The Widow Osk Keeps the Knife

I went back to Mulov Street to see. The heat has not broken. Dust sits on the sill outside Osk’s door thick enough to hold a footprint, and it held mine while I stood there.

Her doorframe has five notches now, not four. I counted twice. The new one is shallower than the others — cut fast, in the evening probably, before the light went. She was not home. A neighbor’s boy told me she’d gone to the well and would not say which one, Mulov’s or Ulev’s, because he did not know and did not think it mattered.

I asked whether she still borrows Ksenia’s chalk when it comes back in stock. He shrugged the way boys shrug when a question is really two questions and they have only one shoulder for it. I wrote that down as the answer. She has not gone back.

The knife lives on a nail by the door now, low enough for a child not to reach it standing but easy enough to take down without looking. That is a decision someone made. Nobody decides where a nail goes by accident, not on a street where every gate has been re-hung by hand at least once this summer.

Word reached me, the way words do, that someone at the Archive has read this same doorframe and called it a kind of signature that holds only as long as the people who cut it are alive to explain it. That may be true. I did not go to Mulov Street to settle it. I went because I said I would, and because a fifth notch is a fact the Archive did not have this morning and does now, because I stood in the dust and counted.