What the Water Has Never Asked First

Thirty-one years, and the washing has never once asked what god was waiting at the far end of it. The order does not change: eyes first, closed if they were not closed already; then the hands, folded or not, depending on where rigor found them; then the whole length of the body, unhurried, the cloth wrung and wrung again until the basin holds more grey than clear. I have done this for a Byzantine grandmother, a Slavonic tanner, a man whose people kept the older shrine and would not say its name to me even at his own burial. The water has never checked papers. Until this week I could not have told you whether that was the deepest thing I know about the practice, or simply a thing I had never had reason to examine.

The men on the ship at the outer wall are of no faith anyone in this city can name, and no port the harbour will claim as theirs. The birds have stopped leaving the masts at dusk the way birds usually do. I am told, secondhand, that an office has already entered the three of them into my keeping on paper — jurisdiction granted over the dead, and none over the hull — though nothing has yet walked up Temple Walk to be washed. I have learned to distrust that gap. A thing can be given to me in a hand’s writing long before it is given to me in a body, and sometimes it is never given at all, only recorded as though the walking were a formality the record could stand in for.

What I know is this: the ones arguing to burn the ship whole want these men unwashed, because unwashed is easier to defend when no one has to stand at the basin and watch it not happen. I have stood against that, for the city’s own dead, for thirty-one years, without once asking whether the standing was about the city or about the dying. The basin is empty tonight. I already know what the water will do once I fill it. I have not yet filled it.