flood she does not talk about.

She did not go up to the Archive Steps to see what the city is saying happened there. Neither did I. The talk in the quarter this morning is all Archive — water in the storerooms, the Archivist carrying folios by lamplight, what was saved and what was not. Real enough, and none of my business today. Fedra’s shrine took its own small flood in its own corner of the city, and no one is writing an inventory of it, and it does not need one. She will move it back down when the corner dries. The nail holes will wait for the next time.