Nadezhda Teterina Sells the Blanket She Kept for a Wake

Fourth dry morning. Gulls still working low over the mole, same four mornings running, and nobody in the Quarter can say what that’s for either way. Fingers raw with the first real cold — half the Bazaar in gloves with no fingers in them by midweek, and I was not the last to put mine on.

The notice went up on Mulov Street three days back, chalk gone soft already: wool wanted, any weight, any wear, inquire at the house with the blue door. Pavel Gorin’s house. His wife buried in Frostmonth two winters back, and this is his first count of blankets without her to say which ones stay.

I watched four women bring wool to that door today. Three brought what they could spare and call it spare. The fourth, Nadezhda Teterina, brought a folded grey blanket with a moth hole at one corner the size of a dram coin, and did not call it spare.

She told Pavel, handing it over, that she had kept it folded at the bottom of her chest for nine years, since her own husband’s wake, because you keep a wake blanket, that is simply done. She said she had decided this morning it was warmer folded around a living man than a dead one, and that was the whole of her reasoning, offered flat, no catch in it.

Pavel paid her the same two drams he paid the other three, by weight, not by what the wool had been for. She did not ask for more. She also did not leave quickly — stood at the blue door a moment after the coin was in her hand, looking at the blanket once more where it sat now on his arm instead of hers.

Then she went home. The gulls are still over the mole. Nobody has said why.