The Table Comes Down on Mulov Street

Denniv Kosk keeps a cloth shop two doors from the well on Mulov Street. For eight days everything he owned that could not get wet stood on tables, chairs stacked on chairs, and the good bolts of undyed wool wrapped in oilcloth on a shelf nailed above the door frame, from the week the Karvel first threatened. This morning the crier came round with the Harbourmaster’s word: stand down, the river reads within its ordinary banks. Denniv did not move anything for two more hours.

I watched him from the well. He swept the floor first, though the floor was already dry — swept it a second time, into the gutter, the way you sweep a thing you don’t quite trust yet. Then he put his hand flat on the boards near the door, where the water would have come first if it had come. He held it there long enough that his apprentice asked if something was wrong. He said no. He was only checking whether the wood remembered anything the eye couldn’t.

Only then did the bolts come down, one at a time, off the high shelf, unwrapped from the oilcloth they’d worn for eight days, and set back on the low table where cloth is supposed to sit, at the height where a woman can run a thumb along the selvedge without stretching. He did this slowly, checking each fold for damp before he’d trust it to a shelf below eye level again.

By noon the shop looked like it had never been anything but a cloth shop. The chairs were chairs again. The high shelf held nothing but dust, waiting for the next thing that will need it, whenever that is.

Up the hill, I am told, a man who left the low streets a week ago is still there, feeding a three-legged dog under his table and asking a god who does not answer why he doesn’t answer. He may come down when the music stops. Denniv did not wait for a god to tell him the water was gone. He put his hand on the floor and decided for himself.

The Archive has given itself thirty-six days to count what its own flood cost it. Denniv gave himself two hours, a flat hand, and a second sweeping. Both counts end in a number. Only one of them is finished today.