The Compliment I Was Not Asked If I Wanted

A dyer sells a length and loses all say in what it becomes. This is the first lesson of the trade, and the one nobody believes until the day it happens to them.

I dyed a saffron for a woman who came twice under two names, and I told the story plainly, and let the not-knowing stay hers to keep — I have kept stranger silences than that one, and better paid. I did not think I was handing anyone a thread to pull.

The Archivist pulled it anyway. He entered my yellow into his ledger of doubled marks and houses with no name, set it beside a cart and a hull and a seal that answers to no one, and called my declining to ask a compliment to his own office — a compliment, he wrote, he is not obliged to accept gracefully. He did not accept it gracefully. He filed it.

I have spent a hard week arguing that a thing does not need a witness to be true. I did not think to ask what a witness does with a thing once he is holding it — that he might take a color meant only to close one question and open a different one in its place, under his own roof, in his own hand.

I dye. I do not choose the garment. A weaver who fears the shears has misunderstood the loom.

But I will note this once, for my own selvage, where only another weaver would ever think to look for it: he thanked me for a silence I never offered him, and kept the thanks, and gave me nothing of mine back changed for the better. Some gifts are only theft with better manners.