Day 32: Lena's Mending

Gogol wrote about a poor clerk whose old coat had worn so thin that the tailor said a needle would go straight through it, because there was nothing left to sew a patch to.

My coat is not that bad yet. But it was close enough that my mother took one look at it and asked for a needle.

Dear Grandmother,

My mother came on the Saturday bus. It was her first time in the lake town; you had left it long before she was born. She walked through the teacher's house slowly, touching things: the stove door, the window latch, the kitchen door frame with the pencil marks. She found your initials without my help. She stood there a long time with her thumb on them and did not say anything, and I did not either. Then she put the kettle on, because that is what she does when she does not know what to do.

My winter coat had torn on the ice last week. The lining had come away along the hem, and the left pocket had a hole in it big enough for a key to fall through, which one did. My mother held the coat up to the window like a fish she was deciding whether to buy. "This can be saved," she said. "Get me your sewing tin."

My sewing tin is a jam jar with three needles, a reel of black thread and a button from a coat I gave away. My mother sighed at it. She had brought her own, of course, the flat wooden box with the red lid that I remember from every childhood winter. You gave it to her. I did not know that until today.

So we sat at the kitchen table, one at each end of the coat, and mended. She did the hem. I did the pocket. She showed me how to cut the thread at a slant before threading it, so it slides through the eye instead of fraying, and how to wet the end between two fingers rather than in your mouth. "Your grandmother's rule," she said. Then she showed me the ladder stitch, which closes a seam from the outside so you cannot see it. You take a small bite of cloth on one side, then on the other, like the rungs of a ladder, and when you pull the thread the two edges meet and the stitches disappear. It is a good thing to know. Anyone can try it on a torn cushion or the lining of an old jacket, and it feels like a small magic trick the first time the seam closes.

We talked while we sewed. Not about the letters, and not about the tin on the shelf above the stove. We talked about Room Twelve, and about Hanne, who sings while she folds towels, and about the dumplings I made for Tomas and Mila. My mother asked about Tomas in a careful, sideways voice, and I answered in the same voice, and we both smiled at our needles. It was the longest we have talked without one of us getting up to wash a cup that was already clean.

An aside, because my mother told me and I had never heard of it. Women used to darn socks over a wooden darning mushroom, a smooth wooden dome on a handle. You slipped it inside the sock under the hole, and it held the knitted cloth firm and round while you wove new threads across, first one way and then the other, like the lattice on top of a pie. My mother said you had one made of pear wood and kept it in the red box. It is still there. She showed me.

When the coat was finished, she made me put it on and turned me round by the shoulders, as she did when I was six. The hem was straight. The pocket was closed. You could not see where either of us had been.

At six the ferry bell rang. My mother looked up and asked what it was, and I told her about Emil. Only a little. She listened and said, "Your grandmother used to hum when she heard church bells. I never knew why." She said it quietly, and then she went to catch the last bus.

Gogol's clerk had a coat too far gone to save. Ours was not. And I think the same is true of other things that have worn thin between people. You do not need new cloth. You need a little cloth left on each side, a fine needle, and two people willing to sit at the same table until the seam closes.

Your Vera

Day 33: The Ferryman's Hands

Chekhov once wrote to his brother that brevity is the sister of talent.

I thought of that line today, holding a book in which nobody had ever written one word too many.

Dear Grandmother,

The bell did not ring on Tuesday. I was marking spelling at the kitchen table and I looked at the clock at five past six, then at ten past, and then I put on my mended coat and walked down to the ferry house. Greta was already at the gate with her bicycle. She had noticed too. In a town this size, a bell that does not ring is louder than one that does.

Emil had a cold. Nothing worse, he said, from the chair by his stove, wrapped in two blankets and cross about it. He had not rung the bell because he could not get his boots on. Greta made him tea and went to tell Dora. I went home, and an hour later I was back with soup.

It was your barley soup, the one Mrs Varga remembers from your year and taught me in her kitchen. I had made a big pot on Sunday, the way you used to tell my mother to, so that the barley had a day to drink the stock and go soft. I warmed it in his own pan on his own stove. He ate two bowls, slowly, and some colour came back into his face, which was the only thing I was watching for.

His hands are what I want to tell you about. I had never looked at them properly. They are wide and brown, with knuckles like knots in old rope, and a pale scar across the left palm where a cable once ran through it. When he held the spoon, his fingers curled round it the way they must have curled round the ferry rope, firm and unhurried. My hands look like I have only ever held pencils, which is nearly true.

After the soup he pointed to a shelf and asked me to bring down a ledger. It was the oldest of the ferry books, which fill the whole shelf, begun in his father's hand and finished in his own. Date, weather, passengers, fares, one line each. "North wind. Six crossings. Doctor's cart." "Fog until noon. Two crossings. Cow." There is not a wasted word in it.

He turned back to your year for me, his thumb leaving the paper a little damp. At the end of August, in his father's hand: "Calm. Four crossings. New teacher, with trunk." That was you, Grandmother. Your first day on the lake. Further on, in spring, a line in a younger hand, Emil's: "Rain. One crossing. Miss Sorel. No fare." He did not say anything about it, and neither did I. He just let me look, and then closed the book and rested both hands on the cover, the way you rest your hands on a loaf to feel whether it is still warm.

An aside about ledgers. Ships kept a log book because sailors once measured speed with a real log, a piece of wood tied to a long line with knots in it. They threw it over the back of the ship and counted how many knots ran out while a sand glass emptied. The numbers went into the book, and the book took the name of the wood. That is why we still say a ship's speed in knots.

When I got home I tried something. I took an old exercise book and wrote one line, the way the ferry book does. "Clear, very cold. Soup for Emil. Bell silent." Just the day, in a few words. I think I will keep doing it. A letter like this one takes me an evening. One line takes a minute, and I can see already that the lines will add up to something, the way a pot of stock adds up from bones and peelings you would otherwise throw away. Anyone could keep one. A child could. You could have, in your year here, if you had wanted to.

On Thursday the bell rang again at six, a little late, a little slow. Dora said she heard it from the school kitchen and put her ladle down to listen. So did I.

Chekhov was right. Brevity is the sister of talent, and I would add that it is sometimes the sister of love. "No fare" is two words. I have read that line again in my head many times since Tuesday, and every time it says a little more.

Your Vera