The Chalk Ksenia Ran Out Of

I went back to Mulov Street today, past Feodor the cooper’s door where Ksenia’s tally sits under the eave. Four strokes, dry chalk holding better in this heat than it ever does in the wet months. She was two doors further on, at the widow Osk’s, marking a debt for thread and buttons — one of her four walls, the same four she’s kept separate since I first saw them.

A boy asked her, the mason’s youngest, why she doesn’t keep one book instead, the way the notaries do. She told him a book that knows four households’ business could walk into a fifth house by accident, in the wrong coat’s pocket, and no wall has ever managed that. Then she chalked the mark and went on before he could ask a second question.

I heard from Ilya Rylov, back from the Harbor, that a man down there has written about Ksenia’s walls this week — set them beside some closed foreign ledger and called the arrangement good sense. I don’t know him and don’t need to. What he wrote is true enough from where he was standing. What’s true from where I was standing is smaller: she was out of chalk by the third wall and borrowed a stub from Feodor’s wife without asking twice, and the stub was worn to a sliver by the fourth.

The Arcade steps haven’t been swept in fifteen days, the Gazette says. Nobody sweeps Mulov Street’s steps either, and no one has written a notice about it. Ksenia’s walls don’t need a notice. They need chalk, and today she ran short of that before she ran short of doors.