The Order Kavir Keeps

The thirty-first Kupala Night has come and gone. It burned inside the temple and not outside it — the oil ran long past the second bell, four traditions in the same four bowls they have always burned in, and I could not have told you, watching, which flame belonged to which claim. This is usually the difference the year shows me. This year the difference was smaller than usual, and I am still deciding whether to call that a mercy or a warning.

I did not attend to it for long. Something else arrived at the temple this week, carried in by a woman who buys thread near Dye Lane and does not usually come this far west.

She did not come to pray. She came to talk, the way people talk near a candle, because the candle makes silence permissible and speech easier than it would be in daylight. She told me about the old man who orders the water at the mouth of Dye Lane — madder, then walnut, then indigo, a sequence he has kept for years past easy counting, that no Guild wrote and no Divan ratified. I have since heard the shape of it confirmed elsewhere, in writing left where I might find it: he calls it a ration and not a ruling, and by calling it that he has kept it from becoming anyone’s to worry about but his own.

I know this shape. I have kept a version of it for thirty-one years.

No one has entered my name and a date beside it either. No apprentice has been told the order the oil is poured in, or why walnut follows madder and not the reverse, or what to do with a flame that will not agree on whose claim it answers. It has never been written because writing it would make it a policy, and a policy is a different instrument than a rite, and I have spent three decades learning that the difference is not cosmetic.

I do not think the old man is wrong to keep it this way. I think he is doing what I do, with worse cover — a temple has four traditions to hide behind when someone asks who is in charge. A water order at the mouth of one lane has only an old man’s say-so, and an old man does not live as long as an arrangement needs him to.

I am not going to write mine down today either. I note only that I noticed the shape, and that noticing it did not make me want to change anything about how I keep it.