Prokop Vershinin's village did not die of fire or of plague. It was erased by one line in an official book.
The district chancery smelled of sealing wax, mice and stale paper. Prokop had been standing at the long table for three hours with a chest on his shoulder. His father's chest, of dark oak; the brass band had been rubbed yellow by palms. Inside lay the petitions his father had written for twenty-two years.
The clerk at the table was not unkind. That turned out to be the hardest part. An unkind man can be argued with. This one was simply bored.
"Vershinin," he read. "On the matter of the settlement of Burn."
"The village of Burn," Prokop said.
The clerk raised his eyes to him calmly.
"There is no such settlement in the register. There is a locality, burn. With a small letter."
"There were eighteen households there," Prokop said. "A church school. My father taught letters there for two decades."
"In the register," the clerk repeated, "a locality: burn, small bog, waste ground by the old cutting. Empty lands, prepared for distribution."
"The people from there are alive. I am alive."
The clerk sighed and unhurriedly turned a thick book towards him.
"See for yourself, if you are literate."
Prokop was literate. He found the sheet of the old survey, found the little river, the edge of the bog and even the old cutting along which he had run behind his father's horse as a boy. The village was not there. In its place lay a smooth white field of paper, and across it ran a single word, written in somebody else's quick hand: burn.
With a small letter.
He had prepared for this table for a year and still turned out not to be ready.
"My father wrote here for twenty years," Prokop said. "Here are the replies."
He set the chest down on the floor and opened the lid. The petitions lay in bundles, by year. On top lay the last sheet, which Evlampy Vershinin had not managed to send: his hand no longer held the pen straight, and the letters leaned over like fences in spring.
The clerk did not even lean forward.
"Who was your father?"
"A schoolmaster."
"Schoolmasters are supposed to know the order of things. What has not been surveyed onto a sheet does not exist in law. What is not in law has no heirs."
He said it without mockery, the way people say that winter is cold.
"An empty place has no heirs, Vershinin. Go in peace."
Prokop did not go in peace.
He stood and looked at the white field of paper. Deep in his mind, where the other memory had lived since the fever, a familiar thought surfaced: a map is not the land. A map is somebody's decision about the land. He did not know where the words had come from. They were older than his pain and calmer than it.
Behind him a queue was waiting: a peasant with a boundary suit, two widows, a steward with a deed of purchase. Nobody hurried him. It had long been known here that if you chased a clerk, your case would end up at the very bottom of the pile, and the pile was as tall as a man. Prokop closed the chest, lifted it onto his shoulder and walked to the doors between the waiting people.
By the chancery doors sat a second clerk, younger, with a recruitment sheet. Above him hung a notice written large, so that it could be seen from a distance: "The Unified Survey is taking on men. Porters, chainmen, cooks. State pay."
The young clerk looked Prokop over: shoulders, boots, hands.
"Literate?"
"Literate."
"Can you count?"
"I can."
"Will you go as a porter? Eastern belt, taiga, two years." He pushed the sheet across and, growing kinder, pulled a spice cake out of a drawer, hard, made for the road, in a twist of paper. "Take it. For a quick hand."
Prokop looked at the cake, and his hand would not rise.
"No need."
"It is free."
"I don't eat sweet things."
He answered without thinking. Prokop had not eaten anything sweet for so long that he no longer remembered why.
The clerk shrugged and put the cake away.
Prokop took up the pen. His hand did not shake. He enrolled as a porter of the Unified Survey, in the party going along the eastern belt, and only as he wrote the last letter did he ask:
"What places does the belt run through?"
The clerk ran a finger along the official sheet.
"Pereymishche stockade, Dry Portage, then the watershed." The finger stopped. "Here, by the old cutting, some locality or other. Burn, is it."
Prokop shifted the chest to a better grip.
That evening, at the coaching inn, he went through his father's papers to pack them tighter. Between the bundles of petitions lay two things he did not remember.
The first was a list of the pupils of his father's school: forty-six names by year, with notes on who had gone where after the village was struck off the rolls. His father had kept the list until the last winter, as though he were still proving that Burn was alive.
The second was an old sheet, drawn up before the Unified Survey and before his father was born. It had been drawn by hand. The eastern edge of the map ran out beyond a ridge unknown to Prokop, and beyond the ridge a sea was marked.
On every official sheet Prokop had seen in his life, in the east there was taiga and the white edge of the paper.
He wrapped the old sheet back in its cloth and hid it under all the petitions.
The law might not recognise Prokop's inheritance, but his father's papers belonged to him all the same.
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